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5 Smart Ways to Make Dynamics 365 Work Better for You

August 3, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Your Dynamics 365 is already doing many things for you. But software developers are here for you to make it work even better. Check our suggestions on how you can improve the performance of your CRM, increase security and cut maintentance costs.

xscott graham 5fNmWej4tAA unsplash min 1 625x417.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Hp9Vb1Ajaq 5 Smart Ways to Make Dynamics 365 Work Better for You

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Integrate Dynamics 365 with SharePoint

Documents in the CRM – contracts, invoices, payment orders, etc. – are usually stored as attachments against Notes. But a much better way of keeping them organized is transferring them to SharePoint.

This organization gives several advantages. SharePoint is a great team and document collaboration platform. You receive online editing tools in SharePoint and document versions are taken care of. As it often happens in any kind of organization, salespeople save documents in multiple folders: on OneDrive, Google Drives, on their personal desktops. Documents get lost. Also, chances are, document versions get confused and colleagues have to do double work. Storing sales-related documents in SharePoint relieves all this pain. In addition, SharePoint provides much more storage space than Dynamics 365 Notes, so you will hardly ever run out of space.

The good news is that Microsoft provides a native SharePoint integration in Dynamics 365. And it is straightforward. In this post, we show how to set the integration and move your documents from Dynamics 365 to SharePoint.

Protect sensitive information between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint

Quite a lot of companies use the option of integrating Dynamics 365 with SharePoint. However, not all of them know that security roles in Dynamics 365 don’t automatically apply in SharePoint in such an integration. Why is it important?

Many of us store sensitive documents in the CRM: contracts with values, information about prospects, stamps, etc. With privileges, you define who has access and editing rights for these documents in Dynamics 365. But when the documents are stored in SharePoint folders, they get available to any SharePoint user in your organization, and not only to those who have privileges. Obviously, this carries risks to the information integrity, the trust to your organization, and potentially violates the GDPR.

The lack of synchronization between Dynamics 365 privileges and SharePoint permissions happens because the two Microsoft products have significantly different security models. But this is not helpful for organizations, right? What you can do in this case is customize the integration by writing code, or use an out-of-the-box product CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator.

Remove attachments from Dynamics 365 to an alternative storage

“One of our clients is having a problem with increasing database size very quickly. The huge database size is also becoming a performance issue. Besides, the client is looking for decreasing the storage costs. The current database size is 530GB. We have checked the free add-on from Microsoft but we are reluctant about bringing it in our org full scale. Besides, looking for more functionality like extracting old and new documents”. This request from a D365 admin reflects a typical constraint of the cloud CRM: free storage that is the default subscription capacity runs out sooner or later, especially so if you track emails in Dynamics.

Dynamics 365, just like every other cloud CRM system, has been primarily designed to manage customer relations and not store documents. When too much space is occupied, the CRM performance suffers significantly.

Monitoring D365 health is essential. By doing that, you ensure the system’s optimal performance and enough space for growth.

You can leverage alternative storages like SharePoint, Azure Blob or Azure File Storage to move heavy attachments from your CRM and optimize its performance.

Connect from any on-prem database to D365 Online

With many organizations transitioning to cloud services, it won’t be a surprise if you use Dynamics 365 online. SaaS is a great thing in many ways except for connecting with on-prem databases or applications or migrating to the cloud if you use an on-prem CRM at the moment.

The problem is that, generally, exposing back-end databases of SaaS services to the outside world is considered bad practice and can bring security risks. Therefore, Microsoft does not provide access to the back-end database of D365 online. Instead, to perform data interaction with D365 online, Microsoft offers the official API services, as we explain in this article. Thankfully, there are solutions now that help you to set up the integration easily – like, for example, D365 Database Sync Solution.

Seal Documents in CRM with Blockchain

Now that more document exchange is done online due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and natural processes like digitalization and decentralization, the question arises: how to keep the integrity of your data.

Many organizations look for a solution to prove the integrity and authenticity of documents and processes, ensuring trust in their business, in a fast and cost-effective way – unlike traditional methods that are slow and manual, demanding a lot of resources and interrupting the workflow.

And blockchain comes to help – with a practical application that can be used on a daily basis and in a familiar environment like your CRM. Smart Stamp Document Sealing with blockchain technology is an up-to-date solution to the issues of data compliance, storage and auditability. With one click, you seal a document, and with another click, you can verify if the document is the same as it was at the time of sealing or someone has tampered with it.

