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I have a little slice of both of these companies so am looking forward to see what happens this week.
 
That's interesting. I'm not doubting Salesforce has a lot to offer a big company with lots of financial resources to put towards licensing and customizing it for their needs. But as a company with only around 150 employees, it was a terrible choice for us.

We already use Microsoft's Dynamics GP (Great Plains) as our accounting package and have done so for many years. We *know* how clunky, bloated and trouble-prone THAT application is - yet it gets the job done for us at the end of the day. (We do project-based accounting here, which apparently limits the options out there that really work well for our needs.) And we're pretty interested in the Dynanics CRM software because it would interface with GP and let them auto-export info into CRM.

I know one place we tried to use Salesforce products that really fell flat on its face for us was their "Chatter" product as a corporate IM solution. Their Mac client was written in Adobe Air, which was bad enough. But then they discontinued it and didn't bother to replace it with anything better. Just told Mac users to use the web-based Chatter instead. And even the Windows client fell behind in functionality compared to what the web version offered (like badges and awards you could send co-workers in it). Seemed like an easy place to make something really slick -- yet Salesforce did the bare minimum with it instead.


There many other options out there for CRMs (Zendesk, Hubspot, Zoho etc.) but Salesforce is King imo. I work in CRM development and Dynamics is hot garbage. We sunset Dynamics (the company I work for a big MS shop) last year and been using Salesforce. Night and day difference....Salesforce is 10x better than Dynamics. It does depend though on what you're trying to achieve. Salesforce better meets our needs but other companies could get by with alternatives for much less money.
 
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