Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 release preview guide now available!

Microsoft
Dynamics
CRM 2015
Release
Preview
Guide
Detailing:
 Microsoft Dynamics
CRM 2015
CRM Online (2015 Update)
Marketing (2015 Update)
 Microsoft Social Listening
(2014 R2)
NOTE:
The guidance included in this document
reflects current release objectives as of
September 2014. This document is not
intended to be a detailed specification, and
individual scenarios or features may be added,
amended or deprioritized based on market
dynamics and customer demand.
Please contact your salesperson for more
information on the pricing and licensing of
features contained in this release preview
guide.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015
Release Preview Guide 2
CONTENTS
Introduction 03
Key Investment Overview 04
Marketing 04
Sales 09
Customer Service 13
Social 15
Platform 16
Conclusion 20
Release
Preview
Guide
September 2014

Introduction
At Microsoft Dynamics, our vision is to help our customers deliver the kinds of
amazing customer experiences that will help their business thrive. We believe that
there has traditionally been a chasm between marketing and sales that needs to be
bridged in order to truly deliver personalized, end-to-end experiences that customers
will love. In a world where sellers and marketers must work more closely together to
seamlessly and successfully engage customers, Microsoft is providing the solutions
that can enable them to deliver amazing customer experiences together. By aligning
your organization around what matters most, companies will be able to drive greater
success and engagement with their customers.
This document highlights the capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, Microsoft
Dynamics CRM Online (2015 Update), Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (2015 Update)
and Microsoft Social Listening (2014 R2) that will further our customers’ abilities to
deliver amazing customer experiences. With a commitment to an agile release cycle,
there are currently several releases in planning and development. Dynamics CRM 2015
is a major release that will be delivered to our online customers as a customer driven
update and to our on-premises customers as version 7.0. Microsoft Dynamics
Marketing will be delivered as a manual update.

Key Investment Overview
To help our customers market smarter, sell effectively and provide care everywhere, we are investing
in the following areas:
Marketing
Business Context – The world is changing and it is impacting how companies need to engage with
customers. Customers are 57% of the way through the buying cycle before they engage with you.
Marketers, more than ever, need to be there every step with the customer, ensuring that when the
customer does reach out, sales, marketing and the customer are all on the same page. Marketing
owns more of the customer journey than ever before, so they must engage customers in new ways,
across new channels in a personalized, relevant way. At the same time, marketers are being held
increasingly accountable for the ROI of their marketing investment, yet most lack the ability to track
campaigns end-to-end and understand impact in real-time. More than 50% of CMO’s feel
unprepared for the new marketing landscape.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing enables your marketing team to seamlessly go from planning, to
execution, leveraging the power of Excel and Power BI to measure campaigns across channels from
start to finish so you can bring your marketing vision to life. You can engage customers one-to-one
across channels, build your sales pipeline and demonstrate the impact of your marketing
investments in real-time.
Multi-channel Marketing
Today’s buyer is smart and getting smarter each day. You need to understand what matters most
to them and help them get to the truth that they seek. Quickly and consistently. The 2015 update
of Dynamics Marketing helps organizatons streamline campaign creation and improve
segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B and split testing, integrated offers and approval
workflows.

Email Editor
The new Email editor provides marketers with the ability to select from pre-defined templates or
create an Email from scratch using an interactive drag and drop build process or an advanced editor
for the CSS & HTML experts.
Campaign Management Console
The Campaign Management Console has been enhanced to include complex multi-condition triggers
to fine tune responses, embedded cross campaign offers and A/B testing. A/B testing provides
marketers the confidence that their efforts will deliver the desired impact by easily setting up and
running A/B tests that are multi-objective with results displayed via in place real-time analytics.

Integrated Social Listening
Ensure success with integrated transactional and social insights and positively impact on your brand
with sentiment analysis.
Sales Collaboration
Strengthen your marketing and sales synergies with the new Sales Collaboration Panel which allows
sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting. Sellers can gain visibility into the campaign
activites and can control communications targeting their customers as well as setup and receive alerts
based on their interactions.

B2B Marketing
Deepen your lead management capabilities with webinar integration and improved lead scoring,
including the ability to introduce multiple lead scoring models.

