Today I red a post about MSDynamicsWire on A CRM Riff blog. MSDynamicsWire is a portal which collects many blogs and web sites related to Microsoft Dynamics products by using RSS techonolgy. It is a very effective source, especially to know new blogs and to follow latest developments about those products.
Microsoft finally released Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. I am impatient to examine this accelerator, unfortunately I have to work on a presentation for the moment. I will share more after a detailed analysis, but I want to give a brief info at least.
This accelerator provides to follow up the activities of your customers on social networks such as Twitter. So you can create new opportunities by following your customers on online world.
First release only delivers integration with Twitter, but new networks will be added in the next releases.
Click here to download the Social Networking Accelerator.
Microsoft plans to announce a new social networking accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 very soon. This add-on will be free for current CRM 4.0 users. A video has been posted on Microsoft web site.
First impressions are very positive for me. I really liked the flexibility of creating a lead or a service case from a twitter message. This idea can be a good starting point to integrate popular social networking sites with the CRM system of a company.
I will write a more detailed article after downloading and examining the accelerator.
In 2007, Microsoft released Dynamics CRM 4.0. This version was including many improvements compared to the former one, 3.0. During this time, some add-on products called “accelerators” became available to the customers without any fee. In addition to current 8 accelerators, Microsoft will publish 3 new accelerators in a very short time. The one about social networks integration really attracts me. Especially people who use Microsoft Dynamics CRM in English take the benefit of the continuous improvement of this CRM solution. Actually as a consultant, whose customers mostly use Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Turkish, I experienced some technical difficulties to adopt them into a Turkish environment.
This week Microsoft organized a worldwide partner conference in New Orleans. There are some news about the future of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft announced that the new version, 5.0, will be available in the second half of 2010.
For a few years, Microsoft started to focus on SharePoint a solution which ease the document management and includes many other benefits. I guess that CRM-SharePoint integration will be a key part in the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I also expect some improvements about reporting and analysis services, especially user friendly and usable ones. Moreover, I hope that some of the accelerators Microsoft released for CRM 4.0, will be default in the new version. If the accelerators related to social media and analytical measurements of the data become available at the first release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5.0, Microsoft can have a competitive advantage over its rivals.
One of the another major subjects of the conference was XRM. R and M mean relationship management as you guess. However X totally depends on your prefence. Microsoft provides a platform which includes integration with Dynamics CRM, and you can make development on any area you want. Actually a fun video which I saw its link in Menno te Koppele’s blog explains this concept better.
The level of the competition in CRM market increases day by day, and Microsoft hardly focuses on its CRM solution for a while. They aims at taking the biggest share in the market by integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM into widely used Microsoft Office based products. The rivals also working hard to increase their share, and following these improvements is sometimes exhaustive, but it is clearly pleased to be in the middle of this competition.
If you visit the links below, you can find detailed information about these news.
