2010 looks to be an exciting year for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and xRM, with lots of developments in the pipeline including CRM 5.
Before we get too excited about what’s coming up in the New Year, we thought it would be nice to look back on all that has happened in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world in 2009 – it’s certainly been a busy year!
6 January 2009 – Enterprise Search accelerator was released, allowing Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) customers to view and search their CRM data directly from Sharepoint
8 February 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 2 for Dynamics CRM 4.0
2 March 2009 – Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) launched to the UK market, delivering competitively priced communication and collaboration tools (Exchange, Communicator, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting) as a subscription service.
5 March 2009 – The Business Productivity Newsfeed accelerator for CRM 4.0 was released on Codeplex, allowing dashboard reports to be generated to allow users to see at a glance summaries of recent activity in their CRM systems
12 March 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 3 for Dynamics CRM 4.0
10-13 March 2009 – Microsoft Convergence conference took place in Louisiana, United States. It was reported that the number of CRM users worldwide exceeded 900000, from 18000 organisations
19 March 2009 – Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8
27 April 2009 – Business Productivity Workflow Tools accelerator launched for CRM 4.0, providing additional workflow capabilities around string handling, mathematical functions and HTML hyperlink creation
28 April 2009 – Following successful trials in the UK, Microsoft released the full Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) to UK customers.
7 May 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 4 for Dynamics CRM 4.0
16 May 2009 – Business Data Auditing accelerator was released, providing basic auditing to allow organisations to see when their CRM records have been created, updated, assigned or deleted.
4 June 2009 – Microsoft and Intel announced that CRM 4.0 had been successfully scaled to over 50000 users with sub-second response times
2 July 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 5 for Dynamics CRM 4.0
8 July 2009 – Microsoft released Mobile Express for Dynamics CRM 4.0, adding Mobile access to the platform
13 July 2009 – Microsoft announced at Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 that Dynamics CRM had passed the 1 million user mark. New sales and marketing programs for xRM were also announced
August 2009 – Further information began to become available about Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated social networking accelerator to allow data from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to be analysed and updated from within CRM. Microsoft also published a white paper, “CRM and Social Networking : Engaging the Social Customer” to help businesses to understand how social networking might benefit them
26 August 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 6 for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Mobile Express was also distributed as part of this update
4 September 2009 – The CRM Business published a new case study highlighting a new solution integrating the new Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) with Dynamics CRM. This innovative solution combined the power of Dynamics CRM with cutting-edge collaboration tools, shared workspaces, mobile functionality, instant messaging and audio/video web conferencing.
8 October 2009 – Microsoft announced several leading global enterprises that had selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM as their solution of choice, including Barclays Bank Plc, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc, the City of London, Hard Rock International Inc, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Polaris Industries Inc and Vodafone Iceland.
13 October 2009 – Portal Integration and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) accelerators for CRM 4.0 became available on Codeplex
19 October 2009 – Social Networking Accelerator for CRM was released allowing Twitter integration – other social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn are to be added in the future.
22 October 2009 – Microsoft launched the new Windows 7 operating system in the UK. By the time that Windows 7 launched, all Microsoft Dynamics products were certified to run on both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
27 October 2009 – Microsoft announced at Convergence 2009 Europe that CRM Online will be coming to the UK in the second half of 2010
3 November 2009 – Microsoft announced a pricing update for the Business Productivity Online Suite, reducing the full subscription for the standard suite (Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting and Communicator) from £10.03/month to just £6.71/month per user
5 November 2009 – Microsoft released update rollup 7 for Dynamics CRM 4.0, delivering significant performance improvements for the Outlook CRM client and improving customer experience.
It has certainly been an exciting year! If you know of something which we might have missed from the above listing, please let us know so that we can include it.
