Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Microsoft CRM, ShoreTel Announce Integrated Application

ShoreTel (News - Alert), a vendor of Pure IP Unified Communications (News - Alert) products, has announced its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration application. ShoreTel officials say it integrates ShoreTel's call management and control capabilities with access to customer data.


The application is intended to help provide increased effectiveness, shorter response times, and improved account management, company officials say.

Basically the product integrates the phone communications and customer tracking. It links an incoming call to either an existing customer record or one of several new record creation screens. Users can dial out directly from theMicrosoft ( News - Alert) Dynamic CRM application using the embedded ShoreWare Web Dialer app, or they can dial out using a call manager and have an associated CRM record open.

Users can customize search settings to enable lookup of both standard and custom CRM entities and attributes, and each user can control how the integration software responds to calls and lookup results. The application doesn't require any modifications to any Microsoft components -- you don't need to coordinate product updates.

Earlier this month ShoreTel detailed the benefits of a ShoreTel IP unified communications system deployed by Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas. The ShoreTel UC system has "transformed the agency's communications system" by connecting regional offices, presenting a unified face to the community, driving down communications costs and improving service delivery, ShoreTel officials say.

Streamlined business processes and new call management features have helped Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas increase the number of mentoring relationships by more than 34 percent over a two-year period, while cutting almost in half the average wait time to find a successful match, according to ShoreTel officials.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas is the largest U.S. mentoring organization that provides children with support, guidance, friendship and fun by matching them to adult role models.

The organization had delivered its services via a professional staff working out of regional offices that relied on an outdated phone system that was not integrated. There was no single number that callers could use to reach anyone in the agency, office lines were often busy, and the agency incurred long-distance charges when calling across area codes.

In addition, staff and consultants were reluctant to use home or personal cell phones to keep in touch with the families and volunteers they served because of privacy concerns, which limited their availability and increased response time.

Microsoft CRM Picked for South African Firm

Terex Africa, a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Holdings, has implemented Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM to help improve its sales and marketing processes while providing access to customer information for reporting, analysis and forecasting.


Terex Africa distributes construction, mining, road building and aerial working machines and equipment across sub-Saharan Africa. The company wanted more visibility into its sales pipeline to improve sales efficiencies and the ability to view, store and segment customer and prospect information.

The Microsoft-based CRM product was implemented and customized by Microsoft Gold Certified partner IS Partners. "For a national company, it is particularly significant to have a centralized repository of information for cross and up-selling," says Heath Turner, CRM director at IS Partners.

In December the new version of Microsoft Dynamics was offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment. It's designed with a single unified-code base for both on-premise and on-demand deployments, and has "the flexibility to change deployment models over time if their needs or preferences change," according to the Microsoft officials.

Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft, outlined some new features as an advanced multitenant architecture that supports multiple customers per server, extended global capabilities including user choice of more than 25 languages and pervasive support for multiple currencies an new business intelligence capabilities, including cross-entity views and an end-user ad hoc reporting wizard.

This past October Microsoft Gold Partner Sunrise opened a joint venture company, Huamei Soft, in Xi'an as part of its Dynamics AX expansion.

Huamei Soft will focus primarily on offshore software development for the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system. Sunrise has invested in China in part to take better control of off-shore development operations.

Huamei Soft is located in the Xi'an Software Industrial Park, which was established in 1998 and authorized as one of the top five national software export bases. The Software Industrial Park will provide excellent infrastructure, value-added services on recruiting and training, and government support.

"Huamei Soft will play a critical role in supporting Sunrise Technologies' growth objectives in the future," states John Pence, president of Sunrise Technologies. "Not only has Huamei Soft provided outstanding customer service to our U.S. based operations, but they will be a critical partner as we ramp up our Sunrise China operations later this year."

Monday, January 28, 2008

Microsoft CRM, Dynamics AX Picked for Large Manufacturer

Sunrise Technologies has announced that American of Martinsville has chosen Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics AX as its new ERP product. American of Martinsville required a system that would provide complete integration across all business functions and applications.

AOM manufacturers, imports and supplies contract furnishings to the hospitality, healthcare/senior living, and government markets.

Using Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft CRM will allow AOM better control and visibility of their customer order cycle, from design inception to final order shipment, Sunrise officials say.

Noel Chitwood, President and CEO of AOM, said their customers "will benefit greatly from the increased transparency on their orders across our global manufacturing operations."

Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Sunrise has regional offices in Dallas, Los Angeles and Xi'an, China.

This past October Microsoft Gold Partner Sunrise opened a joint venture company, Huamei Soft, in Xi'an as part of its Dynamics AX expansion.

Huamei Soft will focus primarily on offshore software development for the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system. Sunrise has invested in China in part to take better control of off-shore development operations.

Huamei Soft is located in the Xi'an Software Industrial Park, which was established in 1998 and authorized as one of the top five national software export bases. The Software Industrial Park will provide excellent infrastructure, value-added services on recruiting and training, and government support.

"Huamei Soft will play a critical role in supporting Sunrise Technologies' growth objectives in the future," states John Pence, president of Sunrise Technologies. "Not only has Huamei Soft provided outstanding customer service to our U.S. based operations, but they will be a critical partner as we ramp up our Sunrise China operations later this year."

Terex fuels sales, service with Microsoft CRM

[ Johannesburg, 28 January 2008 ] - Terex Africa, a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Holdings, has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to streamline its sales and marketing processes while providing user-friendly access to relevant customer information for reporting, analysis and forecasting purposes.

Terex Africa distributes construction, mining, road building and aerial working machines and equipment across sub-Saharan Africa. The company needed visibility into its sales pipeline for improved sales efficiencies and the ability to easily view, store and segment customer and prospect information.

The Microsoft-based CRM solution was implemented and customised by Microsoft Gold Certified partner IS Partners. "For a national company, it is particularly significant to have a centralised repository of information to ensure opportunities can be capatilised on for cross and up-selling through the customer base," says Heath Turner, CRM director at IS Partners.

The solution was implemented to maintain consistent execution of the existing sales methodology. "Terex can now better understand and analyse sales cycles, calculate probabilities and ensure new staff adopt set processes within the sales team. Sales teams across South Africa can also view activities from other regions relating to customers and prospects and also generate quotes and orders from within the CRM system," Turner says.

Information about competitors can be easily tracked and understood, and customers profiled for campaign and event purposes. Reports are also easily generated and viewed from the system.

"Terex Africa sells through a team of approximately 25 sales people, situated throughout southern Africa," Turner says. "The solution has given the sales team access to all their information, whether from their office PCs, or offline on their laptops.

"It has also enabled marketing to extract customer lists based on specified segments and criteria and so communicate more effectively. Management can now also analyse sales efforts and win/close ratios as well as manage the sales teams' activities more effectively."

Basic complaint management will further ensure that any queries and service-related issues are captured against a customer and assigned to a responsible person. “Centralised access to information across all divisions has ensured more proactive management of Terex's customer base," Turner adds.

IS Partners

Established in 2001, IS Partners addresses the need for quality implementations of Microsoft solutions. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Business Intelligence, IS Partners specialises in empowering sales, marketing, financial and management in its customer base. This includes various industries such as retail, distribution, finance and IT.

IS Partners uses its own proven, streamlined methodology for all implementations. It also specialises in bringing bottom line value to CRM systems, providing business analysis, technical design, application architecture, implementation, training and performance tuning of CRM implementations on the Microsoft platform and Microsoft's own CRM solution.

For more information, go to: www.ispartners.co.za

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Microsoft rivals Salesforce with new CRM

Bill Gates will visit London this week to boost Microsoft’s latest release in customer relationship management (CRM).

The Microsoft chairman, currently on a farewell tour as he winds down his day-to-day commitment to the company he started, is in the UK on Wednesday to promote Dynamics CRM 4.0. The new edition comes as Microsoft is showing signs of making impressions on the market.

CRM 4.0, codenamed Titan, has been widely trailed as a product that supports so-called multi-tenancy capabilities, meaning Microsoft or partners will be able to host multiple instances of the software on one server and distribute it to customers over the internet. In that sense at least, Microsoft will move closer to Salesforce.com, the big growth story of CRM in the last 10 years. However, Microsoft said that the Microsoft-hosted variant, Dynamics CRM Live is only currently available in the US and Canada and even there only as part of an “Early Access” programme. It plans to replicate the plan for the UK but there is no near-term date planned.

The product will also offer business intelligence tools, workflow capabilities for business process management, and tie in to Office 2007, for example by tapping presence awareness in Office Communications Server 2007.

