I headed down to New York City on Monday so that I could get up bright and early on Tuesday, October 9th and attend the 1st Dynamics CRM v4.0 Readiness Tour. Wow, was I ever surprised. Not only did I not have to listen to "the same marketing pitches I have heard for umpteen months at events like WWPC" BUT the event was very, very, very much worth my time and effort to get down there.
The afternoon was PACKED with technical content and training on the new version and was presented by none other than three of the most senior level development team right out of Redmond. It was great to see Philip Richardson, Manisha Powar and Michael Lu and to have the pleasure of hearing them speak. Philip is one of my favorite presenters because he talks so fast and crams so much into the time given and yet I can keep up with him. There is nothing like that kind of efficiency.
The morning offered insight from Brad Wilson, general program manager for Dynamics CRM, and his team which I was totally thrilled to discover was not more of the same consistent and canned marketing message. Brad offered interactive fresh insight on the teams direction, on the CRM marketplace, and on many of his interactions with the industry analysis such as Gartner. He also offered a low key Q&A session (no waiting for the Mic or waiting in line to ask a question) and made a point of trying to get to every question.
The room was buzzing with great partner energy and all are excited about this new product. Best of all the product is not a radical shift from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 so customers can install today and easily slide right into the numerous more advanced and improved features and functionality of the next version in the first quarter of the new year.
I will be posting a long, long list of just a few of the great new top features in my next blog post.