Industries have seen customer relationship management (CRM) become one of the most essential tools for business growth. Businesses have an interest in tracking their regular customers from the very beginning, offering them a better experience and attracting new customers. This interest led to the birth of the traditional CRM system.
Add to that the need to track vendors and partners, determine where the best relationships are in place, and find out what the most efficient way to collaborate with these other businesses is, and you can see how CRM becomes a rather complex endeavor.
Over time, it turned out that having such platforms hosted in house, while absolutely providing increased value, encountered new challenges when faced with a mobile workforce. The cloud was there to support this sorely needed expansion.
The next logical evolution happened somewhat in parallel with the move to the cloud. Organizations are recognizing that a simple system, on its own, cannot provide the value needed for the business to gain an edge over its competitors. As such, the tools evolved again, integrating with other essential tools in the organization, as well as with various social channels.
The last few years have seen a merger of the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms with the classic customer relationship management platform. This results in better end-to-end processes across the entire organization, and better visibility into where the biggest issues are within an organization. The end results provide better customer experience and a faster and better service, while adapting to the customers' growing online presence.
Dynamics 365, now joining under its umbrella with both CRM and ERP functionality, is Microsoft's response to a growing trend. It is a set of robust business applications, with a long history and presence in the market, all brought together to maximize an organization's performance and homogenize its data.
This book focuses on the functionality, which was formerly part of the CRM platform. While at times we might touch on some of the newer offerings, we'll be spending most of our time focusing on the revamped modules for Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service, and Marketing. We'll also be looking at the new paradigm and features offered through the Power Platform. As the new kid on the block, the Power Platform quickly gained popularity by not being entirely dependent on the typical CRM functionality, but rather by allowing us to build brand new functionality for the organization in a much simpler and rapid manner.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- What is Dynamics 365 really?
- Global data center locations for Dynamics CRM Online
- What do you need to customize Dynamics CRM?
- Opening a free 30-day trial of Dynamics 365 for Sales
- Configuring a domain name for your environment
- Integrating with Office 365 E3 trial services
In this chapter, we will first look at what environment we need to complete the examples presented in this book. We will create a new environment based on a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online 30-day trial. This approach will give us the means to experiment with a trial environment for free.
Let's get started!