Dynamics CRM 2011 announces significant updates coming

Sonoma Partners have posted the Microsoft CRM team’s recent statement of direction.  There are some promising acknowledgements in this statement.  The open acknowledgement that the Dynamics CRM 2011 product fell short when it did not include cross browser and cross  device support was smart. 

Some highlights are:

Cross-Device Support – Which devices is not listed by Apple and Blackberry would be likely.  Android remains questionable.

Multi-browser Support – Leveraging the HTML 5 movement and allowing users who do not have IE running to access CRM.  This has been a deal killer for organizations who use Apple devices or who chose to run Firefox and Chrome browsers.  While Chrome support would be nice I am not holding my breath on Google and Microsoft playing well together.

Extended Self-Service BI – The ability to drive business intelligence through CRM has been increasing with integrated dashboards, expanded SharePoint list integration, and live datasheets in Excel.  This next release should be interesting.

Enhanced Data Visualization – While it is unclear what this means, I am hopeful that the integrated dashboards can integrate a visualization from more than one data source. Essentially ask two questions and see how they relate to each other.  A fundamental requirement for driving predictive analytics.

Social Integration – A cool but underutilized feature offered by Salesforce is the ability to integrate social media, web based activity and conversation into the customer experience.  Microsoft has lagged in this offering and it looks like they intend to make up for it.

In all these are some key areas that we are excited to see become available.  Since these additions are scheduled to be included in the base service offering and at the standard base fee Dynamics will have a price point approximately 300% under the comparable Salesforce offering.  This is a big deal when you consider that these systems can be extended to company wide process control and are no longer only used by small sales groups.

This link is to the Statement of Direction document posted by Sonoma Partners – This is a direct PDF file access link.