At the partner event in March, we showed you a pretty exciting demo about the power of CRM Online as a platform, and how people might interact with business systems in the future. Those of you that attended the demo but where sceptical when I said we would make the code available to you, well here it is! Look for Kevin Hughes blog for the code. Amazing effort by Kevin and look out for much more from Kevin and the UK Team! Enjoy!

This post was originally published on https://markmargolis.wordpress.com. This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

At the partner event in March, we showed you a pretty exciting demo about the power of CRM Online as a platform, and how people might interact with business systems in the future. Those of you that attended the demo but where sceptical when I said we would make the code available to you, well here it is! Look for Kevin Hughes blog for the code. Amazing effort by Kevin and look out for much more from Kevin and the UK Team! Enjoy!

This post was originally published on https://markmargolis.wordpress.com. This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

There are many important questions that you have to ask yourself when deciding to implement a new ERP solution for your business.

We would like to suggest one more that should be added to your list… who do you prefer, Batman or Superman?

While the relevance might not seem instantly obvious, after watching the latest trailer for the next big screen depiction of the characters, it suddenly occurred to us that these two comic book icons could teach us an awful lot about ERP deployment options!

If Enterprise Resource Planning is the Justice League of business management software, once you’ve decided to use it in your business, you need to decide which super-powered deployment option you’re going to use.

Do you team up with Batman; the Dark Knight of Deployment (on premises ERP)?

Or do you choose Superman; the indestructible, airborne Man of Steel (cloud based ERP)?

We’ve made things a little easier by channelling our inner comic-geek and giving our thoughts on which option will best suit your requirements, providing you with the outcome you’re looking for.

Batman – On Premises

Batman fights crime face-to-face, on the streets of Gotham, so it makes sense that he should represent the in-house option of on premises ERP.

Let’s face it, the server room where all of your data will be stored with an on premises solution isn’t that dissimilar to the Batcave. He may be the Dark Knight and Caped Crusader, but Batman is also known as the World’s Greatest Detective. Highly intelligent, he can acquire knowledge at the touch of a button, processing it, analysing the results, and using it to his advantage. Sound familiar?

An on premises solution gives you access to real-time data, allowing you to make important business decisions, as and when they become relevant.

Most of Batman’s famed villains reside in the seedy underbelly of Gotham City, which is where the majority of his crime fighting takes place. Once he’s vanquished The Joker and locked him up, he can return to the safety of the Batcave with Robin and Alfred. We’re assuming that your business doesn’t have a seedy underbelly but, in a similar way, on-premises deployment centralises information, so that you can return to the office after a hard day of gathering data, update information on your ERP system, and catch up with staff.

It’s important to note that you’ll need your own Boy Wonder and trusty old butler to look after your ERP system, at least metaphorically. On premises solutions will require manual updates and maintenance and in-house support will ensure that you can control when and how the software is being updated.

The Dark Knight is famed for his high-tech equipment, from the contents of his utility belt to the Batmobile, Batplane and all his other wonderful toys. The Batcave is bristling with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to keep him up to date on the comings and goings of the criminal underclass.

An on premises ERP solution is equally brimming with hi-tech data gathering tools. You can get a 360° view of your business (without posing on top of a gothic skyscraper), allowing you to streamline processes, reduce inefficiencies and save time and money. Having the data on-site also means that you can control the security measures that protect it. A secret entrance to your server room with a batpole is obviously optional.

Whether you’re a playboy millionaire or not, like Batman, your business will own this hardware and the installed ERP software. Just like the pointy eared purveyor of justice, you can be secure in the knowledge that it’s always there, lurking in the shadows of the server room, ready to spring into action whenever you need it.

Superman – Cloud based

Cloud deployment’s early days in the 1950s, with mainframe computers that were often referred to as ‘dumb terminals’, are probably more similar to Superman’s clumsy alter-ego, Clark Kent. Thankfully, when it comes to any number of software applications, including ERP, the cloud is a lot more refined.

