Business Intelligence Info - What's happening in the BI World

Double Edged Razor Blade Sharpening

September 22, 2018 Humor

Interesting methods of double razor blade sharpening from long before disposables became fashionable.

“Vintage Razor Blade Sharpener.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/Mn9mLtc

Operation of razor blade sharpeners

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August 2, 2013

Double edge razor sharpener

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April 18, 2008

moloko520

Published on Apr 18, 2008

There are two leather wheels on the inside. Before use, I add a little olive oil, then begin turning. It’s a mini strop for double edge razors. I’ve used the same razor for weeks.

Little double edge razor blade sharpener in Bakeltie box [Bakelite]

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February 18, 2010

Dynamics 365 Monthly Update-August/September 2018

September 22, 2018 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Quick Links: Featured News | Updates and Releases | Additional News | Training Corner

Featured News

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Update Policy

For customers who are currently running older versions of Dynamics 365, Microsoft will continue to provide you with the ability to schedule an update to the latest version and will send reminders to your Dynamics 365 administrators to schedule your update.

Dynamics 365 (Online) version 8.2 will be fully supported until January 31, 2019. After that date, all customers will be updated to Dynamics 365 (online) version 9.0.
From February 1, 2019, onwards, Microsoft will only support the latest generally available version.

Here are the recent versions of Dynamics 365:

View the Manage Updates page on the Microsoft Documentation site for more details.

New user experience to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement

The next update to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement is coming in October, bringing a brand-new user experience among a host of new and updated capabilities.

The Unified Interface is a new metadata driven client interface that provides consistent experiences across all applications, devices, and forms. Whether you are on a browser, tablet, or phone, you will be able to consume similar experiences, including:

Similar forms to update and view your records
Interactive dashboards across all devices to view your information and drill into it
Reference Panel is now available to be used with all entities supported in Unified Interface
Support for right-to-left (RTL) languages
Accessibility improvements across all experiences on Unified Interface

The complete list of features is available here. More details will be provided about the preview program through the Insider portal soon.

The new update—Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps, Version 9.0.2, On-premises update—will release in October 2018. Customers currently in “December 2016 Update for Dynamics 365” (Microsoft Dynamics 365 version 8.2) can update to this version once it is available.

Announcing: Dynamics 365 for Marketing August 2018 update

Microsoft is proud to announce the August 2018 update of Dynamics 365 for Marketing is now available. Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a marketing-automation application that helps turn prospects into business relationships. The app is easy to use, works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 for Sales, and has built-in business intelligence. Some key features include:

Customizable templates to create graphical email messages and online content such as landing pages
Drag-and-drop design tools to create multichannel campaigns to send emails, generate follow-up activities and launch workflows
Import leads from LinkedIn
Use dashboards and reports to track the performance of marketing initiatives

Review this announcement for information on how to get the update and additional documentation on the application features.

Updates & Releases

Update for editable grids in Dynamics 365 for phones mobile app

Users of the Dynamics 365 mobile app can view and quickly edit entity data in views and sub-grids using editable grids. This capability has existed since the introduction of the editable grids feature in Dynamics 365. While this feature has been beneficial for tablet users, Microsoft has received feedback from mobile phone users that their experience has been limited. This is because the editable grid control was optimized for tablets and, subsequently, does an automatic rendering of the editable grid control on phones resulting in a less than optimal experience for phone users.

At this time, Microsoft has made the decision to restrict the use of editable grids on phones. For more information, review this post in the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Team Blog.

Unified Service Desk 4.0 Release

The Unified Service Desk 4.0 Release is now available. With the release of Dynamics 365 (online), version 9.0, Microsoft introduced a new user experience which uses responsive web design principles to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device, or orientation. Unified Service Desk supports the apps built using Unified Interface framework. Version 4.0 includes the following new features:

.Web Client – Unified Interface Migration Assistant to help seamlessly migrate existing Unified Service Desk configurations from Dynamics 365 Web Client to Dynamics 365 Unified Interface App
Close Confirmation Window is introduced to prevent the accidental closure of the Unified Service Desk client application
Unified Interface KM Control is introduced to enhance the knowledge base search experience
Some of the features that are not yet in the Unified Interface can now be accessed in the Unified Interface client to include Advanced Find, Bulk edit, Merge records and Record Sharing.
Previews are also available for new features that may be added

For more information on the release, review this blog post.

Microsoft Social Engagement 2018 Update 1.8

The Microsoft Social Engagement 2018 Update 1.8 is now available.

New and updated features:

After signing in to Social Engagement, customers can select the smiley symbol and provide feedback about the app and the service.

When a comment on WordPress is removed by the author, it’s also removed from the Social Engagement databases.
In accordance with the Facebook Graph API v3.0 changes from August 1, 2018, Social Engagement no longer supports engagement actions for Facebook user profiles.

For more information on the update, review this blog post.

Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization Version 2.7

The Resource Scheduling Optimization v2.7 release is now available.

New and updated features:

Enabled capability of scheduling ‘Location Agnostic’ resources.
Ability to create simulated optimization from the schedule board and visualize it.
Hardening of schedule definition experience through validation rules
Able to reset 1 or more RSO optimization schedules (instead of reset all)

For more information on the features included in the release, review this blog post.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal Capability Releases

The September 2018 portal capability updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 are available (v9.0.9.2).

Some of the resolved issues include:

Knowledge Article Feedback calculation was not correct and always showed a value between 0-1.
Portal was throwing a generic error if multiple instances of same field were placed on Entity forms or Webforms.
Confirmation dialog Yes/No buttons were not aligned within the Close case dialog.
If entity list actions had confirmation dialog setup, they didn’t work properly when the entity list was used in a web template.

