Dynamics Crm Reference Architecture Version 1.0

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reference Architecture P a g e | 2

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CONTENTS

1 Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................... 4

1.1 Purpose ........................................................................................................................................... 4

1.2 Audience ......................................................................................................................................... 4

2 Key Architectural Components ...................................................................................................... 5

System Architecture Components ............................................................................................................ 7

Integration ................................................................................................................................................ 8

Authentication .......................................................................................................................................... 8

3 Core CRM Components .................................................................................................................. 9

3.1 Sales Force Automation .................................................................................................................. 9

3.2 Customer Care Business Scenarios ............................................................................................... 10

4 Extended CRM ............................................................................................................................. 11

Role Based User Experience ................................................................................................................... 12

Business Designer Layer .......................................................................................................................... 12

Managing Solutions ................................................................................................................................ 12

5 Dynamics CRM in the Cloud ......................................................................................................... 13

Authentication ........................................................................................................................................ 14

6 Performance and Scalability ........................................................................................................ 15

7 Summary .................................................................................................................................... 16


1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers several key capabilities and features that can be leveraged by organizations across a wide range of industry segments as well as solution providers that are market leaders within industry verticals they specialize in. These include:

• End‐to‐end CRM functional modules including Sales Force Automation, Customer Service Automation, and Marketing Automation.

• Integration tools that spans line‐of‐business applications across the enterprise.

• Comprehensive business intelligence and analytics tools for business management and risk and compliance reporting.

• Centralized store of all information, reports, communications, portfolio, performance in one easy‐to‐access location.

1.1 Purpose

The purpose of this document is to provide generic architecture guidance for solutions based on Dynamics CRM 2011. This document describes Dynamics CRM 2011 as a set of architecture components, presented from the perspective of stakeholders’ architectural concerns. The reference architecture describes the core platform features, deployment models, and operational processes.

1.2 Audience

The intent of the reference architecture is to help enterprise architects guide the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 platform architecture discussions with customers, so that Dynamics CRM is deployed in a consistent manner and to effectively manage those deployments. The model helps to develop consistency across deployed instances as well. Additionally, the model aids customers with information on the sourcing choices—on‐premise, hosted by third parties, or hosted in the cloud as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.


2 KEY ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENTS

Within any organization, software applications, legacy systems and reference data providers are vital to develop and maintain client information, including planning and reporting for customers. However, a typical business environment today consists of a wide range of line‐of‐business applications, built over the past decades, spanning multiple architectures. A typical business user is expected to interact with them through multiple user experiences to meet their day‐to‐day information needs as well as to perform key business functions. Because many of these systems are not integrated, users must perform many business processes manually. Communications, data re‐entry, and duplicative functionality are further complicated by multiple service delivery channels including call centers, client internet, mobile devices and workstations to serve the same client. Users pay a high cost without integrated systems because they waste time working with the disparate systems that could be better spend providing direct client service and developing business.

Dynamics CRM 2011 is designed with maximum flexibility to enable adoption by enterprises with varying degrees of flexibility support end‐to‐end CRM capabilities. This architectural flexibility enables Dynamics CRM 2011 to be deployed in several ways, such as:

• Dynamics CRM 2011 as a traditional CRM application

• Dynamics CRM 2011 as an application framework

• Dynamics CRM 2011 as a Service

In order to leverage these capabilities, solutions need to be designed using an architecture that reflects the underlying structure imposed by Dynamics CRM 2011. The Dynamics CRM 2011 platform integrates tightly with the broader Microsoft platform, using Internet Information Services (IIS) as a front‐end Web server to host Web sites, and SQL Server as the store for site definitions, content type definitions, published content, and configuration data. Shared service applications hosted as applications services provide reusable services for the enterprise Web applications. Figure 1 shows how Dynamics CRM 2011 is logically structured with all major components.

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Integration

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 offers several programming paradigms designed to provide flexibility around that works best for specific integration requirements. The integration framework within Dynamics CRM is built on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) end points that have been streamlined to provide a set of tools to simplify the development of integrated solutions. This framework supports Language Integrated Query (LINQ) queries to retrieve data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The REST endpoint for AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight clients provides an alternative interface that can be leveraged to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM data. Rather than directly invoking a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)‐based Web service, requests can be executed using a service that is based on a URI.

Microsoft Dynamics can also be extend or customized through the integration of custom business logic called Plug‐ins. A plug‐in is basically custom business logic that can be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Dynamics CRM hosted or on‐premises, to modify or augment the standard behavior of the system. Plug‐ins are implemented as event handlers that are registered to execute in response to a particular event in the system. Plug‐ins can be defined in any .NET language.

