MS CRM 4.0: What’s missing?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a powerful customer management tool that integrates with Office and Internet Explorer and is able to be customized to fit almost any business. Microsoft made great improvements over previous versions with 4.0. Surprisingly, there is something that Microsoft left out, maps!

You would think that maps would be part of a powerful tool used to track customers and facilitate sales. I mean, what salesperson doesn’t use maps to find customers? I know, if you Google CRM, Microsoft and maps, you will come up with a number of hits. There appears to be a veritable cottage industry of developers out there with MS CRM mapping solutions. Bloggers from the Netherlands,  Spain, and elsewhere abound on the subject. There are a variety of suggestions using Live Maps, MapPoint or Google Maps with MS CRM. You can try these on your own. My question is, shouldn’t the folks from Redmond have thought of this? Maybe it’s coming in MS CRM 5.0.

I would love to hear from anyone who has gotten one of these mapping solutions to work in MS CRM 4.0.