Product Update

Microsoft has recently released Office 365, a tool that allows organisations access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars from virtually anywhere so you're always up-to-date, it is a secure and reliable application that your team will already be familiar with. Office 365 is available from £4 per person per month and it includes SharePoint Online!

SharePoint Online brings together the familiar SharePoint collaboration platform now delivered as an online service making the power of the cloud work for your business.
The benefits of using the application include;

• The ability to connect anytime, virtually anywhere, PC or mobile
• Language support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese
• Use of HTTPS to help keep Internet access secure
• Antivirus scanning with Microsoft Forefront™ Security for SharePoint
• Sign In application that provides single sign-on capability
• 99.9% scheduled uptime with financially backed Service Level Agreements
• Web form and 24/7 phone-based Tier 2 support for IT administrators

For more information visit http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/online-software.aspx or contact dhc on 01483 413381 or by email info@dhcltd.com

I recently got pointed to the following article on the web:
http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/salesforce-alternatives-5-systems-to-consider-1052011

Interesting stuff. In it, Lauren Carlson rightly states that salesforce.com is the market leader with the others chasing their tail. I do feel that she’s sat on the fence with some of the opinions on the functionality of the products and differences can be quite marked with some of them. Significantly, some of the products do not have the same R&D pumped into them and are therefore falling behind on the functionality stakes – Microsoft reportedly spent $9.5bn in 2010! I don’t think it would be right to go about naming names here but anyone who’s viewed the software will soon know what I mean.

As we promote Dynamics CRM, I think it would be appropriate to point out a few of its key benefits. I’m not going to waffle for pages and regurgitate the Microsoft marketing speak, just the following:
1. Value for money. You get loads with Dynamics CRM online. For just over £30 per user you have full functionality – no buying in at the base level, realising you need more functionality and having to fork out more
2. Super-tight integration with Outlook. If you want to, you can run Dynamics CRM online without even leaving Outlook
3. Broad offering. Dynamics CRM is on-premise too and employs the same codeset to deliver this. This means that if you decide that you want to own the software at a later date and move it in-house, you can do this with no change to your customisations

I have been very impressed with Microsoft’s latest incarnation of CRM. Dynamics CRM 2011 is a real leap forward in functionality terms from Version 4, and it now gives an air of established maturity and a product that will hold up very well against any of its competitors.

• Functionality. Only go for the functionality that you really need. Don’t insist that you must have the pretty front-screen graph just because it is pretty. Does it deliver valuable information without detraction from the software’s main use?

• Working with Users. Ensure that you bring the users along with you as you plan the database. In most cases, this just means keeping up a regular communication with them throughout the planning stages. This way, the users will feel involved and hopefully be keen and excited to get started when the CRM D-day arrives
• Simplify the screens. We help clients to turn off the screen menus if they don’t need to use them. CRM 2011 also gives you the ability to have different screens per user group allowing the removal and re-arranging of fields if they’re not needed. As an example marketing could see all the contact’s marketing opt-out information on the main contact screen but sales would have this tucked away at the bottom of the screen. This makes the user’s experience as compact and focussed as possible
• Training. With increased functionality, focussed training becomes even more important. Ensuring that the user can hit the ground running with CRM increases the likelihood of confident adoption.