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.
