Robert on Software Development

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Microsoft Dynamics lately. Microsoft Dynamics encompasses Microsoft’s enterprise software for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Microsoft developed CRM in-house, and bought the ERP applications from various companies so it could compete in the enterprise applications spaces held by companies such as Oracle (which owns Siebel and PeopleSoft) and SAP.

Microsoft Dynamics is made up of five different products: CRM for CRM; AX, GP, NAV, and SL for ERP. Figuring out how the four ERP products differ, and which one to choose, is not immediately clear. Because the products all come from different originating vendors, there’s even some overlap. For example, AX offers a CRM module that overlaps with Dynamics CRM. GP has a ledger built in, but so does AX and SL. And with all these initializations (which stand for the companies that originally developed the apps, such as “SL” for “Solomon”), it’s easy to get the products all confused.

The ERP products are also developed in different programming languages and don’t always fit cohesively into the Microsoft family of products. This makes it quite tough for custom developers like myself to walk into a shop that says they’re using Microsoft Dynamics for ERP. Which product? What customization has already occured? What modules are installed?

While it might sound like I’m being harsh on Microsoft, I’m actually not. I know Microsoft has been working on improving the Dynamics experience the past few years. CRM, for example, is a very polished product and the new version, coming out later this year, runs on SharePoint. I’ve also heard that the Dynamics team is working on new versions of the various products that will be built on .NET, with better Office integration and a lower barrier of entry for developers. As an enterprise IT guy, this pleases me. Microsoft will probably rename the applications once their focus shifts from supporting existing customers to acquiring new ones, so it becomes easier to figure out which application covers supply chain management, for example.

I think the Microsoft Dynamics tools can be expanded beyond their original domain, too. Take CRM, for example. When people talk about CRM, they’re almost always talking about it within the context of sales. A CRM solution tracks and organizes a company’s contacts with its current and prospective customers. But can Dynamics CRM be applied to domains where sales aren’t the objective?

That’s the topic for part II of this series.