Recently, we have been working with a few customers to fine tune the performance of their CRM Online systems. I would like to share the findings of our research with you.

Most of the time, and very rarely otherwise, CRM online performance is defined by end user connection, equipment, software and system configuration. I will discuss each of them to give you a little bit of insight.

Using an Online system you have to have an internet connection – quite obvious, but will any connection work well? Again, the simple truth is that the better connection you have the quicker your online system is most likely to respond. But even now – in 21^st century (2015), what some geeks describe as location, there are still households and businesses with internet speed less than 2Mbps, when modern online society are working with speeds getting close to 100Mbps and in some cases a lot more. As CRM online information is communicated via secure ports of your connection – speed available through secure port may be a limiting factor. That may vary on each network settings and organisation requirements. To check your CRM Online response time from any of the locations you can go to https://<YourCRMURL>/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx, please note that to run the test, you have to have System Administrator privileges. Recommended latency is under 100ms (under 150ms will work) and recommended bandwidth more than 50Kbps, but these values are recommendations only and do not guarantee satisfactory performance.

Equipment (hardware) does play considerable part in online system delivery performance as well. If you only generally do basic browsing, emailing and messaging – a very basic computer usually does the job well enough, but when accessing online systems like CRM and similar, the performance may be not up to satisfactory level. The following displays MS Dynamics CRM for Outlook Client hardware requirements:

 

CRM Online can be accessed using different applications: the most direct way of accessing the system is using web application via browser, Microsoft Outlook with CRM add-in can be used, or Dynamics CRM mobile application when using a mobile device.

Users can access the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application on the most recent versions of the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer on Windows
  • Windows 10 supported when you use Internet Explorer 11
  • Windows 8.1 supported when you use Internet Explorer 11
  • Windows 8 supported when you use Internet Explorer 10
  • Windows 7 
• Microsoft Edge on Windows 10
• Firefox on Windows
• Safari on Mac OS X
• Chrome on Windows or Google Nexus 10

Outlook CRM add-in usually is used to give end user familiar Outlook interface and provide Exchange and CRM integration. The down side of this option may be, that first load time of Outlook increases as it has to load yet another add-in (as well as already installed ones such as antivirus).

To use Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office integration features, such as Export to Excel and Mail Merge, you must have one of the following Microsoft Office versions on the computer that is running the Microsoft Dynamics CRM web application:

• Microsoft Office 365
• Microsoft Office 2016
• Microsoft Office 2013

For a mobile device, such as an iPad or smartphone, the following apps are available:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for iPad
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Windows
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Android

Full compatibility and supported applications specification can found though the links at the end of this post.

 

And lastly CRM system setup and configuration can affect end user experience as loading a lot of JavaScript functions or iframes as well as running many workflows on forms does not help the cause.

It is worth considering pros and cons to what is the most optimal way of using your CRM Online system and chose the option that works best for you to get the best performance.

Some useful links.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn531055.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699710.aspx

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3018360/

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7f9d8425-f26c-43ac-bdc7-ff258977ff80#BKMK_iPad