What are the advantages of Customer Relationship Management over Goldmine?
My company is in the process of reviewing Customer Relationship Management
solutions and our reseller is suggesting Goldmine over Customer Relationship
Management.One of the key reasons is that Microsoft Customer Relationship
Management has a problem with its "one-to-many" relationships when associating data
within another file. Is this true? What are the advantages of Customer
Relationship Management over Goldmine?
We had reveiwed goldmine for our firm as well.
We went with CRM mostly for it's high level of customizability.
If there is a need that CRM does not fill, we can integrate and develop it
ourselves.
It is web browser based making it much more easy to deploy than standard
windows apps also.
MSCRM has no problems with one to many relationships.
If fact, nearly all relationships in MSCRM are one to many, with a few one
to ones.
CRM out of the box dosen't support "many to many" relationships, however
this can be resolved within the CRM using custom programming.
If it's the same thing that SalesLogix can do, that Microsoft CRM
cannot do -
it's that in Microsoft CRM, a contact can have only 1 account. Not
multiple accounts. So in tech terms, there is not a many-to-many
relationship between Accounts and Contacts.
Actually this probably more down to how you hold data ie in MS CRM and
GoldMine you have something called Fields (or Details) these offer 1 to 1
management ie an account has one turnover, one set of employees etc. But it
doesnt manage 1 to Many items (well you can fudge it) ie Contacts with
Multiple Hobbies selected from a list or perhaps interest areas,