CRM 3.0 Set For 4Q

What had been called Microsoft CRM 2.0 and then CRM 2005 officially will be dubbed Microsoft CRM 3.0, said Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft CRM. The product is still set to be released to manufacturing in the fourth quarter, he said.

On top of the planned marketing modules, such as list and campaign management, the product adds what Wilson called a "high-speed, role-based sync engine" and tighter than originally planned integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office. The news came at Tech Ed Europe and Microsoft's Worldwide Partners' Conference last week.

For users who sometimes work offline, the new synchronization feature means the software updates only data that's relevant to them and their roles. "If you're a regional manager, you may not need all of the objects in the system to sync but just those that have to do with your region and accounts," Wilson said.

CRM 3.0 should make it easier for VARs to create custom objects for a particular vertical business, he said.

"If you're a builder, you care about customers, but your world revolves around buildings. So you can create a building object and rename any system entity you want. In the old model, you couldn't change things you had already built," Wilson said.

"One of the biggest things is that you can now modify or enhance the product with new entities. That will make it easier to customize and verticalize in a native CRM environment without going outside," said Andy Vabulas, CEO of Ibis, an Atlanta-based Microsoft partner.

The new SPLA option will give solution providers an option to host CRM for customers on a subscription basis. That could enable partners to better compete with Salesforce.com in hosted situations. Pricing for the hosted CRM license isn't set yet, but VARs would be able to offer prices that are competitive with Salesforce.com Professional, which costs about $125 per user per month, Wilson said.

Microsoft had hoped to get the hosting side of the product done last year. But the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant held off to sort out SPLA issues and to architect this CRM version to better support the hosted model.

CRM 3.0 is still not a full multitenancy platform, according to one hosting partner, but it's getting better. "They've made a lot of improvements; we can now install all the different [necessary Microsoft] components on a single server. Multiple servers increase the cost of hosting," said Bernd Leger, vice president of marketing at Navisite, Andover, Mass.

Surebridge, now part of Navisite, was one of Microsoft CRM's original hosting partners. Leger says his company offers hosted Microsoft CRM now for $99 per user per month if the customer already has the CRM license, or $122 per user per month inclusive of that license.