CRM2011: Roadmap Summary for Q2 & Q4

Q2 - Roadmap

Earlier half of this year (May), Microsoft CRM team published a roadmap document that gave partners an insight on what will be the next trend and directions to focus on CRM business. With the slogan of “driving transformation and enabling dynamic businesses”, Microsoft announced some of the key points:-

1.     Social Collaboration

Continuing extend those capabilities across a numbers of products (SharePoint, Lync, Office) with new experiences facilitate CRM.

·         Micro-blogging – notification & status update

·         Business activity feeds – configurable real time notification

·         Social intelligence – identification of data patterns to enhance marketing decision making.

2.     Optimizing Business decision making

·         Extend self-service BI – enhance tools that build business reports

·         Enhanced data visualization – enriched real time analytics dashboards

3.     Consumerist of Business Application

·         Multi-browser – utilizing HTML5 for structuring and presenting content.

4.     Extending Solution Opportunities

·         Enterprise cloud – enable larger organization to utilize online services.

5.     Release Model Alignment & Improved Agility

Traditional major CRM product version delivered with 2-3 years cycles, new CRM Online/ on premises added parallel track of shorter cycles deliver updates and new feature enhancements twice yearly. (Targeted for Spring (Q2) and Fall (Q4))

Q4 - New Capabilities for CRM2011

For second half year 2011, the following part diagram summarizes service update for Q4 2011. 

1.     Unified Office 365 Experience

CRM online will begin the process transitioning customers to a common administration, billing and provisioning platform which Office customers use today.

2.     Enterprise Cloud

·         Identity Federation – provide more options on how organizations streamline user access CRM Online.  (Support AD)

·         Enhanced Disaster Recovery – Microsoft data center sits in the US, Europe Middle East Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC). They will begin to offer system failover across data centers within a region.

3.     Feature Enhancements

·         Dialogs – support lookups and dates, flexibility in generating dynamic hyperlinks

·         BI capabilities – New chart type, configure multi series chart.

·         Extended De-duplication rule processing – can ignore null values, potential duplicates can be flagged

4.     Social Investments

·         Wave 1 – able to participate in rich online communities based on their mutual interests or professional commitments

o   Internal – Email, Micro blogs, intranet apps

o   Managed – Corporate forum, Facebook pages, customer portal

o   Independent – Twitter, Facebook

·         Activity Feeds – Follow records, post status manually or automatically. “Mention” feature. Mobile activity feeds.