Microsoft, In Convergence Presentations, Makes a Strong Case for CRM Live

CRM Live has put its best foot forward at Convergence 2008 with promises of a spring 2008 release coupled with user success stories from the past year based on open Web Services protocols and simple pricing.

I am comfortable with Spring of 2008”, said CRM Product Manager Christian Pedersen. With approximately 500 customers using CRM Live over the past year either as a full-fledged production system or just to kick the tires, the invitation-only period is nearing an end, and Microsoft management is optimistic on its competitive stance in the on-demand CRM marketplace.

With the use of the open Web Services standard for data transactions between systems, the Dynamics CRM team is able to put together a promising story on how CRM should work for many businesses. A conference session on Thursday profiled the early adopter Noble Trade, a Canadian plumbing wholesaler who, with the help of partner Brodie, joined CRM Live and integrated it to two separate in-house systems.

With no IT availability to support a new in-house CRM application, CRM Live came at the right time for Noble Trade. Brodie worked with Noble trade to establish the CRM Live account and create two integration points to Noble Trade. One remote connection was a nightly download process to move data from Noble’s back end system to CRM Live. They also enabled bi-directional communication between CRM Live and an in-house quoting service to generate integrated account contact information from CRM Live data with the quotes being auto-generated in-house. The finished quote documents were then sent back ...