Time for another mini truck stop, folks. In a recent discussion, Donna “I’m on a boat” Edwards asked

When does it make sense to use Dynamics CRM as a development platform vs. building your own application from scratch?

Shan “Grillmaster” McArthur had a great response:

The best way to estimate the strategic value and/or ROI of using Dynamics CRM as a development platform for applications instead of building your own application from scratch is to assess how much of the application depends on a security model, configurable forms and schema, workflow, and mobile features, and if the data model would naturally fit into the forms/view model of CRM.

An application that has a higher percentage of these features and a close fit to the CRM UI model will have a very high productivity ratio (from building with Dynamics CRM), but if these things are not important and the application does not fit the CRM UI then the ratio would be lower.