Summing up

Security, performance, cost-saving are important factors to consider when working with a CRM system. Dynamics 365, being one of the leading CRM systems on the market and an advanced tool for managing your sales and customers, can be upgraded using Microsoft tools and add-ons from software integrators. Good luck in your quest! We are always here to give a helping hand in your strive for a more productive and compliant workplace.

***

Written by Anastasia Mazur from Connecting Software, a producer of synchronization and integration software for business needs. For more stories, visit our blog.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Google and Harvard release COVID-19 prediction models

August 3, 2020 Big Data

In partnership with the Harvard Global Health Institute, Google today released the COVID-19 Public Forecasts, a set of models that provide projections of COVID-19 cases, deaths, ICU utilization, ventilator availability, and other metrics over the next 14 days for U.S. counties and states. The models are trained on public data such as those from Johns Hopkins University, Descartes Lab, and the United States Census Bureau, and Google says they’ll continue to be updated with guidance from its collaborators at Harvard.

The COVID-19 Public Forecasts are intended to serve as a resource for first responders in health care, the public sector, and other affected organizations preparing for what lies ahead, Google says. They allow for targeted testing and public health interventions on a county-by-county basis, in theory enhancing the ability of those who use them to respond to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic. For example, health care providers could incorporate the forecasted number of cases as a datapoint in resource planning for PPE, staffing, and scheduling. Meanwhile, state and county health departments could use the forecast of infections to help inform testing strategies and identify areas at risk of outbreaks.

To create the COVID-19 Public Forecasts, Google says its researchers developed a novel time-series machine learning approach that combines AI with a clever epidemiological foundation. By design, the models are trained on public data and leverage an architecture that allows researchers to dive into relationships the models have identified and interpret why they make certain forecasts. They’ve also been evaluated to ensure predictions with respect to people of color — who have been hardest hit by COVID-19, with disproportionately high rates of cases and deaths — aren’t wildly skewed or otherwise misleading.

“We observe that our models produce meaningfully lower absolute error and normalized (relative) error as compared to the comparison model across predominantly African American, Hispanic, and white counties,” Google researchers wrote in a fairness analysis of the COVID-19 prediction models. “Our models optimize for high accuracy across all U.S. counties to provide the best overall forecast for most communities.”

The COVID-19 Public Forecasts are free to query in BigQuery as part of the service’s 1TB-per-month free tier or to download as comma-separated value files (CSVs). Additionally, they’re available through Google’s Data Studio dashboard and its National Response Portal.

All bytes processed in queries against the data set will be zeroed out, Google says, but data joined with the data set will be billed at the normal rate to prevent abuse. After September 15, queries over the forecast sets will revert to the normal Google Cloud billing rate.

The release of the COVID-19 Public Forecasts follows the launch of Google’s COVID-19 Public Datasets program, which hosts a repository of public data sets relating to the crisis and makes them easier to access and analyze. Corpora within the COVID-19 Public Datasets program includes the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) data set, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and OpenStreetMap data, all of which are stored for at no cost on Google Cloud.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company, Wins 2020 Global Microsoft Partner of the Year Award… Again!

August 3, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

We’ve got exciting news to share in today’s blogpost. On July 13, 2020, Microsoft announced their global Partner of the Year winners and finalists. We are pleased to report that we won one award and were a finalist for another! The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year.

Source

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PowerObjects- Bringing Focus to Dynamics CRM

AI Weekly: Big Tech’s antitrust reckoning is a cautionary tale for the AI industry

August 3, 2020 Big Data

This week, as the heads of four of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the world were called before a virtual congressional antitrust hearing to answer inquiries into how they built and run their respective behemoths, you could see that the bloom on the rose of Big Tech has faded.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, once the rascally college dropout boy genius you loved to hate, still doesn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of the problem of globally destructive misinformation and hate speech on his platform. Tim Cook struggles to defend how Apple takes a 30% cut from some of its app store developers’ revenue — a policy he didn’t even establish that is a vestige of Apple’s mid-2000s vise grip on the mobile app market. The plucky young upstarts who founded Google are both middle-aged and have stepped down from executive roles, quietly fading away while Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai runs the show. And Jeff Bezos wears the untroubled visage of the world’s richest man.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google all created tech products and services that have undeniably changed the world, some in ways that are undeniably good. But as these tech titans moved fast and broke things, they also largely excused themselves from asking difficult ethical questions, from how they built their business empires to the impacts their products and services have on the people who use them.

As AI continues to lead the next wave of transformative technology, skating over these difficult questions is a mistake the world can’t afford to repeat. What’s more, AI technologies won’t actually work properly unless companies address the issues at their heart.

