Microsoft Dynamics CRM Accelerators

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Accelerators are a range of free add-on modules to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 solution, which can be configured and extended in order to broaden marketing, sales and service capabilities within CRM in line with your business needs, resulting in cost savings and productivity gains.

These Accelerators can be deployed quickly and effectively and have been architected to work with both Outlook and Web Browser clients.

The release of these Accelerators demonstrates Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to drive innovation in between major releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Current Accelerators:

•      Analytics
•      Business Productivity
•      CRM Notifications
•      Customer Care
•      Customer Portal
•      Enterprise Search
•      eService
•      Event Management
•      Extended Sales Forecasting
•      Partner Relationship Management
•      Portal Integration
•      Sales Methodologies
•      Social Networking

Analytics

The Analytics Accelerator delivers sales, service and operations dashboards and scorecards.

It takes advantage of an entire suite of Microsoft business intelligence software (including SQL Server, SharePoint, PerformancePoint Server and Office Excel) to enable you to undertake comprehensive business performance management, business reporting, ad-hoc and predictive analytics.

It has been built to cater for differing business intelligence skill-sets and experience levels. At its basic level, you will be able to tailor custom dashboards to meet your particular needs. At an intermediate (“rationalised”) level, you will be able to capture and present trending data for your sales pipeline as well as give your users an ad-hoc reporting environment. At its premium (“dynamic”) level there are data mining models to allow you to engage in predictive sales and service analytics and use a set of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server dashboards for full rollup of business metrics into an executive scorecard.

You will be able to conduct in-depth analysis and key performance monitoring using CRM 4.0 data as well as leverage predictive analytics to better manage leads and sales opportunities.
The Analytics Accelerator will work with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

Business Productivity

This Accelerator features a collection of time-saving productivity customisations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Included are:

•      Business Data Auditing, which provides basic audit capabilities within CRM by taking a snapshot of a record whenever the relevant event occurs within the system such as Create, Update, Assign and Delete. Through workflow, auditing can be configured for any entity and any trigger event.

•      Business Productivity Workflow Tools which give workflow design users the flexibility to add additional workflow step actions to workflow processes. Each custom action provides additional capabilities around string handling, mathematical functions and HTML hyperlink creation.

•      Business Productivity Newsfeed which turns Dynamics CRM 4.0 into the hub of business activity, keeping users informed in real-time on events happening across the organisation. The   Business Productivity Newsfeed Accelerator drives user adoption by presenting CRM data to users in a way that is appealing and interactive, drawing them into the application and encouraging use.
Please note: The current version of the Business Productivity Newsfeed Accelerator will only work with the on-premise edition of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

CRM Notifications

The CRM notifications accelerator allows users to subscribe to the CRM “business events” that are significant to them, e.g. a salesperson is interested in new leads and opportunities assigned to them whereas a customer service representative is interested in new service cases assigned to them. Once the user has subscribed (each user manages their subscription profile) to the types of events that are important to them they can elect how they want these event notifications to be delivered. Notifications are delivered via a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and can be consumed with many desktop tools including Microsoft Outlook 2007 or the standard newsfeed Windows Vista® gadget.

Please Note: This first version has been built for On-Premise only - IFD and other deployment models for will be developed in future releases. Full source code is supplied to allow customers and partners to modify accordingly.

Customer Care

Build out new and powerful composite desktop applications for contact centres or any other business requirement where you need to “mash up” multiple applications from different platforms into one consistent desktop application!

Being able to quickly and easily access information enables agents to provide efficient service and improve overall customer satisfaction

•      Integrated Desktop
•      Desktop Automation Workflows
•      Computer Telephony Interface (CTI)
•      Activity Reporting

Microsoft recently announced that Dynamics CRM has been positioned in the Leader Quadrant of the 2010 Magic Quadrant for Customer Service Contact Centres.  This significant achievement illustrates Microsoft’s commitment to empower companies with software that will increase profits and elevate customer satisfaction levels in the costly customer support aspect of business.

Customer Portal

Build out new and powerful portals for you and your customers! This new release consolidates the functionality of Portal Integration, eService and Event Management into one consolidated portal.