Authentication

User authentication in Dynamics CRM 2011 is based on Windows Identity Foundation that forms the basis for claims based authentication, allowing a user to present their identity as a set of claims. In this type of scenario, a Security Token Service actually performs authentication, rather than Dynamics CRM. This standardization of authentication mechanism allows Dynamics CRM 2011 to become easier to implement within infrastructures that leverage multiple authentication mechanisms, including third‐party SAML compliant providers


3 CORE CRM COMPONENTS

While the economic recession is officially over, many companies are still reeling from its effects. The downturn has led to a very competitive landscape. This shift has been further fueled by some key market trends.

• A more discerning consumer with heightened sensitivity to price, value, and service

• Unparalleled consumer access to vendor information

• Erosion of barriers to switching a product or service

Buyers have changed the way they evaluate and purchase, driven by greater access to information, led by maturing internet technologies. It is not sustainable for a business to compete solely on price. Dynamics CRM provides a cost effective, easy to deploy platform that improves user adoption, productivity and the bottom line. The innovations in Dynamics CRM 2011 enable a wide variety of new capabilities that drive productivity gains including the following:

1. Uncover new connections, both in terms of people and systems

2. Focus on rights leads by more effectively qualifying and routing them

3. Be more effective in their team selling activities

4. Streamline problem resolution with dynamic guided processes and dialogs

5. Attain real‐time insight into the business with flexible dashboards, visualizations and ad‐hoc reporting features

The platform provides capabilities that address Sales Force Automation and Customer Care Scenarios for a wide portfolio of organizations across a broad range of industries. Dynamics CRM 2011 is available in 41 different languages as a multi‐lingual solution that meets the needs of today’s truly global business environment. The Sales Force Automation and Customer Care functional areas of Dynamics CRM are highlighted from an architecture standpoint in the sections below.

3.1 Sales Force Automation Within any organization, sales operations is all about generating revenue. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by spending more time with customers. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can help sales organizations reduce busy work and allow them to have more time for customers. The native Outlook experience that Dynamics CRM provides enables sales users to extend the email, calendaring, contact management and collaboration capabilities to their sales processes, including prospecting and opportunity management. A key element of effective selling, and one that is very time‐consuming, is content creation. Specifically, the creation of quotes, proposals, reference forms, and RFPs can be tedious. If a sales person has to create any of these documents from scratch, they can easily take hours if not days. Dynamics CRM 2011 has SharePoint capabilities embedded within the product, so sales users can easily create, share, and re‐use key documents such as proposals and quotes. More importantly, the salesperson can take advantage of valuable knowledgeable from other salespersons


who created similar documents, in turn enabling more effective selling. Key business functions of lead, opportunity, and client and campaign management are addressed as part of the Sales Force Automation module of Dynamics CRM 2011.

3.2 Customer Care Business Scenarios As the complexity and number of software products and services increases, organizations strive to achieve more efficient and collaborative processes. These processes typically involve multiple team members, and a typical sales or service professional is expected to juggle multiple tasks. It’s important that these professionals have tools and product information readily available to identify appropriate products and services for their clients and to respond to investors when sales and marketing performance need to be enhanced. Microsoft Unified Communications solutions are powerful enterprise collaboration technologies that compress the time it takes to gather time‐sensitive information from various communication channels to dissemination to their clients. Streamlined communications and collaboration, fully integrated within CRM enables end users to quickly and easily find the right person and click to communicate from within everyday software applications and business processes, and convey accurate and timely information to all parties concerned. With voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), enterprise telephony, and integration of the firm’s telephony and e‐mail infrastructures with unified messaging, an organization gets a robust e‐mail, voicemail, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing solution that is cost effective and easy to manage.

A challenge of providing great customer service today is related to expanding and enriching each of multiple service delivery channels from which the client wants to interface with the business. Although most companies have established client websites, some sites lack transactional capabilities and many do not provide the real‐time visibility of a customer’s data and account status. Dynamics CRM provides a central repository of customer information accessible via multiple channels to a wide range of audiences, therefore, enabling everyone to access the same information across multiple devices.


4 EXTENDED CRM

Businesses today need to maximize the value of their relationships. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software and the xRM application framework, organizations can quickly and easily extend their CRM solution and build custom applications to track any business relationship–without compromising features, capabilities, budget and delivery time. The Dynamics CRM 2011 framework provides a flexible and extensible services infrastructure to host multiple applications leveraging scalable hosting models, multi‐tenancy support, and enabling application capabilities such as offline support and ad‐hoc reporting that generally involve significant engineering effort.

