Seeking The Future of Dynamics CRM: Microsoft Asks the Community

As Microsoft gears up for Convergence 2011 in Atlanta, the Dynamics CRM team wants to hear what's on the minds of partners, end users, developers, and business decision makers in terms of the product's future.

To that end, the CRM Research and Development team will be hosting a series of discussion groups and forward-looking research sessions between Sunday, April 10 and Wednesday, April 13 at the Atlanta Convention Center that they call the "Concept Box".

If you've wondered what the Dynamics CRM team is planning for, the topics of these small - and NDA-protected - sessions should give a pretty good idea, at least in general terms.

The Dynamics CRM team will present sketches and ideas designed to improve the future Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For example, there will a session dedicated to reviewing and critiquing user interface experiences for seeing business contact feeds, social graphs for business connections, and sharing business contact information with colleagues.

Another session will focus on sales force automation, which Microsoft says will grow best when a company's R&D teams listens to sales, understands its experiences, focuses on its scenarios, discusses its current thinking with sales and appreciates its feedback.

The Dynamics CRM team will also be discussing the Agent Desktop feature that's designed to increase customer agent effectiveness by unifying data and legacy applications while guiding agents through their workflows. These sessions will also review of the integrated Lync experience designed to provide customer care agents with contextual collaboration.

Microsoft also wants to hear whether on-premise customers and hosting partners are interested in upgrading to the cloud. The wants to include customers and partners as it considers the opportunities, approaches, ...