May 3 Blog Review

Here is a quick review of the top articles and interesting pieces from the CRM world this week:

Yammer Integration Demo Video from Customer Effective – This video demonstrates how you can use Yammer within your organization. There are also a few other important tidbits brought up:

• To use Yammer in CRM you must have the Enterprise Yammer subscription. That’s the paid version.
• If you are already using Activity feeds and you begin to use Yammer, you will lose those posts. They will not be visible in your Yammer feed, but only through Advanced Find.
• Finally, you need to keep Security in mind and verify it is set correctly inside Yammer. Yammer is beneficial because employees without CRM access can view the Yammer feed, just make sure they aren’t seeing more than they should.

Case Study on Data Load Performance – Interesting case study on the time/resources required for a large data load. Here is an exerpt from the Conclusion.

The results of this benchmark illustrate how a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 implementation can scale to support performance on large data loads. By scaling out and adding more CRM application servers and scaling up the database server (with processors, memory and IO capacity), data processing capacity can improve linearly.
Customers may be able to achieve even higher levels of performance and scalability via customization and a finer level of optimization.
SQL Server is the crucial component for Dynamics CRM, proper sizing and performance tuning of the SQL Server/database is very critical for performance. This is not limited to data loads, but also for daily operations and use.

CRM for DHS and DoD – DefenseReady is a new CRM solution designed for Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense organizations. It contains “out-of-the-box mission-enabling solutions for Force Readiness, Mission Execution and Training Management”. It looks to have many interesting features.

Using CRM to Meet Patient Standards – This describes a new solution developed by PowerObjects that can help to automate Hospital follow up with patients. This can ensure they are getting the care they need. The system can automate reminders to visit their primary care physician, refill prescriptions and even send information to assist patients.

Finally, in the April 26 Blog Review I discussed the Meet the Experts Webinar. There were several articles released this week related to the announcements made there:

Vision for Game-Changing CRM - For his part, Stutz maintains his focus on innovation and forward progress. "We're innovating at a pace that is pretty unbelievable," he said near the end of last week's webcast. "We made some very serious decisions to not charge for social, to just blend it in. If you buy CRM you get those capabilities. We're not charging for mobile, we think it's just another piece of CRM that you can't charge for. Things that become part of a CRM suite should just become part of the experience. That's one of the things that is so powerful about our system. Some we've acquired, some we're building, some we've borrowed from Microsoft, all come together for a solution."

Will Microsoft split MarketingPilot into a series of Components? - While features like campaign management, email automation, and lead nurturing are core features of many third party solutions, they are just a small sliver of what MarketingPilot offers. But based on market interest over the last few years, these features are the ones that most Dynamics CRM customers are interested in tackling first, and have been doing via third party marketing automation solutions.