Chapter 1. Getting Started

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market has seen a huge uptake in the last few years. Some of the drivers for this market are the need to enhance customer experience, provide faster and better services, and adapting to the customer's growing digital presence. CRM systems, in general, are taking a central place in the new organizational initiatives.

Dynamics CRM is Microsoft's response to a growing trend. The newest version is Dynamics CRM 2016. It is being offered in a variety of deployment scenarios. From the standard on-premise deployment to a private cloud, or an online cloud offering from Microsoft, the choice depends on each customer, their type of project, and a large number of requirements, policies, and legal restrictions.

In this chapter, we'll first look at the environment we need to complete the examples presented in the book. We will create a new environment, based on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online trial. This approach will give us 30-day trial to experiment with an environment for free.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter: