You’ve invested a lot into the systems you use for your business. Each asset has been carefully selected to protect critical data, provide infrastructure, and support open technologies for remote work, all while keeping your overall business goals-- and budget-- in mind. When shopping for new ways to support these systems, many organizations have turned to a hybrid cloud approach to offer the flexibility and efficiency of new cloud technology while retaining the infrastructure they’ve already invested in. It’s the best way to optimize your existing assets while taking advantage of today’s newest technologies.

The best part about considering this hybrid cloud approach is that migrating isn’t as overwhelming as you think. If you have a strategic roadmap, a clear understanding of your priorities, and a systems integrator that understands how to apply the cloud to your business, you’ll be well on your way to modernizing your IT operations and achieving cost efficiencies.

Hybrid Cloud: A Fully Integrated Environment

Your migration to the hybrid cloud is impacted not only by the size and complexity of your applications, hardware, and operating systems, but also by your users, processes, and governance. Having one hybrid cloud vendor means your organization will have identity management, security, and data models for developers all in one spot. By using uniform technologies across these touch points, you free your developers and IT professionals from unnecessary constraints caused by disconnected systems.

The bottom line: when selecting a hybrid cloud system, your priorities must include providing consistency across identity, management and security, data platform, and development and DevOps.

Common Identity with Hybrid Cloud

As your employees log into your systems with more and more devices, security fatigue becomes an issue. With so many logins and passwords comes inefficiencies with your employees and security threats to your organization.

Having users use single sign-on across devices and operating systems, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud, guarantees they’ll have a consistent, secure, and rich experience. It also benefits administrators, who can manage security and governance so users can access what they need as they need it.

Granular Analytics and Deeper Learning

A hybrid cloud environment allows data from internal and external sources to come together. Users can work with both operational and analytical data to provide the same services for data warehousing, analysis, and visualization, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This allows your organization to leverage analytical and operational tools, create and scale resources, and handle high availability, all while optimizing for costs.

End-to-End Visibility & Control

Built-in management and security features allow you to monitor, configure, and protect your hybrid cloud environment. Your team will have complete visibility and control across assets, no matter if they’re on-premises, on a hosting provider, or in the cloud by providing administrators with monitoring capabilities, protection and recovery processes, automation and control facilities, and security and compliance abilities. It’s an end-to-end approach that will give you peace of mind with the hybrid environment.

One Environment for App Development

Consistency is paramount for DevOps teams, and having a common approach to building applications offers an array of benefits for your developers and organization as a whole. Applications built in the public cloud may not be built in the same language(s) that are on-premises, leading to additional developers translating those applications into different languages. With hybrid cloud, developers are able to build and deploy modern applications in your on-premises and cloud environments in a familiar way. Your on-premises projects will never be limited by older technologies again.

Migrate Your System to Hybrid Cloud Today

An important step in optimizing your existing systems and modernizing them is selecting the hybrid cloud solution that works best for you. Contact AKA Enterprise Solutions to discuss their Ground to Cloud Essentials services and learn more about how they can make a hybrid cloud environment customized specifically for your business today!

Want to learn more? Download this Microsoft Whitepaper, Accelerate your digital transformation: the enterprise guide to hybrid cloud.

ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!

The post What is Hybrid Cloud and How Can it Work for Your Business? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

In this short demo video, our Power Platform Capability Manager takes a common scenario – a sales team using Dynamics 365 and a service team using Excel – and shows how Power BI can pull all that data into a single view for actionable and interactive insights. Check it out!

Presenter: Dan Edwards

Auto Date Fields

Power BI can create automatic date hierarchies, for report and drill down by Year/Quarter/Month/Day. It’s important to consider whether your data model has more than one fact table with a date attribute. If there are multiple facts, or you have already created a date table, it’s a better to use your own date dimension.

“Don’t use auto date/time” -Dan

I love these types of tips and tricks – here’s how it works, and don’t do it!

Creating a Date Table with DAX

It’s possible to use a DAX expression to create a date table. The initial DAX expression looks like this:

Date = CALENDAR(“1/1/2016”, “12/31/2019”)

Use the DAX expression to create a New table in Power BI.

Then additional columns can be added to the Date dimension table:

Month = MONTH(‘DATE'[Date])

It’s also possible to do concepts like MonthDate where you calculate a Date column with the first day of every month, which can provide flexibility.

