CRM Online and CRM 4.0 Differences

Some important features and capabilities available in CRM 4.0 will not be available in the initial release of CRM Online.

In general, customization options for CRM Online customers will be limited to what can be done using the application’s built-in (or “declarative”) customization tools. For example, CRM Online users can define new entities, deploy simple custom workflows, and write applications that access CRM Online service via its Web services programming interfaces. However, they cannot install custom, executable code on CRM Online servers.

Other notable differences include lack of multilingual support in CRM Online (at least in its first iteration), Windows Live ID authentication, and the inability of CRM Online customers to deploy custom reports built using SQL Server’s Visual Studio—based report design tools. (Specifically, customers cannot deploy custom RDL reports—RDL stands for report definition language, the XML syntax used by SQL Server to specify report content and layout.)