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