CRM 2011 Online Implementation Outline

For those of you that are experienced implementing traditional enterprise applications you are well familiar with the process that you must go through to get the hardware resources provisioned, prerequisite operating systems installed and upgraded to the latest service packs.  Microsoft partners and clients who have experience with earlier versions of CRM have looked for the release of the CRM Implementation Guide to assist them in configuring the underlying system(s) that must be in place prior to installing CRM.

However, Microsoft's CRM Online 2011 system does this for you already and thus radically simplifies this process and in fact takes it pretty much out of the equation. (NOTE: You will still have to consider the client computer hardware, OS, and  application environment).  But the official IG doesn't present the steps for implementing a CRM Online 'installation'. This article starts the process of outlining those steps from a real world perspective for CRM partners.

CRM 2011 Online Implementation Guide - Simplified Overview.

 

  1. Customer hires Partner to implement Vertical Industry solution or customize CRM  to fit the way their business works.
  2. Partner enters basic information about the company.
  3. Enter Captcha
  4. Repeat step 3 several times until you get it right, enable audio version if necessary.
  5. Partner lip syncs to entertaining CRM informational video for 1-2 minutes while the CRM Organization is provisioned after watching it dozens-hundreds of time.
  6. Login in to the new CRM Online organization.
  7. Register yourself as the Partner of Record (POR).
  8. Obtain customer's credit card number, billing address, expiration data and security code and enter it into CRM
  9. Obtain Live ID for each of the users and send them invites.
  10. Customize CRM
  11. Import Data
  12. Train Users
  13. Go Live
  14. Customer cancels SFDC.com account

References

Open to partners only:

Open to the public and partners:

The following documents and videos are informational resources to learning more about and how to get started with CRM 2011.