Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Roadmap for 2015 More New Codenames Delivery Dates

A roadmap with the latest delivery dates and codenames was shared by Microsoft officials last week during the company's Convergence conference. A blog post from Jukka Niiranen, a consultant with Digital Illustrated in Finland, included the slide above which lists the coming set of deliverables.
Microsoft officials said last year that the company was planning to deliver the following updates in the second quarter of calendar 2015:

•     Dynamics CRM "Carina"
•     Social Listening "Corvus"
•     Dynamics Marketing "Spica"
•     Parature "Taurus"

(Yes, the Dynamics team's constellation codename theme continues.)
The updated roadmap now lists the following set of deliverables for Q2 2015:

•     Dynamics CRM "Carina"
•     Social Listening "Hydra"
•     Dynamics Marketing "Spica"
•     Parature "Atria"

Social Listening "Corvus" is now listed as a Q4 2015 deliverable. There's no mention of Parature "Taurus" at all. Also due in the fourth quarter of this calendar year is another version of Dynamics CRM, codenamed "Ara"; Dynamics Marketing "Capella"; and Parature "Hercules."

The Dynamics CRM "Carina" is expected to be named CRM Online 2015 Update 1, according to Niiranen's blog post. It looks like the Dynamics team may be heading into the same choppy naming waters as the Windows team with this one, as "Vega," the Dynamics CRM Online version Microsoft rolled out earlier this year was christened "CRM Online 2015 Update," Niiranen notes.

Carina looks to be an online-only update, based on blog reports from the Convergence 2015 show. Its features aren't likely to be available to on-premises Dynamics CRM users until the next update in Q4 2015.
The new Carina features outlined by Microsoft execs at Convergence include a new navigation bar that looks more like the UI in Dynamics Marketing, along with a new "hamburger" menu button for easier discover ability and manipulation.

Microsoft will be integrating Dynamics CRM more tightly with Office 365 with the Carina update. There will be an immersive Excel experience and more integration of OneNote and Exchange right into CRM.

On the social front, there will be a social center for marketing, sales and service teams to monitor social topics and engage socially. Social analytics will get text mining, cloud visualization and social activity maps. And there will be integration between Parature and Dynamics CRM for knowledge management, officials announced.

Microsoft also announced a number of other improvements scheduled for the fall (Q4 2015) release of CRM, according to the C5 Insight blog. These include offline mobile use; predictive analytics capabilities; OneDrive integration; and Delve/Office Graph integration.

At Convergence, Microsoft officials also said they have acquired intellectual property from Fusion Software-- specifically the Mojo Surveys product for building questionnaire forms inside Dynamics CRM and automating data-collection processes.