Today Microsoft announced what’s going to be in their next service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, codenamed “R8″, under the headline: CRM Anywhere.

The R8 service update is expected to be available Q2 2011 and is built on six broad themes: Mobility, Browser Flexibility, Social, Industry Templates, SQL Server 2012, Certifications.

Mobility

Microsoft will be launching a new product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, which will enable CRM Online, partner-hosted and on-premise customers with Internet-facing deployments to use CRM on up to three devices per user.

There will be native clients, which means offline support, on all the main mobile platforms: Windows Phone 7.5, iPhone & iPad, Android, BlackBerry.

Browser Flexibility

For years prospective customers have been crying out for multi-browser support and Microsoft has finally delivered! Once R8 hits your CRM server you’ll be able to access CRM using: Internet Explorer 7 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP; Safari 5.1.1 or above on Mac OS-X or iOS5 ;Firefox 6 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP or Mac OS-X or iOS5; Chrome 13 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Activity Feed Enhancements

In the Nov 2011 service update (codenamed “R7″) Microsoft released the new Activity Feeds feature which introduced some social enterprise features into CRM 2011. R8 introduces a series of enhancements to the Activity Feeds feature: like/dislike, enhanced filtering (e.g. @me, types of records I follow, record views), and an updated mobile activity feeds client for Windows Phone 7.5.

Industry Templates

Building on the work of Microsoft partners and its own consulting team, the Dynamics Labs will be releasing several industry templates into the Dynamics Marketplace. The first few templates will be: Wealth Management, Non-Profit, Health Sales Plans and Relationship Management for Health.

The templates will include data model customizations, dashboards, workflows and sample data. They’re designed to help customers in those industries visualise how Dynamics CRM can help their business, and speed up an implementation without necessarily being a fully-packaged vertical industry product.

SQL Server 2012

Microsoft’s own data centers have already been upgraded to SQL Server 2012 and the R8 service update bring official support for partners and customers wanting to upgrade their own deployments to SQL Server 2012. Additionally, there will be some new CRM features that make use of SQL Server 2012 new capabilities. For example: performance improvements, enhanced database recovery, next generation business intelligence (“Crescent”) such as pre-defined Power Pivot models, Power View reports, and time-animated reports.

Certifications

Certifications are critical to enterprise adoption and Microsoft has been working hard over the last year to ensure that its data centers and CRM Online service meets several important certification standards including: ISO27001, SAS 70 Type II, SOX, SSAE 16 SOC1, Safe Harbor, Data Processing Agreement, EU Model Clauses and HIPAA compliance (supported through Business Partner Agreements).

For More Information:

Download the R8 Release Preview Guide from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM website: http://crmpublish.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ReleasePreviewGuide.pdf

Read the CRM Anywhere blog article by new CRM General Manager Dennis Michalis: https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmnontechnical/b/crmconnection/archive/2012/02/06/crm-anywhere.aspx

Posted on LinkedIn by Neil Benson

Join CoreMotives at the Webfortis Roadshow in California-

• January 17 San Francisco
• January 18^th Mountain View
• January 27^th Irvine

Come discover these must have Microsoft Dynamics CRM add-ons to get the most out of your CRM system.

Meet one on one with Rhett Thompson, co-founder of CoreMotives, an email marketing and marketing automation solution for Dynamics CRM.

“Email marketing has become a necessity of any businesses marketing mix. Having it directly integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables tracking of emails down to the contact, but continues by telling the whole story, beyond the click, enabling marketing and sales to be able to offer the right product, at the right place, at the right time,” said Rhett Thompson, Cofounder of CoreMotives. “These presentations will show how email marketing, enhanced with lead scoring, web page tracking, web forms and social media, enable you to do it faster than your competition and put you ahead.”

List of presenters:

• Stefan Burak, CWR Mobility
• Ernie Pyle, Scribe
• Mark Nimnicht, Zap Technology

Schedule

In -Person Dynamics CRM Training Program for you and your staff.

Lunch and Learn

• 9:30 AM -10:00 AM Registration
• 10:00 AM -12:30 PM Presentations
• 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM Networking Lunch

Training Program

• 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM Dynamics CRM Training

Hope to see you there!

Feedback made easy.

Find out how your customers rate you with our new Star Rating feature! You can now add a star rating as a field type to any web form to capture a rating between 1 and 3, 1 and 5, or 1 and 10. We offer many different sizes and styles of stars to fit your design. Learn more.

Personalize Webforms

Show your Style.

With our new web form personalization tools you can make your forms and surveys fit your design. You are now able to add your logo or an image to your web forms. You can also customize the background color, fonts, borders and more. Learn More.

Mailgun

One Click. Send.

Now you can send a “one-off” tracked email to a marketing list, lead or contact from any editor you choose with our new Mailgun feature! This allows you to send from Outlook or Gmail and still have all of your data tracked in your CRM database. Learn more.

CAPTCHA

Slide. Submit.

Frustrated with CAPTCHAs that make you type in two words you can barely read? Us too, so we created a slider CAPTCHA! You simply drag it from left to right to unlock the web form allowing you to submit. You can add it to your web forms to limit SPAM and to make sure an actual person is filling out the form. How simple it that? Learn more.

Email Marketing Subscription Center

Easily Build Your List

With our Subscription Center instead of your recipient clicking unsubscribe and globally unsubscribing themselves to all your lists, let them decide what lists they want to be on. The Subscription Center page can be customized to fit your brand and allows you to choose which lists can be viewed. Learn more.

