Website and CRM for a new business: My thoughts

Overview: I need landing pages and/or a simple CMS that copes with mobile devices (responsive).  The website needs cookie acceptance, performs analytics, and a form to sign up users.  Then keep the signed-up users to be emailed and develop them into customers using email tracking and email templates.  The number of contacts is high, plus 10k, and the conversion rate is envisaged to be low.

Lastly, it needs to be able to manage and track my paid-for advertising at a later stage. Options included Hubspot, Mailchimp, EmailLite, Brevo, Zoho CRM, ActiveCampaign, and WordPress. As this is a startup and a small business, I discounted Microsoft and Salesforce.

WordPress is fantastic with all its plugins, but I was looking for a one-stop shop for a startup.

Option1: Hubspot

Hubspot is a fantastic tool for web-based marketing. It has a built-in CMS, CRM, cookie acceptance, and contact forms that are extendable and flexible. It also has fantastic email capabilities, including templates that interact with the CRM and email templates, and it takes care of the emailing itself. There are various versions, and if the business was high-value low numbers, I'd 100% have gone for the solution.

Pros:

1. CMS (Solid), but all tooling is integrated, so it's a strong contender
2. Has a cookie acceptance (GDPR compliant)
3. Own web page, email analytics, and tracking  OOTB (both are string)
4. Contact and forms are extendable and offer options - great integration
5. Email integration is key to our business, and HubSpot offers tracking, mail templates and sending and avoids spam filters.

Cons: 

1. HubSpot has way more functionality than we'll ever need; therefore, the UI and usage can be somewhat complex.
2. The cost is unsuitable for our scenario, which involves many contacts, each with low value. Pricing is designed for low contact numbers, and high-value customers, like an accounting firm, would be ideal.
3. CMS is limited compared to WordPress

Decision: 

Don't use HubSpot, as the starter edition has a limit of 1,000 contacts. The price escalates quickly based on the number of contacts.

Option2: MailChimp with WordPress (CMS)

TBC

Generating a Word Document from a Row change in Dataverse without SharePoint

Problem:  Dataverse/Dynamics has a great way to generate Word or Excel documents in Model apps using the UI.  I want to generate a generate letter from a CDS entity/Table when the status changes.  And I'm not allowed to use OneDrive/SharePoint (governance restriction).

High-Level Steps:

1. Create Dataverse Table - ensure "Notes" & "Business process flows" are enabled

2. Generate the Word Template & add it to the "Template View"

Generate Word Template with dynamic column vals

Add Template

3. Create a Process to generate the output/docx from the Word template i.e. generate when status of the row changes

Activate the Workflow

4. Use Power Automate to call the Dynamics Process

Generating a pdf from a word binary - Power Platform

Overview: Move a word document into a pdf stream in a Power Automate flow.

Solution: I am triggering a flow when a word document is created in Dataverse.  I get the word document in a stream and use OneDrive for Business (OD4B) to persist the docx to OneDrive.  I use the Power Automate Word for Business connector to convert the docx in OD4B into a pdf binary stream in my flow.  

Tip: The Location (OneDrive site collection) gets converted to a guid, so if you need a separate site collection for OneDrive or SharePoint, you can use the MS Graph and I believe this URL also works: 

https://radimaging.sharepoint.com/personal/paulbeck/_api/v2.0/drives.

Customer Care Accelerator for SharePoint

A few days ago I was in an Architecture Design Session with Microsoft Consulting and they showed me the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft CRM dynamics 2011.

CCA simply allows you to maintain context between disconnected systems.  If I select a customer using my Windows application that stores my customer orders, I can take the selected CustomerId and use it directly in SharePoint to say retrieve all documents related to a customer. 

In summary, CCA allows me to use data from various desktop applications, such as web forms, crm, SharePoint or websites.  This is pretty useful for sticking together historical disparate systems.

More Info:  http://dynamics-crm.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-GB/applications/customer-care-accelerator-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-12884914795
http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmtechnical/b/crmukblog/archive/2011/05/11/getting-started-with-cca-for-crm-2011.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukcrm/archive/2011/05/11/getting-started-with-cca-for-crm-2011.aspx