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Keep your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Data Secure – Azure AD Best Practices After MFA – Part 1

April 4, 2021 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a database packed with invaluable information on your business. It deserves the best protection you can provide. From prospects, customers and service issues, purchasing, and so much more, your business can’t function without this information. A security breach that puts this data in the wrong hands would be nothing short of devastation.

While your everyday CRM users are probably focused on serving or selling, they’re probably not thinking about their every action as it relates to security. Setting up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with Microsoft Azure AD is a great first step, but there are other best practices that can maximize your organization’s data security in the cloud while still providing an end user experience that promotes productivity.

Eric Raff, Cloud Practice Director at JourneyTEAM, in a presentation hosted by buckleyPLANET to the Utah SharePoint User Group (UTSPUG) and Microsoft User Group (MUGUT), shared the top 10 security tips and considerations after you’ve rolled out MFA in your Microsoft Dynamics 365 tenant. Raff is a 25+ year expert in Identity and Access Management in Microsoft 365 and Windows Azure.

This is a two-part blog. In Part 1 we cover first five of the top 10 Microsoft Dynamics 365, Windows Azure and Microsoft Cloud Services security tips after you’ve deployed MFA. Many of the security steps involved with these best practices require that you have Azure ADP2 or the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S) mobility management and security platform.

1. Azure Portal Settings: Two Suggestions

Log into portal.azure.com and check on these two settings:

Go to “User Settings.” You should restrict access to the Azure AD Administration Portal — to do this, make sure this is set to “Yes.”
Also, check out the name of your tenant. This will show up whenever there is a Microsoft OneDrive sync integration. Make sure it is relevant!

2. Set Restrictions on Guest User Access

Do you know how many guest accounts you have in your tenant? If you don’t know the exact number, you should at least be aware of where you can find out. The default External Sharing Setting is “Allow guests to share items they don’t own,” meaning sharing content with anyone can be done anonymously, including guests. Your guests can also invite other guests. This is an ideal area to create some restrictions. Thankfully, “Restrict access to the Azure AD Administration portal” is “no” by default!

The Identity Governance solution in Azure AD P2 can set restrictions on guest accounts with Access Packages and Access Reviews.

Access Package

In the Azure AD Portal, click “Identity Governance” > “Settings.”
Select what happens when an external user that was added to your directory through an Access Package request loses their last assignment under “Manage the lifecycle of external users.”
This allows you to block external users from signing into the directory and will remove an external user after a set number of days. This only works if the guest account came in via an Access Package.

Access Review Policy

From the Azure AD Portal, click “Identity Governance” > “Access Review.”
To create a new Access Review:
Select what to review by “Teams + Groups,” or “Applications.”
Select a specific group, e.g., “All Guests.”
Select a review scope: “Guest Users Only.”
Adjust the settings to your preference. You can set up a policy that ensures guest access only to those that truly need it. Your policy could put the responsibility on the users to review their access. If they don’t respond to a review request in a specific amount of time, they may be blocked from signing in for 30 days, then later removed from the tenant.
At myaccount.microsoft.com you can self-manage your guest account in other directories as well as completely delete guest accounts you don’t use. Go to “Organizations” and click “Leave Organization.”

3. Manage Consent and Permissions for Enterprise Apps

Cyber criminals now use fake enterprise apps to gain access by convincing you into consent. New functionality in the Azure Active Directory Microsoft 365 environment allows for greater consent governance.

Head to “Enterprise Apps” > “Consent and Permissions.”
Here you can manage user consent and permissions from verified publishers.
Once an app is a verified publisher and you set up the permissions, users will only be able to consent to those actions.

Next, check the user settings under “Admin consent requests (Preview).”

Change “Users can request admin consent to apps they are unable to consent to,” to “Yes.”
Click “Select users to review admin consent requests” and select an appropriate Admin (should be Global, Application or Cloud Application Administrator) who will be notified and make the decision to allow or reject consent.

A last note, if you as a Global or an Enterprise App Administrator ever see a “permissions requested” box with the option to consent on behalf of your organization, proceed with caution. You will be consenting for everyone in the tenant and should be sure about this decision.

4. Block Legacy Protocols

Hundreds of spray attacks can happen every hour that target legacy protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, POP, Active Sync, Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP), and older Office clients, such as 2010 and 2013.

