MS Dynamics 2011 vs salesforce.com

If you read my previous comparative review between salesforce.com (SFDC) and Microsoft Dynamics CRMs, you know that I originally began comparing the two in search of a less expensive option for clients, without saddling them with a clunky, unreliable, ineffective system like so many of the low-cost options out there. So with Dynamics 2011, which is scheduled for general release next week, I was hoping to find that all my annoyances with the cheaper choice were sufficiently mitigated to where I could confidently recommend it to others.

What I found was that Dynamics was definitely worth reviewing again. There were some things I liked all right before that I really don't like now that I've spent more time working in Dynamics, and some things I thought were "nice-to-haves" before that I've come to appreciate much more. I've primarily focused this review on presenting new information, whether it is due to a new feature in Dynamics 2011 or something newly noticed about the CRM in general. Therefore, please consider the combination of the initial review and this one to be the full review of how the two CRMs stack up.

New Features in Dynamics 2011

• Improved Microsoft Office interface – Introduction of Ribbons, as found in MS Office products
• Advanced user personalization – similar to SFDC’s Admin level homepage personalization features, but available at the user level
• Role-based forms and views – similar to SFDC record types assigning appropriate page layouts to different profiles
• Inline data visualization – is essentially the contextual placement of individual dashboard components/ Excel charts
• Dashboards – Addresses the drawbacks of context specific inline charts with a central dashboard similar to SFDC dashboards. Still no centralized report location.
• Better Office Outlook experience – Users can optionally decide to use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook edition that allows them to access the on-demand CRM from within their desktop Outlook application, instead of through a browser. This option provides tighter integration with Outlook while also offering significant improvements over the standard online CRM experience by taking advantage of native Outlook functionality.
• Contextual document management – SharePoint documents can be accessed and edited within the CRM directly from whatever record the document is associated with.
• Goal management – set goals for a campaign or fiscal period, have Opportunity records roll-up, then track those roll-up summaries against the goals within one organized process.
• Interactive process dialogs – think of call scripting, where prompted questions are combined with workflow to guide users to ask all the right questions when qualifying a Lead, filling in all the important fields on an Opportunity, or logging a new Case.
• Cloud development – take one Windows Azure platform, add two drops of .NET programming and a dash of Visual Studio, then shake with Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation, and .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and you get… well I don’t know exactly what you get, but Dynamics is now letting you get whatever it is.
• Solution management – very similar to SFDC’s Managed Packages feature, allowing users to bundle custom solutions for distribution to others with change management and versioning, then offer them in the marketplace.
• Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace – Other companies continue to develop integrated products for the CRM, thus building out Dynamics' feature offerings.

Other than the above, the new Dynamics is mostly like the old Dynamics, but one of the items on this list bears particular mention–that is the new Outlook interface for accessing the CRM. This one feature is probably going to be pretty divisive. Some people are going to love the CRM for this reason alone and others are going to trash it for what is at root the same reason. I confess that I fall into the latter category.

The great thing about the new Outlook integration in Dynamics is that if you spend your entire day in Outlook and not in your web browser, and if you like the Outlook user interface and don't really want to have to learn one that is arranged differently, this new feature is going to make your life a lot easier. Instead of navigating back and forth between Outlook on your desktop and your browser's CRM offering, you will be able to navigate to the CRM's remotely stored data without ever opening your web browser. The layout of the CRM and of Outlook is the same, with there simply being a LOT more items in the left navigation pane, with new selections appearing as you work.

For me this is actually a major drawback, because while I think the layout of Outlook is great if the only navigation you are going to do all day is going back and forth between your Calendar and your Inbox, it truly is not up to the task of presenting the complex inter-related data of a CRM system. It is just fundamentally the wrong layout, and no interface designer would ever start from scratch and come up with this for anything requiring that sort of navigation. In wanting to satisfy its customers' desire for a familiar Outlook look and feel even while in the CRM, Microsoft sacrificed an optimized user experience for all users.

This last part relates not just to those people who install the Outlook edition of Dynamics. In general, Dynamics uses Outlook's user interface. You can't avoid that by simply choosing to use only the edition they call "Dynamics CRM Online." In fact, I would suggest anyone who uses both Outlook and Dynamics to definitely get the Outlook edition, because it fixes some of my pet peeves about the previous online edition.

Recall from the previous review that there is no way to view a record without going into edit mode within the Online Dynamics system. In the Outlook edition of the CRM there are record previews, just like one is able to see the contents of an email in the preview pane when that email is highlighted in the Inbox when working in Outlook. And the Dynamics problem of opening 6 windows for you just to accomplish what to you feels like one task is eliminated because you don’t have as many windows popping up all over the place when you can see more of a record in one screen when just viewing records.

This is all small consolation though when there is another CRM that always shows you all your data on a record on one screen when viewing, by way of Related Lists. Which brings me to the next section of this review, the comparative advantages and disadvantages of each CRM. Again, since for the most part Dynamics 2011 is a lot like 4.0, most of the original pluses and minuses noted in the original review still stand and I won't re-post the exact same here again.

Dynamics Advantages in comparison with salesforce.com

• Microsoft plays well with Microsoft – Being an Office user, including Outlook, I appreciate the tighter integration that only Microsoft can achieve between its proprietary systems. For example, you can now edit an Office document you attached to a CRM record without leaving the CRM. You edit the version that is uploaded directly, similar to how when you add an attachment to an email in Outlook then click to edit the attachment you are taken to the doc in Excel or Word and saved changes affect both the version on the email and the one stored in the file system.
  
• Workflow Creates New Records – Dynamics offers workflow (renamed Processes) that can branch to other levels of workflow and also create new records. This isn't actually new, but I like it so much I wanted to state it again–salesforce.com? Hello?
• List Views with More – Helpful in-context resources such as "how-to videos"and dashboard components on each object's list views put more relevant information in front of you as soon as you navigate to any object.
  
• System default to leave you signed in all day – What good is a task reminder you can't see because the system logged you out when you were inactive in the CRM for 2 hours? This default can easily be changed in SFDC if you know where to look, but if Dynamics can start it at all day, so could SFDC.
• Connect Ribbon Button – A greater variety of ways to establish relationship roles between different records. SFDC non-profit users who have the non-profit starter pack will be familiar with the Affiliations and Relationships related lists, which provide this same sort of functionality. SFDC business users don't get this though, so would have to build it out themselves.
• Mass Lead Conversion – in addition to being able to convert one Lead at a time by “Qualifying” the Lead, in Dynamics you can also mass convert a group of Leads without using an outside product like CRMfusion.
  
• Dashboard Flexibility – you can add IFrame components to dashboards so that data from outside websites can be displayed within context with CRM data. You can also create chart components directly off criteria, rather than by making a separate report first.
• More Types of Report Exports – you can export reports as PDFs, web archives, XML files, and TIFF images, as well as SFDC's standard CSV and XLS exports.
• Reusable Picklists – Dynamics offers the ability to apply the values from a saved picklist value set into a newly created picklist (How many times do you necessarily want to type in the months in a year on different objects having a Year picklist?)
  
• About a dozen other benefits I listed in the previous review.
  

Dynamics Disadvantages in comparison with salesforce.com

• Microsoft does not play well with others – unlike the “Platform as a Service” extensibility of SFDC, Dynamics seems to only want to cooperate with other Microsoft products. You get amazingly tight integration with Office, Outlook and SharePoint, with those applications even having altered code to accept data coming from Microsoft’s CRM and only Microsoft’s CRM, but when I think of some client projects I’ve done with SFDC, there is no way Dynamics could have fulfilled the same role.
• No Chatter – so all internal communication has to be by email communication, whether manually sent or sent by workflow. Just as personal communications are moving more towards social networks, having a system like Chatter running in the background allows internal business communications to be put on auto-pilot. With Chatter users can subscribe to the information they care about receiving and let others do the same, instead of having users push information to the people they think should want to know. Dynamics has tighter integration with Outlook than SFDC does (though both allow users to share Contacts, Calendar events and Emails between Outlook and the CRM), but this just keeps its users more focused in an email based world that does not leverage enhanced communication possibilities and the efficiencies that could be delivering, particularly for large businesses.
• Two-relationship-levels Report Limit – In creating reports, user can only create reports that go up to 2 relationships deep, such as Account with Contacts or Accounts with Cases, but not Accounts with Contacts and Cases. You are meant to create custom Fetched-based reports with .NET for anything more complex, including drill-down reports.
  
• Navigation & Usability – The Dynamics user interface was clearly patterned after the Outlook user interface, even when one is within the browser accessed version of Dynamics Online. Outlook has certainly been a winning product for Microsoft, with even many people who use no other Microsoft products relying heavily upon that one. However, what works fabulously for Microsoft in one application falls far short in another. On top of that, when working in the Online edition of Dynamics, native browser zoom features don't work properly, thus leading to eyestrain if you are someone who normally enlarges their text. When you zoom in, all scroll-bars disappear. There is no zoom at all in the Outlook edition.
  
