Combining Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains ERP with non-Microsoft Business System or CRM: Lotus Notes Domino, Oracle, DB2

There are multiple opinions on building your established large business IT system. Some companies prefer to be "Microsoft shop", others prefer to stick to Java world. In our opinion large company should try balance its ERP in several layers: Hardware, Operating System, Database Platform, ERP/CRM software vendor. The history always proofs that staking on one thing statistically has a chance to fail, remember Windows/Mac battle in the middle of 1990th? Then Java resurrected UNIX world in the end of the 20th century. All these facts just tell us that any prediction of the future should not be accurate, because the factors we could consider in the prediction formula will be superceded by new conceptions. Good example would be C cross-platform programming language ? however now we are crazy about thin client ? so where is C longevity? So, in 2004 we merged several companies to serve large corporate businesses, positioning us as cross platform integrators and the company, envisioning harmony between multiple computer platforms and conceptions. Let us give you our bullets below:

? Microsoft Business Solutions pluses ? old conception that OS should be separate from the DB platform and from your accounting application doesn't work when we consider modern Microsoft: it now offers all in one: Microsoft Great Plains/Navision/Axapta/Solomon/Microsoft CRM/Small Business Financials ERP, based on MS SQL Server DB platform and all this nice suite is working under Microsoft Windows 2003 Server. This is very nice to have and the price would be lower, however you are in the business space and conceptions of Microsoft corporation, which really deserves you to consider either ERP or CRM solution to be trusted and handled into Microsoft guys

? ERP/Accounting/MRP - we suppose that the old days of expensive ERP application are going to the history. Nowadays we see the trend to use reasonably inexpensive and functionally sufficient applications, based in decent SQL platform. So, our suggestion is ? do not pay for "high end" ERP/Accounting system and rather consider reliable budget solution as a platform for light customization

? Business System/CRM ? CRM market should be considered a mature one in 2010, when such pioneers as Siebel will cross 15 years of the existence. Again in our opinion you'd rather pay for small or moderate customization to budget CRM solution to have work done. Microsoft CRM or SalesLogix would do the job

? Oracle Financials ? we are supporters of the companies who decided to go with Oracle Financials or SAP and have their CRM/Business Management System to be placed on the Microsoft Windows platform. Microsoft CRM would integrate with Oracle smoothly

? Microsoft CRM ? in our opinion large publicly traded company should consider using Lotus Notes Domino for document workflow and CRM and when adopting MS CRM ? it should consider using Domino as primary email server ? see our MS CRM ? Lotus Notes Domino email connector description.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Germany, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK