Who Is More Excited About Upcoming Winter'11 Releases, Salesforce.com Users or Microsoft Users?

Jeffrey Schwartz (Redmond Channel Partner, Editor-at-Large Redmond Magazine) wrote a recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Online, titled Dynamics CRM Facelift Brings Confidence to the Channel. I read the article, hoping to get some insight about the upcoming "Salesforce.com Challenger", but I think I'd be discouraged if I were a Microsoft partner. The whole article seemed to be an endorsement for Salesforce.com.

Here were some of my favorite quotes:

""I just went on a call for CRM and the VP of sales just keeps pushing Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce and he'll find a flaw in anything else no matter what you implement," says Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of New York-based Queue Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner.

Forrester Research Inc. analyst William Band says while Microsoft Dynamics CRM has gained appeal, outpacing Salesforce.com could be a high bar to clear.

"In order for Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM to become a billion-dollar business, the market has to grow more or somebody else has to lose a lot of market share," Band says. "I don't know that there's that much space in the marketplace for Microsoft CRM to get that big. I don't know where another billion would come from."

A further source of frustration for Goldstein is the $49 per month price tag for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, which he says is far less expensive than Salesforce.com, yet customers aren't swayed by that. Price and feature comparisons are not the issue, Goldstein says. "The problem we run into is so many VPs of sales and ex-sales people just have a history with Salesforce. They just ask for it by name and they just refuse to use anything else," he says.

So what's in this upcoming release for Microsoft CRM 2011?  According to the article, here are the key features:

"Outlook Integration: Users can manage their CRM interactions from within Outlook. CRM data can be treated like any other Outlook data.

Ribbon: The Office Ribbon added to the new Outlook also will be added to the new Dynamics CRM client.

Role-Tailored Design: Users access relevant forms based on their role in the organization and are restricted from accessing data they're unauthorized to view.

Inline Data Visualizations: Users can create charts, drill down into them and share them.

Real-Time Dashboards: Customers can provide real-time dashboards to assess business performance.

Solutions Management: Developers and IT managers can package up all customizations and install them into the system and they can stay protected from others inadvertently overwriting them.

Field-Level Security and Record-Level Auditing: Important to any organization where privacy and/or compliance are required."

This isn't exactly material that will steel market share from Salesforce.com.  These features have been standard with Salesforce.com for more than 5+ years.  By comparisson, in it's upcoming Winter'11 release, Salesforce.com is deploying:

Chatter: Probably the most talked about Salesforce.com feature in the past few months, Chatter asks the question, "What are you working on?" It brings social media into the CRM tool, giving Salesforce.com a Twitter or Facebook like facelift. It seems to be making a real difference in user adoption among the companies that are deploying it in production.

Outlook 2010 Integration: This release will have a number of key (and much needed) improvements related to Outlook 2010 integration, including: email added indicators, improved Outlook administrator settings, increasing # of characters supported in the Subject field, 64-bit OS Support, simpler synch features and scheduled sync functionality.

Reports, Dashboard Improvements: Salesforce already has very powerful reporting and analytic features built in. In the Winter'11 release, there are a number of improvements targeted toward this Salesforce.com feature: drag & drop report columns, drag & drop dashboard features, improved report sorting functions, ability to run Dashboard reports as "current user", ability to change the running user in real-time, improved chatter integration, and more.

Improved Search functions: ability to search Content (document libraries), improvements to the advanced search features.

Improvements to the Change Sets deployment features

Improvements to Sites (web site hosting inside Salesforce.com), including support for 30x redirection

These are just a few of the features that Salesforce.com is rolling out at the request of Salesforce.com Customers (via their IdeaExchange forums). On top of all this, we're going to see some nice new functionality related to VMforce, Chatter, calender scheduling, consoles, and more.

Salesforce.com weighs in with a heavier price tag, but it remains easier to implement, easier to customize, and contains more functionality "out of the box" than it's Redmond competitor.  Salesforce.com remains my preferred CRM in the competitive marketplace.

Will the Upcoming Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta Challenge Salesforce?

On the Salesforce Evangelist Power LinkedIn Discussion Board, Cheral Stewart submitted a great follow-up post to the following article:

Will the Upcoming Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta Challenge Salesforce?

She writes, "Having been a salesforce.com Administrator for over 5 years with a detour to MS CRM 3.0 in the middle, I have a hard time believing MS will be able to challenge salesforce.com. The inherent difference that I see is Microsoft is still too concerned with maintaining control of the CRM through IT Departments and IT consultants. This slows innovation, internal busines change, and most strikingly, empowerment of the business Users.

"The reason so many business users/departments now pay for their salesforce.com licenses and the support staff is that they want to quickly respond to changing business climate. They do not want to go through 2-4 weeks of CABs, written requests, funding allocation and final review while waiting to have the dropdown choices in one field change.

"IT Departments that are focused on quickly managed innovation, not just control, do not find their business users purchasing SaaS programs like salesforce.com outside of IT. The innovative IT Department welcomes the SaaS programs and seeks full integration between all the information systems to materialize the competitive advantage CRM offers."

Spot on.

I used to be a Microsoft Dynamics CRM User myself, although that was way back in version 1.2 days, before the rebranding to "Microsoft Dynamics". Back then, the product was simply horrible.

Although I'm a Salesforce.com Evangelist (some call me "fanboy", but I'm too old for that moniker), I watch the evolution of Microsoft CRM closely. Why?

First, because I believe competition is good. It helps drive innovation. Salesforce.com has emerged as the clear front-runner on the multi-tenant, highly-reliable, highly available CRM platform. They've pushed beyond that with their Force.com development platform. As high as they are in the cloud, I want them always watching with one eye below, to see who's coming up to unseat them.

Secondly, I generally like Microsoft products. There, I said it. I've used OpenOffice, Google Docs, and Zoho Docs, but business needs always brought me back to Microsoft Office. The web-based apps just don't meet the breadth and depth of functionality in Office. When I need to make that professionally looking Word document (formatted just so, quickly and painlessly), or crunch serious numbers, formulas and data, or build a slide deck that wows and amazes, I load up Microsoft Office. I also use Outlook, Visio, Project and SharePoint heavily. They are critical tools in my daily work.

So truth be told ... I want Microsoft CRM to be successful. I believe they have the best chance to provide that clean, elegant, seamless integration between my CRM tool and all of my daily productivity tools.

There are signs that Microsoft "gets it", and wants to realize that vision, too. At Microsoft's Worldwide Partners conference this week, Business Division President Stephen Elop described a suite of interacting Microsoft programs, all accessible through the cloud. Marketing, Manufacturing, Sales, Procurement, Service, Accounting, Distribution, Human Resources, Collaboration, Service Delivery all in one tightly integrated cloud-based tool set? Sign me up!

I don't anticipate Microsoft realizing that vision any time soon, but they need two things to win me back to doing a serious evaluation of their CRM offering:

1.) The Microsoft version of Salesforce.com's "IdeaExchange". Microsoft is very much out of touch with the needs and interests of it's user community. The IdeaExchange has proven to be the ideal tool for crowd-sourcing new features and functionality, and influencing the Salesforce Roadmap. Every company should have one of these, and Microsoft needs it desperately.

2.) Tight integration with the other Microsoft produtivity products I use every day: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Visio and SharePoint. I want the functionality of these products in the cloud, fully accessible through and tightly integrated with my CRM. Without hiring an army of IT consultants, Only then will I be free of my desktop, and able to access all of my work needs from any computer in the world. The company that implements this seamlessly (or comes closest to that) will capture my CRM interest.

Can they do it? Not soon enough.