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.

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)

I was lucky to recently get access to a CRM Online development environment, provide to us by CoreMotives as a part of our evaluation use of their Marketing Suite. Here are some of my initial impressions on the differences and similarities between Dynamics CRM Online and the good ol’ on-premises Dynamics CRM.

Outlook client setup

Since my work laptop’s Outlook is connected to a production CRM instance, I decided to try the CRM Online with my home PC. The installation file download took a while, but soon we were on our way.

I decided to skip the SQL Server installation to speed things up and settle for the online-only version. After all the patches had been applied, I was greeted with a login window for the Outlook client.

From here onwards everything seemed to work just like in the familiar on-premises CRM world. Perhaps even a bit too closely, as the first prompt that greeted me when accessing CRM Online was a notice about scheduled maintenance downtime later on the same day.

Oh well, I guess the cloud needs some regualr reboots, just like any Windows machine.

CRM Online user inteface

Like with the Outlook client installation, most things look very familiar inside the CRM Online UI. The home page does however present some new features to us.

CRM Online contains a feature called Get Started Panes, which provide contextual information at the top of the main CRM window entity screens. By default these contain categorized instructions on common tasks a user might want to perform when working with e.g. accounts or opportunities.

What’s really nice about this feature is that it provides an additional customization point where you can inject your own help menus into the Get Started pane. See the SDK for more information on how you can use the GetStartedPanePath and other variables to customize the panes through Sitemap XML. Looking forward to having something similar in the on-premises CRM, at least by the time CRM 5.0 is released, since I can think of many cases where providing company-specific process instructions right inside the CRM UI would be very practical.

Another visible new feature is of course the dashboard style charts that are presented at the CRM Online home screen. Although not too fancy in their appearance or feature set, it’s nevertheless a nice addition to the product, making basic data visualizations something that can grab the attention of the CRM end-user more easily, maybe even driving him or her to have a closer look at the actual reports menu. The charts have a few settings available for the user to customize to his liking, including record type, selected view and the type of chart.

For those users who need to rely on CRM Online as their only system for reporting on customer data, things are still not so great, as using SQL Server Reporting Services for building custom reports is not an option. Well, there are of course ways to arrange it, as outlined in this post on the Dynamics CRM Team blog recently, but exporting offline data snapshots might not sound appealing to all users.

Internet Lead Capture

One additional marketing feature not available outside CRM Online is the Internet Lead Capture menu.

Basically what Microsoft does is they offer to host landing pages or online forms that feed data to your CRM Online database. While this sounds like a nice idea, I’m not too sure how many companies would in practice be willing to utilize a hosted contact form page that exists outside their website (you can find some live pages by searching for “dynamicssite.com”). For a quick’n'dirty landing page for some specific campaign this might be an option worth considering. The editor makes creating integrated forms a fairly easy task, so playing around with the option is a fun little exercise.

I won’t go further into details, as the lead capture form has been covered with many screenshots in this blog post by MS. One thing to note is that the Internet Leads are stored into a separate entity from the regular Leads, thus allowing you to filter out spam messages before assigning the data to your sales reps. Importing data from external lists collected from other sources into the Internet Lead entity is supported through a wizard.

Mobile Express

Ok, this is not a feature limited to only CRM Online, but since I hadn’t previously had the chance to use a CRM server that could be accessed directly through the web, I wanted to test how the Mobile Express client has evolved since the days of 3.0.

What’s the verdict? Well, let’s just say that it’s “a nice try” and better than nothing, but there’s still a long and winding road for Microsoft to travel, if they intend to reach a mobile user experience that would somehow be at least close to what is delivered through the web and Outlook clients. The whole process was full of pitfalls that shouldn’t really exist: from trying to desperately log into the service with a Windows Mobile phone (HTC Touch Pro2, with Opera as the default browser), fighting with the useless default customization configurations, to the point of eventually realizing how the relational data model of CRM is only partially supported in Mobile Express. There could be some specific use cases where the mobile client would serve its purpose, but as a CRM system admin I might hesitate on promoting these to the CRM users who don’t understand the limitations.

Conclusions

The overall impression from Dynamics CRM Online is definitely a positive one. It’s not a lite version of CRM, it’s the real thing, with only a few differences and some limitations that you need to be aware of. Combining the ease of deployment with the integration possibilities gives a very interesting value proposition for the product.

During my test usage, the response times from the CRM Online server were surprisingly decent, compared to using one of our own on-premises CRM server in US through a web client from Finland. With a proper roll-out to international markets and the enhanced solution management functionality promised in CRM 5.0, I’m sure the service can become a very viable option for companies of all size.

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).