The Townsend Report

Businesses and government have adopted off-the-shelf software, especially cloud software products, to avoid the cost and technical risk which have often accompanied custom software development.  This means that software vendors control the user experience such as navigation, menus, colors, fonts, and all other aspects of the products. Faced with rapid innovation and competition, cloud software vendors are introducing updates at an increasingly rapid pace, forcing users to relearn on the fly.  Browser-based solutions also embody the behavior of the specific browser each user chooses, such as Chrome or Microsoft Edge. In some cases, you may not like the most recent version, or an update may be disruptive to your user community. Should you write code to recreate the previous interface? Or circumvent the default behavior of the browser or the app? My experience is that resistance to the user interface of a commercial product is largely futile. Accepting changes introduced by the ve

Government budgeting requires more than just accounting.  It also entails complex business processes to prepare and approve budgets. InfoStrat has been using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for government budgeting solutions for over ten years.  Dynamics 365 includes several features which enable budget tracking: Business process flows which automate approval processes Ability to store chart of accounts information Integration points for financial management systems to pass transactions and look up information from other systems Ability to store multiple versions of budget items Data auditing to show who changed what data, and when Rollups of financial information according to the budget hierarchy Dashboards for graphical representation of financial information The Grants Manager Plus solution includes a budgeting module for grant managers to establish program budgets.  Grant applicants enter their project budgets using Dynamics Portal, and the budgets can be compared to actua

Customers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement have been notified in recent weeks of new policies for updates .  Customer Engagement refers to the traditional core components of what was formerly Dynamics CRM (sales, marketing, and customer service) as well as newer apps for Project Service and Field Service which have been added to the Customer Engagement subscription bundle. The updates only apply to customers hosted in the Microsoft commercial cloud and not for on premises deployments which are managed by customer organizations. So far, the Microsoft government clouds for the United States and Germany are also operating on their own update schedules in order to maintain compliance with government security and privacy regulations. I will not restate all the details which you can review at  FAQ for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps Update Policies   as well as  Previewing April 2019 release functionalities and updates for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement .

Many government and commercial organizations are responsible for conducting audits of financial and other performance in order to ensure compliance with regulations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a rich platform for automating auditing activities.  Here are some of the key functions that Dynamics 365 and Office 365 can perform for auditors: Schedule visits . The Field Service app for Dynamics 365 includes a dispatcher console, and a module to assign auditors and schedule their visits or inspections.  It can also track other resources such as equipment which is used for field audits.  Manage documents .  Dynamics 365 is integrated with SharePoint and also Azure Blob Storage.  This means that files may be associated with audit records, and searched using Microsoft search technologies which index full text and metadata.  Generate notifications . Alerts via email or other communication channels (such as text messages) may be generated with Dynamics 365 automated workflows.