For more information on the features included in the release, review this blog post.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Releases

The August and September 2018 Service Updates for Dynamics 365 online versions 9.x and 8.x are now available.

The naming conventions for versions 9.x have changed to clarify the link between the version number and service update. For example, Service Update 14 will correspond to version number 14XX. Occasionally a Service Update will be canceled and all the associated fixes will be rolled into the next Service Update, thus the Service Update numbers will not always increase incrementally.

Service Update 14 (9.0.2.1455) resolved issues include:

The error message text for SLA-related failures has been improved
PowerBI on the CRM dashboard is not rendering correctly on Internet Explorer 11
Outlook freezes when setting the Regarding field while the mail notification is visible
Characters in a text field within a subgrid are truncated
The pop-up window for duplicate detection is too small
Improvements made to the number of requests that can be included in an OData batch call

Service Update 17 (9.0.2.1708) resolved issues include:

The PublishAll action times out
Scrollbar and paging buttons are not appearing for inline Subgrids in Chrome
Escaped HTML tags appear in the body of some email clients
Activating account records via the ribbon changes read-only fields to editable
Opportunity Edit Properties are displaying nearly invisible text boxes
The Customer field does not populate when converting Email to Opportunity

Service Update 20 (9.0.2.2061) resolved issues include:

The editable subgrid is not properly rendered on refresh method
When creating bar charts, the x-axis labels are not properly rendered
Upgrading to version 9.0 causes performance issues during upgrade
When a user inserts a dynamic field in the URL configuration of a hyperlink in a workflow, it is displayed as “NULL”
Custom security role names revert back to the default name upon upgrade
Emails with attachments are not synchronizing into CRM

Service Update 22 (9.0.2.2257) resolved issues include:

After canceling openConfirmDialog, the Quick Create form stays loading and the Save button does not work
SQL errors produce intermittent performance issues
The timeout has been extended for UpdateBusinessIdForEntity
The Activity Wall Create Task button opens the main form instead of the inline form when clicked from More […] command list
ValidFor properties are not set correctly for system attributes when the attribute metadata is updated
Dynamic Help for Server-Side Sync passes unsafe characters in the call stack parameter

Service Update 23 (9.0.2.2381) resolved issues include:

Wrong icons displayed after importing a customized solution to v9
Read-only fields became editable when field metadata was modified
Rollup field value was not displayed automatically in the IE and Chrome browsers
Users could not read the complete Instance name unless column width was expanded manually
Jquery not displaying when bulk editing custom entity settings
Error “An item with the same key has already been added.” occurred when upgrading to V9.0

Service Update 19 (8.2.2.2257) resolved issues include:

Performance Improvement: Async jobs are validating slowly
The Look-Up field needs to be selected twice to function
Custom messages feature not functioning. Default message displayed instead of custom one
The From field on emails is not automatically populated when there is custom field mapping between the account and email
In some scenarios, record GUIDs are appended in a Word template
CRM App gives an error when attempting to load

Service Update 20 (8.2.2.2361) resolved issues include:

Email forwards time out when containing an attachment of 10 MB or larger
The multi-line text field does not break the line on the phone app when set as read-only
Client telemetry has been updated to report offline draft information
Orphan Active Workflow records are created when importing a new version of a solution
The Import Data, Option Set field mapping is not showing the scrollbar
Upgrading a solution will fail if there are multiple sitemaps

Service Update 21 (8.2.2.2423) resolved issues include:

Server allows plug-in assemblies with unsupported .NET Framework versions to be registered in error
The Date Only record field displays a date and time instead of just a date
Encrypted org properties are not cached when the ‘cache encrypted org properties indefinitely’ option is selected
Business process flows cannot be imported into organizations as part of a solution
Fetching entities from CRM results in null ref exception
A sync error deletes user metadata, preventing an application from loading

Additional News

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Outlook is unable to render webpages

When attempting to render webpages via the Outlook folder pane using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Microsoft Outlook add-in (Outlook client), the view pane remains blank and “Waiting for a page to be retrieved from a CRM server…” displays, but the corresponding webpage does not load.

When tracking an item or opening an already tracked item in Outlook, the tracking details section that normally shows the Regarding and Tracking Status is blank.

These issues are due to the an issue found in the August Office Insider Update where DDPI settings (optimizations for multiple monitor displays) causes the add-in to never be able to display the pages requested.

As a workaround while this issue is under investigation, System Administrations can navigate to the following location within Outlook:

File > Options > General > User Interface Options > When using multiple displays

And change the value of this setting to “Optimize for compatibility” (it will also notify you an application restart is required).

For more information, review this support article.

The 2018 State of Global Customer Service Report

Customer experience is quickly becoming the number one brand differentiator. So it’s no surprise that 95 percent of survey respondents in the new 2018 Global State of Customer Service report indicated that customer service is important to their choice of and loyalty to a brand.

What are customers looking for? These are just a few of the findings:

A desire to be heard. Customers want a voice. An average of 90 percent of respondents wanted to provide feedback about their experience but are only given the opportunity 37 percent of the time.
Service anytime, anywhere. Customers expect to receive service through any channel and on any device, with 59 percent of respondents having used multiple channels to get questions answered.
Digital and emerging tools. AI-driven virtual agents are trending. Bots built using technology like natural language processing and machine learning can provide an intelligent, conversational and effortless customer service experience.

Download the 2018 Global State of Customer Service Report to learn more.

