One of the best features of
We have a great customer that coordinates no-cost eye exams and eyeglasses for children in need. Doctors and eyeglass providers donate a certain number of eye exams and eye glasses per month to the program. Our customer uses MS CRM to track all the children, doctors, eye exams, eyeglasses, in the program... a great example of the
We already had the address information for all the children, doctors, and eyeglass providers. To make the mapping work quickly, we first had to convert all of the addressess to Latitude/Longitude. For this conversion, we used a workflow assembly that would pass the address to a web service, which returned the Latitude/Longitude and saved it as part of the child, doctor, or eyeglass provider record.
Then when an eye exam was to be scheduled, we passed the Latitude/Longitude of the child as well as the doctors and providers to Microsoft Virtual Earth, and set the zoom factor to about a 20 mile radius. Using custom icons for the child, doctors, and providers makes it easy to pick services that are close to the child’s location. Additionally, numbers on the icons showed how many eye exams and eyeglasses were available that month. Here are some screenshots showing our
Prior to the Virtual Earth integration, the appointment process was very time consuming. With this new integration, our customer claims they save over five minutes per appointment made! With their team arranging hundreds of appointments a day, this capability has been a huge timesaver for them. As the customer changes their focus from state to nation-wide service, this capability as well as the other tools provided by Microsoft CRM will be the key to making this incredible growth possible.
By Alan Camp, 2B Solutions –