Comments on: How Microsoft plans to make its mark in CRM

q&a Company is well placed to take the lead in the arena of customer relationship management with its on-demand and packaged software, says Microsoft's Brad Wilson.

[hhandyman]

With all the good free software why pay per use or keep your data so prone to attack on a remote server even if its across the street to large a chance your personal information will be accessed by the genearal public or thru search and seasure methods of government the Citizens employee and the intent misunderstood or goals taken out of context or investments ideas lost advantages to the data thhief..
you could use suns Free suits and do everyting you pay Microsoft Premium prices.

Flat file systems can be made and used to reaonsable success with no excessive overhead and limited big brother Waatch affects.

[jessiethe3rd]

free software sucks at integrating. free software is not supported for free. free software's UI usually sucks. Microsoft offers both a hosted solution and a solution you manage internally through IT. Both solutions leverage industry standards, can be integrated easily with backend systems,and lastly they work with the tools 98% of sales people are already using - Office. Business is not looking for free software - they are looking for standardize that are easy to support because in the long haul business spend 80% of it's IT budget managing assets and 20% implementing new technologies.

[Earl Benzar]

Why is it that Microsoft believes they have to own every tech market sector out there? I'm sick of them. Sorry, I'll stay with Salesforce.com

[jessiethe3rd]

They won't stop because they are a company... that's what companies do - consolidate and take over as much as possible. duh

[shelby_sf]

Its called business. Grow or die. Its not about MSFT bashing. It's about the product. If you like it, buy it. Or don't.

[Vegaman_Dan]

I'm not surprised that MIcrosoft would say they can do what they claim- that's what every company says. No company would come out and announce that they can't do what they are bragging about.

That said, how much competition is there? Salesforce, Microsoft... who else?

[SebastiaanB]

SAP has a new CRM offering for the SME. It is called SAP CRM Business all-in-one. It is based on their flagship CRM application CRM2007 but with a limited scope and starting at a competitive price, 9.900 euro. We have chosen this solution over salesforce.com (more expensive) and Microsoft (no strategy to scale the system).

[Renegade Knight]

Crappy CRM is why I don't buy MicroSoft. Either they don't use their own great software or worse, they do.

[jypeterson]

SAP's new CRM offering is based off of Outlooksoft's CPM (aquired by SAP last year). We currently are using CPM internally, and it is a very robust and flexible system. It was initially designed for manufacturing and sales, but we have found it to work in heathcare very well.

We will likely upgrade to CRM in the next 12 - 18 months. We are looking forward to some of the new features with regards to interfacing with our organizations overall BI and data warehousing projects to consolidate corporate data.

I cannot imagine using MS as our CRM manager. The relationships that we have with our vendor and support is very close, and I do not think that MS would understand healthcare like our current vendor.

[rockytop985]

Actually, SAP's new CRM offering is NOT based on anything from Outlooksoft. You are mixing apples and oranges, which is very easy to do in the SAP world. The latest release of SAP CRM All-in-One represents a radically enhanced user interface, to put it on par with the leading CRM offerings. The underlying architecture is based on the same infrastructure (Netweaver) that SAP has used for years. More likely than not, SAP CRM is meant for existing or new SAP customers who desire an SAP ERP backend solution. I have seen very little competition between MS CRM and SAP CRM. In the few cases I have, it has been a matter of quick contact management and sales activity recording, with little to no thought regarding backend integration (i.e. 360-degree view of the customer).

SAP rebranded Outlooksoft "SAP Business Planning and Consolidation", for managing critical financial and operational planning, budgeting, reporting, and analytic requirements. It in no way represents any customer relationship management functionality.

[s.ge]

SharePoint is the great platform for enterprise document management and collaboration, and the integration application on SharePoint lets organisations to keep IT platform up with their business development and requirement in the future.

For more information about SharePoint integration, you can visit nsynergy.com.