MonthDate = DATE( YEAR(‘DATE'[Date]) , MONTH(‘DATE'[Date]) , 1 )

Using an Effective Date

One of the scenarios is a scenario where the user wants to pick the effective date – for example a cutoff date or the last 12 months.

Dan mentioned he has a fairly extensive blog post on how to implement this concept.

Great presentation!

Most of today’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions are similar across the board: they have the same rich features, but lack flexibility, agility, and security. And because they’re all so similar, it’s difficult to stand out among your competition. But what if there was a way to get more out of your software solution? ERP technology has come a long way since its introduction in the 1990s, and this includes ERP software flexibility that has never been seen before--thanks to cloud software and artificial intelligence. Now, ERP is more of a platform than an application and can save you more time and money with powerful features like AI and machine learning.

The Struggle with Legacy ERP Software

Getting the most out of your employees and systems is paramount for any business owner. However, with traditional ERP solutions, there’s no escaping the endless cycle of putting a request in to IT, waiting for it to be acknowledged, meeting with a programmer to discuss solutions, and finally getting something implemented. This may seem productive to your team because it’s all “work,” but it’s work that doesn’t need to be done this way. Time is being wasted! Chances are that you’ve automated tasks and implemented code changes that a more flexible ERP system could have handled for you.

A World with Flexible ERP

Currently, you may have a departmental dynamic that looks like this: your business users are fed up with trying to request system changes or enhancements from IT. There are so many requests that the developers can’t keep up, which amounts to longer wait times and priority shifts. To cut down on those hassles, business users take it upon themselves to shop for apps, tools, or plugins for your ERP software in an attempt to meet their needs. These end up on your credit card and can result in logistical nightmares or, even worse, can open your business up for a data breach or cyber attack.

Enter a flexible ERP enabled by Cloud technology, ready to save you time and money. With a flexible ERP platform configuration sitting on a Common Data Service, your business users can tailor an ERP solution for themselves. There’s no programming knowledge required, and no chance of causing system damage. For example, PowerApps and Flow are drag-and-drop tools that allow your employees to create their own business apps that connect back to Dynamics 365, Common Data Service, Salesforce, third-party applications, and more. This allows your business users to meet their own ERP needs while freeing up development time for other projects vital to your organization.

This doesn’t leave your developers out of your ERP solution. However, tasks that would have taken them much longer to code in your legacy system take much less time with strong and powerful tools that make more advanced projects easier. This further frees up their development time when they do need to accommodate the needs of your business users, especially when your business needs to adapt quickly when new compliances are issued by regulatory bodies or customer engagement processes need to change.

Get More Flexibility from Your ERP Platform

ERP software capabilities are growing, and with this growth comes immense time savings for you, your business users, and your development team. Now is the time to upgrade to a more flexible ERP system, and AKA Enterprise Solutions will make the process quick and painless while educating you on how to get the most out of the software for your specific business. Contact them today to see what they can do for you!

ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!

Today was day 2 of the official portion of GPUG Summit 2018 in Phoenix, and my last day here. I’m flying out early Thursday to head back home, missing the 3rd day (so there will be no recap from me about it!).

Here is how my day fared today…

Breakfast & Bad News

Breakfast was horrible today, for more than one reason. The food today was just not great. Yesterday’s wasn’t outstanding but it was decent enough. Today it just wasn’t very good. The second reason was no sooner had I sat down to eat when I got an email that my dad had what the doctors think is a mild heart attack last night. That’s not something you want to see at any time, but especially when you’re so far away, and can’t be of any help at all. I called his wife to get the details and see how things are, what’s next etc. It sounds relatively minor but there still might be surgery. As of writing this, he will be transferred to a hospital near me (vs. where he is now which is 2+ hours away from home). I’ll be happy he’s close so I can be there.

After talking to family I decided to bail on breakfast here and went for a walk to pick up something to eat at Starbucks instead. Ugh.

Microsoft Keynote

The big Microsoft Keynote session was this morning for all of the user groups. Unfortunately there was no space at the convention center large enough to hold everyone so approximately 4,000 people were in the “North” hall where the live presentation was and the remaining 3,000 or so were in the “South” hall watching on some kind of simulcast.

