Jukka Niiranen

Tag: Orion

  • Dynamics CRM 2013 Finally Revealed

    There were a couple of announcements made regarding the upcoming version upgrade of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (previously known as “Orion”) during the World Partner Conference 2013 event (WPC13) three weeks ago: 1) it was named as “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 / Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall ’13 (depending on your deployment model) and 2) the client licensing model was unified between Online and on-premises to consist of Professional, Basic and Essential license tiers. The CRM related sessions also presented several interesting facts about where Dynamics CRM is heading (see my WPC13 recaps of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 if you missed them), but all in all they were more about the product roadmap rather than detailed features of the next release.

    CRM2013_BlitzToday, on July 31st, Microsoft held the Dynamics CRM Training Blitz Day for all its partners. The sessions were split into two tracks, but for most of this blog’s audience I’m sure the track “Technical Overview for Application Consultants, Presales Consultants and Developers” was the preferred choice. The sessions presented by the Redmond allstars Eric Boocock and Girish Raja consisted of the following topics:

    • Reimagined User Experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Process Agility in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Mobile Client Application
    • Yammer Integration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Outlook Client and Exchange Sync in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Microsoft Online Portal Administration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Upgrade Process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Business Rules with Dynamics CRM
    • Client Extensibility in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
    • Extensibility on the Server and Cloud with Dynamics CRM
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Platform for Business Apps

    If you’re a Microsoft partner and have access to the event site, you really need to schedule some time for going through the recordings and other content available, because this is effectively the “What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013” training kit that summarizes the new and updated features of the product you’ll be working with from Q4 onwards.

    Although this was a partner event, it was declared “free to tweet” and resulted in a wealth of content being shared over on Twitter. I collected the most interesting content related to new features of CRM 2013 onto a Storify post that you can view below, to get a quick overview of what was announced in the Blitz event.


    There will surely be more material made available to Dynamics CRM customers shortly, so that they’ll have a better understanding of what it means when they see the update notifications in their existing CRM Online instances. If I’d have to summarize the CRM 2013 release highlights in five bullet points, they would be:

    • The new UI that was previewed in the “public beta” of the Polaris release looks like a worthy successor to the previous forms & ribbons. The impact to user adoption and differentiation from competing CRM products is potentially huge, while the feared breaking changes to existing customizations may not be as big as the initial reaction might have suggested (things will break, of course, but I don’t foresee a catastrophe).
    • Business rules and synchronous workflows are the real killer feature of CRM 2013, since they expand the no-code capabilities of the product immensely. They will surely not cover all the common customization scenarios in the first release, but they point the way towards a declarative future where custom development efforts can be targeted to where they are really needed, meaning system integrations.
    • The mobility story with responsive design and “write once” business logic is far beyond what the “CRM Anywhere” path announced in February 2012 (and later cancelled) would have allowed to achieve.
    • Server side sync is long overdue and many organizations will surely be happy to replace the email router with this solution. Tracking individual items will still require Outlook, though. And while we’re at it, the new UI in Outlook client with its popups and hidden global navigation doesn’t look all that hot, but friends of Outlook and CRM 2011 may disagree with me.
    • Acquisitions of Yammer, Marketing Pilot and NetBreeze will play a significant role in the future of the product, but CRM 2o13 is still very early days for this feature set. It’s loosely coupled services like this which will surely make the most of the rapid release cadence of CRM Online (twice a year), so keep an eye on them.

    As with most new things, there’s a great deal of excitement I have towards the CRM 2o13 release based on what I’ve seen, and at the same time a healthy sense of fear on “is it all really going to work”. Lucky for us, we can now seek validation for the excitement and relieve our fears by downloading the beta for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that has been posted on Microsoft Connect today patiently waiting for a public beta to become available (if ever). Yes, the beta link shared by the CRM team previously was apparently not meant to be made available publicly, so you’ll still need wait for a while to get your hands on the latest version of Dynamics CRM.

    When will the actual Dynamics CRM 2013 product be released then? Many sources are pointing to The Partner Connections Event starting on October 20th as being the official launch event. Also many CRM Online customers have already received information on their organizations having been scheduled for updates to take place during Q4 2013, so I think it’s safe to assume this to be the time frame for general availability of the next version of Dynamics CRM.

  • Keep Calm and Prepare for Orion

    keep-calm-and-prepare-for-orionJust a quick note to all the readers of my blog regarding a new post I wrote for MSDynamicsWorld.com on how existing customers can start preparing for the upcoming release of Orion, the next version of Dynamics CRM.

    That is all. Keep calm and carry on.

  • LinkedIn, Dynamics CRM and Social Selling

    LinkedIn, Dynamics CRM and Social Selling

    LinkedInA significant share of Dynamics CRM systems tend to be implemented for B2B sales scenarios. In the age of social selling, digging up information about the person you’re about to call will quite often involve looking up his or her LinkedIn profile. With this in mind, surely everyone’s running a tight integration between their customer relationship management system and the LinkedIn network, right? Well, based on my personal experience, quite often it tends to be one of those requirements that come up during the sales phase but then get phased out from the actual go-live of a new CRM system.