Training Corner

Microsoft Ignite

Join us in Orlando, September 24-28 for Microsoft Ignite. This conference offers attendees a chance to learn the latest insights and gain new skills from technology leaders and practitioners shaping the future of cloud, data, business intelligence, teamwork and productivity. From demos to keynotes, learn about new tech in a way that speaks to you. Plus, get exclusive access to the latest updates and developments across Microsoft’s products and solutions. This year’s keynote speaker is Microsoft’s very own Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella.

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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Field

#powerbi – Switching a report from one PowerBI dataset to another PowerBI dataset

September 22, 2018 Self-Service BI

At the Power BI world tour in Copenhagen last week I was asked how to change a Power BI report’s connection from a dataset in the service – for instance if you have a test workspace and then want to move the report to a production workspace.

I started to refer to my previous blogpost – https://eriksvensen.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/how-to-change-the-powerbi-desktop-file-connection-from-data-model-to-a-power-bi-service-dataset-or-azureas/ – but when using this hack it won’t work.

So we have to do it in another way and it is quite simple – one important thing is of course that the dataset has the same dimensions and measures – otherwise some of your visualisations will show an error.

When we create the report we can select a Dataset from the service

#powerbi – Switching a report from one PowerBI dataset to another PowerBI dataset

When we save the report it will automatically be saved in the workspace where the dataset resides.

But how can we change it –

If you go to Edit Queries

#powerbi – Switching a report from one PowerBI dataset to another PowerBI dataset

You can click Data source settings – then we will get the option to pick a dataset from another workspace

#powerbi – Switching a report from one PowerBI dataset to another PowerBI dataset

And then you just pick the dataset you want to use.

When you save the report now – the report will be saved in the workspace where the selected dataset resides.

Hope this can help you as well – and if so give this post a like

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Erik Svensen – Blog about Power BI, Power Apps, Power Query

5 Big Trends in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering from Strata NYC 2018 – Part 2

September 22, 2018 Big Data

5 Big Trends in ML AI and Data Engineering from Strata NYC 2018 Part 2 5 Big Trends in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering from Strata NYC 2018 – Part 2

Paige Roberts

September 20, 2018

Here are the five big trends I noticed, and some of the things that Paco Nathan and some of the other folks at Strata had to say about them. Last time, we covered trends 1 and 2 which focused on machine learning and the constant stream of data. This time we’re covering 3 and 4.

If you missed part 1, you can find it here.

3. Ethics, Bias and Privacy

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Nicola Askham, the Data Governance Coach, and I recently did a webinar entitled “AI Without Data Governance is Unethical.” As AI becomes more ubiquitous in our lives, and even, maybe a little bit boring, we realize how important it is for the machines we created to treat people fairly. And the more ML and AI are put into practice, the more we see how easy it is for a machine to perpetuate the unfairness of the past.

As Clare Gollnick, CTO of Terbium Labs, pointed out in the Women in Big Data lunch panel – “100% of data is about the past. Unless you want your machine learning model to persist the biases of the past, you need a values-based approach.”

Every dataset is biased in some way. You have to assume that before you even start an ML project. Ethics has to be built into the ground floor of the data engineering, and it also has to be in the feedback loop. Ethics has to be fundamental, but that human refinement of what is right and fair also needs to be on the deployment side to keep AI from adversely affecting people. Find the edge cases and make sure that the results are not biased by testing the results, and refining them.

Privacy becomes key. The direct EEG-based brain interface is great, until someone decides they can arrest you because you have the brain patterns associated with people who are about to commit a crime. Also, the only way they can build this wonderful interface that lets you think commands to control a device, is if the designers have access to large datasets of people’s brain patterns.

“Using brain-based data, of low quality, and possibly normed on biased datasets. Our laws don’t give us much protection against this. – Amanda Pustilnik, Professor of Law at University of Maryland

The current applications of data analysis in our legal system don’t exactly provide a warm feeling of trust that our government will treat us fairly. Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal technology reporter, Julia Angwin, gave a particularly moving keynote presentation about the uneven application of punishment and other racially biased practices, justified now by machine learning.

In her many years of reporting tech industry scams, she noticed that only two people were sent to prison due to something she wrote. Both of them were black men. White men had committed similar crimes, and she had exposed them in similar articles, but none of them went to jail.

Bias is often found as a form of cutting a break, or offering forgiveness, but only for some. That bias is as clear and enraging as a slap in the face when you see the recidivism analyses that have sent so many to jail for longer and longer sentences, but only if they’re not white.

“Skewed algorithms for recidivism give ridiculously high breaks to white people. It’s forgiveness through data, but only for some.” – Julia Angwin

While this is one of the most heinously unfair examples of machine learning abuse, don’t think that if you’re not in the criminal justice system, bias is something you don’t have to worry about. This happens every day, in regular business analyses, all too often in subtle and maybe almost boring ways.

“Bias can often look like a break for one group that another group doesn’t get. People in white neighborhoods get charged lower insurance rates, even when their risk calculations are the same.” – Julia Angwin

While the rest of these trends are to make machine learning and artificial intelligence faster, more efficient, more effective, it is on all of our shoulders as data engineers, data scientists, and all the professions surrounding these fields to make damn sure we’re not more efficiently discriminating, or enforcing bias at a faster pace.

4. GPU’s and Custom Hardware

Even faster, more efficient data crunching.

We’re starting to see a lot of changes in the hardware space to accommodate the demands of AI and ML projects. GPU’s are faster than general purpose CPU’s at linear algebra. There were a lot more vendors out on the show floor this year taking advantage of GPU’s with their products. Tensorflow, one of the most popular machine learning frameworks, has both a CPU and a GPU implementation, and many argue that is why it’s become so popular.

