The Skeptical Developer
Recently my company, Ascentium, posted a white paper titled Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Application Platform that was written by my co-workers Aaron Elder and Jason Hunt. In the white paper is a section titled "The Skeptical Developer", which speaks to my experience with CRM and moving from a pure custom development background into the world of CRM and using CRM as the platform to build the same applications I have been custom developing and architecting for years. Yesterday I noticed that a fellower CRM blogger, Menno te Koppele, posted a write-up summarizing the white paper that I thought was very good. Below is a C&P of the write-up and the post is here.
“It Doesn’t Pay to Grow Your Own”
- When building a custom application, most organizations
“spend most of their time on the plumbing” (see below) and don’t have
enough time for business functionality.
- Ascentium has found
from their experience they SAVE “50% to 70% of the development time”
using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the Platform
- Using Dynamics
CRM as a Platform allows Developers to “focus on solving the employees’
problems and solving them well [functionality], so that they choose to
use your application”
- “Custom business applications are often not extensible or scalable over the long term” due to time restraints around development
- When
technology changes you have to update and modify your Platform, using
Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Microsoft takes on that cost
- New versions of SQL Server, Exchange, Office, SharePoint
Benefits to the Business
- Centralization of data (Prevent Silos of information)
- Standardization of user experience – inherits Dynamics CRM web-like UI (user adoption, lower training costs)
- Simplification of development (Using Customization UI, Web Services, SDK, Service Oriented Arch [SOA], any .NET language)
- Integration with organizations existing systems (Web Services, common SQL Server tools)
What Dynamics CRM provides (The Plumbing)
- Security Model with Authentication tied to Active Directory
- Presentation Layer :: UI Framework (Tool build forms, tabs, add fields, IFrames without any coding)
- Data Model
- Structure of the Data (Tables, Fields, Etc.)
- Integrity of the data (Relationships, Dependencies on one another)
- Extensibility of the Data Model without SQL (Tool to add tables, fields, relationships without any SQL)
- Software Development Kit (SDK) – access to the entire SDK used by the developers of Dynamics CRM themselves
- Workflow Engine (Windows Workflow Foundation – build through simple UI)
- Built In connection with Outlook / Office
Don’t miss the “The Skeptical Developer” a great real world story.
If you haven't read the white paper, I highly recommend it. The Skeptical Developer is a great story (I'm biased because I helped write it :)) about my conversion. I now speak about CRM 4 to clients and ISVs all over the world with my most recent travels on behalf of Microsoft during Titan Ascend and Metro programs.