4 new features on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

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1. Dashboards
2. Dialogues
3. Role based forms
4. Enhance Outlook features.

One motivation for this new website was to take advantage of the new opportunity that will present itself with the release of Microsoft Dynamics 2011, mainly via cloud computing through CRM Online.

As we approach this new release there is a lot of interest as people start to see the features of CRM 2011 and what it is capable of providing.  At a local meeting of the CRM user group there was general acceptance and anticipation about the functionality available in version 2011.

The committee was asked about their favourite new features and the following were highlighted:

1. Dashboards

Dashboards have often been cited by our competitors as a short coming in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  This was, to some extent, plugged with standard dashboards added to CRM in an early service pack release.  These dashboards were based on Sequel Reporting Services.

2011 dashboards are very powerful. Users will be able to define the data set, choose a dashboard type and the display. These new dashboards are interactive - simply chose a segment of the dashboard and the dataset changes to that selection.

2. Dialogue

This is the ability to define a script to interactively “interview” a target and have the detail automatically populate a form. This is a powerful way of capturing structured data.

If the interview is interrupted the partially completed form is saved and can be retrieved when the target calls back.

3. Role Based forms

The ability for different parts of a business to see an entity such as Accounts with only the information they need has often been requested.  For larger customers who can afford the feature we have in the past used Java script to simulate this.

Now this a standard feature of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 that can provide true difference in the way the users view these entities.  An example is that Finance department may want to see the data in a different way than Distribution or Customer Service. This is now possible.

4. Rich outlook forms.

We have had very good interface between Outlook and CRM but there were many things that we needed to use the web client to be able to do, for example - convert an email to a case. The interaction with CRM resembled the i-frame functionality.