Some great announcements recently. I will post more later on these:
1. The recently released Analytics Foundation is a package is a great new bundle of configs that load on top of SharePoint and Business Scorecard Manager. It is a download from Microsoft that basically shows you what you can do with the Business Intelligence Analytics Engine. This is a free software bundle from the Dynamics team.
2. REMINDER That CRM ELearning and Customer Source is a great place to get a LOT of free training on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You have ot be an on premise CRM client to get this training. It is great stuff. If you do not know how to get to CustomerSource just email your partner and they can get you hooked up.
3. Taking Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile. Did you know you get access to the fat client and thin client for Mobile for free. Yes that is right: FREE. The Thin Client is open source development from Microsoft Dynamics and avail on the Sandbox. Ask me how if you need directions. jon@productivegap.com - We have run the Thin Client (Mobile Express) in house for a long time and it is great. Very useful tool and very easy to install.
4. TITAN is coming. Microsoft is now planning to release its Dynamics CRM 4.0 product in phases during the third and fourth quarters of 2007, rather than all at once in the third quarter of this year. It will most likely be called CRM 4.0. It will most likely be avail for general consumption in December of 2007. That will come up fast. Major features/functions/enhancements will be around A) Multi-tenancy B) Multi-Language C) Multi-currency. There will be other enhancements that speed up the application on the backend that will make users more productive and happy but nor other major functions on the front end.
5. Expect CRM LIVE the hosted version in the MSFT Data centers to be available in Oct or Nov. This will start out for the time being as a pure hosted application with very little or no ability to integrate to other system. The only way to integrate will be Web Services. There will not be any space or real estate to load other applications that will work with CRM. So it will be limited to just the pure CRM for a bit. After that I am sure they will open it up for a price. Right now they are saying that if you want to integrate with SCRIBE etc then you would do complex hosted like what partners offer.
6. Brad Wilson and Steve Ballmer demonstrated CRM LIVE to the General Session and it was SLICK. It will really make our jobs a lot easier in deploying and managing the Software side. You know CRM has a lot of internal weight and external potential for Microsoft when Steve Ballmer spends time presenting and building the vision!
7. Forrester released its review and rankings of Dynamics CRM and it was excellent. We were ranked leader of the pack for Vision and Strategy. That is amazing for how quickly we have moved to the lead. read more in this blog below.
8. Brad Wilson mentioned that Gartner had just ranked Dynamics CRM #2 of all mid market applications. More in this blog below. That is really incredible. These rankings combined with the rumblings that Salesforce.com is starting to loose some steam on various fronts means great things in the future. It must kind of be tough to have Oracle, SAP and Microsoft gang up on you in a year. Oh Well. Benioff is laughing all the way to the Bank.
9. On another note. Lets talk about Multi Tenancy for a second. It was brought up at Convergence by Christian that you have to ask: "Who really benefits from SF.com multi-tenancy?" SF.com leads with it a lot that they are Multi Tenant and Multi tenant and Blah Blah blah. But does that really matter to or bring value to the client? the answer is NO. It only benefits SF.com directly that they can pack more clients on a server. That is the main function of SF.com multi Tenancy.
10. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Multi Tenancy will be slightly different because Dynamics CRM has a Hybrid Approach to delivery, meaning it can be deployed SAAS, Hosted, or full on premise. This means you can have multi-tenancy on premise say in a large org or multi divisional or dept. Say you have a bank that wants one DB but exclusive views and instances. Now they can have their system in house and the Microsoft Dynamics multi-tenancy will enable them to have completely separate and secure instances, views and forms, into the same data but only returning the appropriate and desired info to the specific user in the correct division. This way they only need one server and db but have multi instances on the server. It is perfect. Now that is valuable to clients! That benefits clients.
Regards, Jon Petrucelli, Founder, ProductiveGap Corp. www.productivegap.com
Sunday, April 15, 2007
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