User Group Session: C360’s Productivity Pack for Dynamics CRM 4

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

October 30, 2009 · Filed under CRM Add-Ons

2 Comments »

  1. Josh Said,

    May 3, 2010 @ 8:36 pm

    First of all, thank you for all of the educational resources you have available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I purchased your Building Workflows in CRM 4.0 eBook which has been an invaluable resource for me.

    Question: Are there any products offering a slimmed down version of c360’s Core Productivity Pack available? We currently use c360’s Productivity Pack, exclusively for the Multi-Field Search and Summary capabilities, but the time delay it creates it killing our productivity (Dynamics CRM On-Premise). It has some fantastic features but the load time, per page, is at nearly 1 minute. Any advice or suggestions you may have would be greatly appreciated.

  2. Richard Knudson Said,

    May 4, 2010 @ 6:37 am

    Hi Josh,

    It sounds like you might be using an older version of the CPP. A few months ago c360 released a “Summary performance” patch, which from what I’ve heard is an order of magnitude faster. (something to do with their previous version using filtered views if I remember right…) To obtain this update, customers can email support@c360.com and request the “Summary Performance” patch.

    Maybe try that, or contact Brad Burks — brad.burks@c360.com — he’s a great guy and can answer your questions or get you connected with the right people there.

    Thanks for reading!

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