Mariano is playing with PowerShell and Dynamics GP

The Dynamics GP Blogster: “Get-Content : Cannot find path ‘C:\en-US\Welcome.txt’ because it does not exist” error when running GPPowerShellStart.ps1

The post The Dynamics GP Blogster: “Get-Content : Cannot find path ‘C:\en-US\Welcome.txt’ because it does not exist” error when running GPPowerShellStart.ps1 appeared first on DynamicAccounting.net.

Personally, everything I ever wanted to know about SUTA is a way shorter list than what I needed to know.

Everything and Anything you wanted to know about SUTA in Microsoft Dynamics GP! – Microsoft Dynamics GP Community

The post Everything and Anything you wanted to know about SUTA in Microsoft Dynamics GP! – Microsoft Dynamics GP Community appeared first on DynamicAccounting.net.

Usually the obscure is the domain of Steve Endow, this time though, it’s Mariano.

The Dynamics GP Blogster: Revisiting: Microsoft Dynamics GP’s PerformancePoint Server Connector

The post The Dynamics GP Blogster: Revisiting: Microsoft Dynamics GP’s PerformancePoint Server Connector appeared first on DynamicAccounting.net.

Shawn Dorward has put up a great suggestion on Microsoft Connect, universal search for Dynamics GP. Wouldn’t it be nice to search for a name and be able to see that it’s both a customer and a vendor without having to run multiple Smartlists?

I’m encouraging you to go vote for this at:

“Search” for Reports & Windows in Dynamics GP | Microsoft Connect

The post “Search” for Reports & Windows in Dynamics GP | Microsoft Connect appeared first on DynamicAccounting.net.

Microsoft has released its earnings for Q2 2017 (Q4 CY 2016), as follows:

• Revenue was $24.1 billion GAAP, and $26.1 billion non-GAAP
• Operating income was $6.2 billion GAAP, and $8.2 billion non-GAAP
• Net income was $5.2 billion GAAP, and $6.5 billion non-GAAP
• Diluted earnings per share was $0.66 GAAP, and $0.83 non-GAAP

Just as he did in describing Q1 results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted digital transformation (read that, "cloud migration") as a key driver:

Our customers are seeing greater value and opportunity as w...

read more

Microsoft has released its earnings for Q2 2017 (Q4 CY 2016), as follows:

• Revenue was $24.1 billion GAAP, and $26.1 billion non-GAAP
• Operating income was $6.2 billion GAAP, and $8.2 billion non-GAAP
• Net income was $5.2 billion GAAP, and $6.5 billion non-GAAP
• Diluted earnings per share was $0.66 GAAP, and $0.83 non-GAAP

Just as he did in describing Q1 results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted digital transformation (read that, "cloud migration") as a key driver:

Our customers are seeing greater value and opportunity as w...

read more

Yes! Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been officially launched, and this is great news for CRM enthusiasts. Microsoft’s new cloud-based offering, which combines Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX, is chock full of new, fully integrated features and tools for sales, marketing and operations to enhance your productivity.

In the first part of our Deep Dive series, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Features and Pricing, we delved into the basics. In Part 2, we’re taking a more granular look at 10 fabulous features and tools that will transform the way you do business, with screenshots to help you visualize each offering. All of these capabilities will be yours when you upgrade to Dynamics 365:

#1: Relationship Insights

Available on any device, the new Relationship Insights “assistant” tracks all of your communications and interactions with customers. Once the assistant has gathered all of the data from your interactions, it then guides you through your daily work, reveals opportunities, suggests follow-up tasks, and manages your email while identifying actionable messages.

As the assistant analyzes your communications and interactions, it develops a series of action cards that provide customized information, links, and controls.

Action cards provide the following:

• Reminders for upcoming activities
• Suggestions for reaching out to inactive contacts
• Alerts regarding emails waiting for your reply
• Identification of potential opportunities that are ready to close
• And that’s just the beginning

Because the Relationship Insights assistant will also drive email engagement and provide a choice of content templates, with recommendations based on historical open and reply rates.