    The question of “how to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with LinkedIn” has been making the rounds in various forums for as long as I’ve been involved with the product. Now that you’ve potentially arrived here in search for an answer (thanks, Google!), I thought I’d collect a few pieces of information and personal thoughts on the subject. If you have any experiences to share regarding using Dynamics CRM in the social selling scenarios, please do leave a comment in the box below.

    The Quick Way

    As always with information systems, there’s integration and then there’s “integration”. If you can meet the requirement by just surfacing a bit of content from LinkedIn inside a Dynamics CRM form, then here’s a great article from Salesmetrix that shows you the steps to integrate the LinkedIn Member Profile badge onto a CRM contact form. By adding a simple web resource and signing up for a LinkedIn API key you can show the contact’s job title and picture from LinkedIn alongside your CRM data, like this:

    CRM_contact_LinkedIn_profile_widget_small

    Why is this not the perfect solution? Well, did you notice the step require for copy-pasting the URL to the contact’s LinkedIn profile field before the profile badge is shown? Yeah, that’s the bit that your sales people are most likely not going to perform. Getting them to even enter the minimum required details on their leads and opportunities into a CRM system can be a major struggle, so introducing a complex operation like this into the process is going to require plenty of sales skills from the implementation consultant to convince the users that there’s a tangible benefit for them in filling in all the blanks on the contact form.

    That’s of course not anything that couldn’t be overcome with a little bit of further development. One example for performing the profile search dynamically based on name fields on the CRM records can be found from Nicolae Tarla’s blog. Coincidentally, Nicolae has also recently released the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Scripting Cookbook that contains a few examples of lightweight social network integrations in the final chapter. Building proper social profile discovery services will require more than mere Javascript, but for showing LinkedIn Member Profile Plugin and Company Insider Plugin in the CRM UI you probably don’t need to invest a whole lot of time in developing a working solution.

    You could choose an even more simplified approach and just add a button on the contact form’s ribbon to open LinkedIn search page with pre-filled values. A URL like http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=Jukka&lastName=Niiranen&company=CodeBakers will get you onto my LinkedIn profile faster than manually entering the same search terms. You can study the LinkedIn URL Query Parameters to see the kinds of variables that could be used. There’s also a post on the old CRM Online Team blog that shows you how the button would have been added back in the CRM 4.0 days. (While building your URL’s, do remember to handle special characters and spaces in contact and account names.)

    The problem with all these type of solutions is that if you’re not paying for them (on a continuous basis), you can’t expect them to remain working forever. Several variations of the LinkedIn and Dynamics CRM integration techniques have come and gone, such as Marco Amoedo’s CRM 4.0 LinkedIn Company Insider Widget hover link and Leon Tribe’s & Matt Wittemann’s Five-Minute Integration Between Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn. All fine solutions in their time, but as the API’s and applications keep changing, the need for re-developing solutions to the same problem remains.

    The Official Way

    A company like LinkedIn surely wouldn’t have missed the chance for monetizing the data they’ve accumulated into their network by selling it to B2B sales people who are using a system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, now would they? Of course not, which means “there’s an app for that”: LinkedIn for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

    The product requires a Sales Plus or Sales Executive subscription for LinkedIn, which start from €28.95 per user per month. If you’re like me, you probably receive frequent “special offers” for a free month of LinkedIn Premium. This time I decided to activate the offer and use it for test driving the Dynamics CRM solution. The deployment process was quite straightforward for a CRM Online environment as no further configuration was needed apart from installing the solution file. After that, this is how you’ll see LinkedIn company profile and people data on the account form:

    LinkedIn_DynamicsCRM_company_profile_small

    On the contact form we have tabs for both Company Profile and individual Member Profile.

    LinkedIn_DynamicsCRM_member_profile_small

    For some reason the lead form doesn’t get any LinkedIn components added on it, so you’ll need to qualify the lead to an account and contact before being able to leverage the integration.

    Not every CRM user needs to have the subscription, but unless they do, they’ll not be able to see the premium content on the account or contact forms. Therefore you’ll probably need to manage role based forms for different user groups by creating a specific LinkedIn security role for those who have the Sales Plus subscription.

    Unfortunately the solution from LinkedIn hasn’t yet been updated to be compatible with the cross-browser world of Polaris / Update Rollup 12, so using it on Chrome, Firefox or Safari isn’t supported. Also Internet Explorer 10 fails to render any content in the iFrame and LinkedIn recommends downgrading to IE9, so if you’re running Windows 8 you’ll need to run Dynamics CRM in IE7 Compatibility View to make use of the solution. No release schedules for an updated solutions were available when I asked about this from LinkedIn support. Needless to say, running CRM Online with the new Polaris process forms isn’t supported with the LinkedIn add-on.

    The Ultimate Way?

