What is Office 365?

What is Office 365?

It is secure, anywhere access to email and calendars, Office Web Apps, instant messaging, conferencing, and file sharing.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you get powerful CRM software delivered as a cloud service from Microsoft, providing instant-on anywhere access, predictable pay-as-you-go pricing and a financially backed service level agreement (SLA).

1. Offers & Pricing

2. Flexibility

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers the power of choice in deployment. You can implement in the cloud, on-premises, or have your solution privately hosted by one of our partners. You can even change your deployment type, if the need arises.
• With Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you are able to scale the number of users up or down, based on your business requirements.
• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online architecture provides customers with complete autonomy over how they operate, manage, configure, and secure their CRM solution.
• Customer and user administration features are designed to increase self-reliance. Customers have complete control over all aspects of data structure, user experience, business intelligence, and business process management.

3. Security

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has an end-to-end approach to security that begins with the development of the application through to the service’s operations and management.
• The solution is managed by highly skilled network operations personnel in Microsoft data centres worldwide, having achieved ISO accreditation and SAS70 Type II attestation.
• Microsoft has applied state-of-the-art technology, culture, and processes to maintain consistent and reliable access, security, and privacy for every user.
• Although housed in the Microsoft cloud, customer data is owned by the customer and is never used by Microsoft for data mining purposes.
• Unlike other hosted CRM solutions, there is no co-mingling of customer data. Customers are provisioned with their own customer database to maximise the security and integrity of their data.

4. Reliability

• Microsoft’s considerable operational expertise and investment in cloud services deliver peace of mind.
• Microsoft offers a global data centre footprint with facilities located throughout the world that are managed and operated directly by Microsoft.
• Many aspects of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online system are configured in a redundant manner to eliminate single points of failure.
• Microsoft provides 99.9% uptime with one of the industry’s only financially backed service level agreements (SLA).

5. Simplicity

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online simplifies the management experience by providing ongoing application monitoring and maintenance. As a result, your IT staff can focus more on supporting the priorities of your business.
• With Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, staff can quickly deploy and add users at a moment’s notice. This drives rapid business impact, helping customers realise quicker time-to-value.
• New versions or updates to the software are easily distributed to users, without the interruption and management of costly patching and upgrades.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is an affordable solution with flexible payment options that helps businesses to forecast costs over time. With pay-as-you-go pricing, you can transform capital expenditures into predictable operating expenses.

CRM 2011 Update Rollup 9 coming soon.

1. CRM Anywhere

Access Microsoft Dynamics CRM anywhere, from PC, Mac, and even smart phones.
For PC on computer running Windows 7 / Vista / XP; you can access it using IE 7+, Firefox 6+ or Chrome 13+.
For Mac and iPad 2 you can access CRM is by using Safari 5.1.1+.

The support for smart phones is such as the following. It supports Windows Phone (OS 7.5+), Apple iPhone 3GS+ (iOS 5+), Android (OS 2.2+) and Blackberry (6.x and 7.x).

Access CRM 2011 via Firefox thanks to Update Rollup 9

2. Rapid View forms

Rapid view forms are usually used by a group of users who use CRM to look up information with no immediate need to apply modifications. Rapid View forms hides the ribbon button and the form will open in view mode with two menu bar buttons for Close and Edit record.


3. Enhanced Social

The Activity feeds gained the 'Like' and 'Unlike' feature.
Like in Facebook you can like or unlike posts .


The @me filter new feature allows you to see all posts that mention you.


4. Industry Solution Templates

Microsoft delivers a range of templates that demonstrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM's suitability and flexibility for a different industries such as Health Plan Sales and Wealth Management, Non-Profit, Insurance Sales. These industry solution templates are going to be published on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace but Microsoft will not be officially supporting the industry solution templates.


5. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Support

When Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is fully RTM-ed, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will be ready to take full advantage of all the performance benefits and new features offered by SQL Server 2012.

Some of the awesome features from SQL Server 2012:
- Significantly boost query performance by up to ~100 times for star join and similar queries.
- Support blazing fast queries with dramatic improvement for Full Text Search
- High scale with support for up to 256 cores!


6. Business Intelligence Insights with Power View

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces a new Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 called Power View, previously code-named Project Crescent. Power View is a next-generation BI tool for interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation. It provides intuitive ad-hoc reporting for business users such as data analysts, business decision makers and information workers. In short, Power View provides better business insights and collaboration for casual and experienced users alike. Power View allows a user to configure reports that connect to Microsoft Excel’s PowerPivot or SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS).

