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If your business or career involves Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this is probably the announcement you’ve been waiting for.  Microsoft released a statement today addressing several important topics on the future of Dynamics CRM.  You can really tell they believe in the software and has big plans for it in the future.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog released a document titled “Statement of Direction”, which is available for download at these links:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Statement of Direction [PDF, 487KB]
• CustomerSource [link]
• PartnerSource [link]

Some of the topics covered in this statement include:

• Roadmap
• CRM Mobility
• Solution Accelerators
• SharePoint Web Parts
• BizTalk integration
• New features in CRM Online
• CRM “V-Next” (aka, Dynamics CRM 5.0!)

Some major announcements I’ve collected from reading this statement:

• Microsoft will release “CRM Mobile Express” in Q3 of 2008.  This fully-supported software will allow CRM to run on any HTML 4.0 capable phone.  To support Blackberry customers, Microsoft partnered with TenDigits to provide their MobileAccess 4.0 software at a cost-effective price.
• The list of confirmed CRM Accelerators are as follows:
  • Analytics
  • eService
  • Event Management
  • Enterprise Search
  • Sales Methodologies
  • Extended Sales Forecasting
  • CRM Notifications
  • Business Productivity
• An updated SharePoint web part for CRM 4.0 will be released in the second half of 2008.  It will support multi-tenancy, IFD deployments and 64-bit environments.
• New tools and features will be phased into CRM Online between now and CRM “V.Next”.  This will include advertising management, search engine, new analytics elements and dashboards.

CRM “V.Next”, or perhaps more known as CRM 5.0, deserves it’s own special section.  It’s slated to be released late 2009 to early 2010.  I’ve summarized some of the goals for this next version below.

• Deliver a “rich and satisfying user experience, leveraging new usability advances in the next releases of Microsoft Office and Windows.”
• Enhance the Outlook and Office “ribbon” experience.
• Streamlined user interface.
• More user personalization options.
• Closer integration with SharePoint, especially around document management.
• Improved Business Intelligence tools.
• Balanced workload management for more efficient use of resources.
• Overall improvements to:
  • Contact and Account Management
  • Team-Based Collaboration
  • Call Center and Unified Communications Support

For the full Table of Contents, click on the link below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: CRM, CRM 4.0, CRM 5.0, CRM Online, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Mobile, SharePoint