News

Dynamics CRM 2013 Coming Fall with Mobile-Device Support

• By Gladys Rama
• July 07, 2013

The next major release of Microsoft's customer relationship management (CRM) product, Dynamics CRM 2013, will become generally available sometime this fall.

The name "Dynamics CRM 2013" refers to the on-premises version of the release. It will also be available in an online version as "Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13," Microsoft said in its announcement last week.

In a phone briefing, Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics marketing, outlined some of the changes coming in Dynamics CRM 2013. He said the upcoming release is aimed at meeting the needs of increasingly savvy prospects and customers, who expect greater collaboration and social networking capabilities, as well as increased support for mobility.

"We need to make this release personal," Studer said, referring to Microsoft's overarching design principle for Dynamics CRM 2013. "We need to make it personal for people that will use it. We also need to provide this release in a personal way so that our customers can provide personal experiences to their customers. And as we built [Dynamics CRM 2013], we thought there's got to be a few areas of focus that we can deliver on. And that really formulated the release."

The improvements coming in Dynamics CRM 2013 are intended to achieve three basic goals, according to Studer. The first is to match customers to the products they need through more effective marketing. To that end, Dynamics CRM 2013 will have deeper integration with MarketingPilot, a marketing automation firm that Microsoft acquired last fall.

"We have broadened the connection to MarketingPilot to all of our users, both online and on-prem," Studer said.

The new release will also feature new flexible business-process capabilities "that allow people to adapt their processes to match whatever their customers' needs are," he added. "We offer many of these out of the box. We allow people to modify them, to change them for very specific roles to make it very easy. But we also have the capability to make your own processes."

The second goal of Dynamics CRM 2013 was to enable customers and prospects to "engage at the right level," according to Studer. "Many customers these days are 60 to 70 percent into the sales cycle before they even touch a salesperson, another human being. So their expectation is that the company who is marketing and selling to them already knows where they are and can engage with them in the right way."

To that end, Dynamics CRM 2013 will have a "reimagined" user experience that is easier and more intuitive.

Additionally, Dynamics CRM 2013 will have expanded mobile-device support. The new release will have touch capabilities and support running on Apple's iPad tablets, as well as on Windows 8 tablets and PCs. Microsoft also plans to deliver smartphone apps for Windows Phone 8, Apple iOS and Google Android devices. That smartphone support will arrive "shortly after" Dynamics CRM 2013's release in the fall, Studer said.

Microsoft's third goal with Dynamics CRM 2013 is to nurture customer relationships via increased social networking and collaboration capabilities. Microsoft is integrating its Lync, Skype and Yammer technologies into the upcoming product. It will also launch an early-access beta program for its Netbreeze technology with the new product. Microsoft acquired social analytics company Netbreeze in March.