A new era for SMB and SME companies thanks to Virtualization, new technology innovations and Cloud computing.
Keeping costs contained is the challenge and objective of every company and IT is classically considered a cost center; I personally believe that an innovative IT Department actually can save organizations money and utilizing technology advancements can actually increase profitability.
With the emergence of companies like Kaseya, Level Platforms and Zoho, formerly Adventnet, Asset Management and Real-time Monitoring are now budget friendly to SMB and SME companies. These type of software’s in conjunction with Microsoft’s innovations incorporated into Vista/Windows 7 and Server 2008/20008 R2 has empowered companies to implement infrastructures that are semi-fully automated, something that use to have a starting cost of $30K+.
If a company adds Virtualization to the picture, a feature Microsoft and VMware offer at no additional cost, the game has been forever changed and the IT Services market shaken up.
Cloud computing offerings take advantage of some or all of these technologies and others not mentioned. Using these new technologies innovatively further extends the accessibility of technologies of which were formerly exclusive to enterprise sized companies, such as redundant Exchange Servers with 99.9 uptime, on-demand Servers and Server clusters, ad-hoc storage arrays and more.
Enterprise class companies have enjoyed semi-full automation in their IT Infrastructures utilizing asset management/automation and imaging solution software’s for some time. Using these technologies together has resulted in centralized manageability of large infrastructures inclusive of day to day support and application and asset upgrades which has in turn assisted in managing costs. These technologies use to have a cost that kept them out of reach to smaller companies however things have changed and for the benefit of both SMB and enterprise companies.
Some key questions decision makers should be asking when they are considering changes to their IT infrastructures both procedural and solutions based are:
• Where is my IP content stored? Within or Outside of Canada?
• What security is embedded into the technology or solution and who controls it?
• What are the Exit conditions? in the case of a hosted service.
• What are the internal Security Policies of the Hosted Services provider?
• What is the Disaster Recovery Plan of the Service Provider?
• What is the licensing model? Perpetual or Annual?
• How open is the software to third party plugins? Does it conform to Industry standards?
• Online Backup, is there a rapid return/restore option via DVD, Blue Ray or Hard Drive?
• Always ask for client reference that would match or exceed the capacity you are engaging at.
• What changes are required to ensure the solution runs optimally? versus simply asking for the minimum requirements.
If you have any questions about the information above or wish more detail, please feel free to contact us using the information presented in the Contact section.
While launching a CRM 4.0 deployment for a client we encountered many challenges migrating from BCM 2010 and integrating Outlook 2010.
I came across this blog post and found it very informative for those who are trying to better understand the inner working and best setup process.
….
CRM 4.0 Deployment Walkthrough Guide for Service Providers (PDF, 172 pages)
This is a “how-to” guide with step by step instructions on how to install and configure CRM in various hosting scenarios, including how to enable the Internet-Facing Deployment (IFD) option during the install (it can also be enabled after the install). The trick in reading this document is to find what is pertinent to your implementation among the 172 pages. The document goes to great lengths to discuss hosting Exchange in conjunction with CRM, including the side-by-side provisioning of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (“HMC” which is a solution for SPs to host Exchange and Sharepoint). If you don’t need to host Exchange, much of this document will not be relevant to you.
How to configure an Internet-Facing Deployment for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
(12/8/2008, Word Doc, 24 pages)
This is a brief guide on how to set up CRM so that it will provide a logonform to someone who is accessing the software over the Internet, from outside the firewall. This is known as forms-based authentication. This document is an update to the original document released on 1/14/2008 which was an 8 page PDF. It includes instructions for configuring IFD at install time and using the IFD Configuration tool. You could also use the info to gain an understanding of how to manually configure IFD by editing the registry, SQL tables, and the web.config file. Of course, I would NEVER recommend (at least not publicly) editing the SQL tables directly (add all the pertinent warnings about editing the registry or SQL tables directly here). Seriously though, I would not recommend doing a soup to nuts configuration of IFD manually.
more at the following link:
http://thecrmarchitect.com/2009/01/05/a-primer-on-multi-tenanancy-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm/
Many Non-Profit organisations are not aware that there are a couple of really great software licensing resources that will empower them with free or near-free software licenses for key business software they use every day.
IT Managers should also be aware of these resources as there are many technical support and management related software’s that organisations could leverage through their IT Departments / Personal which would enable them to be more strategic and cost efficient in some cases.
Microsoft is the first resource I would like to mention as most organisations in North America utilize MS as their foundation software. Below is a link where you can explore MS options:
Another great resource is Tech Soup who has established relationships with most of the major software vendors and can be the single source or additional source for licenses. Tech Soup will charge an administrative fee however it is quite small and comparatively to MSRP is inexpensive.
http://www.techsoupcanada.ca/product
The challenge: how to have the organizations contacts easily available on the Blackberry handhelds and enhance the business processes.
Business Contact Manager, BCM, is an excellent entry level CRM application that integrates with Outlook and utilizes SQL to make contacts available offline and track communicates with a given contact or account. A central set of contacts/accounts can be created and then shared with the organization so as to create a centralized resource instead of having disparate contact groupings. While Exchange offers the ability to create shared address books, the organization and integration options are limited even compared to BCM.
MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM 4.0
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides organizations with a highly flexible customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can adapt, grow, and scale along with your business. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is based on a commitment to providing organizations with the Power of Choice to make it easy for you to evolve your business unencumbered by technology limitations. With tools to enhance your company’s marketing, sales, and customer service processes, a solid analytics platform, and native integration with the Microsoft® Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 helps you drive consistent and measurable improvement in everyday business processes.(1)
Solution Process
1. After exporting the contacts, in our client’s case they has not setup Accounts, the contacts were saved in a .csv format in a network store.
2. We then had to create a Field Translation template so that the BCM 2010 contact fields and information would be properly migrated into CRM 4.0 fields that are named slightly different in many cases.
3. A User was created to represent the Organisation and then the .csv file was imported and contacts applied through the Field Translation template.
4. Contacts then were shared to previously configured CRM Users and Group.
5. Users Outlook CRM setup was then configured to include a Local Data Group representing the Organisations contacts which resulted in the contacts syncing to the Outlook default contact list and then in turn to the Blackberry Handheld.
[1] https://partner.microsoft.com/global/productssolutions/dynamics/microsoftdynamicscrm/40062156
Jan
Welcome to the iT911 Blog.
We are looking forward to providing key insight and guidance as technology goes through some significant growth and changes over these next couple of years.