New release has suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities within a native Microsoft Office experience
Redmond, WA — December 9, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. has announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, the new release of Microsoft's customer relationship management solution for small businesses, midsize companies and large enterprises.
Microsoft CRM provides a suite of marketing, sales and service capabilities, all with a familiar and consistent user experience based on Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Outlook.
The product is offered in a Professional Edition and a Small Business Edition, and is immediately available in English worldwide. Dutch, French, German and Russian versions of Microsoft CRM will be available January 1, 2006, and 17 more language versions will be released in the coming months.
Microsoft said its CRM is built to address the three key challenges that it believes determine the success or failure of most CRM initiatives: user adoption, business fit and total cost of ownership. First, Microsoft said the software delivers roles-based CRM capabilities within a native Microsoft Office and Outlook experience. Users can choose to use a rich Outlook client or access the system through a browser-based client or a mobile device, thus increasing user adoption.
Second, according to Microsoft, the suite adapts to each company's needs through event-driven workflow capabilities and reporting and analytics capabilities.
Finally, Microsoft said its CRM has a low total cost of ownership by offering a flexible and configurable platform built on Web services and other standard tools and technologies.
As of January 1, 2006, Microsoft said it will offer subscription-based licensing to partners that deliver hosted solutions based on Microsoft CRM. The company added that this continues its commitment to provide a choice of CRM functionality in both on-premise and hosted deployment models. Since the same code is used in both models, customers can choose whichever deployment model fits their business and technical requirements at any point in time.
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