I came across a few issues that might cause problems in the installation process, so I decided to link the relevant KB articles and other related content into this blog post to help you save some time when upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM on your client machine. I’m using CRM Online here, so some things may differ from the on-premises client version, which no longer has a separate client version, but of course the authentication methods do differ.

Before you begin: go with 32-bit

Yeah, I’m sure most of the new business laptops nowadays come with a 64-bit (a.k.a. x64) version of Windows 7. Nevertheless, you should treat 64-bit applications with caution. Why? Well, it’s a bit like with IPv4 vs. IPv6. Everyone knows the old world as we know it is coming to an end, but there simply isn’t a concrete enough reason for developers or companies to go “all in” with the 64-bit apps.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 the situation was quite nasty, as there was not and there will not be support for the 64-bit versio of Microsoft Office. You simply had to tell the users to “downgrade” their Office, which is not the most optimal starting point for getting someone to adopt a new application such as Dynamics CRM. Now with the arrival of Dynamics CRM 2011 we do in fact have an x64 client for Outlook, so everything should be in order, right? In theory, it is, but if you’re planning to install any fancy RIA apps from the Dynamics Marketplace into your CRM 2011, you should read this blog post from Customer Effective. That’s right, Microsoft hasn’t releases a 64-bit version of the Silverlight add-on for Internet Explorer, which leads us into the following situation:

KB2500373: Microsoft Silverlight web resources cannot be viewed in the 64-bit version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Microsoft Office Outlook

It’s a fact of life: the world is not 64-bit just yet. With the Office applications there’s not likely to be a significant performance boost from using the x64 version, so take the easy way out and just install the 32-bit Office 2010. Let’s revisit the topic when we all have Windows 8 and Office 2013, shall we?

Favorite folders no more

KB2494600: There is no option to add Microsoft Dynamics CRM entities to favorites in Microsoft Office Outlook 2010

The Solutions Module is a new feature that has become available in Outlook 2010, as described here in the MSDN library article. It allows developers to integrate their applications directly into the Outlook navigation pane, which is what Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client is doing to achieve the seamless integration into the native Outlook navigation items.

What’s the downside? Unfortunately the add-on solution folders cannot be added to the Outlook favorite folders group. Bummer. This was one of the first things I always instructed people to do when training them on how to use Dynamics CRM. There’s no better way to drive CRM adoption that getting the list of the company’s accounts and contacts to be available right below the Outlook inbox folder, where most people start their day at the (MS) office. Even though the CRM folders are now more visual and available under the CRM navigation pane tab, there’s still likely to be tens of entities visible for most CRM users, out of which they typically access just 3-4 most popular ones. I, for one, hate navigating through hierarchical folders that require you to expand them to see the what’s hidden on the next level, so always visible one-click navigation is how I prefer to arrange my working environment, be it SharePoint workspaces or CRM menus in Outlook.

Following the instructions in the KB article, you can achieve the old favorite folders functionality also in Outlook 2010, but this will require you to disable the Solutions Module. Which, if I’ve understood correctly, will again turn the flashy CRM folder icons into the generic folders that we see in Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003. Guess we’ll just have to figure out which is a bigger loss for the end user experience and make a choice, until there is a feature enhancement available for the Outlook 2010 Solutions Module (I hope there’s no technical limitation on why this couldn’t be implemented in a future service pack).

Clashes with Windows Live Essentials

KB2498892: Unable to Configure the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Outlook against Dynamics CRM Online

Seems like the Windows Live ID authentication in CRM Online has some issues with the “consumer products” for Windows Live. This might not be a big issue in big corporate environments with locked-down client machine configurations that don’t allow using consumer targeted services such as Hotmail or Skydrive. However, as Dynamics CRM Online is clearly making the former enterprise level applications like Customer Relationship Management suites available to even the smallest organizations with its low monthly cost per user and ease of deployment, there’s likely to be more and more users who’ll be transitioning from Microsoft’s consumer product lines to the new cloud-based business product lines, such as CRM Online and Office 365.

Basically you’ll need to run a repari install on the Windows Live ID Sign-in assistant or Windows Live Essentials 2011 to make it compatible with the Outlook client for CRM Online, which is also using Windows Live ID to connect you to the CRM server. That should do the trick.

But wait, isn’t Dynamics CRM Online a business product? Why is it using the WLID authentication method meant for the consumer products? For comparison, here’s an aswer from Allen_MSFT on the Office 365 FAQ to a question regarding weather using Office 365 will require WLID.

