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Tag Archives: Better

Better CRM with Your Microsoft SharePoint Intranet

January 6, 2021   CRM News and Info

Having a better intranet is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. Clear communication, secure content storage, and advanced knowledge management are only a few of the critical elements to your intranet. There is a big advantage that is important for you: Microsoft’s Sharepoint Intranet can improve your organization and your CRM system. 

 Your Sharepoint Intranet 

Sharepoint Intranet used by companies for managing, organizing, and customizing their internal communication. It features a team collaboration that encourages greater effectiveness all-around.

Appearance: At the most basic level, your intranet theme is customized to your organization’s specifications. The interface has the colors, branding and layout you choose.

Name: You choose the name of your intranet. Choosing something meaningful can have a significant and lasting impact. One of our clients, an essential oil company, Young Living, named their intranet the “Source.”  How Young Living sources their oils are an integral part of who they are, so the term “source” has layers of meaning. Their intranet symbolizes the place everyone goes for authorized, quality, and reliable information. It is a place where real and effective communication and collaboration happens.

Templates: Also included at the basic level are templates. Slide design templates include the relationship to the Hub Site and an update of the custom theme.

Menu: All intranet sites are built with related mega menu navigation.

Webparts: New out of the box webparts and other related webparts are deployed and configured across the intranet.

Your Involvement: Thorough communication is ongoing between JourneyTEAM and your organization during the planning and installation stages. JourneyTEAM provides training hours to clients during or after installation to ensure maximum usability.

As you discover your intranet’s capabilities and compare them to your organization’s needs, you may find additional webparts that will make all the difference. Many of our clients request these, and more:

  • Employee Recognition
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Polls & Quizzes
  • Simple Charts
  • Quick Links
  • Timeline
  • My Sites/Teams

A Masterful Employee Directory

JourneyTEAM has developed its own world-renowned Employee Directory webpart. Clients who see how it works often ask for the invaluable tool to be implemented for them. Ask one of our SharePoint experts to demonstrate how it would work for you.

CRM and Sharepoint Integration

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) with your SharePoint Intranet means you have a fluid working system both internally and externally. Quality CRM ensures the smooth execution of every customer interaction.  You understand the value of your CRM system, so internal efficiency through your intranet system makes sense. Your SharePoint intranet helps your organization organize and provide access to everyone exactly as you intend. Your Microsoft software connects to achieve a cohesive strategy across the board.

Click here to see the full article

JourneyTEAM’s SharePoint Professionals

Our SharePoint team deploys Microsoft technologies to help organizations share information and collaborate. SharePoint Teams and the supporting cast of functionality and technologies from Microsoft are included. We help you with the information-sharing tools Microsoft has available through products such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and the integrations that those tools have within Planner within Office 365 as a whole within Power Automate and Power BI, et cetera. For many clients, we do everything from establishing information architecture, implementing corporate internets, to helping organizations learn how to structure and secure their content in a way that drives business efficiencies.

You may be looking to build a cloud intranet for the first time. Perhaps your organization is just opting for an improved or upgraded working intranet. Even better, those looking to customize their intranet per their needs will find satisfaction with Microsoft SharePoint. Equip your company with a common knowledge-sharing platform that aids employees in collaborating across all projects. Everyone can securely find what they need, in the right place, at the right time with our experienced professional team.

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. Consolidating your communication, collaboration, and productivity platform with Microsoft will provide the best support possible for your sales, marketing, and other teams, wherever they work. Let us show you how. Contact JourneyTEAM today!


177x247x2020 08 24 15 32 44.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.GxqNPDY2JL Better CRM with Your Microsoft SharePoint IntranetArticle by: Dave Bollard – Chief Marketing Officer  | 801-436-6636

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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7 Ways The Right CRM Helps You Serve Your Banking Customers Better

December 13, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The old adage about a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush rings true when you’re talking about nurturing existing client relationships. It’s less expensive and more efficient to cultivate the customers you already have while your marketing department helps you find new ones. This is especially true for retail banks and lenders.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software was designed to keep track of your customers’ data and provide insight and give direction for serving them better.

Building better relationships with your customers will increase their business with you and turn them into a strong and loyal customer base who will be your best advocates for new customers.

Here are some of the benefits your bank can expect from using a comprehensive CRM system like Crowe CRM for Banking on Microsoft Dynamics 365 to improve your customer service:

  1. Efficient data management and reporting

Gone are the days of Rolodex and sticky notes to manage your customer data. A modern CRM keeps your customer information at hand in a convenient, usable form. You can easily share customer data with other team members or even different branches when the need arises.