And, this feature that you’ve been waiting for! The ability to see when a recipient opens an email, clicks on a link, opens an attachment, or sends a reply.

Plus, you now have the ability to write your emails whenever you have the time and schedule them for optimal delivery. No need to worry about time zones. The system check those for you and recommend the best times for optimal delivery.

#2: Outlook Client

Although the integration between Dynamics CRM and the Outlook Client has always been tight, Dynamics 365 takes that integration to yet another level. Now you can work more efficiently without ever leaving your inbox, tracking your emails, appointments and tasks. Ready for more good news? Dynamics 365 supports Outlook for Windows, Macs, and the Outlook Web Application, with support for iPhones coming soon.

Take a look at the Outlook Client in action by watching this short video.

#3: Editable Grids

It just keeps getting better! With editable grids, editing records is faster and easier. How so? Because this feature offers rich inline editing for main views and sub-grids. It also includes support for JavaScript, grouping, dragging columns, and a whole lot more.

What else is supported? There’s in-grid record editing at the entity or sub-grid level, web clients, mobile clients, grouping, filtering, sorting, pagination, keyboard navigation, mouse navigation, and the list goes on.

#4: Relevance Search

Consider this your Valentine’s Day gift: Relevance Search! What could be better than a search tool that delivers fast results from multiple entities, sorted … you guessed it … by relevance. This new and much improved search tool will find matches for any word or key word phrase in any entity or Relevance Search enabled field.

Now that there’s facet and filter support, you have the ability to drill into search results without refining your search terms time and time again. Your search results will now automatically include matches to related word forms. Take for example the search word “order." Results will also be returned for “ordering” or “ordered.” This feature eliminates the need to use wildcards. Your search term/s will be found wherever they appear anywhere in the text.

Additional features include:

• The ability to use Relevance Search in any client, phone or tablet.
• The ability to narrow your search results and save time with facets and filters.
• Return results from within any document stored in Dynamics 365, be it in Notes, or attachments to emails or appointments. Supported formats include the Office suite, PDFs, EML, HTML/XML, ZIP files, and more.
• Secure searches, showing only the information you are allowed to access predicated on CRM’s security protocols.
• And there’s more, because Relevance Search also supports text within Option Sets and Lookup fields. This is extremely powerful.

#5: Mobile

The latest version of the CRM Mobile Client Application, (MoCA), already incorporated touch-friendly Custom Controls for a more intuitive mobile device experience that included sliders, spinners, gauges, calendar, timeline, video player and more.

The next level of that experience, now available in Dynamics 365, includes new workspaces, layouts, colors, editable grids, tracking, and task flows. Layouts are now more compact and optimized to minimize scrolling. Dashboards and forms now “stack” related elements, which results in more information being exposed at once.

#6: App Modules / Site Map Designer

App Modules? What are they? In short, they’re a vehicle for packaging and deploying entities, forms, views, dashboards, and business process flows that in turn allow for role-tailored access within Dynamics 365. Given this granular level of access, users will only see the specific site map, form or view that you’ve included in each App Module that you create.

While previous versions of Dynamics CRM provided similar capabilities, they were limited to a single site map. Your ability to hide system views and dashboards was similarly limited. That’s no longer the case.

What’s more, with App Modules you have the ability to create highly targeted apps using drag and drop functionality. Add-ins and/or plugins are no longer required. Best of all, there is absolutely no coding involved!

Now let’s take a look at Site Map Designer, a feature that’s related to the App Modules. This is a feature you can fall in love with because it eliminates the need for a third-party tool to create or edit a site map. What you have in Site Map Designer is a visual, easy to use, drag-and-drop tool that allows you to design multiple site maps, one for each app in your deployment. We should note that even if you do not have app modules, you can still use the Designer to hide features and modules not currently in use. Think of this as a way to keep the user experience simple.