“Re Windows Live ID, you don’t need a Windows Live ID to use Office 365 or to use your Windows Phone 7 with Office 365.  Windows Live services are for consumers, so they are not linked within the Office 365 portal.”

Indeed. I’m waiting for the day when also Dynamics CRM Online will be migrated over to the new Microsoft Online Services Delivery Platform, which will hopefully give us better tools for managing CRM user accounts and authentication.

Missing Outlook ribbon after CRM client installation

KB2494581: The Outlook and CRM ribbons disappear from Microsoft Outlook when you use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Microsoft Office Outlook

I had this one happen to myself, since I had been using a previous beta version of the CRM 2011 client on my machine. I had uninstalled both Office and CRM, but there still remained a few lines in the registry that needed to be removed to get the Outlook ribbon to reappear.

I have to tell you, Outlook 2010 really looks naked when the ribbon is gone (not just hidden). I’m not sure if there even was a way to do any basic Outlook operations like sending emails with the ribbon completely blank, so I started googling around immediately and came up with the instrcutions that pointed to the following steps required to restore the ribbon:

• Run Regedit.exe
• Locate the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{2DF8D04C-5BFA-101B-BDE5-00AA0044DE52} key
• Delete the 2.4 key that’s found under it. It’s not needed anymore, there should only be 2.5

Reading pane always shows the contact layout

Dynamics CRM Deployment Forum: CRM 2011 reading pane error in Outlook 2010

Unfortunately this one doesn’t have a knowledge base article or a fix yet. I encountered this issue briefly when installing the Beta version of CRM 2011 Outlook client. Back then, all it needed was a reboot and the reading panes and icons were restored. With the RTM version of CRM 2011 client, the issue is more persistent. Each and every CRM entity appears as if it was a contact, presented in a business card layout that only contains the entity primary field (name) and not any other data. Click the image below to see an example of the account record shown as a business card with the contact icon.

Update Nov 10th 2011: Thanks to Wimco’s post on Dynamics CRM Forums, I was finally able to fix the reading pane layout problem on my PC. I simply uninstalled the Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies, after which I also applied the latest Update Rollup package and voilá: the reading pane now shows the fields specific to each entity.

While the first slide deck was focused on how the new CRM 2011 features look like from the system end-user perspective, this time I have taken a look at the toolset available for system customizer, administrator or solution developer. Since I’m not a programmer, I’ll gladly skip the detailed discussion about CRM 2011 platform SDK enhancements (like WCF, OData, REST, LINQ and other hot acronyms) and leave them to the experts. Instead I’ve tried to cover featues that will have an effect on how to design and plan your CRM implementation or custom solution. Just like before, there are plenty of screenshots included, so that also users without access to a CRM 2011 Beta environment can preview how the features appear in the UI.

The topics included in my presentation are as follows:

• Customization menus
• UI customization options
• Solution management
• Web resources
• Processes (workflows and Dialogs)
• Custom activities
• Queue enhancements
• Multiple forms per entity
• Security features
• Cloud services (CRM Online, Dynamics Marketplace, Azure AppFabric)
• Upgrading from CRM 4.0
• What’s not there in CRM 2011

To summarize my core message after giving this presentation, the following would be my key takeaways from the slides:

• Solutions and web resources will challenge both how you’ve built your CRM enhancements and how you have managed them, so invest time in planning your own processes before rushing into the operational tasks
• Process automation / work management functionality is becoming an increasingly integrated part of the Dynamics CRM story and 2011 offers great improvements on that front, but remember that it’s still a work in progress area in many ways
• You can’t escape the cloud, no matter which deployment model you or your customers are currently using, so at least familiarise yourself with what’s out there
• Despite of the 500 new features in CRM 2011, there’s still plenty of room for add-ons and tweaks. The more the platform expands, the more we’ll demand from it

That’s all the slides I have for now, but I’m sure there will continue to be lots of interesting features discovered and news items to discuss before Dynamics CRM 2011 comes out in January (RTW) / March (RTM) next year. I recommend you to keep an eye on the #CRM2011 hashtag on Twitter to follow the community buzz around the upcoming release.

The good news is: you absolutely can! The bad news? It requires a bit of XML editing. Now don’t go running away all scared, because it doesn’t take a .NET developer to perform some basic tweaks into the CRM 2011 charts. Heck, even I was able to figure it out after an hour of surfing around the documentation and blog posts on Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET 4.

In this quick example I will take the a custom chart I built in the solution customization UI for CRM 2011 and inject some more parameters into it to enhance the presentation. The first thing we’ll need to do is select the chart you want to modify in CRM and click Export Chart to grab the XML definition for the chart.

Open the XML file in the editor of your choice and have a look at the structure. Inside the <presentationdescription> tag you’ll find details about the <Chart> in question. What we’ll want to do in this example is insert more attributes inside the <ChartArea> tags. From MSDN Library we can find the following piece of information:

The Chart control supports 3D charts. To use 3D charts, set the respective chart area’s Area3DStyle.Enable3D property to True.

So, we know we’ll want to have the <Area3DStyle> tag in there with some parameters. In my chart we can apply the following addition into the chart definition XML:

<ChartAreas>
<ChartArea BorderColor=”White” BorderDashStyle=”Solid”>
<AxisY IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
<MajorGrid LineColor=”239, 242, 246″ />
<LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
</AxisY>
<AxisX IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
<MajorGrid Enabled=”False” />
<MajorTickMark Enabled=”False” />
<LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
</AxisX>
<Area3DStyle Enable3D=”True” LightStyle=”Realistic” WallWidth=”5″ IsRightAngleAxes=”true” />
</ChartArea>

Once we save the XML file and import it into a new CRM chart, the results will be the following:

There you go, that’s all there’s to it. Or more specifically, that’s just the beginning of what the visualizations in Dynamics CRM 2011 are capable of. Have a look at the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2010 on articles about using Chart Controls or browse the Chart Controls for .NET Framework forum for questions and answers on how to work with the charts available in CRM 2011. Downloading the Sample Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls might also be a good place to start.

What’s my answer then? Well, I’m a PowerPoint guy who likes to present his thoughts in slides, so this was the obvious format for me to start compiling my introductory materials to the brave new world that awaits for us when Microsof Dynamics CRM 2011 becomes available in a few months time. Slides are great for capturing screenshots of the UI and annotating them with callouts, so that’s been my main focus in the presentation; giving a clear view of the new features in a logical order.

These 74 slides are actually just Part 1 of the deck I’ve been building. There’s simply way too much great new stuff (or limitations to be aware of) in Dynamics CRM 2011 to make a very brief introduction, so please bear with me while I walk you through the application.

Part 1 is titled “end-user tools and features” and it’s split into the following topics:

• End-user tools and UI enhancements
• Outlook client
• Form customization options
• Auditing
• Connections
• SharePoint integration
• Visualizations
• Goals

As you may have guessed already, the second part of the CRM 2011 Walkthrough (that’s still in the making) is going to focus more on behind the scenes changes that will be of interest to consultants and developers who are managing and building CRM/XRM solutions on top of the platform. The planned contents for part 2 is:

• Customization menus
• UI customization options
• Solution management
• Web resources
• Processes (workflows)
• Custom activities
• Queue enhancements
• Multiple forms per entity
• Security features

Stay tuned for updates and let me know if there’s any specific features in CRM 2011 that you would like to see in my slides.

(Update: you can now find the part 2 slides in the following blog post: Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough Part 2: another 100+ slides of new features)

The Ribbon

Some love it, some hate it, but here it is anyway! In an application like CRM where the actions one can perform on a record tend to keep on growing over time as more and more customizations and integrations are applied to the system, the context sensitive ribbon with it’s graphical icons is much more important than in traditional Office apps. While not everyone is happy that CRM 2011 has lost form its tabs after the entity form was changed into one long page with sections, the tabs have infact found a new home on the ribbon. With this UI shift in mind, it’s easy to see why having two alternative levels of tabs was not really an option from usability perspective. In this new fluid ‘n flat world of CRM 2011 the custom tabs on the ribbon will offer a great customization point to insert shortcuts and custom actions that will help the user navigate inside the application.

There are already many nice shortcuts included in the default UI to reduce the number of clicks, which has previously been a common complaint from Dynamics CRM users. One convenient new feature is the Recently Visited button on the CRM main window, which shows a list of previously opened items and lets you pin down the favourite links that are most frequently accessed.

