I was reading around the CRM blogs a bit and looked in on Jonas Deibe who had a posting linking to a nice move about CRM Live. Here is the link to that movie: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=297916

Some of the marketing guys in Redmond (technical people) are talkning and showing some of the CRM Live functionality. To make a long story short, some of the more interesting things they talked about and that could be seen in the movie are:

– Ability to “Download web service description files” into CRM. It is done from the menu where you can select import/export customizations, so I am a bit curious of what it actually means and to what degree they have created automation for web service integration.

– According to them, Windows Workflow Foundation is the workflow engine for the new version (Titan) of CRM.

– I am still a bit confused if CRM Live, that will be launched in the second half of 2007, is the CRM Titan or if it is a Suped-up version of CRM 3 and that Titan will be something more. I will get back on this. I think that it might acctually be Titan, but I am not sure, and I have not read anything definitive on the question (as far as I remember anyway)

– The Titan version will have three deployment scenarios; normal, Service Provider Edition and Live.

– According to the movie, a customization created for one deployment will work for all deployment scenarios. This is probably true for customizations created using the GUI but my experience of working with CRM 3 SPE tells me there might be differences concerning dll-versions of for instance callout-base. Hence, you might have to have different compilations of your ISV solution for each deployment. We will see later how this develops.

– It is also a bit unclear on how callout and workflow dll:s should be deployed to the Live system it the callout and workflow dll-extending functionality will still be supported in Titan. I would imagine that Microsoft Live IT-people, might be a bit restrictive to letting people run their own dll:s on their servers.

– Concerning security, the normal version of CRM will still use NTLM, the SPE edition will use Forms based authenticatio (cookie) and Live will use “Live ID” which is the new name for Microsoft Passport, I believe. When consuming web services from CRM today, there is a difference between the two versions (normal and SPE) in how you authenticate yourself to the service. Since the three are based on different security architectures, I would imagine that you would have to write three different securtiy handlers to make your ISV-solution transparent to the deployment version.

– The long awaited offline API will be released making customizations of the offline experience possible in more manners than changing the GUI and creating non-AJAX javascripts. This is great news! 🙂

– In the movie they are talking about the possibility to download a trial version and a VPC. I acctually think this is CRM 3 not the Titan version they are talking about. Please correct me if I am wrong.

– In general, CRM Live looks quite a lot like CRM 3 but I am curious to how the deployment of callout and workflow dll:s will be handled.

Please let me know if you have an more info, I will always write who has given me the info (if you want to of course).

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se