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The Microsoft Dynamics CRM4.0 in Review
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 introduces exciting additions, increased flexibility, and more opportunities to engage Customers with superior tools to help manage their customer relationships.




The Power of Choice


Offering On-Premise, Partner Hosted, and CRM Live. You now have choices on how to deploy and how you will use CRM.
Change your mind any time – It is planned that all customizations will be interchangeable from installation type to installation type. Some obvious exceptions include Workflows / Plug-ins (Callouts) that require code to execute; as the live version will not support running code on the server.


However, all non-code workflows and schema customizations (forms, views, attributes, entities, relationships) as well as system settings etc, should be able to be simply exported from one and imported into another.

Customization Features
  • Form Assistant options in form properties. You can set options for how the Form Assistant displays for each entity.
  • IME mode selection for each attribute. Input Method Editor (IME) mode can be set for attributes which accept text or numbers. IME is used for East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) to allow for the thousands of possible characters in these languages to be entered using a keyboard.
  • Application mode setting. In System Settings you can choose whether Microsoft Dynamics CRM will launch in application mode. Application mode hides the address, tool, and menu bars on the browser.
  • ISV integration setting. In System Settings you can choose whether custom buttons or menus will be displayed.
The Titan Multi-Plex

With CRM “Live” CRM is re-architected on a multi-tenanted architecture, offering Software as a Service at Microsoft MSN Hosting for Live

Multi-tenancy

Earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server provided a single organization solution. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Community Technology Preview 2 provides the ability to host multiple organizations in a single Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment. This feature is a great benefit for hosted solutions. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Community Technology Preview 2 now implements two types of databases:

There have been big investments on internationalization around Multi-Lingual User Interface, and Multi-Currency.
The Transactional Amount, Base Amount, Transactional Currency ID and Conversion rate are all stored on the entity record.
Multi currency is achieved by adding new currency entity. more..
Currency settings are per record and not per field.


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Expanded Relationships



Unified Event and Extensibility Model

With Titan CRM is moving to a common workflow engine share with other Microsoft products and solutions called Windows Workflow Foundation (shipped with .NET 3.0 framework). Office 2007 and SharePoint also ship with this workflow engine. Opens opportunities for tighter integration between products

New Callout architecture now called Plug-ins. Plug-ins can be registered before or after built-in platform functionality (synchronously or asynchronously). Entity images come in the form of dynamic entity. Registration accomplished through SDK APIs.


Offline SDK

The Offline capabilities of Titan allow users to experience much of the same functionality of CRM connected or disconnected from the network. The Offline API allows users to perform the same actions they would do connected to the network as when they are disconnected. When the Outlook client is taken back online all changes are synchronized between the client and CRM server.




Workflow Changes

Workflow moved from windows application to web based application Integrated in side Unified eventing across all the synchronous and asynchronous operations (callouts/plug-ins, workflow, bulk operations, bulk mail,etc)

Workflows can be built by a broad range of users from sales managers to expert developers; Workflows allow quick development of custom business logic with a consistent experience across other technologies and tight integration with Visual Studio.

Reduce number of click to enhance user experience

CRM 4.0 the navigation pattern has been reorganized to reduce number of clicks for e.g product catalogue has moved to main menu, Template in the same way has moved to main menu.




Resource Center Online help and solution center

The resource center brings together information that will help in getting started with CRM 4.0 , provides a central location for the information on helps ,tips, in-depth description of product features, examples and advice from subject experts

The Resource Center provides a place within the application where users, administrators, and implementers will find information to help them use and configure Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When completed, the Resource Center will present a wide range of rich content and links to valuable resources. Much of the content in the Resource Center will be created by experts in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community.

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Duplicate Detection this feature is available for both custom entity and customizable entity

Duplicate detection is available:




Report Management in terms of privileges around reports are now based in CRM
    Report is an entity in CRM 4.0. So we can provide the privileges, the way it is provided to other entities or object
    Publish report to organization is privileges allows users to publish their reports to the organization
    Reports are available on offline and advance find

Report Scheduling Wizard

Report scheduling wizard has been added to the action menu on the grid.


SRS Data Connector

The SRS Data Connector is a service that connects the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Community Technology Preview 2 Server computer to the Microsoft SQL Report Server computer. The SRS Data Connector eliminates the Kerberos double-hop authentication that was required for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 deployments where Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services was installed on a separate computer. The SRS Data Connector is installed as a separate component.


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Licensing


Data Migration
    Data can be migrated into Microsoft Dynamics CRM using the Data Migration Wizard. This wizard is installed on a client computer.
    Data can be imported into most entities, using the new Imports area. The first row of each .csv file must use the exact Display Labels used on the Attribute page for the entity, because custom map files are not yet implemented. For each import, the user can view the status of each record in the import.

Upgrade from CRM 3.0
    Upgrade from CRM 3.0 to CRM 4.0 is only supported within the same language.
    Upgrade will ‘convert’ (ie. Add new attributes) to existing Money attributes

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