Dynamics Light Seeing the (Silver)Light effect in Dynamics CRM

Dynamics CRM 5 Sneak Peek

Microsoft PDC conference was held on 17 Nov – 19 Nov last week at Los Angeles. A bunch of new technology was announced such as Silverlight 4 Beta, Microsoft Live Pivot. On top of that, there are heaps of sessions around VS 2010 Beta 2, C# 4.0, SharePoint 2010, and the long awaiting CRM 5.

This blog post will summarize some of the new features from CRM 5 which I gathered from the PDC videos and a number of twitter feeds (ceibner, davidyack, crmlarry). CRM 5 itself is planned to be released on second half of 2010.

Note: the features listed here might change for the final release of CRM 5.

NEW FEATURES: USER INTERFACE

- New Ribbon UI

This will replace the existing CRM Toolbar at the top of each page. I started to like this new Ribbon UI. It really provides a visible quick-way to perform an action.

- Single Page Forms

The forms in CRM 4 uses tabs to divide information in a form into multiple views. In CRM 5, all the tabs are displayed along the left hand side as a section.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the tabs in Account form are displayed under the Information link.

- Data Filtering

In CRM 5, the end user can navigate to the "DataView" and perform their own filter criteria directly.

- Inline Visualization

CRM 5 supports simple numeric data visualization using in-line charts out of the box, without having to use SQL Reporting Services or third party charting solutions.

- New Ownership Type

Team Owned entities are supported in CRM 5 and fully integrated into the Role-Based security model.

- Native SharePoint Integration

Integration with WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) for document management, including site and document library provisioning, document metadata, item security, and check-in / check-out capabilities.

- Unstructured Relationships

The next generation of "Set Regarding" and "Relationship Roles" functionality, allowing you to define ad-hoc relationships between two entities.

- Option Sets (Global Picklists)

This functionality allows the end user to define a number of picklists (enumeration) and be able to reuse it across multiple entities. One of the great example of this is the country list which you might use across Account, Contact, etc.

- Flexible Form Layout

In CRM 5, you can position sections side by side, as well as customize the labels position (top, left, or right of each field). On top of that, you can create "In-Line Sub-Grids" easily without having to use IFrame and JavaScript. Just in case you are wondering, yes the form editor in CRM 5 will support drag-and-drop fields.

- Filtered Lookups

You can choose a pre-defined views or filter by related record on the same form.

- Built-In Audit Capability

NEW FEATURES: Development

- Uses .NET 4.0 as the base framework

- Flexible Web Services

Supports WCF, REST, and AJAX Web Services.

The new WCF Web Service also provides a significant performance improvement over the classic ASMX Web Service.

By exposing these new interfaces, it lends itself to easier interoperability with other non .NET technologies such as PHP, Ruby, etc.

- Enhanced Query Support

LINQ will be the first class citizen in CRM 5. If you are developing a xRM solution in Silverlight, you could also use .NET Ria Services to interact with CRM 5.

- Custom Code Sandbox

There is a new server role for running custom plugin and workflow activities without requiring full trust. This allows ISVs to run custom code on CRM Online environment and achieve true parity between On-Premise, Partner-Hosted, and Microsoft-Hosted deployments.

- Plugin Transaction Support

Previously in CRM 4, you can only register plugin to run before or after the event takes place, which is troublesome when it comes to rolling back changes when failures occurs. Luckily, CRM 5 allows you to register your plugin as a part of the same transaction as the platform event.

- Automatic Plugin Profiling

CRM 5 tracks how a plugin executes, how much resources it consumes. If a particular plugin fails a number of times, it will automatically disable it to maintain system integrity.

- Better support for ALM (Application Lifecycle Management)

Andrew Bybee had a full session on this which you can download here. As ISVs, how many times we build xRM solutions which consist of multiple components with complex dependencies, and every clients want to get only parts of the solution or slightly different component to what we have out-of the box. This causes a lot of pain in CRM 4. The great thing is, Microsoft introduced a concept of Solution in CRM 5. This allows multiple ISVs to deploy their own solutions and customize the prefix to avoid namespace collision.