Microsoft announced CRM4 (Titan) as a very cool product. CRM team has done great improvements, and some of them I listed in Part 1 of this post.
The product definitely deserves 4 stars out of 5, but there are some things I would like to change.
Here I will list the features I would like to improve:
1. Integration with SharePoint 
Although developers of CRM belong to the Office Servers division it seems they have never heard of SharePoint. The new version does not allow you any kind of document management. It is a pity since that would give CRM4 great advantage against other competitors.
What am I missing here?
– document libraries per CRM entity
– document tagging
– document search
– edit in datasheet
– entity versioning
2. Duplicate detection 
Yes, it is great that finally CRM4 can detect duplicates. This feature is very cool for marketing materials but it is not so useful for day to day implementations. Since rules are not so flexible, duplicate detection algorithm will not be able to detect that the following accounts are duplicates:
– Coca-Cola
– Coca Cola
– CocaCola
– Coca Cola Ltd.
– Coca Cola Beverages
What am I missing here?
– regular expressions support
3. Firefox
Yes, I understand that Microsoft develops Internet Explorer but some rudimental Firefox support should be available.
What am I missing here?
– Support for Firefox/Opera…
4. Interface enhancements 
Interface has been improved a lot, and that’s great. However, one important feature is missing: client side validators.
What am I missing here?
– ASP.NET client side validators
5. Set regarding history in Outlook client
Set regarding history is cool but it could be better. If I’m sending email to john_wayne@litwareinc.com, than CRM client for Outlook should automatically offer me to track that email as activity for CRM contact of John Wayne.
What am I missing here?
– The ability of CRM client to automatically recognize/suggest “regarding” for outlook activities
6. Licensing
Licensing has been changed to allow small companies with less than 5 CRM users to purchase a very affordable CRM Workgroup edition. However, CRM is still too expensive for companies with more than 5 CRM users.
The problem here is that only named (CAL) licensing is available. You need to purchase a license for every employee that needs to use CRM system. For CRM implementation to be successful, every employee should be able to access the system from time to time (at least to check/update a customer phone number). If a company has 50 employees and only 15 in sales/marketing department, it might be too expensive to purchase 50 CALs.
Microsoft should offer concurrent licensing, that would allow companies to license all employees to use the CRM system from time to time. They did introduce same improvements in licensing like read-only CAL and device CAL but I do not find these to be very useful.
What am I missing here?
– Concurrent user licensing