Smart and ruthless was the tradition of Big Tech, but AI requires people to be smart and wise. Those working in AI have to not only ensure the efficacy of what they make, but holistically understand the potential harms for people AI tech impacts. That’s a more mature and just way of building world-changing technologies, products, and services. Fortunately, many prominent voices in AI are leading the field down that path.

This week’s best example was the widespread reaction to a service called Genderify, which promised to use natural language processing (NLP) to help companies identify customers’ gender using only their name, username, or email address. The entire premise is absurd and problematic, and when AI folks got ahold of it to put it through its paces, they predictably found it to be terribly biased (which is to say, broken).

Genderify was such a bad joke that it almost seemed like some kind of performance art. In any case, it was laughed off the internet. Just a day or so after it was launched, the Genderify site, Twitter account, and LinkedIn page were gone.

It’s frustrating to many in the field that such ill-conceived and poorly executed AI offerings keep popping up. But the swift and wholesale deletion of Genderify illustrates the power and strength of this new generation of principled AI researchers and practitioners.

The burgeoning AI sector is already experiencing the kind of reckoning Big Tech is only facing after decades. Other recent examples include an outcry over a paper that promised to use AI to identify criminality from people’s faces (really just AI phrenology), which led to the paper being withdrawn from publication. Landmark studies on bias in facial recognition have led to bans and moratoriums on the technology’s use in several U.S. cities, as well as a raft of legislation to eliminate or combat its potential abuses. Fresh research is finding intractable problems with bias in well-established data sets like 80 Million Tiny Images and the legendary ImageNet — and leading to immediate (if overdue) change. And there’s more.

Although advocacy groups play a role in pushing for changes and posing tough questions, the authority for such inquiry and the research-based proof is coming from people inside the field of AI — ethicists, researchers looking for ways to improve AI techniques, and actual practitioners.

There is, of course, an immense amount of work to be done and many more battles ahead as AI fuels the next dominant set of technologies. Look no further than problematic AI in surveillance, military, the courts, employment, policing, and more.

But seeing tech giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon pull back on massive investments in facial recognition is a sign of progress. It doesn’t actually matter whether their actions are narrative cover for a capitulation to other companies’ market dominance, a calculated move to avoid potential legislative punishment, or just a PR stunt. For whatever reason, these companies acknowledged the value of slowing down and reducing damage rather than continuing to “move fast and break things.”

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How Cloud Systems Can Help Re-Invent Insurance Brands

August 2, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This article was originally published on Insurance-Edge.Net on June 11, 2020.

With global Insurtech revenue expected to top $ 10 billion by 2025, traditional insurers must start examining ways of modernising their systems to remain relevant for today’s digital-savvy customers. This is no small feat given the complexity of the technology environments of financial services companies, and the reliance of incumbents on monolithic architecture that have primarily remained on-premises despite the appeal of cloud-based solutions.

Legacy Limitations

Complicating a potential migration to more digital-centric environments is the fact that many on-site services integrate into third-party offerings. For example, the public vehicle register of a government. Any development or change to the environment, no matter how small, requires significant effort. Insurers are also limited in scaling their solutions horizontally (by adding more machines) or vertically (by adding more computational power or memory to existing machines).

Any additional load will, therefore, require significant investment in more physical and people resources to support it. To continue operating effectively, an organisation’s resources must be allocated around the clock. But this is where the challenge lies; by having to dedicate so much attention to maintenance due to the rigidity and size of existing legacy architecture, an insurer is left with precious few spare resources to focus on and drive innovation.

Typical disadvantages of such a traditionally focused environment include the following:

As engagement with customers increases across insurance touchpoints – think websites, call centres, chatbots, and the like – traditional systems cannot provide the performance improvements required to operate effectively making the systems difficult to scale.

The inability to fully embrace a multi-channel environment inadvertently places existing systems under strain and requires significant implementation efforts to review these monolithic architectures. As the systems are inflexible, there is limited possibility of allowing for a hybrid approach that connects on-premises sources with cloud-native ones.

Traditional environments have no native support for containers, a standard unit of software that packages code and its dependencies, therefore, their benefits that include speed of application delivery and reliability as well as dynamic scaling functionality, won’t be achieved.

With no native support for the practice of DevOps that advocates an agile relationship between development and IT operations, teams aren’t able to act or perform cohesively. There is no possibility of fast prototyping, resulting in a low or slow time-to-market.