But software being written to take advantage of existing hardware advantages like GPU’s isn’t the only hardware-related trend. We’re seeing more and more customized hardware now, and I suspect we will see even more of it in years to come.

ASICs are a big thing now. For folks who aren’t familiar, here’s a definition of ASICs from Wikipedia:

“An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed to run a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency Bitcoin miner is an ASIC.”

“Now, they’re really coming out with ASICs that can do more advanced linear algebra at enough scale that you don’t have to go across the network. That’s the game.” “Hardware is moving faster than software and software is moving faster than processes.” – Paco Nathan

That is how it always seems to happen. The hardware improves, the software eventually improves to take advantage of the new hardware, and eventually the business processes get to the point where they take advantage of the new software.

The irony to me is that a lot of the Hadoop and big data processing revolution came about by making it possible to use inexpensive commodity hardware to crunch massive datasets, making processing at that scale affordable. Now, we’re seeing hardware customized and optimized for specific machine learning tasks.

“We’re moving towards a streaming world, and I think we’ll see much more math intensive, much more bizarre hardware. Brace yourselves.” – Paco Nathan

The new way of computing is coming whether you’re ready for it or not.

Ziya Ma, VP of Software and Services Group at Intel, announced another advance, Persistent Memory, memory with the size and persistence of storage.

Check back on Monday for the final trend from this year’s Strata Data conference.

Also, make sure to download our white paper on Why Data Quality Is Essential for AI and Machine Learning Success.

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Syncsort Blog

Utopia or Disaster? AI's Transformation of Sales

September 22, 2018 CRM News and Info

If there’s one thing that can be said with certainty about artificial intelligence in the field of sales, it’s this: It’s coming.

Solutions for sales leaders, account executives and business development reps tout various AI-enabled features and the benefits they offer to sales. Writers breathlessly forecast the loss of millions of jobs due to AI, including the decimation of most professions, sales included.

Beyond the hype, what is true? What are the real positive and negative implications of AI on the sales profession?

To separate hype from reality on a topic like artificial intelligence, we need to get beneath the Hollywood view of sentient robots taking over the world and understand what AI truly is and what it’s capable of. With that understanding, we can begin to break apart the discipline of sales and identify the areas where AI likely will have a profound effect.

What Really Is AI? What Truly Is Sales?

So what, really, is artificial intelligence? Fundamentally, it’s a set of software tools that can be trained to recognize patterns. Whether we are talking about self-driving cars, image recognition, or natural language processing, each is all about recognizing a pattern — even if the style of the tool might change. Once trained, an AI system can recognize examples of a pattern quickly and easily.

When applied to the real world, AI is good at tasks that can be carefully trained once, and then repeated many times. As with all software, it scales astoundingly well when compared to humans performing the same task. However, it does poorly at tasks that are new, unique or unprecedented.

From a sales perspective, we can identify pattern-oriented, repetitive tasks that might be replaced by AI. However, this is harder than it seems, as some tasks that appear to be repetitive and pattern-oriented are actually quite complicated when viewed more closely.

Sometimes we might sell more effectively if we could repetitively perform a task that is too burdensome when done manually. Only when we break down what it means to sell can we tease out the positive and negative implications of AI on the sales process.

To get buyers to buy, we need to do two things: inform them that a new approach is possible, and convince them that the new approach is what they should do. This, of course, is much harder than it sounds, as anyone in marketing or sales knows well.

Buyers are bombarded with information relentlessly and have equally rich access to information that they can look for on their own. Gone are the days when information on a solution was enough to secure interest or even a meeting. Attention from the buyer, not information, is the rare commodity.

Similarly, everyone peddling a new approach, service, supplier or solution is trying to convince the buyer that their option is the best. The competition includes different options for solving the same problem, as well as different problems that are fighting for prioritization.

Convincing buyers to deal with the problem you solve — urgently, right now — is often a more difficult task than convincing them to use your solution over another competing solution.

A Human Model of Excellence

So how do great sales people cut through this noise? They focus relentlessly on two things.

First, they deeply understand what the solution means for the specific buyer at that specific company and in that specific situation. Using this insight, they can deliver a message that truly resonates.

Second, they focus on building the one thing that cuts through all the noise: trusted relationships. Sometimes they build relationships with the ultimate decision maker directly, and sometimes it’s with trusted staff members. Buyers are far more open to shifts in viewpoint and perspective when their source of information is a trusted confidant.

With this as a model for selling, we can start to understand how AI will change sales. As a first pass, let’s look at all the tasks that are pattern-oriented and repetitive. Sales outreach, sales research, mapping buying committees, and sales forecasting are obvious starting points. They are all very repetitive tasks, and they follow quite predictable patterns. As it happens, each offers a unique model for ways in which AI will affect sales.

Transforming Each Task

Sales outreach is an interesting example to start with. The current trend of highly automated, generic outreach (“Did you get my email?” or “Just following up on my past email,” etc.) is clearly ripe for automation. It is repetitive and follows a very obvious pattern.

In fact, vendors in the sales automation space already have been automating this with various levels of AI. The challenge here is that the more the task gets automated, the lower its value. If you view this through the lens of the buyer, clearly the deluge of “Did you get my email?” outreaches will add less and less value the more automated it becomes.

Sales research provides the opportunity for a better form of outreach. Knowing what’s happening with an individual company or buyer allows the outreach to be deeply personalized to reflect the challenges of that one buyer’s reality. However, research takes time. When it needs to be repeated for each account at least a few times per week to find new and interesting nuggets of information, it quickly becomes impossible at scale.

