First a quote on CRM 4.0 by Steve Bulmer CEO Microsoft

“I think you will agree that it’s the best version of our product, and maybe any product, we’ve ever brought to market’

When you note all the successful products Microsoft have had in the past including Windows, Office and backend Servers, this is indeed a strong statement. I think that it reflects the fact that the new version of Microsoft CRM is a green field development product that can be consumed any way that the customer wants and is also a full development framework platform for business solutions.

According to the Microsoft management, many of the IT information and technology research and advisory firms such as Gartner and Forrester think that Microsoft CRM 4.0 will make Microsoft the leader in the CRM marketplace.

New Features and enhancements

There are well over 100 enhancements focused around user experience, performance and platform capabilities. Key enhancements include:

1. Multi Tenancy – allows hosting partners to provide CRM to customers without the need for separate server hardware per customer. Also enterprise customers can now host completely different configurations of CRM for separate divisions on the same on-premise hardware.

2. Multi Language – each user can decide which language they want to work with.

3. Multi Currency – one base currency and any number of transaction currencies allowed.

4. Relationships enhancements including Many to Many, System to System and Self-Referential Relationships – allows 3^rd normal form relationship structures to be created with ease.

5. Wizardly Workflow based on Windows Workflow foundation – useful both for developers and for power users. It may well offer productivity enhancements much in the same way that macros helped empower Excel and Lotus 123 users some 15 years ago.

6. Data De-Duplication – including very powerful facilities such as bulk import, data entry & promotion from Outlook.

7. Smart Search – just type first few characters of required record and either the record or a selection list will pop up.

8. Most recently selected & searched list including Outlook CRM Breadcrumbs – similar to Word/Excel recent documents lists.

9. Email Made Easy – bulk email selection and tracking and no CRM tokens needed!

10. Mail Merge Magic – significantly less clicks and you can now easily upload templates into CRM.

11. Excel Export for Import – great for outsourcing validation of crm data and importing it back to CRM with ease.

12. Connect with Presence – Office Communication Server Integration to give visibility into Status and additional information and kick-off Interaction from interface.

13. Reporting Wizard – great for allowing users and managers to create sophisticated two table based reports and graphs.

14. Send Record – drop down menu to forward a CRM record link via outlook to colleague.

15. More synchronisation with Outlook – all activities are now fully synchronised with Outlook.

We happy to give customers a personal 1 hour presentation and demonstration via the internet and Microsoft LiveMeeting on some of these enhancements. Send me an email stephenp@f1comp.co.uk to arrange a suitable date and time.

Upgrades from CRM 3.0

1. You can upgrade each CRM 3.0 Client license to either a CRM 4.0 client License or CRM 4.0 Device License.

2. You can upgrade your current CRM 3.0 Professional Server license to either one CRM 4.0 Professional license or two CRM 4.0 Enterprise Licences (replacement value $9,998!)

3. CRM 3.0 SBE upgrade path will be clarified later this month.
   

Microsoft CRM Pricing is reduced - please see http://www.f1comp.co.uk/crm/crmpricing.html

Training Courses - please see

http://www.f1comp.co.uk/indexes/CRM_index.html 

CRM Live

is a new software-as-a-service offering called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live announced in July 2006 and expecting to be released at the same time and CRM 4.0 (Titian) - i.e. December 07.

Initially it will only be available in the USA.  Brad Wilson was quoted as saying "We want to make sure we do terrific job getting CRM Live up and running in North America and get all the operating kinks out. We aim to move it out internationally as fast as we can."  

The Microsoft CRM Live service will be operated and managed by Microsoft within its Windows Live™ data enters, and will offer Microsoft’s partners another fast and flexible way to address the unique customer relationship management (CRM) needs of each customer.

Microsoft CRM Live will use the same code base as the on-premise and partner-hosted versions of Microsoft CRM, a strategy that reinforces Microsoft’s leadership in allowing customers to choose the best deployment option for their business and IT needs at any time.

The full range of Microsoft CRM products is part of Microsoft’s vision for business — the People-Ready Business — and the new Microsoft CRM Live service will be integrated with Microsoft’s Windows Live services and Office Live services.