Date: 01/11/2007, www.mycustomer.com

What's that coming over the hill? It's Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - primed and ready for an imminent launch. John Stokdyk witnessed a demonstration of the new software at the company's Convergence conference in Copenhagen this week.

The steady drumbeat from Microsoft about its Dynamics CRM 4.0 launch is building towards a crescendo as it readies the new version for a big launch event at the beginning of December, with commercial shipments due to start in late January.

Microsoft Dynamics UK CRM product manger Jason Nash said that pricing for the new version will be announced on 1 December and the company will be working with a small group of "showcase" customer reference sites in the month or so before it goes fully live.

As with version 3.0, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will be available both as a traditional on-premise application and as a web-hosted on demand service. One of the key enhancements will be a multi-tenant facility that will make it possible for individual user companies - and hosting partners - to set up different company structures within the system.

Because the online and on-premise versions are based on the same code, customers will be able to choose whichever model best fits their business and IT needs and change the delivery method later if suits them, Nash explained.

In a demonstration of Dynamics CRM 4.0 at the company's Convergence conference in Copenhagen this week Brad Wilson, the general manager of Microsoft CRM took just a couple of minutes to set up a new 20-user company using the application's new Deployment Manager wizard.

Other features he highlighted were closer integration with Microsoft Outlook so that new opportunities were stored in an incoming Outlook folder. From within the e-mail folder, the prospect could be checked against the CRM database, filtered into the correct currency and product group and captured as an opportunity within Microsoft CRM.

Wilson also showed off workflow controls that made it possible to step the opportunity through a series of steps from qualification, to assessing the customer needs and creating a proposal before they reached the closing stage. The plans, proposals and status of the opportunity could also be shared around the organisation using Microsoft's SharePoint web portal system.

Reporting has also been upgraded, so that getting information back out of Dynamics CRM 4.0 can be done using a simple wizard that lets users choose different report formats, or design their own by picking data types from a pull down menu.

Hosting partners

During the demo, Wilson picked a saved view of opportunities closing in the next month, added a new column from the wizard's layout command and specified a grouping for the results and the users with whom the report could be shared via SharePoint.

"This is supposed to be put in the hands of any user in the organisation with no need for reprorting training or resorting to the high priests of data," he said. "In maybe 90 seconds we have generated a report on opportunities, and this is hitting the core CRM database."

To prepare the way for the new release, Microsoft Dynamics announced four new CRM hosting partners at the Convergence conference. One of these partners was Increase CRM, whose director Neil Benson spoke about his involvement with the product at a conference seminar.

"When I saw [Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0] I thought I could build a business around it," said Benson. He set up Increased CRM in July 2006 and before long had taken 40 Microsoft users on to his hosted service from a government department that needed to manage an office move. A year later, Benson has a staff of 10 supporting a couple of hundred users.

Two Increase CRM customers are upgraded as part of the version 4.0 showcase programme. The Mole Clinic, a skin cancer screening service, approached Increase CRM six weeks before it needed to go live with a CRM system to support a new screening service that was going to be offered through the Superdrug chemist chain.

"I met them over lunch on Friday and they went live with Microsoft CRM on the Monday morning," Benson said. "We did some enhancements and six weeks later they went live with 16 nurses. Today 30 nurses have screened 2,000 people, doctors have assessed 500 moles and 120 of them have been excised."

While Microsoft product managers and CRM hosting partners would be expected to talk up the impending product, Brit Insurance head of strategic architecture and change Mike Thomas said his company was very interested in moving to the new version.

The insurer works with a group of third party underwriters and was very keen to get its hands on the workflow tools so that it could better control its approvals process. The new version also boasted better integration with other Microsoft Dynamics products, so that would help link to Brit's Dynamics GP accounting system. That would also open up opportunities to share and control CRM and financial data around the organisation via SharePoint.