Wednesday, August 6, 2008

CRM Accelerators – Part I – Analytics Accelerator

Reuben Krippner Published Tuesday, August 05, 2008 10:08 AM by crmblog
Last week we introduced the CRM Accelerators program for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers and partners, each week we will unveil more details of each accelerator. In this article we feature the Analytics Accelerator.
Analytics Accelerator – Due to be released in Q3 2008

Many customers and partners will be familiar with Analytics Foundation for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 which was a business intelligence feature pack for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Analytics Foundation for Dynamics CRM 3.0 included Dashboards, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and a suite of new reports. Analytics Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 expands on this, and is designed to support a range of business intelligence “maturity” levels for customers and partners. The Analytics accelerator has been built to cater for differing business intelligence skill-sets and experience levels. Elements of the accelerator include:

  • Sales, service and operations dashboards delivered with Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services (SSRS).
  • Sales, service and operations dashboards and scorecards delivered with Microsoft PerformancePoint® Server.
  • Additional reports delivered with SSRS.
  • Two Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes which are designed to allow customers to conduct in-depth analysis and key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 data. Customers can consume these cubes through Microsoft Excel®, Microsoft SharePoint® technologies and Microsoft PerformancePoint Server. The first OLAP cube is designed for simple setup and consumption, the second cube is more detailed and requires a more advanced knowledge of analytics and OLAP technologies within Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Predictive analytics to provide statistical guidance in areas such as lead and sales opportunity management. There are several sample applications which ship as part of the accelerator that showcase how customers can leverage predictive analytics directly within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 user interface.
  • The analytics accelerator will work with SQL Server 2005 with some components enhanced to take advantage of SQL Server 2008.

The Analytics accelerator will be free of charge for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 customers and partners.

The following images are taken from the beta version of the Analytics Accelerator (NB: these may change between now and the release of Analytics Accelerator)

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Beta version of the Analytics Accelerator landing page in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

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Beta sample sales dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Kind regards,

Reuben Krippner

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