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Microsoft will be rolling out eight CRM “accelerators” for its Dynamics CRM product line in the second half of 2008. On the Javista blog, Microsoft’s Reuben Krippner gives readers a thorough update on what they will offer customers. On the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog, he shares information for the analytics add-on. Krippner promises to blog about each accelerator each week. Altogether, the company will release accelerators for analytics, eService, event management, enterprise search, sales methodologies, extended sales forecasting, CRM notifications and business productivity.

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Microsoft Ready to Hit the Gas on CRM Accelerators

On July 11, when Apple had barely started to sell its much-anticipated iPhone 3G, Salesforce.com became the first customer relationship management vendor to announce the availability of its mobile applications for the iPhone in Apple’s App Store. Now, two weeks after the phone’s release, a few other CRM vendors can claim some sort of iPhone 3G compatibility; many more are planning to roll out an application in the future. With the souped-up iPhone 3G and Apple’s software development kit, building sophisticated business apps is now much easier.

Source:
The New Best Hope for Mobile CRM: iPhone 3G

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow because there are so many things that we do in the front office that have not been automated and because CRM vendors like Salesforce.com have taken a lead in application development.

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CRM’s Big Shadow

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I knew and understood that platform pretty well and the jolt of cutting over cold turkey was both surprising and refreshing. The surprises came in discovering some pleasant differences between where I had been and where I was going and that was mostly on the cultural side.

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The Good Old Analog Customer

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, and Sonoma Partners’ Mike Snyder summed up the event’s highlights. “Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention,” he wrote. “During the opening keynote on Tuesday, there was just one product demo: Microsoft CRM, conducted by Brad Wilson. “There are now 14,000 customers and 775,000 users worldwide; Microsoft added 4,000 customers and 225,000 users in FY08; there are 500 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers,” Snyder noted.

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Microsoft Plugs Dynamics, Cloud Services