In fact, the power it can yield is definitely up to the calibre of Superman. Like the Last Son of Krypton, it gives you a high flying overview of your business. Its major benefit being speed, flexibility and added freedom.

Batman’s, and on premises’, strengths lie in the security they can offer by being fixed in one place. On the other hand, Superman, and the cloud, can be there for you (faster than a speeding bullet) whenever you want and wherever you are. Since the data on your ERP system is stored ‘in the cloud’, you can access, measure and update it on any mobile device.

On a junior journalist’s salary, Superman doesn’t have Bruce Wayne’s vast fortune, but who needs money when your powers are built in? Similarly, a cloud solution doesn’t require the same kind of expenditure as an on premises solution. If you don’t have space for a server room, that’s fine too because you won’t need one.

While Batman has the added back up of Alfred and Robin, with all of his powers, Superman doesn’t really need any help. The cloud is pretty self-sufficient too, automatically updating itself and not requiring any maintenance, since no hardware is involved.

Who’s on your team?

For some of you out there, it’s going to be obvious which hero you add to your team. Batman brings security, technical prowess and dependability. Superman is fast, flexible and efficient. But ultimately, your choice of deployment will depend on what’s right for the way that you do business and, more importantly but often forgotten, where you see your business in the future.

Before you ally yourself to one super solution, take all the facts into consideration and make your choice based on what will provide your business with the most tangible results.

Having said that, Batman has definitely got the coolest car!

By ERP Central - http://www.erpcentral.co.uk/

This is part 2 of our Office 365 Partner Community blog series about adding CRM Online to your practice. Read part 1.

How CRM Online helps increase customer adoption and usage of Office 365

In the introductory post to this Office 365 Partner Community blog series about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Janet Kahrs talked about how the combination of CRM Online with Office 365 is a powerful way to encourage cloud consumption, by providing the users in an organization with a cloud-based solution that aligns to how they want to work. Partners that have an Office 365 practice today are well positioned to expand their practice to include CRM Online.

When you change the discussion with your customers from product-driven to one that is about their users’ experience with an integrated solution, it becomes easier to explain how Microsoft can address their business challenges in ways that other companies can’t match. The Sales Productivity Solution (SPS) is a great example of this, combining CRM Online with Office 365 Plan E3 and Power BI. Existing Office 365 customers can add CRM Online and Power BI to their subscription.

CRM Online is often viewed as the tip of the spear in terms of business solutions that light up the investments organizations are making with Office 365. It offers deep, native integration with the tools people use every day to be productive and satisfied in their work, such as Outlook, SharePoint, Word, Excel, Power BI, Lync/Skype for Business, and Yammer.

Now, let’s take a look at how deep that integration is, and how we’re shaping the One Microsoft story to provide the most value to customers.

Integration between Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online

People across organizations are faced with a multitude of demands that pull them in different directions and take them away from their focus of engaging with their internal and external customers. Switching tasks and switching business applications is a drain on productivity and client focus. Allowing people to perform their duties without leaving the context of their work is key to what CRM Online does, and that is bolstered by the tight alignment with Office 365.

Integration with Microsoft Outlook has been a hallmark of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for several years. That integration embeds the entire CRM application into Outlook, and allows salespeople, marketers, and customer care representatives to do their work without having to jump from Outlook to other systems. Here are three scenarios that capitalize on this integration.

Accounts and opportunities

The Spring 2015 release of CRM Online includes a new folder-level tracking feature that allows people to track emails pertaining to their accounts and opportunities, directly from any Outlook app, across phones, tablets, and the desktop. Other investments include an immersive Excel experience that will allow users to perform analysis on their data without having to leave CRM Online, coupled with enhancements to the Excel export process. In addition, the Spring 2015 release includes embedded OneNote which lets users capture notes, photos, and more, automatically linked with the record in CRM Online.

