CRM Statement of Direction and CRM Accelerators

Just downloaded this document on Partnersource and found of course a lot of blogging articles on the internet about it. Below you find the article I took of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM partners and customers can look forward to a packed program of exciting releases during the second half of 2008.

The Statement of Direction whitepaper will be updated periodically to keep prospects, customers and partners up to date with key roadmap information for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

One of the big announcements for Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston (and detailed in the Statement of Direction whitepaper) was about CRM Accelerators. This post will detail the overall Accelerators program and future posts will provide a high-level overview of each accelerator and its capabilities.

CRM Accelerators are a range of free-of-charge add-on solutions which are being developed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 customers and partners. Each accelerator will showcase how the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform can be configured and extended to broaden marketing, sales and service capabilities. CRM accelerators provide additional functionality for deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers are encouraged to further configure these accelerators to meet their specific business needs.

Each accelerator may consist of the following:

• Importable data model
• Business process workflows
• Business Intelligence elements such as custom reports
• Functional code samples (strictly adhering to SDK guidelines)
• Documentation for installing, operating, localizing and extending the solution
• An automated installer

Each accelerator will be supported as per any other customization that follows SDK guidelines. Additionally, all samples are supplied with full source-code so they can be extended further to meet specific customer requirements. Because of Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s services-based architecture and metadata-driven application capabilities, accelerators can be easily deployed for both on-demand and on-premise environments.

Through accelerators, customers and partners benefit from new functionality on a more frequent basis, and they can be deployed to their environment quickly and easily. Delivery of these accelerators will be during the second half of 2008.

The list of accelerators is as follows:

• Analytics
• eService
• Event Management
• Enterprise Search
• Sales Methodologies
• Extended Sales Forecasting
• CRM Notifications
• Business Productivity