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Deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM — Part 1

For a long time, we at Integrated Computer Systems have considered using Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM product for our internal sales force automation solution. We are currently running Clientele®, a product we have had since the last millennium. We have hundreds — no, thousands of hours invested in custom development and modification. While Clientele provides contact management functionality, we use it primarily for our service call management and tracking. We have developed a tightly integrated solution that exports service billing directly into our MAS 200 accounting system.

While the billing solution is critical to our operation, we have suffered with a very outdated CRM package that lacks any connectivity to current Microsoft Office products (it only works with Office 2000), and is very difficult to use. We lack the ability to quickly and easily generate reports, e-mail clients and track sales progress. This led to our interest in evaluating MS Dynamics CRM.

Initial deployment of MS Dynamics CRM is relatively straight forward. We set up and deployed a Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 server with SQL Server 2008 on a virtual machine. From there, we installed the core product along with all of the service release updates for MS Dynamics CRM 4.0. This is the easy part.

Once the product is physically installed, there are a multitude of issues that need to be addressed before Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used. This is very much like deploying a new ERP accounting system; installing the software is only the first step. As this server is running in a virtual environment, backup and data recovery are easily managed with our new Microsoft DPM Manager 2010. We use DPM to backup the native MS SQL server data, and we also use DPM’s Hyper-V capabilities to take daily images of the entire server virtual hard disk (vhd). MS Dynamics CRM is entirely browser-based and there is no client software required. That said, we want to secure the connection with SSL so a certificate must be purchased and installed. Microsoft has thought through the remote access issues with CRM and it needs to be configured for “Internet Facing Deployment” (IFD) if you plan on accessing it remotely.

We now have MS Dynamics CRM up and running. A simple browse to http://crm1:5555 brings up the web interface. No logging on is required as MS Dynamics CRM uses your current logged on credentials to automatically enter the system. This is nice! What you will notice first is that the layout is very much like Outlook Web Access (OWA). Data is orgainzed into Accounts and Contacts. From there, you have lots of related information like activities, queues, reports etc. (We will go more into the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at at later time.)

Unless I wanted to manually key in 6000+ contact records, we needed to find a way to move all those customers and contacts from Clientele into CRM. This is where Microsoft Dynamics CRM really shines. First, as this product is a SQL database product, there are numerous ways to import data. MS Dynamics CRM provides several ways for administrators or even end users to do this with import tools available within the product itself. One of the nice features is the ability to create and save data import maps. You can set up unique maps that will import data from specific data fields and place that data where desired.

We started off with a small 1100 record import using a marketing database that our Microsoft Dynamics NAV sales team is using. It was originally in an Excel spreadsheet format. I set up a map to bring in accounts (companies) and a separate map to bring in contacts (people). It took a little trial and error to get through the data validation issues, but soon we had active records in CRM. I assigned all of those records to our MS Dynamics NAV sales team and proceeded to work on the imports from Clientele.

Clientele uses a similar data structure to MS Dynamics CRM. While MS Dynamics CRM calls companies “Accounts” and links “Contacts” to those companies, Clientele uses People, Groups and Organizations (PGO). It took a bit of thought to map the Org data to the Account database and the People data to the Contact records in MS Dynamics CRM, but it is fairly straightforward. Naturally, we have fields in Clientele that are not available in the out-of-the-box CRM product, so we needed to add those fields in the appropriate tables.

This is another area where MS Dynamics CRM is really strong. Administrators can relatively easily create new fields in MS Dynamics CRM. From there, those fields are easily placed on forms and reports. Once those data fields were created, we built import maps to migrate the Clientele data. Again, after a couple of tries, we were successful in moving all of our company and contact data into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The next challenge we are working on is migrating the call tracking data records to MS Dynamics CRM. This is much more complicated than org and people data as the format and structure of the data is much different between products. This is something that will be done over the next weeks. Once that is done, we will be ready to fully implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For now, our sales people are using the system for outbound calls and marketing. Contrary to what usually happens when new tools are put in place, I’m not seeing much resistance to using this new tool.

For more information, please contact Chris Faist, Integrated Computer Systems Support, at 425-284-5410.