Towards a Reference Enterprise Application Architecture for the Customer Relationship Management Domain

摘要

The work presented in this paper, focus on a first step towards a Reference Application Architecture, for the CRM domain. A Reference Architecture is a way to approach usual occurring problems through good architectural design patterns. To reach a Reference Architecture, we analyzed the features of five CRM market solutions, to get the industry best practices. The chosen CRM solutions were: SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sage CRM, Siebel Oracle CRM and Salesforce CRM. From these solutions we extracted fifty-three common features from the systems datasheets. These fifty-three features are grouped into ten modules (namelly: Sales module, Marketing module, Service module, Reporting module, Calendar module, Integration module, Document module, Workflow module, Mobile module and Security module), with all these modules being part of the CRM system. We arrived at these modules through the groups that already existed in CRM's datasheets. With the proposed Reference Architecture we expect to help architects by providing guidelines and knowledge about the CRM domain, with focus on CRM market solutions which targeted primarily small and medium businesses.