Identify who is using legacy protocols in the environment:

Log into the Azure AD portal (portal.azure.com).
Click to “Sign-Ins” > “Monitoring.”
Make sure you have the new experience turned on.
Click “Add Filter” > “Client App” > “Apply.”
You can then review the client apps and see a list of Legacy Authentication as well as review the successful and failed attempts.

Now you have what you need to build a Conditional Access (CA) policy to block access.

Navigate to “Security” > “Conditional Access” > “Classic Policies.”
Here you can create a new policy that blocks legacy protocols. Be sure it targets all users (except your “break glass” account).
Go to “Conditions” > “Client Apps” > “Legacy Authentical Clients.
Set access controls to “Block Access”

5. Check Your Security Defaults

Before following this tip, be aware that using Security Defaults is only suggested if:

No Conditional Access policies are enabled in your environment.
You don’t need fine-grained control over access and authentication.

Your organization is relatively small.

Microsoft’s Security Defaults are basic recommendations for identify security mechanisms and provide a great baseline of features, but you should still consult an expert to confirm if Security Defaults is the right choice for your organization.

To turn on defaults:

From the Azure AD Portal, go to “Properties.”
Make sure that Security Defaults is set to “Yes.”

What Security Defaults activate or enforce:

Requires all users to register for Azure MFA.
Administrators must perform MFA.
Blocks legacy authentication protocols.
Users must perform MFA when risky activity is detected.

Access to the Azure Portal and other “privileged” activities will be protected.

Be sure that “Users can use the combined security information registration experience” is turned on.

Read the full article.

Click here to continue and read up on tips 6 – 10!

NEXT STEPS:

Join a free consultation and ask all the questions you wish.
Plan your Deep Dive meeting – Get your organization’s Customized Solutions presentation.

Article by:Jenn Alba – Marketing Manager – 801.938.7816

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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What the swarm of new Azure announcements mean

March 5, 2021 Big Data

Join Transform 2021 for the most important themes in enterprise AI & Data. Learn more.

This week at Microsoft Ignite, a number of new developments to Azure were in focus. While there were dozens of updates to the world’s second-largest public cloud, data was once again in the spotlight. The company made a series of announcements to enable users to extract more value from the exponential increase in data.

Satya Nadella, in his Ignite keynote, provided a new visionary direction, or at least a new way of expressing the company’s cloud endeavors. These newly minted focuses included:

Ubiquitous and decentralized computing
Sovereign data and ambient intelligence
Empowered creators and communities everywhere
Economic opportunity for the global workforce
Trust by design

In short, the Microsoft cloud is evolving to further embrace edge, privacy, security, AI, and developers (both coders and no coders), and to serve as an engine of job creation.

On the surface, this shift appears subtle. In reality, reaching these ambitions requires a seamless edge-to-cloud toolbox that can bring data to life at an almost unbounded scale. Microsoft took steps to meet these needs with key announcements around Azure Arc, Azure Synapse, Azure Percept, Azure Purview, and Azure Cognitive Search, among a slew of other announcements.

Azure Percept. Azure Percept is designed to enable customers to use pre-built Azure AI models for object detection, shelf analytics, anomaly detection, keyword spotting, and other functions at the edge. The Percept platform will come as a fully contained development kit with the Azure Percept Vision intelligent camera, a carrier board and mounting tools. As edge continues to become the preeminent location for data creation, it will be critical for organizations to be able to development and scale edge applications.

Azure Arc. For those unfamiliar, Azure Arc is a suite of technologies designed to simplify management, expedite app development, and deliver consistent Azure services across multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. This week at Ignite, Microsoft announced that it is updating Arc to run apps across on-premises data centers, multiple clouds (including AWS), and edge devices. A big piece of news was that Azure Arc-enabled machine learning is now in preview. This enhancement fills a significant gap that will allow users to deploy Azure ML to engage any Kubernetes cluster for model training, no matter where the data is located.

Azure Synapse. Synapse is an analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics through a unified experience that enables ingestion, exploration, preparation, management, and data service to meet enterprise ML and BI requirements. Underneath the Synapse umbrella, the company rolled out a few new vital data and migration services.

