This article was published on February 22, 2012

Microsoft plans to pack social power into Dynamics CRM with coming ‘R9’ update


Microsoft plans to pack social power into Dynamics CRM with coming ‘R9’ update

Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM product, one of its top line highlights, has a second update planned for 2012 entitled ‘R9.’ Dynamics as a product has been posting double-digit revenue gains, something that Microsoft likes to report in its earnings.

We reported some weeks past that Dynamics was prepping some rather large mobile moves, taking itself to nearly every platform that matters. We put it like this:

The company will release native apps of Dynamics between April and May of this year for Android 2.2+, Windows Phone 7.5+, iPhone 3GS+, Blackberry 6.x and 7.x, and both iPads running iOS 5 and higher. It’s an impressive list, and shows that for an enterprise product such as Dynamics, one cannot make choices in terms of platform specificity; the enterprise is diverse enough that it may now be an ‘all or nothing’ proposition to develop for its mobile side.

However, ZDNet now reports that a second update, dubbed ‘R9,’ will bring even more power to the product this year. R9 will contain a grip of social capabilities that bring Dynamics into what one could call the modern web. Here’s the gist: social analytics are an increasingly critical component of customer resource management, and if Dynamics wants to continue to compete, as it currently does, at the highest levels, it has to manage that information.

Enter R9. The obvious question is where Skype fits into all of this. Mary Jo Foley has the scrap of information that Microsoft will let loose:

I asked […] if Microsoft planned to include Skype integration in its CRM client this year. [Microsoft] noted that some Microsoft partners already have integrated Skype with Dynamics CRM. [Microsoft] also said that once Microsoft integrates Skype with Lync, as it has indicated it plans to do, Dynamics CRM users will benefit from that integration because “Lync is already baked into the product.”

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Or, Microsoft isn’t spilling much at the moment. This update should be available in the second half of the year. As we learn more, so will you.

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