“Microsoft is a mixed bag,” said Denis Pombriant of analyst Beagle Research. “Their technology has taken a major leap ahead to the point where we can talk about parity with other CRM products [but] one of the issues that most strikes me is how Microsoft is increasingly being constrained by their distribution channel. [There are] too many ways to deploy it. You can go on premises as ever and also go online and Microsoft feels this compunction to make their product available as a solution for companies somewhere in the middle who want the flexibility to migrate. So, we have some pretty good product being sold in a questionable way.”

However, David Bradshaw of analyst Ovum said that by covering so many bases, Microsoft had “a brilliant plan”.

“The most attractive offering is the one that lets have it any way you want. Software-as-a-service is just a delivery model and we shouldn’t get too religious about it. The people they’re trying to compete with are Sage, NetSuite and the bottom end of Salesforce. The sweet spot is the mid-market and possibly even the low-end of that.”

CRM now within reach of smaller companies

Customer relationship management (CRM) software has finally come of age both in terms of usability and cost. That's the opinion of David Meyrick, Sales Manager at e-business solutions company, Epages.net.

"For the past five years, CRM has been a hard-sell to companies," he said. "Using customer information to improve service, predict trends and increase sales has been seen as a large and time-consuming project, which invariably falls by the wayside."

Part of the lack of enthusiasm for CRM has been the perceived difficulty of using CRM software: "Clients tell us it is difficult to ensure that information is recorded and stored for later use, but with products like Microsoft CRM, this difficulty has been overcome.”

Microsoft CRM is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office suite, particularly Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft looked at how people work and what businesses need to achieve. It realised that having to launch and learn another program was a barrier to successful data capture and have made its CRM software part of the Outlook toolbar.

"Customers using Microsoft CRM have a reduced adoption phase as the software works just like any other Microsoft product," comments Meyrick. "Users don't even have to remember to open the program as it is launched with Outlook and works with it."

Epages.net has just concluded sales with three KZN companies for MS CRM solutions. A financial services company, clothing manufacturer and a voice recording company have decided to implement Microsoft CRM.

"Each company has very specific requirements of the software and that is where the ease of customisation comes to the fore," said Meyrick. "The financial services company wants to manage broker sales and commissions, while the clothing company has a need to maintain customer order information and produce forecasts to ease production bottlenecks. All of the companies will be using CRM to proactively communicate with their customers and create a competitive edge," he said.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner and the leading CRM specialists in KZN, Epages.net has been working closely with Microsoft to dispel the perception that CRM is only an option for large companies.

"The solution is both affordable and scalable," remarked Penny Macpherson, Marketing Director of Epages.net. "A company can purchase licences per user and can have five or 5 000 licences, depending on the size of the business." According to Macpherson, a business without a CRM system and a small sales force of less than five reps stands to lose a large percentage of its vital customer information if a sales rep leaves the company.

"CRM takes all of the information that is contained within a sales person's head or on their cellphone and transfers it to a system owned by the company. In this way, the valuable customer information is retained even if the sales person leaves. This makes handover to a new employee a much more efficient process and reduces the risk of losing the client."

Citizen push for Microsoft CRM

Microsoft has introduced a citizen services platform as part of a new citizen relationship management (CRM) push.

The company says its Citizen Service Platform (CSP) will help public authorities to make their services available to citizens with modern communication methods. Over the course of this year, the software company plans to offer a package of online services that cities and communities can adapt to their own needs.

The strategy behind CSP is to make it easier in general for public servants to interact with citizens and streamline processes, saving time and tax money. It is also intended to provide the elusive single view of the citizen. The CSP will include templates built around Microsoft Dynamics CRM to ensure a consistent view of the citizen's information, whether accessed over the Internet, by telephone or at the town hall

"Governments need to respond to the growing needs of their constituencies and modernise the way they conduct business and engage with their stakeholders," said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International. "Technology can help local and regional governments increase efficiency levels and offer modernised services, but many are ill-equipped to meet citizens' needs due to a lack of funding, technical expertise or other resources."

The strategy takes into account research, conducted by Capgemini and cited by Microsoft, indicating that 80 percent of public services take place at the local level, but that local authorities do not have adequate technical means to meet the demand.

"CSP arose from a series of projects among Microsoft, our partners, and local and regional governments," said Courtois. "By incorporating past lessons and achievements, we will be able to provide these governments with technologies they can cost-effectively and easily deploy for the direct benefit of their citizens."

