Microsoft CRM Marches On

CRM Mobile will bring sales-centric capabilities to PocketPC 2003 devices in July, and a phone edition is slated for later in the summer, said Holly Holt, group product manager for Microsoft CRM at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. The latter release is basically "waiting for the phones" to be ready, she said. Pricing for the mobile support, which is considered a part of the current 1.2 release, hadn't been determined at press time.

Plans call for Microsoft CRM 2.0--slated to go to beta this fall and ship between April and June 2005--to be shaped into a better hosting platform. Microsoft decided early on that the focus of its first release would be for on-premises use, Holt told CRN at the Convergence 2004 show in Orlando, Fla.

Microsoft CRM currently has two official hosting partners: Surebridge, Lexington, Mass., and ePartners, Dallas. But other partners said the current release of the product isn't conducive to hosted use.

Rival hosted offerings include Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Salesnet.

A truly efficient hosted solution must be built from the ground up for that purpose, said Zach Nelson, president of NetSuite, San Mateo, Calif.

Other planned improvements include marketing automation and campaign management functions, as well as appointment tracking capabilities. Microsoft, too, is rewriting the bCentral Appointment Manager online scheduling software, sometimes still called WebAppoint, for Microsoft CRM 2.0. The scheduler opens up a people schedule and coordinates resources for meetings.

"If a dentist has four chairs and one assistant and you need a filling, you will need the dentist, the assistant and maybe a certain chair. This [software] sorts that out," said Alex Simons, director of program management for Microsoft CRM at Microsoft.

The current generation CRM is based on the Microsoft .Net framework. Plans still call for it to move to the deeper Microsoft Business Framework (MBF), but because of delays, MBF support isn't in the cards for release 2.0 or even release 3.0, Holt said. Microsoft plans to start finalizing the feature list for the 3.0 version in April, she said.