Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Microsoft CRM 3.0 - C360.com and MS-CRM-ADD-ONS.com Word Mail Merge

I was looking online for some good add-on software to do better mail merges in MS Word with MS CRM 3.0 data. Here's some add-ons available:

* c360 Word Mail Merge
* MSCRM-ADDONs.com Word Mail Merge
* Microsoft Business Data Lookup Snap-in for MS CRM 3.0

It appears that C360 and MSCRM-ADDONs.com are selling the same software but just branded differently. Interestingly enough, their pricing on Word Mail Merge appears to be the same. C360 provides revised user guides, and sometimes more bug fixes to Word Mail Merge. Yet, MSCRM-ADDONs.com provides an extra add-on called "AutoMerge", which works with MSCRM-ADDONs.com's Word Mail Merge to generate documents as part of a MS CRM 3.0 workflow!

Hang in there, because there's always a third option (which is free!) - the BDL Snap-in. This Snap-in is available for Microsoft Word/Excel 2003, and 2007 and provides an interface to browse through MS CRM 3.0 data. It also allows the user to attach a document to a CRM entity or activity. Nice. One BIG BUT! This snap-in doesn't seem to work with MS Word fields/Mail merge. It simply inserts text into your document.

So what is your choice here? Stick with these options? or... reinvent the wheel? Test these products out, and find out for yourself. If you need custom development, I could always be reached douglas.leung@uniqueworld.net :)

Here's some useful links:
* MSCRM-ADDONS.com http://www.mscrm-addons.com/
* C360 http://www.C360.com/
* Microsoft Dynamics Snap-ins http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=b44f8ee7-4d2b-4e39-9bfb-1119fffbe018

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