WPC 2010 wrap up and CRM 2011 Updates

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 21, 2010  |  Comments (0)

Last week I attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, DC, and I *think* I have caught up on all the email and stuff I missed while I was out of the office. Therefore I finally have a few minutes to write up my thoughts on the conference. While Washington, DC was very hot, the news about Microsoft Dynamics CRM was even hotter! :)

Here’s some of my personal news/highlights from the conference:

• Microsoft CRM “V.Next” got an official name: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Most people, including myself, have referred to V. Next as version 5 for a while now but Microsoft likes to keep us on our toes. Who can forget all the good fun when the product skipped 2.0 and went from 1.2 to 3.0? I guess the 2011 naming is to have the CRM product naming line up with the Office and SharePoint name/numbering (versus the rest of the Dynamics products which use numbers).
  
  
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (2011 version) will be available by year end! This is great news, we have customers and prospects fired up to get rolling with CRM Online.
  
  
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will have a public beta this September! Sign up and get more information here.
  
  
• Microsoft CRM has 23,000 customers and 1.4 million users. Wow, great success.
  
  
• Microsoft announced they will launch a Dynamics Marketplace this September. Microsoft marketing’s description of the Marketplace = “The marketplace will allow customers to quickly search, discover and apply industry-specific applications and solution extensions from Microsoft and its partners to help them accelerate and extend their CRM and ERP implementations.” I will now translate this marketing-speak into regular person language = “The Dynamics Marketplace is our competitive offering against Salesforce.com’s Appexchange.”
  
  
• Microsoft is “all in” on the cloud. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that expression last week, I would give Warren Buffett a serious run for his money.
  
  
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was everywhere at the conference! I was lucky enough to provide a CRM 2011 demo as part of a session with Steve Fox. The crowed oh-ed and ah-ed at some of the cool stuff I showed off, and it was just a quick 7 minute demo.

When I presented my session at WPC, there was another session at the same time called “Taking the Covers Off of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5” so unfortunately the scheduling conflict prevented me from attending in person. While that bummed me out, I was able to watch the recorded video of that session. I will post my notes and highlights on that session soon!

Overall, I really enjoyed WPC and the great momentum around Microsoft CRM!

(FYI, Los Angeles will host the WPC 2011 next summer from July 10-14, 2011…should be a blast)