Before we go onto what XRM is lets first look at what a CRM is. Straight out of Wikipedia "Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments"
So now that we know what a CRM is, lets see what Dynamics CRM offers and why Microsoft is promoting the term XRM (Extended Relationship Management).
Out of the box dynamics offers typical CRM functionality such as marketing, leads, sales, correspondence (emails, phone, fax) etc, but the difference is that you have the ability to customize all this. You can build your own custom entities which can capture anything for example you could create an entity called Application, add a few fields to it and there you go you'll have your own application entity which you can use to enter in details about a particular application (such as application for a job or a tender response), the possibilities are limitless. On top of this you have the ability to create relationships between these entities, so this would mean an create sometime really complex with many entities related to each other. Its just like creating a database within SQL Server of MySQL, but with one difference you straight away get your forms to enter data, you can create reports by a few clicks and you can even secure your entities in quite a number of ways, and to top this off you can create workflows that contain business rules for your entities and if you fancy yourself you can also create .net plugins to extend your xRM further. The XRM also exposes web services so other programs can hook into it, not to mention the Sharepoint and Outlook integration that comes out of the box. So there you are, that's what Microsoft mean by XRM.
So now that we know what a CRM is, lets see what Dynamics CRM offers and why Microsoft is promoting the term XRM (Extended Relationship Management).
Out of the box dynamics offers typical CRM functionality such as marketing, leads, sales, correspondence (emails, phone, fax) etc, but the difference is that you have the ability to customize all this. You can build your own custom entities which can capture anything for example you could create an entity called Application, add a few fields to it and there you go you'll have your own application entity which you can use to enter in details about a particular application (such as application for a job or a tender response), the possibilities are limitless. On top of this you have the ability to create relationships between these entities, so this would mean an create sometime really complex with many entities related to each other. Its just like creating a database within SQL Server of MySQL, but with one difference you straight away get your forms to enter data, you can create reports by a few clicks and you can even secure your entities in quite a number of ways, and to top this off you can create workflows that contain business rules for your entities and if you fancy yourself you can also create .net plugins to extend your xRM further. The XRM also exposes web services so other programs can hook into it, not to mention the Sharepoint and Outlook integration that comes out of the box. So there you are, that's what Microsoft mean by XRM.
