Welcome to the first official Cornerstone Solutions blog.  In our blog we will discuss the Microsoft business applications.  Specifically, we will cover SharePoint and the Dynamics platform including Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Great Plains.  Our goal is to create a forum to allow people to exchange ideas and information.  In addition, we plan to link out to other sites so we provide our opinions as well as the thoughts and ideas of other industry leaders. 

I hope you will check back with us often because no blog is successful without input and comments from others. 

Look for an RSS feed to be installed soon so you can receive automatic updates!

Contract research organizations use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help make decisions on clinical trial feasibility within minutes instead of weeks.

A contract research organization or a CRO is a third party that pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies hire to help them pass the pre-clinical and clinical trial process. During the clinical trial process the CRO needs to hold in-human clinical trial studies.  These studies are managed and reported on by physicians and hospital staff which have to be selected by the CRO.  In order for the CRO to interview the physician their needs to be a large database or way of listing and searching a group of physicians to properly recruit for the clinical trial.

The methodology that CROs are using for this system is to create the account as the pharmaceutical company and the physician as the contact in the system.  When a clinical trial is initiated an opportunity (clinical trial study) is created for the account (pharmaceutical company) and the contact...

As many of you know Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 was released a while ago. Just as with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 this release of SharePoint has created a huge buzz in marketplace. There are many uses for SharePoint, and as we wrote in previous newsletters companies are using it as a document management solution or a company intranet. All of those documents and information can now be stored in a more organized manner.

Another exciting use of SharePoint is the social networking avenue. This article written by CIO insight discusses SharePoint becoming a social networking tool for corporations. It is definitely an interesting concept and an exciting use of SharePoint!

All of this begs the question.. How are you using SharePoint?

In our blog we will cover exciting topics as well as mundane, but important items.  Today's topic definitely falls into the mundane, but important category.  The topic is backups.  We have noticed on a regular basis that some of our clients do not have adequate backups.  We always ensure that an initial backup plan is in place when we implement, but often times the overall infrastructure changes and backups do not get adjusted.  Imagine if you lost all of your Microsoft Dynamics GP data and had no backup in place! At a minimum, we recommend nightly backups kept on-site and weekly backups off-site.  The off-site requirement can be as simple as a key employee or owner taking a tape home on a weekly basis.  Of course, there are more sophisticated ways, but this method still fits the bill.  So please, check you backup routines and set a reminder for yourself to check in on them at least one a quarter.  Make sure that a system change or server move did not affect your plan....

Obviously, one of the hottest topics in the Microsoft CRM world today is the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.  Many people might have heard of this project as "Titan" which is the code name Microsoft has given the project internally.  The questions everyone asks is "What is coming in the new release and when is it coming". 

As far as when, the best guess is late 2007 or early 2008.  I have my fingers crossed for late 2007.

Microsoft has kept the "what" pretty quiet, but the two major areas of the release are multi-tenancy and a hosted version.  Multi-tenancy refers to several things including being able to run multiple CRM databases on one CRM server, running Microsoft CRM in multiple languages and having multi-currency capability.

The hosted version of Microsoft CRM is called Microsoft CRM Live.  There is some great information about it here.  The hosted version will be hosted by partners as well as Microsoft.  Of course, on premise is still an option for deployment.  The hosted version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM should make CRM an option for smaller companies and is a direct entry against SalesForce.com. 

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