Microsoft is updating its customer relationship management
suite with subscription licensing and new features designed for
non-technical sales and marketing staff.
To make it easier to use, CRM 3.0 will provide a complete suite of
marketing, sales and service capabilities with the look and feel of
a Microsoft Office and Outlook user interface.
With CRM 3.0, Microsoft is also introducing a subscription-based
licensing model for users that prefer a hosted offering, enabling
Microsoft to compete against other hosted CRM suppliers, such as
Salesforce and Siebel.
Microsoft said CRM 3.0 is designed to address the three key
challenges that determine the success of most CRM initiatives: user
adoption, business fit and total cost of ownership.
CRM 3.0 also comes with a service scheduling module that can
automatically manage complex scheduling requests.
Microsoft said data objects could be added to the system easily and
linked to other predefined objects, with all underlying data
storage and web services automatically generated by the system.
Microsoft is also introducing a small business edition of CRM 3.0
for companies that use Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium
Edition.