One of the projects I am currently working on involves managing appointment bookings, tracking activities and making sales to a large customer base.
All of these things are easily achieved in any decent CRM product and being a Microsoft Gold Partner we naturally are using MS CRM. Fortunately for this project MS CRM 4.0 had just been released as we went into the development phase so we took all our CRM 3.0 knowledge and started applying it to CRM 4.0, as well as picking up on all the new cool stuff that we can now do.
There is also a big requirement on replacing the financial systems for this client as their current system no longer does what is needed. For us this means using Dynamics NAV 5.0 deployed at a head office level.
The tricky part of the solution is allowing the devolved users that will live predominately in CRM to record their information and have it feed the NAV system. To do this we needed fairly extensive integration between the two products, something that isn't available 'out of the box'. In the past we have done this sort of project and manually built the integration points, but they were fairly minor, simple things. This solution requires much more complex integration points.
After search around we settled on the Celenia Connector. The latest version of this allows us to wire together all the parts of the two systems and it lets us build configurable workflows in the connections.
This has allowed us to deploy portions of the financial system to users that will never actually have to access the NAV Client. As CRM is web deployable this also minimises the software footprint on individual machines, something that is desirable as all 'managed' desktops at this client are deployed via Citrix.