Synapse Link. Microsoft announced that Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB and v4.0 server support in Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB are both generally available. While those services are a mouthful, they serve an essential purpose by breaking down an important barrier between OLTP (online transactional processing) and OLAP (online analytical processing) through linking Azure Cosmos DB to Azure Synapse. In simpler terms, this tool enables cloud-native and near-real-time analytics over the NoSQL data in Azure Cosmos DB, including support for MongoDB.

Synapse Pathway. Pathway is a tool that designed to speed up migration from legacy and/or cloud data warehouses to Azure Synapse Analytics. It scans source systems and automatically translates existing scripts into TSQL rapidly (up to hundreds of thousands of lines per minute). Microsoft sees this tool as an enabler to support and simplify customer migrations from Snowflake, Netezza, AWS Redshift, Teradata, SQL Server, and Google BigQuery.

Azure Cognitive Search. Cognitive Search is an AI-powered cloud search service for mobile and web app development. One of the capabilities I found to be important was that Azure Cognitive Search includes semantic search capabilities so that organizations can deliver search results based on user intent — such as natural language and concept matching — instead of just entered keywords. I believe we’ll see much more of this in the future.

Azure Migrate. Just like it sounds, Azure Migrate is a set of tools and capabilities to simplify the migration of workloads from either on-premises or other clouds to Azure. At Ignite, Microsoft announced new capabilities in preview to make Azure SQL migrations easier. With these updates, users can discover and assess SQL servers and databases for Azure migration from within Azure Migrate. An update that caught my attention was a new app containerization tool with support for ASP.NET and Java web apps to help customers migrate apps to containers running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Also of interest is a new Azure PowerShell module that supports the Server Migration tool’s agentless method to make migrating VMware VMs to Azure less complicated.

Azure Purview. Purview is a less highlighted but essential unified data governance service that helps organizations manage and govern on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data to build an up-to-date mapping of the enterprise data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage. As we continue to hear about the importance of compliance and governance, these capabilities will see increasing demand. Newly announced capabilities are now in preview; they include automatic scanning and data classification in Amazon AWS Simple Storage Services (S3), SAP ECC, SAP S4/HANA, and Oracle Database. These services will allow user organizations to scan and classify data in numerous on-premises data stores with the Azure Purview Data Map to meet data governance requirements more efficiently.

What it all means

As expected, the announcements around Azure were fast and furious at this year’s Ignite virtual event. It felt similar to AWS re:Invent, with the rapid-fire announcements bouncing between infrastructure, data, edge/IoT, platform, services, and software — which makes sense given the two companies’ rivalry for leadership in the cloud space. Microsoft’s Ignite announcements successfully addressed key gaps in the company’s capabilities while directionally putting the company on course with Nadella’s evolving vision for the Microsoft Cloud. The key, as always, is tying together the technical complexities, with the desired business outcomes — and the company seemed to accomplish this.

These announcements show that Microsoft is continuing to provide enterprise customers with the complete set of capabilities they need. That means: more hybrid, more multi-cloud, more data-dependent, and of course, doing all of this with increased velocity and reduced friction. What is apparent from the announcements is that Microsoft is leaning hard into the proliferation of data and its complexities to expand its services and make it easier for enterprises to build, migrate, and scale around Azure. It is also increasingly apparent, to Azure and virtually all the cloud providers, that data and workload placement will continue to be transient. Having tools and services to support data regardless of its residency will be critical to growth.

It’s also important to note that the competition will continue to be significant for Microsoft. Most notably from AWS, which has an expansive set of tools for edge, migration, governance, hybrid/multi, and AI/ML. This is the focal point of the competitive cloud landscape. Other cloud vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Google, all have strong growth ambitions and continue to mature services and instances to appeal to a growing demand for cloud and manage the unparalleled pace and volume of data creation.

Daniel Newman is the principal analyst at Futurum Research, which provides research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to high-tech companies in the tech and digital industries.

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How Microsoft Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365 CRM Work Together to Improve Service Responsiveness

February 24, 2021 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

An upset customer calls. My system is down! This feature doesn’t work! While many issues are open and closed cases (or are the result of user error), there may be bugs that need to be addressed by the development team. Having a centralized place for your customer information is just one CRM function. Your CRM can also reduce inefficiencies in application support and management, especially when effectively connected to other systems. Integrating applications such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM with Azure DevOps services amplifies case management capabilities for your development and support teams to escalate support cases and create work items to get problems resolved faster.

