Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Extends Roadmap to 2014 with Focus on Window 8, User Engagement

What does it take to entice a user to embrace CRM, to willfully feed it the sales, service, or marketing data that the organization demands?  The Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team's view, according to their pitch to users at CRMUG Summit this week, is to deliver a more responsive and streamlined user experiences. And coupled with enticing the user, they take the position that what's best for customer outcome may often be to give them software that tells them how they should do their job.

If WPC 2012 marked a new beginning for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product management and marketing teams, then the reset has now cranked into gear as the Polaris release approaches inside of 2012 and three more releases - Orion, Leo, and Vega, await into 2014. And in a new development this week, the MarketingPilot acquisition adds another dimension to future of the product.

Beyond the Polaris release in 2012 and Orion in the second quarter of 2013, a Dynamics CRM management panel featuring Dennis Michalis, Bill Patterson, Craig Dewar, and Eric Boocock, shared two subsequent release names - Leo and Vega.  These releases will take the product into 2014 on an approximately twice yearly release cadence, first in Polaris with cross browser capabilities and a new "Flow" user experience, and then by adding a new HTML5-driven Windows 8 interface for Orion and beyond. The overarching theme of upcoming releases: "helping organizations attract, win, and retain customers through compelling apps, modern user experiences, and an open extensible platform."

"I genuinely care whether you are getting the value you expected out of Dynamics CRM," Michalis, the Dynamics CRM general manager, told the assembled audience ...