Why Polaris is the Windows 8 of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The latest product roadmap and statement of direction for Microsoft Dynamics CRM announced last fall gave us a taste of what the future user experience of CRM would look like. As the Polaris release has now been rolled out to several CRM Online customers and new trial organizations have been provisioned, we now have the opportunity to explore this next generation CRM UI in practice, before it becomes available for all deployment models in the next release called Orion.

When getting familiar with the new version of CRM Online myself, I came across several moments that resembled the experiences I'd had with another recent Microsoft product update: Windows 8. While underneath it was still the familiar application (OS) I had been using for years (decades!), on the surface (no, not the Surface) some things had changed quite radically. As a result, I decided to perform a comparison of how these two products are evolving and what kind of impact, both positive and negative, the changes have on the user today.

Let's start with one non-functional aspect: product naming. Yes, the official name for the latest edition of CRM is the "December 2012 Service Update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online", but since 50+ character product names are not all that catchy, I'll keep referring to it by the "Polaris" codename throughout this post. Also Windows 8 has suffered a similar fate when it comes to naming, since the term "Metro" was forcibly removed from Microsoft marketing materials and product documentation right before the new OS went RTM. As a result, very few people know exactly what the modern UI should be officially called, so you'll have to excuse me for sticking to the old terminology there, too.

Moving onto ...