AI can help with the research, at massive scale, in a way that tees up interesting insights for sales people on all their accounts. Then comes the creativity involved in translating news about an executive change, new product, or acquisition into a powerful sales outreach. This involves the uniquely human ability to understand what likely has been motivating each individual, given the recent news. In this way, AI and human salespeople together can make outreach efforts much more effective.

Understanding and guiding the dynamics of a buying committee is another unique challenge of sales. Many buyers are involved in any significant decision. Sales teams need to be aware of who is involved, how they are leaning, and who might be able to influence them. An exercise to map out these relationships can be done manually, but the effort involved makes that prohibitively expensive on all but the largest deals.

AI is able to model an understanding of organizations, buyers and relationships effortlessly, and to enable single-threaded deals (where there is only one established relationship into the account) to be flagged, potential introductions to be identified, and relationships across the organization to be measured and visualized. This allows every deal cycle to be understood with the rigor that historically has been reserved for seven-figure deals.

Sales forecasting is another area of sales that serves as an interesting case study for the positive and negative changes AI will bring. Forecasting a quarter’s performance is an exercise in comparing deals in the current pipeline with what successful deals typically look like at the same point in the quarter. This often involves deal reviews in which each deal is explored in depth to understand which relationships are in place and which are missing.

With AI to model the buying organization and understand the relationships, this in-depth review of each deal becomes much easier. This, of course, simplifies the act of forecasting, and it also opens up new ways to improve sales performance. With this view of an account available at the click of a button, sales leaders can focus on guiding deals that are at-risk, coaching reps who are weak at developing certain relationships, and accessing new opportunities.

A Transformed Discipline

When we look at sales through the lens of individual tasks, an interesting picture emerges. AI will make some tasks irrelevant while it greatly enhances others. It will make advanced techniques available to broad market sales teams, and it will provide insights to allow leaders to be better coaches and mentors. It is hard to think of any of these transformations as inherently good or bad — they are just different.

However, avoiding the transition clearly can be categorized as bad. Sales teams who rely on undifferentiated sales automation clearly will see their teams’ results continue to plummet as AI reduces the value of automated outreach to zero.

Account executives in the mid-market who continue to manually map out buying committees will be outmaneuvered by sales teams with that level of insight at their fingertips, utilizing AI. Sales leaders who manually review deals will continue to be plagued by inaccurate forecasts and deal slippage. They also will fail to transition from reporting on sales performance to coaching toward better performance.

Sales will change dramatically over the next decade as AI permeates all aspects of the process. The day-to-day lives of sales professionals and leaders will be nearly unrecognizable by today’s standards, but the challenge of convincing buyers to adopt a new mindset will remain.

The winners of this transformation will be those who leave to AI the tasks and tactics that are best done by AI, and who invest heavily to gain a deep understanding of how to guide buyers to think differently about the problems they face.

Steve%20Woods Utopia or Disaster? AI's Transformation of Sales
Steve Woods is cofounder and CTO of
Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform that helps businesses find and grow the right relationships that drive sales. He previously served as cofounder and CTO of Eloqua, a company he helped guide to a leading position in marketing automation while growing it to a $ 100M revenue run rate, shepherding it through its IPO on the Nasdaq, and ultimately positioning it for acquisition by Oracle.

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CRM Buyer

Four Employee Applications To Improve Business Productivity

September 22, 2018 BI News and Info

Recent tech trends have caused a shift in nearly all business operations. Remote employees are becoming dependent on the cloud, readily accessible Internet, and mobile devices to work virtually from any location. Companies are also allowing their employees to work remotely due to the maneuverability permitted by mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Many companies with over 2,500 workers find remote working enhances productivity and efficiency.

With the latest technology, remote operations have become widely accepted and a necessity in some situations. Following are some great tools to sustain employees’ productivity and increase workplace efficiency.

Organization and time management software

Timesheets, deadlines, and schedules are all essential components in an organization and can allow a remote team to be as efficient as an onsite team. Remote workers can even be better than their counterparts in the office when provided with the right tools. Scheduling and time management software allows remote workers to track their hours and know when they are supposed to clock in and out and schedule their work. Time management software also enables HR managers to track and monitor their workforce, even while they’re out of the office.

There are plenty of tools that companies can use to boost productivity, but it’s crucial to find one that enables a good work-life balance. Companies need to equip their workers with tools that track their efforts and time so they also know when to relax. Before you buy, ask a prospective software provider about how their tool facilitates work-life balance, improves workers’ satisfaction, and boosts their productivity.

File-sharing software

Achieving productivity involves managing documents and working collaboratively on various projects. That means remote workers must be able to share documents digitally across time zones and over many miles. Investing in tools and software that can facilitate sharing files without hiccups can make the process seamless. For example, some companies use Google tools to allow remote workers to work on the same project from different locations. However, there are plenty of file management systems available. No matter which tool they choose, cloud-based file-sharing software is ideal for a company with remote workers.

Project management

Companies can use project management tools as the hub of their activities. Everyone wants tools that can monitor and track their daily duties and tasks to maintain an elevated level of efficiency. It’s possible for organizations to manage their productivity levels, or even make them more efficient, by investing in comprehensive project management software that is integrated in the cloud and runs on mobile devices. Project management software can also enable remote workers to assign tasks to others, ensuring the right talent and professionals are brought into a project as needed. Furthermore, allowing on-the-go employees to assign roles to each other, collaborate on various activities, and schedule deadlines can enable an organization to meet and exceed its efficiency standards. Project management software also provides team members with progress reports to help keep them on track and allow supervisors to monitor their performance.

