Reasons to Upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011

There are lot of new functionalities added to CRM  2011 which were missing in CRM 4.0. This summary will help technical consultant and pre sales managers to convince their clients to upgrade their Microsoft  Dynamics CRM system.

1.) Dashboards: Previously clients were using 3^rd party software like Dundas or ZAP to create dashboards adding extra licensing cost to their budget. This is now available as a free component.

2.) Field Level Security: CRM 4.0 had a major drawback to exposing all the data on the from to any user having access to the entity. In CRM 2011 fields can be exposed and hidden on based on security profile of each.

3.) Team Ownership: Teams can own records in CRM 2011 which makes support tasks much easier in the service industry.

4.) FetchXML Reports: Use of fecthXML decreases the execution time of any report and also enables clients to deploy custom reports to CRM online.

5.) Auditing: Changes on each record can be tracked based on pre-defined system settings. Clients had to write custom plugins in CRM 4.0 to achieve this goal.

6.) Data Import: CRM 2011 enabled users to import data from multiple file types i.e. csv, txt, xml or zip. Pick lists and lookups can also be mapped now.

7.) Multiple Forms: Each entity in CRM 2011 can have multiple forms. Different forms can be opened based on security profiles.

8.) SharePoint Integration: CRM can be integrated with SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

There are also many new features introduced for administrators and developers enabling them to maintain the application with much ease. Developers can make use of multiple endpoints available for writing custom application.