With all your communication and reporting tools in one solution, your workflow processes will be more efficient, and you’ll improve the quality of customer care.

  1. A complete view of all customer activity across departments

Team members from customer-facing reps to executive management will have access to complete customer data. Track communications and avoid duplicate effort or inappropriate offerings. All the information a loan officer or customer service rep needs is there in real time.

  1. Easy reporting and up-to-date information

To ensure consistency of customer service, managers need access to easily understood standard reports. Make sure all customer interactions are handled consistently with high standards.

The right CRM will provide managers with a series of standard reports that can be run and shared with a couple of clicks. Having all information in one system that is easily accessible will eliminate workflow bottlenecks and improve the usefulness of your data.

  1. Automated workflows

The more time spent on internal work processes and communication, the less time team members have to serve their customers. The right CRM can make your organization more efficient and conserve valuable time. Also, automated workflows will be more consistent. Assign tasks, create and route referrals, track sales, and manage cases more quickly, more easily, and more accurately.

  1. Anytime anywhere access to your data

To be truly useful, your CRM should be mobile. Crowe CRM for Banking is a cloud solution that is accessible from wherever you need to be at whatever time. Sales reps in the field or onsite with customers and prospects can get all the information they need over their mobile devices. This feature is even more important when team members are working remotely. It allows managers to stay connected to their employees and employees connected to their workflows.

  1. Immediately identify your best customers

It’s important to identify your best customers and treat them accordingly.  Crowe CRM for Banking allows you a complete customer profile and history that will enable you to determine customer profitability. Tie in general ledger costs and allocate soft and hard costs across products, processes, and customers for one transparent assessment of customer profitability.

  1. Motivate employees to improve performance

It’s essential to motivate employees to work harder and smarter at providing exceptional customer service. With Crowe CRM for Banking, you can create goal and incentive plans and automate them for maximum effectiveness.

Automated tracking allows employees to see where they stand in relation to their goals.

CRM can automate your employee incentive plans and make the process more efficient, accurate, and transparent to all. This will drive better results from your employees and further employee “buy-in” to using your CRM system.

Why CRM?

CRM systems are designed to make customer information understandable, transparent, and actionable to all your employees while providing managers information about employee activities. Today’s employees have come to expect and appreciate full-featured CRM solutions that empower them to complete their jobs with greater speed and efficiency.

When you benefit your employees, your processes, and your customers, you’ll continue to advance your business even in the competitive world of banking.

Crowe CRM for Banking powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a CRM system designed with your needs in mind. We draw on our wide-ranging experience, banking expertise, and independent perspective to help you gain new insights into industry best practices, while offering practical solutions to address your specific needs to help you achieve higher performance.

Learn more about Crowe CRM for Banking on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Contact our team to start the discussion at crminfo@crowe.com or 877-600-2253.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

Follow us on Twitter: @CroweCRM

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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.

x2020 12 02 11 12 31 625x349.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.GptUULYq E Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2

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 

x2020 12 02 11 11 43 625x336.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.Elb5Lw7iqe Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2

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.

x2020 12 02 11 26 10 625x351.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.mm5I0WBIE6 Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2

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!


162x227x2020 08 24 15 32 44.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.gHcGugJN8B Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

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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Chat Commerce Driving Higher Revenue, Better CX

November 6, 2020   CRM News and Info

By Jack M. Germain

Nov 6, 2020 5:00 AM PT

More consumers are shopping via phones and other mobile devices, and companies that use chat with commerce are reaping rewards while improving the customer experience.

New commerce research reveals that at least two-thirds of firms using chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat see greater commerce gains than competitors that do not. These gains include year-over-year revenue growth of 75 percent, greater annual growth in cross-sell/upsell revenue of 89 percent, a YoY bump in customer retention rates of 48 percent, and an almost two times greater YoY increase in marketing ROI.

Research IT firm Aberdeen recently surveyed top global IT executives across a range of business verticals to help quantify the impacts of chat deployments on their business. The research shows significant benefits to customer experience metrics and other top key performance indicators of businesses utilizing chat for customer service and commerce activities.


86910 chat commerce results small Chat Commerce Driving Higher Revenue, Better CX

- click image to enlarge -


In-Chat Transactions

The digitalization of commerce activities continues to grow with increasing speed and diversity. This is the result of growing numbers of consumers utilizing mobile devices — smartphones, tablets, and wearables.

