Is BCM viable for 'company-wide' use? - comments

[Phil Partridge]

All you experts, and those 'just trying it'...

Have a Client who uses Act!6, and is very disappointed with it and the
support they are getting. - Not my choice, or support.
They have SBS2k and about 25 machines/Users on the network.

I have looked at BCMv2, and do not consider it suitable to be used on
this scale. - Do you agree?

Do the Group consider that BCMv3 would be suitable for this scale of
use?

How would you get round the database being stored on a local machine? -
I presume it installs similarly to v2 in this respect?

Will it grow an unwieldy, large database?

Are there tools to compress and repair said database if things go wrong?

Sorry for all the questions, but you all have more experience of this
than me.

Regards,
Philip Partridge

 

[Guy]

I don't think BCM v2 would be viable because of the lack of customization. I
have been testing v3 beta and I think that would work for you provided you
installed in on a full SQL server. This will remove any database size
limitations (2 GB on MSDE) and fit your user numbers (currently limited to 5
concurrent connections).

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

All you experts, and those 'just trying it'...

Have a Client who uses Act!6, and is very disappointed with it and the
support they are getting. - Not my choice, or support.
They have SBS2k and about 25 machines/Users on the network.

I have looked at BCMv2, and do not consider it suitable to be used on
this scale. - Do you agree?

Do the Group consider that BCMv3 would be suitable for this scale of
use?

How would you get round the database being stored on a local machine? -
I presume it installs similarly to v2 in this respect?

Will it grow an unwieldy, large database?

Are there tools to compress and repair said database if things go wrong?

Sorry for all the questions, but you all have more experience of this
than me.

Regards,
Philip Partridge

I would try BCMv3 for companywide use. The solution is built on SQL Server
Express 2005, which is basically your regular SQL server with some
limitations. There are plenty of SQL server experts available, such as
myself , who can fix the database problems. More importantly, you'll
really need to be very diligent about your backups.

If that's still insufficient and you find yourself wishing for even more
features, MS CRM 3.0 will be a good choice. There is a direct upgrade path
to CRM 3.0 from BCMv3. It doesn't cost you anything to try it now anyway, so
why not?

 

[Phil Partridge]

I would try BCMv3 for companywide use. The solution is built on SQL Server
Express 2005, which is basically your regular SQL server with some
limitations. There are plenty of SQL server experts available, such as
myself , who can fix the database problems. More importantly, you'll
really need to be very diligent about your backups.

So I presume it won't run on 'whatever' version of SQL is within SBS2k?

Nightly full backup should cover it, no??

I presume everyone has to be 'out' of the database if you use the backup
'tool' in BCM?

If that's still insufficient and you find yourself wishing for even more
features, MS CRM 3.0 will be a good choice. There is a direct upgrade path
to CRM 3.0 from BCMv3. It doesn't cost you anything to try it now anyway, so
why not?

Surely CRM 3.0 would kill the present Server?

Would it even run on a SBS2k server?

AND, though I haven't looked, I bet CRM 3.0 would cost more to implement
than they spent on SBS2k and the server combined. :-(

Regards,
Philip Partridge

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

So I presume it won't run on 'whatever' version of SQL is within SBS2k?

Nightly full backup should cover it, no??

I presume everyone has to be 'out' of the database if you use the backup
'tool' in BCM?


Surely CRM 3.0 would kill the present Server?

Would it even run on a SBS2k server?

AND, though I haven't looked, I bet CRM 3.0 would cost more to implement
than they spent on SBS2k and the server combined. :-(

SBS 2000 or SBS 2003?

There is a very big difference between the two and there are a lot of
improvements on the 2003 platform. Anyway, SQL Server Express 2005 is free
and will co-exist with SQL Server 2000 on the same server.

CRM 3.0 is just a SQL application. Why would it kill a server? I'll be
testing, when I get some time, CRM vs. BCM as far as system resources are
concerned, but I don't anticipate much trouble.

SBS 2003 Premium happens to be the only platform possible for those who want
to run CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition. It scales to 75 users with a
migration path from BCM. The cost per user is lower with CRM 3.0 SBE than it
is for the CRM 3.0 Pro.

We are still early into evaluating the beta of this product, but I'd be
really curious to find out what features you find missing for a 25-user
deployment.

To put it succinctly - if you find yourself really needing features beyond
BCM V3, you are likely to be able to afford the estimated cost of a 25-user
CRM 3.0 deployment project.
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/product/compareeditions.mspx

Nightly full backup is a must, but additionally someone should keep making
backups from inside BCM into .BCM format. There typically is no need to be
logged out of the database to perform a backup and I haven't seen that
requirement in BCM documentation.

 

[Luther]

Couple things to add.

For db backup, BCM merely calls Sql Server and instructs it to do a
backup, so the features and limitations there are the same as Sql's.

With 2007 (AKA BCMv3) Microsoft continues to recommend a maximum of
five users per db. The limitations in Xpress are different from MSDE
but five sounds reasonable. You may run into problems based on your
user's workload; e.g. if your users just look up Contact's addresses a
random times during the day, you might support ten users, but if your
users are concurrently running reports and importing data then 3 users
may experience slowdowns. Note that the MSDE limitation is on
connections and not on users. A single user may have several
connections if background threads are accessing the db. A limitiation
of five users in a typical office sounds reasonable.

Leonid is correct that the BCM db can be hosted on a full blown Sql
Server, and there appears to be an growing industry of BCM consultants
to support such scenarios. Most of the private emails I receive are
requests for help in this area, but alas I'm a developer and not an
integrator. If you go down the full server route, the number of users
limitation will depend on the memory and CPUs on your server.

Note that BCM is not designed to be an enterprise apps, and even with
an infinite amount of power on the server you are bound to run into
locking issues and the other problems inherent to client-server
applications. BCM is designed to be an interactive application and does
a lot of work to refresh every Outlook user as soon as any user updates
any data. That leads to a lot of database traffic, and typically
applications with many users sacrifice responsiveness in exchange for
supporting many users. MSCRM was designed to support 25 users and more.