Making the Move

However, by moving to a cloud-native architecture, an insurer opens itself up to a myriad of new possibilities. These born in the cloud architectures are designed to maximise the benefits of a distributed platform. This means that an insurer can focus more on its strategic business objectives and less on maintaining legacy systems.

By moving to a cloud-native architecture, an insurer opens itself up to a myriad of new possibilities. The insurer can focus more on its strategic business objectives and less on maintaining legacy systems. Click To Tweet

However, it is not recommended to “rip and replace” an entire legacy system or applications either. When it comes to cloud adoption, insurers should focus on quick wins, using quick sprints. Typically, this approach is more successful than one that seeks to drive massive change over a more extended period with a big-bang approach.

Fortunately, the capabilities of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers mean that it is possible for an insurer to incrementally move new business services to the cloud and still keep its on-premises services running. It also opens the possibility of creating hybrid architectures that enable innovation to be introduced without disrupting the current business environment.

An insurer can, therefore, reinvent itself at its own pace while still being able to deliver an improved customer experience. This is critical when aiming to create differentiation over competitor Insurtechs, who already service customers using the channels they prefer. However, an insurer must leverage its reputation and experience in the industry and then couple it to this enhanced customer experience so as to create a stronger position for itself in the market.

Key Considerations

An insurer should consider commencing a cloud journey by integrating its internal services with an API-led approach. This provides the foundation to develop applications that can be customised more effectively to deliver a faster return than more traditional ones.

New developments should be moved into the cloud by creating microservices that can easily scale with the new load it is expected to handle. For example, a Web-based Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) development tool speeds up the integration of on-premises services and third-party cloud-native services. Since SaaS providers require extensive integration with a cloud-native integration (iPaaS), the much-needed agility is improved.

Some of the advantages this provides include a simplified development approach, unlimited scalability through microservices, a higher resource utilisation thanks to IaaS and PaaS optimisation, and the availability of more dynamic reporting.

A hybrid architecture can also deliver several benefits to the insurer:
–Overall performance increase
–Agile, better-performing front ends
–Unlimited horizontal load dependant scaling
–Multi-channel API-first and API-led integration environment
–Frictionless mobile device support
-Integration with legacy databases
-Integration with a PaaS data warehouse
-Flexible deployment
–On-premises or in-cloud service integration
–Support of containers (Kubernetes or Openshift)
–DevOps support
–Fast prototyping and time-to-market

The Future is Now

By overhauling their core systems and infrastructure, insurers become better equipped for the requirements and expectations of a digital world. For instance, implementing personal voice assistant capabilities like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, and even leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver more customised customer solutions, all become not just a possibility, but a reality too.

The digitalisation journey will only accelerate as more businesses and industries wake up to the potential of the cloud. It is happening right now due to the surge of remote workers and the inability of salespeople to pop out and walk customers through their insurance portfolio changes. Even though insurers do face challenges in migrating to such a dynamic new environment, it is critical to begin as quickly as possible. The significant cost savings, customer advantages, and flexibility to scale according to business requirements make for too compelling an argument to ignore.

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The TIBCO Blog

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August 2, 2020 Humor

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Political Irony

Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS – part 1

August 2, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Part 1: Requesting, creating and importing a new certificate

Part 2: Configuring the new certificate in Dynamics and AD FS

CONTEXTUALIZATION AND SCENARIO:

In this article we will cover the standard procedures for replacing an expired certificate in a Dynamics 365 CE environment with federation through Active Directory Federation Services.
It is common (and expected) that in a scenario similar to this, the environment stops responding due to the fact that the certificate is expired, a fundamental security criterion of the federation.

For the purposes of scenario, I used a single pre-existing virtual machine in Hyper-V running Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition with SQL Server 2014 SP2 Enterprise Edition and Dynamics 365 v8.2 as FULL SERVER. As it is a laboratory for educational purposes and with only one virtual machine, it obviously performs all services, including domain controller, DNS, certificate and federation.

Dynamics and AD FS-specific services run under the context of a service user, here called SVC_DYN. Therefore, we assumed that the environment was completely configured and functional until the certificate expiration date. We will not address the creation of infrastructure from scratch, but the procedures for replacing the certificate in order to restore the operation of the services in a pre-existing environment. It therefore requires that the reader already have prior knowledge of configuring AD FS, certificates and Dynamics itself.

As both Dynamics and AD FS are running on the same server, we specify the Dynamics HTTPS port at 444 insted and leave the AD FS port at 443 as the default.