Buyers are using these devices to interact with businesses trending across almost all consumer-related industries. This new marketing strategy is impacting the retail, CPG, hospitality, transportation, banking, and telecommunications markets.

Think of chat commerce as a method by which businesses can set up rich and engaging exchanges of information with consumers. This enables them to move from inquiry to a commercial transaction without ever needing to leave the chat app, according to Pieter de Villiers, CEO and co-founder of Clickatell.

“Thousands of businesses are now using chat to onboard, offer, and cross-sell to customers,” he told CRM Buyer.

Report Findings Credible

Aberdeen’s research supports the results Verint’s Intelligent Self-Service’s enterprise customers recognized in recent years, according to Jen Snell, vice president for product marketing for Verint.

“One surprisingly simple reason that we found chat works so well for the cross-sell and upsell situations is that the assistants actually ask the questions,” she told CRM Buyer.

Moreover, with chatbots, customers are less likely to feel that they are being sold to with upsell offers. Instead, customers feel they are simply hearing about available options, Snell added.

“That makes a dramatic difference in the effectiveness of the cross-sell and upsell,” she said.

Familiar Technology

Culturally, Verint sees consumers becoming more comfortable and familiar with chat technology for business. Its use is at a point where customers expect quality chat experiences and know-how to navigate them effectively.

“We also have to remember that for a growing number of customers this technology is not new. It is something that has always been there. Members of Generation Z were born into a culture of advanced technology,” said Snell.

The oldest Gen Zers were 10 years old when the iPhone was launched. They had 3G and 4G cellular access before they even reached high school, and on-demand content has, for them, always been the rule and not the exception. It makes sense that they would expect to — and likely even prefer — to engage commerce over chat, she observed.

At the same time, technology has also improved significantly. Today’s chat technology has better natural language processing and intent-understanding capabilities that make these experiences more effective for users.

“So what we are seeing is not an unexpected trend, but rather a solidification and proof of a move to chat interactions for business,” Snell remarked.

US Firms Behind the Chat Curve

Chat commerce pioneer Clickatell sees digital transformation succeeding as chat moves from self-service to actual commerce. To date, companies outside the U.S. are leading in this arena, but Apple and Google are making advancements, as are others.

Aberdeen’s March 2020 survey shows firms in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions currently have the lead in chat adoption, with 77 percent and 76 percent using it. These regions are followed by firms in North America and Latin America (LATAM) with 67 percent and 63 percent respectively using one or more of the chat capabilities.

The push in those regions was largely due to a lack of smartphone penetration and the use of mobile apps. Add to that the high cost of mobile data combined with poor reach in terms of broadband WiFi, according to de Villiers.

Chat commerce has blossomed outside of the U.S. because text messaging is expensive. Consumers opted to use the less expensive, IP-based chat apps to communicate with each other, he explained.

Chat’s Where It’s At

Chat adoption across all regions has been steadily increasing with companies continuously enriching and fine-tuning their chat capabilities. Consumer expectations are the driving force behind modern-day commerce activities, added Aberdeen’s report.

“It, however, soon became evident that chat is not a second-class alternative but a first-class customer experience in terms of convenience,” de Villiers told CRM Buyer.

Now with AI-powered bots and advanced assisted chat desks, chat commerce is poised to go mainstream in the US. de Villiers already sees increased inquiries as brands in the U.S. look to reach their customers where they are most comfortable in a more convenient manner.

“Frankly, that is in chat,” he noted.

WhatsApp leads with over two billion users worldwide. There are 2 to 3 billion users of other chat apps such as WeChat and Telegram.

“These applications are more interactive and feature-rich than SMS text messaging, and businesses have come to understand that these apps can be go-to platforms for commerce as well,” de Villiers said.

Integrated Approach Needed

Chat commerce has been slower to catch on due to consumers being well served through mobile apps. However, app downloads are declining, and consumers spend less time on branded apps and more time on chat, according to de Villiers.

Added to this, the chat commerce experience has only recently become very compelling and more convenient. That credit goes to the advances made in robotic processes automation (RPA) and AI.

The Aberdeen report outlines several key building blocks chat-enabled commerce users should establish to maximize performance, noted de Villiers.

