Microsoft fine-tunes CRM offering

Microsoft has detailed the new features of its customer relationship management (CRM) package, Microsoft Business Solutions CRM 1.2, due to be released in August.

The software giant said that the CRM 1.2 feature pack will offer closer integration with Office 2003 and add CRM Mobile 1.2 without additional licence fees for existing Microsoft CRM customers.

Office Information Bridge Framework will deepen the integration between Office 2003 and the CRM package, making it to possible to perform CRM tasks such as tracking sensitive letters and looking up customer data without leaving Office 2003.

Anders Brown, group product manager for the information worker new markets solutions group at Microsoft, said in a statement: "Two already great products - Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Office 2003 - have already proved themselves to be powerful tools for conducting business more efficiently and supporting strong customer relationships."

Microsoft CRM Mobile 1.2 allows customers to offer contact management and opportunity management capabilities to staff using Pocket PC 2003 devices.

The CRM 1.2 feature pack also includes enhancements to the Sales for Outlook client and a redeployment tool designed to enable the migration of Microsoft CRM configurations and data across sites and application domains.