Collaborative selling

CRM Online users in sales, marketing, and customer care roles rely heavily on the ability to collaborate to get their work done and satisfy their customers. Dynamics CRM has integrated natively with SharePoint, Lync/Skype for Business, and Yammer for several releases. These tools help users bring together colleagues for tasks like document collaboration, communication, and online meetings, as well as the discovery and sharing of ideas. On top of that, the integration puts this into the context of the CRM Online record that they need to collaborate on. The Spring 2015 release will add the capability to create Office 365 Groups, and CRM Online users will be able to collaborate with team members who don’t have access to CRM Online.

Sales analytics

In the past, CRM systems were viewed as a tool for sales managers to keep track of sales performance, and where salespeople could house their contacts and activities. What was missing was business intelligence that could provide real insights that lead to a competitive advantage. CRM Online features  capabilities that let customers visualize their CRM data using charts, graphs, and dashboards. If you need to pull in data from outside sources, custom reports can be created using SSRS or other tools, but in today’s world, self-service reporting is an expectation, and should be as easy to use as Excel.

Enter Power BI. Using the CRM Online oData feeds, or the newly created adapter for Power BI that puts CRM Online as a first-class data source, Office 365 partners can create dazzling dashboards and reports that turn a customer’s data into meaningful information that empowers employees to do their jobs and run their businesses. There is even a pre-built sales template to help you get up and running quickly with Power BI that connects to your customer’s instance of CRM Online.

On the May 7 call for the Office 365 Partner Community, we’ll talk more about how CRM Online encourages customer adoption and use of Office 365, and why you should consider adding it to your Microsoft practice. I hope you’ll join us for the discussion. Register for the May 7 community call.

CRM Online partner resources

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online on the partner portal
• Partnership journey with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
• Cloud SureStep for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
• Microsoft Dynamics Cloud Partner Profitability Guide
• Internal use rights guide for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and CRM Online
• Recommended training for Sales, Marketing, and Technical roles
• Modern Biz | Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online marketing campaign

CRM Online product information

• Test Drive Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Product release information for Spring 2015
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM pricing and licensing

Microsoft Social Engagement provides a convenient way to analyse the sentiment of voters, as well as the output of politicians and the media, to offer a detailed picture of the actual events shaping the race for Downing Street.

Our latest Microsoft Social Engagement snapshot focuses on the week of the BBC's "challengers2 debate, featuring Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage, Natalie Bennett and Leanne Wood.

Click here to download the full snapshot report

AKA: The (Recent) Evolution of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I’ve been noticing a lot of customers have elected not to upgrade Dynamics CRM beyond the 2011 version.  Most of them have seen the new interface and have concerns on the impact on their users, similar to the concerns of many organizations when the new Microsoft Office ribbon came out.  In this blog, I will show why it is worth the effort and cost of moving to the most current Microsoft Dynamics CRM release within about 6-12 months of it’s release.

I started working with Dynamics CRM 3.0 in 2005. At the time, was a significant improvement over CRM 1.2, which some of my associates remember all too well. Dynamics CRM 2013 and 2015 are also significant improvements over previous versions and provide better usability/flexibility to techies and users alike.

Recently, I began updating my teaching slide decks for both applications courses and the technical courses from Dynamics CRM 2011 to CRM 2015.  I had expectations that I might have to do a complete rewrite of the decks due to all the changes. Once I got started, however, I realized that this was not the case.  I had to update all of the screen shots, but most the functions of CRM remained consistent. Sure, I had to add new sections where new features had been added and deal with the navigation changes, but the basic functions of Dynamics CRM still work the same way they always have except for the improvements. Yay!  The job took much less time than anticipated, always a plus!

So why is that important to you if you haven’t upgraded to CRM 2013 from CRM 2011?