Firms do not think of chat-enabled commerce as a purely technology-driven initiative. To get the most return from chat investments, firms must support their activities with the capabilities categorized across these three points:

  • Enrich chat-enabled commerce through context
  • Minimize complexity and hyper-personalize chat activities
  • Regularly gauge performance to drive continuous improvements and keep up with changing buyer needs

Using chat platforms for business requires firms to determine which activities across the three building blocks are not working well. Once they figure that out, fix them by implementing the missing capabilities, de Villiers directed.

Inevitable Time Frame

The trend toward a chat economy has already started. A strong pipeline of innovative brands looking to launch chat commerce capability is now waiting, de Villiers observed.

“We believe the market will be moving from a current chat commerce innovator phase to an early majority phase during the next 18 to 24 months,” he said.

But de Villiers does not think chat should or will become the primary channel for marketing. In fact, he prefers it if chat platforms refrained from such a goal.

As consumers, chat platforms are very important messaging and engagement channels to get things done. Organizing and turning it into a marketing-focused channel will not serve consumers well.

“However, we do believe chat commerce will happen everywhere and that being able to pay bills, upgrade travel, and resolve customer queries via our favorite chat platform are powerful things,” he insisted.
end enn Chat Commerce Driving Higher Revenue, Better CX


Jack%20M.%20Germain Chat Commerce Driving Higher Revenue, Better CX
Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. Email Jack.

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Better Analytics Through AI: Our Take on Gartner’s AI Trends

September 6, 2020   Sisense

AI and machine learning are the future of every industry, especially data and analytics. In Growing Up with AI, we help you keep up with all the ways these pioneering technologies are changing the world.

Reading through the Gartner Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics for 2020, I was struck by how different terms mean different things to different audiences under different contexts. We hear a lot about AI and analytics not only in internal conversations, but also from our customers and prospects. But what do we really mean when we talk about these issues?

Seeing as how they will only become more important to our world, I thought it would be worthwhile, as Sisense’s head of AI research (AIR), to dive into 7 of the 10 trends on the list and give my views on each.

The article starts with a big statement about AI starting to operationalize, moving the requirements for data and analytics infrastructure to accelerate the development and adoption phase:

“By the end of 2024, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI, driving a 5X increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures.”

This is a major change in the way AI has been used in the past alongside data and analytics, making both more powerful and effective. Let’s dive into these trends and see what else is on the horizon.

packages CTA banners Cloud Data Teams Better Analytics Through AI: Our Take on Gartner’s AI Trends

Trend 1: Smarter, faster, more responsible AI 

Gartner:

“Within the current pandemic context, AI techniques such as machine learning (ML), optimization and natural language processing (NLP) are providing vital insights and predictions about the spread of the virus and the effectiveness and impact of countermeasures.

“Significant investments made in new chip architectures such as neuromorphic hardware that can be deployed on edge devices are accelerating AI and ML computations and workloads and reducing reliance on centralized systems that require high bandwidths. Eventually, this could lead to more scalable AI solutions that have higher business impact.”

My take:

Augmentation and reinforcement learning are much more powerful than out-of-the-box solutions, and this is what’s guiding us along the way. Planning for every feature starts with questions about how the user will be able to play around with and modify the input to see how it affects the result. It was only natural for us here at Sisense to put significant investment into knowledge graphs, NLP, and automated machine learning. Together, they enable users to actively engage with the system, enjoying recommendations along with analysis. These features also facilitate a positive feedback loop, using engagement to strengthen what works and get rid of what doesn’t.

One result is that systems become much more intuitive: Users can take advantage of the “Simply Ask” feature to check “what are my sales next two months” and receive chatbot messages with projected visualizations and suggestions for further exploration routes. In a similar way, the forthcoming “Explanations” feature provides users with possible drivers of the movements in the data automatically, using knowledge graphs to go beyond the boundaries of their charts. This can turn the problem definition environment to multidimensional and learn from the user interaction with the system to personalize and match the results.

From Forecast to Trends to natural language querying, we are completely transparent about the technology behind and the statistical characteristics of the output. Whatever you’re seeing when you use Sisense, you can easily dig into the systems behind it.

Trend 2: Decline of the dashboard

Gartner:

“Dynamic data stories with more automated and consumerized experiences will replace visual, point-and-click authoring and exploration.” 

My take:

At Amazon, everyone in a meeting sits down at the beginning and reads a full write-up, and then the discussion begins, rather than sitting through an endless PowerPoint presentation during the whole meeting. They focus on real storytelling rather than bullet points. We expect something similar to happen with dashboards: fetching insights-driven digests just in time, but also accompanying the daily routines with an “agent” supporting business flows in various tools.