Collaboration and communication software

Remote workers need to maintain continual communication to maintain high productivity levels. Tools such as smartphones, tablets, and computers will allow them to communicate seamlessly. Equipped with a smartphone, a field technician or sales representative trying to solve a problem can immediately reach an expert in the office with a text message or phone call. Companies can also use collaboration and communication software to send notifications to remote workers anywhere, even at home or on the way to a job site. Sales reps no longer have to wait to get to the office to get updates or enter reports into the database.

Dig deeper into HR Everywhere: The Case For Engaging Mobile Experiences.

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Digitalist Magazine

Jamie Foxx And Joseph Gordon-Levitt Join Netflix’s New Untitled Sci-Fi Feature

September 21, 2018 Humor

Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are boarding Netflix’s untitled sci-fi movie which long-time collaborators Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are directing off Mattson Tomlin’s screenplay.

The pic’s storyline is being kept under wraps.

Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless’ Screen Arcade will produce as part of their first look deal with Netflix. Newman, who has been behind such productions as the Oscar-nominated Children of Men, and Zack Snyder’s reboot of Dawn of The Dead, has a strong, ongoing relationship with Netflix that goes back to the streaming service’s second original series Hemlock Grove. He also conceived and packaged Narcos for Netflix on which he serves as writer, show-runner and EP.

Unkeless recently produced the three-time Oscar-nominated film I, Tonya, starring Margot Robbie and Allison Janney; the latter winning an Academy Award for best supporting actress. Unkeless’ film First Match, which he produced for Netflix, won the Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year.

Ray Oscar best actor winner Foxx is currently shooting the courtroom drama, Just Mercy opposite Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson for director Destin Cretton. Foxx can next be seen in Lionsgate’s Robin Hood on Nov. 21 and his Fox show Beat Shazam, which he serves as EP and hosts, was recently renewed for a third season. Gordon-Levitt can next be seen in the airline hijacking thriller, 7500 from Patrick Vollarth. Gordon-Levitt is a two-Golden Globe nominee in the comedy/musical lead actor category for 50/50 and (500) Days of Summer. Foxx is repped by CAA and LBI Entertainment. Gordon-Levitt is repped by WME and Jackoway Austen.

Source: Deadline

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Jordan Peele To Host And Narrate 'Twilight Zone' For CBS All Access

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Opening Web Resources in Dynamics 365 v8.2 versus v9.0

September 21, 2018 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In this blog, we will discuss the differences opening web resources in Dynamics 365 v8.2 versus v9.0. The openWebResource client API function is used to open a HTML web resource. Let’s see how this feature improved from v8.2 to v9.0

Opening web resources in Dynamic 365 v8.2

General syntax for this:

Web Resource Name is the name of the web resource that needs to open.
Web Resource Data contains the data passed to the web resource.
Width is the width of the window.
Height is the height of the window.

1. The Web Resource Name is mandatory and other parameters are optional if you need to simply open the web resource then use:

2. If you need to pass data via the query string parameter then use:

3. You can also specify the width and height of window:

Opening web resources in Dynamics 365 v9.0

Utility is replaced by the Navigation client API in v9.0 and the general syntax for opening a web resource is:

Web Resource Name is the name of the web resource that needs to open
Window Options is an object that contains three attributes. i.e., Height, Width, & Open in New Window, which Indicates whether the web resource needs to open in a new window or the existing window
Web Resource Data contains the data passed to the web resource

1. Web Resource Name is mandatory and other parameters are optional if you need to simply open the web resource then use:

2. If we need to set window options then use:

3. If we need to pass data via the query string parameter then use:

This functionality is supported for both versions of Dynamics 365 v8.2 and v9.0 if you are using the supported web browsers. However, in the case of mobile devices this functionality works only in v9.0 and is not supported for v8.2.

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Happy Dynamics 365’ing!

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10 Things People With Disabilities Wish Online Retailers Knew

September 21, 2018 CRM News and Info

Many shoppers would be just fine if they could never set foot in a retail store again. After all, everything is available online: books, groceries, pizza, household necessities, even big ticket items like mattresses and cars. However, 15 percent of people worldwide have a disability that affects their daily life, according to the United Nations, and many retailers are unaware that their websites are not always accessible to them.

The longer retailers wait to create an inclusive online shopping experience, the more money they could lose to their competitors, as perhaps 15 percent of their potential customers are forced to find accessible alternatives. This is especially important now, since many in the large Baby Boomer population segment may be starting to experience disabilities related to age.

Although technical abilities and access needs are unique to each individual, following are 10 common things that customers with disabilities wish online retailers knew. Included are insights from Level Access accessibility consultants Nat Tarnoff and Kara Van Roekel, and Chief Accessibility Officer Jonathan Avila, a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

1. ‘I’m more likely to abandon your website than ask for help.’

Only 7 percent of people with disabilities will reach out to a retailer’s customer service department for help when they encounter an access barrier, based on results of the Click Away Pound study done in 2016.

Slightly more (11 percent) will ask for help from a friend or family member, but the vast majority of those shoppers will “click away” to seek out a more accessible website to complete their purchase.

Eighty-two percent of the customers with disabilities surveyed said they would spend more online if retailers’ websites were accessible.

Retailers can help by creating an inclusive user experience. In the meantime, they retailers can provide training to customer service representatives, so they are prepared to provide a pleasant and helpful experience for people with disabilities when they call or reach out for assistance.

“When someone calls customer service to say they have a problem using the site with JAWS (a popular screen reader),” said Level Access’ Avila, “the last thing they want to hear is, ‘What is JAWS?'”

2. ‘You’ve blocked me from using my keyboard to navigate.’