I had met Fawad Khan yesterday at the Microsoft booth in the Expo hall and introduced myself to him. He’s often presenting or facilitating the MVP PGI’s we have (product group interaction sessions). I ran into him while walking in to the hall for the keynote and we had a good chat and ended up sitting next to each other for the session. Fawad’s official title is Principal Strategy and Operations Lead – Cloud & Enterprise at Microsoft, which currently is a lot around Dynamics 365 and the community around it. He has a couple of siblings in the Southwestern Ontario & GTA area so we talked a bit about that and then of course the Dynamics stuff we have in common.

The keynote itself was headlined by James Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Group at Microsoft. There was some introductions by Janet Lampert and Andy Hafer of Dynamic Communities to kick it off then James took the stage. I wasn’t quite sure where this keynote would go, as the recent history has not be great, from a Dynamics GP customer/partner point of view. The Microsoft keynote at the Tampa UG Summit 2 years ago was not well received by many at the time as Dynamics 365 was introduced.

Today though I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, Dynamics GP only got mentioned once and it was an off-hand reference about customers that might not use one of the D365 cloud offerings, but hey, at this point, we’ll take it. We’re well used to not being in any “vision” presentations.

There were a couple of things I took away from the presentation, in no particular order:

“Telemetry is coming out of everything”

It was a fairly innocuous comment but interesting. Everything seems to talk to everything else these days. Lots of every day things have some element of IoT (internet of things) elements to them, and it’s not going away.

“Your business applications are never where you want them to be and by the time they are, your business changes”

I don’t know if I have this quote verbatim, but it was close to that. This resonated with me as a process person, since so much of my role is focused on where we can make improvements with our business solutions and the processes around them. I’ve never thought of it specifically like he stated but it’s always in the back of my mind that what I work to improve today, by the time I may think I’m “done”, the time will be to revisit the first things I worked on to make further improvements. It truly is a continuous activity, not a destination.

Demos

The demos of the keynote were focused mostly on Polaris, a company who underwent a transformation of their business to what appears to be quite the interconnected Dynamics 365 environment. For an SMB (small/medium business), the vision of what was presented just feels completely unattainable. The implementation of such a wide ranging solution seem like they must incredibly complex and costly. It’s interesting to see, but doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to what seems possible at a smaller scale without significant investment.

Another demo scenario later brought out Errol Schoenfish, familiar to those in the Dynamics GP community, but his presentation was around Business Central and an SMB customer demo. This one hit a little closer to home for what is likely the largest audience in the room, I would guess.

MVP Meeting & Photo

After the keynote, the MVPs had an opportunity to meet James Phillips and engage in a private Q&A session with him. It was all under NDA so that’s all I can say about it. I must say I didn’t realize there were that many MVPs in attendance! We got together for a picture afterwards. I don’t know how many other MVPs were missing but there were at least 5 other GP MVPs who didn’t make the meeting or photo so that would mean there are at least 50 MVPs in attendance this week, most of whom are here presenting content. Impressive!

Session 1 – Performance Tuning in Power BI

My first session after the keynote and meeting was presented by MVP Ginger Grant. There were simply a ton of great tips around data modelling and loading of data to understand how and where things affect performance. There was a lot of talk about dates and date tables as well as handling relationships where there are multiple date fields in a single table (e.g. Invoice Date and Order Date). How Power BI stores data was also discussed and I had no idea it was done that way. The data is encrypted and as such all fields are aliased into numeric fields which is why there really is no performance impact from linking data types together that otherwise wouldn’t attempt in a relational database.

Session 2 – Understanding Time Intelligence in Power BI

This was fascinating and I have a lot more work to dig into wrapping my head around this. By the time this session started, my Surface Go battery was dead, my iPhone was < 30% battery and my backup portable charger was also dead. So, I sat in the farthest back corner in this presentation while my things charged and typed out notes into OneNote on my iPhone! Not ideal!

The funny part is everywhere you walk in the convention center, there were people sitting on the floor near power outlets charging their things too. Life at a conference!

This session was all about dates and nothing but! So much useful information but I need to play with things to wrap my head around all of it. Lots of tips around relative dates (Last X months), concepts like handling QTD, YTD data and rolling date reports. SO MANY DATES. The amount of formulas in DAX are staggering and the examples of what you can do… so much to learn!