In the federation of our lab, we have the internal relying-party as “internalcrm” and external as the name of the CRM organization itself in addition to “dev”. Therefore, the expected access URLs are (remember, they won’t work outside this lab):

Internal:

https://internalcrm.crmadmin.com.br:444

External:

https://microsoft-dynamics.crmadmin.com.br:444/

https://dev.crmadmin.com.br:444

Our organization is called Microsoft-Dynamics. The internal access will support SSO, while the external will ask for credentials. We will issue a new certificate from a self-authority but in real scenarios you may acquire a valid one from a trusted Certificate Authority.

Ok, that’s said, let’s start the lab.

CHECKING THE ISSUES

1768.pastedimage1595963179516v5 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 1: user unable to access Dynamics from internal or external URLs

In our scenario it happens (fig 1) due the certificate expired. The same occurs in both internal or external URLs. We can see that Dynamics is working well if we use the localhost:5555 URL (fig 2). It means, when we use localhost:[port] we are using without HTTPS, so the platform responds but only internally and without the proper security:

8206.pastedimage1595963446672v7 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 2: Dynamics working well using localhost:[port]

Let’s take a look at the certificate in some places. First, opening the IIS, pointing to the CRM Website and clicking in Bindings we can see that the certificate is really expired (fig 3):

0184.pastedimage1595963890571v8 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 3: IIS Dynamics Website with expired certificate bound

As we’re using a Wildcard certificate, the same certificate is applied to AD FS, so we can check also there (fig 4 and 5):

1526.pastedimage1595964035538v9 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1 6153.pastedimage1595964163230v10 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figures 4 and 5: AD FS with expired certificate bound

CREATING A NEW CERTIFICATE

As the first step, open Manage Computer Certificates, or just CTRL+R and certlm.msc and then Go to Certificates -> Local Computer -> Personal -> Certificates -> All Tasks -> Advanced Operations -> Create Custom Request… (fig 6):

0777.pastedimage1595964748219v11 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 6: Certificates

In the Certificate Enrollment screen -> Before You Begin, click Next. In the next screen, in Select Certificate Enrollment Policy, select Proceed without enrollment policy under Custom Request (fig 7):

5758.pastedimage1595964930911v12 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 7: Custom Request -> Proceed without enrollment policy

In the next screen, in Template, select (no template) Legacy key and leave Request format as PKCS #10 (fig 8). CAUTION: the CNG key is incompatible with Dynamics CRM when creating custom certificate requests and should not be used.

8463.pastedimage1595965030926v13 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 8: Custom Request -> legacy key and request format

In Certificate Information, expand Details then click Properties (fig 9):

4544.pastedimage1595965335107v14 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 9: Custom Request -> Details -> Properties

In Certificate Properties -> General tab -> provide values for Friendly name and Description (fig 10):

0525.pastedimage1595965475204v15 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 10: Certificate Properties -> General tab

In Subject tab, select the attributes to customize in the certificate, enter the value of the attribute and click Add (fig 11). In this example, we are generating a wildcard certificate, so make sure that in Subject name you have a CN line (Common Name) with the proper value in the format like *.domain.com: this will be the the wildcard value:

1157.pastedimage1595965765609v16 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 11: Certificate Properties -> Subject tab -> custom attributes

In Extensions tab, expand Key usage and add Digital signature and Key encipherment and then click Apply (fig 12):

7317.pastedimage1595966081115v17 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 12: Certificate Properties -> Extensions tab

In Private Key tab, expand Key Options and select the value 2048 in Key size and check Mark private key exportable. Expand Key type and select Exchange (fig 13):

1565.pastedimage1595966316137v18 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 13: Certificate Properties -> Private Key tab

Click Apply and OK. In the next screen of Certificate Information click Next (fig 14):

4380.pastedimage1595966526586v19 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 14: Certificate Enrollment -> Certificate Information

Provide a location and name to save the certificate request file. In File Format, select Base 64 and then click Finish (fig 15):

3276.pastedimage1595966642710v20 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 15: Certificate Enrollment -> Save certificate request

Once the certificate request file is saved, open it in Notepad, press CTRL+A to select all and copy the content to clipboard (fig 16):

7080.pastedimage1595966793631v21 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 16: Copying certificate request file content

As I told in the beginning, our environment has everything we need to proceed with certificate request and creation. So let’s access the Active Directory Certificate Services via web browser, typing in the address bar http://localhost/certsrv and then clicking in Request a certificate (fig 17):

6165.pastedimage1595967045016v22 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 17: Requesting a certificate

In the next screen, click in advanced certificate request (fig 18):

1057.pastedimage1595967150882v23 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 18: Advanced certificate request

