Microsoft CRM 3.0 Logical Database Diagrams

A series of diagrams showing the logical database structure for Microsoft CRM 3.0.

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Microsoft CRM & MapPoint Cases

When managing your sales team, there may be times when you want to change the distribution of sales territories in a geographical region. You may want to compare sales forecasts with the actual sales figures for specific regions or distribute accounts more equally among your organization's salespeople.

You could spend large amounts of time studying the maps of each territory to identify where changes need to be made. You would need to garner a cross-referenced list of your sales force and their associated territories before you can even begin the evaluation. Some possible points for consideration could include sales pipelines, current customer locations, sales history, associated product sales, and demographic information. Just gathering all of this information may seem daunting.

Then, you would need to visualize the information within a geographic context. When you’re finished, you would want to be able to check the performance in your new territories over time to see if further adjustments are required. Seem too complicated?

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With today’s high gasoline prices and time at a premium, it is important that you plan your business trips to visit customers, sales prospects, and others to maximize time and cut costs. Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Microsoft Excel with Microsoft MapPoint, you can create a targeted and efficient plan for your onsite calls in about twenty minutes depending on the number of stops in the trip.

Suppose that you open your Microsoft CRM Workplace and see that Marketing has assigned a new task to you. They want you to introduce a new product line to your active accounts in Southern California with over 500 employees and an annual revenue of at least $7,000,000.

For our example, assume that you are based out of Chicago and will fly into Los Angeles International Airport. In Los Angeles you will rent a car and drive to each of your clients ending your sales trip in San Francisco, where you will fly back to Chicago. You want to make sure that you can see all customers in the three days that you have available, so you want to plan your trip to minimize time-consuming routes and backtracking.

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Microsoft CRM 3.0 Online Help Files

You can use this download to view Microsoft CRM 3.0 online Help on a computer that does not have Microsoft CRM installed, or to replace the help files on your Microsoft CRM server and on any computers running the Microsoft CRM laptop client for Microsoft Outlook (Only English).

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM is seeing big wins among global corporations

Microsoft Corp. today announced that since its introduction in December 2005, Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0 has been deployed by a broad range of enterprise-scale businesses, many of which comprise thousands of CRM users. The growing adoption worldwide of Microsoft® CRM in corporations and their divisions reflects how Microsoft CRM is meeting the demand for a solution that provides the right level of functionality and extensibility to serve the needs of diverse global enterprises.

Recent enterprise customers include the following:

•H&R Block Inc., a leading U.S. tax service provider, has a previous deployment of 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM. It has added 500 additional seats for the launch of a new line of business and has a five-year plan to deploy 6,000 seats.
•AGFirst Farm Credit Bank, the premier agricultural lender in the eastern United States and Puerto Rico, is deploying 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
•Chiesi Farmaceutici SpA, an Italian multinational pharmaceutical company, is deploying 500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
•Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel’s fastest-growing health maintenance organization, now has 1,200 seats of Microsoft CRM.

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Business Intelligence in Excel 2007

Mike Arcuri, a group program manager on the business intelligence team shows off Excel 2007's new features for looking at how your business is doing.

Awesome video, that shows that Excel 2007 will become a great Business Intelligence tool in combination with Microsoft Business Solutions.

The video on Channel 9

Don't lose customers when a salesperson leaves your organization

This is a situation that happens a lot: A salesperson leaves an organization, and you want to reassign the work to one or more persons.

With Microsoft CRM you can protect the critical business data owned by the person who is leaving, reassign all data and activities to other employees, and send a personal e-mail to each contact letting them know who their new salesperson will be, in just a few minutes.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Data Migration Pack released

The Data Migration Pack includes two tools for migrating data to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0:

Data Migration Wizard for Microsoft Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager, for migrating data from Outlook with Business Contact Manager to Microsoft CRM 3.0.

Data Migration Framework, for migrating data from any data source to Microsoft CRM 3.0.Both tools are installed on the Microsoft CRM server, and must be run by a user with the Microsoft CRM System Administrator security role. The English version of this tool can be used with localized versions of Microsoft CRM.

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