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Business Analytics
Extends business intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics CRM by delivering sales, service and operations dashboards.
The Analytics Accelerator for Dynamics CRM 4 supports a range of business intelligence 'maturity' levels and includes Dashboards, Key Performance Indicators and a suite of new reports. The Analytics accelerator has been built to cater for differing business intelligence skill-sets and experience levels.
This is the first of three releases for the Analytics Accelerator. Future releases will include:
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SQL Server 2008 dashboards as well as Sales Pipeline trending capabilities
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More advanced SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) capabilities as well as Microsoft Office Performance Point Server scorecards
Event Management
New and extended CRM functionality to plan, create, execute and review events.
The Dynamics CRM 4 event management accelerator gives businesses specialise tools to manage the planning, execution, tracking and reporting of events. This focuses on three areas of event management:
Event Planning - logistics around an event such as: booking the venue, presenters, catering and presentation content preparation
Event Attendance - all aspects around managing the attendees such as:
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Inviting the target audience via phone, fax, letter and email
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Managing registrations via phone, letter, fax, email and web
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Tracking all people who actually attended the event
Event Review – Microsoft Dynamics CRM reports that measure the effectiveness of the event:
A core component of the event management add-on is the web portal that handles online event registration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This includes capability to manage delegate numbers and waiting lists
Enterprise Search
Rapidly configure portal views of CRM data within SharePoint (MOSS) and expose this data to MOSS 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:
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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.
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Launch a MOSS search which can return documents, emails, web content and Microsoft Dynamics CRM data.
The enterprise search accelerator provides a single enterprise portal that users can search and view important customer information and documents from several sources within the organization. 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.
Actionable audience-specific portals, dashboards and interfaces can be configured without the need to write any code.
Extended Sales Forecasting
Enhanced sales forecasting mechanism for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
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 summarize sales performance for the organization as a whole or for individual salespeople.
CRM Notifications
Newsfeeds (RSS) that allow users to subscribe to CRM 'events' that are relevant to their job role.
The CRM notifications add-on allows users to subscribe to the CRM 'business events' that are significant to them. For example, a salesperson will be 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 to the types of events that are important to them they can choose how they want event notifications to be delivered. Notifications are delivered via a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed which can be accessed via many desktop tools including Microsoft Outlook 2007 or the standard newsfeed Windows Vista gadget.
Business Productivity Accelerators
A collection of time-saving productivity customizations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. By using these accelerators users can conduct business data auditing and improve team workflows.
Sales Methodologies
Practical Guidance for adoption of third-party sales methodologies such as SPI Solution Selling and Miller Heiman). With ready access to sales methodology, users are able to follow proven sales practices from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Social Networking Accelerator
Monitor and analyse people’s conversations about your business and products on social networking sites. This accelerator delivers integration with Twitter though other networks like Facebook will be introduced in future releases. You can see a brief demonstration at: http://crm.dynamics.com/demos/twitter/default.html.
Social networking sites open a new channel through which to interact with customers, prospects, industry influencers and other contacts. This new accelerator enables a wealth of opinions, recommendations, feedback and other comment to be collated and analysed within Dynamics CRM so organisations can interpret the results to improve brand awareness and develop richer customer engagement.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Accelerator
Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to distribute sales leads and centrally manage sales opportunities across channel partners. Pre-built extensions to Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales force automation functionality include new data entities, workflows and reports. The PRM Accelerator means that businesses can jointly manage sales processes with their channel partners through a centralised Web portal and extend this integration to automate additional business processes.
Portal Integration Accelerator
The Portal Integration Accelerator easily connects Microsoft Dynamics CRM to an organization’s Web experience. With this added capability, a business analyst can use point-and-click configuration — as opposed to Web development — to rapidly extend to the Internet any business process and drive costs out of everyday business interactions.
Customer Care Accelerator
The Dynamics CRM Customer Care Accelerator combines data from separate applications into a single unified interface.
Integrated desktop: aggregate information from different applications into one desktop view that shows all customer interactions.
- Eliminates Duplicate Data Entry: Streamline business processes using desktop automation workflows that remove the need for agents to re-enter the same data in multiple applications.
- Computer Telephony Integration: Consistent framework to connect CTI systems with key line of business applications.
- Activity Reporting: Swift access to desktop transaction reporting to identify process bottlenecks.
Customer Portal Accelerator
This accelerator provides businesses with the ability to deliver self-service portal capabilities to their customers while tracking and managing these interactions in Dynamics CRM. The portal can be deployed on their own web servers or in the cloud and works with all CRM deployment models including on-premise and hosted.
The new portal add-on empowers customers to access, modify and create CRM entries. As a result, users can take a more proactive approach in transacting business by making sales enquiries or creating support requests online without have to rely on a phone service.
By deploying Dynamics CRM with the eService accelerator businesses are able to service more people by using CRM as a multi-channel solution without the need to increase staff numbers.
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