Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2018

Understanding Dynamics 365 and Office 365 Admin Roles

Managing Dynamics 365 instances If you run Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) in the Microsoft cloud, you need to understand how your Dynamics instances relate to Office 365 and choose which of your administrators receives which roles and permissions to manage Dynamics 365. In on premises deployments, your network administrator would create and delete user accounts.  The Dynamics 365 admin would then assign permissions to users in Dynamics 365. This post explains three administrator roles: Office 365 Global Administrator Dynamics 365 System Administrator Dynamics 365 Service Administrator You may think that the Dynamics 365 system administrator would have power to do all the actions needed to manage Dynamics 365, but this is not the case. What's different in Microsoft cloud deployments is that licenses and user accounts are managed in Office 365 by an Office 365 Global Administrator.  This role is analogous to a network administrator for an on premises

Track Your Relationships in CRM -- Whether or Not You Have "Customers"

Many businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track sales activities, marketing and customer service, but CRM is a great tool for tracking other relationships as well. My company InfoStrat is focused on work for government agencies and non-profits, neither of which have customers per se, but they do have relationships with citizens, stakeholders, members, vendors, grantors, grantees and many other types of relationships with both organizations and individuals. CRM products such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce were designed to track people, organizations, relationships and all the activities that are associated with these relationships.  If you expand your view of what relationships you can track, you will see that cases used to track customer service inquiries may be used for many other types of cases.  We have used cases to track social services eligibility determination and for managing constituent inquiries or reports of broken stoplights o

Time is Running Out for Parature Migration to Dynamics 365

With Microsoft scheduled to shut down the Parature customer service solution on May 15, 2018, time is running out to convert to Microsoft Dynamics 365.  Microsoft offers a migration tool to make it easier to export data from Parature.  For a look at how Microsoft Dynamics 365 handles customer service and field service, watch this video: To migrate to Dynamics 365, start by purchasing a subscription to Dynamics 365 for Customer Service .   You can then use the Parature migration tool to perform a test export of your data, and import the data into Dynamics. Many of the data elements and business processes map directly from Parature to Dynamics 365, but some key features are different, and the programming model to extend and customize the solution is not what was used in Parature. Microsoft dropped the live chat feature and is now referring customers to the CafeX Live Assist add-in for live chat and co-browse.  Here is a demo of Live Assist: I don't lightly say that