Tag: Dynamics

Top BI and Corporate Performance Management Trends for 2016

Another year has come and gone, seemingly faster than ever – and we’re already into the second month of 2016. At the end of 2015 or in early January, some people were writing about Business Intelligence (BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) trends they predicted we would see manifest this year. However, much like my current approach to New Year’s resolutions, I felt it was important to let the dust settle, work through the workload hangover of the holidays, and have the New Year function as a soft opening. This way, we can approach 2016 with a rolling start that doesn’t set us up for failure. This article will discuss some key trends and trajectories that data management and analytics will take in 2016.

February 10, 2016

Tips for Migrating Your VBA Code to a GP Dot Net Add-on

Recently we had the task of getting a large number of customization that had been created using VBA and Modifier to function on the GP2015 Web Client. Since VBA will not function on the web client, we had the option of re-writing the functionality in Dexterity or Dot Net. Our development team is mainly focused on Dot Net, with a few of us that are well versed in Dexterity. For this reason, we decided that Dot Net would be the best tool to use in this update, and ongoing support in the future.

February 8, 2016

CRM 2016 SMS Marketing

What can the new SMS (Short Message Service) Marketing feature in CRM 2016 do for your company? The new SMS feature allows your marketing department/marketing staff to become truly mobile. It allows your marketing department to step into the modern era. Marketers within your company can now create powerful SMS marketing campaigns. They will be able to integrate this feature into the already existing multichannel campaigns running within your establishment. Dynamics CRM 2016’s new SMS feature will support both outbound and inbound SMS marketing in select markets.

February 3, 2016

Lions, Tigers, and HTML5… Oh My!

The Dynamics world is all a buzz with the news of GP2016 set to release right around Envision (Convergence for those of you who remember the old days.) There are some great new features and enhancements with this version, one of the most exciting being the HTML5 Web Client!

February 1, 2016

2016 Sales Tax Changes: What to Expect in the New Year

Like every New Year, 2016 will bring many sales tax changes. Rates will decrease or increase, there’ll be new product taxability rules, exemptions will expire or take effect, and there will be reporting changes. The only thing certain when it comes to sales tax is that change happens. And if often happens without much warning.

January 29, 2016

Professional Services Using CRM

In the past, professional services technology systems were closely tied to ERP systems, sometimes baked right in, sometimes as a third party product. The common practice was to utilize the ERP’s architecture, database and financial modules to create a full-featured financial project management system that could produce very granular financial metrics. I recently wrote about an evolution taking place whereby professional services technology applications can now work using CRM systems, and the advantages/disadvantages of doing professional services in ERP or CRM based technology.

January 21, 2016

Correcting a Duplicate User in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

It was the perfect storm that unfurled to cause this commotion that had us spinning our wheels for a while. A User left the company and had been deactivated in CRM (we’ll call this record User1). Due to policy (I’m guessing policy, as I have heard the practice is not recommended) the user Account was deleted in Active Directory (AD). Well, lo and behold, this User decided to return to the company within a few months of leaving. When the Administrator attempted to reactivate the User within CRM, they were unable to because the User was no longer in AD; the User was added again in CRM (the new User record will be User2). After this the User was once again set up within AD, but any attempt to log into CRM failed.

January 20, 2016

2016 – What to Watch for as the Cloud Impacts Your Technology Partner’s Value

This is going to be about how the cloud is automating much of what IT did, (networks, maintaining emails, managed services) and how your technology partner will be giving you much higher value services instead.

Remember when you owned your own servers, connected your users via a network software and had some IT staff (or some outside IT firm) tell you when something was wrong, something needed to be updated or something was down?

January 18, 2016

How to Utilize Dynamics CRM: Five Tricks for a New Salesperson

Joining a new company is always exciting: new people, new opportunities, and new systems to learn.I have the opportunity to learn Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a new CRM software that we sell, and because of my entrepreneurial background, to see it through two lenses: one of a user trying to learn a new system and one as a salesperson utilizing a new tool to sell more efficiently.

January 8, 2016

How to Avoid a Bad Project

Do you ever feel out of control of your project?

Over the past 27 years, I have worked on over 500 large scale projects. Within these 500+ projects, I have taken an interest in listening to client’s and other project professional’s previous experiences about projects that have gone bad. In these conversations, we can learn from failures and plan for better success in the future. But to be quite honest, I will do anything I can to prevent a project that I am working on from “going bad”. With that being said, there are some things that are outside of my control. As much as I want the project to be successful—I do need the client to be in control of the right things.

January 6, 2016