Microsoft Convergence 2013 – Blog 4- Orion Roadmap & Look n Feel Screenshots

Greg Olsen, 01 April 2013

Wednesday 20th March 2013 session at Convergence 2013 in New Orleans, Jujhar Singh delivered a session titled CSCRM08 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Product Recap & Roadmap Primer. Now this is a session I had been waiting for. It contained the roadmap and look n feel of the next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM code name Orion, which was released publically today to customers, partners and other attendees of Convergence 2013. I will continue on the theme of photos. They explain most of it – I’m sure you can read from the photos right?

The roadmap can be displayed in 4 areas:

• Polaris
• BCM
• Polaris Update
• Gemini
• Orion
• Orion MKT

The next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM will come in the form of the Orion release in the second half of 2013.

The major themes for the Orion release are as follows:

• User Experience – Continuation of the journey in Polaris
• Ubiquitous – Role-tailored applications for Sales Professionals. (Ubiquitous key word replaces the word Mobile. You will be hearing this a lot more).
• Productivity – Internal Collaboration for the on-premise customers & Server Sync enhancements
• Business Process – Process-centric theme continued to the next level
• Online – Online first focus to continue (this means CRM Online will get all the new features first before OnPremise)

Now lets take a look at the new Orion User Interface. Firstly, you will notice it has no ribbon. Next it has no left navigation bar. The navigation bar is now at the top (as shown in purple colour in the screenshot below).

This new UI drives a better user experience for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Everything is happening in the one browser window. Note: I have no information on the Outlook UI. You will need to wait for Microsoft to announce this.

If you have used Outlook.com, then you will be familiar with the dropdown navigation. This experience is now similar within Orion as shown below.

More UI screenshots can be seen below

The mobility roadmap for Orion

Platform in Orion

The Next Frontier …

This slide gives you a snapshot of what is coming

This is the look n feel of the MarketingPilot application which will be a part of the Gemini release. Note the flat UI.

Exciting times ahead in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.