CRM 2011 Sneak Preview

I am really excited about some of the new functionality which Microsoft has made available in the newest version of CRM 2011.  We are hosting a Sneak Preview CRM 2011 event on December 3rd at Hully and Mos in Dallas so please email me if you are interested in attending.  There are 3 categories in which I see these enhancements benefiting Pariveda's internal CRM and our clients:

• User Experience and Visualization Enhancements
• Business Productivity
• Customization Management

User Experience and Visualization Enhancements:
Microsoft has finally embedded CRM into Outlook using true Outlook forms rather than an IFrame.  The application takes advantage of native Outlook functionality for things like conditional formatting, reading pane previews, and more personalization. 

Business Productivity:
The CRM 2011 platform has improved workflow by adding guided dialogs to help users work through a script with a client.  The CRM 2011 platform is also tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010 to improve document management capabilities within CRM.  Other valuable enhancements include team ownership of records, custom activity types, out of box field level auditing, and improvements to queues.  Many of these changes will enable call center environments to more effectively manage their processes.

Customization Management:
The customizations area of CRM has become more of a drag and drop environment and has eliminated many of the clicks required to modify a form.  Developers will like the improved web services and .NET data types.  Microsoft has also included role-based forms which eliminates the need for lots of Javascript on shared forms.  Finally we have field level security out of the box.  Last, the solutions area makes it much easier to package customizations and move them between environments.

This is just a taste of what the platform has to offer and if you see my blog on this topic, hopefully you can join us on December 3rd in Uptown.

Don't get forced

Microsoft has launched an interesting campaign recently called 'Don't get forced' in order to convert Salesforce.com customers to Microsoft CRM Online.  Microsoft will be launching CRM 2011 Online in January which will give them almost feature parity with Salesforce.com.  In some ways this release will leapfrog Salesforce and it is priced at less than half the cost.  One of the selling points is that current CRM Online customers will have one year to upgrade to CRM 2011 instead of 'getting forced' with the rest of the customers during an upgrade. 

We have one client in Dallas called Century Payments which is featured in this campaign.  They have a great success story of migrating from Salesforce to Microsoft and we advised them to make this change.  Please check out the following article:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-Online/Century-Payments/Fast-Growing-Payments-Processor-Meets-New-Needs-Saves-Money-with-Hosted-CRM/4000007658

Microsoft CRM 2011 early thoughts

In June I attended a Microsoft CRM bootcamp in Redmond with the CRM product team.  I spent several days learning about the newest CRM release once branded v5 and now 2011.  I have been impressed with the amount of work Microsoft has put into improving this product and shoring up some of the weak spots of the product.  I'm happy to report that functionality like audit trails and field level security is now out of the box and doesn't require a customization or 3rd party plug in.  The development team is also leveraging .NET 4.0 and the performance of the application has improved significantly.  From an eye candy perspective the most improved area is the dashboards.  Salesforce has dominated Microsoft for years in this area and Microsoft has finally answered.  For Outlook users, Microsoft has rewritten the Outlook client and all CRM forms actually are now embedded in Outlook instead of pretending like they are.  I have CRM 2011 beta installed and Pariveda will be looking to upgrade as soon as the path is released.  More to come as we begin to deploy this exciting new product.