CIO Magazine interviewed Chris Caren the general manager of product management and marketing for Microsoft’s Dynamics line of ERP and CRM products.

With Dynamics, Microsoft’s ERP and CRM Business Apps Go Head-to-Head with Oracle and SAP

It’s an interesting read. Microsoft is really going after a sore sport with other business applications – user adoption.

“The core approach to our product strategy is to overcome the inflexibility and the ease-of-use issues that have limited adoption of business applications, and for us that means really blurring the lines between what a business application is and what the world of Microsoft Office is.”

Microsoft is tackling a major cause of user adoption problems. Ease-of-use. Essentially, if it’s too difficult to use and makes employees less productive they will be reluctant to use it. So would employees be more comfortable using CRM or ERP as part of something they’re already familiar with such as Microsoft Office? Or having to learn and use a completely unfamiliar separate application?

One of the other major causes of CRM user adoption problems is (lack of) implementation methodology. I’ll cover that topic soon.