A Tale of Two Deployments

With the rise of CRM Online, businesses looking to take advantage of customer relationship management are no longer restricted by physical servers or large IT hardware budgets. That being said, CRM On-Premise still plays a large part for many of our new and existing customers. That is the true beauty of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you always have a choice.

The decision between these CRM deployment options (Online vs On-Premise) comes down to two main factors which you must consider. First, you must consider your current and future infrastructure. Second, determine how you would like to proceed with user setup. Those choosing CRM Online and Office 365 can provision a new CRM organization in a few hours with little to no technical expertise and zero hardware.

On the other hand, deploying CRM On-Premise requires a great deal or expertise in a variety of areas and a relatively significant hardware investment. More often than not, you will need a Microsoft partner, such as Alta Vista Technology to assist you with this deployment as it requires knowledge of Active Directory, Active Directory Federated Services, SQL Server, IIS and several other nuances that go along with deploying a web based application.

When it comes time to provisioning users, CRM Online offers a variety of choices. For instance, you can setup users directly in Office 365 so they can be added to CRM. This is the fastest way to setup new users, but will require users to remember another set of login credentials. Keep in mind that each user will require a CRM license and these will be limited based upon the amount you have purchased.

On the other hand, with CRM On-Premise you can utilize Active Directory to provision users with the same credentials they use when accessing their computers. In addition, On-Premise licensing will also allow for a company to create nearly infinite users to fit their business needs.

There you have it. Two questions to be asked with multiple impacts to follow!