The acronymn CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to automation of the marketing, sales and customer service areas of a business. Out of the box, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application handles all three areas.

The acronymn xRM is where the MS CRM program doesn’t stop as just an out of the box application, but is an actual development platform. Substantial modification can occur to the three areas I mentioned above, but also in areas totaly unrelated. That’s where the ‘x’ in xRM comes in.

For example, the United States Air Force is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a major extension to their human resource system to track training, certifications, experience and the like on Air force personnel. This is certainly not an area of the traditional CRM but the Microsoft product easily can be customized to handle this other non-traditonal CRM subjects.