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Showing posts from February, 2019

April 2019 Release of Microsoft Dynamics 365

Dynamics Virtual Agent for Customer Service It is still winter in Washington, DC, but spring is just around the corner.  We can look forward to cherry blossoms, the Potomac shad run, and Microsoft's next release of Dynamics 365. Microsoft has published the release notes for April '19 and there are many highlights. Artificial Intelligence is still one of the hottest trends, and Microsoft has a steady stream of new AI features of Dynamics, such as Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service provides AI-powered chat bots to optimize the customer experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables every organization to unify and understand their customer data to harness it for intelligent insights and actions. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection enables the e-commerce merchants to drive down fraud loss, increase bank acceptance rates to yield higher revenue, and improve the online shopping experience. Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications &

Handy CRM Views and Graphs for Government Contractors (GovCon)

If you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system for tracking government contracts, you will find yourself using some views, reports and graphs more frequently than others. Here are some favorites from my experience and from users of the InfoStrat GovCon CRM  solution. The most fundamental chart is the sales pipeline funnel.  This is broken into the sales stages of your business process flow, such as unqualified, qualified, RFI, RFP, proposed and others. Sales pipeline The view that I use most often is Open Opportunities by Owner.  This is the view that helps coordinate sales meetings when you are reviewing open opportunities with your business development team.  Adding the Opportunity Owner to the standard Open Opportunities view makes it easier to sort the opportunities during the course of the discussion.  I like keeping the opportunity owner as the rightmost field in the view. Using the Opportunities with Proposals Due view helps you focus on outstanding

Microsoft Ignite: The Tour Visits Washington, DC

This week Microsoft took its tour of the Ignite conference to Washington, DC.  The initial Ignite conference was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, but the tour brings much of the content to a broader audience.  You can access recordings of the sessions online. Because there were over 100 sessions and workshops in two days, it was impossible to attend all of them.  Here are the learning paths from the event: For me, the most important overall message was the blurring of lines between Microsoft cloud products and the continual expansion and opening of the Microsoft platform. Cloud computing has allowed Microsoft and other vendors to introduce new products and product versions more quickly.  For Dynamics 365, Microsoft introduces continuous small fixes and significant versions every six months.  This is much faster than the product cycle ten years ago which offered major versions every two or three years. The pace of innovation creates challenges for customers to keep up, so event