Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as Office 365 Add-On, AX RapidStart Services in Q4 2011

With the Q4 2011 service update, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be offered as an add-on to Office 365 customers, Microsoft's Kirill Tatarinov announced Tuesday at Worldwide Partner Conference 2011. Dynamics CRM Online will become an optional add-on for customers and becomes part of the same billing and provisioning agent as Office 365.

And while no Dynamics ERP products are yet available on Windows Azure (the next release of Dynamics NAV is planned to be the first in 2012), Tatarinov managed an somewhat Azure-related announcement in the Dynamics ERP group's new RapidStart Services for Dynamics ERP, an Azure-based service planned for release around the same time as Dynamics AX 2012 in the later part of 2011.  The service will "help partners deploy cloud-based systems quickly" by streamlining many of the common areas of configuration and setup of Dynamics AX and delivering those configurations to the system in a more accelerated way.

Microsoft has plans to deploy RapidStart Services beyond Dynamics AX at a later time, officials confirmed.

Other improvements in the upcoming fourth quarter service update to Dynamics CRM Online include improvements in enterprise capabilities like security and federated identity, as well as additions in social capabilities - in a way that improves productivity, not "useless chat" as Tatarinov characterized it -along with better disaster recovery and more industry-specific capabilities.

While Tatarinov didn't elaborate on what he considers useless chat (presumably Salesforce's Chatter), he handed off his presentation to Dynamics CRM group product manager Varun Krishna, who kicked off a CRM Online-plus-Office 365 demonstration with a look at a CRM mobile application with social feeds, including streams of chat and data from people and Dynamics CRM records, as well as enterprise chat with federated authentication as a sales rep initiated an instant messenger chat from a CRM account ...