Are you a cowboy riding an ostrich?

If your collection of software applications running your business looks like The Island of Misfit Toys, then it’s worth considering some new alternatives.

 

Have you ever found yourself frantically looking for your car keys, only to have someone point out that they are in your hand? I must admit I do this at least once a month, and it is usually my wife who “finds” them for me. It is no longer embarrassing to me, just something I accept about my personality and the way I think. I get into a project and have such laser focus sometimes it’s easy to miss something right in front of me. It occurs to me that this could be happening in the software world. Maybe not the same thing but I don’t care – I like a good “sort of” comparison for an intro, and this one will do. 

Many organizations have decided to use XRM to build a custom solution for their business, rather that creating it from the ground up using custom application development methods.

Could this be a good idea for your business?  Here are 7 good reasons that may get you thinking.

One of my favorite toys as a kid was Legos. It was that awesome feeling I got from creating something out of nothing. Usually, I would make some monster truck – it was the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and Big Foot was a big deal. But I digress. So we weren’t building something out of “nothing”. We were starting with some building blocks that the Lego company provided.

No question there is a lot of thought, planning and precision engineering put into manufacturing those pieces so that they all fit together perfectly. As smart as we were, building a plastic Big Foot replica without those building blocks would have been beyond our ability. So we start with a pile of seemingly unrelated plastic blocks, wheels, people (with and without heads), shrubs, chimneys, car parts, etc. and create something entirely new from the seemingly random pieces. Fun!

CRM & SharePoint Integration 

If you are familiar with the very powerful interface which allows a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) user to attach seamlessly documents to a given entity (account, contact, opportunity, etc.) using the CRM/SharePoint integration, you may also be aware of a potentially dangerous gap in the security model.


I have found that the out-of-box integration is well designed, intuitive, and easy to use. I can take any document and with a few clicks of the mouse, associate it to a CRM entity while saving it in a SharePoint library. This interface gives users the best of both worlds: CRM for field level data and SharePoint for document management. The possibilities are seemingly endless.