Extended CRM is all about relationships and connections. In a typical business organization, relationships no longer just span the customer. Organizations in today’s complex business environment need to be able to track all relevant relationships. The new Connections feature within Dynamics CRM 2011 enables organizations can easily define and set‐up any relationship they want to track, assign attributes to it, and then actually associate individuals to that relationship. For example, an enterprise sales team may have a complex sales process, and for a particular product or service, they may have a target role to sell to. For example, a potential sale to a CXO may involve buy‐in from peripheral roles like in‐house lawyers, tax consultants, and accountants. The Connections feature allows these key role definitions, their association to specific individuals, as well as end‐to‐end tracking of all associated actions and activities.

Dynamics CRM is built on and works with Microsoft technology that organizations worldwide are familiar with and don’t require significant learning curve for deployment. From a business user standpoint, the system works with the familiar tools they use every day, which not only reduces training requirements but increases the utilization of existing systems. With Dynamics CRM, organizations can leverage existing Microsoft investments including:

Office

Visual Studio

.NET

Unified Communications

Exchange

SQL Server

BizTalk Server

WPF and Silverlight


Role Based User Experience

One of the most effective ways to improve the business fit of business solutions is to ensure that the solution is optimized for each specific role. Dynamics CRM 2011, with the role‐tailored experience, provides a whole new set of capabilities around declarative design and specifically around role‐tailored forms. Organizations can create forms specific to each individual role and tailor the amount of information, order, and presentation of information that is displayed on that form. For example, they could create a different Opportunity form for a sales VP versus a sales rep: one showing an aggregate view and the other showing more detailed sales information.

From an Extended CRM standpoint, they could also create specific data views for non‐traditional roles. For example, they could create a new form for an operations manager, another one for IT manager, another one for a compliance officer, each showing different levels of data. Tailoring the presentation and order of information through role‐specific forms, organizations can increase the relevancy of the information, the business fit, and ultimately the adoption.

When tools are not well integrated, end‐users must constantly switch between systems, screens, applications, and various lines of business to find the information they need to answer clients’ questions. Dynamics CRM provides an environment where users’ work behaviors are molded around separate silos of information to an environment where technologies more intuitively emulate users’ work behaviors, without concern about the underlying applications/technologies that provide it.

Business Designer Layer

A key enhancement in Dynamics CRM 2011 is that business users that are subject matter expeperts for their line of business have the ability to customize and extend application areas with drag‐and‐drop customization capabilities. They can easily create new business entities, add or change roles, modify attribute definitions, add or change relationships between entities, and design new forms and views for UI layout. All of these scenarios have traditionally required significant customization effort. The business designer layer within Dynamics CRM enables these customizations to be performed with minimal effort and little IT intervention. Dynamics CRM 2011 allows process definitions to be exported and imported, a feature highly leveraged by customers and partners, as this allows for easy deployment across organizations and CRM environments.

Managing Solutions

The new Solutions feature in Dynamics CRM 2011 provides a holistic feature set to allow organizations to find, use, and manage complementary and value‐add solutions. The feature provides a centralized console where organizations can install, uninstall, manage, and track solutions. For example, organizations may want to use one of the many partner‐built solutions for Dynamics CRM, or they may want to use third‐party applications that have pre‐built integrations to Dynamics CRM or they may want to take advantage of industry‐specific applications or existing in‐house applications. The feature significantly enhances manageability of those value‐add solutions and to extend out the capabilities of Dynamics CRM.


5 DYNAMICS CRM IN THE CLOUD

Microsoft cloud services include a broad range of products ranging from business applications to productivity suites. These include Dynamics CRM Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync. These services extend beyond applications to the core platform with SQL Azure and Windows Azure. With cloud computing still in its early days, business and technology decision makers today often look at cloud computing through the lens of a single application, such as sales force automation as‐a‐service. Microsoft’s approach of “the Cloud on your terms” provides customers with flexibility on their software investments in the Cloud or on‐premise.

Feature Set

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offering includes the following capabilities:

• Marketing—flexible segmentation tools, simplified campaign management capabilities, intuitive response tracking, and insightful analytics.

• Sales—full lead to cash visibility, lead and opportunity tracking, streamlined approvals, and real‐time sales forecasts.

• Customer Service—tools that simplify case management, streamline escalations, improve knowledge sharing, and enable more effective account management.

• Extended CRM—a flexible framework that helps organizations to create custom business applications and industry solutions.

