At the October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I followed a presentation by C360 on their Core Productivity Pack with a session of my own on the BI Analytics add-on. I consider myself an “educated layman” when it comes to BI, which made me all the more impressed with how much business intelligence I could glean from using BI Analytics with only about five hours of learning time. (Impressed with the tool, that is!)

I recorded the session, and here’s a link to it: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/Richards_BI_Analytics_Demo.wmv

This is a non-trivial add-on: it’s powerful, complex and justifies a much more comprehensive write-up than I have time to do now. On the other hand, I’ve been asked by a couple of attendees to get the recording posted, and I hate to post a recording with no context, so here’s my executive summary on C360’s BI Analytics add-on for Dynamics CRM:

• I think this application is excellent, and I wish I could run it on my production system. (It only works currently with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM 4.0, and my production system is Dynamics CRM Online.) 
• BI Analytics is developed by a firm called Strategy Companion. Their flagship product is the “Analyzer”, which is a general purpose Business Intelligence application that can integrate information from lots of different data sources. BI Analytics runs on top of the Analyzer, and is specifically designed as an add-on for Dynamics CRM 4.0. C360 is the exclusive reseller of the CRM-specfiic BI Analytics.
• The installation process is relatively complicated and should not be performed solo by an ”educated layman”. I had to run through it a few times to get it to work, and required the help of the folks at Strategy Companion.
• Once installed, using the application can be done without heavy-duty BI or technical expertise. As I mentioned above, I spent about five hours familiarizing myself with it. Strategy Companion has some video tutorials on their web site that are helpful.
• In my view, the two barriers that will prevent some organizations from using BI Analytics are:
  • Availability. I already mentioned that it’s currently only for on-premise. I wish they’d come out with it for Online!
  • Price. The license fee is $4,000. My understanding is that gets you a license for one “designer” — that being a single person who has the ability to create reports. Users who consume the reports can do so for free. More designer licenses each cost an additional $4k up to five of them, after which the per-designer fee drops somewhat.       

A note on price, which is a general one that could fairly be made about any add-on that a) saves you time, and b) costs money: If you need the kind of functionality BI Analytics contains, trade off the time it takes you to implement it from scratch, against the $4,000 license fee. My guess is that very few organizations can implement the functionality available in BI Analytics with anything nearly as small as $4,000 worth of effort. And a large organization with lots of potential report consumers will be able to justify the investment a lot easier than a smaller one. If you’ve got 100 users, a $40/user one-time might not seem too high, compared to the BI value you’ll realize.

The October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com) featured two presentations, the first of which was by Brad Burks and Patrick Sells of C360 (www.C360.com) presenting on their best-selling product, the Core Productivity Pack for Dynamics CRM 4.

I thought they gave an excellent presentation! I recorded and posted the  presentation for your viewing pleasure.    

I won’t write too much here on it, since Brad and Patrick cover it thoroughly in the recording, but here are a a few comments:

• You can tell the product planning people at C360 spend a lot of time either using Dynamics CRM or talking to people who do. For example, users often remark that the Dynamics CRM web UI is extremely “clicky” (or words to that effect), meaning you have to click a lot and open lots of windows to drill down to the information you need. As you’ll see in the recording, the “Console” (one of the primary features of the Productivity Pack) relieves about 90% of that clickiness. The tradeoff is a slightly busier screen, but I think a lot of users will prefer the busier screen/fewer clicks UI presented by the Console.
• Personally, the editable grid they also include with the CPP (how soon we geeks lapse into acronyms!) was my favorite. I think that would make batch editing of records way easier than it is out of the box.
• The SharePoint integration part is new, apparently, and it looks like a great start. Basically, it sounds like they’ve automated the process of creating a SharePoint site or document library when a new account is created in CRM. I’d like to know more about it, such as how much control you have over determining which accounts get sites created automatically, how the integration UI looks and so forth. In any event, this is an important function for a lot of organizations and I’m glad C360’s added it to the CPP.

Let me know what you think.

Here’s the full URL to the recording: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/C360_DCRMUG_October2009.wmv

Richard