Microsoft skips a version, comes out with CRM 3.0 |
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Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:35
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REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft Corporation is releasing a new version of its customer relationship management software, Microsoft CRM 3.0, by year-end, the company announced on Tuesday. In doing so, the company will skip a version, which was earlier due for release in early 2004.
The product will be available to end-users early next year, while the company plans a beta version to be in market in September.
Microsoft said CRM 3.0 will take care of the three key challenges that every CRM initiative confronts -- user adoption, business fit and total cost of ownership. It will have two new modules: one to automate direct marketing campaigns and the second to handle personnel and resource scheduling requests with incorporated marketing automation applications like list management, campaign management, marketing response management and marketing resource management. The pricing plans for the modules are yet to be worked out, the company said.
Microsoft said customers will be offered two choices to buy CRM 3.0: either as a packaged product (intended for use by small businesses with 75 employees) and run by the customers themselves or as a hosted service which has a subscription-based pricing model, where users can pay on a per-month rental fee than a license price. Customers can switch from one plan to another as the code for the on-site and hosted versions will be the same. Only the license will change.
Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft CRM, said the company is focusing on ease of use in this release with a user interface that is "indistinguishable" from the native Microsoft Outlook client interface.
"When we first came out [in Microsoft CRM 1.0], we were based on Outlook, but it wasn't as seamless as we wanted it to be in terms of windows popping up, icons and user metaphors. We put a lot of effort into redesigning it to be as indistinguishable [from] the normal Outlook experience in terms of screen flow and layout," said Wilson.
Microsoft CRM 3.0 will support 23 languages against the current 16. These languages include Chinese, Swedish, Finnish and Turkish.
Nearly 4,000 customers use Microsoft CRM worldwide with 100,000 deployed users.
CRM 3.0 will be demonstrated at TechEd Europe in Amsterdam and at the company's conference for software developers and at the Worldwide Partner Conference in the U.S., both later this week.
Microsoft disclosed that its SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 products will be shipped on 7 November across 50 countries.
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