The benefits

• The 2013/2015 versions more productive & feature rich allowing faster and easier enhancement as well as more productive for users.
• Much more powerful forms now let you include fields from parent entities on a form and much more
• Can use new features such as calculated fields and rollup fields to reduce and eliminate custom code
• More focus and support for current versions, especially if interfaced to other software

The drawbacks

• Must retrain users on the new interface, but the new interface looks more intimidating than it actually is
• Unsupported code won’t work without changes or in some cases rewrites. This also means testing all the changes before going live

I have to admit, I was intimidated by the new interface when CRM 2013 came out, but even without training, I was able to get up to speed pretty quickly.  That said, about 2 hours worth of user training and a day or two of use gets most end users up to speed on 2013/2015. As far as the techies are concerned, review the list of changes, watch some videos and you’ll be fine. I took all of the recorded partner training for CRM 2013 and 2015 in about 16 hours and did fine.

The improvements are worth the effort. The new navigation and interface are an improvement, easier to use, out of the way, and work on touch. Many new features provide a more robust customization environment, reducing the need for code and testing.

If you have been waiting, it’s a good time to take another look.

Stephen V. Noe

There’s something important going on every time your customer uses a mobile device, and you’re probably unaware of it. It’s called a “mobile moment.” A mobile moment refers to when a person pulls out their mobile device to obtain immediate, contextual information.

Mobile moments are valuable for companies. They’ll want to make sure that consumers are turning to them when they want information in a mobile moment. Mobile moments offer an excellent monetizing opportunity for firms.

Here’s an example of a mobile moment: Jane walks into her local branch of a national chocolate shop chain, which we’ll call Ooey Gooey Inc. Ooey Gooey Inc. has a customer-facing app, which Jane uses quite frequently. When she walks into Ooey Gooey Inc., the app alerts her that the bonbon of the month is on sale, and it gives her a coupon to purchase it. Jane is happy about this turn of events, because she was planning on purchasing the bonbon of the month, and the coupon is the extra motivation she needed.

With opportunity comes responsibility. Mobile moments must be secure. During these moments, consumers share their identities, time, location and biometrics. All of those details can be exploited by hackers and criminals.

But how can the enterprise secure mobile moments? Currently, businesses use static security policies and controls. They don’t offer adequate protection against unscrupulous individuals who prey on unsecured data. Firms need to utilize dynamic security policies and control. As the name suggest, the security policies and controls will change based on what the user is doing at that moment.

Security can’t have a negative impact on user experience, though. If an application that captures mobile moments is very secure yet so difficult to navigate that no one wants to use it, it’s more of a liability than an asset. Balancing security with a positive and simple user experience isn’t easy, but it is a necessity.

Surprisingly, digital security has a very human component. The developers and programmers who create the apps which capture mobile moments must understand how to engineer security in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with user experience, yet is still strong enough to keep users safe.

Furthermore, the technology specialists responsible for capturing mobile moments need to be aware of national and international privacy regulations which prohibit companies from collecting, using and storing personal data.

Human creativity can also play a role in designing security measures for applications. Mobile devices provide companies with a wealth of information, such as the user’s location and what they look like. Developers and programmers can make security easy for users by giving them access to an application if they perform a retinal scan or furnish their fingerprint.

Capturing and monetizing mobile moments is an art. So is securing them. The opportunity to engage with customers should not take place without the necessary security precautions, and those security precautions should be a seamless, invisible part of the user experience.

Setting up a developer box VM and cloning it for other developers is a great way to spin up machines quickly.  However if you have already connected to a TFS workspace your machines may throw an error regarding the workspace when logging on a different user and opening the client for the first time.

The TFS workspace files are cached on the client machine in the following directory.

%userprofile%\appdata\local\microsoft\team foundation\3.0\cache

The file you'll need to modify will be the VersonControl.config file. 

You can rename this file to VersionControl-old.config and re-launch the AX client, this will rebuild the config file with the appropriate workspace associated to the current user.

Putting a new lead-generation strategy in place led O’Neal Steel to land a multi-million dollar account within the first week.

