Microsoft CRM or Other CRM?

[Bruce Gow]

Anybody have any experience w/ Microsoft CRM or any other recommended CRM to coordinate new business & marketing, etc. within a networked group (20 - 40 people)? I'm looking for something that "ties in" to Outlook and is not too complicated -- i.e. I don't want too steep a learning curve for all my users here at my company.

I'm looking at Microsoft's CRM program, but I've just begun my investigation...

- BG

[smithdoug]

For me, it makes more sense that CRM software integrate with the accounting software. We use QuickBooks and I had plans to switch to Peachtree, thinking that it was more sophisticated, when I encountered QuickBooks Customer Manager. Customer Manager integrates with QuickBooks Accounting software. Customer Manager could definitely use some improvement (and hopefully Intuit will address its shortcomings) but all said, it's improved things for us and kept me a QuickBooks user. In addition, QuickBooks appears to have made some great strides with their accounting packages in recent years such that some of their more advanced modules will likely give us everything that we need.

Customer Manager has been a great help, but it could definitely use some improvement. Hopefully, Intuit will address its shortcomings.

It does integrate with Outlook. It can import Outlook contacts (and I believe synchronize with Outlook contacts) and you can set it up to use Outlook's calendaring function rather than it's own. This would be useful, for example if you need to synchronize your CRM information to a Palm for use outside the office. But I've tended to keep my customer information seperate from my Outlook information.

[Denver Dave]

I'm a single user, so I'm not sure that Time & Chaos would work in your environment or not. I tried Act 2005, Maximizer 8, older version of Goldmine and ended up (for now) with Time & Chaos. I'm in this forum to see how to apply the software to GTD:
http://forum-chaos.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=6

[bassdrone42]

Our company uses Sage ACCPAC CRM.

It is an enourmously powerful program that integrates very well with Outlook.

here's a link.

http://www.accpac.com/products/crm/salesforce.asp

[Bruce Gow]

I appreciate the feedback. What I'm really looking for is a program that will assist coordination and sharing of client calling & marketing. The accounting tie-in is not really of use for me. The Sage ACCPAC may be the sort of thing I'm looking for.

- BG

[apinaud]

Have you check the Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager, if you are in a Exchange environment it is perfect.

For sharing is perfect, and helps to track information and makes life easier since works great with outlook

So far is working great, even we are thinking on migrate for Quickbooks to Microsoft Accounting because everything is integrated in Outlook...