New solution accelerators announced for Dynamics CRM 4.0

As our new CRM Consultant, Speed finds that he gets more thrills out of solution accelerators.

I couldn’t attend the Microsoft Partner Conference in Houston, so I missed what looks to be a very cool announcement.  Microsoft announced that it will soon release some freely-available solution accelerators for Dynamics CRM 4.0!

Solution accelerators are tools designed to save time, increase your productivity, and enhance CRM 4.0 functionality.  I’m looking forward to toying with them soon, as they will be released over the next few months.

The IncreaseCRM blog neatly outlines these accelerators below.

Analytics Foundation: includes marketing, sales and service dashboards, user adoption dashboard and a range of scorecards from Microsoft PerformancePoint

Business Productivity: a range of configuration options commonly requested by customers such as auditing, sales processes and common workflow patterns such as incident management

Enterprise Search: integration with SharePoint business data catalog to make it easier to search for customer data stored in a CRM database from within your SharePoint portal.

Notifications: a range of options for sending notifications and alerts to users via email, Vista gadgets and unified communications

Sales Methodologies: built-in support for popular sales methodologies from the TAS Group (Target Account Selling), Sales Performance International (Solution Selling) and Miller Heiman (Strategic Selling)

Sales Forecasting: improved features for sales professionals to be able to provide forecasts and for sales managers to get insight into forecast trends and patterns

Event Management: extension of campaign management functionality to your website to allow marketing professionals to publish an events calendar online and manage online registrations

eService: a customer support portal to allow customers to submit and review cases, search the knowledgebase and more