#7: BPF Designer / Visual Process Designer

Wow! Yet another drag and drop designer available in Dynamics 365. This one is specifically for creating business process flows, task flows, and business rules. With a visual designer, it’s so much easier to create the flows and rules you need, especially when the capabilities now include timers, suggestion bubbles, and the ability to call up workflows directly.

You will use the Visual Process Designer to manage the stages and branches of a process, as well as setting rules for process flows. Plus, plus, plus…there’s an export-to-image capability that allows you to create a visual representation of your process flows, which is very helpful when it comes to images in documentation.

#8: Learning Paths

Learning Paths, a tool that includes authoring capabilities, is your vehicle for creating custom Help experiences for your users. There’s no better way to walk a user through guided tasks, videos, how-to and other documentation. Learning Paths can be further customized by role, depending on the user’s departments or job functions, and/or localized in different languages.

Customized Help means that users can work at their own pace as they learn new features and business processes or familiarize themselves with new forms. This feature is a win-win because it reduces training time and costs while increasing productivity in Dynamics 365.

#9: Power BI

Business Intelligence (BI) tools have become indispensable, as companies seek better and better to make informed decisions regarded any and facets of their day-to-day operations. And Microsoft’s Power BI leads the pack. The capabilities of Power BI in Dynamics 365 have been further enhanced so that you can add “tiles” to dashboards, embed entire dashboards in reports and make them interactive, and create real-time visualizations.

Beyond that, you can also enable these embedded dashboards for tablets as well as smartphones.

#10: AI / Artificial Intelligence / Azure Machine Learning

Included in Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s tool for predictive and artificial intelligence (AI). It’s called Azure Machine Learning (ML) and ML can be used for, among many other things, recommending cross-selling opportunities, auto-suggesting knowledgebase articles, and analyzing cases and tickets.

Also included in Dynamics 365 is Versium Analytics’ Next Best Action (N.B.A.), a world-class customer-centric technology with the capability to analyze actions from CRM historical customer interactions and recommend the next best action to be taken. In this way, the likelihood of a positive response is exponentially increased.

Since N.B.A. is continuously suggesting the best thing to do next, users will remain more engaged with customers and they will also continue to deliver a better customer experience. This fabulous tool is available in Dynamics 365 as ready-to-use widgets. You can easily add these widgets to any out-of-the-box or custom entity you choose!

Stay tuned for more as we continue to dive even deeper

Thus far in our Deep Dive series, Part 1 covered the basics of Dynamics 365 and Part 2 zeroed in on our top 10 picks for fabulous features in this powerful release. But there’s still so much more to learn about Dynamics 365. Stay tuned for more blogs and Webcasts as we continue to dig even deeper into the features, the functionality and business benefits afforded by Dynamics 365. It’s new. It’s innovative. It’s exciting. And it’s the embodiment of Satya Nadella’s vision for Microsoft as a cloud first, mobile first company, always on the cutting edge of technology.

Next Steps

Want to learn more and see Dynamics 365 in action? Join AKA for our upcoming Deep Dive Webcast: New and Exciting Features in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The post Top 10 Fabulous New Features of Microsoft Dynamics 365: Deep Dive Series, Part 2 appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has a shiny new Outlook App. In this post, I won’t discuss the functionality of this Outlook App (for the information about functionality, please use the following article: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/dynamics-365-app-for-outlook-user-s-guide.aspx)

One of the first pre-requisite of the new Dynamics 365 Outlook App is to enable the server-side sync (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn531109.aspx). Once the server-side sync for the user’s mailbox completed, the user will be displayed under Dynamics 365 App for Outlook as Eligible User:

Click the “ADD APP TO OUTLOOK” button to let the provisioning service adding the Outlook App. This might take up to 15 minutes to finish the provisioning. For more information about the security requirements, supportability, compatibility and more details of the deployment, please refer to the following TechNet article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn946901.aspx

Once you’ve got it provisioned, it will be available on your desktop-based Outlook:

As well as on OWA client: 

Gotcha #1 – Outlook App Doesn’t Like Multiple Dynamics 365 Instances

Now, as I’m happy with the App, I would like to make it available in other Dynamics 365 instances (Typical IT project lifecycle we will have multiple environments to be used for their purpose, such as: DEV/TEST/UAT/PROD).

So, what I have done was made the same configuration at the other environment, let say in UAT environment. And add progressing to add the app to Outlook. However, I’ve got the following error:

“Issue when adding to Outlook” – with detail: “CRM : IncomingEmailRejected”.

So I click the link “Help me resolve this issue” that takes me to the following KB Article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/3211627/incomingemailrejected-error-when-attempting-to-install-dynamics-365-app-for-outlook

The article mentioned the cause of the problem: “This error can occur if the Mailbox record has not been approved.”

Well, I’ve approved the mailbox. Otherwise, how come I could get a success message from the testing result:

To resolve this issue. I need to update the Mailbox synchronisation to the current organisation only. Which means, I can only sync and use the Outlook App for an instance at a time (which makes sense).

Once I ticked this option, I can add the Outlook App successfully for the new instance.

So, the feature of the traditional Outlook Client that is able to keep the configuration of multiple instances and switching on which one that becomes the syncing org, seems to be not available for the Outlook App.

Gotcha #2– How to Remove or Disable the Dynamics 365 Outlook App?

Now, in some situations, it could be a business decision whether they would like to use the new Dynamics 365 Outlook App or the Traditional Outlook client. One thing that I noticed, once I enabled the Dynamics 365 Outlook App for the user, I can’t find anywhere in CRM UI to remove it:

It can only add, but not remove… Okay, this is not the end of the world. The Dynamics 365 Outlook App is technically an “Add-in” for Outlook. So, to remove it, simply navigate to File > Info > Manage Add-ins from Outlook desktop.

That practically will redirect you to Outlook OWA: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/?path=/options/manageapps

Now in here, we can see the list of Outlook add-ins that have been installed for us. Click Dynamics 365, in there we also can see which Dynamics 365 instance that the App is currently connected to.

To disable: simply untick “Turned on” checkbox.

To remove: select the add-ins and click the minus (-) button.

For now, these are the lessons learned that I’ve got from the Dynamics 365 App.

HTH!

One of the most popular American pastimes is coming up in just over a week: The Big Game. When the two best teams in American football go head-to-head to win the coveted title of Champion.

What does this have to do with document management software, you ask? Well, if you are planning to implement an AP automation/document management solution, it’s likely that you have been comparing software solutions for months (maybe years) in search of the best one. Now you’re down to the final two and it’s time to find the champion – the software that will provide the greatest ROI and most improved efficiency for your business. Think of it as the Document Management Bowl.

So, now that you’ve narrowed it down to the final two and have pitted them against each other, how do you choose a winner?

1. Ask for references. Many companies have current customers that have agreed to be references for potential customers. This is a great chance for you to get some intel on the solutions you’re considering from someone who doesn’t work for the document management vendor.
2. Ask about upcoming functionality and software upgrades. You want to make sure that your solution won’t just be supported in the future, but that it will continue to be enhanced as technology continues to advance. Ask your sales rep how often new upgrades come out and what’s on the docket as far as new functionality or modules.
3. Check out one more demo. It’s like trying to decide between two shirts at the store – you should try them both on one more time, one right after the other. Watch the demos of the two solutions side-by-side, there could be something that you missed the first time around, or you may see an obvious winner!
4. Price it out. Sit down and hash out all the details. You may know the price of the software implementation, but how much will it cost to train your staff? What is the price of support? Do you need to pay for upgrades? Will you need to transfer data? Talk with each of the vendors to see if you can mitigate any of these costs – if the functionality is truly the same, then your decision may just come down to price.

We know the pressure is on when it comes to choosing a winner from the final two solutions. Our advice: Remember what the most important aspects of document management are to your company and the pain points that you’re trying to alleviate, and choose a solution that will meet those needs and solve those problems.

Game on!

At its core, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is all about empowering sellers and it accomplishes this in five unique ways.

1. Insight that Drives Action

First and foremost, it provides actionable insight. Actionable insight is created thanks to the in-depth amount of data the software is able to capture and analyze. Through unique analyses, insight that would otherwise not be available becomes not only accessibly but usable as well.

1. Engagement that is Personalized

This leads to the second way in which Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales becomes of such value; it leads to enhanced personal engagement, and with enhanced personal engagement comes an increase in customer satisfaction.

1. Effectively Managing Customers

Along with enhanced customer satisfaction comes the need to have improved customer management, which is another key benefit of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales software. Pertinent customer data can be captured and accessed, allowing your company to better target and meet each customer's individual needs, which then increases your ability to effectively sell your products and services to them.

1. Engaged and Effective Marketing

Remember, selling products and services to your customers requires effective marketing, which is another benefit of using this software. With detailed reports developed as a result of capturing and analyzing actionable insight, marketing becomes greatly simplified, and this of course leads to the most notable benefit -- empowered selling.

1. Improved Sales Performance

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales easily integrates with Office 365 and is operated using today's latest technology, including Power BI, Cortana Intelligence Suite, and Azure IoT Suite. Your sales performance will be boosted by taking advantage of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, giving you the ultimate competitive edge over your competitors who have yet to integrate the software into their daily operations.

For a deeper look at each of these areas, view this 25 minute on-demand webinar:

By Socius, an Ohio Dynamics 365 Partner

The post 5 Ways Dynamics 365 for Sales is Empowers Engagement appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

This is a short series of posts on how to install Microsoft SQL Server 2016; the series index can be found here.

In the last post, I installed the SQL Server Database Engine and the Reporting Services, but I did not configure Reporting Services. I mentioned that I have had problems before when doing this, so always do it separately.

To configure SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), launch Reporting Services Configuration Manager from the Windows Start menu.

Select the Report Server Instance to connect to and click Connect:

Once the Reporting Services Configuration Manager has launched click on Service Account in the navigation pane:

Check the service account and make changes if necessary and then click Web Servie URL:

If you want to configure the Web Serviec URL with an SSL certificate, select a valid one in the HTTPS Certificate field and confirm the HTTPS Port.

Click Apply to apply the changes and configure the URL.

Click on Database in the navigation pane.

A database is required for all report server content and application data. To create a new database, click on Change Database:

Leave the Create a new report server database and click Next:

Enter the full instance name of the SQL Server which will host the Reporting Services database in the Server Name field.

If your user has permissions to create databases, you can use an Authentication Type of Current User – Integrated Security, otherwise change it to SQL Server Account and enter a Username and Password.

Click Test Connection to validate the supplied details.

Click Next:

A Database Name will default in, but this can be changed.

Click Next to proceed:

I have left the Credentials set to the SQL Server service account, but this could be changed if necessary.

Click Next:

Review the Summary and click Next when ready to proceed:

Once the creationof the new database is complete, click Close:

Ensure the Results show the dataabase create task completed successfully and then click on Web Portal URL:

Review the Virtual Directory for the Web Portal URL and click Apply:

Close the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.

When configuring SSRS for Microsoft Dynamcis GP, there is one final step required; this step involves editing the web.config file.

The file is located, for SQL Server 2016, in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS13.GP\Reporting Services\ReportServer.

Find the line:

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="9000" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

And add the following to the end:

maxRequestLength="20690"

You should then have a line which looks like the below:

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="9000" requestValidationMode="2.0" maxRequestLength="20690" />

Click to show/hide the How To Install Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Series Index

Read original post How To Install Microsoft SQL Server 2016: Configuring SQL Server Reporting Services at azurecurve|Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant