Tag: ecosystem

The Social CRM that came to be: from 2010 to 2020

Last week I came across an article on LinkedIn, where someone was saying “the time for Social CRM is upon us, thanks to COVID-19 changing the customers’ behaviour, and here’s a CRM system that you should use for managing it” (I’m paraphrasing). What caught my eye in the text was the references to the writings of Paul Greenberg, the semi-official godfather of CRM, in the 4th (and last) edition of his bible “CRM at the Speed of Light”. Released back in late 2009, the 700 page worth of content are probablt too much for anyone but the most hardcore CRM fans to consume at this point, but Paul’s blog post “Time to Put A Stake in The Ground on Social CRM” certainly is worth revisiting even in 2020.

Of course those who have followed Paul’s writings over the years may remember that he made the decision in 2013 to drop the “Social” from Social CRM and just call it CRM once again. The reasoning behind it was just as sound as was the original text laying out the definition of SCRM. I want to emphasize that I don’t consider the era of Social CRM from 2008 to 2013 to be a mistake of any sort. What I did find a bit awkward is the idea of selling any suite of software as the platform for “Social CRM” in 2020, since what Paul Greenberg wrote already back in 2009 for his Stake in the Ground article is still very much valid:

“When you look at the SCRM applications out there – there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side. What you do have are effective and important applications that increase the ability of employees to interact with customers – though they are not tools that facilitate the actual interaction. You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM. I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company’s consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there – as of yet or in the near future. Which doesn’t matter one iota.”

In the same vein as you can’t simply “do CRM” by just deploying a CRM software suite while skipping the strategy part and business process implementation, Social CRM was never about waiting for a version of your CRM suite to arrive that included the missing social module. This is not a radical piece of insight by any means but rather common sense – something that needs to be stated also on a technical blog like mine every now & then.

What actually inspired me to start writing this article about Social CRM is the image that I saw in my Timehop stream yesterday morning. For those who don’t know, Timehop is a service that creates a bucket of digital memories from the same date X years ago and delivers it as a push notification on your smartphone every day (I wish the still did the email digest but that’s another rant). 10 years ago I was attending the Microsoft Convergence conference in Atlanta and attending a session called “Deriving Value from Social Networks”, delivered by Nikhil Hasija from MS and Paul Greenberg from… well, you know Paul already. The picture I had grabbed from the session was this #Customer #SCRM Stack slide:

Not just that, I actually wrote a review about the session in my blog that used to be called Surviving CRM. With the whole Social CRM topic fresh in my mind I needed to go and revisit my notes from a decade ago, to gain some perspective on what the world looked like back then and what I was expecting to see from technology vendors like Microsoft on this social front.

The early 2010s were a time of Social CRM technology acquisition spree. If you want proof, the company that published this infograph on the Social CRM Arms Race between Oracle and Salesforce in June 2012 (which I referenced in my later blog posts) had actually found itself to be part of Salesforce only one year later – after having first been acquired by ExactTarget. Microsoft was late to the game and playing with a considerably lower stack of chips than these two. In hindsight, it may have been wise to not pour in all of their money into this one table, since it’s hard to say if the ROI has truly been there for any of the large tech corporations that were chasing the elusive Social CRM suite at the time. Still, MS naturally had to take part in the game, which is depicted in this 2012 slide on how the Dynamics team perceived the role of Social in their product strategy:

Viewed through the lenses of a MSFT ecosytem player like myself, here are some of my own observations on how their strategy eventually played out in different areas of Social CRM.

Social network data streams

The big data from public social feeds like Twitter and Facebook was at one time considered to be so critical for your SCRM product offering that Microsoft went out and bought a company called Netbreeze in 2013 that had built a system to harvest social posts and produce nice looking analytics on top of it. Initially named as Microsoft Social Listening and then Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE), the service was offered to basically all Dynamics CRM Online customers for free. This unfortunately meant most of them didn’t actually perceived it as a serious business tool, which I’d imagine also affected the product development budget in a negative way, leading to a vicious cycle.

In the beginning of 2019 Microsoft announced it was going to shut down MSE, and at the same time launched a preview of a new service called Dynamics 365 Market Insights. Then a year later also Market Insights was discontinued, with the message that some of the capabilities will find new homes in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Microsoft Bing industry updates. One thing to keep in mind is that the actual social data streams of Twitter and Facebook had already been removed from the scope of the product before that, so the statement doesn’t necessarily cover those ever making a return.

After making investments in both acquisitions as well as product development over the past 8 years, Microsoft has now effectively made an exit from the business of social listening and social engagement. Partner solutions from the likes of Sprinklr, Orlo or Hootsuite are now offered as the systems to use for social media management with their integrations to Dynamics 365 apps. Entities like Social Profile and Social Activity remain in the Common Data Model schema, but I’m not sure if there’s any service feeding data into them after MSE is gone.

I don’t believe for a moment that Microsoft would not be seeing value in the data itself, rather I think they are aligning themselves behind a much more realistic strategy now. Building upon the strength of Azure data platfrom, Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform is in a position to make them a leader in CDP rather than a follower in social data processing. This is much better in line with how Satya Nadella has been transforming MS from their early OS monopoly roots into a team player for the cloud, seeking to create value via new connections in the global network of people and technology, rather than trying to (immediately) bring down their competitors.

Social selling

While there is far more data in the social media firehose of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc., the one source that everyone in the B2B business of CRM have always had their eyes on is LinkedIn. It is their API that was the foundation of so many early Social CRM tools like Nimble back in the 2010 era. LinkedIn’s decision to lock out these smaller CRM providers in their 2014 “LinkedOut” API restrictions put an end to the era where building a sales app of your own on top of a database from someone else had seemed like a good idea.

Undoubtedly the biggest move that Microsoft has ever made in the social field was the 2016 acuisition of LinkedIn for $26 billion (note that this was already during the Nadella reign). As this deal was reportedly a competition between Salesforce and MS, it was only natural that the initial assumptions were for this new data source to light up in the Dynamics products and change the game of B2B CRM forever.

It hasn’t happened yet. What we’ve seen so far on the Dynamics 365 side has been mostly just the Microsoft Relationship Sales offering that embeds content from LinkedIn into the UI of Dynamics. Sure, there’s a bit more to it on the functional side, but it still closelt resembles the LinkedIn Sales Navigator that Paul Greenberg has always hated, calling it “a faux middleware to get access to the LinkedIn data”. In the standard Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise app, there still isn’t even a LinkedIn profile card available yet for contacts, whereas Outlook on the web shows one. All in all we’re still surprisingly close to what the social selling story for Dynamics CRM was back in 2013.

Instead of using LinkedIn as a weapon in the battle for CRM supremacy, Microsoft appears to have chosen to play the long game – and also to play it safe. I belive the major driver behind this approach has been the hightened attention on privacy. Back in 2010, there wasn’t a widespread awareness yet on the potential privacy issues that the global social networks have introduced into our lives. Today pretty much everyone has heard what the NSA had been doing with their social data archives, as well as how Cambridge Analytica gamed the election systems with the help of Facebook social profile/network data and ad targeting. We’ve seen GDPR come into effect in the EU, forcing companies from around the world to pay attention to their policies and procedures around customer data handling.

The real strategic value from LinkedIn isn’t in the straightforward enablement of social selling via offering data to users of a CRM system, rather it is in the “professional graph” that Microsoft can build when combining this with signals from its own services like Office 365. Yes, in the end it will help both Microsoft and its customers to sell more products and services in the digital world, of course. It’s just going to be more AI driven than the original visions from a decade ago, with MS keeping the network data closer to itself and the faceless algorithms that are crunching the big data to deliver smart recommendations to the app users.

Social customer service

As mentioned, acquisitions were a popular path for CRM giants to build up capabilities to match the new social customer era in the early 2010s. Customer service was an area where Microsoft originally attempted to bring the self-service capabilities of online knowledge bases and Facebook page embeds into their CRM suite by acquiring a company called Parature. We hardly even saw that product in the European market before it was discontinued, in favor of a long & winding internal feature development path to build a foundation on top of which the customer organizations could build their service processes (often still requiring plenty of custom code). While SaaS products like Zendesk weren’t necessarily customizable enough for enterprise needs, what they did was show a level of modern customer service experiences that seemed very difficult to reach when building up from a traditional CRM system design to be used behind corporate firewalls.

