First Impressions of Microsoft CRM 4.0 codename "Titan"
Now that Microsoft CRM 4.0 (codename "Titan") has been released, I thought it was time to take it for a test drive. I've loaded up Windows Server 2008 RC1 on my virtual server and installed Titan on it. After just a few hours of tinkering, there are a few new features that are immediately apparent.
The first of these is duplicate detection. Microsoft's CRM product was often criticised for not having any built-in duplicate detection. The company's defence was along the lines of "we don't need duplicate detection because all the data should be validated at the point of entry". Honestly, no-one was impressed with that line. Microsoft has taken the criticism on the chin, however, and Titan is armed to the teeth with "de-dupe" features. I can see this being a very useful feature for keeping that sacred database clean and tidy.
Duplicate detection immediately detects when you create a potential duplicate and pops up a warning that lets you review the other record(s), as in the example here when I edited an existing record to give it a duplicate email address. At this stage however, there is no option to merge the records.
A second line of defence runs duplicate detection jobs in the background which can run on a schedule and can send an email when duplicates are detected. Users may create their own de-dupe jobs that will operate just on a subset of the database, get a copy of the results in their Workspace page and can then review and merge or delete duplicate entries, as shown in the screen clipping here. Obsolete records are deactivated and left in the database for subsequent review or deletion. In the settings pages there is a host of options for creating duplicate detection rules and jobs, plus other data management tasks such as bulk record deletion. I always wondered if CRM databases would just grow and grow as there never seemed to be any way of cleaning old junk from the database - now there is. Another nice feature here is that you can create Data Maps, which aid with importing and exporting data. For example, one could create a data map to make it easy for users to import their contacts from Outlook or another personal organizer program.
As a part-time developer I've noticed a lot of interesting changes happening around workflow lately, beginning with the release of the .Net Framework 3.0 and the 2007 Office SharePoint Server which was the first product to make use of it. CRM 4.0 now hosts this same workflow engine. Creating workflows is much more user friendly now and the process is available to end users - in CRM 3.0 creating workflows required use of the Workflow Manager and was really in the realm of the system administrator. The workflow editor (shown left) is now built right into the user interface enabling users to get as sophisticated as they like with their own data. 
The simple workflow I created here runs when new contacts are created and if the credit limit has not been set, sets it to £500. It then waits for 3 months before automatically increasing it to £1000 unless the record owner has already set it higher. Simple to do right in the web application. Users can also see which workflows are currently active on any given record, something which again needed special software and privileged access in version 3.
The final neat feature that I want to cover is many-to-many relationships, something that was absent from previous versions and I felt was a severe limitation. To illustrate many-to-many relationships, consider that you want to track your contacts' hobbies. So you create a list of possible hobbies, say Golf, Astronomy, Power-Kiting, Skiing, etc. Now in your contact details, you can add a list of hobbies that the person enjoys. You can open a contact and view the list of hobbies or you can open a hobby and see which of your contacts likes that activity. You could also search for contacts who like Golf and Skiing, for example. In CRM 3.0, this was difficult or impossible to do. It was easy to add one-to-many and many-to-one relationships, so for example you could easily include one hobby per contact, but without getting down and dirty in code it was pretty much impossible to do this many-to-many thing. In CRM 4.0, this is easy to do once again from within the user interface and Microsoft has plugged this serious limitation.
With many of the serious limitations of version 3.0 now gone, I think Microsoft has a world-beating product here.