MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM

POSITIONING WHITE PAPER

xRM Framework

and Microsoft SharePoint
 

Executive Summary

xRM refers to a flexible and extensible framework within Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. This
framework enables organizations to rapidly modify Microsoft Dynamics CRM through a
point-and-click interface to better fit their customer relationship management needs or to
manage other relationships. The primary approach for the xRM application framework is
“CRM-out,” which focuses organizations first on supporting customer relationships and
extensions, and then expanding to customer-like relationships.

xRM surfaces the Microsoft® Application Platform technologies to better enable the
management of these relationships, and to help organizations more fully leverage their
technology investments. Microsoft SharePoint® is one of these technologies, which when
combined with the xRM application framework helps support any relationship scenarios
through its complementary capabilities. The most common connection points between
xRM and SharePoint include embedded document repositories, portal integration,
enterprise search, and dashboards.

xRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The xRM framework is a component of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which is a packaged
application designed to help organizations manage their customers across marketing, sales,
and service activities. Traditional CRM applications were feature-heavy with user adoption
issues, poor flexibility, and low deployment success. The key components of Microsoft
Dynamics CRM were designed to resolve these issues.

·         User Experience – Microsoft Dynamics CRM works with familiar productivity tools
that our customers use every day—such as Microsoft Outlook®, Excel®, and
Word—so users don’t have to switch to other applications or learn how to use
other systems.

·         Relationship-Management Capabilities – Out-of-the-box scenario capabilities
are provided to support specific marketing, sales, and service requirements. Other
packaged relationship-management capabilities are also provided to help
organizations support a complex relationship.

·         xRM Framework – The need for flexibility and extensibility resulted in the
development of a business application framework that allows every component of
the application to be adapted to fit a wide variety of needs, ranging from data
model, business process, security, and integration up through the user interface.

·         Service-Oriented Architecture – All of these capabilities are built upon a service oriented
architecture (SOA) that supports global enterprise requirements, such as scale and
performance.  The xRM framework is a foundational component of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
 

xRM Framework

The xRM framework enables organizations to modify every aspect of the Microsoft
Dynamics CRM application to better fit their needs. For customers using Microsoft
Dynamics CRM for customer management, the xRM framework provides the flexibility to
adapt Microsoft Dynamics CRM to better fit their marketing, sales, and service business
requirements. The xRM framework also enables customers to create relational applications
to help manage other customer-like relationships. This is accomplished through the
following xRM capabilities:

·         Framework Services – The xRM business application framework is a
comprehensive set of application services that can be adapted to fit the needs of
most relationship-oriented business application requirements.

·         Point-and-Click Customization – Each of these services is structured to enable
business analysts and non-technical users to define and build solutions through
point-and-click, significantly reducing the development time, resources, effort, and
associated costs required to create new capabilities and solutions.

·         Extensibility – xRM also allows deep customizations and extensions to the
application through Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio®.
 

xRM Manages “Customer-Like” Relationships

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to help organizations manage their customer
relationships. The flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the xRM framework enables
organizations to leverage the out-of-the-box relationship-management capabilities to
manage other types of “customer-like” relationships. Relationship examples include
partners, vendors, students, patients, constituents, employees, and others.

Every organization has relationships they need to manage in order to achieve their business
goals. The capabilities required to manage customer relationships are very similar to the
capabilities required to manage other types of relationships. The tools used to manage and
automate relationship processes and scenarios are the same.
 

The “CRM-Out” Approach

The “CRM-out” approach is a structured progression to provide guidance on how
organizations should expand from managing customer relationships to managing other
types of customer-like relationships.

Use xRM framework to manage customer relationships:

1. Extend CRM – Enhance marketing, sales, and service capabilities with new
features to better support customer relationships, such as customer
entitlements for service, or a press and analyst tracking tool.

2. New Customer-Centric Applications – Create new applications that support
the primary customer relationship; for example, industry-relevant customer centric
applications such as wealth management.

Use xRM framework to manage customer-like relationships:

3. Related to CRM – Create capabilities and applications that support the
primary customer relationship; for example, create a property management
application as an add-on to customer support in order to more effectively
manage customers who lease properties.

4. New Relational Business Applications – Create new applications focused on
managing other relationships that are similar to customers, such as
constituents, patients, students, vendors, or dealers.




 

xRM Surfaces the Microsoft Application Platform

In addition to providing core packaged capabilities, the xRM framework also allows
organizations to take advantage of the Microsoft Application Platform. xRM surfaces the
capabilities of these productivity and infrastructure technologies and connects them as
tools in the context of a relationship, providing the following benefits:

• Allows xRM customers to benefit from the Microsoft investments in these platform
  technologies.

• Enables business applications built with xRM to better fit within an organization’s
  existing Microsoft technology environment.

• Helps organization to better use and maximize investments in Microsoft
  technologies.

By surfacing these features in the context of a relationship-management application, xRM
enables these Microsoft platform technologies to support a broad set of relationship management
requirements.

SharePoint Complements xRM

Microsoft SharePoint is an integrated suite of collaboration and content management
capabilities for information sharing across organizational boundaries. Many organizations
are already familiar with SharePoint in its role as supporting a variety of collaborative
business applications. SharePoint provides complementary capabilities to xRM for
organizations seeking to manage customers and other customer-like relationships.

Most end-to-end relationship management scenarios require the ability to extend the
business process and data components out to a broader set of resources, internally and
externally. SharePoint, as an extension to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and xRM, improves an
organization’s ability to better manage these scenarios.

SharePoint Enhances xRM

Every organization will choose to manage their customers and other key relationships
differently. xRM defines the core relationship data model and views as well as the business
processes and relationship scenarios.

Within these relationship views and business processes, there is very often the requirement
to track documents, manage content, or provide a collaborative workspace for internal
teams to work together on a specific topic. These are required to be contextually aligned
with the relationship they are supporting, such as agreement forms for a vendor, or
contracts for a customer.

xRM surfaces SharePoint by enabling the automated provisioning and display of a
document repository or collaborative workspace based on the attributes of a relationship,
such as a repository that is created and embedded when a new vendor is created, or a
document repository when a large sales opportunity is qualified.

xRM connects the SharePoint tools directly within the context of a relationship view or
within a business process. This connects structured and unstructured data for a specific
person, activity, or process.

xRM Enhances SharePoint

In addition to the ways in which SharePoint can be embedded within xRM to support the
management of relationship-oriented processes, there are several key scenarios in which
xRM also enhances SharePoint implementations by delivering relationship data in a variety
of ways for better discovery and information sharing. These connection points include:

1. Access – Access relationship data and process controls in SharePoint through Web
parts for portal integration.

2. Search – Search and retrieve relevant relationship data within a SharePoint
enterprise search.

3. Share – Share xRM data and reports through SharePoint dashboards.

Conclusion

The xRM framework is a tool that can help organizations create applications to better
support customer-relationships or to manage other customer-like relationships. xRM
surfaces a variety of Microsoft Application Platform technologies, including SharePoint, to
better support these relationship scenarios. SharePoint is a complementary technology that
an be embedded within the context of a relationship within xRM, and relationship data in
xRM can be surfaced within SharePoint connecting structured and unstructured
relationship-oriented data.

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