Do you like to see what you missed first thing in the morning? Be alerted on significant movements? Is an executive summary enough to start the ball rolling, knowing you can always do a deep dive and ask for more? Using your favorite task management solution? The world is moving from the static, rigid experience to the data-, insight-, and personalization-driven assistant that knows how you want specific analytics to be served.

In order to make that work, a number of moving parts need to come together as one well-oiled machine: embedded interfaces (on-the-go via your device, in your email, chat, or in-app), pretrained analytics services and training pipeline, the vehicle to facilitate the data model creation, and the right visualization and narration to make the results digestible, trustable, and learning.

This is what keeps Sisense AIR busy: dashboard automation research and our knowledge graph, which has incorporated the behavior of thousands of past users. 

Trend 3: Decision intelligence

Gartner:

“By 2023, more than 33% of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling.” 

“It provides a framework to help data and analytics leaders design, model, align, execute, monitor, and tune decision models and processes in the context of business outcomes and behavior.”

My take:

Decision-making automation requires a lot of steps: First you document the process, then configure it based on the result, then automate the possible parts. My take on it is that if you can automate the loop from data to analysis to decision back to data, it is not analytics, it’s robotic process automation. There’s an argument to be made that once decision-making on a use case becomes predictable, it should be moved from BI to a part of the back office.

But that kind of thinking comes from the world we used to know, a world that was less volatile and more manageable, more influenced by the proximity ecosystem than by world events and climate. Today, the world changes at a speed that’s hard to fathom, so decision-making needs to be adjusted based on insights coming from data, accompanied by recommended actions. “Survival of the fastest” is the rule today.

Trend 4: X analytics

Gartner:

“Gartner coined the term ‘X analytics’ to be an umbrella term, where X is the data variable for a range of different structured and unstructured content such as text analytics, video analytics, audio analytics, etc.”

My take:

The world is wider than the traditional BI tabular data. It’s visual, it’s spoken, it’s audible. Why use just one of the senses and limit your perspective?

Sisense recently used our ecosystem of ML service providers to help scan and surface the medical crowd wisdom of COVID treatments from piles of textual data from a site called G-Med. There was no point in reinventing the wheel to build our own video, image, speech, and text analysis tools — there are plenty of those on the market already.

How exactly is all that data going to talk to each other and come together to provide the end-to-end analysis? Knowledge graphs will be the base of how the data models and data stories are created, first as relatively stable creatures and, in the future, as on-demand, per each question.

Trend 5: Augmented data management

Gartner:

“Augmented data management uses ML and AI techniques to optimize and improve operations. It also converts metadata from being used in auditing, lineage and reporting to powering dynamic systems.”

My take:

The Gartner article doesn’t go beyond lineage or workload automation. That’s important, but that’s only what’s going on today. Fetching calculation results ahead of the question improves performance, but it’s still limited to the data model or dimensional paradigm of the single individual in the organization. Do they have the required perspective to include hurricane data for the supply chain dashboard for East Asia? Domain experts would likely decide to include that information after reading about losses in the news. What if the relevant data could be added to the context to tell the data story without humans needing to take action themselves? Data exchanges will play a more significant role in the future, extending their offerings to data modeling.

Trend 6: Cloud is a given 

Gartner:

“By 2022, public cloud services will be essential for 90% of data and analytics innovation. As data and analytics moves to the cloud, data and analytics leaders still struggle to align the right services to the right use cases, which leads to unnecessarily increased governance and integration overhead.”

My take:

Cloud is here to stay. I witnessed the mainframe/PC/cloud/personal graphics processing unit evolution. To me, the tipping point of cloud analytics will be in the “context as a service” combination of data and logic components served based on user questions. With offerings like AWS Outposts, it couldn’t be easier to start the cloud journey.

In the analytics world, it’s crucial to stay up to date, implementing “continuous integration/continuous delivery” systems and A/B testing for better performance and experience. This is only possible with cloud services. Cloud combined with compliance with General Data Protection Regulation and SOC are vital to gain customers’ trust. Data-hungry calculations will be costly to perform in the cloud if data is on-premises due to data gravity and latency. Adjusting a system’s architecture can make all the difference quickly, meaning you can easily pull insights from large datasets.

Trend 7: Data and analytics worlds collide

Gartner:

“Data and analytics capabilities have traditionally been considered distinct entities and managed accordingly. Vendors offering end-to-end workflows enabled by augmented analytics blur the distinction between the two markets.

The collision of data and analytics will increase interaction and collaboration between historically separate data and analytics roles. This impacts not only the technologies and capabilities provided, but also the people and processes that support and use them. The spectrum of roles will extend from traditional data and analytics roles in IT to information explorer, consumer, and citizen developer as an example.”

My take:

I agree that new roles are required. As new data and analytics products are built and every product begins to have data and analytics elements in it, data/knowledge product managers will emerge. These specialists will understand data and be able to run and create queries and transformations but will also be knowledgeable about the applications running on top of those data streams.

Regarding data and tools, “extract, transform, and load” (ETL) will become ETLT. The “T” stands for the “transformation pipelines” either bringing data from the exchanges or pre-trained ML services or training pipelines for both structured and unstructured data. Software developers and data scientists can use these same pipelines to deploy their parts of the application, and analytics workflows can be automated to the point where business users can even trigger them without outside help.

AI and analytics: Building the future together

If you have data, odds are you have a lot of it. You’ve probably got more than you can handle. Alone, that is. Only AI will be able to help humans make sense of the huge datasets being generated every day by countless individuals and devices. AI systems will play greater and greater roles in our personal and business worlds, so whatever you’re building, start thinking about the ways AI can help your product, service, colleagues, and customers be better. And whatever you’re working on, build boldly.

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Inna Tokarev-Sela, Sisense’s Head of AI Research, has over 15 years’ experience in the tech industry. She spent the last decade at SAP, driving innovations in cloud architecture, in-memory products, and machine learning video analytics. A frequent speaker at industry events like IBC, NAB, Wonderland AI, and Media Festival, Inna holds a BS in physics and computer science, an MBA, and an MS in information systems, having written her thesis on neural networks.

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Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps and resolve them quickly!

August 15, 2020   CRM News and Info

621x355xGet better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM.jpg.pagespeed.ic.C07adb9ZgK Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps and resolve them quickly!

One of the factors that helps in maintaining efficiency, productivity and agility in business process is seamless data visualization. For this very purpose, we at Inogic, have come up with very a user-friendly Dynamics 365 CRM productivity app  – Kanban Board.

Let’s understand how this amazing app will benefit you in visualizing Dynamics 365 CRM data in a card-based view that helps you to easily identify the status of the records, with an example of Case Entity.

As you know Service industry deals with a variety of service cases that need to be attended and resolved at the earliest.

Suppose the Service Manager of ABC Corps allots cases to the service representatives which are by default displayed as read-only grid. Now this makes it difficult for the service reps to visualize records based on their statuses. But with our data visualization app Kanban Board, these cases can be viewed as per their status and thus the pending cases can be worked upon accordingly.

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Since Kanban Board is very well integrated with native CRM functionalities, the service rep would be able to use charts to filter out the records on the Kanban Board as and when required.

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Moreover, once the case is resolved the service reps can simply drag and drop the case card from ‘In Progress’ lane to ‘Problem Solved’ lane. This will update the underlying value of the case and its status will change from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Problem Solved’.

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In the meanwhile, if one of the service reps wants to assign his case to another team member then they can ask the Service Manager, who will just have to select the card in Kanban Board and use native Assign action from the ribbon. And just like that the case will be assigned to another service rep.

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Apart from this, service reps can create quick activity actions like Email, Phone Call, Tasks, etc. from the card itself without opening the respective records.

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In conjunction to viewing the cases categorized by Statuses, service reps are able to further categorize the cases within each lane on the basis of Priority – High, Normal, Low, Other – with the help of Row Grouping. This gives enhanced view of the CRM data, which in turn helps reps to quickly pick the important Case.

616x300x6Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM.png.pagespeed.ic.ZVGE9adIM6 Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps and resolve them quickly!

Not only this, the service reps are able to classify records based on the stages of Business Process Flow (BPF) as it would simplify the process for reps. They have to simply select BPF from dropdown and the cases would be classified based on the stages of BPF i.e. Identify – Research – Resolve. In this way, they can view the cards based on their stages in BPF.

612x298x7Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM.png.pagespeed.ic.sl  M9FK5O Get better visualization of Cases using Kanban Board within Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps and resolve them quickly!

With all these amazing features, you can expediate the business process and enhance productivity of Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps users in your organization.

So, what are you waiting for? Make Kanban Board an integral part of your business strategy.

