Microsoft's New Dynamics CRM Product: Project Service

Microsoft has intensified the pace of innovation in Dynamics CRM, adding a broad set of new capabilities in recent versions of Dynamics CRM Online. Most of these have been from companies that Microsoft acquired, such as Customer Service (Parature), Field Service (FieldOne), gamification (FantasySales Team), and Marketing (MarketingPilot).

Project Service, the latest addition, was developed in-house by Microsoft. It offers an end-to-end solution that helps sales and delivery teams track project delivery activities.

Project service helps you:

Estimate, quote, and contract work
Track time and expenses
Plan and assign resources
Enable team collaboration
Capture time, expense, and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing

Project-based contracts
Project contracts relate quotes and orders to project plans, financial estimates, labor pricing, and billing arrangements, like time and materials or fixed price. The contract highlights key metrics, including profitability and feasibility.

Project planning
Visual project planning tools include predecessors, and automatic task scheduling. The plan may be exported for use in other documents.

Resource management
Project Service tracks skills and availability, so you can assign people to the right projects. The following screen shot shows resource utilization for members of your project team.

Time and expenses
Team members can use the web or mobile apps to record time and expenses for projects. Managers can participate in approval workflows for timesheet entries.

This demo walk-though video is a good place to begin:

For a longer description of Project Service, watch this:

Many of our CRM clients require project management capabilities but find Microsoft Project Server too unwieldy for users who are not professional project managers. CRM Project Service fulfills the needs of a large audience -- perhaps for the majority of services projects.

Key Concepts for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Tenant, Instance, App and Solution

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

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Solutions for Education

Student Portal by James Townsend For over three years, Microsoft has released solution accelerators based on Dynamics 365 for industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, finance, nonprofits and education. Each year we are seeing new solutions and updates to solutions based on Dynamics 365, Power Apps and the Common Data Model. In August 2021 Microsoft released the Higher Education component in the latest version of the Dynamics 365 Education Accelerator v3.2.3.10 . Here are some highlights from the Higher Ed solution A student portal An advisor dashboard A business partner dashboard for events, hackathons, internships, scholarships, and grants. The Accomplishment extension tracking student work outside courses. The Grants phone app that allows research faculty to keep track of applications and approvals. Rich reporting on students applying for internships, grants, and scholarships. System views for tables including students, faculty, extracurricular activities, pr

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

The Townsend Report

Search This Blog