CRM 2015, 2016 (365) – WHAT’S NEW

Features

CRM 2016 (Online)

CRM 2015 Update 1 (Online)

Information Discovery

· Trending Documents from Office Delve can be embedded on a dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

· Trending documents could be access directly in Delve but could not be embedded in Dashboards

OneDrive for Business and documents

· Get a consolidated view of contextual documents across OneDrive for Business for any CRM record

· Get a consolidated view of contextual documents across SharePoint, and Office 365 Groups for any CRM record

Document generation

· Users can see relevant templates available (role-based) in CRM and 1-click generate documents to download.

· Mail Merge or Custom Code were the only options to generate documents from CRM.

FantasySalesTeam, from Microsoft

· Goes beyond traditional gamification to help sales teams run more engaging and higher performing sales contests

· Team-based competition gets reps pushing on each other and investing in the success of those around them

· Drive activity, performance, and behavior by setting goals and defining metrics.

· Keeps sales reps engaged, helping to increase overall CRM adoption and drive greater results

· Custom Gamification solutions (either created from scratch or created by ISV partner) had to be leveraged to drive activity, performance, and behavior based on Team-based, and/or individual-based competition

Features

CRM 2016 (Online)

CRM 2015 Update 1 (Online)

SMS marketing

· Create powerful SMS campaigns as well as integrate SMS marketing in your multi-channel campaigns

· Available only via Custom Solution.

Interactive Service Hub

· This new online user experience provides role based scenarios to deliver tailored application experiences for Tier 1 and Tier 2+ agents

· Real-time dashboard for a One-place view of workload

· Interactive chart based visual filters

· Configurable data streams for multiple entities

· Perform Queue and Entity actions directly from Streams

· Granular and customizable filtering criteria

· Customizable display

· Dashboards were used to allow some of this functionality, but dashboards have limitations by design that prevent the flexibility found on the Interactive Service Hub

External Party Access

· External Party Access is the foundation to enable CRM to allow external parties to access CRM with the right level of permissions (e.g. Customer / Partner Portal scenarios).

· External parties required a user account to access CRM, unless they interacted with the data via a custom portal.

Voice of the customer

· New rule-based, multi-channel enterprise feedback management capabilities enable embedded voice of the customer insights into customer engagements

· Fee-based solutions or custom portals were required to provide comparable functionality

Features

CRM 2016 (Online)

CRM 2015 Update 1 (Online)

Service intelligence

· An interactive Power BI dashboard to provide Customer Service Managers (CSMs) with an aggregated view of customer service performance

· Dashboards were used to allow some of this functionality, but dashboards have limitations by design that prevent the flexibility found on Power BI dashboards  

FieldOne, from Microsoft

· FieldOne allows customers to execute their field service management strategy

· End-to-end solutions that enable customers to drive revenue, reduce costs and deliver world-class customer service

· Strengthens our already comprehensive customer service capabilities

· Leverages Microsoft cloud and productivity offerings Azure and Office 365  

· Custom solutions were available to provide similar functionality (Including FieldOne prior to the acquisition by Microsoft)

Productivity & Intelligent Social

· Adaptive sentiment: learn from curations of sentiment values to create domain specific models

· Automated triage: Automatically detect intention in social posts and triage/route them as cases or leads into CRM.

· Group collaboration: Enable teams to collaborate using Office Groups for assigning posts and sharing streams & social profiles.  

· Not available on Social Listening

Social CRM

 · Transform social interactions into end-to-end customer experience with the ability to create CRM actions like cases and opportunities from social posts.

· Define and set up rules to automatically create CRM entities through Social Engagement  

· Not available on Social Listening

Features

CRM 2016 (Online)

CRM 2015 Update 1 (Online)

Mobile offline support

· Dynamics CRM Online will be able to get full offline experience with mobile apps.

· Users will be able to create, change and delete records while offline.

· Automatic playback of offline actions helps synchronize local changes with CRM Online.

· Mobile apps provide a seamless user experience when switching between online (connected) and offline modes.

· Draft Records allowed users to create new records offline to later synchronize these records manually once the client was Online

Document management on Mobile

· Allows you to view the documents from SharePoint or OneDrive for Business in context of a CRM record on your Mobile device

· This is enabled through outbound mobile deep-linking allowing users to seamlessly open various Office apps within the CRM mobile app.

· Documents hosted on SharePoint were not visible when navigating through the Phone and Tablet app. They had to be opened separately and outside of the app (with the exception of OneNote documents when the OneNote Integration was enabled).

App-to-app deep linking

· Enables other mobile apps to link and directly navigate to a record/ view/ dashboard within the CRM mobile app.

· Other apps could not launch records inside the CRM app for Phone and Tablet.

Features

CRM 2016 (Online)

CRM 2015 Update 1 (Online)

Data performance dashboard

· Admin-driven optimization to understand the performance over time of components with long running queries.

· Performance tools available to test real time performance rather than performance over time.

Bulk Data Loader

· This tool will allow uploading large data files to cloud staging tables where you can perform lite data quality functions and then push the data into CRM Online

· Import Data Wizard or Fee-based Data Migration and Integration tools

Ecosystem enablement

· Allow for sub-components of a Solution Package

· Patching support

· Lifecycle Improvements for Integration with the Marketplace

· Parallelization of deployment

· Solutions could only be exported from CRM including complete entities and full components list

Azure Machine Learning

· Offers configuration experience and insights integrated into CRM UI removing complexity of requiring data scientists or understanding ML models

· Similar functionality only available via Custom Solutions