by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 31, 2007

Today I attended the CRM 4.0 partner readiness tour and I took the opportunity to ask the technical specialist from Microsoft headquaters a lot of questions. In regard to my entry yesterday concerning licensing, we had an interesting discussion on how it can be managed and how it is handled in CRM 4.0.

In general the same licensing limitations apply as I described in my previous post. The new “light”-userlicense I described bellow will be a read-only user license with a reduced price. The external connector will also be available at a substanially lower cost.

However, we found some technical workarounds that the Microsoft representative actually said were ok but I havn’t asked a Microsoft sales rep and I don’t know if I should…

If you want to create dynamic reports based on CRM data, what you must do is to replicate all the data that you want to base your reports on to your own database. Then create all the reports based on this database, which can be called datawarehouse or something similar.

The same “intermediary” database can also be used when you have, for instance, an internal support page where you can submit your support issue, which is then added to the CRM as a Service case. Let the application write to a database and then create an service that periodically (like every minute or so) reads the new data, and writes to the CRM webservice. There are other similar ways of doing this (like sending emails from the form to a support que) and I think you get the general idea.

The legal workaround using a subsidary company with an external connector license is also valid, but will require you to buy the external connector which has a non trivial price.

I feel this is very strange, that you using a technical solution can bypass some licensing rules that actually should be changed.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Licensing of CRM and external software

by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 30, 2007

During Convergence 2007 in Copenhagen, it got into a discussion with some Microsoft empolyees concerning the licensing issues when creating applications that directly or indirectly access CRM-based data.

According to what I have heard, it boils down to the fact that a user license is required for all users who interact with the data in any way. This means that no user license is required for a static report displayed in, for instance, SharePoint, but, as soon as there is any interactivity with the data, as for instance, drill down, a separate user license is needed.

So, if you want to display data in SharePoint that comes in whole, or part, from the CRM-database, make sure it is a static report, so that no special user license is required. Creating a report (with for instance SQL Reporting Services) that has drill-down, will require each user to have a user license.

This rises the question of what kind of licensing is needed to access OLAP cubes that are assembled from a data warehouse based on data from many different system, among these, Microsoft CRM. As far as I have understood a full user license is required for all users who can access the OLAP-cubes.

This issue will probably change in CRM 4.0 when there will be a new “light-user-license”. Exactly what this means is still unclear and I have heard no details from Microsoft.

When creating any outside interaction with CRM, like a web based tool for submitting service cases, the separate “External Connector” license is needed. This is independant of the magnitude of the application or number of external users (company employees cannot use the external connector). It is also independant of if each user actually uses a named user or some common system user. I am unsure of the exact price for the external connector, but I believe it is somewhere around $40 000.

So, what does this mean for CRM-developers? That we have to have some basic understanding of the licensing modell and what limitations there are to it, so that our customers don’t have to pay unnecessary license fees just because we thought that drill-down was a nifty feature in our report that is published on a SharePoint portal.

As many of you, I think these limitations are non benificial for Microsoft since they greatly restrict the possibilities of creating nice Mash-up applications and portals, something Microsoft technology is very good at and something I would view as a great advantage in comparison to Microsofts competitors.

I would also like to point out that I might be wrong in understanding some of these details, and I would be greatful if you could leave a comment if you know or think that I might have understood something wrong.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB / Soon Logica CMG/WM-Data
www.humandata.se