Optimizing your Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 ecosystem: Migrate, integrate, or consolidate?

You're a Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 administrator. Like many businesses, your company has other applications running alongside your Dynamics instance such as a marketing automation system. You know that optimizing the performance of all your systems, as a unified engine, is key to user productivity and business growth. You also need to ensure your company has trusted datasets to power business analytics and unified views of your customers.

So the question becomes: What's the right approach for Dynamics and its system siblings? Do you migrate, integrate, or consolidate? Let's walk through key considerations for each option.

Migration

Migrating applications and their data to Microsoft Dynamics would allow the latter to take over a wide range of business functions, including:

• Finance and Operations
• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer Service
• Project Service Automation
• Field Service
• Retail
• Talent

As you consider this option, consider the full scope of what it will mean to be best in class in serving these business functions. There are increasingly specialized applications optimized around each of these areas. Within marketing, teams use software such as HubSpot and Marketo outside their CRM to manage marketing databases, programs and reporting. Which applications you migrate to Dynamics will therefore depend on your business needs.

Before you decide to turn off an application, you should ask if users will be successful when working with the Dynamics modules. Do you have users that closely identify with user communities of an existing application? Will it be challenging for them to adopt a new application for their business function? How will switching applications affect recruiting new users into that function? Only adopt modules within Dynamics in areas where you ...