    What if we are really determined to get the most out of this wonderful source of “free” information that is LinkedIn? Wouldn’t we want to pour all the data into our own CRM database and preferably also synchronize it with the latest updates available from different online directories?

    (more…)

  • Ready Or Not, Orion Is Coming

    There’s been a huge level of interest towards my previous blog post on the updated user experience in the next Dynamics CRM version, codename Orion. A wealth of great comments have been added by #MSDYNCRM community members both here and on the LinkedIn Dynamics CRM Group thread. Thank you all for contributing into the discussion around the future direction of CRM!

    Based on these comments and observations, I decided to write down some further thoughts of mine on the potential impact of Orion. After all, it will be a while before the next Dynamics CRM release is officially out the door (notice how it’s almost “light years away” in timeline slide below?), so we’ve got plenty of time to kill.

    Conv13_Roadmap_02_small

    The Aftermath of Polaris

    The Polaris release in January seems to have raised a few concerns among customers and consultants, specifically on these two fronts:

    • CRM Online only – is Microsoft going to ignore its on-premises customers?
    • Lack of support for Javascript on the process forms – will Dynamics CRM cease to be an extensible XRM platform?

    If we start from the Online part, Microsoft has made it clear already some time ago that they will proceed with an “Online first” strategy when it comes to updates and new features. While previously the gap between the on-premises and Online environments in terms of feature availability has been fairly small (with many hotfixes still arriving first for on-premises customers), Polaris really shifted this balance by introducing a whole new user interface with the process forms as well as integrations to external services like Bing Maps and Skype.

    If you were only casually following the product roadmap announcements from Microsoft last fall, it will have been easy to miss the fine print that said the December 2012 Service Update was for CRM Online customers only. Although Microsoft has basically promised that all of the new features will be introduced also in the on-premises version, with no specific release dates available yet, this message may not have been very comforting to those who were mistaken to expect the new Polaris features for their CRM servers already in December. Many blog posts were later on written to clarify the differences between Update Rollup 12 and Polaris, so clearly there was some room left for improvement in the product roadmap communication strategy for future releases.

    Since Orion will be a major version release with synchronized contents for all deployment models, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll return back to the status of feature parity between Online and on-premises. However, it’s also just a matter of time before there’s a further release planned that targets CRM Online customers only. As has been stated, the plan is to have one release per year for on-premises and two for Online, so it’s best to adjust yourself to the idea that the latest innovations will be piloted in the Microsoft cloud. On-premises remains a perfectly viable option (or the only option for some customer groups), but things just won’t move as fast there as they do in the cloud. When dealing with business software, that’s not always such a bad thing actually.

    Let Them Eat Jscript

    Just like the “Online only” nature of Polaris, the support for scripts or, more precisely, the lack of it wasn’t a widely advertised quality of the new UI. This limitation has understandably caused frustration in different departments. Funnily enough, having the privilege of access to new features doesn’t necessarily make you any happier if you end up feeling that something has been taken away from you at the same time.

    For existing CRM Online customers with form scripts already applied, be it for simple conditional logic related to fields and values or more complex calculations, it has meant that the benefits of the new UI can’t be taken into use without cutting back on functionality that exists in the old UI. For new customers who sign up for a CRM Online trial it can come as a surprise that in order to implement the business logic that the organization needs, their Microsoft partner will have to “downgrade” them to a UI that looks very different from the one that got the excited about the product during the 30 day trial.

    If you ask me, I think the problem really is that Polaris wasn’t released as the “iPad client” but rather as the new user interface for all clients. This brought the requirements for the UI onto a whole different level and, unfortunately, at this level Polaris isn’t able to compete with the classic forms yet. If the Flow UX was something that the users themselves could easily switch to, similar to using the “/m” in the CRM URL to access the Mobile Express version, consultants and administrators wouldn’t need to be cautious about enabling this new UX alonside the fully functional Ribbon UI of CRM 2011.

    Orion Rising

    With Orion we can expect to see the support of form Javascripts to be extended onto the new Process forms, if only for the simple reason that the “classic” forms may not be available anymore in the next release. Alongside this we’ll also see a brand new navigation pattern supported by the global Navigation Bar, as Dynamics CRM will transform from a popup-driven application to a standard web application that can be operated in a single browser window. (more…)

  • The Next Dynamics CRM User Experience: Orion

    Post updated 2013-06-26:

    Hi there, thanks for your interest in Orion, the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You’ve probably arrived here by following a link that promised to show you what the user interface of the upcoming application release was going to be. Unfortunately you won’t find that content here anymore.

    Back in March 2013 several Microsoft representatives presented a preview of the upcoming release at the Convergence 2013 event. It was the first time that Orion was publicly shown to MS partners, customers and anyone interested enough in the product to either attend the event in New Orleans or watch the webcasts through Virtual Convergence. I enjoyed the latter ones and took a few screenshots from those sessions (which can still be accessed through the aforementioned site. Based on them, I wrote my own analysis of how the upcoming user interface changes were going to impact Dynamics CRM users, consultants, developers and so on.