That’s ultimately what was always weighing down a product like MS CRM in the Social CRM race: it was designed to be an internal system. Exposing the data to the outside world meant that you had to re-think the system architecture in a major way. Sure, there were visionaries already back in Convergence 2010 like Adxstudio that powered the portal accelerators for CRM Online. Later MS decided to acquire the company and today that technology also powers the Power Apps Portals aimed at citizen developers, to quickly build self-service interfaces to access line of business data via responsive web interfaces.

Omnichannel has been a big investment area for Dynamics 365 in the past few years. While still working on their own web chat, co-browsing and call/video technology for the public web, Microsoft partnered with CafeX to offer a stop-gap solution to allow live online support experiences on their Portals. The recent updates to Omnichannel are now finally bringing also non-MS channels into play, with support for WhatsApp discussions (via Twilio), Twitter, WeChat and LINE. The modern Azure-based architecture of Microsoft Teams provides a solid foundation for future expansion of messaging functionality. You could say that after a slow start and a few side steps, the social customer service story has developed into a promising direction.

Social events

The backchannel of physical events that takes place in social media, under specific hashtags, was a big new phenomenon back in 2010. It was around that time when I started to actively follow and curate content from conferences around the world, from the comfort of my own home, armed with just a set of Twitter streams on my Tweetdeck client. Actual live streams of the sessions were still very rare, but the community around MS Business Applications strated to come together precisely because of the key role of individuals in spreading the word on what was being presented on the live stage.

As it just happens, 2010 was the year of the ash cloud, which stopped a significant slice of all air traffic globally and forced conference attendees like me to look for alternative routes to get to the venue from the other side of the globe:

10 years ago flights were grounded only on one side of the planet, due to the ash cloud. Compared to #COVID19, those were actually pretty fun times, as there was a way around it all. Today we're grounded indefinitely and there's nothing anyone can do about it😕 pic.twitter.com/vW516wrrWr
— Jukka Niiranen mstdn.social/@jukkan (@jukkan) April 17, 2020

Looking back at what a single volcano did in 2010, it was a tiny little blip compared to the COVID19 pandemic we are facing right now. In trying to adjust to the new reality of a world full of coronavirus, Microsoft has announced to go digital-only with its own events for at least the end of June 2021. While I belive this is the right move for them to make, I also belive Microsoft will take this as an opportunity to build up their own technical capabilities for running virtual events and offering social engagement channels around them. This would surely be a very welcome direction for Microsoft’s customers, since these capabilities haven’t progressed as much from the year 2010 as you could have expected. Let’s look at a few key elements that could use bigger investments:

Webinars. Those who participate in the MS partner ecosystem events may well have run into the ON24 webinar platform. It also happens to be the only supported webinar provider for Dynamics 365 Marketing today. To give you an example of the event attendee experience for ON24, let’s just say that the little red icon you see in the Slides window below belongs back to 2010, not this current decade that the rest of us are living in…

Event recordings. Microsoft does run a service called Stream that’s included in Office 365 (Microsoft 365) subscriptions, but it doesn’t allow sharing videos with anyone outside of your tenant. Not even guest accounts that can sign into the Microsoft Teams teams are allowed to view event recordings from Stream. Since this limitation has been around for over two years already, I suspect we’re not very close yet on Stream becoming a real competitor for the public video sharing services like YouTube or Vimeo and their community features.

Slides. Together with their LinkedIn acquistion, Microsoft became the owner of SlideShare. While initially it would seem like an obvious “better together” story to have the makers of PowerPoint united with the leading social platform for sharing slides, this has obviously not been an area that MS has prioritized. In fact, the SlideShare service seems to have been abandoned years ago already. Instead of developing new features, even old useful ones are now being stripped away. You can no longer sign up for a company account, as this option has been silently removed, so our new company had to give up on the idea of distributing our webinar slides on a MS hosted service and instead just publish them as PDFs on our WordPress site.

