The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Spring Release Preview Guide is now available.
You can download it from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=395005
The CRM 2013 Spring Release Preview Guide highlights the new features and capabilities that will be released soon. The Spring Wave is one of the biggest updates?to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.?This is going to be HUGE! There are lots?of something for everyone in this release, including marketing, sales and service.
Marketing
Microsoft Social Listening enables you to identify who’s having social conversations about your company, products, competitors or another topics. Track buzz, trends and sentiment related to things like your customers, campaigns and competitors.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, provides?email marketing, landing pages, social campaigns and more on par to most of the third party marketing automation systems available today. Quickly and easily deliver qualified leads to your?sales teams and measure the return on marketing investment. It also includes lead nurturing and scoring, improved dashboards and analytics, and an awesome campaign visual designer.
Email Marketing
Send highly personalized E-mail messages to drive improved open rates. Personalize the content per sender, recipient, subject & content allowing you to send fewer emails with greater business results.
- Deliver mass and transactional emails scalable to millions of emails to customers per day
- Cross campaign rules to build sophisticated nurture and drip email campaigns.
- Manage and control how many emails a contact can receive in a given time period to improve email performance.
Sales
For sales teams, there are enhancements to the CRM Tablet apps. We’ll see Social Insights right inside the mobile experience. Social Insights provides real-time company and contact information like financials, breaking news, social buzz and social connections. It’s very powerful for marketing, sales and account management professionals to help you engage more effectively to win more deals and spend less time spent researching and more time selling.
If you are an Android fan, the mobility updates will include a version for Android devices.?As before, the iPad is also supported.
The mobile experience will also be extended to include Customer Service capabilities optimized for people who want to?keep an eye on high priority Cases, monitor Queues?or route items across the queues to deliver amazing experiences no matter where you?are.
Customer Service
There’s lots of new “stuff” for customer service professionals?from the powerful self-service capabilities in the?recently acquired Parature, to the multi-channel capabilities coming in CRM including the Unified Service Desk to empower contact center agents to resolve customer issues with ease.
Parature includes lots of awesomeness including:
- Parature Portal: a 24/7 customer support center that is seamlessly integrated into your?current website. It includes a searchable knowledge, submit help tickets, track its progress and receive automatic email notifications.
- Parature Mobile Self-Service: Provides mobile friendly, responsive designs of the portal?that work?across desktop and mobile devices.?
- Parature Facebook Portal: Seamlessly provides?FAQs and KB searches, or create help desk tickets from inside of Facebook.?
- Parature Real-time Chat: provides instant live online support to provide?assisted support online. ?
- Parature Knowledgebase: provides quick answers to common questions and support issues, plus essential downloads including forms, how-to videos, product manuals, knowledge base information updates and more.?
Server-side Synchronization Updates
Server-side synchronization allows administrators to easily manage the synchronization of email, tasks, appointments
and contacts between CRM and Exchange. No additional cost….unlike some other solutions out there!
The original release synchronized ?data?between Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Exchange on-premises deployments only. We will now see support for both?Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Exchange Online as well as the continued on-premise option. POP3/SMTP3 providers are also supported for sending and synchronization of Email.
SharePoint Integration Enhancements
Simplified integration between CRM Online and SharePoint Online will be managed inside of?Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. If you have?Dynamics CRM Online and SharePoint Online you will no longer need to install and configure the CRM List Component to enable the Document Management integration. Woo-hoo!
Sandbox Environments
A big request from larger customers and those that prefer dev/test and production environments. It will be point and click simple to configure isolated, non-production online environments. Administrators can make a copy of a CRM Online instance into a Sandbox Instance.
- Minimal Copy only includes customizations & schema from source
- Full Copy includes all application data, users, and customizations from source
- Administrators can reset a Sandbox Instance back to factory settings (e.g. delete and re-provision)
- Administrators can take/restore a snapshot of a Sandbox Instance??(only one snapshot per instance at any time)
And lots more good stuff!
Microsoft plans to deliver the Spring Wave features to CRM online customers as an automatic service update with the option to opt in for additional Customer Service capabilities, and to the on-premises customers as an installable service pack (SP1).
Market smarter. Sell effectively. Care everywhere.