Microsoft Dynamics CRM Portal Accelerator

PRLog (Press Release) - Nov 27, 2009 -
The Microsoft CRM portal integration accelerator connects business information and customer interactions from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to an organisation’s web experience. With this added capability, an organisation can extend any business processes – such as product registration, to the internet and allow organizations to expand their reach and reduce transaction costs across sales, service and marketing. This accelerator is a foundation piece for delivering portal access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. All other accelerators with a portal component (eService, Event Management and Partner Relationship Management) will use this framework. 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.

The default Portal includes a form that can be filled out by your prospective customers and once submitted will add their information into CRM as a Lead record. You could then, for example, build a CRM Workflow to have an email automatically sent to this new Lead/Prospect to welcome them or to provide information regarding the products they may be interested in.

This Web-To-Lead form provides a nice, new CRM feature for relatively little cost of implementation. The true value behind the Portal Integration Accelerator does not stop there however.

With some .Net code modifications, this Portal Site could be extended to allow your Customer Accounts, Vendors, Leads, Contacts, etc. to view the details of any records that are related to them in your CRM system.

An example of how Microsoft crm http://www.pythagoras.co.uk/microsoft_crm.aspx could be used that wasn’t possible in the eService Accelerator would be the ability to expose Web Literature documents to your CRM Portal Customers. Previously, if you wanted to share documents such as Product Lists, White Papers, or FAQ Documents you would have to copy the text of the items into a Knowledge Base Article and share the article via the eService Portal.  You are now able to share documents directly with your customers, perhaps by targeting them by industry or any other type of segmentation you may have setup in CRM. This type of focused document distribution could be a great way to promote new products or help your customers find exactly the support they are looking for before they have to call to request it.

The Portal Integration Accelerator provides a set of user controls and functionality for utilizing ASP.NET membership authentication with CRM. ASP.NET Membership allows you to easily add a way to validate user credentials and handle authentication in your ASP.NET application.  Using ASP.NET Membership gives you the following built-in functionality:

Creating users

Storing information about users

Authenticating users

Managing passwords

About Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of adaptable, easy-to-use ERP and CRM applications that enable business decision-makers to run their business efficiently and drive business success. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business