With a new year, Microsoft refreshed Dynamics CRM with a 2016 version update. Microsoft’s Dynamic CRM application has been on an upward climb the last few years in terms of the features and functionalities it offers. Microsoft's 2016 refresh brings some exciting new features and functionality to CRM. Microsoft has focused on providing features to improve productivity, mobile access, and customer service.
Lets begin by discussing productivity features. Microsoft has introduced with CRM 2016 the CRM App for Outlook. This lightweight application allows users to view Dynamics CRM information and track email from directly within Outlook. It is important to make a distinction between CRM App for Outlook and CRM for Outlook (aka Outlook Client). The Dynamics CRM Outlook Client is a full featured add in for the desktop version of MSCRM. The CRM App for Outlook on the other hand is a lightweight application which acts as a tool that enables users to easily track email wherever the user may be as well preview CRM information. The CRM App for Outlook is designed to tackle the most frequently CRM related actions executed within Outlook such as tracking incoming or outgoing emails, adding contacts from within an email message, or even creating CRM records. In addition, users can track email messages to new or existing CRM records.
It is now also much easier to create Excel & Word documents from Dynamics CRM because you can now create templates in both Excel & Word and use them to generate documents with ease straight from within CRM. Creating documents such as quotes, contracts, invoices and work orders can be generated with more ease than ever before.
Administrators can now enable CRM to connect to your organizations One Drive for Business allowing users to store private documents and access them directly through CRM.
Currently for CRM Online only, the new Delve dashboard component can be added to any personal or system dashboard and Delve searches the system's documents and provides the user with content that is most relevant to them.
Now lets jump in to mobile features of the 2016 release of Dynamics CRM. You can now view SharePoint documents in CRM for phones and tablets. In addition, if you have the mobile office apps downloaded, you can now export data to Excel and open it directly on your mobile device. Quickly and easily share documents with co-worked while on the go by email them links to CRM pages that you're looking at. The mobile applications are currently compatible with Windows 10 and ios9. These are just some of the improvements to Dynamics CRM in the mobile functionality section.
There is also a huge buzz about the service features added to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With the addition of the new survey designer (online only currently), users can create and send out questionnaires to collect feedback from customers about their products or services.
The new interactive service hub forms help you maintain context while addressing customer issues. The service hub allows you to view a quick summary of the case and customer contact information, see all activities related to the record and be able to take action upon them.
This summarizes just a few of the great things brought to CRM with the 2016 release .
Cheers!!
Ratanjit Gupta
Senior Systems Engineer - Dymamics CRM Team