The Dynamics CRM product team at Microsoft have an Industry Vertical template program. It was created as a vehicle for identifying, validating and distributing vertical specific IP as templates to be used to assist partners and Microsoft deliver easy to use vertical specific demonstrations.

The product team have recently released three vertical templates based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. These can be used in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and in on-premise based demonstrations too. The new templates are for:

• Wealth Management,
• Non-Profit (donation management)
• Health Plan Sales

Typically a template will consist of the following components specific to a vertical:

• Sitemap
• Vertical workflows
• Vertical custom entities
• Vertical reports
• Vertical dashboards
• Vertical sample Data

All the templates have gone through our detailed security and privacy review processes.  They can be used as a conceptual framework for vertical usage scenarios but are not intended to be used for actual implementations as they are not production level solutions or code and there is no technical support or warranty for these templates available from Microsoft. Microsoft strongly recommends that an implementation partner be engaged to effectively match Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the unique needs and specific vertical requirements of customers.

The templates are delivered as solution packages that can be easily downloaded through the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketplace for partners to import and use in sales engagements. The solutions can be found on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketplace under the search “Microsoft Dynamics Labs”, alternatively I have supplied the individual links below:

• Wealth Management: http://dynamics-crm.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-AU/applications/microsoft-dynamics-crm-for-wealth-management-12884926609
• Non-Profit: http://dynamics-crm.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-AU/applications/microsoft-dynamics-crm-for-nonprofit-organizations-12884926413
• Health Plan Sales: http://dynamics-crm.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-AU/applications/health-plan-sales-solution-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-12884928852

When you import and publish a template onto an existing instance of CRM, with other solutions already published, the template will be made available as a managed solution. In essence it will be added to the existing instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The solution framework for Dynamics CRM supports layering; hence you can typically install one solution on top of another. Please refer to MSDN for more info.

If you need to further customise the template for a specific customer demonstration the existing components of the managed vertical template cannot be edited or changed. However, a template can be used as a reference to build more complex components when required. For example, consider that a workflow, WF1, is provided with the template. WF1 cannot be edited to satisfy customer needs. However, you can build a new workflow referencing WF1 and use that for the demo, if required.

Thomas