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

Localization / Language Conversion Tool

In one of our current projects we had to deal with a multi-server installation in several european locations. The pilot deployment was in German and one installation was in Hungarian. Due to the fact that exported customizations are not compatible between languages, this can create a major problem, especially of you as implementation partner don't understand the target language. What we did was to create a document with a screenshot of every available form and a table underneath with all the fieldnames in language A. We gave this one to a translator so that we had all the forms translated. The implementation contains a lot of custom entities and relations so it would have been quite a hassle to manually recreate all those - especially if you don't understand a single word in the foreign language interface!

Now Michael Höhne from Stunnware came into play who has created a "CRM Localization Tool" which is a .NET application that helps a lot to save much time in such a scenario. Michael released this handy tool as a free utility, but don't forget to at least drop him a line if it was helpful to you. Thanks again Michael for your kind support.



As CRM 4.0 will support multiple languages, this tool will not be needed anymore, as soon as "Titan" is available.