Dennis Pombriant in his recent 'me-too' post regarding Vista vs Leopard decided to take a swipe at Microsoft CRM.
"In a vain effort to catch up and protect another franchise in the process, Microsoft is building Outlook into CRM or vice versa. Their contention is that people already spend the majority of their days in Outlook so it must be a perfect place for CRM users."
Let's be clear: Email, Appointments and Tasks are an incredibly important part of modern relationship processes. Outlook is Microsoft's client application which helps users manage Email, Appointments and Tasks. Wouldn't it then make sense for CRM to integrate with Outlook. Contrary to popular belief the Microsoft product teams don't sit around and say: "what features can we build to protect our sister teams?". We always ask ourselves: "What features can we build to deliver value to our customers". We also try and deliver on the promise of integrated innovation - the principle that Microsoft's products should work well together.
But - hey - maybe salespeople nowadays are just reading blogs, twittering and attending unconferences. Maybe Microsoft is totally wrong to think that Salespeople do lots of email, meet with customers and perform tasks.
Don't just listen to me. Listen to our competitors. Most of them also have Outlook Clients. Also listen to some of our partners. For example: LinkPoint360 with their awesome Lotus Notes clients for ACT!, MSCRM, Netsuite, Sage, SFDC, SalesLogix and Pivotal.