Microsoft accelerating CRM release cycle as collaboration comes into focus

Microsoft has outlined the broad functional direction that will be taken by its Dynamics CRM suite at the same time as revealing that it will up the pace on the upgrade cycle of its on-premise applications, aligning it with its Online offerings.

The software giant made the announcement in a ‘Statement of Direction’ via a post to its Dynamics CRM blog on 12 May. The document indicated that future investment in the applications would focus on collaboration, business intelligence, consumer device support and rapid deployment capabilities.

On the collaboration side of things, support will be added for micro-blogging and configurable business activity feeds, which will provide users with status updates and notifications about business events and actions. Social intelligence functionality will also be included to enable users to identify data trends in a bid to enhance their decision-making capabilities in a customer service and marketing context.

In BI terms, existing Dynamics CRM 2011 tools will be beefed up so that users can create and share their own business reports and analyses without having to resort to the IT department. Better design tools will enable additional business charts to be created and real-time analytics dashboards enhanced, while data analysis capabilities will also be improved.

A further aim is to provide users with different user interfaces if they are on the road or in the office, depending on the form factor of the device they are using. Another goal is to reduce application and service deployment and customisation times and to come up with more granular packages. Examples here include sales and marketing as well as productivity offerings that use BI software to enable more effective decision-making.

Finally, Microsoft said that major upgrades to its on-premise CRM applications would no longer be released every two to three years, but would instead mirror the twice-annual release cycles of their Online cousin. Such releases will now take place in the Spring or second quarter and in the Autumn or fourth quarter of each year.