Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 CRM & VoIP

Pixel Power, my employer these past ten years, uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We don’t love it, but we need it and we really do use it. It’s taken a long time to get it worked into our corporate culture. We started with v2.0 and have since migrated to v3.0, with a further step to v4.0 coming in the next couple of months.

The move to v4.0 is really a good thing for multiple reasons. I’m told that integration with Outlook is much improved, including the ability to access CRM while offline. Also, v4 supports the Camrivox Flexor CTI plugin allowing integration with our OnSIP hosted IP-PBX.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Flexor has supported integration with Asterisk and snom phones for some time. Integration with Asterisk is through the AMI interface so that the Flexor plugin issues commands to the server to initiate calls. Integration with snom phones is similar except that the plugin communicates with the phones API directly, not dealing with the sever. That approach is ideal since it makes sens for anyone using a hosted IP-PBX instead of a local PBX.

A short while ago Camrivox contacted me to tell me that Flexor now supports integration with Polycom Soundpoint IP phones. I was really excited about this since I have quite a number of these deployed across the US.

I mentioned the CTI idea to our US CEO while at NAB this week and he was really enthused about it. He was accustomed to CTI as implemented in ACT! long ago. The ability to bring similar capabilities into MS Dynamics is genuinely appealing. Worth the asking price of $85/seat, in single unit quantities. There are discounts for orders of 10+ seats.

It looks like Flexor will interface directly with all of our Polycom desk phones, and even the IP6000 conference phone in the new Burbank office conference room. That’s definitely interesting. I might also be able to try it with the new VVX-1500 multimedia phones. I’m expecting a couple of these for evaluation in a few weeks.

Normally I don’t get to excited about CRM migrations. It all happens in our UK HQ and doesn’t impact me at all. But it looks like I could be involved in the Dynamics v4.0 project, and it might even be interesting.