Cloud CRM Solution - Anyone else gone this way?

Must admit, I tend to blow hot and cold with all this cloud malarky.

When it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong But have put a toe in the water and migrated our exchange server into the "cloud" and it's been pretty good. Still had a few minor outages, so not the bomb proof solution people keep going on about, but much less hassle than looking after the thing ourselves, plus cost of hardware, license etc.

Now considering dumping the office win2003 servers completely and moving them over, as they are starting to show their age.

No longer a user of CRM, but why not get a couple of trials going? Play them off against each other.

Here's another with a 30 day trial.
salesforce.com/uk/crm/sales-force-automation

May mean some duplication, but as long as you can get some data through it with a couple of power users, you should have a good idea if it's for you.

Hi diggersjohn33,

We use both Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, we are an IT company and we often have Engineers on sites etc and this gives us a great flexible way of quickly adding extra people e.g. outside contractors.

Also we have saved a fortune on hardware costs, and migrated most of our servers (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync) to the the cloud.

Obviously we are techies so its been a lot easier for us, we have been so impressed with the systems that we became Microsoft partners and took the necessary steps to become Microsoft cloud partners so we can resell and provide consulting services to others, since we had lots of hands on experience with the system.

For Office 365 I think 30 day trails are enough to have a play with it, but I think its better looking at a demo that is already up and running we tend to show our clients our demos, since you can't put easily put their trials into production for only 30 days! It involves pointing the domains.

With Dynamics, I think you need to have a demo set up as its a big product with lots of integration, you'd be hard pushed to do anything useful with it in a trial with out the help from an experienced consultant.

Needs to watch her words very carefully for fear of advertising....

Having something cloud based might be a good thing. But then again I am obviously biased. Anything specific you were wanting to do with the CRM?