Microsoft quietly released to manufacturing on Monday its Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 code. Company officials also quietly put to rest speculation that Microsoft itself is planning to sell a hosted version of its customer-relationship-management product.

Just a week ago, Microsoft delivered a new public beta release of its Microsoft CRM 3.0 product. At that time, officials said their plan was to finalize the product before the end of this year and make it widely available in the first quarter of 2006.

Earlier this week, Brad Wilson, Microsoft's general manager of CRM, said Microsoft decided the code was solid enough not to wait any longer. As a result, the new availability date of the international English of the product is "early December," rather than the first quarter of next year, Wilson said. (The other 20-plus language variants will follow later, he said.)

In addition to clarifying Microsoft's ship schedule, Wilson also made clear Microsoft's plans around releasing a hosted version of its CRM 3.0 product.

"We are not going to offer a hosted solution ourselves," Wilson said. "We don't need to play somebody else's game."

Microsoft will provide a hosting infrastructure and "encourage our partners to make the product available on a hosted basis, where appropriate," Wilson explained.

Microsoft announced earlier this year that it would make its CRM 3.0 product available via subscription-based pricing under service provider licensing agreements. This means channel partners will be able to offer interested customers a hosted version of CRM 3.0, for which they can pay as they go.

In September, hints by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about Microsoft's intents to get into CRM hosting left a number of analysts, partners and customers confused. Some speculated that Microsoft would offer a hosted CRM service — similar to what Salesforce.com does — via which customers and partners could pay a monthly fee for software hosted on Microsoft's own servers. Others believed Microsoft would allow customers and partners to rent CRM 3.0 and host it themselves. Microsoft officials did little to clarify the company's intentions.

Microsoft CRM 3.0 will include native Outlook integration; new reporting capabilities, provided by Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services; new customization, deployment and management tools. New features include long awaited marketing automation applications, including list management, campaign management, marketing response management and marketing resource management.

In July, Microsoft announced it was skipping Microsoft CRM 2.0 and going straight to 3.0. Microsoft CRM 2.0 originally was slated to ship in the first quarter of 2004. This fall, Microsoft announced it was rebranding its Microsoft Business Systems applications, of which CRM is one, under the "Dynamics" brand name.

Currently, Microsoft has 5,500 Microsoft CRM customers and 150,000 users, Wilson said.