CRM 4 – eService Accelerator = CRM 2011 Customer Care Portal

A potential customer asked about the eService Accelerator and if it was available in CRM 2011 and had the bugs and problems been fixed.  I’m sure this is a common question, especially for those CRM 4 users who have use the eService Accelerator and are thinking about upgrading (brave people)

I hadn’t used the accelerator but I did recall a couple of Accelerators having been brought across sometime back in May.

I had a look but couldn’t see any accelerator called eService and then I found this forum post which explain things to me.

The eService accelerator was deprecated in CRM 4, with all of the functionality being replaced by the customer portal accelerator.  The customer portal was released last spring for CRM 4. The eService accelerator was not upgraded to CRM 2011, but the Customer Portal accelerator was upgraded and is now available in the marketplace at the following url:

http://dynamics.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/applications/Customer-Portal-for-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-2011-12884910826

Support for the CRM 2011 version of the customer portal is available at this url:

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/crmlabs/threads

The customer portal for CRM 4 is available at this url:

http://customerportal.codeplex.com/

 

So it seems it has been renamed to the customer care portal.  The first thing I noticed is that on the Dynamic Marketplace not one person has reviewed it? have a look here.  I know not many people use the marketplace but this seemed very odd.

I then had a look on codeplex and found this http://crmcca.codeplex.com/ but it had only been downloaded 60 times.

I have tried to install one of the accelerators before and even working through the instructions line by line I couldn’t get it to work and then gave up but maybe the documentation has been improved.

I found this blog which seems to be a decent guide to getting started

http://gtcrm.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/installing-the-customer-care-accelerator-cca-for-crm-2011/

 

3 thoughts on “CRM 4 – eService Accelerator = CRM 2011 Customer Care Portal

  1. Neil Benson November 10, 2011 / 4:23 pm

    Hi Ben, the Customer Portal Solution Accelerator and the Customer Care Solution Accelerator are different beasts entirely.

    The Customer Portal Solution Accelerator is a simple example portal to show how to build event management and case management portals. There have been various iterations of this accelerator over the last few years.

    The Customer Care Solution Accelerator is a development framework for integrating many line of business applications into a single application within enterprise call centres. It used to be called the Customer Care Framework, before it was brought under the CRM product team’s wing in 2009.

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    • Hosk November 10, 2011 / 4:32 pm

      Thanks for the comment, I seem to be getting my wires a bit crossed there.

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  2. Hosk November 10, 2011 / 4:41 pm

    reading the description of te Customer Care Portal on the market place. It seems to me the customer portal has all the functionality of the eService accelerator

    http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-us/applications/customer-portal-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-12884910826

    Functionality includes lead generation, service scheduling, case management, event calendar, product registration, self-help knowledge base and content management. Customers can turn this functionality on or off depending on their specific requirements. Note, this solution includes all functionality from the Portal Integration, eService and Event Management accelerators that were released for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

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