With CRM 5.0 around the corner I wanted to talk briefly about some of the upcoming features that we know about so far. These are definitely things to get excited about, both for the end user experience, as well as for administrators. Lets jump right in:
Enhanced Navigation for End Users
Ribbon UI and new form display
CRM 5 will, like all do it seems, move towards the ‘Ribbon’ user interface for the top menu similar to Microsoft Office. This will be context sensitive and should give more controls more easily. In CRM 4 and older, users were constantly selecting between tabs to get the information they needed. In a similar but different manner, Microsoft is placing the tabs into subsections on the left pane. What this means is that all your navigation will be on the left pane, rather than having to switch between the left pane and the upper tabs. This certainly should save some time.
Data Filtering
Much like Excel, the grid views will now have the ability to filter data with a single click. This is one of those features I almost can’t believe took so long to get into the product as it will save so much time on sorting/filtering data
Customization Enhancements
Additional form customization
New enhancements on the form layout will allow new ideas for positioning fields on the form or even in line sub grids for child records. This will allow a user to select a record, and then additional information specific to the selected record to populate on the screen beside it. Thumbs up on this one!
Drag and Drop Form Editor
Although the form designer has improved through the iterations, CRM 5 will go one step further by allowing users to drag and drop the elements of the form; that should speed up things considerably.
Misc Enhancements
Additional Security Model
Rather than having ownership be linked to just a single user or an organization, CRM 5 will add team ownership to allow additional flexibility
SharePoint Integration
Out of the box, CRM will integration with document management, including its check in/check out and library provisioning capabilities.
These are just a glimpse of some of the things to be seen with the new CRM 5 release. As we get closer to the launch date, expect additional details on as to how we can help make customers more efficient and have a higher ROI with CRM.
Article written by Stephen Schilling, Technical Consultant – ERT Group
ERT Group is a– offering Microsoft and .
