I don't believe that conspiracy theories have anything to do with this. It
all comes down to how one assesses the marketplace. I believe that MS has it
all wrong. Neither the size of an organization nor whether they have IT
staff should determine which application to use. In their monopolistic
messaging to the marketplace, MS will preach this nonsense but just look at
the explosive growth of "hosted" solutions for remote data access. The
sector that is driving this most profoundly are the small business mobile
warriors such as myself. It is plain stupid for MS to have exchange butnot
include BCM in such functionality. It just forces users to look elsewhere
rather than adopt the MS platform. I remain convinced that such short
sightedness is by intended design rather than an accident. There are some
positive signs that they might be starting to "get-it" with the Office Live
solution based upon SharePoint technology. Of course, true to MS
bureaucratic tradition, Office Live does not yet integrate seamlessly with
BCM data either.
Can anyone say clueless?
-THP
I don't believe that MS wants to enable BCM to be hosted for remote, multiple
location access as you describe. In the seemingly limited worldview coming
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Having discussed this directly with Microsoft, I can tell you that the
availability of remoting features is a function of the resources
required to implement such versus other possible features and the
number of users for the feature. The difference between BCM and MSCRM
is the number of users and size of the company each product is
designed for. BCM would love to provide a remoting solution to their
customers and MSCRM doesn't want to deal with customers that don't
have an IT staff. Clearly there's a gray area where a customer can
decide to use one or the other, and Microsoft would like BCM customers
to migrate to MSCRM as their companies grow, but conspiracy theories
are best left to that MI5 poster.