At Actum we have Salesforce and Microsoft division, which gives us the unique benefit of being able to propose CRM solutions on both platform (actually we can do SAP as well). It also means that Salesforce isn’t really happy and I’m not sure about Microsoft.
Anyway, the other day we have been preparing with Karel (the Delivery Director of Microsoft division) another RFP, where customer wanted quotation for both platforms and Karel wasn’t really happy with the estimates I’ve been putting together. The idea has been born – let’s compare the solutions side by side.
It took a bit longer to prepare everything, after all the summer period is usually a bit slower and we’ve been busy on projects. At the end of summer Adam (the Kentico Division Director) agreed to be our customer and put together his requirements for CRM system, based on which we should configure the systems live from scratch.
Beginning of September roughly 50 people have been registered for the event, majority of them attended on-site and we had a few on-line people as well. The start of the event was a bit stresful as the meeting room got cleared just minutes before start, we didn’t have time to test the beamers (they don’t really work on black wall) and a few other things, but at the end we started basically on time.
As I’ve been presenting I didn’t really have time to pay close attention to what Karel is doing, from my point of view the solutions are almost equal, each of them has their own benefits which you might or might not appreciate. A feedback I’ve got after the event was, that it feels like you need to click more on Microsoft to set it up and Karel had a bit challenge to keep up with me configuring the system. But that’s not something you’ll really appreciate in daily live.
My key takeaways:
- The security has mostly the same possibilities – object, row and field level;
- Microsoft speaks a lot about their Dataverse, we have Platform but doesn’t really stress its importance that much;
- The business process definition on Microsoft is awesome! It can be dynamic with conditions, so the moment the opportunity is above some value or has any other condition you can extend the business process. On Salesforce we can use record types to achieve it, but that’ll be pain;
- Salesforce has more flexible and easy to configure UI – the Lightning Pages are just so easy to configure and so flexible. Microsoft is mostly about two columns with fields and tabs with additional related info, you can definitely develop your own component in JavaScript, but probably nothing as easy to use as screen flow. And the design is kind of spartan;
- Power Automate on the other hand is superrior to flows – all the connectors, the fact that it records all the calls so you can update the definition and just re-run based on the saved data, no need to trigger is again. Which might be beneficial when being called from external system and in plenty of other situations. It also shows the timing so you know where to focus with your optimization. Yes, we have the MuleSoft Composer, but that’s extra money and don’t have that many prepared integrations;
- Native connection with Teams, not just for the chat but also for calls, another benefit of Microsoft. And based on the presentations from Dreamforce Salesforce is aware of that and when positioning Slack they don’t compete agains the telephony part;
- Training is probably stronger on Salesforce, Trailhead is just awesome. Microsoft has something as well, it isn’t the old good text documentation but something more fancy, but still not on-par with Trailhead;
- At the beginning it looked like Experience Cloud is something where they cannot compete but at the end Karel was able to quickly spin-up something as well;
- Development, sandboxes, pipelines, etc are similar, on Microsoft platform you are limited by the allocated space into which all your data needs to fit;
- Licenses are similar as well – not speaking about the absolute price, as we didn’t speak about it, but about their variation for different use-cases.
At the end Adam as our jury decided it was a tie with each platform being slightly better at some areas but generally speaking both were really good. Obviously the sample scenario was super easy, at the same time what we see in real life customers aren’t usually more complex as the platforms bring most of the features out of the box.
It also looks like an important event for the wider community as potential customers are still getting in touch with us asking for recording or whether we can run it for them again. And we are definitelly happy to help with finding the right solution, our System Integration division can run technology agnostic discovery of needs and at the end compare the solutions and clearly say why they propose one of them, including TCO calculation.
Slighly selling end, but it happens and I really enjoyed this event. Does it make sense to compare Teams and Slack or who cares?