As Microsoft CRM continues to iron out its kinks and starts to seriously challenge Salesforce.com for usability and features, here is a list of some cool new features just announced in Microsoft CRM 2011:

First item up, *DYNAMIC* Marketing Lists!!   Yes, we are a little excited about this one.  Being a CRM support provider, how many times do you imagine we get someone asking about how to update their marketing list because they need to add new accounts/contacts to it, and it?s not updated automatically.  Well, pretty much every time they need to use it.  No more!  This was one of my disappointing features in CRM 4 because, while it had great use, every time you want to do a distribution email, etc, you have to update the marketing list, because our list of customers never stays the same.

Bulk Management For activities - Another feature that?s new is Bulk Management for activities.  This allows you to add notes to a bulk of activies, or mark them for complete, add them to a queue, etc.  This is helpful if you do a lot of activities in CRM, and maybe you need to move all activities from one day to another, etc.  Some activities are limited to you only selecting the activities of the same type.

Custom Activities - When creating a new entity, you have the option to specify the entity is actually an Activity entity.  These records will show up in the activity area.  This is helpful if you want to create an Activity type that is not defined by default.

Recurring Appointments - we don?t use this much, even in Outlook.  However, it is pretty easy to create recurring appointments now in CRM.  Even when selecting the activity you want to create, you can select Recurring Appointment instead of an appointment, and then making it recurring.  Makes it that much easier.  CRM does also notify you if there?s a conflict of schedules, much like Outlook does.

Field Level Security - Yes, that?s right..   Field Level Security is here!!!!  You can set permissions to a field to allow a user to Update, Create, and/or Read a field.  You can look at the lessons to read more on how to do this, but in general, it is done via Field Security Profiles.  The general idea is, when you define the Field, you specify that Field Security is enabled.  When you do this, it becomes inaccessable by all users except for sys admins.  All that shows in the form is the field with the data masked by *.  You can enable read/update/create permissions for users via the Field Security Profiles.

Dialogs - This allows the standardization of conversations with customers.  This is along the lines of a Script that guides the user through a process, or maybe use as a survey for following up with customers.  This is nice in that,  you can set it to an account or order, and later on, go and look at the Dialog Sessions for that entity, along with the responses

"SharePoint Designer Workflows" is nothing new, we've had that in 2007 as well. In SPD 2007, workflows were not reusable. Once you have defined a workflow, you cannot move that workflow to another list or reuse it somewhere else.

NOW in SharePoint 2010, this is possible! You can create reusable workflows and attach them to more than one list.

"Reusable workflows" is one of the coolest features in SharePoint 2010, however when I opened up SPD for the first time, I was a bit confused because I noticed two different terms "Reusable Workflows" and 'Globally Reusable Workflows".

When you create a Reusable workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010, it?s by default reusable within the site it has been created in, which means that it can be attached to any list within this site. But what if you want your workflow to be reusable in the whole site collection ? Well, this is the definition of ?Globally Reusable Workflows?. You can easily convert your workflows to be available anywhere in your site collection by opening your workflow and clicking on ?Convert to Globally Reusable? from the ribbon as shown below.

Also it?s worth mentioning that only the workflows created at the root level of the site collection can be converted to be Globally Reusable but other ones created in sub sites cannot. Try to create a workflow in a sub site , open it and note that the Conversion button is dimmed.

Another important question is what if I want to take my workflow and give it to somebody else in a different site collection? There?s another button in the ribbon called ?Save as Template?, this takes the workflow, put it in a wsp file and save it to the ?Site Assets? library. You can export this file and deploy it to other site collection and what?s really cool is that you can import this wsp into Visual Studio and extend it over there. Very cool stuff! Thanks Microsoft for this  feature!