The Townsend Report

Grants Manager Plus is a solution for tracking the full life cycle of a grant, from funding sources to publishing grant opportunities, accepting online applications, review, scoring, award, post-award reporting and closeout. The solution and its precursor Stimulus360 has been used to track over $250 billion in government grants. InfoStrat has been building grants management systems for government agencies since 1999 and we have implemented a wide array of grant systems. The number of users, complexity of your business rules and the extent of your automation goals are cost drivers for the system.   We will discuss some of the factors that must be considered to help you come up with a cost estimate for your requirements. The Type and Number of Grant Programs Grants are typically either Competitive Grants or Formula Grants.  You may also need to track loans in addition to grants. Formula grants award funds to the applicant based on a preset formula.   For example, some federal agenci

Updated: 9/20/2022 I was not able to find a comprehensive list of companies that provide databases to government contractors to find potential opportunities, so I created this list. Many of these sources are reviewed here . This is a blog post which I will expand based on feedback from readers and additional research. FedBizOpps : FBO from the General Services Administration is the best known source of federal business opportunities.  Many of the paid services list below include FBO search results.  Be sure to try the advanced search feature. Deltek GovWin : Deltek's flagship service GovWin IQ is the largest and probably most comprehensive source, purchased by nearly every large government contractor. When GovWin was hacked in 2014, a  news story  claimed that 60,000 customers were affected, so this represents a large user base.  Deltek has purchased a number of competitors over the years, such as FedSources, Centurion Research and Input.  Deltek is one of the most expens

Updated 8/15/2022 To understand Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) and Power Apps, you need to learn some new terms and concepts that may be a bit different from what you know from databases and solutions that are hosted on premises.  These concepts also apply to Power Apps.  The main difference is that with Power Apps you are not starting with a Microsoft app but more of a blank canvas for your custom apps.  This post introduces some key terms and how these concepts are important for planning your implementation. While Dynamics 365 is still available on premises, it is most commonly deployed on the Microsoft cloud.  This blog post discusses only cloud implementations. Microsoft has multiple clouds such as commercial and government community clouds in several countries. We start with a Microsoft tenant .  A tenant is the account you create in the Microsoft Online Services environment (such as Office 365) when you sign up for a subscription. A tenant contains uni

Updated August 3, 2022 Grants Manager Plus is one of InfoStrat's most popular software solutions.    We developed Grants Manager Plus to help grantor organizations streamline their grant processes.   InfoStrat has provided  grant management solutions since the late 1990s.  We developed Stimulus 360 for Microsoft in 2009 to help state and local government track stimulus funding.   Grants Manager Plus was introduced in 2010.   The solution is based on Power Apps/Microsoft Dynamics 365, the product originally called Dynamics CRM.   InfoStrat maintains Grants Manager Plus to take advantage of new features in Dynamics as well as follow our product roadmap of new grant features.  The overarching goal of Grants Manager Plus is to capture the entire grant life cycle for grantors, starting with establishing funding sources, accepting applications, online review, scoring, award, and post-award reporting all the way to close out. Grants Manager Plus provides a portal user interface for

Building a Digital Future: A Transformational Blueprint for Innovating with Microsoft Dynamics 365 by Lipi Sarkar and Vinnie Bansal. (Wiley, 2021) Buy on Amazon   Digital transformation has been one of my favorite topics since it emerged as an industry buzzword.  Many books and articles discuss digital transformation as an abstract concept, but few of them can cite specific technologies, products, companies and case studies. Building a Digital Future fills this niche with a wide-ranging set of industry examples, all related to Microsoft's platform for digital transformation.  Part 1 sets the stage with an introduction to digital transformation, illustrated with case studies showing how organizations can harness disruptive change to improve themselves.  It explains the capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform, including Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI and other tools.  Finally, it covers the rise of low code/no code development along with the citizen developer.  Part 2 pres

[This is a guest post from Steve Vickerage of pavliks.com. For more information, see the pavliks.com blog .  ] Although it is not a new trend, we continue to see accelerated movement from on premises servers to cloud computing from our prospects. For many, the move is triggered by the need to upgrade aging server hardware. This leads to reconsideration of costs and new options to meet computing requirements. Here are the Top 5 reasons to consider moving your infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud: 1. Scalability If you need another server, we can provision one for you relatively quickly. If you need more resources for an existing server, we can add it for you on the fly, no need to buy drives or RAM and schedule onsite visits. If you need more capacity for your back up and disaster recovery solutions there is no need to buy costly appliances, just add more space and retention as needed. If you are hosting a webserver, Azure can handle spikes of traffic and scale with no proble