I am working with a company which designs and builds one-off machines. They have been 'dabbling' with hosted Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint (on different servers!) in an attempt to centralise their data and help colleagues collaborate more effectively across projects. They haven't used either system to their potential.

Now we are looking at the engineering department who already use a form of version control software for the various CAD files (Autodesk Vault) however it is becoming increasingly necessary to implement more of a generic file version control system as they use many more files than can be managed in Vault (sometimes just photos or scans of paper documents), hence why they were looking at using Sharepoint.

However... as the 'programmer' of the bunch, I can see several scenarios which don't seem to fit well with the Dynamics + Sharepoint approach; simple reports based on cross-table queries, exporting certain metrics as a spreadsheet, defining project hierarchies and many-many relationships, and as such I have been pushing for an in-house developed 'ECM' / 'ERP' software package (perhaps in .NET or php).

Some colleagues seem to attach a greater value to the MS software (perhaps becuase it has a logo!) but don't see that it's just a framework, not a solution.

Can anyone provide a good example of when custom software would actually be better than using Dynamics + Sharepoint and how do I relate that to non-technical staff?