As mentioned in earlier posts I attended the 1st Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.0 Partner Readiness Event (in NYC). During this event I took notes on all the highlighted and demonstrated top 25 new features and yet I also realized that there are sooo many existing features in v3.0 that many a partner does not know about. In future days I will also be focusing on these untapped gems. Today however we will focus on a few of the "oh cools". Understand that these are from my NOTES and as such can be misinterpreted either by me or anyone else and are simply shared as is, no guarantees to complete perfect accuracy.
The list is in no particular order.
- Multi-currency: Oh not just localized versions, but the ability to mix currency choice within one specific company.
- Multi-language: The same as above and a big thank you to the team from the many companies with multiple global offices!
- Support for roaming profiles when using terminal service environments
- Significant development around increased WAN performance
- Multi-layers of advanced duplicate detection. A major thank you from me to the team! They went above and beyond on this one (although this demanding little gemstone can always find more to want)
- Support for SQL Monitoring and SQL Clusters
- Support for alternative deployments
- "self updating" installation
- Diagnosis and process monitoring
- Embedded Auto-Complete on numerous fields
- More Bulk Changes and Data Cleansing features
- Web Based Mail Merge
- A new Report Wizard to empower customers to extract all the data they want to extract in the way they want to extract it
- Integration with Office Communicator (think embedded IM)
- Presence control (who is on-line)
- 360 Degree View of the Customer
- Cross entity advanced find enhancements
- Role based report foundation
- New Deployment Wizards which include bulk importing of users from Active Directory
- OneNote Integration
- A new level of Bi-Directional integration to Excel (Export to Excel, make changes, re-import into DynamicsCRM)
- New workflow Wizards, Templates and libraries
- Web based/Client Workflow configuration
- Break down any workflow into stages
- Multi-criteria e-mail tracking. E-mail tracking token can be turned off.
- New more flexible licensing options such as device versus user CALs
- Role based Report Foundation - Reporting can be dependent on the user's rights, security and roles
- New Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resource Center
- Reconfiguration/Redesign of the Outlook Client for CRM to allow for the wide variety of outlook footprints and variables in the field
- Diagnostic Tools in the Outlook for CRM client
- The Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) with more integration to MOSS (SharePoint)
- Many to Many Relationships
- System to System Relationships
- Pop3 Support/Exchange 2007 Support (64 bit)
- Direct External Interface into Dynamics CRM without a required VPN
- Asynchronous processing
- Offline and On-line use is consistent no change of features when offline
- New Data Mapping features
- Multiple ways to Authenticate
- Various components from within Dynamics CRM can be split out onto different application servers including API Calls, WorkFlow, UI Calls, etc.
- Greater Organization Visibility
- New Client Migration Toolkit
- Multi-Tenant platform for enterprise hosting
- E-Mail Topology changed to support more multiple choices of e-mail routing
- E-mail routing can be done without Exchange
- Reporting stored within the database for easy disaster recovery planning
and sooo much more!