Room Booking Add-in for MS CRM
Lots of companies are beginning to put Customer Relationship Management at the core of the business - after all, looking after your existing customers makes sense - it costs 7 times more to
get business from a new one! And having a specific CRM system eases and enforces the adoption of best practices in this area.
And by including service case management in their product Microsoft is putting together a formidable case for rationalising and consolidating customer data and more and more activities
related to customers.
However, our topic of interest here is booking of meeting rooms and other equipment and facilities. It is apparent that this is yet one more area in which the flexible architecture of MS
CRM can be persuaded to offer a solution, witnessed by the downloadable white papers on the subject. Microsoft have obviously engaged significant resources to attempt to demonstrate that
performance would be "acceptable" in this application.
One key thing stands out - by throwing huge amounts of computing horsepower at a problem with a generic architecture one can achieve results, of a sort!
Our experience in this area came about through developing an employee self-service booking portal to solve the problems of a global enterprise with 2000+ users and 80+ rooms trying to use an
Outlook / Exchange solution who finally succeeded in severely affecting the reliability of their email!
A key design decision was to disconnect these functions and employ a 'snapshot' approach to availability display. The resulting reduction in complexity, network bandwidth and server power
requirement, coupled with an intuitive and speedy user interface have ensured its timelessness.
In this add-in we have adopted a minimal integration 'SOA-type' approach, which can easily use a separate backend server, plus allows non-CRM users access to booking rooms without
restriction.
Our Add-in provides a comprehensive solution.
- Integrates within the MS CRM Workplace sitemap, or direct to URL
- Automatically recognises users from their domain login credentials, or handles remote web login
- Accommodates user group permissions - no visibility, read-only and self-service booking on resources
- Handles multi-resource booking across time-zones and recurring bookings - eliminates conflicts!
- Allows menu ordering of catering and other optional commodities by site
Check here for screenshots illustrating features.
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