Microsoft this week has unveiled further details about its CRM product, that should hit the shelves towards the end of this year. The product, cleverly titled Microsoft CRM, is gunning for the medium sized enterprise and hopes to provide a solution that will be tempting to all. As such it's coming in a couple of flavours: hosted application or off-the-shelf. It's all very exciting, but not necessarily hugely compelling.

The product is based around a loose collection of technologies that Microsoft has acquired over time, most notably perhaps Great Plains Software and, ultimately, Navision. Naturally, it's more intrinsically tied to the likes of Outlook, with its email and calendar options, and SQL Server, Microsoft's database. The latter of these is essential to underpin the whole thing. It's not clear yet if other database solutions will be supported but you can only hope they are.

With all of that software tied together you'd have thought that Microsoft would be delivering something compelling. It probably is too if we're honest about it. Pull all of this together and you have a system that will manage your emails, contacts and provide some level of account management services too. Beyond that it's not clear. It looks like that could well be the sum of it.

That's not knocking the product, incidentally. Microsoft is aiming this at organisations with between 25 and 500 employees. It's more likely that sales will go to the lower end of that figure, and, for organisations of that size, this will be a logical fit for their operations. They don't want to be buying an Oracle or Siebel system, they want something that they can snap straight into their, inevitable, Microsoft architecture.

It's all well and good. Microsoft has, by the sound of it, produced a reasonable, mid-market, first generation product. It's expected to retail for around ,200, which isn't bad considering that gives you the server too, or you can go up to an enterprise edition which is more than double that price. Again though, it's compelling, it will make sense for many users and, again, Microsoft will do well with this first attempt to muscle into the traditional enterprise software space.