The First Looks at CRM 4.0

The first reviews of Dynamics CRM 4.0 "Titan" are coming in, and they are good.

"With many of the serious limitations of version 3.0 now gone, I think Microsoft has a world-beating product here," says Tim Long, a developer, on his Electric Dreams blog.

He is especially excited about the new deletions-detection functionality. Instead of just warning users in advance when a duplicate name might be entered, it provides its warnings at various key points, such as when mass emails are being prepared. Users "can then review and merge or delete duplicate entries," he says.

He also loves the way Titan handles "many-to-many relationships." As an example, he says, "consider that you want to track your contacts' hobbies. So you create a list of possible hobbies, say Golf, Astronomy, Power-Kiting, Skiing, etc. Now in your contact details, you can add a list of hobbies that the person enjoys. You can open a contact and view the list of hobbies or you can open a hobby and see which of your contacts likes that activity. You could also search for contacts who like Golf and Skiing, for example. In CRM 3.0, this was difficult or impossible to do."

The blog, Tidbits on Microsoft CRM, lists 25 "oh cools," including a new Report Wizard that enables users "to extract all the data they want to extract in the way they want to extract it," along with diagnosis and process monitoring, embedded auto-complete on numerous fields, web-based mail merge, and diagnosis and process monitoring.