The ease of customization

Usability is a big factor not just for the system end users but also administrators, developers and any type of consultant that needs to spend a significant share of his working day interacting with the application. Back in the previous versions of CRM the number of clicking you were required to do in modifying customizations and various system settings was infuriating at times. I’m very glad to see that the UI enhancements in CRM 2011 have also been extended to the “engine room”.

For starters, there is now a Customize tab on each entity’s ribbon toolbar. What this means is you can proceed from the live CRM record window directly into the customization settings, significantly reducing the barrier of fixing issues noticed on the form while working with the data. In fact, changing the forms and schema is now so fast that setting up a policy for system configuration change management becomes all the more important, not to let things get out of hand with rogue customizations breaking scripts and integrations.

Once on the form designer, you’ll notice the UI also presents a list of available, unused fields on the left. Most importantly, form designing now takes place in a drag & drop environment! Simpy select a new field from the field explorer list and drop it on the intended location on the entity form:

Beautiful! Another cool time saver is the fact that you can now add new attributes while designing the form, just by clicking “New” on the field explorer. Notice also the new header section on each form (yes, there’s a footer as well).

From Workflows to Processes

The term “workflow” does not have the same role as it used to, since from CRM 2011 onwards well be dealing with processes instead. Don’t worry, under the hood everything is still built on the familiar Windows Workflow Foundation (version 4). Now also XAML or “no-code” workflows will be supported through Visual Studio Workflow Designer as the graphical authoring tool, but these will not be editable through the default CRM Process Designer interface.

There are two categories of processes in the 2011 world: workflows (yes, the term is still there) and dialogs. For the end user these will be visible in the UI under the Processes menu, which replaces the previous Workflows menu. I kind of prefer the new naming policy, since the term “workflow” has often seemed to cause a bit of confusion when training the end users to work with the system. Now we can talk with pure business terms like “new customer product delivery process” instead of making everyone think about workflow diagrams and all the complexity involved in automating business data flow inside information systems. Just run the process.

Dialogs

This particular feature was always something that intrigued me ever since I saw the Metro Program slides for CRM “5″. Previously referred to as “UI Scripts”, they are basically a way to manage complex processes within the CRM user interface.

Dialogs are interactive workflows that run synchronously as a result of the user explicitly executing them. The dialog page pops up, presenting predefined prompts and response fields, which can be used for guiding the CRM user to step through a sequence of data entry tasks. Using query conditions the dialog process can be altered on the fly by evaluating data already entered and presenting different dialog pages as the process moves further.

Based on the demo video available on the CRM 2011 Beta site, the default method of triggering a process for a record seemed unintuitive . A common customization item could therefore be to link the process start action behind more obvious and informative Ribbon toolbar buttons, by calling the dialog URL with DialogID and EntityObjectID dynamically inserted. Another obvious need would be to have the process window pop up automatically when a create form is opened for a new record, thus providing a structured way to guide the user through filling the fields while displaying  relevant instructions.

Identifying the suitable use cases for this new feature will require playing around with the system, which is why I’m anxiously waiting to get my hands on a Beta environment right now (well, just one of the reasons).

Auditing

There’s a great FAQ already posted on the PowerObjects blog about the new auditing feature in CRM 2011. Instead of describing it any further here, I urge you to check out the link.

Auditing combined with the new field level security functionality are definitely the type of core features that any credible CRM platform should not be lacking. From what I’ve seen, their implementation in CRM 2011 looks to address the common use cases quite well, so this release should move a few very imporant feature bullets in the “Can your CRM do this?” comparison table from the previous column of “well, there’s a workaround…” to a firm “yes, it can“.

Team ownership

Even though the business unit hierarchy allows for a robust model of managing CRM user rights, the reality is that strict hierarchies do not represent the modern organizations too well. Knowledge work is all about collaboration and this type of work commonly takes place across organizational silos, not inside them. Therefore it is crucial that the CRM platform is able to facilitate rights management in scenarios where the are multiple dimentions that affect the visibility of information, not just a top-down hierarchy.

We’ve had the concept of teams in Dynamics CRM already since the time when the whole “Microsoft Dynamics” brand didn’t even exist yet. However, in CRM 2011 there are enhancements that can possibly revitalize the feature and give it a new life. First of all, teams can now be assigned ownership of records. Similarly, teams can be assigned security roles to allow privileges to records. As all the access right checks are now additive, this model allows a user to have rights to data outside the default privileges of his or her business unit.