In the next screen, click in Submit a certificate request by using a base-64-encoded CMC or PKCS #10 file (fig 19):

5226.pastedimage1595967217314v24 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 19: Submitting a certificate request…

In Saved Request, paste the content you’ve copied from Notepad in the figure 16. In Certificate Template, select Web Server then click Submit (fig 20):

6204.pastedimage1595968658107v25 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 20: Submit a certificate request

After submitted, select Base 64 encoded and click Download certificate (fig 21):

1106.pastedimage1595968933305v26 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 21: Downloading the certificate file

Provide a name and location to save the certificate file (fig 22):

0083.pastedimage1595969039235v27 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 22: Saving the certificate file

Good! You’ve created the new certificate file self-issued and valid for 2 years.

IMPORTING THE NEW CERTIFICATE

Open Manage Computer Certificates or just CTRL+R and type certlm.msc like you did before. Before import the new certificate you may see the old certificate in place yet. In order to avoid confusion delete it, as it is expired and unable to use anymore (fig 23):

3716.pastedimage1595969566850v29 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 23: Saving the certificate file

Go to Certificate Manager -> Certificates (Local Computer) -> Personal -> Certificates -> All Tasks -> Import… (fig 24):

3872.pastedimage1595969601845v30 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 24: Importing new certificate

You will see a Welcome screen with store location set as Local Machine and unable to change. Click Next. In the next screen, browse and select the certificate file you’ve downloaded and click Next (fig 25):

7318.pastedimage1595969827242v31 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 25: Selecting the certificate file

In the Certificate Store screen, select Place all certificates in the following store and select Personal, then click Next (fig 26). In the next screen, click Finish:

2133.pastedimage1595969904047v32 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 26: Selecting the store

Now you’ll be able to see the new certificate imported (fig 27):

5756.pastedimage1595970092975v33 Replacing an expired certificate in Dynamics 365 CE environment with AD FS part 1

Figure 27: Certificate imported successfully

In the Part 2 we will cover the procedures to configure the new certificate to work properly in Dynamics and AD FS.

Walter Carlin

Senior Customer Engineer – Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – Microsoft Corp.

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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Field

Parameter estimation using LogLikelihood

August 2, 2020 BI News and Info

I’m trying to understand Likelihood methods with parameter estimation in mind. To this end I am trying to construct small examples that I can play with. Let’s say I have some data which I know (or suspect follows the function)
$ $ f(x) = (x + x_0)^{2}$ $
and I want to find out the value of the parameter $ x_{0}$ and the associated error using likelihood methods.

Let us then make some pretend experimental data:

f[x0_, x_] := (x + x0)^2
  
ExperimentData = Table[{x, f[-1.123, x] + RandomVariate[NormalDistribution[0, 0.25]]}, {x, 0, 3, 0.1}];

Then let us construct some test data where I “guess” my parameter $ x_{0}$ . I replace $ x_{0}$ with the parameter $ \theta$ to represent my test value:

TestData = 
Table[
        {\[Theta], Table[{x, f[\[Theta], x]}, {x, 0, 3, 0.1 }]},
        {\[Theta], 0.5, 1.6, 0.1}
     ];

How can I use LogLikelihood to make to make a parameter estimation of $ x_{0}$ . Using my TestData? The motivation is if I cannot construct a pure function, for example if I generate my test data from a numeric intergeneration.

My approach so far is to maximise the log-likelihood of the “residuals”

X = ExperimentData[[All, 2]];
MLLTest = 
  Table[
        \[Theta] = TestData[[i, 1]];        
        F = TestData[[i, 2]][[All, 2]];
        MLL = 
    FindMaximum[
      LogLikelihood[NormalDistribution[\[Mu], \[Sigma]], 
       X - F], {{\[Mu], 0}, {\[Sigma], 0.25}}][[1]];
        {\[Theta], MLL},
        {i , 1, Length[TestData]}
    ];

Then if I plot the Maximum Log-Likelihood as a function of my guess parameter $ \theta$ .

However this is clearly wrong, so I think I misunderstand something about the Log-Likeihood in this context.

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Recent Questions – Mathematica Stack Exchange

Antitrust experts weigh in on breaking up Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

August 2, 2020 Big Data

Gary Reback is perhaps best known as the lawyer who helped convince the U.S. Department of Justice to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the 1990s. He watched the majority of the House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Reback still remembers a Senate hearing that put pressure on the government and led to the filing of United States v. Microsoft Corporation in 1998. That’s why he focused more on lines of questioning this week than on answers from CEOs of companies that have amassed unprecedented wealth and power.

