CRM 2011 – Hosk blog numbers

I do like a good stat and I have a few from my blog

I have published 500 blog posts, this is number 501!

I currently have 270000 all time views.

Although views aren’t really all they cracked up to be with WordPress.

Check out the stats for yesterday blog post CRM 2011 – Microsoft Send CRM Anywhere and everywhere and on all browsers 

132 read the blog but WordPress only counts people who visited the page (not people reading through rss feed readers etc). So WordPress counts this as 24!

still I had my most popular number of visits in a day last week, a very impressive 1634.

Last week I had my most popular week with 8119 views

My blog has been very popular at the start of the year and I broke my biggest number of views in a month with January 31416 views

So a big thanks to all the people who read the blog and especially to the people who comment, I do appreciate a good comment, often to tell me I have got something wrong but it’s good to learn from people with more knowledge on a subject than myself.

The CRM community as a whole is very active and always has interesting blogs, tools, videos and big announcements from Microsoft.

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CRM 2011 – 30 % off CRM ebooks at Packt publishing

Packt are having a sale on CRM books (in fact the whole Dynamics range) in what they are calling Microsoft Dynamics Mayhem

As my blog focuses mainly on CRM, I will tell you the books they have available.

 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM books/e-books

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting and Business Intelligence		Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 New Features		Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Dashboards Cookbook

Leon Tribe a CRM MVP has written a review of the new features book which is very indepth and well worth a read

http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2012/02/book-review-packt-microsoft-dynamics.html

 

I also notice that if you take the survey to rate their website then you can get 40 percent off.

CRM 2011 – Video – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sales Automation Demo

Here is an interesting video about Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales automation.

The video shows you the possibility of CRM 2011 with regards to sales automation and goes through a few examples.  The video could give current CRM users a few ideas.

CRM Market Share predictions for 2018

I read a blog post about the predicted CRM market shares for 2018 and I wasn’t convinced of the figures, especially after reading and writing about the update for Q2 in 2012 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

The full market share article can be read here I have just copied the image below and here are the interesting stats

• Salesforce – is the most popular cloud-based CRM software, claiming 14.8% of the entire CRM software market. According to Trefis, Salesforce’s market share is expected to reach around 24% by the end of 2018.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Analysts expect the total revenue from Dynamics CRM and ERP to reach $2.5 billion by the end of 2018.

• SAP – has over 30,000 customers and over 2 million users. They also have 12,000 partners to assist them. SAP’s market share is expected to stand at 20% by the end of 2018.

• SugarCRM – SugarCRM is the leading provider of open-source CRM software. The company has more than 7,000 customers and over half a million users around the globe.

My first thoughts looking at the image below was although Microsoft entered the CRM arena quite late on but I thought they would have gained more market share with CRM 4 and even more with CRM 2011.

The figures would suggest a low growth in market share, personally I think Microsoft are going to grab more than that.

CRM 2011 – Microsoft send CRM Anywhere and Everywhere and on all browsers

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 community has exploded with blog pages and tweets flying around and everyone getting excited.

Microsoft are really pushing their Dynamic products because they have recently announced NAV 7 statement of direction which announces they are going to have a major release of NAV every year for the next 3 years, which considering the last major release was release 2009 this is some major investment.

At this point I would like to ask, no plead with Microsoft to invest in the CRM/NAV connector because that would make my life a lot easier.  Although I would say the CRM/NAV connector blog has recently published some excellent videos and have created two new releases.

To Microsoft this week have announced the Q2 2012 Service Update in the Release Preview Guide.   The blog post announcing this was quite low key, not many pictures and then you open the release guide and POW, you release Microsoft are going to wow the CRM community with some fantastic enhancements.

The biggest point I will make is Microsoft are still keeping CRM Online at $30 a month, despite adding lots of new functionality.  This is big point which I think has been overlooked when considering these new enhancements coming our way.

There are so many good things but my favourite is

Multiple browser support

Yes at last, although a lot of people use Internet Explorer a lot of people don’t use it and it comes down to personal choice.  It can be quite a downer to users when you tell them you can only use internet explorer to use CRM and this will make it easier for new users to get started with CRM, this is also one of the most popular questions I get asked by potential customers.

CRM is going to be working on these browsers

• IE on Windows 7
• Safari 5.11 + on Mac OSX and iPad 2
• Firefox 6+
• Chrome 13.x

MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2012 and BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI) INSIGHTS WITH POWER VIEW

This is another big improvement.  Currently one of the biggest weaknesses (in my opinion) in CRM 2011 is the lack of reporting capability.  The dashboard charts are certainly a step in the right direction and great when pitching CRM 2011 but in reality these are very simple graphs as soon as you want to do something more complex, what are you options.  Report Wizard is also limited (to two entities).  The next step is the dreaded reporting services.  This is an area where Microsoft is weak so any improvements in this area are important and especially when you consider that reporting is such an important area to customers.  CRM 2011 is great at allowing users to collect information but at the moment it’s not brilliant and allowing them to report on it.

I have to admit I have no idea what Powerview is or if it’s going to be a big improvement but I am hoping and the screenshots look good.

PORTAL FRAMEWORK ENHANCEMENTS

I think Portals will get used more and more, especially as CRM gets bigger and is used by more people and doing more things.  Once Microsoft Dynamics CRM gets to be used by companies and then they start to modify it to capture more information and is used by more parts of the business, I think you will see more portals start to be used.

MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM MOBILE

The current CRM mobile basic interface is going to be replaced with a full range of smartphone apps which are going to work on all the major smartphones and tablets.  This is a big move from Microsoft and one which is right on the money, everyone has smartphones and tablets these day and whats more people seem to enjoy using them.  Its going to be very persuasive when selling CRM to potential customers.

Smartphones
Windows Phone 7.5+
Apple iPhone 3GS+ iOS 5+
Google Android 2.2+
RIM Blackberry 6.x and 7.x

Tablets
Apple iPad/iPad2 iOS 5+

 

The full document has a lot more details so I would recommend you read it, I will add another link to it here.

That’s my thoughts on the forthcoming release, all we can do now is wait for the good times to roll.

Well done Microsoft and keep the up the good work and the investment in CRM.  I think they are moving in the right direction and really have seemed to listened to their customers and what the enhancements they want to be added.