Role based forms

Going deeper in customizing the CRM experience per each users, not just CRM organization, the new role based forms will give a whole new dimension of personalization options. In the previous CRM versions, didn’t you just hate it when the Forms and Views list in the entity customization menu always just displayed the single default application form alongside all the views, giving an indication that “yes, in theory we could allow the creation of new forms” yet never delivering on that promise? Well, now you can create them as much as you like, so the victory is ours!

If all users will no longer see the same entity form, then we’ll of course have more things to manage in the system, by controlling who is presented which form. In CRM 2011 each entity must have a single form defined as the fallback form. Any additional forms you create will need to have the intended target audience specified through security roles. As it is of course possible that a single user will have multiple secruity roles that would allow displaying a number of different forms, the particular form to be displayed by the application is determined through form order variables. Starting from the top, the system will work through the list of available forms in order of priority, and if no matches are found in the roles, the fallback form will be presented.

Remembering that forms can now also contain web resources, such as HTML, images or SilverLight components, the UI can truly be personalized for different user groups in a managed way. You’ll just need to keep in mind who sees what form, when working with your System Admin role that may present the application quite differently than how the end users see it.

Goal management

This one was a total surprise to me, as I don’t recall seeing references to the feature in any pre-release materials. Or maybe I had simply ignored it while focusing on more exciting areas of the application. Anyway, we will now have goal management in CRM 2011. Sales quotas were never such a popular feature in 3.0 or 4.0, but the new goals feature appears to offer a lot more functionality for defining complex real-life goal scenarios into CRM, so perhaps this will re-ignite the interest towards the concept.

Charts and Dashboards

Data visualization is now a native part of CRM, not something you necessarily need to use SQL Server Reporting Services for anymore. Any grid view can be accompanied by a chart that follows the view criteria definitions. Out-of-the-box charts include column, bar, line, pie and funnel. More can be added through custom development with Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

You’re not limited to only showing the charts in grids, as the new Dashboard functionality allows you to combine a multitude of charts on a single page with various layout options. Also keep in mind that a dashboard does not need to consist of charts, as also grids, iFrames and the new Web Resources are supported elements. Dashboards can therefore used also for creating console views of detail data and interfaces to other web based services. Whether there is support for passing parameters from one component to another withing the dashboards is something to be verified.

Solution management

This will surely become a favourite topic for many of the upcoming blog posts regarding customizing and developing for CRM 2011. Solutions, in short, are packages of schema, UI, code, template and settings definitions that are used for delivering and managing a particular business functionality into a Dynamics CRM organization. Think of them as apps that you can install on your CRM. Even if you are just performing your everyday customization tweaks like updating lists of attribute values, you are working with a solution. The choice is yours on whether these changes are performed on the Default Solution that is available in all CRM instances, or if you want to package them into a custom solution instead and manage them as a separate layer above the default solution.

You have Unmanaged Solutions and Managed Solutions. By default every solution you create is Unmanaged, but upon exporting it you have the option to lock it down, i.e. turn it into Managed. These can be added to or removed from a CRM organization and the platform will take care of updating the components like entities and workflows respectively. However, the order in which the solutions are added does make a difference in cases where customizations are addressing the same attribute, for example. Also, direct modifications to the Default Solution will remain supported like in 4.0.

Despite of the clear benefits in having solution layers available in Dynamics CRM, I’ve got a feeling that there’s going to be a learning curve in adopting them and formulating the best practices for solution management process. In terms of the upcoming Dynamics Marketplace launch, the solutions are a must, so I’m sure everyone will be encourage to work towards seamless installation and co-existence of ISV solution packages.

Conclusions

All in all, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will contain a very impressive amount of new features and enhancements of the existing ones. I’ve only touched on some of them and feel like I’m already running out of breath when describing them. Combine all this with the big shift that is coming through CRM Online: availability of the on-premises features (well, most of them) as a cloud hosted version sold in 40 different markets. Looks to me like we’ll have some mighty interesting times ahead in the world of CRM during the next few months.

I’ll end this post with a few essential CRM 2011 links:

• CRM 2011 Beta landing page (videos)
• Download the CRM 2011 beta bits for installation
• CRM 2011 Beta forum

So much for the branding. Underneath it all we will have the “CRM5″ engine evolving from CRM 4.0, with quite a few important improvements on how the application can be utilized as a platform for developing your own custom applications, a.k.a. the XRM mantra that Microsoft has been heavily promoting and showcasing between the product version releases. While this side of the coin will surely play an important part in gradually turning Dynamics CRM into part of the core enterprise infrastructure like SharePoint has become, the first thing most new users will see from the application will still be the Outlook client and traditional customer data management functionality. Which is why there have been some big investments from the Redmond boys on developing that side of the CRM product, as you can see from the picture below.

