Sonoma Partners Microsoft CRM Blog

Second and Final Notice about your upcoming upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Release

Just received this email today since we are Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Early Adopter. I thought this might be of interest to others too:

Dear Mike Snyder,

Thank you for your participation in our Early Access Program!  We hope that you are finding our online service for your organization Sonoma Partners to be a flexible and familiar system in helping you develop customer and business relationships.

As the designated administrator for your system, we wanted to provide advance notification on the remaining schedule for our Early Access Program.  In addition, we want to take this opportunity to inform you on the conversion to our production release and to outline your options for becoming a paid subscriber for our web-based system.  

NOTE: This is the second and final notice. Please read carefully as some of the dates have changed slightly from the first notice.

• Program Updates for Production Service Conversion
• Advanced Schedule of Activities
• Entering a Billing Agreement with Microsoft Corporation
• Accessing your Technical Support Benefits
• Terminating your Early Access Subscription

Program Updates for Production Service Conversion:

As we ready our new service for general market availability, we wanted to take a moment to inform you of an important update.  Upon the migration from Early Access to our Production Service, our service will be renamed from Microsoft Dynamics^TM CRM Live to Microsoft Dynamics^TM CRM Online.    This rename reflects new naming conventions chartered by Microsoft when referring to web-based business services for small business, mid-market and large enterprise organizations.    

Upon conversion to your production service database, you will see this new name reflected in product logos and online references within the Application Header, Online Help and Resource Center areas of your application.    

Advanced Schedule of Activities:

Your organization Sonoma Partners is set for migration to the production release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online beginning April 14, 2008.  During this time, we will begin automatically migrating your online CRM database to our production version - including all business entity customizations, form customizations, report definitions and transactional data stored within your organization database.  

You will be given one-day advanced notification for the specific date of your migration.  On the day of your conversion, your online system may be temporarily unavailable to allow our automated upgrade process to complete without interference.  To minimize the impact to your business, this will be done during off-peak hours.  We expect this process to be complete and for your business to be back online within a few hours.  

Once your upgrade is complete, we ask that you validate all system customizations, workflow definitions, and business reports to ensure that all changes have migrated successfully. In addition, users of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Clients (Microsoft Office Outlook, E-Mail Router, and Data Migration Manager) will need to perform an uninstall and reinstall of their client software to leverage these features with their new production account.

Entering a Billing Agreement with Microsoft Corporation:

During the online sign-up process for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live Early Access, your organization was asked to provide a valid Credit Card payment option to complete your system sign-up.  While this Credit Card was not charged during our Early Access Program, it has been kept on file for your organization.

Beginning May 1, 2008, active Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live subscriptions and user accounts will automatically convert to a paid offering of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.  By default, all Early Access subscriptions will be migrated to the following offer:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - Professional - 12 Months

Subscriptions converted to this offering will be charged according to the following schedule:

· A one-time, $79.00* Activation Fee for enabling your online subscription.  This is a flat-fee used for system activation and does not vary based on the number of user licenses applied to your account.  This charge will appear on the Credit Card stored on file for your organization once you are converted to the paid offering.

· After the first month of use of the online system, you will be charged a monthly service fee for all user licenses defined on the system.  Current standard rates for the per user license charge of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online are as follows:

For organizations located in the United States:

$39.00 USD* per user license per month for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional

$59.00 USD* per user license per month for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional Plus

For organizations located in Canada:

$39.00 CAD* per user license per month for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional

$59.00 CAD* per user license per month for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional Plus

· For early access customers, user licenses will be calculated based on the number of active users in the system at the time of conversion.  Active users are defined as users that have accepted invitations from the System Administrator to use your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online application for organization Sonoma Partners.  There is a minimum requirement of five user licenses for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.  If your organization has less than five active users, your organization will be assigned five user licenses to meet this minimum.  

· Once monthly billing begins, an early termination fee will apply to your subscription.  If your organization chooses to cancel the subscription or reduce user licenses prior to the end of your commitment term, a fee of $175.00* per user license will be charged to your credit card on file.

*All prices quoted are exclusive of applicable taxes, levies, and duties.

Accessing your Technical Support Benefits

During the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live Early Access Program, all organizations were given online, e-mail, and telephone access to Technical Support personnel at no cost to your organization.  With the migration to our production service, your technical support benefits are tied to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscription offering.  Current technical support offerings for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscriptions are listed as follows:

	Professional	Professional Plus
Number of Support Incidents	Unlimited	Unlimited
Support Type	E-mail	Phone or E-mail
Response Time	24 Hours	24 Hours
Online Portal and Knowledge Base	Yes	Yes
Online Training Benefit	Unlimited	Unlimited
Hours of Operation	8am - 8pm CST M-F	8am - 8pm CST M-F

All Early Access participants will be provided free telephone support until May 30, 2008 to assist with conversion-related questions or issues.  To leverage this benefit, you may contact our Technical Support team at 1-877-CRM-CHOICE, and select option 3 for Technical Support.

Terminating your Early Access Subscription

If you wish to cancel your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online account, please contact our Customer Service team at 1-877-CRM-CHOICE and select Option 2 from the automated teller.  You will have until April 11, 2008 to terminate your subscription and avoid subscription charges. 

We truly appreciate your support and hope that you have found the Early Access Program to be a great way to manage your customer information. We look forward to working with you as you convert to this exciting new product from Microsoft.  

Sincerely,

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Team

Microsoft CRM 4.0 RTM and what it really means

If you're reading this blog, you probably already know that Microsoft announced yesterday that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was released-to-manufacturing (RTM). Of course, this caused a great deal of excitement around the Sonoma Partners office, and we're already hearing buzz from customers about upgrading. I thought I would try to address some of the common questions I've heard about the CRM 4.0 announcement:

• While the development team is done with their part, customers and partners will need to wait "7 to 10 days" before they can download the software. I took a peek at the MSDN downloads tonight but of course it wasn't posted yet. I tried to subscribe to a Microsoft RSS feed to notify me of new MSDN downloads but...this thing hasn't been updated since 2006! I guess we'll just login to MSDN everyday and keep checking. Sigh.
  
  
• Yesterday's RTM announcement does NOT apply to CRM Live. Customers who want to get on CRM Live will need to continue to work through the early adopter programs. Expect CRM Live to be ready for public access in the first half of calendar 2008.
  
  
• Even though the main Microsoft Dynamics CRM product is complete, none of the Microsoft CRM add on solutions will be released at the same time. Microsoft has not publicly confirmed which add-ons they will release but we can take a good guess based on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 add-ons. Therefore, we assume (hope) that there will be 4.0 versions of these add-ons released in the coming months:
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Mobile
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Connector for Microsoft Dynamics GP
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 BizTalk Server Adapter
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Sharepoint List Web Part
    
  
  
• One current Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 user said they weren't sure if it was worth the effort to upgrade to 4.0 because 3.0 works fine. For the next 5 minutes I rattled off about 25 great new benefits and they said "Ok, nevermind. It sounds great!" If you're a current 3.0 customer and you're not sure what benefits 4.0 offers, please contact us and we'd be happy to share our ideas on the upgrade benefits.

Congrats to the product team on all their hard work. After working with the new version over the past 12+ months, I can confidently state that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is an amazing release.

At Sonoma Partners of course we use Microsoft Dynamics CRM for our internal sales, marketing, service and project management. We've already completed a half dozen trial upgrades of our internal system to 4.0 and we plan on upgrading to the final RTM bits as soon as possible after release. Even though I can't definitively prove this, I like to think we were the first company in the world to upgrade to Microsoft CRM 3.0 way back in November 2005. We plan to be the first again on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0!

85,000 seats of Microsoft CRM sold in the last quarter

I saw in Information Week that "there were 85,000 seats of Microsoft CRM sold in the last quarter, which is roughly comparable to the sales of Salesforce.com." This stat absolutely blew me away for a few reasons:

1. Microsoft is tight with publicly releasing details about the total number of CRM customers and the total number of CRM users, but through FY06 (last June 30th) they said there were 10,000+ customers and 400,000+ users. Since Microsoft released version 1.0 on 12/26/2002, it took us 3.5 years to reach 400,000 users. With those numbers as context, the fact they added 85,000 Microsoft CRM users in just the last quarter is amazing. In other words, in the last 3 months of FY07 they sold more than 20% of what it took the previous 42 prior months to sell. Wow. You can really see the momentum building behind Microsoft CRM.
   
   
2. I am extremely encouraged that we added the same number of users as Salesforce.com considering everyone knows it is easier to sell a hosted CRM service like Salesforce.com to smaller companies. At their price point, Salesforce.com can add lots and lots of 5, 10 and 15 users deals relatively easily. Customers can pull out their credit card and go. Those types of smaller opportunities can be more challenging to sell with Microsoft CRM 3.0 since right now we only have an on-premise option for customers. The on-premise deployment (mostly) requires them to pay for the CRM licenses up front and purchase the system pre-requisites (like SQL Server) which is sometimes an issue for those smaller deals. Therefore if Microsoft CRM kept pace with Salesforce.com last quarter without a CRM Live option to offer customers, I expect that Microsoft CRM will start outpacing Salesforce.com for seats sold early next year when CRM Live is available!

All in all, this is great news for Microsoft CRM customers and partners like us.

On a side note, if anyone knows the new total number of Microsoft CRM customers and users worldwide through the end of FY07, I would love to see those numbers so that I can include in them in my future sales presentations. Please send them our way!