Social apps ecosystem

The Social CRM movement was all about putting the customer in control of the conversation with the company, thus leading to an inevitable growth in the number of different services and digital touchpoints where the interaction would take place. Therefore it was no longer possible for companies to build a “one perfect system” to govern all the relevant processes and messages, rather the CRM systems had to become more compatibile with the outside world and the various services where the conversation took place. In practice you needed to support an ecosystem of apps and service providers to partner with one another and to offer connectors between the data sources and targets.

The technical infrastructure in 2010 wasn’t ready for this at all yet. Back in Convergence 2010 it was the first major event where the upcoming solution framework in Dynamics CRM 2011 was being presented. This mechanism was going to allow apps from different providers to be plugged on top of the common platform (and also unplugged) without the work traditionally required from a systems integrator that managed the CRM system. The CRM Online service launched globally on the following year would also heavily depend on this new modular model of extending the CRM capabilities with integrations to new cloud services without disrupting the core business processes that were relying on this system of record.

In 2010 the Apple App Store had already been around for a couple of years and this model was envisioned to become the new standard for also how business software capabilities were distributed in the near future. Out of all pieces in the puzzle for Social CRM technology, the inability to build a viable marketplace for ISVs from also outside the immediate MS ecosystem was perhaps the biggeset stumbling block for Microsoft. What was launched as Dynamics Marketplace in 2010 became pretty much all that there would ever be: a random listing of solutions and service providers that did very little to help customers in discovering the right building blocks for the latest social technologies and services for their CRM systems.

This part of the journey has been incredibly long, but on the technical side of things we’re still moving along. The solution framework that was being previewed for XRM in 2010 is being developed to support the whole range of new Power Platform services in 2020 that now share the same foundation. It’s pretty wild that the low-code tools being offered to citizen developers across all corners of organizations are now riding along in the same freight train that originally consisted of only the sales, marketing and services cars of CRM.

This is representative of a larger movement that I think has also changed how CRM and social channels are coming together these days. Moving most of the core CRM systems into the cloud for modern organizations has made them far more accessible to social data, even without tightly coupled integrations via packaged apps. Technologies like Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate (Flow) have lowered the barrier for connecting systems together and thus made the sales, marketing and service departments a lot more agile in adopting and integrating with new social tools. In a way, the need for an SCRM suite to be built by a big tech corporation has somewhat diminished as a result of this, because customer organizations are now better equipped in assembling their own unique toolkits for engaging in social channels while connecting to their systems of record.

“One more thing”

Ah, nothing takes you back in time to the days of early Social CRM like that iconic phrase from a certain tech company’s keynotes… Anyway, to close off this exploration into the days gone by, here’s one more gem that Timehop delivered to me from 10 years ago:

For once I can say “I told you so”! Now, this particular tweet was surely about providing the customers to the option to change the visual branding of their system, but in retrospect it almost looks like if Microsoft themselves wanted to break free from the cages of the CRM acronym already way back then. Splitting the Dynamics 365 suite into separate apps and stopping the use of the term CRM was a controversial move back in 2016, which appears to have only accelerated the juggling of product brand names at MS in the past few years.

The convenience of having an established acronym to describe what you’re doing is definitely very tempting for us lazy human beings, and attaching terms like “Social” into it must seem like the easiest way to explain something new while still holding on to all the old stuff. In the end, though, Social CRM became the everyday reality through routes we might not have expected to travel – and we stopped calling it both “Social” and – on the technical platform side – “CRM”. Or did we?

April 27, 2020
Building The Platform for Every Developer

For the first time ever at Microsoft Build conference, the Power Platform was presented right at the start of Satya’s keynote this year! Woo-hoo!

Of course this time last year there wasn’t yet the name “Power Platform” to even reference at Build. We had only just seen the merger of XRM and PowerApps into something that was a bit of a puzzle to communicate to partners, let alone customers. Well, the puzzle hasn’t exactly been solved yet, but it is still quite remarkable how far we’ve come in one year already.

Last year’s sessions at Build 2018 were mostly about introducing the concepts like Common Data Service to a .NET developer audience that probably had zero hands-on experience with any Dynamics product for the most part. Not a whole lot of noise was made about this entry into the #MSBuild space. Fast forward to 2019 and now the vision of uniting pro developers with “every developer” is already touted at the keynote sessions. Not just that, but Satya is saying that recent re-architecting of Dynamics 365 on top of Azure infrastructure and services should be examined as an excellent reference for anyone who’s planning to build their own products on SQL Azure.

