The various contributors on the blog have mentioned ‘V3C’ on and off for the last several months now. For those of you just joining us, V3C the internal name for the project to develop a CRM v3 Outlook Client that is compatible with Windows Vista and Office 2007.
A small focused subset of the CRM team has been tracking closely with Vista and Office for the last several months. We released an internal Microsoft-only beta back in mid-September alongside the releases of Vista RC1 and Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. The beta has been extremely well-received and has been a fantastic way of exercising the limbs of the V3C client in a “real-world” environment. Feedback we’ve received has been extremely helpful and positive in improving V3C for our customers.
With Vista and Office 2007 closing in on their ship dates, we’re preparing to turn the corner and enter our final phase of development, that of driving the bug count to zero, certification, and release. Without boring you with the details of project management, I will say that this final stage includes intense comprehensive testing and more internal dogfooding efforts on our Release Candidate builds. I’m not yet able to talk about an exact release date…schedule dependencies are making this tough to nail down. However, we’re shooting to have something before the end of the year and will be communicating out more detailed dates soon, hopefully by the end of this week.
More to come!