Minnesota county builds xRM-based land permitting solution, integrated to geographic information system (GIS)

In 2011, a county in rural Minnesota embarked on a big a project to upgrade its legacy land and water permitting system.

"Our land permitting systems is in Dynamics CRM but our geographic information system (GIS) is by Esri," said the project manager at a recent online meeting of CRMUG. "The old system was on SQL Server 2000 and it was developed with Active Server Pages."

Because the older land permitting technology couldn't be upgraded, the system failure danger was high," she said. "That sort of put us in the position of getting it replaced as soon as possible because the fear was if the server crashed, or anything happened, we wouldn't be able to recover from that. And it was important, in terms of the business use to keep it going."

The failure danger  of the legacy land permitting system caused the county to limit the scope of the project to replacing the original functionality for 14 distinct business processes, according to the project manager.

"We upgraded the old [land permitting] system in 2011-2012 and we wanted to add GIS integration to our process," she said.

So the project team started by mapping all its existing business processes and then it looked at the off-the-shelf software solutions, as well as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, she said.

"What we found with the off-the-shelf solutions [for land permitting] is that they're very expensive, especially if you want to include GIS integration. And they were mostly designed for large cities and counties as opposed to rural areas; they had way more functionality and tools then we required," she said.

So the county decided to go with a ...