    It turned out to be quite a popular post. As I write this update on June 28th, the page had been viewed over 11,000 times. Links to the post had been shared almost 300 times on various social channels. Several Dynamics CRM experts contributed to the discussion on the Orion UX changes in the comments section, on LinkedIn and elsewhere. In short, it was a hit.

    Linktally_analytics_Orion_UX

    The reason why the post cannot be available for you to read anymore is that three months after its release my employer has signed an agreement document and the contents of my (personal) blog is seen to be in conflict with the terms of this agreement. I understand the reasoning behind this interpretation and have no problem removing some of the content based on the request I’ve received. After all, I think the post has already done its job in distributing the publicly available information from Convergence 2013 in a structured format that has hopefully made it easier for anyone working within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM ecosystem to understand the direction where the product is heading in its upcoming release.

    We’re approaching the moment when Microsoft will be making official information available about the Orion release. At that point there will no longer be a need for any preview screenshots of the UI. If you simply can’t wait for that moment to arrive, then luckily this is the Internet and it does a great job in distributing information to anyone who can be bothered to search for it. If you want to stay on top of the latest news around Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one source of information to keep an eye on is the Surviving CRM Google+ page. If you want to know, how to prepare for Orion, there are some fine articles written on the topic 😉

  • eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome takeaways

    eXtremeCRMThere are no more Microsoft Convergence events held in Europe, but luckily the eXtreme CRM organization has stepped in to arrange a bi-annual conference where all the Dynamics CRM professionals can meet up and share information & thoughts on what’s happening around the product and the surrounding ecosystem. Last year in Berlin was the first time I attended the eXtreme CRM conference and this year it was time to head down south to Rome for eXtreme CRM 2013. Here’s my travel report from the event, focusing on the product roadmap details that were revealed and the direction that Microsoft Dynamics CRM seems to be heading towards, based on my interpretation.

    It’s been a bit rough

    The opening keynote by Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, was a somewhat unusual appearance compared to the traditional Microsoft way of highlighting their past achievements and future opportunities. From the European viewpoint, the typical US style keynotes often go over the top in building up hype for the success of the products, but Bob came onto the stage with a different kind of a message. Basically he apologized for all the problems that have surrounded Dynamics CRM recently: the delay of cross-browser support, CRM Online performance/reliability issues and the sad saga of recent Update Rollups being pulled.

    Bob_Stutz_eXtremeCRM_keynoteI think most of the MS partners in the room had shared the pain from these issues, especially when having to explain them on a day-to-day basis while working with customers. In the software business it’s of course nothing unheard of that  such problems may occur, but there’s been an elevated sense of frustration recently with the lack of information given to partners on what’s going on at Microsoft. Communication is the most effective cure in recovering from such events and I bet that it would have been far easier for all parties if there had been more transparent exchange of information on each of these issues earlier on, but it’s good to see the top management acknowledge this now and hopefully do what is necessary to straighten these things out.

    One thing that Bob Stutz promised to change was to return the Update Rollups back to pure hotfix packages instead of vehicles for new feature delivery that they’ve turned into after Microsoft adopted the agile release policy for Dynamics CRM shortly after the 2011 version came out. What this means in practice is that MS will need to come up with a new delivery vehicle for introducing the new features into on-premise CRM environments at least once a year. While this can potentially improve the stability of those environments, the gap between CRM Online and on-premise feature release schedule can also grow even larger as a result of this, which could introduce it’s own challenges through an increased platform fragmentation.

    The mobility story

    This time last year Microsoft made a big announcement of their upcoming “CRM Anywhere” prodcut offering. Following the aforementioned turn of events, the cross-browser support got eventually delayed up until Polaris / Update Rollup 12 while the mobile strategy was gradually revised, scrapping their planned partnership with CWR Mobility and opting to develop in-house mobile apps instead. Individual pieces of news around the mobility offering have become available during the past fall and now at eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome the following mobility roadmap slide was presented:

    Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap & Vision

    From this slide and the accompanying presentation I was able to pick out the following pieces of data:

    • The iPad Safari web client that was postponed from the actual Polaris rollout is arriving this month for CRM Online customers, on-premise support will be in Orion
    • Tablet devices will receive a dedicated app, not only the Windows 8 Sales Workspace but also a similar iPad native app appears to be scheduled for Orion, with further Service and Marketing apps in the horizon
    • iPhone and Android support will be limited to the Mobile Express client even after Orion, all the way until Leo
    • No details on whether Windows Phone will receive any new features in addition to the WP7 Activity Feeds app that was released a bit over year ago
    • Customization options as well as offline data support will be rolled out gradually to these clients

    One thing that Bob was emphasizing during the keynote was Microsoft’s decision not to charge additional licenses for access to these mobile and tablet applications. Choosing to take the longer route of build vs. buy in the mobile CRM gives MS a wider range of options to adjust their commercial offering to market needs, but the prolonged period of uncertainty means that many customers will also be postponing their investment decisions on mobile CRM deployment until they have facts available on what level of functionality is going to be baked into the core platform. At the same time ISV’s like Resco and more recently also CWR Mobility are working hard to be able to offer a HTML5 platform for developing customized mobile and tablet apps for Dynamics CRM for those customers who need to equip their mobile workforce with CRM solutions already today.