“To me, the core turning point was right at the beginning, basically,” he said, pointing to sharp and detailed questioning in reference to a range of documents obtained in the course of the committee’s assessment.

The question on Wednesday was whether tech giants have grown too powerful, and if you watched the hearings, many members of Congress leave no doubt that they believe the answer is yes. In his opening remarks, for example, U.S. House Antitrust subcommittee chair David Cicilline (D-RI) said tech giants enjoy the power to pick winners and losers in the private market and that consumers have “no escape from surveillance” because there are no alternatives. He added “What’s at stake is whether we let ourselves be governed by private monopolies.”

VentureBeat spoke with Reback and other antitrust experts about what stood out during the hearing and what should happen next. Each favors some form of action or legislation to address the litany of anticompetitive practice allegations that emerged over nearly six hours of testimony.

‘We may have run out of options’

During the hearing, a number of Democratic lawmakers argued that Washington needs to take steps to ensure a fair market. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) insisted that existing antitrust law is fine but needs enforcement. Reback pointed out that convoluted antitrust law makes it difficult to bring cases to court. He said Sensenbrenner was correct in the sense that new legislation might not have been necessary if action had been taken earlier, but he stressed that there isn’t much antitrust enforcement happening today.

Reback blamed the outsized growth of tech giants in part on the Obama administration’s failure to take action. Nobody who understands antitrust law would suggest implementing restrictions cavalierly, Reback said, but regulators have already waited so long that it’s tough to see any viable alternative to reform.

“By not doing anything for so long, we may have run out of options,” Reback said. “The way anticompetitive practices work, if you deal with them quickly, if you deal with them in a rifle shot, you fix it and the companies go on competing and everything’s fine. But if you don’t fix it, then market power builds up and builds up and, in the case we have here, there are no competitors basically for at least three of these companies. They bought their competitors, put them out of business, whatever. And so that then is a problem in terms of how you expect a free market to fix this.”

For context: Apple reported nearly $ 60 billion in profits and became the world’s most valuable company on Friday. On Thursday, Amazon reported revenue up 40% to $ 88.9 billion, while Google’s parent company Alphabet and Facebook reported revenue above analysts’ estimates.

Each of these companies has been accused of anticompetitive practices that harm democracy, consumers, and small businesses. And each enjoys majority control in a number of industry verticals in the U.S. (and much of the world). Areas of dominance include:

Facebook’s control of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram
Apple and Google’s control of mobile app markets
Google’s control in search
Facebook and Google’s control of online advertising
Amazon’s online shopping platform, which records nearly 75% of online sales
Facebook’s and Google’s control of digital advertising, which has hurt journalism industry revenue

Stacy Mitchell is codirector of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit organization that champions distributed, local control over corporate power. She found the committee to be very knowledgeable about how the four companies conduct business and argued that Amazon has a monopolistic hold on small businesses. Last week, Mitchell resigned her position as a fellow at the Yale University Thurmond Arnold Project, a group studying antitrust issues, after finding out that director Fiona Scott Morton is a paid advisor to Amazon and Apple. ILSR also researches Amazon’s anticompetitive practices and advocates breaking the ecommerce giant into separate companies.

Mitchell watched the hearing with interest.

“I found it thrilling, really,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, this is what it looks like when a democratic government actually addresses fundamental issues of power and control and … takes an aggressive stance toward CEOs and really in some ways alters the power dynamics.’”

She said an exchange between Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) and Jeff Bezos during this week’s antitrust hearing demonstrated the need for this kind of intervention. Under questioning, Bezos confirmed that the Buy Box algorithm favors products shipped with Prime and Amazon fulfillment services. Bezos also said Amazon ties the use of its fulfillment services to winning the Buy Box. Mitchell highlighted the obvious pressure this puts on sellers. “This is a pretty serious matter because effectively what Amazon has done is it has compelled sellers to use Amazon’s fulfillment services in order to get the kind of placement on the site that actually results in sales.”

Scanlon also cited a report ILSR released last week that found Amazon pockets about 30% of sales from independent sellers, up from 19% five years ago. The fee brought in nearly twice the revenue Amazon Web Services did in 2019, and Mitchell said Amazon uses the money to subsidize other company divisions and dominate new industry verticals. That’s part of why ILSR supports breaking major Amazon divisions into individual companies.

“Much of its power, and abuse of its power, comes from it being able to leverage one part of its operation to compel someone to do something in another part of its operation, like we were talking about with the fulfillment. A lot of the abuse lives in the in-between, and I think that’s a pretty powerful case,” Mitchell said.

