The end of the past week marked the release to manufacturing of Microsoft's customer management solution v4.0. Michael Lu, the Program Manager for Office Integration, Service and Marketing, announced the RTM of CRM 4.0 on December 14th. A couple of days later, Ben Vollmer, Microsoft CRM SSP, confirmed the shipping of CRM. However, the Redmond company took even more time to announce the availability of the next generation of its CRM solutions. Only on December 17th, three days after it dropped CRM 4.0 under the wire, did Microsoft point to the completion of the customer relationship management solution v4.0.

"Microsoft Dynamics CRM is making the power of choice a reality for businesses around the world. This new release further enables us to deliver on Microsoft's software plus services strategy and provide our CRM solutions with a great user experience and exceptional business value", explained Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft.

CRM enables businesses to manage customer relationships, offering the necessary tools and capabilities to streamline keeping track of all the aspects that go into a sale, from the first point of contact. The latest version of CRM, formerly codenamed Titan, comes to the table in two flavors. The Redmond company is delivering both the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, for Microsoft-hosted deployment.

Microsoft "shipped 4.0 on Friday. It generally takes a couple of weeks for everything to hit all of the download sites, etc... But it looks like the Product Development made good on a Q4 Delivery Date for Microsoft Dynamics 4.0. (aka Titan....) The US Launch parties for customers start in March", Vollmer added.

CRM 4.0 comes with a range of enhancements in comparison to its predecessor, version 3.0. Businesses can now manage multiple customers per server via a multitenant architecture, and enjoy the benefits associated with support for no less than 25 languages and multiple currencies. Over 700 companies have already been running CRM 4.0 for the past year, including Microsoft partners and early access customers.