    Update 2013-02-16: Microsoft partners can now download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap slide deck from PartnerSource (login required).

    From Polaris to Orion via Gemini

    The new “Flow” UI of Dynamics CRM has been rolled out to existing CRM Online customers. This has caused both a lot of excitement as well as anxiety, since the new design and integrations (Bing Maps, Yammer etc.) are very tempting to be demonstrated as the next generation user experience, but the feature set of Polaris takes away many of the standard customization options that rely on form event scripting. I’ve covered the Polaris new features & gotchas in a previous post, in case you haven’t had a chance to dig deeper into the updated CRM Online version yet. Just to repeat once more what I’ve been trying to emphasize ever since latest Statement of Direction document was released: on-premise customers won’t get the new UI with Update Rollup 12, it arrives in the Orion release.

    Orion_the_next_version_of_Dynamics_CRMWith that in mind, let’s get the big news out of the way before digging any deeper: Orion is not an Update Rollup or even Service Update type of a release, it is the next major version of Dynamics CRM. In his closing keynote Bill Patterson pretty much confirmed that it would be called “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013” (or 2014) for the on-premise customers. Not a whole lot of other details were shared, apart from the fact that the target release date is in Q3 2013. Although Bob Stutz was hesitant on giving any dates in his speech, July was mentioned more than once, but whether that refers to general availability or CRM Online is anybody’s guess as of now.

    Before that, we’ll have time for another star in the spring sky: Gemini. Yes, it looks like there will be even more frequent releases for CRM Online than previously communicated. Gemini arrives in Q2 2013 and will focus on bringing the Marketing Pilot features acquired last October available to Dynamics CRM users. The feature set was shown in a very brief run through of slides, since the network issues that plagued the whole eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome event held at Marriott Park Hotel forced Bill to skip the live demo and resort to screenshots instead. Not much can be said about what to expect from Marketing Pilot at this stage, but here are some facts I picked up: (more…)

  • What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Polaris Release: The Slides

    On January 21st, 2013 the official announcement on “broader availability” of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update (formerly known by codename Polaris) was made on the CRM Connection blog. Even though not all the CRM Online organizations have yet been updated, new trials in US and shortly in EMEA & APAC will get the latest functionality installed upon provisioning.

    The absolutely best way to get familiar with the future UI of Dynamics CRM is to get a 30 day trial organization for yourself and play around with the demo data. In fact for a large share of the existing customers this will be the only possible way, since there will be no on-premise version of Polaris. You’ll get the cross-browser support, API updates, and, contrary to previous information, the updated Activity Feeds solution when installing Update Rollup 12 for your CRM server (currently not yet available for download after having been pulled). Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the Orion release that’s coming out sometime later in the year 2013.

    Since I know many of you must be busy with deploying, supporting, developing and actually using  the current on-prem version of CRM 2011, I’ve created a summary of the new features  in the December 2012 Service Update just for you. No, not just a list of the bullet points that Microsoft has already communicated, but rather a hands-on exploration of how the new version works differently from the old CRM 2011. You’ll find it on SlideShare available for download or you can view it below (although the image quality in the streamed version is a bit crappy).

    The 34 slides cover those features I personally found noteworthy when getting to know the Polaris release. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but I’ve tried to highlight the changes and gotchas that a system customizer or administrator familiar with the previous versions should be aware of. The topics include:

    • Sitemap changes
    • Activity Feeds filters (see this earlier post for more details)
    • New process form structure and components (previously known as the “Flow UI”)
    • Swithing between new and Classic forms
    • Updated subgrids and limitations on working with related records in general
    • Extended case management functionality
    • Support for creating leads for existing accounts
    • + Many more!

    With this release Microsoft has done an excellent job with publishing a plethora of training videos on the Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update on the Microsoft Dynamics YouTube channel for anyone to watch, with no login required to access the materials on Customer/PartnerSource, so do take advantage of them. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found an official MS index page to these videos, so I suggest you refer to this post by Donna Edwards with the video links, because the video titles are impractically long when browsed on YouTube (hmm, wonder if this says anything about Microsoft’s product naming convention… probably not 😉 )

    And that’s not all, folks! By browsing through the updated Resource Center content online you can access detailed help articles on topics such as installing product updates, turn on the new sales and service process forms or customizing the forms in the new sales process. There’s so much more to this release than just the cross-browser support (although that’s bound to keep people busy as CRM 4.0 scripts start to break) that I urge you to have a look, even if you’re not working on a CRM Online environment. By starting early you’ll have a better understanding of how to prepare for the next on-premise release, what comes out of the box in Polaris and what type of customizations are sensible to make when knowing the upcoming form architecture and user experience that will arrive in the Orion release.

