Microsoft has launched the new Dynamics site.  Currently, the site only gives information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Communities.  The new micro-site is a great idea and allows information about the Microsoft Dynamics products to be viewed and distributed in a cleaner more organized way.

The site contains a community feature that allows you to sign up and create an account to network and collaborate on the uses of CRM.  The community also has events, articles, forums and blogs that can be used as an educational tool on how to use CRM more efficiently.

Click here to visit the site and sign up for your free account.

Improve customer service and marketing with CRM. For some reason customer relationship management or CRM software is sometimes confused with sales force automation (SFA) software which specifically focuses on sales management and pipeline reporting. This concept that CRM is just for sales is a misconception. Therefore, when evaluating a solution that can help your organization with marketing management and customer service don’t dwell on the sales portion and dismiss the solution.

For pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device manufacturers there are few direct customers and sales force software really isn’t needed. These companies could use the marketing and customer service features of CRM.

As always, Convergence offers a lot of exciting news.  There were two important Microsoft CRM announcements. 

• All Convergence attendees get a 30 day free trial of Microsoft CRM Live
• CRM Mobile Express will be available soon, my guess is mid April

The big news with SharePoint centered on integration and business intelligence.  As SharePoint experts we knew this, but it was nice to Microsoft discussing it and Convergence attendees definitely seemed interested.

The focus for Microsoft Great Plains (Dynamics GP) was on upgrading.  Microsoft has released a number of new versions of Dynamics GP over the last few years and clients have gotten behind.  I definitely would encourage everyone to upgrade to GP 10.  The two or three version upgrades are difficult.  GP 10 also offers some excellent reporting improvements. Read More »

Convergence 2008 in Orlando has started.

Cornerstone Solutions and one of clients were recently featured in a Microsoft CRM case study.  We helped our client take over 250 Microsoft Dynamics CRM users live.  We created over 20 custom objects, but limited custom code.  Sales, Marketing and Service were all utilized to the fullest extent. 

It is great to see our client.... (and us) gain some recognition with Microsoft.

Click here to read the entire case study.

Welcome to the first official Cornerstone Solutions blog.  In our blog we will discuss the Microsoft business applications.  Specifically, we will cover SharePoint and the Dynamics platform including Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Great Plains.  Our goal is to create a forum to allow people to exchange ideas and information.  In addition, we plan to link out to other sites so we provide our opinions as well as the thoughts and ideas of other industry leaders. 

I hope you will check back with us often because no blog is successful without input and comments from others. 

Look for an RSS feed to be installed soon so you can receive automatic updates!

Contract research organizations use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help make decisions on clinical trial feasibility within minutes instead of weeks.

A contract research organization or a CRO is a third party that pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies hire to help them pass the pre-clinical and clinical trial process. During the clinical trial process the CRO needs to hold in-human clinical trial studies.  These studies are managed and reported on by physicians and hospital staff which have to be selected by the CRO.  In order for the CRO to interview the physician their needs to be a large database or way of listing and searching a group of physicians to properly recruit for the clinical trial.

The methodology that CROs are using for this system is to create the account as the pharmaceutical company and the physician as the contact in the system.  When a clinical trial is initiated an opportunity (clinical tr ... Read More »

As many of you know Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 was released a while ago. Just as with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 this release of SharePoint has created a huge buzz in marketplace. There are many uses for SharePoint, and as we wrote in previous newsletters companies are using it as a document management solution or a company intranet. All of those documents and information can now be stored in a more organized manner.

Another exciting use of SharePoint is the social networking avenue. This article written by CIO insight discusses SharePoint becoming a social networking tool for corporations. It is definitely an interesting concept and an exciting use of SharePoint!

All of this begs the question.. How are you using SharePoint?

In our blog we will cover exciting topics as well as mundane, but important items.  Today's topic definitely falls into the mundane, but important category.  The topic is backups. 

We have noticed on a regular basis that some of our clients do not have adequate backups.  We always ensure that an initial backup plan is in place when we implement, but often times the overall infrastructure changes and backups do not get adjusted. 

Imagine if you lost all of your Microsoft Dynamics GP data and had no backup in place!

At a minimum, we recommend nightly backups kept on-site and weekly backups off-site.  The off-site requirement can be as simple as a key employee or owner taking a tape home on a weekly basis.  Of course, there are more sophisticated ways, but this method still fits the bill. 

So please, check you bac ... Read More »

Obviously, one of the hottest topics in the Microsoft CRM world today is the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.  Many people might have heard of this project as "Titan" which is the code name Microsoft has given the project internally.  The questions everyone asks is "What is coming in the new release and when is it coming". 

As far as when, the best guess is late 2007 or early 2008.  I have my fingers crossed for late 2007.

Microsoft has kept the "what" pretty quiet, but the two major areas of the release are multi-tenancy and a hosted version.  Multi-tenancy refers to several things including being able to run multiple CRM databases on one CRM server, running Microsoft CRM in multiple languages and having multi-currency capability.

The hosted version of Microsoft CRM is called Microsoft CR ... Read More »