It is important to note that Dynamics CRM Online service is based on the same code‐base as Dynamics CRM on‐premise as well as Dynamics CRM service hosted by partner. Therefore, it includes essentially the same set of features and functionality. The latest release of Dynamics CRM Online has full cloud symmetry as it relates to feature parity. Some new features include support server‐side code, SRS reports, data migration, and support for end‐customer web portals. This significantly reduces limitations around customization, extensions and integration with other applications.

Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure

Microsoft operates datacenters around the world. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers are provided with a managed resource instance of CRM that is allocated based on their needs. Business audiences frequently voice concerns about security, privacy, reliability and operational control, as it relates to leveraging business applications in the cloud. Microsoft has developed security principles and processes through its decades‐long involvement in enterprise technology and is leveraging these competencies in the cloud services environment. Each customer is provisioned with their own customer database. This maximizes the security and integrity of the customer’s data. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online architecture provides customers with complete autonomy over how they operate, manage, configure, and secure their CRM solution. For example, customers can configure their own data schema, user interface, business processes, and security model for their specific instance. In this way, they have full control over the application and its functionality as if they were running it on their servers.


Having a “defense in‐depth” approach is a fundamental element in how Microsoft provides a trustworthy cloud infrastructure. Applying controls at multiple layers involves employing protection mechanisms, developing risk mitigation strategies, and being capable of responding to attacks when they occur. The most recent version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online privacy policy is available at https://signin.crm.dynamics.com/portal/static/4105/privacy.htm.

Cloud services leverage virtualization technologies where data may be stored virtually and distributed across many locations. Physical and network security measures are enforced, however, the focal point of risk management shifts closer to the object level in the cloud environment. Safeguards are applied on multiple fronts including securing the web application with SSL, custom defined security roles which govern what users can access and the actions they can perform, field level security, full business data auditing, and stringent physical security of Microsoft datacenters including building and system/database access. Additionally, the application itself uses standard security features of the Microsoft software infrastructure on which Microsoft Dynamics CRM runs (such as Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange Server).

Microsoft provides a service level agreement (SLA) governing the service availability for the term of the subscription. The Dynamics CRM Online SLA is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=196557.

Authentication

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online uses the Windows Live ID service to manage identity and trust, providing a single sign on experience that allows businesses and customers to use a single set of credentials for accessing various websites or applications. With Windows Live ID, the password recovery is based on a secret question/response provided by the user upon registration. Adding a new user is simplified with entering the user’s name, email address, and Security Role information into the user administration screen, and inviting them to the system. Users can be removed from the system by disabling the user in Dynamics CRM Online.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is planning to offer support for different authentication providers in a future release, thereby allowing:

• Users to be authenticated against services managed by the customer. • Specific password policies to be specified and enforced by the customer.

Additional information about Windows Live ID is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en‐us/library/bb288408.htm


6 PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 supports load balancing across multiple servers. During deployment, an administrator can install certain Dynamics CRM Server components and services in a load‐balanced infrastructure, representing a server role, on different servers. Administrators can also specify one or both of two server role groupings, or to have two or more servers running the same role. Enterprise scale has been a key tenet of Dynamics CRM since early releases. The most recent benchmark performed on Dynamics CRM demonstrates that a single instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on Intel® processor‐based servers with solid state drive hardware can scale to support an enterprise implementation of 150,000 concurrent users, achieving discrete atomic response times under one second.

Based on these results of this benchmark, an organization with a similar data and transaction volume can expect similar results. Multiple factors can affect performance, including the following:

• Number of records in the database • Number, type, and frequency of transactions • Processing power dedicated to workflows or plug‐ins

While this benchmark demonstrates scalability under high transaction rates, customers should evaluate the requirements of their own environments before undertaking a large‐scale deployment. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Performance and Stress Testing Toolkit, a framework for performance testing of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, formed the basis of this benchmark. The test cases were created using this toolkit, and it also facilitated load testing of the simulated environment. This toolkit is planned to be made available as a free download, and can be used by customers and partners to evaluate the potential viability of Dynamics CRM within their own infrastructure.


7 SUMMARY

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is built on state‐of‐the‐art technologies that allow organizations to leverage robust CRM capabilities as a cloud service or as an on‐premises application. The XRM framework, available as part of the Dynamics CRM solution provides line‐of‐business specialists and IT organizations the ability to build flexible and familiar solutions, leading to significant reduction in time to build and deploy these solutions as well as the ability to consume these applications in a browser, mobile device, or within Microsoft Office.

Documents

Dynamics Crm Reference Architecture Version 1.0