  • Breaking down the Polaris and Statement of Direction documents

    After the announcement in July 2012 regarding the delayed delivery schedule of the CRM Anywhere functionality, Microsoft has been promising that their updated product roadmap would be announced “soon”. Well, it took until November eventually, but we now have two new documents available from them: the Statement of Direction and Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update Release Preview Guide. In this post I’ll share a few thoughts and questions that these documents have raised in my mind.

    Polaris (Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update)

    Much of the contents of Polaris was revealed in eXtreme CRM 2012 Las Vegas and tweeted out into the online communities. One major piece of news from there is only casually mentioned in the beginning of the Release Preview Guide document, so let’s emphasize it here once more:

    This document is organized to highlight specific investments included in the December 2012 Service Update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. This release begins in mid-December 2012 and will continue through January 2013.

    Yes, on-premise and hosted customers will still need to wait another 6 months while the new functionality is previewed in the cloud. The Orion release, currently scheduled for around mid-2013, will include these new treats into the CRM server bits you can download and deploy on your own or outsourced hardware. In the meantime, there will be a gap during which some UI customizations and development can be done only in CRM Online, so remember to take this into consideration when planning you solution deployment strategies.

    The new Flow UI, also known as the “Process-Driven UI” or “Refresh UI”, has been shown from the user’s point of view already earlier, but in the Release Preview Guide we get a first glimpse into the configuration options of how you can actually adjust it to match your real business processes. The Process Control Customization Tool appears to consist of a basic set of stages and steps, with no direct connection to the familiar workflow or dialog processes. Of course if you trigger a workflow process from a field value change you could include much more business logic into the stages and steps. The document mentions that there will be “several pre-defined steps such as locate existing contact and account”, so we’ll need to wait and see if the process steps will actually provide a new extension point that allows developers to create custom steps.

    Ever since the Yammer deal in June, we’ve all been wondering (well, perhaps it’s just me who’s obsessed with these things) how this social business tool would be integrated into Dynamics CRM and specifically what it will do to the Activity Feeds functionality introduced in Q4 2011 Service Update. Looking at the Polaris UI preview, we still don’t have too many details about this, but at least there’s a screenshot for us to stare at. Back in July when the Flow UI was first shown, the Activity Feeds were presented on the opportunity form alongside activities and notes/attachments, but now it’s been replaced by a Yammer feed. However, the distinction between auto posts and user posts in the menu suggests that there’s a bit of the CRM Activity Feeds functionality in play here, since Yammer doesn’t have such concepts in their own product.

    Showing updates regarding CRM records in the Yammer UI was already possible before Microsoft bought Yammer, thanks to the integration they had developed. In the release preview guide we can now read that “Microsoft will enable the ability to post messages from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Yammer and vice versa”, which suggest a deeper level of integration, most likely leveraging Yammer’s Enterprise Graph. I guess it’s safe to say by now that the CRM R8 beta functionality developed for CRM Activity Feeds to filter the feed content has been permanently cancelled and all the efforts are aimed at integrating Yammer into Dynamics CRM. However, Microsoft will probably not completely rip out the existing feeds from on premises Dynamics CRM deployments nor implement a non-cloud Yammer, so the transition may take a while. Another thing worth noting is that the current free version of Yammer does not support any integration to applications like CRM, so the Enterprise Plan for Yammer may be required in order to leverage the new functionality in Dynamics CRM unless Microsoft changes the pricing policy.

    Bing Maps integration will be available for the Flow UI, where “addresses for contacts and accounts will be displayed in an embedded contextual map provided by the Microsoft decision engine Bing”. There were some good comments to my previous Future Stars blog post about the licensing of Bing Maps, so you might want to check them out if visualizing your customer addresses on an integrated map is of interest to you. Just like with Yammer, currently the Bing Maps API requires a separate license when used in internal applications and there’s no mention of any changes to this model in the release preview guide, so it’s best to assume that these new Polaris features will not be free to users with a Dynamics CRM Online license alone.

    Cross-browser support arrives with Polaris, but it’s a bit of a “yes and no” regarding support on iPad Safari browser. Yes, users will be able to access something else than Mobile Express on their iPad, but it’s not the same browser client as you’d have on a PC or Mac. A special version of the web client has been created for the iPad only, utilizing the new Flow UI forms. However, as the Flow UI is only available in a limited number of entities so far, only the “sales experience” is enabled in the iPad CRM client version. Judging by the menu below you can only access accounts, contacts, leads and opportunities. Any other entities (presumably even quotes, orders or products) will require you to click the “Launch Mobile Express” link, which will take you back to the CRM experience designed for pre-iPhone era smartphones. The Polaris version of iPad client seems therefore like an intermediate solution while we await for the full tablet UX to arrive.

