Short- and Long-Term Direction
Through our discussions with various product planners and Product Managers, we've been able to arrive at some short- and long-term goals Microsoft has for CRM. As mentioned earlier, at the time of this writing the immediate release feature sets were still being determined and were to be heavily influenced by customer and partner feedback to the first release. Likely to be included in this list are a few feature requests that come up repeatedly:
Internationalization— With the acquisition of Navision, creating an international version of Microsoft CRM that deals with multicurrency, date formats, language, and Navision product integration is the key to tapping into a huge market. This will be highly prioritized.
Data Duplicate Checking— This was one of the most requested early items, so it is likely that it will appear in a Service Pack.
Customer Portal— Among other things, this highly requested component would enable companies to give their customers the ability to submit service cases and update their own profile (their address) over the Web. It has been mentioned that this could make it in an interim release (1.1?) and some partners have already built variations of this functionality.
Survey/Profiles— Survey/Profile data structures enable the compilation of multiple question/response type fields for tracking additional data against CRM objects. Early versions of the CRM database included traces of these structures as they were initially scheduled for inclusion, but later removed.
Chat— Early versions of the database also included references to chat functionality. Microsoft product planners have alluded strongly to their future direction of collaborative CRM.
Schema Extensibility— Version 1.0 enables CRM objects to be extended with custom fields, but new objects cannot be added to the object model. This is a near certainty in version 2.0 because it is critical for true verticalization.
Marketing Functionality— Version 1.0 of Microsoft CRM was marketed as having light marketing functionality. In this was included the lead management, email templates, direct email, and mail merge capabilities. It is rumored that version 3.0 will introduce marketing applications for tracking of specific marketing campaigns and results.
Longer term, the main focuses we heard about were related to:
Business Platform— The common business functionality platform discussed earlier in the chapter.
Collaborative CRM— The ability to offer chat, desktop sharing, cobrowsing, file transfer, and application sharing. With Microsoft's recent acquisition of Placeware, a 20% marketshare holder in the online collaboration market where Webex holds 56% of the market, Microsoft has acquired the tools it needs to fulfill this vision.
Emphasis on the needs of Business Solutions ISV's— The Microsoft strategy continues to move toward dominance in platforms and horizontal technology, while deferring industry specific feature sets and solutions to its business partners. As the concept of the Business Platform develops, Microsoft will continue to build out CRM so that ISV's can tailor it to their clients' needs.