Microsoft has launched its hosted customer relationship management service, Dynamics CRM Online. It is designed to steal business from online CRM pioneers such as Salesforce.com. It comes with 5GB of storage and costs $44 a month for each user; Dynamics CRM Online Professional Plus with 20GB and more features, costs $59. The Microsoft-hosted service is limited to North America although Microsoft partners can offer it in other territories.

● Salesforce.com has teamed up with Google to offer Salesforce.com for GoogleApps. By offering tight integration between Salesforce.com’s hosted CRM service and Google’s online productivity applications, which include word processing, calendar and e-mail, the two firms hope more businesses will abandon packaged software for their cloud-based computing models.