Luther,
You are semantically correct. Design limitations are not built "IN" to a
product such as BCM. These limitations being "inherent to the design" are
the sad result of the lack of a more energetic effort to build such
limitations "OUT" of the product thus enabling the product to better meet
user's real world needs vs. theoretical marketing driven needs of the
intended user of the product. (ie: Most small business) This is the very
point I seek to consistently make. I am not an apologist for ACT or any
other alterative application and whatever they do or do not do well. The
obvious attractive drawing card of BCM that lures many users of other
alternative applications such as myself is due to the attractive promise and
possibility of operating within a single user interface as part of the
familiar Office environment. The interest for a more simple, seamless
integration among our key software applications is in everyone. The sad fact
is that BCM is still not as robust and ready for prime time for anyone
wishing to avoid having to make so many compromises and trade-offs in order
to use it.
I have never contended that BCM should contain every feature for every user.
That is obviously a ridiculous and unrealistic expectation for anyone to have.
My assertion is simply this. Ever software application design should have
the goal of aspiring to offer as ideal of a feature set as possible for its
intended target user base. I would assume this to be especially true for an
area as important to the small business arena as an entry CRM tool. Of
course there will always be trade offs but your comments are of an apologist
nature that would be more appropriate if this were 1985. Providing such
features as forms customization, many-to-many database object linking, Multi
remote user sharing, etc. is not new stuff requiring a lot of new development
investment. The fact that these features still do not exist after several
years indicates that the targeted needs that BCM is intended for is widely
misunderstood. BCM absolutely does NOT currently provide anywhere near an
"ideal feature set" for even probably 10 to 20% of small business normal
usage needs. To believe otherwise is (in my opinion) direct evidence of the
enormous disconnect which results from a mindset unable to think outside of
the larger, corporate IT enterprise level shoebox frame of reference.
A small business person's desire to do more with their database should not
automatically exclude this from becoming more of a possiblity simply because
this desire resembles what has previously only been done this way before on a
corporate IT level in a manner that required an in-house server to host mail
services, etc. Outlook add-ins do not have to remain as limited as they
currently are. If I were the leader of a design team for an Outlook add-in
such as BCM my immediate and overriding directive to everyone on my team
would be to develop an empathy based approach by going out into the real
world and determine as accurately as possible exactly WHO my intended users
are and then discern just how most of my intended users truly wish to operate
with their data. Indeed such an analysis will eventually conclude as
ultimately a subjective judgement call. My overriding principle however
would not be to just cobble something together and then try to justify its
limitations by trying to convince my users to adopt my product with slick
marketing and excuses. If I wished to achieve excellence with my product
design I would not rest until I fully explored the best features of every one
of my competitor's products all the while continuously demanding of my team
whether a way could be found to incorporate and include such best features
rather than exclude and apologize with excuses later after releasing a turkey
on the public. I use BCM only because I can tolerate most of its limitation
trade offs and I prefer to remain within a single environment. I am likely a
small minority though and most folks that I have turned on to BCM can't and
won't live with its limitations. Most of my peers lack my patience.
Microsoft appears to be making the attempt to evolve beyond this paradigm of
limited thinking (business as usual) but I contend that this evolution
remains very slow as one might expect from such a large organization.
Changing the direction and momentum of such a large ship takes time. I am
still inclined to believe that the near laughable limitations and outright
omissions of functionality in BCM are not accidental in nature from a company
with as many financial resources that MS has at its disposal. It is not
credibly logical to me that there is a conscious intent to be mediocre. It
seems more plausible that the masters of marketing in Redmond are ruling the
day here with intention and if BCM were more made robust and feature rich it
would simply provide too much of a competitive alternative and disincentive
of demand for the full Microsoft CRM product.
Thank you for your provocative thoughts Luther.
-THP
Luther wrote:
>Design limitations are not built into a product, rather they are
>inherent to the design. For example, BCM has to work with the same
>limitations as other Outlook Add-ins. Why doesn't ACT just rush out an
>Outlook Add-in for their software instead of using a clunky interface
>to Outlook? According to you the money just sitting on the table
>waiting for someone whip a CRM add-in that'll have every feature for
>every user. Designing software is about a series of trade-offs. The
>ideal feature set for most small businesses will not be the same as the
>feature set for an IT pro. For example, making BCM an Exchange module
>might make it easier to share data in corporate IT departments, but it
>wouldn't work for the 90% of small businesses that don't even have a
>server of any kind, let alone host their own mail services.
--
Message posted via OfficeKB.com
http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...k-bcm/200512/1
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