CRM 4

I’ve been following the release of Microsoft CRM 4 with great interest. Having deployed CRM 3 to many clients I’m all too aware of the limitation you hit customising CRM 3.

Philip Richardson is the CRM Lead Program Manager, he has released many of the screen casts below on his blog. These should let you see some of some of the new features in action.

• Duplicate Detection
• Mail Merge
• Many to Many Relationships
• Workflow (Basic Workflow) (Complex Workflow) (Workflow Activity)
• CRM for Outlook
• Add Multiple Users
• Import Screencast
• Export Customizations
• Renaming navigation areas of Out-Of-The-Box entities (Requires SilverLight to view)

Some of the new features are:

• Multi-currency: Oh not just localized versions, but the ability to mix currency choice within one specific company.
• Multi-language: The same as above and a big thank you to the team from the many companies with multiple global offices!
• Support for roaming profiles when using terminal service environments
• Significant development around increased WAN performance
• Multi-layers of advanced duplicate detection. A major thank you from me to the team! They went above and beyond on this one (although this demanding little gemstone can always find more to want)
• Support for SQL Monitoring and SQL Clusters
• Support for alternative deployments
• "self updating" installation
• Diagnosis and process monitoring
• Embedded Auto-Complete on numerous fields
• More Bulk Changes and Data Cleansing features
• Web Based Mail Merge
• A new Report Wizard to empower customers to extract all the data they want to extract in the way they want to extract it
• Integration with Office Communicator (think embedded IM)
• Presence control (who is on-line)
• 360 Degree View of the Customer
• Cross entity advanced find enhancements
• Role based report foundation
• New Deployment Wizards which include bulk importing of users from Active Directory
• OneNote Integration
• A new level of Bi-Directional integration to Excel (Export to Excel, make changes, re-import into DynamicsCRM)
• New workflow Wizards, Templates and libraries
• Web based/Client Workflow configuration
• Break down any workflow into stages
• Multi-criteria e-mail tracking. E-mail tracking token can be turned off.
• New more flexible licensing options such as device versus user CALs
• Role based Report Foundation - Reporting can be dependent on the user's rights, security and roles
• New Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resource Center
• Reconfiguration/Redesign of the Outlook Client for CRM to allow for the wide variety of outlook footprints and variables in the field
• Diagnostic Tools in the Outlook for CRM client
• The Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) with more integration to MOSS (SharePoint)
• Many to Many Relationships
• System to System Relationships
• Pop3 Support/Exchange 2007 Support (64 bit)
• Direct External Interface into Dynamics CRM without a required VPN
• Asynchronous processing
• Offline and On-line use is consistent no change of features when offline
• New Data Mapping features
• Multiple ways to Authenticate
• Various components from within Dynamics CRM can be split out onto different application servers including API Calls, WorkFlow, UI Calls, etc.
• Greater Organization Visibility
• New Client Migration Toolkit
• Multi-Tenant platform for enterprise hosting
• E-Mail Topology changed to support more multiple choices of e-mail routing
• E-mail routing can be done without Exchange
• Reporting stored within the database for easy disaster recovery planning