May 24th 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Summary: John O'Donnell talks about why you need to ensure all departments such as human resources at your client should be aware of the pending Microsoft CRM deployment just in case they too are impacted.
In reviewing various Microsoft CRM newsgroups there are still far too many cases where people ask what should be a simple question. Our star salesman has just left the company, what do we do with his data in Microsoft CRM? A related question is that we can no longer transfer a user's data that has left our company. This happens after IT operations have deleted the user from the Active Directory.
This shows that it is common for one aspect of a Microsoft CRM implementation to be ignored and that is its impact to areas such as HR or Human Resources department in any company. When an employee decides to terminate his employment there are a set of either automatic or manual processes that are triggered such as disabling an employee's login, removing him from payroll and finally either disabling his account in the Active Directory or deleting it to stop the ex employee logging into the company network. Companies vary in size and complexity therefore the number of processes that happen when an employee joins or leaves a company can be either very simple with some manual steps or highly complex with many automatic processes being launched to add the new employee to various systems, send out welcome emails and many more.
As part of the process of designing and implementing a CRM system one aspect that can sometimes be overlooked is communicating with HR to determine how CRM should fit into the overall process for adding and removing employees.
A sample process for an employee leaving the company might be this, assuming HR does not know about the recently implemented CRM system.
• Employee is removed from email distribution lists
• Employee email is shut down
• Final comments are added to employee record in the HR system
• Employee is marked in the accounting and HR systems as no longer employed
• Employee's final check and termination letter are sent out
• Employee's network logon or AD account is either disabled or deleted.
If this user was a CRM user and IT had deleted their AD / network account then at this point their data in Microsoft CRM has been orphaned and also their CRM user license has been lost. So if you had a 100 user license before, now you have a count of 99. While Microsoft support can help you get around this issue, the better solution is to avoid the problem in the first place and ensure that Microsoft CRM is part of the HR process for when an employee leaves the company.
A possible process with CRM included would now look like this.
• Employee is removed from email distribution lists
• Employee email is shut down
• Final comments are added to employee record in the HR system
• Employee is marked in the accounting and HR systems as no longer employed
• A check is performed to see if an employee was a user of Microsoft CRM
• If yes, then the user's data should be transferred to another CRM user, their manager or the CRM administrator for safe keeping until a decision can be made on who gets the CRM data.
• When the user's data has been transferred to another user, their Microsoft CRM user account can be disabled and their Microsoft CRM user license released.
• Employee's final check and termination letter are sent out
• Employee's network logon or AD account is either disabled or deleted.
At this point the user has been disabled in Microsoft CRM and their data has been transferred to another user.
The whole process of removing someone from Microsoft CRM is a simple one however the process needs to start and end with your HR department.
How to reassign a Microsoft CRM user's data and disable a user.
To re-assign a user records simply open up the users record in Microsoft CRM then click Actions – Reassign Records and choose the user to assign the records to.
To disable a user open up their Microsoft CRM user record and click Actions – Disable and confirm you want to disable their record. After doing this the user will not be able to connect to Microsoft CRM and their user license will go back to the license pool.
Comments
Microsoft does not yet supply command line tools that can add and remove users from a Microsoft CRM system. If your companies IT uses heavily automated processes for handling HR procedures then you may want to consider using the Microsoft CRM SDK to build a set of command line tools that can perform general CRM administration tasks without having to log on and use the web interface of Microsoft CRM.
Summary
The impact to your company's existing processes and systems will increase as Microsoft CRM becomes more widely used in your organization.
As part of your Microsoft CRM deployment make sure that you do your research and totally understand any and all departments that your CRM system will impact beyond the usual sales and client services departments. In this article we have talked about the impact to HR when Microsoft CRM is deployed but there could be many other systems that are impacted but are not found until your system goes live.
