With the introduction of all the nice features in CRM Online 2015 Update 1 release, there needs to be a way to detect whether the server is on a particular version so that it can handle those new features.

Query is further enhanced in CRM Online 2015 Update 1 release, which now offers some new query operators that can be used in FetchXML and QueryExpression.

In your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment, data changes often happen at the same time for the same record, which sometimes could result in data loss. With the introduction of Optimistic Concurrency feature in CRM Online 2015 Update 1 release, you have a way to detect whether the record has been changed since the last time it was retrieved, which can help mitigate such potential data loss.

Data integrity is critical to business. Transactional support is one of the important ways to ensure data integrity, which is something that you often run into in your CRM data integration project. The introduction of "Transaction Batching" feature in CRM Online 2015 Update 1 release is an important step forward as it enables an important integration scenario.

In CRM integration projects, there is often a need to track your source data changes in an efficient way. Currently you would typically implement your solution by comparing CRM entity's modifiedon field, which may not provide the desired performance that you require.

In the past, plugin debugging has been a very challenging task when working with CRM online environment. With the introduction of plugin trace logging feature in the CRM Online 2015 Update 1 release, this has become a much easier job.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses a number of special fields for special purpose, those fields used to require using special SOAP messages in order to write to them. With CRM online 2015 Update 1 release, you no longer have to make special service calls to update those fields, which makes it significantly easier to write integration code, at the same time it now offers much better performance due to the reduced service calls.

Upsert is an important enhancement that Microsoft Dynamics CRM brought in the 2015 Update 1 release. It can greatly simplify your data integration development.