Taking the Covers Off of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (What’s New)

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 22, 2010  |  Comments (1)

At the Microsoft WPC conference last week, there was a session called “Taking the Covers Off of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5”. I watched the recording of this session and tried to provide a summary of the session highlights (to save you an hour of viewing time!). Here we go:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5 (nee "V. Next") is now branded as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011!

  • When we heard this news on Monday we debated how people would pronounce it. Since I call Microsoft Office 2010 as "Office two thousand ten" I was thinking I would use the same pattern for CRM 2011 as "CRM Thousand and Eleven".
  • However both Bryan Nielsen and Andy Bybee from MSFT pronounced it "CRM Twenty Eleven" instead of "CRM Two Thousand and Eleven". I guess I will start calling it CRM Twenty Eleven. :)
• Key messaging for CRM 2011
  • You all know that CRM 4.0 had "Power of Choice" as a key message
  • The key message for CRM 2011 will be the "Power of Productivity", broken down into three categories:
    • Familiar Experiences
      • Native Outlook Experience (preview pane, ribbon)
      • Advanced personalization
    • Connected Experiences
      • Visualizations, dashboards and graphical navigation
      • Guided processes (scripts)
    • Intelligent Experiences
      • Contextual document repositories (w/Sharepoint)
      • Teamwork and collaboration
• Microsoft is expanding the global availability of CRM Online
  • Will include 8 additional markets
  • 40 markets, 41 languages at the end of 2010
  • Poor Tobago was the punchline on a few jokes!
• CRM 2011 will help you manage both customer AND custom relationships
• Enough with the Powerpoints, let's see the DEMO! (courtesy of Andy Bybee). It starts around the 8:50 minute mark of the video.
  • Starts with the Outlook client (of course)
    • You can now view the related records AND the regarding records right in Outlook
    • You can convert an email to Opportunity directly
    • During the demo, Andy selected a lookup. If you pay close attention, you can see that now CRM 2011 lookups allow you to select views in addition to Quick Find! Huge!
    • Now you can also do the following from an Outlook email(with CRM data)
      • Add Connection
      • Insert Template
      • Insert Article
      • Attach Sales Literature
  • Dashboards! Gotta love the new dashboard and visualization capabilities they demo in CRM 2011.
  • CRM 2011 now provides native Outlook access to CRM data (it isn't just an Iframe to the web client like CRM 4.0), benefits include:
    • You can drag columns to reorder, add/remove, use groups, etc.
    • You can toggle the reading pane settings
    • Drag/drop form sections on a personal basis
• Bryan Nielsen interviewed Jason Hunt from Avanade about the partner opportunity with CRM 2011
  • Jason gave a quick shout out to Sonoma Partners, thanks Jason! :)
• Another demo by Andy Bybee (starting around the 29:12 minute mark)
  • CRM 2011 allows you to package your customizations into solutions (instead of one giant munged pile of customizations like CRM 4.0):
    • Solutions consist of more than entities, also includes security roles, reports, dashboards, plug-in assemblies, etc.
    • Developers can work with .NET 4.0 framework
    • Can be managed/unmanaged
  • Saw a quick demo of "processes" (sometimes referred to as scripts or dialogs). This is a huge new feature that a lot of customers ask for in 4.0.
  • You can now create custom activity types in CRM 2011. Big-time benefit!
  • CRM 2011 includes field level security! (whoo-hoo)
• Session ended with a demo from ISV Client Profiles (by their CTO Kevin Wydra)
  • Kevin mention CRM 2011 will have multiple forms per entity. Yes!!
  • Kevin demo'd one of the cool customizations called related parties (a graphical layout of the relationships between entities). It is a custom built Silverlight control loaded easily on the CRM form.