STEFANO DEMILIANI

Monday, August 03, 2009 #

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and iPhone

I know that the iPhone users are growing everyday more and I can undestand that if you try an iPhone you’ll love it forever (this happens to me too), but it’s a first time for me that the iPhone is a pre-requisite in order to buy a software.

We’ve received this type of request during our last demo of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Customer say us: “We’re a group of Sales Agents and we’ve choose the iPhone as our mobility solution. All our agents have an iPhone now. We want a CRM solutions that works well with the iPhone. What about iPhone and Microsoft Dynamics CRM?”.

I’ve to admit that I was a little surprised and not ready for a great answer… my first answer was to signal the good Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (recently released). It works on every HTML 4.0 browser and it works perfectly with Safari on the iPhone. It’s totally free and easy to install and manage.

If you’re an iPhone user, it’s really a good solution I think (I use it on my iPhone for example).

But what about more “powerful” solutions?

I’ve to signal two solutions where I received interesting feedbacks (but not personally tested): iDcrm and Bridge2CRM.

Bridge2CRM is a web-based application that gives you full access to your CRM data, while iDcrm is a native iPhone application (you install it directly on the device).

I’ve found extremely interesting iDcrm: The application give full access to all your Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Activities and any entity that you have in Microsoft CRM. You get the application in your own language including all customizations you have done in your Microsoft CRM implementation. There is no configuration required. All data and all metadata is synchronized to your iPhone. All you need to do is to install the application and provide your server address and your login credentials (the user must have Read access to MD CRM Entities, Attributes and Relationships).