• Inability to Copy Displayed Data – this may seem like a minor detail, but it is really a pain not being able to highlight and copy any text in this system, with the sole exception of field contents while in edit mode. This may be the reason records are always displayed in edit mode in the online edition! I find it particularly annoying when I’m unable to highlight values in a List View. If you see a value you want to copy and paste from a list view to another location, you have to edit the record and navigate to that field on the full record to copy it.
• Cumbersome Picklist Creation Process – An unfortunate drawback of Dynamics' provision of the ability to save a picklist’s values as a set of options available to other picklists is that it comes at the cost of efficiency when creating picklist options the first time. Instead of being able to simply copy and paste a list into the options box, you have to click Add to create each option then edit the label in another box, being sure to leave the defaults in for the “Value” field, which is the unique number between 1.0 and 2 billion that the system uses to think of this value. I love the saved picklist value set feature, but wish it could be achieved in a less laborious way the first time around, particularly since it is likely you will have more unique picklists than duplicated ones within the system.
  
• Campaigns – where to begin… after considerable effort I was able to get Leads into Campaigns such that I could navigate from the Campaign to the Marketing List, then to a list of Leads associated with the campaign through that marketing list, but not only could I not get all this to show on one page, but I had three different windows open by the time I was done, each showing me only part of the information I was trying to analyze. Additionally, when creating a marketing list to go on a campaign, you have to choose to either have it be for Leads, Contacts or Accounts and cannot mix them together in one list. So I could have gotten to five windows open before being able to see a Campaign and all its members. I could not see a list of related Opportunities on Campaigns no matter what I did. I could clearly see Campaigns entered on Opp records, but when clicking on the linked Opp record, no data was found showing the Opp I had just come from, nor any other Opp record that referenced that campaign. The linkage is there, because Campaign reports calculate ROI, but you don't get the related lists showing the linkage on the actual campaign record the way you do in SFDC. If someone can please explain to me how this feature is meant to work, it would be greatly appreciated. This can't possibly be how people are using it every day.
  
• In addition to about a dozen other drawbacks listed in my previous review, there is also a long list of features Dynamics simply lacks that a SFDC enterprise user is going to expect, including:

  • No universal search, so you must search object by object. (What Dynamics calls global search is a search of objects related to all other objects, e.g. Users/record owners.)
    
  • No Excel-like calculated formula fields (you have to have a developer code them for you) -- yes, you read that right. SFDC does Excel-style formulas, including functions, better than Microsoft does.
    
  • No HTML email tracking so that you can see when a sent email was read
  • No scheduled emailing of reports
  • No multi-select picklists, unless you have a coder build them out for you
    
  • No custom roll-up summary formulas without .NET coding (in general, you need programmers to do calculations in Dynamics, where Sys Admins who don't code can do a lot more in SFDC)
  • No lookup filters that would allow users to only see applicable options when they search for records to attach to another record (no search filters either)
  • No revenue scheduling on products with recurring billing
    
  • No variation of page layouts for a given object, such as different fields or related lists displaying depending on the type of sales deal it is (e.g. deal size, product vs. service, etc.)
    
  • No Sites for public display of select CRM data
    
  • Really, I could go on and on like this, but I think you get the picture. There are just a lot of core CRM functions that Dynamics either doesn't give you or makes you work a lot harder to get.

In Summary

The bottom line is that Dynamics is the economy choice, where you pay less and get less. It is improved in 2011, (such as by allowing record previews when in the Outlook Edition), just not enough for me to actually like working in it. If you have a choice, choose salesforce.com. If your company simply cannot afford SFDC's Enterprise edition, don't feel too bad about having to use Dynamics 2011. It does seem to keep getting better with each release and may eventually present a compromise that is easier to live with from day to day. Maybe Dynamics 2015?

Note on Production of this Article
After my previous comparative review between the CRMs of Microsoft and SFDC I received an inquiry from salesforce.com about whether I had plans to evaluate Microsoft's new offering, Dynamics 2011. I told them that I rarely review any product more than once, since everything has one release after another and I have new products to move on to. Apparently they felt so confident about how their product offering stacks up against Microsoft's that they were willing to pay me for the time it would take for me to do another comparative review, this time using Dynamics 2011 as the basis of comparison.

Since I'd invested my own time in researching and writing the original review, and was actually wanting to review the new version of Microsoft Dynamics, but just not wanting to take the time away from paid work to review the same product a second time, of course I was more than willing to take SFDC up on their offer – provided they were willing to accept just as balanced an evaluation of their product's relative advantages and disadvantages in the requested piece as in the original unsolicited one, without knowing in advance what my findings would be. They were, so here it is. Hopefully you have found it to be a balanced review that presented you with the information you need to make an informed decision you'll be happy to live with in your workplace.