CRM 4.0 TOP 20 features from Partner Readiness Event

This past week our team attended the CRM 4.0 partner readiness event in Dallas. It was a great deal of information in a short period of time. Also one of the Microsoft Executives gave a great presentation to kick off the day. All in all it was a great primer for CRM 4.0 for some of the folks on our team that have been heads down and not gotten too much time on CRM 4.0 yet. We have been very busy with some large projects.

The new code is supposed to be locked down and ready to send to the disk manufacturers next week! (Estimated Time Nov 1.) This means that the new product could be available for purchase and install some time in Late November or early December. That is coming up fast.

At the high application level not too much has changed on the front end. Nothing like the move from 1.2 to 3.0. There are a ton of new and needed features that are great, but nothing like the last version upgrade. It seems to me that most of the budget and hard work was done on the back-end of the application. I believe a lot of hard work under the hood was done to enable a robust multi-tenant and multi-national data model and architecture. It will be hard for most clients to really appreciate this. Nevertheless it is there and works really well. I have implemented the milti-tenant instances on one server and it only took minutes. Pretty amazing!

Here is a quick rundown of the Top 20 features the product team illustrated in the readiness event:

1. User Productivity Improvements to Interfaces
2. End User Report Wizard - For going beyond Views and Excel Spreadsheets
3. Workflow improvements - Windows Workflow Foundation
4. Real-time Visibility & Collaboration
5. Resource Center - For building internal community and external access to community
6. Better email interaction tracking and management (no more GUID option)
7. Intelligent Data Import and Migration
8. Data Integrity, Hygiene, and Duplicate Detection management features
9. Multi-National - Currency, Language
10. Business Process Management
11. Many-To-Many Relationships - System, Self, Core Entities
12. SDK improvements and Offline SDK
13. Leverage Technology Platforms - supports POP3 and Exchange 2007
14. Expanded Deployment Choices - CRM LIVE added into mix
15. Multi-Tenancy Options
16. Run CRM without VPN - Basically works in RPC over HTTP but called "Internet Facing Deployment"
17. Security and Outlook syncing improvements in speed.
18. Better Admin and Settings Management - Admin in Outlook folders too.
19. Performance, Scalability, & Availability Improvements
20. Clean Upgrade from CRM 3.0

That is a pretty solid list of improvements and Enhancements. Looking forward to the launch!

Regards, Jon Petrucelli - http://www.productivegap.com/