Session 3 – Enterprise Data Warehousing

This presentation was back on the “GPUG” side of things and it was presented by fellow GP MVP John Lowther. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from the session but there was some good information nonetheless. What I took out of it was more ideas around planning for a data warehouse and more ways to populate a DW than I had considered at first. There are definitely areas where we could leverage data warehousing to reduce the impact of some large reports on the application databases.

Session 4 – Landed Cost in POP

The last session of the day was presented by Sunny Mattoon of Columbus. She walked through all aspects of Landed Cost in Purchase Order Processing, what it does, pros and cons of things etc. There were TONS of questions so I suspect this topic could be expanded to a longer session if they ever went longer than 1 hour sessions. We don’t have many scenarios where landed cost is of use but I wanted to sit in anyway to pick up some tips around the matching of those costs vs. the original PO receipts in case we decide to enable it some day.

Dinner and quiet night in the hotel

After the sessions were done, the day was done. I met up with fellow MVP Steve Endow and UK friend Tim Wappat. We went out for a dinner at a great little Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks away from the convention center. We convinced someone to take our picture before we all departed (myself, Steve and Tim respectively). We don’t see Tim every year, so it was good to spend my last night here spending a bit more quality time with both him and Steve.

I often hang out with these guys as none of us are the party crowd, we’re more often the “let’s grab dinner somewhere quiet” kind of people. This year I didn’t make it to any of the evening social events, mostly because I was far enough removed hotel-wise I just didn’t want to deal with the cabs/Uber in the evenings etc. I missed some of that, usually I’m good for joining one night of social activities! Oh well, not to be this year…

The rest of the night was just spent writing this post, and packing up as I will be heading to the airport bright and early tomorrow morning!

That’s it from me this year, unless something spectacular happens on my trip home tomorrow!

Have you ever wanted to know more about leveraging lead scoring in your marketing automation system to drive results?

This upcoming Ledgeview Partners webinar will be dually beneficial for your marketing and sales teams to discover that and more!

The experts at Ledgeview will guide you through using lead scoring in your marketing automation system, whether you use Act-On Software, ClickDimensions, or another system, to truly see the outcomes you have been looking for with marketing automation.

It’s time to hit more home runs with your marketing automation system, don’t you think?

As the digital world continues to grow and evolve, so must our strategies for reaching the right target markets.

This webinar is a can’t-miss, and Ledgeview’s own Director of Marketing, Chad Collett, will present.

After a great initial presentation at this year’s CRMUG Summit, otherwise known as the #UserGroupSummit, you’re in for a treat for this second go-round.

Register for the webinar below.

Webinar: Leveraging Lead Scoring to Drive Results
Date: Thurs. Oct. 25, 2018
Time: 11:00 – 11:45 a.m. CT

Learn more about Driving Growth with Marketing Automation when you download a FREE copy of Ledgeview’s customer-favorite master eBook guide.

Finally found the time for overdue maintenance on the Drag & Drop solution I created two years ago.

Why revisit?

First of all, as the CodePlex platform, previous home of this solution, is being decommissioned, downloading the component got the whole CodePlex project and few visitors commented that they could not find the actual solution.
So now you can download an unmanaged solution from it’s  new home @ Github.

Second, I fixed a major bug related to the plural name of some entities.
For most entities, appending ‘s’ to the entity schema name would result in the matching entity name for Web API. Some entities, like opportunity, do not match this pattern.

Third, I wanted to update the Web API version to 9.0 and to make sure the solution works with Dynamics 365 Online current version.

Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2: Add Web Client Runtime Feature

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 was released on the 2^nd October. In this series of posts, I’ll be going hands on and installing the majority of the components; some of them, such as Analysis Cubes for Excel, which are little used, I won’t be covering.

The series index will automatically update as posts go-live in this series.

After installing the prerequisites, the next step in a single-machine deployment is to install the Web Client Runtime; this is a feature of the Dynamics GP desktop client which allows the code to be translated into a form suitable for presenting via the web client.

To add the Web Client Runtime feature, open Programs and Features, select Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 and click the Change button:

Click Add/Remove Features:

Scroll down and set the Web Client Runtime feature to installed:

When ready, click Install to begin the installation:

When the installation is complete, click Exit:

Click to show/hide the Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 Series Index

Read original post Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2: Add Web Client Runtime Feature at azurecurve|Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant