In his Hiking Both Trails blog, my colleague Michael Philbrick, one of Celedon’s Developers/Consultants, began to introduce the navigational differences between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. In Dynamics CRM, administrators and developers primarily work in the “Settings” menu. On the other hand, they will going through the “Setup” menu in Salesforce.com.
Although components will be found in different menus, once in each respective platform’s administrative menus, you will be able to generally perform the same functions. For instance, administrators can manage users by navigating to the “Administration” and “Users” menu in Dynamics CRM. Similarly, Salesforce.com allows administrators to manage users under the “Administer” and “Manage Users” tab.
As you can see from the image above, although named differently at times, all of the general functions remain the same as an administrator or developer. Each platform allows you to configure objects/entities and other components, set up security for your organization, monitor your workflows and processes, etc. The “Settings” or “Setup” menus even allow administrators to deploy/update changes from one environment to another.
Even though there are many similarities between Dynamics CRM and Salesfore.com, I’d like to point out a couple of major differences:
- Organization of Records: Dynamics CRM combines all of its standard and custom records (entities) in the “Customizations” menu, while Salesforce.com keeps the standard records (objects) in the “Customize” tab and the custom ones in the “Create” tab. Since Dynamics CRM combines all entities under “Customizations”, this makes it convenient as a one stop shop, particularly if you rename any standard entities. On the flip side, Salesforce.com’s model keeps it easy to distinguish between standard and custom objects.
- Navigating through Administrator/Developer Components: Although Dynamics CRM’s flat user interface makes it easy for users navigate through and find such components, there is global search functionality in Salesforce.com’s “Setup” menu that allows administrators and developers to quickly get to their components.
- Custom Code Development: All Apex custom code can be developed within the Salesforce.com platform under the “Build” and “Develop” tabs, while Dynamics CRM can contain custom code in the “Web Resources” or can be pushed from external sources.
Next Steps
This blog is meant to give readers an introduction into the administrator and developer world in both platforms. In upcoming pieces, we will be drilling down into more details between the similarities and nuances between Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Stay tuned!