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Big News in Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 Update: Mobile iOS and Android Versions, Cross-browser Support, Social Upgrades

Microsoft announced today that the next service upgrade (due between April and May of this year) will include a number of big enhancements. At the heart of these updates is the concept of ‘CRM Anywhere’, which means you should be able to access Microsoft CRM from your favorite hardware – not just Windows-based form factors. The Release Preview Guide is here and below are some of the highlights.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile

The next release will include a cloud based mobile CRM service called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile. This will be a hosted (subscription based) mobile solution that is based on CWR Mobility (it actually is CWR Mobility, but it will be available directly from Microsoft as a Marketplace offering). The mobile clients and service will start at $30 per user, per month and supports the use of up to three devices per user. This is considerably less than $65 for the comparable offering from Salesforce. The supported devices are listed below:

For those that want – or need to – run the mobile offering on-premise on their own servers, they will continue to purchase CWR Mobile CRM directly from a CWR partner under a perpetual license model. The mobile client and UI are identical to between the hosed and on-premises solutions.

 

Browser Flexibility

In addition to mobile flexibility, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 service update provides the ability for end users to access the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web Client across all modern Internet browsers on various platforms. This includes browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari running on PC, Apple Macintosh or iPad. This is a huge advancement, as the last few years have seen more enterprises becoming client platform agnostic.

 

Enhanced Social Experiences

This updates adds even more social capabilities to the very popular micro-blogging Activity Feeds feature that was introduced last fall. Activity Feeds feature updates in this release:

• Ability to “Like” and “Unlike” Activity Feed posts.
• Improved filtering capabilities, including the ability to filter @names in a timeline.
• Improved following capabilities. You will now be able to filter based on CRM views; meaning even if you don’t follow a particular opportunity or account, if an activity is triggered that would make it visible in your personalized CRM view, then it will appear on your activity wall.
• Update to the Windows 7.5 Activity Feeds Mobile app.

Creating Microsoft CRM 2011 Activity Feed Auto Posts with Workflow

I love the new activity feed functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 5.  With a little bit of configuration, you can very easily create auto-posts for relevant system events or changes to records.

Activity Feeds give users a way to follow records that are important to them, and by doing this, they see a feed of any events for any records that they follow.

This really makes activity feeds the “notification center” for CRM, and since users can comment on posts, it naturally provides collaboration between users.

In the following screencast I demonstrate how to automatically create auto-posts for system events.

 

Creating auto posts with workflow