Microsoft Quietly Ships Dynamics CRM 4.0

Published: January 30, 2008

by Alex Woodie

On the first business day of the new year, Microsoft quietly began selling Dynamics CRM 4.0, the highly anticipated customer relationship management system that is expected to help drive Microsoft's push into the Software as a Service (SaaS) market. The multi-tenant architecture is a big part of the story, but a combination of other features like a new reporting wizard, a new workflow engine, and better integration with Office are also expected to contribute to the success of CRM 4.0.

The new multi-tenant architecture in CRM 4.0 is definitely a big deal, as it will allow application hosting companies to service more than one customer off the same implementation of CRM 4.0. That will save hosting companies a lot of money on new hardware and the manpower needed to keep everything running, and should allow Microsoft and its business partners to give Salesforce.com and Oracle's Siebel CRM division, currently the leaders in on-demand, SaaS-based CRM, a run for their money.

Multi-tenancy is just the start of what's new and useful in CRM 4.0, according to Richard Smith, who runs the CRM consulting business for Microsoft partner Green Beacon Solutions. Smith sees CRM 4.0, which previously went by the codename "Titan," hitting it off big, particularly among users of CRM version 3.

"It might be a prefect storm of events," Smith says. "There are a number of customers on legacy products that have been holding off on making the move, and some of the functionality in 'Titan' is just so compelling--the Outlook interface as well as some of the new things they built in--that it's getting clients to go back and take another look and really think about making that migration."

Smith breaks down the improvements in CRM 4.0 into two camps: those that will appeal to users and new goodies for administrators.

New Features for Users

Smith predicts the tighter integration between CRM 4.0 and Outlook will be a powerful motivator for CRM version 3 users to make the jump. "If you're a 3.x user, there are a couple of things in the product that people have been wanting forever," he says. "Tighter integration with Outlook enables users to select multiple items in their inbox and add them to CRM as linked e-mails or appointments or tasks." He also sites the capability within CRM to do a quick look up, which avoids going through a couple of screen pops to accomplish the same task.

CRM 4.0 also boasts better connectivity with Word and Excel. While the connection to Excel has always been useful, CRM 4.0 now lets users make changes to data in Excel, and then have those changes automatically applied to customer records in CRM when they're uploaded. "It's real powerful if you have like a marketing list or phone numbers that have changed because of some new area code," Smith says. "It's really simple for someone to just export that data, make a bulk change in Excel, import it, and it updates CRM."

Better data de-duplication should make life easier for CRM 4.0 users. While this feature has been available via third-party add-ins, Microsoft has built data de-duplication into the product. "Unlike what I've seen on other systems, it doesn't just compare one record to itself," Smith says. "It actually can compare accounts to contacts, leads to contacts, or accounts to contacts, etc., so you really get to de-dupe your contact components throughout."

Smith describes the new reporting wizard as "just unbelievable." Reporting has always been a feature of the Microsoft CRM product. But by putting more power into the hands of users, it will allow "mere mortals" to do things that previously required the help of developers, such as adding fields, charts, or tables to new or existing reports.

New Goodies for Admins and Programmer-Types

CRM 4.0 has a lot of new widgets that will make life easier for the customer service representatives, salesmen, and account reps that will use the application on a daily basis. But it also has a few new capabilities that will make it easier for IT pros to install, customize, and maintain the application.

For starters, customizing a CRM 4.0 implementation is much easier now than in prior releases. Previously, developers who wanted to link a custom-developed component, such as a Return Material Authorization (which isn't one of Dynamics CRM's concepts), could do so, but they could only link that RMA to a system object once, according to Smith.

"CRM 4 has really blown the doors off some of those limitations, and we can link things as many times as we want and set up all these various relationships," he says. "Ultimately, it means we can model the client's business much better, so when they say, 'These are the types of relationships we have, this is the type of data we need to capture,' we can really work with CRM and get it to model that framework without having to do a lot of custom development."

Another big improvement is multi-currency and multi-language support. In previous releases, only one language and one currency could be used in any given CRM implementation. "So if you had a European office speaking in French and selling in Euros, you'd need to have a physically separate installation of CRM," Smith says. Ultimately, CRM 4.0 will simultaneously support more than 20 languages, he says.

\r\nA new workflow engine will also make things easier with CRM 4.0. The engine, which is based on the same Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) that will be extended to other Dynamics ERP applications, will allow CRM users to design custom workflows to accomplish specific tasks. "A sales representative, for instance, who's doing a lot of renewal opportunities, could be able to create a quick opportunity workflow for renewals that tracks specifics steps and stages, and maybe fires off an e-mail when certain things happen," Smith says. "And this is something they can do without coding."

The new version also allows more sophisticated custom workflows to be created by developers equipped with Visual Studio. This offering is very powerful, and can do practically "anything under the sun," Smith says. "Today it's very CRM focused, but tomorrow we anticipate that that's going to be very powerful as an integration platform for exchanging data, workflow, and business processing between CRM and the other Dynamics products, and other products as well."

All told, Smith expects version 4.0 to be a breakthrough release for Dynamics CRM. "Version 1 was interesting to look at, version 3 is the first one people start implementing," he says. "By version 4, 5, and 6, you have a very stable platform that's very feature rich that's taken over the market, and that's very much what we're seeing with Microsoft."

Three editions of Dynamics CRM 4.0 are available, including Workgroup Server, Professional, and Enterprise. For more information, visit www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm.

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