New to CRM

Hi,
I am also new to CRM. I am currently studying 3.0 version. CRM can be accessed using IE, Outlook 2003, or other.
To install it, you need a key that write in the key required window before installation. You must also have met the requirement hardware needed.
There are also images and other requirement. Just read the manual. The manuals for complete CRM including C360 is avaialable in partnersource.


Rgds,
Johnson

Some personal views. We implemented MS CRM 1.2 in-house for 100 users (we were a small Navision branch of a hardware distributor). Our experience was very bad: it had almost zero logic, hardly more than a database, very hard to develop and change, and buggy.

I checked out CRM 3.0 and all I can say it's waaaaaay better. You can now create new tables with relationships and whatever and many stupid bugs and misfeatures were ironed out. It still does not have much logic but now the Workflow - for adding custom logic - works much better. As for development capabilities, it's .NET, so "analyst development" like in Navision is out of question, you need to separate the analyst and developer roles, but I think for a .NET developer it's easy. However, compared to Navision, it's still somewhat harder. One of the problems is that there are now OnBeforeSave, OnAfterSave callouts or triggers or how it's called - I don't remember exactly - to put the code to, but it cannot communicate to the user, it cannot throw error messages, so almost all development means writing a webservice and accessing it from JavaScript to do the necessary checks and inform the user of errors, and then you can write the code in the OnAfterSave or what it's called to do the real thing, and the code between your web service and this code will be 50% the same...

On the other hand, it's a lot easier to separate developments from the standard than in Navision, you can build a huge add-on and install it at a customer or upgrade it to a new version very easily.

I think if one come's from Navision, the viewpoint needs to be changed. Navision development typically consists of many small code snippets which almost never getting reused, I think for CRM the way to go is to build an own library on top it's API of helper classes (and of helper JavaScript functions). After that it can be easier.