Outside of tech support’s ability to keep their cool when faced with high-stress situations, they must also act quickly. The more complicated the process and more systems involved, the longer it takes to get the ticket assigned to the right person or team. To help meet troubleshooting service goals, you need an open flow of communication right back to the source — the software development team.

Azure DevOps covers every step in the application lifecycle from planning, collaborating and testing, deployment, and beyond. If your business develops and/or hosts web or mobile apps, Azure DevOps services, integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM, can provide the full visibility across projects that your software development and tech support teams need.

Azure DevOps Services

Azure is a flexible public cloud computing platform that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) pipelines enable your software development teams to get a constant flow of updates — new features, configurations, bug fixes — into production and delivered to your customers quickly and safely.

Microsoft Azure DevOps services allow you to build, test, deploy and manage applications and services. Your software development teams can use all these DevOps services together, or mix and match to use only what you need as part of your existing workflows.

Depositphotos 120503924 xl 2015 625x417 How Microsoft Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365 CRM Work Together to Improve Service Responsiveness — Business meeting between four upper management board members in the new modern office conference room with technology integrated in the form of an electronic tablet.

Azure Boards: Agile tools, Kanban boards, team dashboards, built-in scrum boards and more — Azure Boards is where your team will plan, track and discuss projects at every stage in the lifecycle. Backlog tracking and powerful analytics give insight into project status. With visualizations and tracking tools, your team can easily track any code changes that are linked directly to work items.

Azure Pipelines: Azure Pipelines comprise the whole end-to-end story of how you write code and get it into production. An integrated set of features allow you to automatically build and test your web, desktop and mobile applications and deploy to any cloud or on-premises. It works with just about any language or project type including Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android and iOS apps, as well as support for YAML so you can have pipelines versioned with your code.

Azure Test Plans: A browser-based test management solution, Azure Test Plans provides all the capabilities to test with confidence before deployment. This includes planned manual testing, user acceptance testing, exploratory testing, and gathering feedback from stakeholders. You can test across desktop and web apps, as well as capture data as tests are executed.

Azure Artifacts: Package management with Azure Artifacts simplifies complex build jobs and allows your teams to create and share Maven, npm, NuGet, and Python package feeds. Artifacts provide a place to push your packages so that they can be consumed by the rest of the team or partners. Sources can be public and private.

Azure Repos: This is where your source control is stored that gets published to the artifacts. Unlimited, cloud-hosted Git repos allow developers to collaborate on code.

Depositphotos 218890680 xl 2015 625x417 How Microsoft Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365 CRM Work Together to Improve Service Responsiveness — Working together in office. Business concept with double exposure effects

Before deploying Azure DevOps tools for your software development teams, it is wise to pre-plan how you will support and operate services in the cloud. To learn more about some of the key questions to ask before moving forward, read the full blog.

Get Started with JourneyTEAM

JourneyTEAM was recently awarded Microsoft US Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communications) and the Microsoft Eagle Crystal trophy as a top 5 partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central software implementations. Let JourneyTEAM show you the benefits of integrating Dynamics 365 and Azure DevOps Services. We can provide demos and full custom introductions. Contact JourneyTEAM today!

Article by: Dave Bollard – Chief Marketing Officer

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Azure Availability Blog Series, Part 2 of 3

January 28, 2021 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In Part 1 of this three-part blog series, we discussed Azure availability of a single Virtual Machine (VM). This post will expand on the topic by reviewing Availability Sets and how they can provide an increased Service Level Agreement (SLA) without the need for Premium disks. Before diving in to the why and how, we need to clearly identify what is needed, and that begins with understanding how…

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Build and Release Pipelines for Azure Resources (Logic Apps and Azure Functions)

January 16, 2021 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Today’s blogpost is lengthy but should serve as a fantastic resource going forward. We will explore Build and Release Pipelines for Azure Resources as follows: Introduction Creating a build pipeline Creating a release pipeline Task Groups Library Logic App parameters Enjoy (and bookmark!) Azure Pipelines is a fully featured continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) service.

