Microsoft just released their latest Statement of Direction for Dynamics CRM. It’s typically a must-read for any CRM aficionado if you want to learn what Microsoft has up its sleeve in the upcoming short and long term timeframe.

Download here!
Dynamics CRM Statement Of Direction – April 2010
(link to Ross’ CRM website with the PDF)

There is some exciting information on unifying the Dynamics technologies that will help bring together any challenging business solution, as well as welcome additions to the SDK. Some details regarding CRM 5.0 are starting to be teased out, but in reality most of the information here has been public for some time.

So what did we learn? There are new Accelerators in the pipline:

• Non-Profit Solution for Dynamics CRM Online – now available!
• Portal Accelerators – Q2 2010
  • This release provides new versions of eService, Event Management and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) accelerators that can connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as well as on-premises and partner-hosted deployments.
• Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) – Q2 2010
  • This solution can be used to help customer care and contact center organizations provide consistent customer service experiences by combining data elements from disparate applications such as mainframes, databases or Web sites for display in a single user interface.
  • Some features: Integrated agent desktop, Desktop automation, Computer telephony integration (CTI), and Activity reporting.

New integration tools with other Dynamics software! All the Dynamics technologies are starting to come together very nicely.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics GP – May 2010
  • A highly reliable, bi-directional and fault tolerant business document integration between Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Update Rollup 5 and above) and Dynamics GP 10 (Service Pack 4 and above) and the new GP 2010.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics AX6 – 2011
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics NAV2009 – 2011

And for you developers out there, a big fat update is coming to the SDK in May 2010 making it easier to build agile and integrated CRM Web solutions.

• SDK (May 2010) – Advanced Developer Extensions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a set of new tools included in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK that simplifies and accelerates the development of internet-enabled applications that interact with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
• A full list of key features is outlined in the Statement of Direction document.

Regarding CRM 5.0, it is of course scheduled to release “the second half of 2010″, most likely near the end of the year. The outline is below, and as I expected it doesn’t really reveal more than what has already been disseminated. Regardless, it’s still nice to see what we have to look forward to.

• User Productivity and Collaboration
  • Increase accessibility through the Microsoft Office “ribbon” interface
  • Drive user adoption through personalization
  • Enrich business insight through improved business intelligence
  • Balanced workload management for more efficient use of resources
• CRM Capabilities: core CRM investments
  • Contact and Account Management
  • Team-Based Collaboration
  • Call Center and Unified Communications Support
  • Territory Management
  • Performance Management
  • Other areas:
    • Further improving the flexibility of sales opportunity management to incorporate team selling models.
    • Extending the outbound marketing capabilities to allow richer communications via email, including document attachments.
    • Further simplifying and extending marketing list management capabilities.
    • Providing users the ability to schedule future recurring activities.

Tags: April, CRM 4.0, CRM 5.0, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Statement of Direction