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Microsoft Readies Spring Wave of Dynamics CRM Updates

The "Spring '15" update for Dynamics CRM will arrive sometime early next month, Microsoft said recently.

"[E]arly in May we will make available the Spring '15 release of Dynamics CRM 2015 along with our updated Microsoft Dynamics Marketing solution," wrote Wayne Morris, a software executive in Microsoft's Dynamics CRM business, in a blog post Friday.

In addition, he said Microsoft will update Dynamics CRM's Parature component early this week. The Parature product provides salespeople and marketers with customer-service tools like ticketing and auditing.

Update, 4/28: The Parature update is now generally available from Microsoft, which has added feature enhancements and expanded support to 11 languages.

Microsoft described Dynamics CRM's Spring '15 update at its Convergence conference in March. The company revealed at the time that the update would bring greater integration between Dynamics CRM and Microsoft's Power BI and Office 365 products. It also said that it will be rebranding Dynamics CRM's "Social Listening" feature, which debuted in June 2014, to "Microsoft Social Engagement."

Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Dynamics CRM, shed more light on the new Social Engagement tool in a separate blog post on Friday.

"The new name is more than just a branding change," Stutz said. "It reflects a completely reimagined user experience for companies, extending beyond social listening and sentiment analysis to offering true social engagement."

The Social Engagement tool is designed to help marketers and salespeople track and analyze information about their businesses posted on social media platforms. It will become generally available sometime next week, according to Stutz, and will include an updated user interface, more data visualization options and a "social center" feature, which Stutz described as "user-specific configurable and shareable streams consisting of vertical columns displaying social posts as they come in."

An end-to-end "Social CRM" solution will launch sometime this summer, Stutz added.

About the Author

Gladys Rama (@GladysRama3) is the editorial director of Converge360.

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