Tuesday 10 July 2012

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).

CRM 2011 Update Rollup 9 - access via firefox
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

Tuesday 26 June 2012

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.

NAV2013 benchmark : Sales orders
Test: Invoicing 100 sales orders


NAV2013 benchmark : Repeated read
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

Thursday 29 March 2012

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!

Sunday 5 February 2012

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!!