The Townsend Report

Today I received a blog suggestion to explain why you might want to have a portal for your customer relationship management (CRM) system.  I have written about  Portal Options for Microsoft Dynamics 365  recently, but I didn't provide reasons why you might want to use a portal.  So here are my Top Five Ways that Portals Improve Your CRM: Provide a simple user experience for occasional users . You don't want to train users on a full featured CRM system in order to enter a handful of fields to make a request to the human resources or information technology departments.  The portal offers simple forms to gather only the information you need based on information stored in CRM.  Integrate Dynamics 365 data with other systems .  A portal provides another approach to allow a single screen to show multiple data sources for viewing and data entry, including Dynamics 365.   Provide access to people outside your organization .  The portal access can be protected by different se

In July 2017 Microsoft announced another set of name changes and new bundles for many of their Dynamics brand products. Most significant was the release of some new products for the Business Edition.  Dynamics 365 for Operations (an enterprise edition product) and Dynamics 365 Finance (a business edition product) were both renamed Finance and Operations within their respective editions. This reminds me that it is not easy to segment software into enterprise and small business categories. For many years, Microsoft centered its business on servers and PCs, so the number of PCs and servers at a company determined whether they were a small, medium-sized or large business. This approach no longer holds up in the era of selling apps and services. The most complex enterprise software for manufacturing, inventory, and engineering may have only a small number of end users, but it definitely qualifies as enterprise-class software.  My company has had small company clients which foun

Microsoft hosts production and non-production instances of Dynamics 365 (formerly called Dynamics CRM).  Most organizations using Dynamics 365 will benefit from having at least one sandbox instance for their solutions. Here are the top reasons you should consider a sandbox: When you are developing solutions, the sandbox can be the development environment.  This means that you will not disrupt users who will be in the production instance. Sandboxes are great for testing before you release a solution to production. You can use sandboxes for training.  Users can add or delete whatever data the want during the training sessions without fear or harming the production system. For evaluating Dynamics solutions, a sandbox is more permanent than signing up for a trial account which will end.    Sandboxes offer some administrative controls which are not available in production instances, such as the ability to reset a sandbox instance which essentially wipes the solution and restore