Believe it or not, it is time for Microsoft CRM 5.0. It will probably be released as part of Office14 wave (target year 2010) but there is already some information about the new features.
Simon Hutson a very nice post with information about new features, and from SharePoint perspective the most important feature is the ability to integrate CRM entities and SharePoint as back-end for collaboration and storing documents. CRM 4.0 does not support that and this will be a very cool feature once delivered.
Currently we are using c360 add-on product that gives you the same ability. c360 productivity pack also gives some additional functionalities like bulk editing, advanced search and stuff. Check them out at c360.
Toni, which features you would like to add?
Here is my current wish-list:
- edit in datasheet view (this is already available in SharePoint 2003/2007)
- once you provision a site (document library) hopeful you will be able to propagate some meta-data. For example the ability to tag the document with related info about parent entity in CRM. This would ease document filtering and search
- the ability to map SharePoint site structure to relations defined in CRM. (E.g. Site structure “An account site” > “An opportunity sub-site” > Invoices (Doc.Lib))
- Some SharePoint web-parts to list data from CRM (non BDC web-parts)
- …
