Microsoft Business Solutions Customer Relationship Management "Microsoft CRM". This new product supports and somewhat automates and eases the CRM strategies of midscale business by helping them build lasting and profitable relationships with their most important clients and customers. The solution enables these businesses to take advantage of technology and related services that were previously reserved for large enterprises with big IT budgets.

Microsoft CRM offers an up-to-the-minute view of all interactions from initial lead through lifetime customer history. Featuring an intuitive user interface, Microsoft CRM is accessible both as a browser-based application and through Microsoft Outlook. Sales teams have integrated, up-to-date information, facilitating better work in team environments, increasing efficiency and ultimately improving the customer experience. Customer service employees are armed with a solution that helps meet a greater number of service agreements and provides higher customer satisfaction.

Microsoft CRM is the first Microsoft business application built on the Microsoft .NET infrastructure, facilitating a simpler connection of disparate systems and enhancing integration with external Web services such as credit checking, analytics and marketing automation services that extend the core functionality of the solution. The flexibility built into Microsoft CRM allows midmarket businesses to determine the degree to which they want to automate and share information across their organizations.

Microsoft CRM is a new and somewhat interesting product, which a few key note features enabled in Office Systems 2003. You may notice you can install/enable CRM onto an outgoing e-mail so that only certain priorities can read it, well; this is useful if you have a scumbag sniffing your e-mails on the corporate level and spreading them down through the company. With CRM, only those who SHOULD have access to certain rights, have access.

I will do an article later on what Digital Rights Management "DRM" is and how it works, but for now; I think you get the basic concept of .NET infrastructures and what CRM can do for businesses.

I'd also like to add that you will be seeing a large influx of CRM into the Office Systems technologies such as Outlook, Word and PowerPoint, these will allow management to interact with people on the payroll level and visa-versa for the payroll employees to interact with their customers.

CRM has also gone through some various name changes. It was originally titled .NET Relationship Management. There will be a software server for CRM to interact with CRM enabled software/applicatons/documents etc, but this will be later on in the Q4 of this year or Q1 next year.

These pictures here illustrate how CRM can aid in the escalation of trouble tickets for an internet service provider or other such areas. Notice how each e-mail is given a CRM ticket and an escalation priority