During the week of Build, the product team behind Citizen Application Platform (“CAP”) puts aside their Citizen caps and pulls on the pro dev hoodies to talk about topics like solution management, PCF component development, Azure Functions, DevOps pipelines and all the nerdy stuff that would scare away the folks who normally create PowerApps. It’s inevitable that as the tools for app makers get more mature the next barrier to world domination will be in getting not just the IT admins to build the necessary automation and governance around Power Platform in enterprise environments but also in finding a way to make pro-coders play with low-coders.

If you look back at XRM, then there’s really nothing new about this division of roles. It has always been the case that code illiterate business analysts do the point & click configuration work for data models and business processes, while the XRM developers spend their time with the SDK enabled client-side extensions, server-side logic and system integration tasks. Fundamentally what the Power Platform does is it enables everyone to level up in their game. Application design on the UI level and interfaces to connected data sources can now be handled by those business analysts who are willing to learn new low-code tricks. Similarly, the developers get to break free from the boundaries of the IIS and SQL Server boxes, to harness the amazing power of The World’s Computer (Microsoft’s nickname for Azure) to hook into new AI services and crunch the contents of The Real Common Data Service.

If the app builders are about to step up their game, so must the sales machine of Microsoft. The big push from Redmond is now on ensuring that an ecosystem will emerge on top of Power Platform. The new partner program for Business Application ISVs, lead by Steve Guggenheimer, is trying to make a bigger splash by combining the earlier models of Azure Marketplace and the Dynamics 365 focused AppSource into a single channel that could actually serve the grand vision of a no-cliffs development platform. As always, you should check out what The Other Steve has to say about the upsides to the new program, before making your conclusions on whether it’s just a new tax on ISVs or an opportunity worth pursuing for a growing number of MS partners.

To summarize the announcements and buzz around Power Platform at Microsoft Build 2019 conference, I’ve compiled this handy lil’ Twitter Moment for you to enjoy:

Microsoft Build 2019 and Power Platform

May 9, 2019
XRM Strikes Back
In case you missed the announcement last week, Microsoft has acquired Adxstudio. This is simply wonderful news for anyone working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for a number of reasons. First of all, the Adxstudio Portals product brings in a critical piece of functionality that has so far been missing from Microsoft’s own portfolio, which is surfacing the information and processes of CRM to external parties via integrated web portals. Second, the amount of knowledge and real-life experience that will be brought into the Dynamics CRM product team on topics like solution management, ALM practices and in general the life of an ISV partner in the Dynamics ecosystem is bound to make Microsoft’s product offering even better in the future.

The third point, and the main topic of this blog post, is that in my eyes this acquistion validates one very important aspect when it comes to Dynamics CRM as a business application platform: XRM is alive and kicking. In order to understand why I think that way & why it makes a big difference to the Dynamics CRM ecosystem, we need to look back a bit and understand what’s been happening on the acquisitions front during the past few years.

Let’s Go Shopping

It is not that uncommon for enterprise software vendors to grow their solution portfolio by acquiring companies rather than organically developing new products and features. This timeline from a few years ago demonstrated how Oracle and Salesforce were buying companies related to Social CRM technology. (Funnily enough, the company who posted the timeline was first acquired by ExactTarget, which then got sold to Salesforce within 1 year from that post.) Microsoft hasn’t been quite as active in this shopping spree as some of its competitors, but they do seem to have picked up the pace during the past few years.

Are acquisitions a smart way to spend cash then? Back in the days when Microsoft bought Yammer, the price of $1.2 billion was questioned by many. Three years later the valuation of Slack, which you could call “the Yammer of 2015”, is set at $2.8 billion. Once you get to the “three commas” level, the traditional laws of physics no longer apply, meaning it’s not about technology underneath the product or anything else tangible that sets the price tag for a company. So, instead of handing out investment tips to the big boys in the “,,,” club, let’s discuss a more down to earth aspect of software company acquisitions: integrating the new technology with the old.