Instead of merely wrapping the web client page into an Outlook frame, the new rich client interface introduces whole new components that attempt to follow the faimilar Outlook UI experience. Tabs will help in keeping the number of pop-up windows under control while the preview pane we’ve learned to take for granted in processing our email inboxes is now also available in the scope of CRM entity forms. Since Dynamics CRM 2011 now comes with the ribbon interface like most other MS products, the CRM functionality now blends into the Outlook toolbar and gets presented in all its context sensitive glory. I myself have always preferred to use CRM through the web client, since the Outlook version has faded away some of the native CRM application navigation in order to remain Outlook-ish. With the new 2011 version, it looks like there will actually be better functionality (and hopefully usability as well) available through the rich Outlook client, which may make the web client look thin in comparison. Now, this of course raises the question that will any of these rich UI features be available if you stick to Office 2007 or do they require Outlook 2010? Remains to be seen.

Among the new features there is the ability to connect to more than one CRM organization through a single Outlook client. In my opinion this has always been one of the key shortcomings of the XRM offering from Dynamics CRM. Although multi-tenancy would allow you to easily create multiple different organizations on the same application server and leverage CRM as a framework for building non-CRM applications, the curse of a default organization for the Outlook users has meant that one major selling point of the core CRM product, i.e. familiar Outlook experience, has been somewhat paralyzed in the XRM scenarios. I’m not sure whether email tracking to multiple organizations is among the list of supported features, though, so some barriers may still remain on the road towards a ubiquitous “set regarding” button for all the activities encountered during the office hours of a knowledge worker.

Another common integration point after the Exchange/OCS messaging infrastructure is of course SharePoint for document management, which is also becoming a native part of Dynamics CRM 2011. The OOB functionality is unlikely to offer much glamour over the previous custom integrations of showing document libraries in an iFrame. The big deal would however be in synchronizing the user rights across the CRM and SharePoint realms, which is where I would put my money on MS to deliver a solution. What I would also like to see offered is a native integration to the FAST based search, thus providing a more Google like search experience for CRM users, but since SharePoint 2010 is highly unlikely be a system requirement for CRM 2011 implementation, this will surely remain a custom solution to be offered by the Dynamics CRM implementation partners.

The release of SQL Server 2008 R2 already introduced maps and geospatial visualizations into the Reporting Services (SSRS) feature set. With Dynamics CRM 2011 investing heavily on data visualization and built-in dashboards, perhaps we will finally get an easy way to map address attributes from CRM entities into a nice looking view like the one below. Or then maybe it will still require populating some additional coordinate data onto the records and paying for Bing API usage. Time will tell (or some fellow bloggers?).

Going beyond what CRM offers out-of-the-box has always been what really makes the product so intriguing. There are countless ISV’s and individual developers out there who have built tools, enhancements or full-blown service integrations on Dynamics CRM.  Keeping track of the offering as a CRM end user or gaining visibility for your product as a service provider has not been so straightforward, due to the lack of a clear forum for these two parties to meet (here’s my personal link list on the topic). If both the user and the partner working on a CRM implementation project are small companies, exploring the world of ISV’s for solutions that would fit an identified need may just be too much of a hassle to be undertaken when there are more than enough customizations and plug-ins to worry about. This is where a simple solution could potentially unlock a big new market and that is what the newly announced Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is going to attempt when it is launched in September 2010.

Initially the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace looks to provide the existing catalogue of products from the Microsoft Dynamics Solution Finder. Also it will be built on the existing Microsoft Pinpoint platform. This combination in itself will not yet provide a huge leap forward in streamlining solution discovery and distribution, but at least it’s a start. Later on the Marketplace is promised to offer proper e-commerce functionality, thus allowing the exchange of money like a true marketplace ought to. In Dynamics CRM 2011 the Marketplace will be an integrated part of the application (probably á la Resource Center introduced in CRM 4.0), which will certainly help in bringing down the barriers to commercial transactions taking place in the ecosystem. The biggest dependency to Dynamics CRM 2011 in my opinion will be the upcoming solution management functionality, as this promises to deliver a controllable environment for the service providers to package their applications and not having to invest unfeasible amounts of support resources into ensuring whether the solutions will fit the unique CRM puzzle of each and every customer that wants to install it.

