CRM Online May Service Update

At the recent Convergence 2010 conference on all things Dynamics, the biggest message was Microsoft’s Big Bet on cloud computing. All in is how Steve Ballmer characterized Microsoft’s bet, and it was the mantra of Convergence 2010.

I’ll write a more comprehensive article on Convergence overall, since it was a very good conference and featured a lot of thought-provoking sessions and conversation on slightly more specific topics (most notably, the rise of Social CRM).

But for now, I wanted to comment on just one of those more specific topics: the May 2010 service update for Dynamics CRM Online. I’m all in for cloud computing as well, and have been a very happy user of Dynamics CRM Online for almost two years. At first I didn’t appreciate the importance of these more-or-less every six month service updates (I’m a little slow on the uptake), but after a few of them it dawned on me that they really prove out the cloud experience: in the cloud, new features just happen! Nothing to install, no hotfixes or patches or cumulative rollups. You just read about the new features and one day they show up.

And sometimes, they show up sooner than you expect! For example, it’s April 29 as I write this, and already I’ve taken advantage of one of the important new features from the May 2010 service update: multiple language support is now available!

If you are a system admin in your CRM Online organization, you can see how multi-language support works by following these steps:

1. Click Settings, then Administration, and you’ll see a new link for Languages.
   
2. Click Languages and you’ll see the following dialog. I’ve selected the Spanish checkbox to “enable” it. French and Portuguese are also now available, many others coming soon.
   

    

   
   

         
    

After a system admin enables a language, any user can then toggle back and forth between the base language (English for my organization) and one of the enabled languages as a Personal Option. To do this, click Tools on the menu bar, then select Options. Click the Languages tab and use the User Interface Language drop-down to select one of the enabled languages. (If you install and enable a language pack for Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, you can toggle the language for both the UI and Help. Currently, for Spanish in CRM Online the only option available is for the UI. I’d assume that ultimately the functionality will be the same for online as for on-premise, but for now it’s apparently UI only.)

After selecting Spanish…BOOM!

Welcome to the first installment of the Dynamics CRM Online May 2010 Service Update! Two more things, for those of you who actually need to fully support a multi-lingual user population:

• If you’re using the Outlook client and want an option for a 100% Spanish (e.g.) experience, you’d also need to be running the Spanish version of Outlook. This is probably obvious but worth pointing out.
  
• Perhaps less obvious is the issue of custom entities and attributes. You can tell from the previous screenshot that customizations are not somehow magically translated (look at the column headings for Segment, CRM Platform and LeadSource). If you want to also have your customizations available in something other than the base language, that’s what the “Export Labels for Translation” and “Import Labels for Translation” links on the Customization page are for.
  

   

I’ll discuss that topic in more detail in another article. For now, I have to click the Herramientas drop-down menu, select Opciones, then click on the Idiomas tab to change my Idioma de interfaz de usario from Espanol to Ingles, then click Acceptar. Ciao!

Richard Knudson