Orion, the next major version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is expected to be released in the second half of 2013. Orion will be the first major platform update for Dynamics since early 2011 and it might be packaged as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2014.
For On-Premise customers Orion will retrospectively include the earlier updates from the Polaris and Gemini releases including iPad for Sales and the Flow Interface.
We don’t have a detailed list of changes to be expected, but we can already point out some key areas that existing Dynamics CRM customers should pay attention to when starting their upgrade preparations for this major new release.
Orion delivers a new global navigation bar that is present at the top of all the application windows, there will be no place left for the ribbon anymore. Effectively this means that Orion will offer only the new user interface, with no option to go back to the classic forms anymore. It is meant to simplify the UI.
Microsoft may provide an e option to upgrade the existing entity forms to be displayed in the new process form layout, but this may not be the optimal use of the new UI. To best use the process visualization features will require mapping of your current business processes to the new presentation methods and related data structures. So reserve time and resources for updating and testing the Orion forms before rolling out to the end users.
Development
The CRM 2011 API’s are expected to be supported in Orion, which means the code you write today for CRM 2011 should technically be compatible with the next version. However, legacy support for CRM 4.0 API’s will be dropped, so identify and update such components that may not have been touched when your organization wupgraded to CRM 2011 is something to start now in preparation for Orion.
The auto-save feature of the new forms means that you should no longer design your process around the concept of a user submitting the form fields by clicking on the classic save button. Any plug-ins that may be triggered from the repeated save events taking place in the new forms will need examination to avoid performance issues or problems with existing integrations to other systems.
On the UI the different components get rearranged into a widescreen form layout with no ribbon or left navigation.
Similar to the forms upgrade, existing scripts should technically have a supported upgrade path to Orion, but this doesn’t guarantee the overall application will function as expected when the surrounding CRM UI changes.
Once Microsoft makes a beta version of Orion and its SDK available, learning about the scripting-related changes on the new forms will be a top priority for developers, because the current Polaris forms did not contain support for common script-based extensions.
Add-ons
Compared to CRM 2011, the next version of Dynamics CRM will have a significant share of its new functionality delivered as “out of the box add-ons” based on recent acquisitions. Yammer and Skype integrations have been made available to CRM Online customers in the Polaris release, along with the in-house Bing Maps. MarketingPilot and NetBreeze will be key ingredients in the recipe for building the next generation marketing module for Dynamics CRM.
The Orion release is expected to include Exchange Server Synchronisation enabling Outlook clients to be bypassed to synchronise CRM activities and meetings.
A free Windows 8 tablet CRM will be included as part of the Orion update. On-Premise CRM 2011 customers will also have access to the free iPad CRM Sales Experience that was released to Online users earlier this year.
Orion updates will only be available to on-premise CRM 2011 or Version 4 customers that hold active Microsoft Software Assurance.