Our Users’ Voice

We are constantly looking for ways to enhance your user experience and invite you to submit your feature requests in our User Voice form. Go to http://coremotivestraining.com/contact-us/feature-request/to submit or to vote on others client requests. Stay connected with us! Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+. Get updates on all out newest features, events and hear about what’s happening at CoreMotives.

Advanced Training

Learn more

Did you know we offer Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing Training? Our classes teach you how to be an exceptional marketer. You will learn how to create a powerful marketing engine for your organization with our weekly classes — sign up today: http://coremotivestraining.com/advanced-training/.

Webfortis Road Show

• January 17^th –San Francisco, CA
• January 18^th –Mountain View, CA
• January 26^th –Los Angeles, CA
• January 27^th –Irving, CA

Extreme 2012: Berlin

• February 5-8

Convergence 2012: Houston, TX

• March 18-21

Be sure to let us know if you’re attending these, as we’d love to see you!  Keep an eye out for other CoreMotives spottings in 2012.

The CoreMotives captcha is elegant and simple. Try it below – just use the slider to unlock the form! Studies show that traditional captcha’s severly impact conversion rates because the required text input can be so difficult – leave it to CoreMotives to offer this clever alternative.

To see a full list of features we offer for creating web forms and surveys for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, go here.

More people trust CoreMotives for marketing automation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM than any other solution. What are you waiting for? You could be live with CoreMotives in 15 minutes, contact us to get started.

Want to know more about CAPTCHA? Read the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

A spam trap is an email address that look perfectly normal and valid that is used to identify spam messages.  The idea behind them is to create emails that have never been subscribed to any email communication.  These addresses are then monitored and anything it receives has been unsolicited, aka SPAM.

How did a SPAM Trap get on our list?

Typically, list maintenance and cleaning will prevent SPAM traps from ever joining your marketing list.  How it came to be on your mailing list depends on the type of spam trap it is.  There are 3 standard types of traps: List poisoning, List aging, & Poor list sources.

• List Poisoning:  This can be accidental or deliberate and can be the result of someone using a bogus email address to get materials from your website.  In not using their real email address they may have deliberately or accidentally input a SPAM trap.  The easiest way to avoid this is to ensure  that the list you are sending to is confirmed and you have their permission to email.  The CoreMotives Subscription Center helps to document this and keeps a detailed record of the opt-in for users – we even offer a double opt-in feature that requires an email address be confirmed by a human, making it impossible to have a SPAM trap.
• List Aging: Email addresses that you gathered a long time ago may no longer be valid and can be re-purposed to function as spam traps.  If you have not cleaned your database or marketing list for a long time and continue to send to those email addresses, you could get caught by a SPAM trap.
• Poor List Sources: Beyond being a violation of the CoreMotives Email Policy, poor list sources are a large reason to never purchase, rent, or harvest marketing list.  This is the most common way to get caught by a SPAM Trap.

Why Do SPAM Traps Matter?

Blacklisting:

Blacklisting is a process where the internet is actively monitored for reports of SPAM.  These reports are then publicly listed on internet sites for reference as an effort to fight SPAM.  Many ISP’s and organizations use these blacklist databases as a reference to filter email.  This means that once blacklisted, your emails are very unlikely to ever reach your end contact.

ZY Solutions helps companies integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with CoreMotives’ rich email and web marketing solutions, eliminating the need for a third-party email marketing system while allowing direct campaign tracking in a familiar CRM environment. It’s a powerful combination that gives sales teams actionable information they can use to target and qualify quality leads while uncovering new opportunities for sales and growth.

Embedded directly within Dynamics CRM to provide users with valuable information in one centralized location, CoreMotives’ advanced solutions are designed to enhance:

• Email marketing
• Lead scoring
• Web visitor tracking
• Nurture marketing
• Web forms
• Surveys
• Alert notifications

CoreMotives’ cost-effective solutions add significant functionality to the base CRM marketing model while eliminating time- and money-wasting inefficiencies. No longer do companies need to cobble together a “square peg/round hole” process that includes managing campaigns within CRM and then executing with a disparate email system. And because all CoreMotives’ solutions are based on the Windows Azure cloud, there’s no software to install or maintain, which means low-cost operations.

“Companies today are looking for ways to cost-effectively leverage information from CRM for critical marketing activities,” said Rhett Thompson, CoreMotives Co-Founder. “With our solutions, emails are sent within Dynamics CRM, leads are scored to help salespeople use their time more effectively, more valuable information is gleaned from clients’ corporate Web sites, and more actionable information can be given to sales and marketing.”

“Our proven expertise, combined with CoreMotives’ integrated software, gives companies a one-of-a-kind combination of consulting services and product features,” said David Fretwell, ZY Solutions CEO. “With ZY Connect’s Dynamics CRM experience and ZY Media’s marketing expertise, this new partnership provides proven marketing solutions to companies in virtually any vertical.”

About CoreMotives

CoreMotives is the number one marketing automation vendor in the Dynamics CRM space, with over 700 clients in 30 countries. Offering email marketing, lead scoring, web visitor tracking, nurture marketing, web forms, surveys, and alert notifications all embedded within CRM, CoreMotives enables clients to detect, track and target prospects interacting with their website or other marketing assets. CoreMotives is Marketing power for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.