Air-X has their existing IT infrastructure based on Microsoft Windows Servers which is out of date and less maintained. Their stakeholders want to try something new and want their IT staff to focus on Air-X's various business applications, and not on the infrastructure, operating system, or network maintenance. After reviewing and comparing the existing cloud solutions offered on the market, they chose Microsoft Windows Azure platform, which does exactly what they want and, most importantly, is made by Microsoft itself, and therefore surely follows all "Best Practices".

As a starting point, the airline company wants to set up a "Crew Portal" on the Windows Azure platform, to allow crew members to view and update their CRM data from the portal site.

It's always possible to build a portal solution from scratch, but it's not always efficient to do so. There are many existing CRM solutions that we can use – for free. Microsoft provides an online application store called "Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace" which is the "One Stop Shop" for Dynamics Solutions. The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace helps you discover innovative applications and professional services provided by Microsoft partners worldwide. You can browse by category or search for solutions. In this book, we use the "Customer Portal for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011" as the baseline solution, to demonstrate how the Portal solution works with CRM. Please download the solution from the Microsoft Dynamics Market Place: