A few comments on the Microsoft Dynamics 5.0 sneak peek

Simon Hutson wrote about the new features of CRM 5.0 and was forced to remove it again. Fortunately Stefano Demiliani posted it too, and now the content is reblogged all over:)

The release time for CRM 5.0 is indicated to be late 2009, or 2010. From the looks of it I would guess 2010 with the changes they're making, and with an indicated tighter relation to Sharepoint it's not unlikely that the release of these two products will go hand-in-hand. There are a few interesting things to notice between the lines of Stefanos feature list:

The Ribbon UI arrives in HTML. This is not likely done solely by the CRM team. My guess (and hope) is that they're coordinating a web-based Ribbon UI for CRM and Sharepoint. A quite bold move given the mixed feedback on the Ribbon UI in Office. Nevertheless, this will be the Microsoft businessproduct signature moving ahead. Expect to see an enhanced experience of the ribbon for Silverlight enabled browsers.

Cleaning up navigation. (Single page forms) Navigating CRM 4.0 was no joy. Too many windows. My best experience in using it was actually Firefox with IE Tab because that resulted in sensible tabbing for CRM with no tweaking. Now they've added a good old-fashioned familiar leftnav for clicking around in the subtree of panes. I just hope they make permlinking easier this time (4.0 makes it very hard to permlink to something like an accounts contacts).

More options for customization. Stuff like Team-owned entities is really a double-edged sword. The nice thing is that entities only required for some special team will only appear in that scope. On the other hand this implies that customization descisions can be made on a team basis making overall governance of the system very hard, and (in most cases) lead to CRM spaghetti after a while (consultants: behave:)). A more flexible form layout engine also opens for easier customization. Here I would also like to see a SDK documented way of creating custom webforms with ASP.NET in an easier way than ISV integrating. In the lifespan of CRM 5.0 we should expect users to demand slightly cooler forms than a web-based formdesigner can deliver. And: Howcome Microsoft can't create ONE web form designer? Currently there's one in InfoPath Forms Services, WSS and now in CRM. With the introduction of drag'n'drop form editing in the CRM 5.0 Web UI I would definately say that the CRM designer is (from v5.0) the more attractive one.

Taking the multiple forms engine problem further we'll see even more duplication with the new feature for Filtered Lookups. Compare this to KWizComs product Cascading Lists Plus. It's all about filtering lists; make it native in some way and share between the apps.

More sharepoint integration. They're adding native document management within CRM using WSS. Finally. 

Development & Deployment. The indicated new stuff for Solution Management in CRM 5.0 bares a lot of resemblence to the current Sharepoint solution management. Creating a namespace strategy for ISVs with "publishers" is a good idea (that DotNetNuke had in 2003), and solution dependencies is a useful feature for WSS 3.0. I'm hoping we'll see a complete convergence of deployment models between CRM and Sharepoint here, because we really don't need two. Sharepoint should get simpler and tighter and CRM should get more structure. Managing solution deployment to webfarms is one of the things CRM needs to address better. Also I'd like to see a lot less complicated procedure for deploying CRM plugins (come on guys; this is hell right now).

That's my 2 cents on the latest leak of information on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5.0 product... Or should I say "one of the first pre-marketing events from Microsoft":-) From the point-of-view of a ISV this is not all good news. KWizCom product CRM-Sharepoint Connector gets some serious platform competition, and c360 product Audit is also built in from v.next. But this is what ISVs got to expect in creating general purpose value adds for the Microsoft Business Platform.