Microsoft has made a large investment in BI in 2015, both on-premises and in the cloud. BI offerings across Datazen, R, Excel, Power BI and coming to SQL Server 2016 are huge. Microsoft released a public BI roadmap on where they are headed with their BI stack. Microsoft’s simple goal is to put the power of data in the hands of every business user. This simple goal is inline with the #1 top ranked IT priority according to Gartner.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
To implement my Service Broker ETL API, I started with the basic code/framework provided by Eitan Blumin in this blog post:http://www.madeiradata.com/service-broker-asynchronous-triggers/. He provides a good basic framework for the setup of Service Broker and an explanation of the installation scripts. To learn more on the basic framework and scripts to implement Service Broker please refer to his post.
Excel is the tool of choice for getting data ready for import. Data is brought into Excel directly from the legacy program, or it is imported as a delimited file created by another application. Once the data is in Excel there are several strategies to prepare it for import. This article shows how easy it is to filter data with just the click of a mouse.
The most overlooked setting during CRM user setup are the work hours. Setting up the work hours for a user/facility/equipment record has always been an afterthought (at least for me). Then again, this setting becomes more relevant and important to setup when you are scheduling resources., This is especially true in setting up the service module or as part of any project management/field service module where appointments are being setup for tasks. For those who may not know where this setting exists, it can be found by navigating to ;Settings->Security->Users.' Open any user record, and in the navigation for the user record, you can find the “WORK HOURS” navigation tile. You can access the resources work hours by navigating to ;Settings->Business Management -> Facilities/Equipment.' The resource entity still uses the old CRM form layout so the work hour navigation can be accessed from within the form.
I enjoy working with SSRS reports and learning new things to help me build out reports that meet our clients’ needs. When a client comes to me with an interesting way they want something displayed or a request for a feature that is unknown to me, I jump at the chance to do it. I love a new challenge and it acts as a learning experience as well. A recent request came to me that required a little creativity on my part. It was to modify the default value of certain report parameters based on the security role the User had in CRM.
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