Get Social with Vibe and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (free Community Edition)

Posted by Mike Snyder on January 27, 2011  |  Comments (8)

Microsoft released the 2011 edition of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online last week, and we've decided to celebrate by offering everyone -- not just existing Sonoma Partners clients -- the newest release of Vibe for free. And yes, we mean for free.

We believe in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community, and therefore we want to offer Vibe to the community an alternative to Salesforce.com's Chatter. Because we're not offering support -- think of Vibe as a public beta -- we can afford to give it away, so download Vibe, use it, and enjoy it on us. We firmly believe social networking is a critical way for businesses to communicate, and we want to support that philosophy by spreading Vibe far and wide.

We developed Vibe as an internal social networking application that centers on CRM-related data: employees can collaborate and share details about new opportunities, projects, accounts, customer information, and more. Vibe uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the data repository and uses Dynamics CRM Workflow to automatically post feeds based on CRM usage and data.

Vibe Community Edition:

• Combines the ease-of-use of Facebook and Twitter with Microsoft's powerful CRM platform.
• Is easy to install.
• Posts important CRM data -- but also allows users to manually post information to a feed.
• Lets users create and maintain their own feed subscriptions.
• Has native integration to Gravatar so users can personalize an avatar for their feed.
• Allows users to search across all feeds.
• Supports hash tags in posts (perfect for you Twitter-philes).
• Includes a usage analytics dashboard.
• Works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premise editions.

We've posted the free community version of Vibe on the Dynamics Marketplace and included online help so you can download it and get started right away.

If you’re new to Vibe and want to learn more, you can get a quick overview from this screencast:

If you're evaluating Chatter and Salesforce.com, think about trying Vibe with Dynamics CRM instead. (Not only is it a great product, but the price is right!) Keep in mind that Vibe is not supported -- but we think you'll love it just the same.

So come on down, get Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and start sharing data with Vibe!