In these days of cloud based services with open API’s, it’s really not that difficult to develop a bit of code that will allow you add a bullet into your marketing materials, claiming “X now integrates with Z”! Heck, with services like Zapier or IFTTT, even a code illiterate geek like me could take two applications from the consumer or business space and make them talk with one another, just by setting up the business logic via point & click configuration in a browser window. If I’d want to push tweets with a negative sentiment into Dynamics CRM as support tickets, all I really need is to watch a video from Azuqua, sign up for their subscription service and click my way through the process shown below.

In the marketing speak, any software integration will always described as “seamless”. The reality of what you can actually achieve via the integration (if anything) may not become apparent until it is validated in a real-life use case that takes into consideration the variations in configuration & data contents found in live systems, executing an end-to-end business process rather than a simple data exchange between two IT systems. In practice, a cloud application vendor that promises to integrate with 20 different CRM platforms is unlikely to understand very much at all about the built-in logic of each target system, nor the specific use cases in which organizations wish to leverage such integrated features.

Integrating pieces of software together isn’t a very unique task. After all, that’s the origin behind the term “systems integrator” that’s sometimes used when referring to consulting companies that deploy enterprise IT systems like CRM software and stitch it together with other systems. Integrating actual products, on the other hand, is a much more challenging task than just integrating software. Not only do you need to deliver a solution that adapts to the needs of many customers instead of one, but you also must be able to align the capabilities of all the related products in your portfolio in such a way that makes sense to the customers and end users. Avoiding redundancy and overlap while still smoothly transitioning the old & new users towards the new, truly seamless experience that delivers on the promises made regarding the integration – yeah, I can imagine that being a bit of a product management challenge for sure.

Microsoft’s Acquisition & Integration Track Record

The list of acquisitions Microsoft has made in the recent years that involved product functionality related to Dynamics CRM includes the following notable examples:
- Skype (2011) – At $8.5B, this was the biggest MSFT acquisition to date and the Skype brand has since then replaced Lync as the telephony/messaging brand for consumers and businesses alike.
- Yammer (2012) – Another big one. The whole social revolution in information work meant MSFT needed to make both their products as well as product development processes more like that startup & viral model of Yammer and less like that traditional enterprise software world of Office & co.
- MarketingPilot (2012) – Although not primarily a marketing automation solution for digital channels originally, the MP acquisition was transformed into Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) to attract the CMO’s with an technology budget that would soon pass that of the CIO.
- Netbreeze (2013) – While Yammer targeted the internal social collaboration scenarios in organizations, monitoring the public social media channels needed a separate channel. Enter Netbreeze with it’s initial Microsoft Social Listening brand and the later reincarnation as Social Engagement (MSE).
- Parature (2014) – Along with marketing resources targeted to social channels at a growing pace, the customer service work also moved away from call centers into online support portals and customer reps communicating via services like Facebook. Parature was the answer to meeting the market demand on this front.
For each of these products it was easy to come up with numerous scenarios in which the organizations using Dynamics CRM could benefit from embedding this new technology into being a part of the sales, marketing and service processes managed via CRM, linked directly into the account & contact records, thus promising to deliver that a true 360 view of the customer relationship. Of course the mere change of ownership for the IPR behind these acquired technologies didn’t yet change anything in the physical world that would make such scenarios become reality. How would these new pieces of the puzzle in practice be fitted together with the existing big picture was the important question to ask. Would 1 and 1 be 2+, or closer to “one point something”?

At the time of acquisition, there were some existing integrations to Dynamics CRM available for Yammer and Parature. If we take the former as an example, then there was obvious overlap between Yammer and CRM’s own Activity Feeds feature that was introduced to the platform on the year before. While Yammer of course has far more end user functionality available in its own application, on the Dynamics CRM side there’s actually quite a lot less that we can do with these type of social posts in the business process context than with the native Activity Feeds feature of CRM. Since the posts are now split into two different feeds (Yammer and “System Posts”) inside two different databases with two different security models and several different client application UI’s, it’s not so obvious that this new integrated world is a better fit for all Dynamics CRM customer organizations. (For a discussion on the future of Yammer & CRM, check out this blog post from Gustaf Westerlund.)

Looking at a larger integration effort, Microsoft took the foundation of MarketingPilot and rebuilt much of it to create Dynamics Marketing, but they still decided to keep it as a separate application that can be used with or without Dynamics CRM. So, what does this mean for CRM customers then? Looking at the surface, the main application navigation is identical between MDM and CRM, but the form and view controls presented to the end user have different logic in each application. The system administrator cannot perform similar UI and data model customization on MDM than what the CRM platform provides. Microsoft offers a connector service hosted on Azure that synchronizes data between CRM and MDM databases, but the scope is limited to a set of predefined record types. As an end result, while you get a wealth of marketing resource management functionality via MDM, there will be limitations on how you can integrate the solution to act as part of you specific business processes and data model configured into Dynamics CRM.

Doing It The XRM Way

If as an independent application architect it was clear to you from day one that the product you’ve set out to build should work in the most seamless way for Dynamics CRM customers, you probably wouldn’t first develop a separate application and then start thinking about how to connect it with the CRM database. In such a scenario your architecture design would most likely start from the core of the customer data and business processes that CRM is typically used for managing, as you would want to ensure that your solution is well aligned with the installed base of Dynamics CRM organizations out there. Next you would take a look at what functionality the XRM platform offers that could be leveraged as the building blocks of your own solution, to avoid time spent on developing the “plumbing” already available in each CRM deployment where your application would operate. Only after this would you go and build the external services needed in delivering your application’s functionality, by connecting to other systems, presenting data in non-CRM user interfaces where needed, enforcing licensing policies for your product etc.

The XRM way of developing products has clear benefits not only to the solution provider but most importantly to the organization using the product. The user identities and access rights have a single administration point, the user experience is likely more familiar to your CRM users, you have no application interfaces to configure or manage and the data will (mostly) sit inside the same database as your existing customer account and contact information. Most importantly, from a functional perspective, you can keep on building your business specific processes and reporting for the XRM applications in the same way as you would customize your Dynamics CRM application. If you’re seriously investing in CRM as your business process hub, doesn’t that all sound quite tempting?

Also Microsoft appears to have understood the temptation behind such a model, since the Dynamics related acquisitions it has made during this year for the most part have XRM written all over them:
- Mojo Surveys: Design surveys inside CRM, by modeling the questionnaires as CRM entities and tracking the detailed response data back to the customer records. Will be include in CRM 2016 release as a Survey Designer / “Voice of The Customer” feature. Pure XRM ISV solution from Fusion Software, who still continue to work on similar non-MS products like CRM SalesFlow.
- FieldOne: Field service solution that started out in 2001 with a bit more classic approach for their “Terra” product, then bet the farm on XRM and rewrote it as “Sky”. Built on top of Dynamics CRM and also leverages other leading ISV solutions like Resco for mobility and Scribe for integration. Oh, and coincidentally, Adxstudio for their service portals.
- FantasySalesTeam: The only non-XRM product on this acquisition list. Well, I guess it doesn’t hurt MS to have some apps in their portfolio that integrate with Oracle Sales Cloud and the likes…
- Adxstudio: If there ever was a prime example of an XRM application, it would have to be Adxstudio Portals. Their solution was already included as a part of CRM 2011 SDK to replace the earlier Portal Accelerator, and now the circle is complete. With up to 128 custom entities, Adx hasn’t been afraid to use Dynamics as a true XRM platform, all the while offering the critical missing piece that would connect the internal facing business applications with the customer facing websites.
Depending on what’s the position of your application in relation to CRM, it’s of course not mandatory for it to be fully baked into the XRM platform for it to deliver great value to end users. Also, if Microsoft were to just keep on buying more and more ISV solutions into their product portfolio and assimilating them all into one big CRM suite, there’s a potential risk of ending up with a SAP-esque enterprise monolith that’s no longer serving the needs of the customers (by the way, for anyone interested on some insights on the current state of the “SAP nation”, I recommend reading the book by the same name).

Still, I for one am much more optimistic about the recent XRM based acquisitions when it comes to the expected time to value for customers and partners, as there shouldn’t be a pressing need for MS to rearchitect these solutions to try and integrate them with the existing Dynamics CRM product offering. From our perspective, they’ve been done right from the start. In a couple of years time I think we should reflect back on these different acquisitions made, to see if XRM truly got its revenge or not.
October 6, 2015
Dynamics Marketplace vs. Microsoft Pinpoint: where are all the CRM apps?
When Microsoft released the 2011 version of Dynamics CRM and introduced the solution management functionality they also introduced the Dynamics Marketplace: an app store for CRM solutions, integrated right into the CRM user interface. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post Driving Success with the New Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace:

The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is a new online service – based on Microsoft Pinpoint — that helps our customers maximize the relevancy and value of their Microsoft Dynamics investments by connecting them with valuable, high-quality applications and professional services from our worldwide Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). At launch, the Marketplace has more than 1,400 solution listings, including over 700 application listings and over 700 professional services listing forboth CRM and ERP

So, if you want to find the best listing of CRM solutions and other related applications, Dynamics Marketplace must be the place to go, right? Umm, actually not. You’re better of going to Microsoft Pinpoint to perform your search. Let me demonstrate this to you through a real life example.

Today I saw an announcement from Sonoma Partners, one of the most high profile companies in Dynamics CRM consulting business, about a new, free solution called Universal Search. As I followed the link on the press release onto “Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace”, I actually found myself at Pinpoint instead. It’s not a huge difference in the user experience, as Dynamics Marketplace is a subset of the Pinpoint platform. However, on this occasion I paid attention to the fact that the solution had actually already been published there on August 30th. Hmm, how come I didn’t notice it when scanning the Marketplace listings just last week?

I decided to do a little side-by-side test and opened up the US versions of both Dynamics Marketplace and Microsoft Pinpoint, narrowed down my search to applications only, selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and sorted the list by release date. Here are the results:
- Dynamics Marketplace: 197 applications
- Microsoft Pinpoint: 584 applications
Wow! A search on the generic Pinpoint site gives you three times more CRM 2011 apps than the dedicated Marketplace. Click the image below to see an example of search results that you’d be missing out on if you only use Dynamics Marketplace. 4 out of the 6 latest CRM applications listed on Pinpoint are not available on the Marketplace search.

Why is this happening? Ignoring the chance of technical errors in the search indexing, the difference is caused by the more strict requirements imposed on submissions to the Dynamics Marketplace. If you read the blog post I mentioned earlier, you’ll find the following summary information:

A Microsoft partner needs to have either the CRM or ERP competency in order to get listed on the marketplace. For solution listings, partners must be an authorized reseller of Microsoft Dynamics solution or have a solution that is verified as Microsoft Platform-Ready. Additionally, there is an optional Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) designation available for an additional fee.

That’s a perfectly valid explanation to the difference and the intentions behind the verification processes are surely good. Some customers may well decide to minimize the risk of causing harm to the operation of their business critical CRM systems by only choosing add-ons that are CfMD. Of course, if even solution vendors like Sonoma Partners are releasing products outside of the Marketplace criteria, one might ask if that is a sensible guideline for customer organizations to follow or not.

For anyone who wants to keep track of the useful ISV add-ons released for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they’ll get a much better experience browsing Microsoft Pinpoint rather than Dynamics Marketplace. I myself fall into this category and also try to do my share in promoting the ISV offerings by maintaining a list of Dynamics CRM Links to interesting apps I come across. Another result of the Marketplace limitations is that the majority of the valuable, free tools for CRM developers and customizers are published on CodePlex. So, in effect, we have three separate “app stores” from Microsoft. Or perhaps the term store is inaccurate in this case, as none of these three have cashiers in place, so maybe they should rather be called “app galleries”.

We haven’t seen much development on the Marketplace front since its release, which is quite a shame as we could really use some help from Microsoft in building a more vibrant ISV ecosystem around the Dynamics CRM product. There’s just so much more potential in the app store model, as illustrated by this awesome vision of a better Dynamics Marketplace that Neil Benson & Matt Wittemann. With the nearing commercial launch of Windows 8 and the accompanying Windows Store, the expectation levels of customers and developers alike have surely grown beyond the basic application listing that Dynamics Marketplace currently offers.
October 3, 2012