Building a marketplace is relatively easy, but getting it to work for the benefit of all interest groups (sellers, buyers and the platform provider) can be very tricky. Just because Apple has done such a phenomenal job on this front and built a whole new value adding layer around their core product experience with the help of 3rd party developers doesn’t mean that any app store would automatically be a success. Nokia, the previous leader in the smartphone field had launched their own Software Market around 10 years ago, failing to get much traction on the concept, and finding itself still struggling today, chasing Apple with a not so appealing concept called Ovi Store. Or have a look at the Windows Mobile / Windows Phone Marketplace and compare that to what Apple and Android have. Get the picture? The moral of the story is that you need so much more around the Marketplace concept than just a pretty site with some links to random products you have on sale. App stores only work when they are truly designed to serve the application ecosystem, not just to make money from the service or use the partners as a showcase for your own offering. Solve a real problem first, then watch the revenue streams accumulate later as a result of the value that you injected into the process first. Here’s hoping that Microsoft can build a serious contender for Salesforce.com AppExchange and the likes, as this will surely be one of the key success factors in the brave new world where rigid business applications are transforming into flexible services that the customers assemble into customized solution packages on-demand, pay-as-you-go.

So what’s up with the cloud then? Well, the jokes about running applications in your very own cloud hosted on the server hidden in the closet have just become a tad less funny, as Microsoft went and announced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Bundled with Windows Azure, SQL Azure and some other goodies, this will basically be a cloud-in-a-box type of a solution, which is trying to bridge the gap between on-premises and online. The underlying strategy behind the Azure appliance will surely be speculated from a plentitude of different angles, but my take on this is that it’s a one big step on the path towards Azure and the cloud becoming the default platform rather than the option. Companies who don’t want to or aren’t allowed to move their applications to CRM Online will be offered the possibility of replicating the Azure services inside their own (or hosted) server room. Once on Azure, the step towards handing it all over to Microsoft’s cloud will be not that far away anymore. By giving a clear message that Microsoft is focusing “all in” on the cloud, Steve Ballmer is also saying that the investments to their remaining traditional applications development will be steadily decreasing. You will continue to have the power of choice, but choosing to opt out from the cloud will just become more and more difficult to justify.

On the technical side, CRM 5 will be running natively on .NET Framework 4.0, which means it will be riding on the wave of the latest .NET version released, unlike CRM 3.0 or 4.0. In the presentations there were talks about WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), .NET RIA Services, system types and all kinds of developer lingo that goes way above my head. There’s a great summary article here by Marco Amoedo.

Now, let’s move on to the CRM application itself.

Basic UI

We’ve all seen the upcoming ribbon UI in CRM5 already, so that wasn’t big news. Looking at the start page ribbon content, there’s a button called “Add connection”, which hopefully is about the creation of ad-hoc relationships between any entities, but none of that was shown in the session. Another interesting thing was the “Get started with accounts” instructions pane. That might be just a feature of CRM Online, which was used for the demo, but I sure would welcome a better way to provide customized instruction links to users right within the CRM UI.

More of the same here under the Service menu. The out-of-the-box views don’t seem to have evolved, but it would be interesting to see what’s behind that Views tab on the top. The order of the Quick Find box and the views dropdown menu was somehow messed in this early version of CRM5.

On the entity form, things look kind of familiar, even though form tabs have now been converted into sections and we only have one looooong form instead. I still have mixed feelings about this approach, but perhaps removing one navigation area requiring end user focus and consolidating that into the left hand side menu turns out to be a good compromise, now that we have a busy ribbon on top of every form. As promised earlier, there’s now a native way to present related entity grids on the form without any iFrame magic, but I still didn’t see an option for configuring or filtering the related entity view. I hope there are customization points for it.

Data visualization

Dashboards will finally be a native feature of all CRM editions, so there’s a dedicated menu for them, in addition to the reports list. The Silverlight controls in the charts allow dynamic filtering and other nice user interaction with the data, but we didn’t get to see how you actually modify or build a dashboard. The message seemed to be that these are more intended for getting the CRM users started on looking at their data, but any complex analysis should be done elsewhere. They could therefore be just another way to present the charting feature that appears on all of the entity ribbons in CRM5.