In testimony Wednesday, Cicilline noted that Amazon internally refers to third-party sellers as “internal competitors.”

Bezos said Wednesday that he “cannot guarantee” Amazon employees have not used data about independent sellers to create the company’s own products, which would be a violation of company policy. Lawmakers argued this practice undercuts small businesses that have no option but to sell their goods on Amazon’s online marketplace. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Amazon employees used data about individual sellers to create competing Amazon products.

Anticompetitive behavior accusations have also been lobbed at Amazon by startups who participated in its Alexa Fund, including Nucleus, which says Amazon stole its smart display and home intercom concept. AI startup DefinedCrowd and more than two dozen startup founders detailed similar practices last week. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) referred to this practice as an “innovation kill zone” that puts fear into smaller businesses and makes fair competition impossible.

During the hearing, Apple, Facebook, and Google were also accused of stealing ideas from other companies. (Each of the tech giants has growing investment fund arms.)

“Three of the companies [Amazon, Facebook, and Google] basically have the same set of accusations against them, which is that competitors come on your platform, you take their information, you preference your own results, compete against them, drive them out of business, or buy them cheap,” Reback said.

Big tech too big for free markets?

Both Mitchell and Reback repeatedly emphasized the contrast between the tone of the hearing Wednesday and congressional hearings held in 2018 following the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Mark Zuckerberg. In that earlier hearing, members of Congress demonstrated an inability to understand technology or how Facebook applications work.

What seemed to be missing back then, Mitchell and Reback said — but could be seen in exchanges Wednesday — was the ability to ask followup questions. Without a grasp of how a company operates, or its products and services, any line of questioning will yield little beyond the initial question. CEOs can then run out a portion of the five minutes allotted to each elected official by explaining technology or offering platitudes about how much their companies value things like privacy.

Mitchell said the recent antitrust hearing had a different tone. “This clearly was proceeding as part of an investigation … and sort of had the feel of ‘We’ve gathered all this data or information, and the process is that we’re going to give you a chance to answer for it,’” Mitchell said.

Sally Hubbard is director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute and testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust at its first big tech hearing in June 2019.

Last summer, Hubbard testified that Facebook and Google use their digital advertising monopoly in multiple ways to disadvantage independent journalism and newspapers that are deemed competitors. Both companies directly compete with the free press for attention while controlling the main traffic highways of search engines, smartphones, and social media. She said the hearing Wednesday in part restored her faith in democracy and institutions and gave her hope that meaningful action is possible.

“To me, it was the most impressive hearing that I can remember seeing in my lifetime of the members of Congress being so highly prepared, so in-the-know about complex issues, and willing to take on the most powerful companies in America and the world,” Hubbard said.

Break up big tech?

Hubbard said she could see the rollback of acquisitions like Google’s AdMob and DoubleClick or Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as part of potential solutions, but she pointed out that such measures aren’t the only option. She wants lawsuits filed when anticompetitive behavior like the kind described in the hearing occurs, ongoing monitoring of exclusionary conduct, and scrutiny of mergers, especially acquisitions of small companies that may be viewed as a competitive threat. She also recommended passing legislation to support Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) suggestion that you can own a platform or sell goods on it, but you can’t do both.

Reback agrees.

“If we can’t get antitrust enforcement on [these companies] … we need legislation like the type Elizabeth Warren is suggesting, where if you own the platform then you can’t own anything on it. That would be a big change, but if there’s no way to police the [current] situation so that competitors get a fair shot and you don’t run everybody else out of business by using their data against them, if there’s no way to police that, then you don’t have any alternative but new legislation,” he said.

On the topic of the digital ad market’s negative impact on journalism in the United States, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) talked Wednesday with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai about Google’s AdExchange operating in a way that resembles insider trading, adding in the context of independent news outlets.

There’s nothing revolutionary about stopping a single company from controlling both sides of the market to prevent adverse outcomes that resemble insider trading, and it’s past time to bring the same concepts to the digital economy, Hubbard said.

“The point that I like to make a lot is that the online world somehow has avoided regulation, but it’s not the cute little internet of the ’90s anymore. The online world has basically eaten the offline world, so if we don’t have any rules or regulations governing the online world or fair competition, then you don’t have them in the offline world either,” Hubbard said, adding that the hearing will add momentum to other antimonopoly efforts and will help educate the public.

Mitchell concluded that the hearing itself was just one step in the process and the committee’s final report will convey the actual substance of the debate.

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