Many retailers are unaware that there are people who navigate the Web without using a mouse. There are many reasons why this might be the case. For instance, customers may

have low vision;
have limited mobility or dexterity;
not have use of one or both of their hands (or even have hands);
have arthritis that makes using a mouse painful; or
have Parkinson’s or another condition that can cause hand tremors.

Retailers can help by verifying their website works for keyboard-only users. When a customer presses the Tab key, there should be a visual indication of focus, often a box around the selected field on the screen. Designers sometimes remove the visual indication of focus (by making it invisible), but this feature is vital for many customers with disabilities.

“Set your mouse aside and see if you can complete a purchase without it,” said Avila. “You should be able to select items and click on links using only your keyboard.”

3. ‘I need descriptions of your images.’

Alternative (“alt”) text was important to everyone back in the dark ages of dial-up modems when images wouldn’t always load. Nowadays, images load quickly, but alt text is still needed to describe the image for people with visual disabilities.

If a customer is using a screen reader like JAWS or NVDA, it will read the alt text for the image. Without meaningful alt text, customers with disabilities will not have the same information about the product as sighted customers. If customers don’t have a clear understanding of the product, they probably won’t buy it.

Retailers can help by writing meaningful alternative text for all images that convey information. (Purely decorative images do not need alt text.) For retailers creating product pages, the easiest time to write alt text is when the creative team is selecting images for the product. Why was that particular image chosen? What does it highlight about the product?

Worst Alt Text: No alt text or meaningless text (“image_042.jpg”)
Not Very Meaningful: “laptop bag”
Pretty Meaningful: “open laptop bag, showing padded interior pockets”
Even More Meaningful: “forest green canvas laptop bag with main flap open, showing light olive green padded interior pockets”

4. ‘Your color scheme makes it difficult to read.’

The spectrum of visual ability is wide and varied and includes many people who are not completely blind but have vision that is limited in some way. Color contrast is crucial for those customers to be able to read text online. Color contrast is an especially pressing issue now that Baby Boomers are starting to experience age-related vision loss, cataracts and glaucoma. There are many loyal customers who would like to continue shopping online at their favorite retailers despite their decreased visual acuity.

Retailers can help by verifying that their site’s color contrast meets WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines, which is a 4.5-to-1 contrast ratio between body text and background. There are many
free online tools to check color contrast, including one at Level Access.

5. ‘I can’t find the items I want.’

Search is a powerful tool to help customers find exactly what they want quickly, even if they aren’t 100 percent sure of what they want. Unfortunately, some features are inaccessible to screen reader users.

“Improper field labels are a huge barrier,” said Level Access Senior Accessibility Consultant Kara Van Roekel. “Another is when content updates are not announced. For example, you add some filters to your search and the page updates visually, but the screen reader doesn’t announce the updated number of results.”

Retailers can help by having robust and properly coded search functionality. Checkboxes or radio buttons should be labeled and announce their status (i.e., checked or unchecked) to a screen reader. When the search results update, the new status should be announced so that the customer knows that something has changed.

6. ‘Your site is too crowded with information.’

Overly crowded websites were one of the top three problems cited by shoppers with disabilities in the Click Away Pound study. For customers with cognitive disabilities, such as ADHD or dyslexia, crowded websites can be extremely difficult to read.

“If there is animation or flashing ads alongside the main content, it can be very difficult for some customers to focus on what they want to read,” said Van Roekel.

Retailers can help by following best practices for Web design and keeping clutter to a minimum. They also can offer the option to use their mobile website on a desktop or laptop browser, since mobile experiences generally are pared down to just the necessities.

7. ‘The animations on your site make me sick. Literally.’

Animations may seem like a way to add visual interest to a website (or in the case of a carousel, put more content above the fold), but Technical Consultant Nat Tarnoff advised caution: “I have a vestibular disorder, and certain animations trigger a feeling of nausea, especially ‘wizard’ style interfaces that make the next screen slide in from the left or top.”

Retailers can help by limiting animation unless it is absolutely necessary to the functionality of the website. A good compromise is offering an easy way for the customer to stop or pause the animation so that it is under their control.

8. ‘I love your product videos, but they need better captions.’

Customers who are deaf or hard of hearing can enjoy product videos through captioning, but not if retailers leave the job up to YouTube’s artificial intelligence. While automated captions are certainly better than no captions at all, they are often full of errors.

Up to 85 percent of Facebook’s mobile users watch videos without sound, suggest recent studies by several online publishers. Without captions, retailers are losing many more viewers than just those with disabilities.

Retailers can help by adding captions for videos or including a link to a transcript. If videos are scripted, it just takes a few moments to format the text so it will appear as perfectly timed captions.

9. ‘I want to check out… but I can’t!’

Abandoned carts are the bane of e-commerce, and much has been written about how to recapture those wayward customers. What if the barrier between customer and finish line were related to accessibility?

Free shipping won’t help a customer with a cognitive disability finish the checkout process before being timed out. A 20-percent-off discount won’t help a customer who is blind fill out a checkout form that is missing proper field labels.

Retailers can help by verifying that the checkout process is accessible: form fields should be labeled for screen readers, it should be possible to activate all buttons without the use of a mouse, and that a customer who needs more time to complete checkout should be able to request it.

10. ‘I can help you with usability testing.’

Retailers can make great strides in digital accessibility by training their developers, designers, quality assurance testers, and customer service representatives — but nothing compares to feedback from — and usability testing by — people with disabilities.

“While you can train a sighted employee to use a screen reader like JAWS,” says Avila, “it will never be the equivalent of usability testing by someone who depends on JAWS daily in order to navigate the Web.”