Enterprise Search

The enterprise search accelerator allows Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) customers to view and search for Microsoft Dynamics CRM data directly from their SharePoint portals. By combining these two technologies users from different areas of the business will be able to:
View and edit any Microsoft Dynamics CRM data such as accounts, contacts, opportunities, sales orders, invoices, service cases and any custom entity data through MOSS.
Launch a MOSS search which can return documents, emails, web content and Microsoft Dynamics CRM data.

The enterprise search accelerator provides one enterprise portal that users can search and view important customer information and documents from several sources within the organisation. Additionally, the technology, Business Data Catalog (BDC), and techniques used with this accelerator can be employed to surface data from other line of business applications to further enrich the MOSS portal.

The BDC makes it easy for people to connect to, find, and act on information stored in structured line-of-business systems (such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM) by using a declarative framework to securely integrate them into search results. With the BDC customers and partners can configure actionable audience-specific portals, dashboards and mash-up interfaces for this data without writing any code.

Release 1 (this release) includes key documentation on how to deploy MOSS Enterprise Search connecting to Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the standard Microsoft Virtual PC demonstration image.

Release 2 will provide additional documentation and tools to allow you to customise your enterprise search solution for different customer and partner requirements.

eService

The eService accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides customer self-service capabilities (via a web portal) as a configurable out-of-the-box offering.

Event Management

The event management accelerator gives organisations the ability to manage the planning, execution, tracking and reporting requirements for events. The event management accelerator focuses on three areas of event management, namely:
Event Planning - logistics around an event such as:
Booking the venue
Presenters
Catering
Presentation content preparation
Event Attendance - all aspects around managing the attendees such as:
Inviting the target audience via phone, fax, letter and email
Managing registrations via phone, letter, fax, email and web
Tracking all people who actually attended the event
Event Review – Microsoft Dynamics CRM reports that measure the effectiveness of the event:
How many people attended the event?
What was the revenue impact of the event?

A core component of the event management accelerator is the web registration portal that customers and partners can deploy to allow web registration for their events and track these registrations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The solution also consists of a plugin to manage registration counts and waitlists.

Please note: this first version of the accelerator has been engineered for On-Premise deployments, the source code is supplied so that customers and partners can modify the authentication mechanism to suit their requirements.

Extended Sales Forecasting

The extended sales forecasting accelerator enriches the out-of-the-box sales forecasting capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Principally, sales users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM can review their individual sales pipeline and quickly classify opportunities as committed, excluded or upside. Sales managers can monitor and track sales targets, budgets and performance against these forecasts for specific time periods (e.g. months and quarters).

Underpinning these capabilities are new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 reports that summarise sales performance for the organisation as a whole or for individual salespeople.

Partner Relationship Management

The Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Accelerator allows businesses to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to distribute sales leads and centrally manage sales opportunities across channel partners. It provides pre-built extensions to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales force automation functionality, including new data entities, workflow and reports. Using the PRM Accelerator, companies can jointly manage sales processes with their channel partners through a centralised Web portal, as well as extend this integration to automate additional business processes.

Full source code, customisations, reports, workflows and assemblies are provided.

NB: In order to utilise the Partner Portal you are required to install the Portal Integration Accelerator first.

Portal Integration

The Portal Integration Accelerator easily connects Microsoft Dynamics CRM to an organisation’s Web experience. This release builds on the eService portal engine and expands to allow customers to configure and expose any CRM entity to an external facing portal.

Sales Methodologies

Practical guidance for adoption of third-party sales methodologies, such as SPI Solution Selling, Miller Heiman and Target Account Selling (TAS).

Social Networking

The Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows business professionals to monitor and analyse customers’ conversations on social networking sites, and as a result, provides real-time status updates about their products and services. This first release of the accelerator delivers integration with Twitter; other networks will be introduced in future releases.

Ongoing Support

Each accelerator will be supported as per any other customisation that follows SDK guidelines. Additionally, all samples are supplied with full source-code so they can be extended further to meet specific customer requirements. Because of Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s services-based architecture and metadata-driven application capabilities, accelerators can be easily deployed for both on-demand (Software as a Service or subscription-based) and on-premise environments.

Please note that for all Internet facing portals (eService and Event Management Accelerators), an External Connector Licence will be required.