So, we’ve seen a preview of what CRM 5 will look like. Some notable features will be customizable menu bars (same look as Office 2007), pages having header and footer regions which remain static as the rest of the page is scrolled, drag and drop in customization screens and a concept of building and publishing solutions in place of simple customization of entities.
The concept of using CRM as a development platform is being presented. One example was a very robust time sheet application. I’m still thinking about this and will address some of the issues more later, but it’s a good concept and could be useful. It’s also a way for MS to license more and more users of CRM within an enterprise. Currently we only license those users that will need CRM for looking up contacts, organizing and running campaigns, etc. If we add custom applications on top of CRM, we will most likely need to buy more licenses. Not necessarily bad, but I’m sure one of the reasons they are suggesting we do this – giving us more reasons to add more licenses to CRM.
Here’s a couple screen shots of various pages in CRM 5. The first is actually a shot of the custom time sheet app that was created in CRM 5.
Mostly Film Photography (GotFilm.org) 