    So, where’s the Dynamics CRM Mobile part of the CRM Anywhere release? Hmm, not mentioned in this document, so let’s check out the long term roadmap next.

    Statement of Direction, November 2012

    This document discusses the Dynamics CRM product vision for the next 36 months and is therefore much less specific on the upcoming functionality than the Polaris release documentation. It starts with a list of upcoming applications to be added into Dynamics CRM in future releases. Putting the terminology into context, an example of a new application for CRM 2011 was goal management, so these would likely include a bunch of new default entities, business logic, UI enhancements and potential new integration points.

    On the SFA front we’ve got Quote, Order, and Pricing Management, which is a very important area for Dynamics CRM to step up it’s game. Anyone who’s ever demoed the existing UI for creating quotes knows that the popup jungle is something you want to avoid showing to potential customers, so a more flat user experience for working with product lines . In the Service section the term Knowledge Management brings a breath of canned air from the past decade, especially when we later on hear that “SharePoint will power next-generation content and knowledge experiences to strengthen supporting business processes”. All joking aside, it’s pretty obvious that the KB functionality in Dynamics CRM is in need of a makeover, so bringing SharePoint into the picture is the obvious route for Microsoft to improve its CRM offering for service users.

    The direction of marketing functionality development in Dynamics CRM will be shaped by Microsoft’s latest acquisition, Marketing Pilot. Although no one seems to have heard about the company before the MS press release, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good choice for the foundation which the v2.0 of Dynamics CRM marketing module would be built on. Whereas Skype and Yammer were big existing brands with their own technology stack, MarketingPilot is a small company that has developed their product on top of Microsoft’s platform and should therefore be much more easily assimilated into the Dynamics CRM product. Not a big splash like Salesforce.com’s acquisitions of Buddy Media or Radian6, not even close, but Microsoft have said marketing automation is one of their key investment areas for CRM, so let’s wait and see how that story develops.

    While not exactly a bullet point in the Statement of Direction document, it’s pretty clear that Surface will be the central vehicle for launching the re-imagined Dynamics CRM experience and Microsoft have come up with a nice promotional video to build up the hype while we wait for the Windows 8 app to arrive. Folding the “Metro CRM app”, Yammer, Skype and Surface all into one sure does result in a compelling image of what the next generation of customer relationship management applications could be like.

    What about devices other than the Surface? More precisely: what about mobile as in smartphone apps? Unfortunately there’s not much to say about them, except that there’s another delay for supporting iPhone and Android devices. Even the upcoming Windows Phone 8 customers won’t initially be able to use their mobile device for more than reading CRM records and posting Activity Feeds posts with the existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile client.

    The February 2012 announcement of Microsoft partnering with CWR Mobility pretty much put everyone in a waiting mode, as the official mobile client for Dynamics CRM would have obviously been the safest bet for any customer or partner. Well, by now we can clearly see that the deal is off and the CWR client is no more “official” than Resco, TenDigits or any other ISV offering. Instead of buying a solution, Microsoft eventually decided that they need to be the ones who build it. In the long run I believe this is definitely the right strategy for them, as mobile is simply far too important to be an outsourced component of CRM.

    We’ve heard from the Dynamics team that they’re betting big on HTML5 to deliver experiences across different devices. Even though Facebook famously backed off from their HTML5 strategy in favor of native apps, I’m somewhat optimistic that the path chosen by Microsoft can work better in the business apps landscape. MS will naturally build native CRM clients for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, but the effort required in delivering an enterprise scale mobile solution for a fragmented Android platform probably doesn’t make sense to them. Those are the gaps that ISV’s are there to fill, delivering more advanced offline clients for non-MS mobile platforms.

    At the same time as the device specific offering is being rearranged, we’ve heard from a source claiming to have official confirmation from Microsoft that the Dynamics CRM CAL price will soon be increasing by 15 percent, in preparation of the upcoming support for more devices per user. Since there will not be any additional 30 USD monthly fee per mobile user, the user CAL can be leveraged on more devices and therefore it delivers more value to customers, which in turn means Microsoft sees it can justify a price increase. Although no one ever rejoices when the cost of a service goes up, I’m actually in favor of a pricing strategy where the mobile and tablet clients will be as easy as possible for any Dynamics CRM users to access, rather than the customer organizations having to go through the internal negotiations of who really needs a premium license for mobile CRM usage. There’s always the device CAL for those who need to just enable CRM access on a single PC per user, after all.

    Conclusions

    Polaris is certainly an important update for Dynamics CRM and in many ways it feels like the starting point for “the next chapter” of the product. With all the UI and client changes lined up for Orion in mid-2013, in my mind it raises the question that will this already be a fully new product á la Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013? Any which way, I think Microsoft is right now delivering a compelling vision with their whole product portfolio and announcements this year, and this reflects positively on the Dynamics applications as well.

