Taking the Covers off Dynamics CRM 2011

The first demo is about some of the new features for users and starts at the 8 minute mark. The second demo focuses on new features for customizers and developers, and starts at 29 minutes.

Here are my RBIs (”Richard’s Big Items”) from the demos & presentation:

Applications

Lots of new goodness in the Outlook client:

• More “context”. For example, the Outlook preview pane will be “CRM-aware”, presenting things like related records for a tracked e-mail or appointment, without having to open the tracked record’s form.
• Convert a tracked e-mail to an Opportunity, Case or Lead…from the Outlook ribbon, without having to open the form. This will be a nice time-saver.
• When replying to an e-mail in Outlook, you can access a Dynamics CRM e-mail template directly from the Outlook ribbon, and you can do an in-place search of the CRM knowledge base and insert an article.
• And…you can even attach CRM sales literature to an e-mail directly from Outlook! Seeing as how you can’t even attach sales literature to an e-mail at all in 4.0, this is going to be a nice feature and for lots of organizations may justify using sales literature (from what I can tell the single least-used feature in Dynamics CRM 4.0.)  

Dashboards and Views:

• Lots of improvements to KPIs and Dashboards. Perhaps most importantly, it looks like we’ll be able to centrally deploy dashboards to users. (Currently, the CRM Online implementation requires every user to create their own).  In the demo at the 15:18 mark, you can see several dashboards available as “system dashboards”, which indicates we will be able to create them the same we can now a system view, as a schema customization.  
• It looks like improvements to views will fix a lot of their current shortcomings. Check out the video at about the 21-minute mark to see improved sorting and grouping of data within views. Andrew doesn’t actually show creating group subtotals, but if that doesn’t make it into the product I’ll scratch my eyes out.

Customization and Development

• A “solution“ is a new concept, described as a portfolio of customizations, configurations, extensions and the like. So rather than manually exporting and then importing collections of customizations, as at present, solutions will let us package them up as pre-defined…well, solutions. (described at the 32 minute mark)
• It appears that extensions (Plug-ins, for example) be part of what can be in a solution, and that they will be supported for all deployment models, including CRM Online. Including the cloud version of Dynamics CRM as a full-fledged development platform, on par with on-premise for extensions like custom workflow actions, plug-ins and ASP.NET development will definitely add credibility to the message that Microsoft’s “all in” when it comes to cloud computing. Check out how comprehensive the solution concept is at about the 33 minute mark in the video! 
• Apparently “workflows” become “processes” in 2011, but more importantly they can do some important new things! Go to the 35 minute mark to take a look at these things:
  • Prompt and Response construct lets you add a synchronous user experience to workflows — sorry, processes! — to store the user responses, and to branch depending on the responses.
  • New workflow Actions sound interesting: Query CRM Data, Assign Value, plus a couple of others that sound like they’re related to Prompt and Response.
• Custom Activity Types. Nice. Discussed at 40 minutes.
• The concept of managed v. unmanaged solutions.  Unmanaged solutions sound like what we have now (exporting and importing customizations) — Managed solutions are for scenarios when you want to lock down a release, and don’t want code or customizations exposed or changed. (42 minutes)
• Field-level security. Yay! (44 minutes) 
    

The embedded video requires Silverlight and a few people have told me they can’t play it — here’s the link to the site just in case: http://digitalwpc.com/Videos/AllVideos/Permalink/f9625bd7-7009-4bed-ab7a-c3fbb548d6ac