Marketing Resource Management
Gain unprecedented visibility into your marketing plan with the new Marketing Calendar and
improve collaborative marketing with click to call capabilities from Lync.
Internal Process Automation
Easily design approval processes and track their status to ensure your team is aligned and on target
to meet deadlines.
Geographical Expansion
Geographical availability of Dynamics Marketing will expanded to include Japan and Russia.

Sales
In order to help sellers sell more effectively by selling more, winning faster and driving results, we
are pleased to deliver the following features:
Guided Sales Processes
Guide sellers toward desired outcomes with enhanced branching logic and increase impact via
automation of business processes and enforcement of business rules across all devices.
This release further improves the business process flows introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
by introducing the branching capability to allow organizations to implement complex business
processes. The branch selection is done automatically, in real-time based upon rules defined during
the process definition. For example, in selling products or services, you can configure a single
business process flow, which after a common qualification stage splits into two branches – one
specific to products and the other for services.

Product Families
Boost selling effectiveness with the ability to bundle products and recommend related products
for cross-sell/up-sell and simplify and minimize product management with product attributes.
Improvements to the product selling experience help sales operations managers and salespeople
manage and sell their company’s products more effectively. Sales operations managers can easily
configure product offerings that bundle related products together and provide tailored pricelists
giving sellers the ability to position the best products at the best price. Salespeople can see
suggestions for cross-selling and up-selling, and get recommendations for accessories or
substitutes right on the opportunity form while they are working their deal.
Product properties (attributes) such as updatable, read-only, required and hidden allow sales
operations managers to determine how they can be used by the sales agent at run time, that is,
while adding an associated product to an opportunity, quote, order, or invoice.

Sales Hierarchies
Manage and report on your sales data in a way that maps to your business. New hierarchical
visualizations and roll-ups bring real-time territory and forecasting data to your fingertips. Visually
explore and traverse hierarchies with key information displayed on tiles, launch actions or
communications from any node, and query filter records using the under operator.
With this release, users can see how info is related or grouped by viewing accounts, products, or
users in hierarchical charts. You can click a block of info to get more details and navigate to the
info you’re interested in.
For example, from the hierarchical view for accounts, you can:
• See how an account is doing in overall revenue
• Drill into tiles for sub-accounts to see where the deals are coming from
• Find out who is working an account and enlist help from others by sending email or
sharing the account with other salespeople
• View important details about each account, such as credit limit and latest activity posts
for the account
Hierarchical views are also available on mobile.

CRM for tablets enhancements
Microsoft Dynamics CRM for tablets helps you stay connected and productive wherever you are.
Use your Windows 8, iPad or Android tablets to stay up to date with your customer info—even
when you’re on the go. CRM for tablets has been enhanced to increase sales productivity with
flexible, role tailored dashboards and analytics, personalized home pages and the ability to
navigate by hierarchy, as well as improved support for disconnected scenarios. A new personalized
home experience allows mobile employees to pin key records and surface analytics from any tablet
enabled dashboard in CRM and to easily access and analyze their key data on the go.
Connectivity is not always available while traveling. With offline drafts new records can be created
and changes can be synchronized once reconnected.

Customer Service
Social and mobile have forever changed customer expectations of how they interact with
companies for service. 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.
They expect high quality, consistent service on the channel of their choice, whether it is over the
web, social networks, or on the phone. Today, 67% of consumers use web self-service to find
answers to their questions.
The challenge for customer service organizations is to balance delivering amazing customer
experiences against their cost to service for an optimal mix over time. Cost of service varies
significantly across channels, so companies are investigating how to provide differentiated levels of
customer support, while looking at how to empower their agents and make them more efficient
and effective.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables companies to build customer loyalty, empower agents and
drive resolution by providing relevant, proactive and personalized service across all channels.
Companies can connect their customers with the right answers to their service inquiries at the right
time, via their channel of choice across web, social, chat, mobile and phone.
Case Management
Enable agents to provide differentiated levels of support with flexible Service Level Agreements
“SLA’s”. Gain insight into service effectiveness with the ability to track and analyze key metrics like
First Response and Case Resolution.
In the previous release we enhanced the case management capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics
CRM to include:
 updated case form to manage related cases, review entitlements , and a Timer to ensure you
do not exceed/breach your SLA’s
 defining and managing service entitlements and SLA’s
 creating dynamic routing and queuing rules to ensure you hit your service targets
 merging duplicte or creating parent / child relationships between cases to eliminate
redundancies
This release further improves the case management capabilities to allow agents to pause and
resume SLA’s and track the time for which a case was on-hold or waiting on customer to ensure
SLA’s are met.

