XRM

XRM is the official positioning of the platform components underlying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. While the "C" is equal to customer in CRM, "X" is equal to ANY relationship that needs to be managed, such as vendors, employees, prospects, dealers, as well as other types of business relationships including properties, assets, projects, grants, legislation, etc. The flexibility of the XRM platform components enables it to be leveraged in a wide variety of ways by many different organizations.

Why XRM?

Most organizations meet their business process automation needs through the development of custom applications or the acquisition of packaged applications. Often times these solutions do not fulfill every business requirement. Custom applications can be extremely expensive to develop and maintain. Research has identified that it will cost a company from seven to ten times more to develop a particular functionality than to purchase comparable functionality. The costs and risks associated with developing highly specialized line-of-business are truly prohibitive. Packaged applications, while easy to deploy, do not fit the business and can be very difficult to change once they are deployed. XRM offers an alternative and the best of both worlds; it accelerates the creation of LOB applications, and it makes it easy to modify existing applications in response to ever-changing business needs.

XRM can help enterprise organizations bridge the gap between packaged and custom applications. Short and long term benefits make XRM a feasible strategic alternative. With XRM the IT Department delivers speed, business fit and business agility. In the short term the IT Department can rapidly respond to a request for an application, on-time and on-budget.

And over time, the IT Department can deliver multiple business applications, all built on a common platform, helping them meet diverse and ever changing business needs across the organization while minimizing the time and costs associated with infrastructure, maintenance, support, integration, modifications and customizations.

Benefits of XRM

XRM is a business application platform layer that sits on top of – and leverages the power of – the Microsoft Application Platform technology building blocks (Windows, SQL Server, .NET, and Office) and is designed to significantly accelerate the creation of enterprise-class relational business applications by providing IT professionals with reusable ‘application services’ that can be rapidly adapted to fit the unique needs of users and businesses through point & click. Key value areas include:

• Familiar Microsoft technologies give end-users a consistent experience across all applications (Office/Outlook) and provide IT professionals with technology they know (SQL Server, Windows, .NET).
• Power of choice ensures organizations get and use XRM the way they need it. Whether it be on-premise or on-demand, subscription or license, Outlook or web, the power of choice ensures it fits customers environment and budget.
• Enterprise-class capabilities through highly scalable multi-tenancy for efficient management of multiple large-scale applications in a single environment
• Point & click customization allows each application to be completely built (relational data model, process automation, user experience…) and maintained through a point & click interface.