  • Future stars: Dynamics CRM roadmap news from Las Vegas

    We didn’t yet get a new Statement of Direction or Release Preview Guide for the future releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM from today’s eXtreme CRM 2012 Las Vegas keynote by Craig Dewar, titled “Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Now and In the Future”. That is scheduled to happen next week, but who wants to wait around for the information that has been shared to the privileged few who attended the eXtreme CRM session?

    Lucky for us who weren’t able to go to Vegas, the best new bits revealed at the session were tweeted out by outstanding #MSDYNCRM community contributors like Neil Benson, Shawn Tabor, Brad Koontz, Bob Hatcher and Eric W Cahoon. Here’s a “best of #eXtremeCRM tweets” collection that tries to summarize what was presented in Dewar’s session.

    Q4 2012: Polaris

    Let’s start with the updates coming in the very near future. The next release is codenamed “Polaris” will be out in Q4 2012, so this is the “Fall 2012” release we saw on an earlier roadmap slide. More specifically, the new functionality will be delivered as a part of Update Rollup 12 during December 2012 for both on-premise and for CRM Online customers.

    Polaris will contain upgrades to the browser UI as seen in the WPC 2012 session in July. It will include the Process Driven Refresh UI and deliver a more “flat” user experience to better match the look & feel of Office 2013. Also, the cross-browser support originally scheduled for Q2 2012 Service Update will now be delivered in December with UR12 and this part will affect also on-premise and hosted CRM environments. The previously delayed custom workflow activity support for CRM Online will be delivered within the same UR12 update schedule.

    New announcements made at the eXtreme CRM keynote for Q4 2012 include click-to-call integration with Lync and Skype (both of which are Microsoft products these days, in case you forgot). CRM Online customers will get a simple Bing Maps integration with maps embedded on the customer forms. Presumably the CRM Online subscription will in the future include a license to use Bing Maps on an internal application whereas customers who’ve bought perpetual server and client licenses from Microsoft need to acquire a separate license to use the mapping functionality through the API (remember: it’s not a free service, like the Bing Maps or Google Maps website).

    Q2 2013: Orion

    The release after Polaris carries the codename “Orion” and is scheduled for Q2 2013. What’s special about this release is that it will be CRM Online only. Whether on-premises and hosted CRM clients will be completely left without updates in Q2 remains to be seen, but the new release cadence suggest only a single major update for on-premises customers per year. The Update Rollup release schedule with an 8 week cycle should still remain unchanged, though, so it’s likely to be a bit of a mixed bag of what’s really “Online only” in terms of new or changed functionality. Update: it’s actually the Q4 2012 Polaris that will be Online only, see the comments at the end from Craig Dewar.

    As I’ve already speculated for a long time, the new Agaves in Office 2013 apps will be used as the means to deliver Dynamics CRM support for Outlook Web Access, both in OWA and MOWA (mobile app). This will finally enable tracking content from your inbox into CRM without having to live with the Outlook desktop client legacy. Also the synchronizing of items from Exchange will be possible on the server side with the Orion release in Q2 2013.

    Yammer integration, which presumably goes much deeper than the current integration solution built by Yammer before being acquired by Microsoft, is scheduled for Q2 2013. Other than this, concreted evidence of bringing social channels into Dynamics CRM was not leaked from Vegas, so we’ll need to wait a bit longer to see how Microsoft intends to deliver on the social story they’ve been promoting for CRM since this time last year. Back when we were still talking about Polaris as the R9 release this was supposed to connect Dynamics CRM with the external communities in a big way, but no major announcements have so far been made on this front.

    Ok, I did spot one physical evidence of social CRM from the Extreme CRM announcements, in the form of a new Social CRM solution built by Sonoma Partners. It’s baked into the updated version of CRM Demo Builder, which now allows you to provision CRM + SharePoint on the same, shared Office 365 platform, thus achieving single sign-on. Whether this particular Social CRM app will be made available to all CRM customers is something I’m not yet sure, but it looks like quite a solid little app for bringing Twitter feeds into CRM by using the same look & feel as the previous Activity Feeds solution. You can promote tweets into new/existing leads, contacts, accounts, cases or opportunities, after which you see the original tweet in CRM as an Activity Feed post. Nothing revolutionary in itself, but a welcome feature, if something like this is actually on Microsoft’s roadmap.

    That’s all of the news I picked up so far from the event by following the social networks. Did I miss any interesting tweet from #eXtremeCRM or an important piece of news? Leave a comment & let’s assemble the pieces of the Dynamics CRM roadmap together!

    Update 2012-09-04: I received clarification on the release roadmap from Craig Dewar himself, here’s the update:

    • “Polaris due Q4 2012 is online only with one exception. There is one capability in Polaris namely cross browser that is of such high interest we will release that capability on premise also.”
    • “Orion due Q2 2013 is online and on premise. It will include all Polaris functionality in addition to many new capabilities.”

    Based on my interpretation of the above, CRM Online customers will get the Polaris functionality first, while on premise and hosted CRM customers receive these updates 6 months later when Orion comes out.