Matt
Tue Dec 21 12:48:12 CST 2004
Bill,
I agree with many of your points, but I also disagree about a few. In many
ways, some of the things the CMR team has done with integration (like the
Information Bridge Framework hook) are cutting edge. The overall SFO
integration (even with it's issues) is way beyond what can be done with a lot of
other products.
But, being brutally honest, they did drop the ball in a few areas like you
mentioned (and a few more I might add). I think a big part of the problem is
the overall size of the MS Org. I know people who work in a 30 person company
that don't know what a co-worker is working on. Now magnify that by a few
thousand and the propensity for dates to slip. From what I've heard, they are
making strides to get more integrated with the other product teams, but it is
not a straight forward effort.
They still need to make delivery dates and they often need to be pragmatic in
how they set those dates and feature sets. We may not agree with those
decisions in hind-sight, but when they were made, there is a good chance that we
might have made the same choice.
Matt Parks
MVP - Microsoft CRM
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:52:58 -0500, "Bill Walter" <wqwalter@hotmail.com> wrote:
Jason,
Thanks for your input. I am at least glad that I was not overlooking some
simple way of doing this.
You comment about the product not being designed to handle this situation
seems to reflect a lot of what is currently in the package. I could not
believe that the original release would not run if .NET 1.1 was added to the
system even though 1.0 and 1.1 were suppose to run side by side, and then it
took almost a year before they could run on Windows 2003. It seems like the
CRM team is completely unaware of what is going on around them at Microsoft
and are fairly primitive in terms of modernization like integration with
Office and other productivity tools. Email originated in the package is
limited to simple text sort of like the messages you could send 40 years ago
using a ASR33 teletype machine.
Bill Walter
"Jason Hunt [INVOKE]" <jason.hunt@nospam.invokesystems.com> wrote in message
news:eviW8iw5EHA.3076@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
> Since Cases require a Customer (Account or Contact) you will need to
> create one to link the case too if it is a case logged by an internal
> user.
>
> We use the case tracking functionality to track issues for the software we
> develop for our customers, we even wrote a customer portal for them to log
> new cases or to check open cases. If an internal developer logs an issue,
> we still set the Customer to the Contact or Account we're doing the
> development for.
>
> The case management functionality wasn't really written with the thought
> in mind that users of the CRM application would also be opening cases.
> THis is just one example of how we've worked around that.
>
> Jason Hunt
> Invoke Systems
>
http://www.invokesystems.com
>
> "Bill Walter" <wqwalter@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:eqkB8xt5EHA.3756@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
>>I would like to route support cases generated by our internal Q/A testing
>>group through the CRM support system with each defect identified becoming
>>a Case and then routing the case just like an outside generated case for a
>>product defect. If the people submitting the Case are also CRM users and
>>it is our own company submitting the case do I need to create an Account
>>for our own company and have contacts created for the people in Q/A? Is
>>there anything written that outlines how to cleanly set this up?
>>
>> Bill Walter
>>
>>
>
>