Download the solution for a free trial of 15 days from our Website or Microsoft AppSource.For quick personal demo or to know more, email us at crm@inogic.com

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Artificial Intelligence, Real Enhancements, Better Insights

August 6, 2020   Sisense

Sisense News is your home for corporate announcements, new Sisense features, product innovation, and everything we roll out to empower our users to get the most out of their data.

Ashley Kramer is our new chief product and marketing officer. She began her career as a software engineering manager at NASA, worked at Oracle, Amazon, and elsewhere before moving to Alteryx, serving as senior vice president of product. She recently spoke with SearchBusinessAnalytics about her vision for the Sisense platform and what it’s like being one of the few women helping shape software development at a major business intelligence and analytics vendor.

SearchBusinessAnalytics: What led you to the decision to leave Alteryx and move to Sisense to head the development of its analytics platform?

Ashley Kramer: What was really interesting to me about Sisense was the approach they took from the beginning, which was to give agility to customers. That means being able to do analytics the way that they need — the Periscope acquisition means it can be code first or drag-and-drop — and being able to allow people to leverage analytics wherever they need, whether that’s embedded deeply within a product, whether that’s in an internal portal, or whether that’s a dashboard that you deploy.

In addition, I have a lot of cloud experience, and I understand what works and what doesn’t, and Sisense took a really unique approach here a year ago to say, “Let’s rewrite our products to be more of a Linux microservices-based architecture,” so that as companies scale in the cloud and as they leverage different complex data scenarios, we can grow with them. We can meet them where they are today, and we can grow with them as they go into the future, and that was truly unique to me and super exciting.

SBA: What is the dynamic between you as chief product officer and chief technology officer Guy Boyangu?

AK: He deeply understands the architecture, both where it was and where it’s come, and what we collaborate on is around the AI space. We have something called the Knowledge Graph that gathers all kinds of intelligence so we can give our customers smartness out of the box when we deliver our analytics, so what Guy and I collaborate on is on the under-the-hood side of where Sisense goes next.

I’m the product strategist and visionary working with the entire team, and Guy is able to take that and say, “OK, technology-wise, this can be our strategy.” It’s a really good partnership that we have together.

SBA: As you come to Sisense, what is your vision for where the analytics platform will be in two or three years?

AK: There are a lot of places we can go, and we need to focus those efforts so we can make sure we’re delivering what customers need. But I can really break this down into further investments in three different areas.

First, how will we continue to scale across clouds? If you think about [many] of the other vendors in this space, they’re mostly part of a cloud ecosystem — Looker and Google, Tableau and Salesforce, Power BI always being part of Microsoft — and we’re a cross-cloud platform, we can work with data analytics cross-cloud, so we want to continue innovating there and scaling to make sure we work seamlessly with all of the different services that all of the different clouds provide. The second is more intelligence. How do we continue to do deeper smartness within the platform, so automated recommendations and automated decisions, alerting, those types of things. And of course we have natural language querying so you type a sentence and get your results. There are many more things we can do to make analytics easier for everybody involved and get more people involved in analytics.

And that brings me to the last one, which is if you look at statistics on the different usage and adoption of analytics it tends to be pretty low in general within organizations, and I truly believe that’s for one reason — most BI platforms assume people will unnaturally leave their everyday workflows and processes and look at a dashboard and then come back. With our API-driven platform and approach, we can bring analytics to the salesperson that spends their entire day in whatever sales platform or CRM (customer relationship management) platform they use, and for someone like me that’s always on the go, send it to my cellphone. By continuing to innovate in that area, I think we can start to see adoption go up and really start seeing organizations make data-driven decisions, and then of course as an end result have better business outcomes.

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SBA: What are some trends you see in BI and analytics that Sisense is responding to and are helping drive Sisense’s roadmap?

AK: The first trend is we’re finally starting to see people migrate their data to the cloud. It’s been something people have been talking about, but we’re really seeing it come to life. The second is adoption — different statistics say that only about a third of an organization are actually using the analytics to make decisions. And the next one is a huge trend around AI and augmented analytics, so how do we not just allow people to make a decision about what’s happening right now, build a dashboard and see sales are down in the west, but how do we actually start to help them predict what to do next and prescribe how to take the action. A lot of the things we’re doing with our Knowledge Graph and a lot of the features we’ve released and have planned as part of our roadmap will start getting people out of just descriptive and taking them to those next two steps of predictive and prescriptive analytics.

SBA: How did your time at Oracle, Tableau, Alteryx, and other organizations prepare you for your new role at Sisense?

