A small and presumably deliberate leak from Microsoft about ‘Elixir’ is of little interest to Office users at this stage, if only because this ‘Elixir’ is such a vague and ill-defined wizards brew.
A small and presumably deliberate leak from Microsoft about ‘Elixir’ is of little interest to Office users at this stage, if only because this ‘Elixir’ is such a vague and ill-defined wizards brew.
Broadly the idea is that Microsoft will offer some more Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools so companies can use Outlook and Windows Server technologies to manage their sales and prospect tracking.
Here is gets vague – depending on the reports available, Elixir will be a set of ‘out of the box’ tools for any small business to use, a beefed up version of Business Contact Manager that is available for Outlook 2003. Or it’ll be some programming tools for developers to make into custom systems for companies. The latter would be like the interesting Information Bridge Framework announced last year at TechEd. Details here.
We’d love to tell you more, but Microsoft has not replied to our questions about Elixir.
Whatever Elixir really is, it is months away at best. You can only hope that when it is released it’ll be a darn sight better than the last effort at CRM integration with Outlook – the best-forgotten Business Contact Manager.
The Elixir will only work with Outlook / Office 2003 and apparently won’t have any additional cost except, if course, those in upgrading to Office 2003.
