Microsoft Dynamic CRM Online Limitation

There are many reasons that companies choose Microsoft Dynamic CRM Online.

• Time & Costing deployment.
• Back up and maintenance costing.
• Using newest update of Microsoft before On-premise version.
• Security & Disaster recovery – It is protected by Microsoft.

…and maybe more reason for you choose Microsoft Dynamic CRM Online solution…But…

In fact, there are some limitation of CRM Online that you need consider before choosing. In this article will try to give you all limitation points so that we can consider and choose right option for your company.

Data storage

For the minimum online subscription, Microsoft give you 5 GB, and you have to pay more costing to get more storage. Think about it, if your company has 1000 users? It is not a good solution for your company.

Customization

Many companies are cope with this issue, and it is the big challenge for them, let consider all weak point of CRM Online.

Access to SQL Database: You cannot access to it because all database has been hosted in Microsoft Cloud. It is easy to know the reason why you cannot access to it.

If you want to implement for your Data Warehouse purpose, you have to pay more costing for using Azure server, it will talk in another article.

Custom Workflow Activities: It is not supported in CRM Online, you can use plug-in for replacement but actually there is still limitation of plug-in development in CRM Online

Plug-in development: Great, It is supported for developing to extend your system but 1 big problem that you just only register it in Sandbox mode (Isolation). It mean that you cannot access external service or third parties Dlls in your plug-in.

Custom web application: You cannot store or manage it in CRM Online. It is a big problem to me J

Reporting: You cannot access to SQL Database, it mean that you cannot not use FilterSQL to make your custom report, the only way is FetchXML, but there are some limitation in FetchXML. CRM 2016 has been improved many feature for FetchXml but I think that it is not enough for businesses. Furthermore, you cannot deploy Business Intelligence because almost of BI solution require for local data storage.

Hope it will help for someone.