Differences between Microsoft CRM and xRM

Question

I am browsing the new xrm.com page and I find it lacks some concrete information of what does it means.

Could you please explain what are the main differences between Microsoft CRM and xRM? What extra features does it gives to the developer or customer?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

xRM is just Microsoft's marketing push to get people thinking about using Dynamics CRM for more than just "Customer" Relationship Management. There is no separate product: xRM is CRM.

Answer 2

You have to consider Dynamics CRM as a real development platform you can use to develop application that manage everything you want.

CRM can be used by default to manage Customer Relationship but in fact, the applications I develop with Dynamics CRM are more and more not related to CRM. That's the reason why Microsoft says that Dynamics CRM an be used to create xRM solutions.

Answer 3

For my $0.02, Microsoft XRM really means data access love to CRM developers. In the CRM 4.0.13 SDK (released in Oct 2010 with Rollup 13), check out the microsoft.xrm directory. There's a CHM and some Word doc walkthroughs and some sample code. In the tools directory lives the crmsvutil executable that will generate a giant proxy class (mine was > 140,000 LoC) so that you can use LINQ to access CRM in an intelligent way.

The proxy has a DataContext based on a ConnectionString that feels very much like Entity Framework. No more FetchXML, no more QueryExpressions with the wimpy-typed BusinessEntityCollection. When you query, you get back IQueryables of strong model types that even have Intellisense XML comments derived from the descriptions in your CRM Entity customizations. In short, getting data from CRM becomes less of a drag.

A grain of salt: I'm still developing my first ASP.Net MVC app that uses microsoft.xrm, so I have no idea of it's production performance or stability yet.