Social
Social has changed the way people engage and communicate. Today’s customers are more
informed and getting their information in new ways and from new sources. Decisions are
influenced by discussions online and user reviews. In fact, 75% of B2B customers are likely to use
social media to influence their purchase decisions, and customers are over 70%1
of the way
through the sales cycle before they contact you. Most of today’s social listening tools, however, are
so complex and expensive that they’re only available to an elite few – which means relevant
information rarely gets to the front lines who need it. At Microsoft, we believe this valuable
information should be available to everyone.
Microsoft Social Listening
Microsoft Social Listening is a powerful new service that your organization can use to monitor
social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. Use Microsoft Social Listening to track products,
brands, competitors, and campaigns globally and in real time to gain a true understanding of your
customers and your business across the social web.
Analyze what people are saying: In addition to the
existing sources (Twitter, Facebook, blogs and
videos), you can now add news to your search topics
and analyze sentiment in Italian.
Gain social insights: Use location filters to narrow
your data set and to see posts from specific
countries or regions. Create and manage location
groups that allow users to filter the data efficiently.
Geographic availability: Listen to social
conversations in 19 languages: Arabic, Chinese,
Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian,
Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai and analyze sentiment in six languages:
English, French, German, Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish and Italian. The Microsoft Social Listening
user interface is localized in the same six sentiment analysis languages.
1
http://partnersinexcellenceblog.com/70-of-buying-process-completed-without-sales-invovlement/

Platform
Powerful tools allow you to tailor Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet your unique business
requirements. Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitates the delivery of rapid business value with an agile
solution framework that can be easily tailored and configured. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM
platform provides a declarative paradigm that ranges from defining the data model to providing
integrated persistence, security, API access, user experience and programming paradigms based on a
modern open architecture. The following investments in our platform capabilities further our
commitment to an open, customizable and extensible product and online service.
Search
Improvements to quick search make it faster and easier to find customer records. Improved search
capabilities provide a quick way to find and navigate to records by letting users enter keywords in the
search box on the nav bar. The search box supports using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard character, and
allows the user to search across record types and get a full list of matching search results.
To do more sophisticated searches, click the new Advanced Find icon, which is now on the nav bar.
To only see matches for a certain type of record, on the search results page, you can select a filter
from the drop-down list. Click a search result to open it.
Synchronize more types of information between CRM and Outlook or Exchange
Teams that use Outlook/Exchange as their centralized information hub can synchronize more types of
information now, including:
 Additional contact and task fields
 Assigned tasks
 Appointment attachments
Users can easily view the fields that are synchronized, which provides confidence about where the
data comes from and how it’s shared. Additionally administrators can enable, disable and configure
the direction of synchronization for these fields.
New Configuration Wizard makes it easy to configure CRM for Outlook for
your organization
The CRM for Outlook Configuration Wizard has been redesigned making it easier to configure CRM
for Outlook. The new Configuration Wizard also makes it easy to add and manage additional CRM
organizations.

Business Rules
Business Analysts can easily create advanced business logic through a declarative “point-and-click”
interface to perform actions within CRM. Business Rules, introduced in Dynamics CRM 2013, have
been enhanced to include the following:
 Write once, execute everywhere - Business logic is now even easier to implement and enforce
o Server side execution allows business rules to be executed irrespective of whether
changes are made through the client or on the server though the SDK. Rules can be
executed on create or update of the record and form specific actions (field visibility,
lock/unlock and field requirement) are ignored.
 Express richer business logic
o If.. Else if.. Else support enables more complex structures to be easily defined
o Combine multiple expressions using simple and/or grouping to enable the definition of
richer conditions. For instance, if the lead rating is hot or if the lead is from an existing
account, mark this lead as ‘ok to pursue’.
 Support for default values and behaviors
o Set up each record just right for your sales reps by pre-filling information when a record
is created. Express condition-less business logic for rules formed of Set Default,
Show/Hide, Lock/Unlock, Set Required.
Business Process Flows
The introduction of the Client API for business process flows, provides complete programmatic access
to active and enabled processes. With JavaScript code, implemented by one of your developers, it is
now possible to ensure that the user is always working on the right stage of the right process in any
given situation. The events such as moving and selecting stages have been exposed to permit for an
action to be taken not just in the context of the process, but in the context of the stage that the user
is working on and currently viewing.
Calculated Fields
Often, the users are looking for data that is a result of some calculation. For example, a salesperson
wants to know the weighted revenue for an opportunity which is based on the estimated revenue
from an opportunity multiplied by the probability. Or, they want to automatically apply a discount, if
an order is greater than a certain amount. To provide this data, you can define the calculated fields in
the CRM User Interface without needing to write code. The calculated fields contain a value calculated
based on conditions and a formula defined within this field. The conditions and formulas can refer to
the values of the other fields in the same entity or values of the fields in the related entities. You can
define a calculated field to contain values resulting from many common calculations, such as simple
math operators, and conditional operations, such as greater than or if-else and many others.