Retailers can help by hiring people with disabilities. Creating an inclusive user experience starts with including as many types of users as possible in a website’s creation. People with disabilities are expert users of assistive technology and can pinpoint areas of an e-commerce website that are technically compliant with digital accessibility guidelines, but don’t offer the best user experience.

Inclusive Design Helps Everyone

Committing to inclusive design not only makes a retailer’s website accessible to customers with disabilities, but also creates a shopping environment that is easier for all customers to use. Streamlined designs load quicker. Captions let customers watch videos in public places.

Thoughtfully planned content structure makes it easy for everyone to get where they want to be. Robust search helps every customer find exactly what they want. So much of inclusive design dovetails with a great user experience for every customer.

By integrating these accessibility tips into their website design best practices, retailers can ensure that they are serving every potential customer and keeping them happily supplied with goods, regardless of their physical abilities.

Derek Featherstone is chief experience officer at
Level Access.

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Amazon’s Echo Sub is a product for no one

September 21, 2018 Big Data

You’ve probably heard the news: Amazon announced a premium smart speaker that’s meant to go head-to-head with Apple’s HomePod and Google Home Max. It’s called the Echo Sub, and it pairs with existing Echo devices to create an impromptu 1.1 or 2.1 sound system.

That’s great and all, and I applaud Amazon for dipping its toes into high-end audio without alienating first-gen Echo adopters. But here’s the thing: The voice-enabled Hi-Fi ship sailed a long time ago. Apple’s HomePod, which launched in February, already has 70 percent of the burgeoning $ 200-and-up smart speaker segment.

If the HomePod were the only high-end smart speaker Amazon had to contend with, it might have a fighting chance — after all, Apple’s product starts at $ 350, and its voice assistant of choice — Siri — doesn’t offer nearly as many integrations or third-party apps as Amazon’s Alexa. But I predict that the real competition will come from none other than Amazon’s ecosystem partners, which run circles around the Echo in terms of features.

Take Bose, for example. In August, the company announced its first voice-enabled speaker — the Home Speaker 500 — powered by Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service, a suite of APIs and tools that let any developer integrate Alexa voice capabilities into their own products (Google Assistant support is reportedly on the way). The $ 400 speaker has a built-in color screen, two drivers that output tracks in two-channel stereo, and the “widest soundstage” of any smart speaker on the market (according to Bose, at least).

And look at Sonos. Its $ 400 Alexa-powered Beam soundbar (with Siri and Google Assistant voice controls on the way) has a five-microphone array, touch-sensitive controls, and an HDMI port for easy pairing with televisions. Heck, it’s even got AirPlay 2 onboard, which lets folks with iOS devices beam music to it over Wi-Fi.

Amazon’s Echo Sub is a product for no one

Above: Google Home Max

Image Credit: VentureBeat / Khari Johnson

The $ 400 Google Home Max isn’t half bad, either — despite the fact that it’s strictly a Google Assistant affair. Its 3.5mm headphone jack sets it apart from its competitors, as does its powerful quad drivers and six amplifiers.

To me, the three are a lot more compelling than Amazon’s peripheral subwoofer. They’re admittedly on the pricier side, though. So what about the more affordable options?

The $ 200 Alexa-powered Sonos One doesn’t have two drivers (you’re stuck with stereo unless you pick up a second speaker), but its six-microphone array and echo-canceling tech more than compensate for the omission. It too supports AirPlay 2, with Google Assistant coming soon.

Another great choice: the $ 400 UE Megablast, which, in addition to boasting a waterproof (IP67) body and Alexa support, draws power from a battery that lasts up to 16 hours on a charge.

If none of those floats your boat, there’s the $ 200 Sony Google Assistant-powered LF-S50G, which has a 360-degree speaker system and dedicated subwoofer (and a built-in clock to boot); the portable (and also waterproof) $ 200 JBL Link 20; and the Panasonic GA10.

They’re not much more expensive than a $ 130 Echo Sub and Amazon’s least expensive standard Echo SKU, the $ 50 Dot, which comes out to just $ 20 cheaper — and that’s for a 1.1 setup.

There’s an argument to be made that the Echo Sub isn’t aimed at new Echo buyers, but rather those who’ve got an Echo on hand. I’d argue, though, that Echo Dot owners are better off picking up an inexpensive 3.1 audio system instead. (The Echo Dot has a 3.5mm audio out jack.) Sure, the tunes won’t be in stereo, but the cost savings will be substantial — Logitech’s Z313 runs about $ 50, which compares favorably to $ 230 for two Echo Dots and an Echo Sub.

Clearly, Amazon’s “Alexa everywhere” strategy is paying dividends — even if its first-party share of the voice-enabled speaker market is slowly declining. The retailer’s voice assistant is integrated with over 20,000 devices (up from 4,000 eight months ago).

But Amazon, which arguably kicked off the smart speaker craze four years ago when it launched the Echo, missed its window of opportunity in premium audio. Unless you’re stuck with an old Echo or Echo Plus, or compelled for some reason to add a subwoofer to the Echo Show or Spot, there’s no reason to pick up an Echo Sub.

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Like this:

1. ‘I’m more likely to abandon your website than ask for help.’

2. ‘You’ve blocked me from using my keyboard to navigate.’

3. ‘I need descriptions of your images.’

4. ‘Your color scheme makes it difficult to read.’

5. ‘I can’t find the items I want.’

6. ‘Your site is too crowded with information.’

7. ‘The animations on your site make me sick. Literally.’

8. ‘I love your product videos, but they need better captions.’

9. ‘I want to check out… but I can’t!’

10. ‘I can help you with usability testing.’

Inclusive Design Helps Everyone

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