Newsfeed Business Productivity Accelerator Released

The latest accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was recently released.  This accelerator is a combination of a dashboard report and a collection of workflows that give you a great way to track user activity in CRM. 

Out of the box, the following events are included in the dashboard report:

- New case created

- Case reassigned

- New campaign created

- Sales opportunity closed

The most exciting thing about the Newsfeed Dashboard report is that it is extremely easy to configure additional events to show up on the dashboard.  The report works by querying the Notes (annotation) table looking for subjects that begin with "Newsfeed:"  To add additional events to the dashboard, just create a workflow to create a note against the selected entity and make the subject begin with "Newsfeed:"  This even works with custom entities.

 

The dashboard report also includes drill through hyperlinks to the record, so you can click on an event on the dashboard and open the record in Dynamics CRM, and it is formatted very nicely to include CRM colors, fonts, and icons.

Based on my initial tests, the Newsfeed Business Productivity Accelerator is very complete and could be easily deployed with little or no modification (other than creating workflows for your specific CRM events).