Friday, January 11, 2008

Microsoft Widens Hosted CRM Preview

Microsoft has expanded the preview of its hosted customer relationship management (CRM) (define) offering to more partners and customers. In addition, the company is in the process of bringing out new features for its Office Live Small Business services offerings.

Formally known as Dynamics CRM Live, the product is actually a Microsoft-hosted edition of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, which shipped last month. The major difference is that CRM Live is hosted in Microsoft's own datacenters, while CRM 4 is available for customers either to host on themselves or to outsource to Microsoft partners who provide hosting.

Both product lines – CRM 4/CRM Live, and Office Live Small Business – are part of Microsoft's emerging software-plus-services strategy, meant to keep the company relevant in the Web 2.0 era.

The company began its "early access" program for CRM Live in September and plans to make the service commercially available during the first half of the year. It is available to customers in North America "who are looking to accelerate their adoption of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live," group product manager Bill Patterson, said in a blog post Wednesday on the Dynamics CRM Team blog.

Additionally, Microsoft plans to roll out updates and new features for its Microsoft Office Live Small Business offering (previously called Office Live) over the next four to six weeks, according to a second blog. Office Live Small Business provides a set of Internet-based services for small businesses, designed to quickly get them up and running online.

Among the additions in coming weeks will be the ability for users to customize headers on their Web pages, and to add a blogging module via Windows Live Spaces. It also provides a redesigned contacts manager and improved synching with Outlook.

"All customers can now take advantage of full synchronization with Outlook 2007 for e-mail, personal contacts, calendar, and tasks," the post on the Office Live Small Business team's blog said.

While viewing the additions and changes as positive, one analyst found that generally, they constitute small improvements to the service.

"Synching seems like the most interesting thing," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst that tracks Microsoft's Live services strategy at researcher Directions on Microsoft. He said he was also pleased with the ability for users to use their own customized headers on Web sites.

What is now known as Office Live Small Business emerged from beta in November 2006. It was renamed in October 2007 from its original moniker, Office Live, when Microsoft introduced Office Live Workspaces, which is a separate offering for consumers and small businesses that enables users to store and share documents online, but not create or edit them.

Microsoft offers three editions of Office Live Small Business, including Basics, which is free. The company's other two editions – Essentials and Premium – are available as monthly subscription offerings. Essentials costs $19.95 per month while Premium costs $39.95.

Microsoft did warn that there is one catch to the additions and updates, however.

"While we implement these changes there will be brief periods when service is unavailable…rest assured that we are working hard to minimize the impact to our customers, but we want you to be prepared," said the post on the Office Live Small Business team's blog.

Meanwhile, CRM Live is free during the beta test period. Once the service goes gold, Microsoft has a promotional price of $39.95 per month until the end of the year. Regular monthly pricing for the service from Microsoft will be $44.95 per user per month for the Professional edition and $59 for a version dubbed Professional Plus.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Microsoft CRM Seminar Scheduled For Atlanta by Customer Effective

Customer Effective, a Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM reseller, has scheduled a seminar aimed at "introducing strategies to accelerate CRM effectiveness with ExactTarget and WebTrends," according to the Customer Effectivians.

ExactTarget sells on-demand e-mail marketing software, and WebTrends sells consumer-centric analytics and marketing intelligence products.

The seminar will address why it's necessary to align your e-mail strategy with your Web site strategy, how some marketers are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, how e-mail can be used to aid the decision-making process from product evaluation and information gathering to purchase, how to acquire and use customer-supplied data to tailor e-mail and why Web analytics have become the secret data weapon.

A couple weeks ago Customer Effective announced the opening of a new office in New York City. "Our expansion into the Northeast supports our initiative to offer CRM technology to organizations nationwide," said Millwood, president of South Carolina-based Customer Effective.

Earlier in December the William Mills Agency, a public relations agency serving the financial services industry, announced Customer Effective chose the agency to "guide its public relations strategy" and promote brand recognition.

"Customer Effective has been developing products on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform since 2002, and it is our goal to streamline and extend the capability of Microsoft Dynamics software for financial service sales environments," said Scott Millwood, president of Customer Effective.

Customer Effective's CRM expertise allows the company to provide functional knowledge and technical development capabilities to its partners and customers. Through its Capital Effective CRM suite, company officials say, the company "provides financial services businesses access to marketing, sales and customer service software."

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet.