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Showing posts from September, 2019

Evaluate Dynamics 365 with a Proof of Concept

Choosing software is a big commitment, and you want to be sure that you don't regret your choice later.  One of the best ways to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics 365 and apps built on the Dynamics platform is to conduct a proof of concept. Here are some of the keys to make your proof of concept (POC) successful: Set a schedule and stick to it . You need a predefined beginning and end to the proof of concept.  One month has been good for InfoStrat clients, allowing for requirements gathering, training users and tackling key functional challenges.  Don't let it drag out beyond the deadline.   Involve the right users . Find users who are willing to devote the necessary time to participate.  Consider who your key stakeholders are and make sure they are represented. Provide training and support for users . Don't turn users loose on a system without providing orientation, training and support during the POC.  Most business software is sufficiently complex that it is not rea

Tracking Feature Deprecations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Cloud solution providers such as Microsoft have stepped up the pace of innovation, and are releasing features continuously rather than their traditional pattern of major releases every year or two.  This fast innovation means that users see new features and enhancements often, and you must account for how to train them to take advantage of them. It also means that some old features are eliminated or replaced - this is called deprecation.  Microsoft publishes deprecation plans to alert administrators and developers so they can make timely changes to their solutions before a new version makes a feature break. The typical pattern is to announce a feature deprecation more than one version in advance, sometimes supporting the old feature and the new feature, then issuing an update which eliminates the old feature. Deprecation affects many aspects of Dynamics 365: Apps or plug-ins may be deprecated, such as the Outlook Add-in for Dynamics which was replaced with the Outlook Dyn

Use Azure Machine Learning for Spam Detection in Email to Case process in Dynamics 365

The following is a guest post from InfoStrat's Dmitri Riz which is also available on the InfoStrat Tech Blog . Major software platforms like Microsoft Azure are rapidly developing toolkits that simplify access to AI or Machine Learning technologies, making them available to a wider group of developers. This article shows how the new AI Builder tool on Microsoft Azure PowerApps allows for a quick development of a text classifier model and easy integration of the trained model in Dynamics 365 data processing. I'll use the Dynamics 365 Email to Case process as a use case. Several of our clients are using this process to generate vast amount of customer support cases from incoming emails. Many of spam emails clear regular email filters and end up as cases in Dynamics, forcing Customer Service Reps to manually tag them as spam and close them. The resulting set of spam cases represents a perfect training set for a binary text classifier model where feature text is represented

Be Careful Deleting Users in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Deleting users and reassigning licenses in Microsoft Dynamics 365 requires some planning and consideration.  Otherwise, you may experience undesired consequences.  Deleting and deactivating users can be complex and involve multiple administrators. For Dynamics 365 deployed on premises, you can disable a user, but online you need to remove the license to disable. Here are some top considerations: Reassign records in CRM. Do you want to reassign record ownership for cases, opportunities, accounts, contacts and other entities?  If so, deleting a user will not do this automatically so you should update with Advanced Find or another approach.  Does the user own workflows?  If so, new system jobs will fail when you disable or delete the user.  This is a good reason to use system accounts that are not subject to change as the owner for these processes.  Deleting users in Dynamics is not the same as deleting them in Office 365.   Some organizations have different administrators for