We use MS Dynamics 4.0 at work for our CRM. This handles all contact management, marketing, resource sharing w/ sharepoint integration, workflow management / collaboration and essentially is used by every department in the firm in some way or another.
We have requirements from business for a new application that we have a tight timeline on. We have only just started rolling out CRM, and most of the custom development was done by a consulting firm.
We need a relatively simple application that we need to track some data for sharing for a specific group. Some of this information already lives in our ‘company’ and ‘client’ CRM entity.
This new project would require us to add around 26 fields – we don’t want to bloat our already large company entity – especially since only around 5% of our companies would use these extra fields.
We are basically debating a design right now – hybrid solution (create our own ASP.NET app that looks like CRM and communicates to it via web services and store all the ‘supplemental’ fields on our own database, possibly living on the same DB server as our CRM DB so we can easily write queries). The other alternative is to do it 100% in CRM.
I’m just looking for advice for people who have done something similar to this. Would you recommend doing a hybrid solution such as this or should we do 100% CRM? Our deadline is tight and the developers working on the project have limited CRM knowledge; this is why it’s a bit of a debate. For those working with MS Dynamics – how would you typically handle a project like this, where we need to add many fields (and even sub fields with parent->child relationships of their own) that would only apply to a very small percentage of our main ‘company’ entity.. something to note: we are already having performance issues when people load up this company entity as is (it could take 5 seconds for the page to render) and the same goes for advanced finds.
Last thing to note – this portion of the application is only for storing the data. In the end, the user will be opening a VBA Excel workbook, pushing a ‘pull down data’ button, that will pull this data from wherever we wind up storing it. We just aren’t sure where we should store/manage this data/UI.
Thanks very much for any advice.
EDIT: How can I create 2 list boxes next to each other with 2 buttons in the middle where one listbox is a lost of ‘my foos’ and the other is ‘all foos’ and you add/take away from ‘my foos’ list box??? the classic ‘i have these foos as part of me’ UI control with 2 list boxes and 2 arrow buttons… Should/can I use jquery for this? and does anyone happen to know of any jquery control that already does all of this out of the box? This is such a common control I’m sure it must be out there somewhere. I’ve browsed some toolkits and controls and some threads on here and seen some really awesome, even more complicated controls but not this particular one..
EDIT2: After doing more research, it seems like keeping the UI all in CRM would be more complicated then just making an ASP.NET app for that portion and putting it in an iframe or modal popup in CRM.
We can still setup all the data fields and relationships in CRM – and have the ASP.NET do the CRUD using Webservice calls.
It seems we would wind up having to do the same amount of work to get the functionality needed in CRM – except it would be more hackish and done in javascript. At what benefit? Keeping the UI in one place??? Not that much of a trade off IMO…
so far we are leaning towards keeping all data in CRM but putting the UI in ASP.NET
Any advice is greatly appreicated. Is what I’m saying sane? Thanks
I agree, you’re better off going with 100% CRM.
If (and I stress if) you find the performance impact is significant, consider using a related entity to hold the additional fields.
CRM doesn’t provide a 1-to-1 relationship type so you’ll have to manage that yourself. Make your company entity the N side of the relationship so the related entity appears as a lookup.
Alternately, if the related entity lookup is too abstract for your users, add a tab with an iFrame to the company entity form. Use javascript to show/hide the tab and also to set the src of the iFrame to the url of the related entity.