Microsoft CRM 3.0 Late to the Party?

Microsoft Corp. will finally preview at two separate corporate events this week the latest version of its customer relationship management solution, dubbed Microsoft CRM 3.0, featuring new on-demand functionality, enhancements aimed at the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) market as well as a more unified user-interface (UI).

The long-delayed release will introduce on-demand functionality and a new subscription-based licensing model. In doing so, Microsoft is keeping pace with the basic ASP offerings of competitors like Salesforce.com and Siebel. (And soon even SAP.) In addition, Microsoft will add a Small Business Edition to its CRM line but that version is only designed for small businesses that concurrently use Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition also. Pricing will be announced closer to availability.

Microsoft executives believe Microsoft CRM 3.0 addresses three key challenges that determine the success or failure of most CRM initiatives: user adoption, business fit and total cost of ownership (TCO). CRM 3.0 will be previewed at the Tech Ed 2005 Europe conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2005 in Minneapolis.

"Every business - whether large or small - needs a fast, flexible and affordable way to manage and grow their relationships with current and prospective customers," said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM. Wilson, himself, was brought on-board to head up the CRM business earlier this year as a result of the version's well-publicized, well-documented delayed launch.

Like its industry peers, Microsoft's CRM 3.0 platform will provide marketing, sales and service capabilities. To address the key issue of user adoption (which is frequently the biggest obstacle to the upgrade cycle), Microsoft has unified the user experience behind its Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook UI. Plus in order to keep up with Salesforce.com's recent Multiforce and Customforce offerings, Microsoft said it added extensive new configuration, customization and integration capabilities to address lower TCO.

The company said because both the hosted and on-site versions use the same code, customers can more easily change their preferred deployment model as their business and IT needs change. For Microsoft's partners, Microsoft CRM 3.0 reduces the time and complexity in creating prepackaged vertical applications, in building integrations to other applications and data sources, and in helping to ensure fast implementations with a low TCO. The software development kit for Microsoft CRM 3.0 will be available to Microsoft partners later this year via the Microsoft Developer Network.

Microsoft conceded that many non-English languages won't be immediately available when CRM 3.0 is finally released; however, the company is porting the newest version to additional languages for a total of 23: Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and Iberian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Today, Microsoft CRM 1.2 is only available in 16 languages.

Microsoft CRM 3.0 will be available to customers who are licensed to use previous versions of Microsoft CRM in the fourth quarter of 2005 and generally available in the first quarter of 2006. Customers who have purchased any modules of the Professional edition of previous versions of Microsoft CRM and that have an active Software Assurance agreement will receive rights to all available modules of the next release; specific license upgrade paths for other Microsoft CRM products will be announced later in the year.

Separately, the company also finalized details surrounding the launch of its SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. As part of his keynote address, Andy Lees, corporate vice president of Server and Tools Marketing and Solutions, announced that these products would launch on Nov. 7 in San Francisco.

-----

Robert Liu is executive editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was executive editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles by Robert Liu, please click here.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]