Program Manager at a government with 501-1,000 employees
27
Published:Apr 6, 2014
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) within the Library of Congress (LOC) is seeking to upgrade its internal client relationship management system, Mercury, used for the tracking of all custom research and informational requests placed by Members of Congress, congressional Committees, and their staff.
Mercury is built on Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) version 4 with customized integration points to Microsoft SharePoint (SP) version 2007 that provide document storage for requests and for collaborating on research projects. CRS currently operates the entire Mercury infrastructure on a virtualized hardware platform using VMware vSphere 4.5 to satisfy maintenance procedures, high availability and disaster recovery requirements implied by our obligations to support Congress.
CRS requires the existing Mercury system be upgraded to 2013 versions of both CRM and SP. Additionally, the existing CRM 4 implementation contains non-standard customizations that were included to support mandatory business requirements identified in Appendix A, Objective 8. The desired outcome is to eliminate all non-standard customizations while best satisfying the stated business requirements in the upgraded system. CRS wishes to somehow streamline (or simplify the code) for certain functionality.
In order to gauge the level of work of this procurement, and accurately calculate the price, CRS will supply source code and three (3) appendices (D, E, F) for serious vendors provided that they sign and submit a Non-Disclosure Agreement to the Library.
Clarification questions must be submitted by 12:00 PM on April 4, 2014. Vendors are to collect all their questions and send them to Nam Nguyen (nang@loc.gov) by this deadline. Multiple emails with questions from vendors may be disregarded at the Contracting Officer's discretion.
Hi @Richard Tibbetts,
There's no short answer to your question. Nearly all existing MDM solutions on the market offer a broad range of patterns to ingest master data from various sources and distribute cleanse and consolidated information, also to the Azure stack. Many vendors offer prebuilt connectors for the most common sources (databases, various file types, storages, business applications i...
Enterprise MDM Architect / Solution Arch at Volvo Group
Jan 14, 2022
Hi @Richard Tibbetts,
There's no short answer to your question. Nearly all existing MDM solutions on the market offer a broad range of patterns to ingest master data from various sources and distribute cleanse and consolidated information, also to the Azure stack. Many vendors offer prebuilt connectors for the most common sources (databases, various file types, storages, business applications including MS Dynamics, Salesforce, etc.), but also support a generic way of ingesting/exposing data via Rest APIs, file drops, etc.
MS MDS is an extension of the MS SQL server 2016. I don't know Microsoft plans to extend it, but I know that Profisee and CluedIn are very active in promoting their solutions as-built having Azure in mind and being a part of the stack.
Informatica MDM has three types of offerings these days: on-prem, hosted MDM, and cloud-native option - they differ in the functionality and integration options.
Obviously, there are many more MDM tools on the market particularly good in various data domains (products, customers/suppliers - so yours, multi-domain, etc).
I think that you should start your MDM journey by answering which current challenges you try to solve or what new capabilities you need to enable to the organisation. Once these questions are answered and based on your organization's Enterprise Architecture principles, look for the best fitting tool. It may (or may not) be the one that fits the best into the Azure Reference Architecture.
I hope this helped.
I agree with @InitZero...
I would add that there's no future roadmap for MDS and they don't have an Azure solution for it. Since it's a free product with an SQL license, don't expect Microsoft to invest in it.
Even though we are highly dependent upon it currently I'm starting to look towards the future where we need to find a replacement - hopefully, a PaaS solution. It would be great if Microsoft came out with something in Azure but I'm not hopeful at this point.
The pricing modules of Microsoft Dynamics CRM are always different. It always differs depending on the amount of users that are being used on that. We are working on the client's side mostly. I am a little bit familiar with what the estimation price is, but to be accurate for every organization or every project, it is a different scenario. When we compare it to SAP or something like that, Micro...
Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Sep 23, 2021
It's kind of pricey. It's about $50 or $60 per user. I have never been on the sales side of it or watched the organization from a licensing perspective. I don't know if it's higher or lower than what else is available. If I was a small business, that price would be too high for me if I was going to run it for my own practice as an individual. I'd either not use it or use something else - maybe something that's cheaper or supports just what I need.
