On 12th July, 2010 during the opening of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft Corporation proudly raised the curtain from the latest capabilities that are coming forth in the next generation CRM solution. It was announced that the CRM5, now christened as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will be publicly available from September, 2010 onwards.
Further to streamline the solutions distribution and discovery they announced the launch of Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace by Sept,2010.This online catalogue can be deemed to be Microsoft’s answer to Arch rival SalesForce.com.The later have been in the business providing similar service to Dynamic Marketplace in the form of its AppExchange store for quite sometime. Arguably quite successful the store sells more than 1000 applications and software’s as of now.
The Dynamics CRM 2011 of Microsoft looks promising with increased Microsoft Outlook functionalities that include a latest contextual CRM Ribbon for the Outlook portion, whereas the analytical portion can boast of its ability to create and store inline charts in a drill down intelligent manner.
The online catalogue is intended to make it easy for the partners and collaborations to sell the products easily. Even the customers will be benefited in the sense as they will have an integrated platform to search and locate industry specific applications. The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace will be integrated within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 giving one the option to search for an application directly from within the CRM solution searched, itself.
It would definitely come as a relief to the Microsoft loyalists who up till now had to use the suppliers Solution finder Search tool to find third party sellers who sold add-ons and applications but could not down load them directly online.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will further deliver ‘The Power of Productivity’ through familiar, intelligent and connected experiences for customers and partners,” said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “For customers, it offers new levels of user productivity and collaboration that meet their specific business needs with a low total cost of ownership. For partners, it unlocks new opportunities and provides a single development environment for cloud-based and on-premise deployments. Together, this new release raises the bar in the CRM market.”
However Tim Barker, who is SalesForce.com s vice president, is seemingly unimpressed by the launch. He goes on to claim that there is absolutely nothing novel about Microsoft’s latest pet. It is just following the footsteps of more successful predecessors. According to him the ‘new’ Microsoft Appstore has got nothing new, because of its uncanny resemblance to the iphone App store and the salesforce.com App Exchange, both of which are extremely popular.
The Microsoft team is off course of different opinion. It is quite confident that the September launch will cause a revolution in the CRM arena. Even Jason Hunt, Avanade CRM and xRM evangelist voices his conviction that the latest features will enable Microsoft to produce and customize efficiently the CRM solutions to match up with the customer’s need and enable them to conduct their respective businesses more productively.
Hailed as a tool to garner global CRM audience for Microsoft, Dynamics CRM 2011 has a lot of responsibility to shoulder.
