Tag: Microsoft

Power BI & Dynamics CRM Online 2015

The Power BI preview released by Microsoft in Convergence provided a great tool to quickly make sense of large amounts of data. Power BI does all the heavy lifting and provides a quick and easy way to interact with the data. As promised by Microsoft with the release of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 CRM is now available within PowerBI alongside SalesForce & Google Analytics to gather data and provide data analysis. As of publishing this article the Power BI Dynamics CRM connector will only work with Dynamics CRM Online, it will not work with an on premise CRM installation, hopefully the on premise connectivity is not too far.

May 26, 2015

KTL’s 10th Annual User Conference: Recap

Can you believe KTL has been throwing a successful and continuously growing User Conference for the past 10 years!? To be honest, neither could we. It’s amazing how our clientele are so loyal; how they and many others want to learn more about the dynamics world that Microsoft has offered. Yes, the beginning idea of this conference ten years ago, was something that KTL thought would grow and hopefully become an annual educational event that we could host for our clients. And it has become that….and much more!

May 21, 2015

Why the User Conference?

For the last few months we at KTL Solutions (me in particular) have been promoting our upcoming “Empower the User Conference” a free one-day educational event for Microsoft Dynamics GP, SL, and CRM users. And while it is a great educational event that you have learned about through a number of emails, landing pages, and tweets from KTL there are other benefits to attending this event:

May 11, 2015

Microsoft Convergence 2015: Five Takeaways and a Brave New World

Microsoft Dynamics’s Convergence, a gathering of 12,000 customers, partners and Microsoft employees, was great this year. Almost transformative, and as an experienced Convergence attendee, here are my five takeaways that make me think this was a great Convergence:

1. The president of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, attended and was the keynote speaker. Ballmer was absent the last two years, which for me, was not an issue, as his messaging was stale and confirmed in my mind he did not understand business applications. See number five below for more detail about why the keynote was so transformative.

April 20, 2015

Combining Social and Financial Data for Powerful Analytics

This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.

April 16, 2015

Dynamics CRM Online & Office 365

Initially when Dynamics CRM Online was introduced it was tied to windows live id, Microsoft’s online authentication platform. Since then it has been replaced by Office 365 login. And it’s not just that Dynamics CRM Online authentication that has moved to Office 365, now there is lot more integration between these 2 systems. The latest one is the connection between Power BI and Dynamics CRM using Office 365. You can find additional details of the same at

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmvideos/archive/2014/11/07/using-power-bi-with-microsoft-dynamic-crm-2015.aspx

April 10, 2015

Marriage Counseling between Sales and Marketing

I was extremely fortunate to have KTL send me down to Atlanta, Georgia for one of Microsoft’s largest conferences, Convergence. Here I was able to really understand concepts involving both marketing and sales that pertained to us as partners using the solutions we not only implement and sell, but use in house as well. My knowledge grew with many of the sessions provided, but one stood out from others. Not because it was more technical or that I learned something specific that I have been wanting to learn more about; it was that this particular session put a retrospect on what KTL’s Director of Sales and I deal with on an everyday basis: the connection and dependence between our two departments.

April 8, 2015

Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Tools Can Jumpstart your BI Initiative

I often get asked about Business Intelligence and related tools, as dashboards and data integration have become so common today, and everyone wants “instant information”. After all, aren’t we all information workers today?

Since my company is a Microsoft Partner, doing Dynamics (GP, SL and CRM) business applications, my first recommendation is to “look close to home”. You may be surprised how much existing BI you already own and are not utilizing if you use Microsoft products. (Dynamics, SQL, SharePoint, Office) The Microsoft BI toolkit is not a lightweight player in the BI market, as you can see from the 2013 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant graphic below.

March 19, 2015

Demystifying The Modification Of Word Templates For GP

Prerequisites:

Once GP has been installed – Install the Microsoft Word Add-In from the GP Installation Disk. This will install the Default Word Templates and will add Template Maintenance and Template Configuration to the Administration >> Reports Window.

March 13, 2015

Project Budgeting and the Questions You Should Ask

Budgets are one of the 3 pillars that hold-up a project and they ensure that there is enough of “it” to support the other 2, viz. scope and time. All three are just as important but for a successful project implementation a smart budget is at its core.

The PMBOK talks about several methods we can use for budgeting but the one that is my favorite and is most accurate is “bottom-up estimating”. When using this method we break down each task into a smaller component and such a component can be assigned anywhere from 8-16 hours to complete. We then work our way up into estimates of higher-level deliverables.

March 11, 2015