Are you ready?

I’m about to ask you the million dollar question…

“Does your company have Office 365?”

Is that your final answer?

Dramatics aside, you can’t integrate CRM On-Premise as seamlessly with Office 365 as you can with CRM Online. Therefore, if you answered yes to the question above, you need to seriously considering CRM Online.

Office 365 and CRM Online

CRM Online is designed to be very tightly integrated with all of the Office 365 components. As an added bonus, the setup is very straightforward because you are using the same credentials to access all of the applications. In fact, to get to CRM all you need to do is login to your Office 365 portal!

When you are running CRM On-Premise, you are likely using your own network’s Active Directory to authenticate users through ADFS. For this reason, some features simply aren’t available. The good news is that SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Outlook and most features with Excel and Word work the same in both setups even if the installation and configuration are more complicated for an On-Premise deployment.

One of the most notable features is the newly released immersive Excel experience (see figure 1).

This new functionality allows users to take advantage of the power of Excel without ever leaving CRM or opening a separate application. Additionally, any changes made to the data in Excel online can be saved and then made available in CRM. Please note that charts, color changes, or graphs will not be added to CRM.

Here’s just a few quick examples of how you and your team can use Excel in CRM:

• Analyze your team’s opportunities and review KPIs to see how you can assist
• Conduct what-if analysis for different incentive scenarios based upon your own pipeline
• Quickly take data from Excel and then copy it to somewhere else such as an email