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Azure Availability Blog Series: Part 1 of 3

December 18, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The move from on-premises to Azure brings its fair share of paradigm shifts to traditional architecture design, even if adoption of Azure services is not in the plan. Virtual Machine (VM) availability, or uptime, is one area that can cause a lot of issues if not planned for ahead of time, leading to rework and possible downtime. In this three-part blog series, we will look at why availability…

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Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2

December 7, 2020 CRM News and Info

Let’s be honest. The world we live in is driven by data. Presentation and efficiency matter. Using the right CRM with the best visuals and security will not only increase your revenue, but guarantee the satisfaction of your valued customers.

JourneyTEAM, a Microsoft Gold Partner, will help you get your organization ahead of this data-driven game. Microsoft announced updates with safer data storage, and smarter, faster analysis platforms. Introducing Azure Synapse Analytics and the Next Generation Power BI Premium! Below you’ll discover why you need not just one, but both in supporting your CRM.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Azure analytics and Power BI are an unparalleled combination. This duo is the optimum performance accelerator. You can reap the benefits of increased capabilities, and incredible cost-management. Using Azure and Power BI together allows you to extract maximum data and technology value for your organization. Just like it is important that your customers trust you, you need to use your data productively with Microsoft technology you trust. Read more to learn about each product. Then, see how they make the best team.

The Basics of Azure

Microsoft’s most popular cloud computing service is known as Azure. Azure gives you access to a limitless directory of:

Databases
Backups
Virtual machines
File storage
Services for web and mobile apps

The Update: Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse Analytics is a modern, cloud based data warehouse. Now, you can build, deploy and run edge and hybrid computing apps. This developmental environment allows you to run these apps consistently across your IT ecosystem. It is also flexible regardless of the workload. Synapse Analytics offers benefits in performance, protection and price.

Pristine Performance – Synapse is limitless. The service unites enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics seamlessly. You can easily learn, prep, manage, and serve data. Azure Synapse has an incredible capacity so that you can, on your own terms, query data. You have the option to use either provisioned or serverless resources.
Protection – Azure’s analytics are services you can trust. Expect nothing less than sound protection when it comes to data governance, compliance, and security. You can find comfort in knowing your most valuable business data is protected by the most advanced security and privacy features in the market.
Cost Management – If transformative insights are what youre looking for, Azure Synapse is what you need. With analytics that produce a significant 271-percent RO, it’s the price performance undisputed leader. This means it is 94 percent cheaper and up to 14 times faster.

The Basics of Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI is an easy-to-use scalable platform. This business analytics service helps you gain more profound data insight. Data analyzing is an experience to enjoy. Get impressive visual data charts, dashboards, and reports. Personalize your reports with your brand and KPIs. Connect to, and create unforgettable presentations. Everyone in your organization will love Power BI’s stunning visualizations.

The Update: Power BI Premium Gen 2

With new Premium capacities, you can have access to all of the features of Power BI. Power BI Premium Gen 2 and its improved architecture provides you with these benefits:

You get free distribution and even licensing for on-premise usage. Get Premium capabilities for Non-Premium owners.
Analytics operations run up to 16X faster with enhanced performance – any capacity size and any time. The top speed operations will not slow down.
Fewer memory restrictions means you don’t have to track refresh schedule spacing. Schedule refreshes and report interaction have complete separation.
Autoscale automatically adds 1 v-core at a time for 24-hr time periods. When idle time is detected, the v-core is removed.
New utilization analysis, budget planning, and metrics are reimagined. With built-in reporting you have clearly visible chargebacks and need to upgrade.

How They Work Together

Azure Synapse and Premium Gen 2 work in perfect harmony. The collaborative process is as follows: Synapse determines materialized views from collected query patterns. Then, Power BI creates the materialized views, and directs the queries. You are able to find solutions for reporting, advanced analytics, and real-time analytics with little effort exerted on your part. Let Azure Synapse and Premium Gen 2 help you business run even smoother.

Get Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI Premium Gen 2 with JourneyTEAM

JourneyTEAM will show you how to get the most out of these services along with your CRM. We’re a Microsoft Gold Partner with knowledge and experience with Microsoft products. Allow us to help you make this transition. Contact us today!

