New Microsoft CRM Mobile Client

I sat down with David Thacher, Brad Wilson, and Bill Patterson this past Wednesday to talk about what we are doing in terms of mobility.  We announced our plans for this recently at our Worldwide Partner Conference.  We’re adding new options here – one that I think really opens things up and fits better with what our customers are asking for.  For those of you that didn’t catch the earlier announcement I thought I would include the mandatory “device shot”:

The coolest thing about the work we are doing here is that it really opens things up in terms of device support.  It’s all web based and uses the internet browser on the device to render lightweight Microsoft CRM application pages.  In fact, this application will work on any HTML 4.0 compatible device – including SmartPhones and Blackberry devices. Our marketing guys got so carried away at WPC, they demonstrated this application on a Sony Playstation Portable (PSP). How’s that for cross-platform support?

It doesn’t have offline support, but that was a key part of the approach here – the emphasis is on opening this up for a broader range of devices without taking on the complexity of a bunch of software on the local device.

Another really cool part of this for you developers and ISVs out there… we are going to distribute this as a shared source application under the Microsoft Permissive License.  Developers out there will be able to extend our solution as much as they want.

We plan to release this on CRM Sandbox as binary next week and then release source code a few weeks later – keep your eyes open for it.

– Jeff Kelleran