Meeting with Mark Corley, Senior Director of Dynamics CRM Channel Strategy

Today I had a chance to meet up with Mark Corley in Vienna to talk about the Austrian CRM market with special emphasis on hosting. Mr. Corley is responsible for building Microsoft’s global Software + Service business for the Dynamics CRM product line – the delivery of sales force automation, customer service and marketing automation solutions directly over the Internet via hosting service providers. He is also responsible for managing all channel strategy activities and helping grow the CRM practices of its various business partners, including Value Added Resellers, System Integrators, Outsourcers, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Hosters.

Among other things we also talked about CRM Live (the Microsoft-hosted sort of „out-of-the-box“ model) and I expressed my concerns, having in mind what every piece of literature about CRM will teach you first: „CRM is not a Software“. Anyway, CRM Live will not hit Europe in the next couple of months, so there is still some time to see what happens and how the US-market reacts. I asked Mark about integration of OWA (Outlook Web Access) which would be a huge step towards ASP-operation working without any software that has to be installed on the client. Hmmm… That seemed to have been a very good question. In my eye the complexity of such an integration would not be that high, let’s see what comes out of that. Having talked about expanding marketshare it looks like that our business model matches Microsoft’s long-term strategy. I can’t tell you more, sorry ;-)

CRM 4.0 Online Handbook

The guys from Redware have taken the effort to put together a nice 4.0 online manual including screenshots and stuff. Nice work islanders!

Press response to yesterday's 4.0 launch in Austria

A collection of press coverage in reaction to yesterday's official launch of 4.0 in Austria:

http://www.report.at/artikel.asp?mid=1&kid=3&aid=13717
http://www.monitor.co.at/index.cfm/storyid/9412
http://www.computerwelt.at/detailArticle.asp?a=113942&n=2
http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=3197694
http://www.be24.at/blog/entry/13438
http://www.pressetext.at/pte.mc?pte=080125014
http://www.pr-inside.com/de/sterreich-launch-von-microsoft-dynamics-r404759.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/austria/presse/pressemeldung1825.mspx?ID=917bf1af-3b5c-4fec-a7ac-a66a06e1ce5b
http://www.mausketiere.com/cont/home_clippings_detail.aspx?siteNo=1&id=156071
http://www.ots.at/presseaussendung.php?schluessel=OTS_20080125_OTS0166&ch=technologie

Official launch of CRM 4.0 in Austria – our project selected!

Today Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 was officially launched in Austria. Therefore Microsoft held a press conference in Vienna, attendance and interest were better than expected. Many journalists of Austrian IT-media were present when Elisabeth Unger-Krenthaller (Product Manager Dynamics CRM) explained the benefits of the new version. One of our customers was selected to deliver first-hand information why to choose CRM 4.0. Thomas Engel, IT-Manager of Bau-Data GmbH praised multi-tenancy, multi-currency, outsourcing-capabilities and easy integration into backoffice and legacy applications. As this project will have some cool features such as Virtual Earth Integration to visualize realtime-data, i think, i’m gonna post one or the other screenshot as soon as we progressed further in the development process…

CRM 4.0 Final German - 3 weeks ahead of schedule!

When the final version of CRM 4.0 was released in English last monday it was announced that the release of "Wave0" languages (German, French, Spanish, Dutch) is expected for 11th of January 08. So it was a nice surprise that the German Edition has been released already - 3 weeks ahead of the expected date. Congratulations to the Product Management and Development Teams at Microsoft. Good job, I like positive surprises at the end of the year ;-)

Download Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 German here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=99CB3A7A-EBA9-4DE9-B0F1-2EBF11C3D756&displaylang=en

News from Convergence 2007, Copenhagen

Being enrolled in the CTP program we knew about most of the new stuff for CRM 4.0 so there were not so many groundbreaking news on official day 1 of Convergence in Copenhagen, Denmark. However some exciting things were announced up to now.

• Presence Information will make it into CRM 4.0. That means that you will be able to see if users are available. As far as i know this works together with LiveCommunications Server
• New Editions and Pricing for 4.0 (subject to changes until launch)
  There will be a Workgroup Edition (user Limited, limited to one organization), a Professional Edition (no user limit, also limited to one organization but can be installed on more than one server) and an Enterprise Edition (no User Limit, multi-organizations, multi instances)
• Possibility to have User CALs or Machine CALs (good for callcenters for example) or mix it.

more to come....

Features still missing in 4.0 (formerly called Titan)

Non disclosure period ended yesterday and Michael Höhne (who else ;-) already wrote a very nice summary including screenshots regarding the main features of the new release. http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=TitanBeta3

We also evaluated the Preview Version (CTP3) and are very very very happy about the added functionality. Here are my favourites:

• Duplicate detection
• Multi Tenancy
• Multi Language
• Better support of Internet Facing Deployments (HMC no longer necessary)
• Changes in Workflow (Webbased Admin, Trigger on Attribute Change)
• Cross-Entity Views
• New Data Import- and Migrationtool supporting custom entities

There are still some features that I was hoping for, which are not included in CTP3 (and will most likely not be included in the final version). Among these are:

• No multi-select picklists
• No filtered lookups (Michael Höhne has a workaround, though)
• No total number of records in views