Anyone esle unhappy with how slow CRM works in the cloud

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Posted on by Fred Luebke

I'm a small business who purchased 6 user licences in March of 2011 and have not had any success using CRM. We are using he cloud version and it is just way to slow and we have had multiple issues tying to get it to work on one particular workstation. We also continue to have the wrong icons show up in differnt screens. For example the contacts icon shows up in accounts section. We also have other users who when they acces CRM it closes Outlook. I'm very unhappy with what we have today especially after paying a third party integrator $6K for some basic set up and support.

This being said I'm still a beliver in the product as I have a few of my larger clients who use it and love it. The differnece is they are all hosting CRM Dynmics their company servers. I haven't found anyone happy with using the cloud version. Any feedback from someone who is using CRM (hosted licensing that may have used the cloud version first would be appreciated)

I'm considering spending another $10K if needed to by the hosted version but was courious about any feedback I may recieve from this posting.

Thank You

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Mohammad Atif on at

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Re: Anyone esle unhappy with how slow CRM works in the cloud

Hi All,

I am using CRM Online from a long time and never faced any performance issue. There are various factors that can contribute to CRM online performance. Below are my recommendations:

1. If it is happening from all the systems

2. If it is happening from web and outlook client

3. If it is happening for all the CRM users

4. If it is happening on multiple network

Please open a support case with MS and operations team will look into the organization. If you can give me your Organization URL i can verify if this is really a performance issue with CRM Online organization or not.

Thanks,

Mohammad

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KevinDavisPE on at

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Re: Anyone esle unhappy with how slow CRM works in the cloud

We are about a year ahead of you with MS Online CRM use. We have experienced numerous issues (dozens) in the last year. We use over 40 licenses (1/2 Local and 1/2 US regions). I maintain numerous SQL databases internally (GP, SP, Proprietary BI, etc.) but, we decided CRM would be our initial cloud foray. It has been somewhat painful. Unless you can have someone dedicated to the intermittent battles with CRM and MS you may want to get some hosting for better performance and support. Mainly support. MS isn’t bad but started out in Fargo and now seems farmed out to India for the most part. The support calls routinely take a day to even get response and then it is sometimes good, sometimes poor and always way to much intrusive on your time rather than being able to solve the problem efficiently and quickly. Sometimes there is so much client debugging and troubleshooting that often the clients choose to live with the minor problems and delays rather than spend hours and hours troubleshooting with me and an MS tech from Bombay. Sometimes its better/faster to rebuild/re-image the workstation to fix the CRM problem. We have had two or three 1/2 or entire day long CRM outages and probably 2-6 client issues a month for the first half of the year and 1-2 per month now. If you could somehow get to the MS "Operations" team or finally get support escalated to someone who knows their stuff the problem is often solved. Some type of dedicated support (hosted?) would make this a much better experience. Of course, learning how the product works over time results in better troubleshooting and reduces your dependence on someone else for support. After a year of supporting and assistance from MS customer support and these forums I understand and can troubleshoot pretty efficiently. That doesn’t help much when the problem is in the MS cloud. I think the Outlook add in product along with CRM use is maturing but the last few years have shown how immature and problematic it can be. When the CRM add in cannot communicate with the CRM cloud it will slow down outlook to a crawl for everything. But, a large part of troubleshooting is understanding the entire infrastructure from the desktop to the cloud. We have had a problem with speed in the past and it ended up being our Trend AV client slowing down traffic during packet inspection (Thanks Alex Furiguo). On the plus side the improvement from MS with the product is good because they listen to the suggestions and we saw necessary improvements and changes incorporated into the 2010 to 2011 version migration we went through with them. MS has and will also pick up the phone and talk to you about their support and other issues. They genuinely seemed concerned about the customer’s experience. They just don’t have any support options except the current structure or a BIG$$$ support contract. We have used different MS partners for support and sometimes they provide good assistance. Sometimes they don’t understand your particular customization/useage/business model. I think it is up to you or someone you hire to stay involved and knowledgeable on your particulars. It is not a turnkey solution as I believed going in. However, the MS CRM Online current price point and onsite support requirement is much lower than on an on-premise solution. Good luck in whichever direction you go.

Kevin

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Scott Jackson on at

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Re: Anyone esle unhappy with how slow CRM works in the cloud

Hi Fred,

I have been through the same journey as you, as in May 2011 we started trialling CRM Online 2011 with around 10 users and after spending around 6 months doing various performance tests we ended up bringing it inhouse and putting in on our own server setup.

Lessons learned from me are:

- Don't forget that the client that runs the CRM Outlook client needs to be a fast PC ( less than 2 years old) , with reccomended 4GB of RAM

- During my tesing of online vs on-prem vs partner hosted, we found that there were inconsistencies of performance from the crm online service, compared with on-prem and partner hosted.

- Run on Win 7 with IE9 if you can as the speed of the browser engine drastically affects performance as most fo the screens are rendered using the browser inside Outlook

- Be wary of network bandwidth considerations as the Outlook client brings down quite a bit of data even when loading one accounts screen.

-Before investing in your own server setup and the configuring and setup duties, I would suggest getting a trial setup with a CRM partner hosted setup with a firm like outsourcery as when I tested outsourcery compared with Microsoft CRM Online, Outsourcery provide a much more consistent performance as it didn't suffer the spikes in performance that the Microsoft CRM Online server provided.

- Use the CRM 2011 online latency tool, but don't jsut run it once as that will give you an *average* repsonse time from 20 requests. If you run the tool and then read through the information below I found that the Microsoft CRM Online server would drop it's bandwith and latency figures down to 3K per second and over 3000ms where as testing against a Outsourcery didn't hit the issue, see: blogs.msdn.com/.../crm-2011-online-latency-tool.aspx

- We ended up bringing everything inhouse as we lost patience with running CRM from the cloud.

Good Luck

Scott Jackson, UK

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Frank Lee 4,617 on at

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Re: Anyone esle unhappy with how slow CRM works in the cloud

What kind of performance are you experience? Open a record takes no more than 2 to 3 seconds in general. Regarding the wrong icons - check the latest update rollup and windows update have been applied.

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