Winning services industry deals with Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011 CU1 - and our partners

We recently won a Microsoft Dynamics SL deal for a large professional services organization based here in the Twin Cities.  They have roughly 700 people entering timecards normally and almost 10,000 entering timecards during their peak season when K-6 graders are having their standardized tests scored.

Part of the reason we were so excited to win this particular deal is because we had come in second place each of the past three times we competed with Deltek.  One key factor in this win was incorporating an add-on solution with excellent scheduling and time entry capabilities, as well as has tremendous integration with Dynamics SL at both the project accounting and A/R levels (I'll share more thoughts on the use of add-ons below).

I believe Dynamics SL has, by far, the best project accounting modules among the 3 mid-market accounting/ERP products that our firm supports: Dynamics SL, GP, and NAV.  All three products are tremendous, but we believe that Dynamics SL gets the nod with project accounting in part due to how well integrated the project and task prompts are throughout almost every data entry screen. And with the web apps that are part of Dynamics SL 2011 Cumulative Update 1, Microsoft may now be getting back into the game on at least some of the key capabilities that SL partners need to continue winning deals. For example, let's take a look at the new project time entry app, which uses HTML5 and will port to any device-any browser, tablet, or phone.

Business Portal is not required, making the infrastructure simpler and faster.  ...