InfoStrat's Townsend Report

Microsoft Dynamics 365 now offers an option to export reports to PowerPoint in addition to the formats such as Excel, PDF and other file formats which have been supported for several versions.  Here is how the Export menu looks on a report:


The output of the report is converted into pages which become pages in the PowerPoint file.  By default the pages do not fit in a standard PowerPoint size, so the images are divided in two and placed on two pages:



The pages contain images of the report contents like this sample from the Account Overview Standard report:



Because they are images, you cannot edit them in PowerPoint beyond image editing tools.  To make them more attractive in PowerPoint, you can change the format of the Dynamics 365 report so it will fit better in the targeted PowerPoint format.
If you what you want is to render data from Dynamics 365 in a pre-built PowerPoint template, you may want to export the data from Dynamics 365 to Excel and use Mail Merge with a third party too…

The latest version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 moves most of the core functionality of sales and customer service to a new user interface - The Unified Interface client.  This user interface is not completely new as it was gradually introduced for the Hub features such as the Customer Service Hub in recent versions of the product.

The new interface is quite different from the previous interface which was used from Dynamics CRM 2013 to 2018 with a few incremental changes. 

This is the Unified Interface, using a form from InfoStrat's Grants Manager Plus Solution.



Here is the same record shown in the previous interface which Microsoft calls Classic.



Here are the top 5 features that I like best about the Unified Interface:

Better menus and navigation. The sitemap on the left is more helpful than the classic menus for larger, more complex solution. Lefthand menu shortcuts are a great use of space and help users access the most popular areas. Better subgrids.  Subgrids are important for en…

Grants Manager Plus provides grantors with an all-in-one, integrated solution that simplifies the grants process from initial solicitation through review, scoring, award, payment processing and post award. InfoStrat designed the solution to allow it to be extended and customized to meet the needs of specific grant programs.

Grant programs may be quite different from one another, and adopting grant management software for your grantor agencies requires flexibility and rapid development of solutions to meet program demands.  For instance, Grants Manager Plus is being used by local government for small grants of less than $1,000 to individuals for public safety initiatives and also large state grants for disaster recovery managed through sub-recipients. Some grant programs call for detailed invoicing on a monthly basis, with payments tied to achievement of milestones and performance metrics.

Grants Manager Plus may be viewed as a layered solution, as shown in this figure:


Grants Manager …

This is a guest blog post from Dmitri Riz, the director of InfoStrat's Microsoft Dynamics Practice.

We are all familiar with Business Process Flows (BPF) in Dynamics 365 – they’ve been around for a while. The set of chevrons at the top of the single record form typically represents major phases in the record’s lifecycle.
The problemWhen starting a new project, we usually end up designing and building a set of BPFs for the most important records in our system. However, one of the first questions we often hear from users after the new project goes live is “Is there a way to hide BPF area of the form?”. The real-life usage of BPFs sometimes falls short of the promise to make users' lives easier by guiding them through a business process. The reason many users often fail to see much utility in BPFs is that a typical BPF is weakly connected to actual processes users go through when working with data and often fails to serve as an enforcer of institutional rules. A purely visual g…

This month InfoStrat released new versions and new editions of Grants Manager Plus to help grantors track the entire grant life cycle, from funding sources to awards, reporting, and closeout. This blog will feature a future post which provides detail on new features, but here are highlights:
New process flows for grants which pass through to sub-recipients and those which do notPlanning tools for top-down planning of spending based on action plansEnhanced payment validation rulesMilestone-based payment gatesUser interface improvementsPortal enhancements for Dynamics portal such as improved navigation for multi-page application formsDeeper project management functions such as budgeting New editions combine features appropriate to specific grant programs: Disaster recovery grants such as HUD CDBG-DR and FEMAVictim services grants such as VOCA, VAWA and SVAPPublic safety grants For more information on grant management and Microsoft Grants Manager Plus, see my posts:

Microsoft Grants Manage…

One of the biggest challenges for IT services companies like my company InfoStrat is to stay current with the latest product releases and to keep learning new things even while we are engaged with demanding projects on behalf of our clients.
For this reason, we have created multiple ways to collaborate and share with one another.  This week we are conducting internal training sessions to allow a forum for our consultants to share what they are doing, the problems they are solving, and new things they have recently learned.
I thought that some of my readers might be interested in the topics that we cover, so here is a partial list of presentations from our agenda: Understanding Microsoft FlowBuilding a configurable framework for a complex website using Azure Service Fabric and SitecoreWorking on Agile projects with large offshore teamsCollaboration with Microsoft TeamsCreating advanced form navigation on Microsoft Dynamics Portal to allow skipping to specified sections in a long formUs…