Yesterday Microsoft made an exciting announcement for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The press release is announced here and the blog post from Bob Stutz is available here.

For us to get up to date with this release, this page from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Center provide the overview of the new features introduced in Dynamics CRM 2015.

The Release Preview Guide also available here. The new features that highlighted in the release preview guide:

Dynamics Marketing

• Multi-channel marketing
• Enhanced Email editor
• Campaign Management Console with the ability of A/B testing, cross channel operations and others
• Integrated Social Listening with the embedded social insights for CRM
• Sales Collaboration with marketing calendar
• B2B Marketing with improved lead scoring and webinar integration
• Marketing Resource Management with the marketing calendar
• Internal Process Automation with approval workflows
• Geographical Expansion to Japan and Russia

Sales

• Improvements to the sales processes enabling branching of the process based on business rules
• Product Families with the ability to bundle products and recommend related products for cross-sell/up-sell and simplify and minimize product management with product attributes (It seems the reason of Product Kit depreciation)
• Sales Hierarchies with the support on mobile device.
• Offline draft mode on table app

Customer Service

• Further Case Management enhancements with the ability topause and resume SLAs, and tracking time of case on hold or waiting on customer

Microsoft Social Listening

• Location filters
• More geographic and languages to be supported

Platform enhancements

• Enhanced Search Capabilities
  • Global search that works similar to the existing tablet app search
  • Search Bar added to navigation bar
  • Advanced find button added to the navigation bar
• Synchronise additional types of information with Outlook with the new configuration wizard
• Enhanced Business rules, which will be executed server side that will works everywhere (not only on web browser)
• Enhanced business logic with If and Else If statements with AND and OR grouping
• Pre-filling information when a record is created
• Business process flows can now be accessed via the client API
• Calculated fields and Roll-up fields are now added
• Field Level Security is now supported for out of the box fields

From my perspective, the overall platform enhancement is a really significant enhancement for functionality and development capabilities of Dynamics CRM. Now we could use more point-and-click customisations to achieve some rules. Especially with the availability of server-side business rules, validation and logic will become easier to manage (compared to using plugin, where developer effort is required). Yet, still there might be some complex scenario that the usage of plugin is still required. In conclusion this release is closing our gap with what Salesforce.com always boasting of their platform. Global Search, Validation Rule, Approval Process, etc. and even we are one step ahead with the Advanced Find and graphical interface to construct business rules.