The Townsend Report

by James Townsend Microsoft has recently added a new support option for its enterprise customers: Microsoft Unified Support .  This offering is in addition to the Microsoft Premier service offering which may be familiar to large organizations that rely on Microsoft software. Microsoft Unified Support is designed to reduce downtime through on demand risk assessments, improve productivity through enhanced user training, and streamline access to technical support through a customer organization.  According to a commissioned study by Forrester Research , Unified Support can produce a return on investment of 130 percent, and reduce downtime by 65 percent. Unified Support is priced based on the Microsoft software owned and Microsoft cloud services consumed by a customer.  Contact your Microsoft sales rep to learn more or get a quotation for Unified Support.  

by James Townsend Microsoft Power Apps and Dynamics 365 provide prebuilt apps and a framework for building custom apps for a wide range of the software needs of nonprofits. Dynamics 365 is a family of products  which include accounting, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software. Power Apps was derived from Dynamics 365 and offers a framework for building standalone web apps (canvas apps) or integrated apps built on a shared common data model .  Building on the foundation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 avoids many of the common pitfalls of custom application development.  It gives users a starting point for functional requirements, contains a rich data model, handles many common low-level programming tasks, and provides advanced functionality such as mobile apps and is hosted in the Microsoft cloud.   Microsoft Dynamics 365 is integrated with other elements of the Microsoft platform such as Office 365, Power BI and SharePoint and readily integrated to other p