The CRM development has been ongoing for about 6 months and at this point, its really stable.  The development process presented a series of problems as we needed to extend and add plug-ins to incorporate functionality needed for our organization.  The plug-ins offer access to data, like the inventory we offer for sale as well as the service codes we use for the services we provide.  

Our initial roll out is small and targeted, though it includes most of our business sales team.  CRM is heavily tied to SQL Server Reporting Services for the reporting aspect of the product and we have also coupled it with Windows Sharepoint Services (the free, WSS product from Microsoft) for document management capabilities.  That presents some obstacles for me as the administrator in the multi-tiered environment.  Permissions, kerberos and NTLM have become my frenemies.

But that said, the system is very robust and the web interface is very well executed — if only in IE.  It mimics the behavior of a traditional win32 application in most every aspect, except for page loads and speed.

In traditional Microsoft strength, the application is extensible and allows for the needed customizations.  Moving from development to product appears to have occurred with limited ease.  Code produced against our development environment ported to new production servers with few hiccups.  The biggest issues here were hard coded server names and other variables that may not have been coded for portability.  But, moving from development to production at least highlighted where those problems lied.

But all that said, I have a very limited view of the project – and I came in very late to the party.  A co-worker had administered the servers and environment until about 3 weeks back.  As part of go live, I was to handle the switch-over, and I did, though my primary admin was unavailable and has since left the company.

So, I’m flying blind today.  I’m learning three new products – Dynamics CRM, SSRS and WSS – all at once and trying to understand the intricancies of each product, their permissions structures and how they actually fit together.  I feel better about WSS after working hands on for a week and half with it, but CRM is still a beast I’ve yet to tame.  I still feel somewhat lost with it, but at least we still have consultants and Microsoft support to lean on.  So, the blog has been a bit radio-silent in the last two weeks because of my preoccuption with my new project.  Wish me luck…