Click HERE to see the full article

JourneyTEAM was recently awarded Microsoft US Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communications) and the Microsoft Eagle Crystal trophy as a top 5 partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central software implementations. Our team has a proven track record with successful Microsoft technology implementations and wants you to get the most out of your organization’s intranet system. Consolidating your communication, collaboration, and productivity platform with Microsoft will save time and money for your organization. Contact JourneyTEAM today!

Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Tagging In Azure DevOps

November 8, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

What is Tagging? Tagging has long been a term used to describe a kind of graffiti to mark public spaces. In Azure DevOps (or ADO), tagging is similar because it can serve as a colorful label for work items to visually distinguish one epic from another, isolate a critical user story from hundreds of others, and so on. The big difference here is that tags in ADO should be encouraged (though…

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PowerObjects- Bringing Focus to Dynamics CRM

Top 5 reasons why Attach2Dynamics is preferred document management app within Dynamics 365 CRM for SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob!

October 17, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

xa2d blog crm 625x357.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Pfp8d4nhnQ Top 5 reasons why Attach2Dynamics is preferred document management app within Dynamics 365 CRM for SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blob!

One of the important roles of Dynamics 365 CRM is to provide structured document management functionalities. As documents in Dynamics 365 CRM are stored as attachments or Note records, managing large number of documents becomes quite complex. And the higher the size of the database, the costlier it gets for buying more storage. Hence, a solution that provides seamless integration of Dynamics 365 CRM with cloud storage of your choice for document management becomes a necessity.

Attach2Dynamics, as the name implies, is a Microsoft Preferred Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps solution that provides efficient management of Dynamics 365 CRM attachments and documents by integrating CRM to multiple cloud storages viz. SharePoint, Dropbox, and Azure Blog Storage. It has a user-friendly interface that lets you perform common file management actions like upload, download, browse, and delete documents within Dynamics 365 CRM without having to navigate to the configured cloud storage. Further, you can also send documents as emails and also generate sharable links of the files and folders for emailing. And all this from within Dynamics 365 CRM!

To better understand how this ‘out-of-the-box’ solution Attach2Dynamics will help you increase your efficiency in Dynamics 365 CRM, let us go through some of the prominent features of this productivity app.

1. Native Integration with multiple Cloud Storages

Attach2Dynamics offers native integration between Dynamics 365 CRM and cloud storage like SharePoint, Dropbox, and Azure Blog Storage. This helps more space for document management in Dynamics 365 CRM. You can also create multiple instances of the same cloud storage with different names to store and bifurcate your data on the cloud as per your convenience.

2. File management with a user-friendly interface

With the help of eye-pleasing easy to use interface of Attach2Dynamics, you can drag and drop multiple files and folders from Dynamics 365 CRM to configured cloud storages. You can also view all the copied/moved files and folders in a single glance with the help of Attach2Dynamics. File management actions like uploading, downloading, browsing, deleting documents, configuring notes, renaming files and folders and creating new folders are as simple as if you working on Windows Explorer.

3. Email Link or Attachment

With the help of Attach2Dynamics, you can also send files, folders and sales literature attachments in an email. It will also allow you to create anonymous file links for sharing. You can also set default from, to, cc and bcc for an email using the ‘Email configuration’ feature of Attach2Dynamics.

4. Bulk Migration Job

Attach2Dynamics will help you in copying/moving History Notes, Email and Sales Literature Attachments from Dynamics 365 CRM to SharePoint, Dropbox and Azure Blog Storage using this feature. Also, you can see the status of migrating attachments. For example, if you want to move emails of the last ‘X’ days from Dynamics 365 CRM to one of the configured cloud storages in bulk, you can do so easily with the help of this feature of Attach2Dynamics.

5. Security Templates

Along with cloud integration and easy file management, Attach2Dynamics also enables managers to set permissions for all the user actions in configured cloud storage on the selected files and folders. User actions like Upload, Download, Email, Copy Link, Delete, etc. can be controlled using security templates.

With all these features, Attach2Dynamics is a must-have solution for your Dynamics 365 CRM environment. Also, check out our smart app SharePoint Security Sync that synchronizes Dynamics 365 CRM and SharePoint security model with a newly added feature to add eSign in your documents using DocuSign.

