Many thanks to Bink for this juicy item.
Microsoft new big product will be its Customer Relation Management suite. It will be released somewhere next year. Unique in this beta program is how it is distributed, on DVD"s! but that"s not so special. On the DVD"s aren"t setupfiles but complete VMware images.
Relatively risk free beta testing? Now where"s the fun in that?
The DVD"s has the images of a virtual machine containing Windows 2000, IIS SQL2000, Exchange 2000 and MS CRM. The client image with a win2k and the CRM client (Outlook11). Is this product so complicated? They don"t trust the testers to install it themselves? Is so sensitive to configure to get it to work together? On they other hand I think this is a cool method of deploying. You can start testing / playing right away, test functionality. CRM users aren"t interested in installing the software (like we OS people do).