The charting tab displays a set of buttons that we didn’t see in action in the PDC sessions. Only couple of views with the Bing Maps integration were flicked through, so I assume the charts are still very much work in progress.

There was one cool demo with service requests and Bing Maps, which allowed you to merge the open cases from within a certain geographical area into one case record. Since case merging in general is a useful feature that we’ve previously had to do with custom code, I hope there would be some out-of-the-box tools in CRM5 for this (not asking for whole the map integration, you can keep that for the demos, thanks).

Customization and settings

Moving to the sysadmin side of the UI, the customizations menu now presents us with some interesting options:

• Find Customizations. Probably some link to an MS marketplace, aimed at bringing the ISV solution ecosystem closer to the CRM users. Didn’t see this one.
• Customize the System. The traditional customize menu, with a new UI (see below for more)
• Publishers. Didn’t quite catch the full concept behind this one, probably used for subscribing to cloud based services from within your on-premises CRM5.
• Solutions. The big new concept in CRM5.
• Download Web Service Description Files. Why the WSDL download is a separate menu option, remains to be seen.

If we first look at the traditional Customize The System menu, there’s a very welcome change of presenting all the entities and their related components in a tree hierarchy, instead of the popup hell that used to be found under the customization menu. Looks like an immediate productivity booster to me, but just make sure we can expand that tree frame to see the full entity names, please.

When editing an entity attribute, we see a few new things. First, there’s an option to enable the auditing feature. Apparently you first specify it on an entity level, then select which attributes to audit, so looks like it might offer some useful data for the end users (who changed the account name etc.). The second thing is the introduction of the Options Set concept. This will effectively be a way to define global picklists, which share the list of values across entities.

Solutions

The concept of solution management was introduced in the session “Managing the Solution Lifecycle for xRM Applications”, so I recommend you watch the 45 minute video here if you’re interested in the topic. In short, the ability to package the customizations, plugins, workflows and other items related to a custom solution into a single zip file and then just import that into your CRM instance should first of all lower the barrier for installing new pieces into your CRM puzzle. More importantly, the system will try to manage the coexistence of multiple solutions from multiple vendors in the customer’s customized CRM environment, which is by no means a minor little task. How well the system handles the clashes in real life remains to be seen, but at least there will now be common procedures and tools that you can rightfully expect the vendors to use.

As a result of the solution management concept, the actual “final” customizations of a CRM instance will now be a calculated Default Solution. When you click “Export”, this is produced in real time  from all the various custom and default components found from the system. Makes sense to me, but how the order and priority of conflicting customizations is managed when individual solution versions are upgraded is something that’s going to take a while to get my head around at.

Building a solution is done right from the customization UI, where you select which components belong to your solution. In this example screenshot, after adding the account entity into the solution, the system is notifying that there are a number of other required components that are missing from the solution. CRM5 looks to introduce a more complete layer of dependency management into sytem customizations. In a relationship management system where everything can be related to almost anything, this kind of a control point does sound sensible, so let’s hope that the result will be something useful for the day-to-day application mangement tasks.

Cloud Architecture

While there isn’t a “screenshot” you can take of the cloud, I thought I’d include this one slide from the “Developing xRM Solutions using Windows Azure” session (view the recording here), just to wrap things up.

Microsoft’s vision of how the Azure cloud can serve the CRM/xRM market is not limited to just subscribing to 3rd party applications from the cloud and integrating them with your on-premise CRM server. They also showed a concept where the Azure layer would act as a kind of load balancing unit between the customer facing services and the back-end CRM. The Azure Web Role would collect all the incoming transactions, hand them over to the Worker Role, which then delivers them to CRM at a rate which the server can tolerate. The whole AppFabric Service Bus (whatever the name will end up to be) is also marketed as a convenient way to talk to applications behind the corporate firewall.

All of this fits nicely with Microsoft’s idea of Software plus Service, which really has to be a viable concept for businesses, if CRM5 is to be able to compete head to head with the full SaaS CRM vendors. Most of the actual new business features for MS CRM will increasingly come from ISV’s delivering their solutions through the cloud, not in the CRM software version upgrades themselves, so Microsoft needs to make sure that CRM5 acts as a pathway to these new services, not as an obstacle.

(Edit: The new version has now been branded Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, as announced at the WPC 2010 on July 12th. See my blog post on the new 2011 version).