Microsoft Announces New CRM Feature Pack

Designed to take advantage of deeper Office integration, the feature pack will ship in August and be added to the 1.2 release of Microsoft CRM.

One week after Microsoft announced the Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework, promising better integration between Office and other applications, particularly Microsoft CRM, the company on Tuesday announced an update to MS CRM designed to take advantage of the deeper Office integration. The feature pack announced Tuesday will be added to the 1.2 release of MS CRM and will ship in August. The prebuilt Office integration will allow users to remain in Microsoft Office 2003 applications to create and track customer communications, escalate customer-service cases and look up customer data, Microsoft Corp. officials said. Click here to read more about how the Office integration framework will help Microsoft CRM. Another previously announced product, the Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals for Microsoft CRM, also takes advantage of this integration, Microsoft officials said. The new Microsoft Office 2003 integrations to Microsoft CRM will be available in both American and international English in August. In the fourth quarter of this year, Microsoft plans to deliver the Information Bridge Framework in German and the Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals in French, Spanish and German, officials said. The Microsoft CRM 1.2 feature pack also includes Microsoft CRM Mobile 1.2, which provides access to Microsoft CRMs contact management and opportunity management applications on Pocket PC 2003 devices. Microsoft CRM Mobile 1.2 will support American and international English only, Microsoft officials said. Read more here about Microsoft CRM Mobile 1.2 and more of the companys plans for CRM upgrades through 2006. The Microsoft CRM 1.2 feature pack includes an improved Sales for Outlook client; a tool used to redeploy Microsoft CRM configurations and data among different sites and application domains at the same company; and support for the development and management of parameter-based reports. Microsoft CRM 1.2 shipped in January. There will be no additional charge for the August feature pack.´ Check out eWEEK.coms Enterprise Applications Center at http://enterpriseapps.eweek.com for the latest news, reviews and analysis about productivity and business solutions.

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