Don’t let your Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps clutter! Download Attach2Dynamics today and increase the efficiency of your CRM environment as well as that of your team.

You can get your free trial of 15 days from our website or Microsoft AppSource.

Drop us a mail at crm@inogic.com for a 1:1 demo or any of your unique document management requirements.

Stay safe and work smart!

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Microsoft explains how it improved automatic image captioning in Azure Cognitive Services

October 14, 2020 Big Data

Microsoft today launched a new computer vision service it claims can generate image captions that are, in some cases, more accurate than human-written descriptions. The company calls the service, which is available as part of Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision, a “significant research breakthrough” and an example of its commitment to accessible AI.

Automatic image captioning has a number of broad use cases, first and foremost assisting users with disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, the number of people of all ages who are visually impaired is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.

Accuracy becomes all the more critical when vision-impaired users rely on captioning for daily tasks. According to a study by researchers at Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Microsoft, blind people tend to place a lot of trust in automatically generated captions, building unsupported narratives to reconcile differences between image contexts and incongruent captions. When asked to identify captions of images on Twitter that might be incorrect, even blind users who describe themselves as being skilled and consistent about double-checking tended to trust automatic captions, the researchers found — no matter whether the captions make sense.

In early 2017, Microsoft updated Office 365 apps like Word and PowerPoint with automatic image captioning, drawing on Cognitive Services Computer Vision. (Cognitive Services is a cloud-based suite of APIs and SDKs available to developers building AI and machine learning capabilities into their apps and services.) More recently, the company launched Seeing AI, a mobile app designed to help low- and impaired-vision users navigate the world around them.

But while Office 365 and Seeing AI could automatically caption images better than some AI baselines, Microsoft engineers pursued new techniques to improve them further.

The engineers describe their technique in a September paper published on Arxiv.org, a server for preprints. Called visual vocabulary pretraining, or VIVO for short, it leverages large amounts of photos without annotations to learn a vocabulary for image captioning. (Typically, training automatic captioning models requires corpora that contain annotations provided by human labelers.) The vocabulary comprises an embedding space where features of image regions and tags of semantically similar objects are mapped into vectors that are close to each other (e.g., “person” and “man,” “accordion” and “instrument”). Once the visual vocabulary is established, an automatic image captioning model can be fine-tuned using a data set of images and corresponding captions.

Microsoft explains how it improved automatic image captioning in Azure Cognitive Services

Above: Image captioning results on nocaps. B: A baseline without adding VIVO pretraining. V: With VIVO
pretraining. Red text represents novel objects. The bounding box color is brighter when the similarity is higher.

Image Credit: Microsoft

During the model training process, one or more tags are randomly masked and the model is asked to predict the masked tags conditioned on the image region features and the other tags. Even though the dataset used for fine-tuning only covers a small subset of the most common objects in the visual vocabulary, the VIVO-pretrained model can generalize to any images that depict similar scenes (e.g., people sitting on a couch together). In fact, it’s one of the few caption-generating pretraining methods that doesn’t rely on caption annotations, enabling it to work with existing image data sets developed for image tagging and object detection tasks.

Microsoft benchmarked the VIVO-pretrained model on nocaps, a test designed to encourage the development of image captioning models that can learn visual concepts from alternative sources of data. Evaluated on tens of thousands of human-generated captions describing thousands of images, the model achieved state-of-the-art results with substantial improvement for objects it hadn’t seen before. Moreover, on a metric called consensus-based image description evaluation (CIDEr), which aims to measure the similarity of a generated caption against ground truth sentences written by humans, the model surpassed human performance by a statistically significant margin.

In addition to the latest version of the Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, Microsoft says the model is now included in Seeing AI. It will roll out to Microsoft products and services including Word and Outlook, for Windows and Mac, and PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, and web later this year, replacing an image captioning model that’s been used since 2015.

“Given the benefit of this, we’ve worked to accelerate the integration of this research breakthrough and get it into production and Azure AI,” Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of AI platform at Microsoft, told VentureBeat via phone earlier this week. “It’s one thing to have a breakthrough of something that works in a delicate setup in the lab. But to have something that [in a few months] we can have pressure-tested and operating at scale and part of Azure … showcases how we’re able to go from the research breakthrough to getting things out into production.”

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