WOW! I am eating my words. Some of you who know me also know that I’ve been a certified MS Dynamics CRM consultant since it hit the streets in 2002. Needless to say I wasn’t a fan until now.

Eight years ago seems like yesterday now.. I recall the pains of v1.0 and honestly thought this could be Microsoft’s biggest failure. Let’s just be honest here, v1.0 was probably the worse hunk of junk ever published with the Microsoft label. Vista and ME at least were functional.

Version 1.2 wasn’t much better. A program that clearly wasn’t on the same planet as all the CRM systems out there it just seemed impossible to recover. I often questioned why even continue. They could have just bought another successful package and put their name on it (aka Oracle). None the less, it was a product that was extremely difficult to install and configure let alone a product that actually helped manage customer relationships.

About 2006… MS CRM v3.0 hit the streets. They did away with v2.0 since it took so long to get a version out. Marketing genius! Here we have a first generation product that was SO BAD… they had to SKIP version numbers to help the public realize how much of an improvement they made. I was able to help a number of clients achieve very modest success with v3.0. Unlike the first 2 releases, this product wasn’t a nightmare to install. The UI still wasn’t as good as the others. The so-called Outlook integration was ironically one of the worse out. However, it worked at least 90% of the time! A step up for 40% of the time… so hats of for at least making the software work.

Version 4…… ah yes.. We finally have a game! Although still severely behind other notables in the market space (Salesforce.com, Saleslogix, Netsuite), signs of a come back began to surface. Much better UI components and other key features that help users achieve success. By this time, I was into other products and watched from the sidelines. I began to see positive reviews instead of negative rants! Still a few major holes, but something I could live with and would actually recommend.

In pops v5 or MS Dynamics 2011