The Townsend Report

By now most organizations are familiar with the benefits of moving their computing to the cloud, such as scalability, reliability, security and elimination of hardware costs.  What may be less clear is that for all this to work as advertised, a business process or application needs to be designed properly to work in the cloud. Cloud computing presents information technology departments with a large number of competing services, architectures and deployment patterns.  Many of these options can be successfully implemented for a given business problem, so one of the challenges is to choose. Your first choice might be among the cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, the Google Cloud Platform and Oracle.  Microsoft Azure offers hundreds of different services that provide overlapping features, not only including Microsoft operating systems but also open source leaders such as Linux. Most custom cloud solutions require multiple services including authent

Local governments agencies such as the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development in my hometown of Washington, DC, - work on behalf of residents to improve living conditions, create economic opportunities and jobs by attracting businesses and helping businesses thrive. A customer relationship management system is key to work in community business development.  If you are a Microsoft customer, which apps in Dynamics 365 should you use for business development? Core functions - All the Dynamics 365 modules track accounts (companies) and contacts (individuals) as well as activities such as phone calls, emails, letters, and meetings.  Sales - Dynamics 365 for Sales provides the ability to track opportunities to attract startup businesses or businesses that are relocating from another area. Sales includes functions for qualify opportunities and working through all the steps in your workflow through a successful win.  You can ascribe dollars to opportunities a