Chapter 21. Future Directions for Microsoft CRM

In this chapter

Background

Market Timing

The Next Step—Microsoft Business Framework (MBF)

Short- and Long-Term Direction

Summary

While we'd love to be able to paint a detailed picture of what the future will hold for Microsoft CRM, at the time of this writing future feature sets for Microsoft CRM have not been published. At a high level, we have heard that a version 2.0 will be released in early 2004 and will introduce international versions as well as de-duplication and record merging functionality. These two features have been highly requested additions to the product. We have also heard that a version 3.0 will be released approximately one year after version 2.0 (early 2005) and will include some additional marketing functionality. Since no official product road map has been released, this information may or may not accurately reflect Microsoft's product plans.

One thing we can definitively say, however, is that Microsoft is approaching the CRM market very aggressively. Prior to the product launch, several large-scale marketing campaigns were executed to promote CRM. Each campaign had a close tie-in to the .NET platform on which Microsoft has bet so much. The fact that Microsoft chose CRM as their first .NET application made the tie-in a natural. We'll discuss what that means for the future of Microsoft CRM, but first, let's take a look at some history.