Business Rules Editor Improvements
The initial release of business rules could only evaluate whether all the conditions in a rule were true.
In this release, in addition to the AND operator, you can use OR and If-Else to build more complex
and rich business rule logic with less effort. Creating a commonly used branching logic, becomes a
simpler task. The business process flow branching capability is built on the new If-Else logic.
Also new, an ability to evaluate the business rules on the server. When you set the scope of the
business rule at an entity level, the rule is evaluated on the server. In the previous release, we
provided a simple declarative interface for you to apply form logic without writing JavaScript code.
But, the rule logic was only evaluated in the clients that supported business rules, such as the CRM
Web application or CRM for tablets. For the business rule logic that had to be evaluated on the server
and applied to all clients you still needed to write and run the plug-ins on the server. With this
release, you can evaluate the business rules on the server and apply them to all clients without writing
code. For example, you can move the logic for commonly used scenarios out of plug-ins into the
entity-level business rules that you define in the CRM user interface. In addition, the support for
setting default values has been added to business rules. For instance, if Contoso only does business in
the United States, a simple business rule can be created such that on the creation of an incoming
lead, the country is automatically set to U.S.A.
Capture key business metrics with Rollup fields
The rollup fields are used to capture key business metrics at a record level from related entities with
One-to-Many (1:N) relationships. The rollup fields also provide the ability to aggregate over
hierarchies for more complex scenarios. You can define the entity rollup fields as a decimal or whole
numbers, currency, and date/time. For example, users may want to know:
 How many open opportunities they are working on
 A total revenue for the open opportunities related to the account
 A total number of high priority active cases related to the account
The aggregates are rolled up from the child records to the parent record. A maximum of 100 rollup
fields can be defined within an organization and each entity can have no more than 10 rollup fields.
The rollup fields are calculated by asynchronous system jobs. The Calculate Rollup Fields is a recurring
job that runs according to the recurrence pattern. The Mass Calculate Rollup Fields job runs once,
when a Rollup field is added or updated. Because the rollup fields are solution components, they can
be easily transported between organizations and distributed in solutions.

Field Level Security for Out Of the Box fields
Many businesses have sensitive data that should only be viewable or editable by certain users. With
field-level security, you can restrict access to custom fields and now other fields. For example, admins
can enable the account number field to be viewed but not changeable for members of the sales team.
Compatibility
Continuing our commitment to deliver CRM functionality on the latest technologies we have
updated the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Compatibility List providing an up to date view of recent and
upcoming compatibility testing results.

Conclusion
Microsoft has a powerful vision to create a family of devices and services for individuals and
businesses that unites and empowers people at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they
value most. Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions play an important and unique role in this strategy.
As the world grows smaller and more complicated, technology plays an important role enabling a
business to understand and effectively engage their customers. Microsoft Dynamics CRM products
help companies unite their marketing, sales and service teams with the insights they need to
deliver amazing customer experiences every time.
It is truly an exciting time to be engaging with Microsoft Dynamics CRM! Microsoft looks forward
to keeping you informed of the innovations and exciting capabilities that Microsoft Dynamics CRM
will deliver for you now and into the future to help your business thrive!
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make
business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like and with familiar Microsoft software, automating and
streamlining financial, customer relationship and supply chain processes in a way that helps you drive business success.
U.S. and Canada Toll-Free 1-888-477-7989
Worldwide +1-701-281-6500
www.microsoft.com/dynamics
Some features and dates are preliminary based on current expectations and are subject to change without notice. The information
herein is for informational purpose only and represents the current view of Microsoft as of the date of this document. Because
Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.
Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of
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© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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