Power View Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Release Preview Guide, Q2 2012 is so much more than just breathtaking end user analytics visualizations and tools, it redefines the data analysis process for business and technical users alike.


7. Portal Framework Enhancements

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 service update includes enhancements to the portal framework that powers customer and partner portals connecting to Microsoft Dynamics CRM (both online and on-premises). These portals can be run in your data center or in Windows Azure. The Q2 2012 service update includes the ability for portals to use Microsoft Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) for authentication. This empowers organizations to setup various standards-based identity providers such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and ADFS 2.0 for portals that require authenticated sign-on security.


8. Custom Workflow Activities in CRM Online

his awesome feature really close off the gaps between CRM On-Premise and CRM Online. You can create the custom workflow activities using C# and deploy the assembly to CRM Online as you would in On-Premise.


Source: Microsoft Technet

NAV2013: Faster Than Ever!

Last week Per Mogensen and Vjekoslav BABIC have done some benchmark tests comparing NAV2009 vs NAV 2013.

NAV2013 greatly outperforms NAV2009 in term of speed as it appears to be 2 times faster.
Below you can see the graph results.

Test: Invoicing 100 sales orders

Test: Repeated read

If you are interested to have more information about NAV2013 performance you can read the full NAV2013 benchmark test of Vjekoslav BABIC or watch the findings of Per Mogensen his NAV 2009 R2 versus 2013 Beta posting performance video

NAV7 will be named NAV 2013

At Convergence in Houston it has made clear NAV7 will be named NAV 2013 and it should be available in 2012 Q4.

As said before there are many changes to come, amongst them:

Forms : As they are not going to be useful anymore we will be able to be import the forms only for conversion purposes.

XMLports being upgraded will cover the old dataports requirement.

Queries: Will be able to run from the browser and retrieve data for OData (Open Data Protocol)


The beta will be released in May 2012, so wait and see!

NAV7 Screenshot

Last week Michael Nielsen (the director of development for dynamics NAV at Microsoft) has posted a message on mibuso, the famous NAV forums.

We learn that Forms, Classic reports, Dataports and Classic database will not be present anymore in v7 of dynamics NAV. Those will be replaced for Pages, RDL reports and XML-port that include dataport functionality.

NAV7 Object designer

We also learn that C/SIDE has been renamed "Dynamics NAV Development Environment" , are we going to call it DNDE in the future?

Also did you see the Query from this screenshot? Microsoft hasn't made any official declaration about this yet. So wait and see.

We will have many more news for NAv7 coming up in the following months.
The next big announcement might be during the Dyanmics NAV - Directions EMEA Conference in Rome on April 25-27 2012!!

Sure Step 2012 Launched!

We are excited about the launching of Sure Step 2012! On this new version the main focus is guidance for the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 release and new content for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 On-premises and Online. You will also find a distinct realignment of content in Sure Step methodology in the following areas:

Solution Envisioning:
A more prominent focus on the Solution Overview section describing,

• Microsoft Dynamics solution capabilities
• Industry-Vertical solutions guidance for Manufacturing, Public Sector, Retail, and Services Sector
• Cross Industry-Horizontal solutions guidance for Customer Care and Extended CRM
• Updated Decision Accelerator offerings content for AX 2012, including Role-Tailored Questionnaires, Fit Gap Spreadsheets, Estimator Tool, and Upgrade Assessments.
• Updated CRM content, including Sizing Tools for CRM 2011 On-premises and Online, and Upgrade Assessment Delivery Guide and Design Considerations.
• NEW! Accelerated Proof of Concept with CRM Online. Use this service to gain quick buy-in from your customers.

Solution Implementation & Upgrade:

• Scalable waterfall and iterative approaches to implementing and upgrading Microsoft Dynamics solutions.
• Updated Implementation artifacts for AX 2012, including updated Configuration Settings, Security Role Definitions, select Process Maps, Testing Guidance, and Environment Specifications.
• Updated AX 2012 Upgrade templates and guidance, including Project Plan/WBS, Application Modules configuration, Custom Workflow and Reporting Requirements, Testing Plans, and Environment Specifications.

Solution Optimization:

• Realigned Optimization Offering roadmaps that map more closely to service offerings by product line.
• NEW! Roadmaps for AX 2012, CRM 2011, GP 2010, NAV 2009 and SL 2011, to help drive greater quality in solution delivery with proactive and post go-live services.

 You can download the new version of SureStep methodology on Microsoft Partnersource.