The firm is one of Zero2Ten’s valued manufacturing customers and it asked for help putting a new lead-generation strategy within Dynamics CRM.
Rather than building growth through its existing customers, O’Neal sought to proactively find new business. Zero2Ten introduced O’Neal to InsideView and the company was overwhelmed by its power in sourcing new leads and enriching its contact database. O’Neal Steel made InsideView the foundation of its new lead-generation strategy. From there, its team was able to build lead lists based on both demographic data and timely news triggers. New leads were instantly synced with the existing Dynamics CRM system thanks to InsideView’s easy integration. As leads were added into CRM they were enriched using data and insights from more than 30,000 sources via InsideView.

Using InsideView saves time for both sales and marketing. Lead enrichment eliminates manual research, targets only the best prospects and disqualifies bad leads early in the funnel, saving time for marketing. Focusing solely on leads that are both pre- and highly qualified, prevents the sales team from wasting time trying to connect and engage with bad leads. O’Neal is now able to quantify that 66% of its time has been saved from chasing unqualified leads and can now be used to sell more efficiently.

The results were immediate. In the first week that O’Neal used InsideView a meeting was secured with an InsideView-sourced lead that eventually turned into an $850 million account– the largest in the company’s history!

If your business is looking to review or create a new lead-generation strategy and you would like to learn more, please contact us today to read the O’Neal case study.

PowerBarcode allows users to create barcode images right from within CRM! Insert a barcode into an e-mail or report. A very simple control within CRM provides the ability to easily insert QR Code, Matrix, Linear Barcode or PDF code.

In this example, we will insert a Matrix into an email. There are numerous possibilities as to how the PowerBarcode may be used; an example would be to send an email to someone who has registered for an event. The registrant could bring that code to the event and have it scanned.

Navigate to PowerPack.

Navigate to PowerBarcode Styles.

Open the desired Barcode Style, in this case: Matrix.

Select New. In the next step, it is required to enter in specifications for the PowerBarcode. Reference this screen for the necessary default details.

Name the PowerBarcode. Style Name should have a unique name to distinguish this exclusive code. The Type is the type of barcode that will be created. Proceed to fill in the other necessary fields. To continue, Save & Close the record. If the name of the barcode is not unique, you will be notified when you try to save the PowerBarcode Style record. Once a record is saved the ‘Style Name’ and ‘Type’ fields can’t be changed.

We will now insert this Data Matrix into an email sent via CRM:

Set up this email as you would any other (navigate to the PowerPack Tab. From there, click the PowerEmail Opens tile. In the upper right corner, select New. From here, the details and body of the email can be filled in. The PowerBarcode can be placed anywhere in the email. It is also possible to insert numerous PowerBarcodes in one email. When ready to insert the PowerBarcode, select Get Token.

Choose the correct parameters for the PowerBarcode you would like to insert into the email. Then select either Copy URL or Copy Token. Send the e-mail.

The Email will appear as follows:

The Copy URL will open a window with the PowerBarcode.

The Copy Token will place the PowerBarcode itself into the email. You may also add this PowerBarcode to a report!

Thanks for your interest in PowerBarcode. Should you have any questions, contact us at 612-339-3355 or email powerpackpro@powerobjects.com. Remember, your trial will expire 30 days from the date of installation. If you are interested in subscribing, go to the configuration screen and change the radio button from “try” to “subscribe” and enter your credit card information – you will be charged $1/CRM user/month.

The post Create a Data Matrix and Insert it into an E-mail via PowerBarCode appeared first on .

Enterprise IT departments often wait for at least one or two updates to newly released software before upgrading. By waiting, the thinking goes, bugs will have been discovered and fixed after the original releases. For many companies, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 is no exception to this practice.

"There's been a lot of interest lately in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015, but I've heard from a number of people that their company won't move to the latest release," writes Mark Polino, Integrated Business Group Senior Consultant. "They insist on waiting until the first service pack or implementing one version back."

Is that reluctance jus...

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