Dynamics CRM 4.0 Promises Easier Company-Wide Links

The big promise of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, being released in stages during this last half of 2007, lies in allowing stronger links to company-wide data than previous versions.

That was the message in a demo provided by Dynamics CRM general manager Brad Wilson at Convergence in Copenhagen. Here are three ways he said it will fulfill that promise:

1. The CRM Deployment Manager. It's "one of the big new things that we have in the release now with multi-tenancy, which allows either a large organization to have multiple groups in the company provisioned as separate CRM instances, or it also allows our partners to offer very scalable, very economic hosted, on-demand services for our customers." With Deployment Manager, "I could add a new organization if I wanted to," like a small business unit.

2. International friendliness. A corporation with overseas units can easily include them because, "We've added some powerful new multi-language and multi-currency capabilities here." In his demo, he added a unit from Denmark, and picked the Danish Krone as the currency.

3. SharePoint compatibility. CRM 4.0 allows users to "provision a SharePoint site for collaboration around this. In this case we're showing off both SharePoint inside of CRM, surfacing lists and documents and things you have to do on the opportunity." Wilson credits "SharePoint's handling of unstructured information, and the way that biz apps handle the structured piece, it's a perfect marriage of technology to solve the kinds of problems that our customers are having." Moreover, with CRM 4.0 "you can also connect workflow not just within the business application itself, but across SharePoint into other applications in your organization."

4. Easier access to reports.