July 2009 – Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions

July 27, 2009: Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions

The July meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group featured two of the leading providers of mobility solutions for CRM: SoftBridge Inc., and CWR Mobility. Their positioning is an interesting contrast, and I thought the session was a good one. I mentioned in the introduction that the general topic of mobility in Dynamics CRM has been one of our most requested, and just to show you how customer-focused we are at DCRMUG, we’re going to follow up in the August meeting with another meeting on the same topic. (Different presenters – more on that later!) So, since we’re on a mobility solutions roll, and it’s summer (and quite a hot one, at least in Forks and Phoenix), I put my marketing hat on and dubbed this our “Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions So-Hot Summer“. (That’s a literary reference, btw.)

Here is some background information and website links to the presenters at our July meeting:

• CWR Mobility’s flagship product Mobile CRM 4.1 “is positioned as the leading Windows Mobile client for Microsoft Dynamics CRM”
• SoftBRIDGE emphasizes their support for three platforms: their product, Bridge2CRM, “works with iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms”

I wasn’t super-happy with the way the recordings published (next month I’m ending my experimenting with Captivate and going back to Camtasia unless somebody can convince me otherwise), but if you can get past the large file size and the SWF format they’re fine. I chunked them down a little bit to make the download a little quicker, so here they are:

• Introduction – this is me doing the meeting kickoff
• SoftBridge, Part 1 – this is primarily the slide part of Mark Aucoin’s presentation
• SoftBridge, Part 2 – Mark’s demonstration
• CWR, Part 1 – again, I started with the slide part of Erik van Hoof of CWR’s presentation
• CWR, Part 2 – then we finish up with the demo part of Erik’s presentation

For convenience, here are a couple of the slides from my introduction:

Contact information for SoftBridge and CWR Mobility:

Here’s how I compare the mobile solutions offered by each of these vendors:

These vendors have fundamentally different architectures, which account for many of the differences in features. SoftBridge’s code all runs on a (SoftBridge-hosted) server, and you don’t install any code on the client, since the client just uses the browser UI. That accounts for why the current version of SoftBridge’s product supports all mobile clients – all you need is a browser. CWR Mobility currently supports only the Windows Mobile OS, but Erik announced upcoming support for the other platforms during our meeting. The reason it’s harder for CWR to support multiple clients is that their approach has you install code that runs on the mobile device. So they’ve got to work harder to support multiple platforms.

I created and worked with a SoftBridge demo account for the two weeks before the meeting. Sure enough, I could access and update records from the Dynamics CRM server on my iPhone. One of my favorite features was being able to navigate to a Contact record, click on the phone number to make a phone call, and then have call saved and recorded as a CRM history item! Even though that’s a trivial little example, it definitely suggested (to me, at least!) how mobile access to CRM information can make mobile sales forces more productive. On the down side, I found the SoftBridge solution a little slow, which is probably explainable by the browser-only approach. I’m looking forward to comparing the experience to the rich-client one CWR Mobility supports. I am a VERY happy iPhone user, so I’ll have to wait until they come out with the next release!

I encourage all DCRMUGers to reach out directly to Mark Aucoin of SoftBridge and Erik van Hoof of CWR Mobility, and to explore how their solutions might work for you. Mark and Erik: on behalf of the DCRMUG community, thank you so much for the excellent presentations!

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.com