In March of 2013, Microsoft officially supported access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Apple’s iPad platform through the Safari web browser.  The following section discusses which devices are supported and on which platforms, as well as the features and limitations of the original release.

Supported environments/devices

For the server component, iPad access to Dynamics CRM is limited to CRM Online.  It is not currently supported for on-premise customers. Additionally, CRM Online customers need to accept the product update from the Settings -> Administration page of CRM Online.

On the client side, iPad access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online requires IOS6.0 and above.  This eliminates the 1st generation iPad from consideration as Apple currently limits the IOS to version 5.1 and has no plans to update the 1st generation to IOS6.  Additionally, iPad support is limited to the full size iPad as the iPad Mini is not supported.  On full-sized iPad’s with IOS 5.1 or older operating systems, the user is redirected to Mobile Express automatically.  Users with the iPad mini are not redirected to Mobile Express.

Features

The following features are supported:

General optimizations. To optimize the experience on the iPad, Microsoft included several features and enhancements.  For starters, both landscape and portrait mode is supported.  To save space and reduce the number of popups, the ribbon bar and help visor were removed.  In addition to limiting the number of popups, many remaining popups were flattened including entity lookups.

Dashboards. As with out of the box CRM Online, the dashboard page is your initial landing spot.   You can customize your default dashboard and easily switch between dashboards with the dashboard picker.  The dashboards fully render inside Safari and you also have drill down capabilities into each chart as you do in the web client.  Unfortunately, you are not able to create new dashboards at this time.