AK: My early career at Oracle and NASA was valuable because I was a programmer, so I understand technology pretty deeply, and I understand how sometimes a product team can dream up something but it might actually be a hard engineering challenge. That was helpful for me to understand how to be a better product leader. My time at Amazon helped me understand the crazy importance of the cloud. They were the early innovators in that area. Tableau was really interesting because Tableau started coming into the market with cloud analytics right at the cusp of when it was happening, so I got to learn a lot about the early market and then see how it evolved. And of course when you’re one of the earliest to arrive you don’t get everything right, and that’s okay. You learn lessons and figure out how to do it better next time. And at Alteryx it was trying to understand what the more data-science part of the world needs.

As a product leader it’s super important to understand what is possible for engineering and what is not, understanding the cloud is important because we’re cross-cloud here at Sisense, and then understanding where people want to go next with analytics by actually scaling it across the organization and taking that next step to be predictive. So, this really was the perfect role.

SBA: As chief product officer at Sisense you are now one of the few women helping shape the product development of a leading BI vendor. Did you face barriers on your path to Sisense?

AK: I was always interested in technology growing up — even in the early days, the Oregon Trail days. Fast-forward to high school and I was in the very first computer science class taught by my physical education teacher, which is crazy when you think about it. It doesn’t make any sense, but at least my school was thinking about offering computer science. I was a senior and the only woman in a class of 10 people. I was very fortunate to have people to encourage me to continue on this path. Move on to college, and in my graduating class there were three to five women in the class. Since then, I think what the world has done a better job of is have things like Girls Who Code, different programs to push the importance of STEM and make girls and women be a part of that. The world has changed and evolved, but it wasn’t really there when I was coming to my professional stage of my career.

SBA: What have you found following school in your professional life?

AK: As far as the glass ceiling, I feel like I’ve had a lot of great mentors along the way, some of them were women and some of them were men, and I think sometimes we undervalue the importance of what we can do for each other. Women can get together and I can go to every women leadership CPO dinner that exists, but we need men there too supporting us. We need them to be part of the conversation. Something that’s super attractive to me about Sisense is that not only is 50% of our core operational team reporting to the CEO women, but also [CEO] Amir Orad’s wife is a CEO [of LimitScreen Inc.]. He definitely understands the value of women in these leadership roles. Everyone has an equal voice, and I think that’s really powerful.

It’s been interesting. I’ve seen a trend with my generation and there are other women CPOs — there aren’t many, but even at my last company there was a woman chief strategy officer and we were really big supporters of each other. There was a historic thing in the past that there could only be one woman in the room, but that didn’t exist at any of the companies I’ve been. I feel fortunate to not have to have lived in that world. The more women in the room at leadership levels, the better, so I don’t feel like I have to speak up or be the alpha woman because that doesn’t exist anymore.

Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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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.

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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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Microsoft Power BI: Custom Bar Colors Helps you Show Your Dynamics 365 CRM Data Better

July 23, 2020   CRM News and Info

Building a visualization that shows performance to goal is a common practice in Microsoft Power BI. In this article, we are going to dive a little deeper into visualizations and how color helps to emphasize data in your CRM system including Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.

One visualization that is commonly used in Dynamics 365 and Power BI is the “Line and Clustered Column Chart”. See the sample below where the line typically shows the goal and the bars show the actual metric for the given period. An excellent way to draw quick attention to the periods that have achieved the goal is to dynamically change the color of the bar when the goal is met or exceeded.

Below is an example of a visualization that shows monthly Sales Amount (bars) and the Sales Goal (dashed line). Note how each time the value of the Sales Amount exceeds the value of the Sales Goal—the color is set to green. When the Sales Amount falls short of that Sales Goal — the bar color is set to tan.

DELTA to GOAL VALUE

The key to building this visual is to create a Delta to Goal value. This can be done by adding a calculated column in Power BI or creating a measure. In this example,  the Delta to Goal field was already added.

Microsoft Power BI can easily achieve the desired visualization by simply applying these simple steps.

  • Add a Line Chart and cluster column chart to the canvas.
  • Place the Date in the Shared axis field, the Sales Amount in the Column values field, and the Sales Goal in the Line value

  • With visualization still selected, click on the Format icon (paint roller) in the visualization pane.
  • Open the Data colors section of the Visualization pane and set the Sales Goal color to Gray and the Sales Amount color to Green. NOTE: it is important to set the Sales Goal to the color that you want to use to show “meeting or exceeding the goal”. If you do not set the color before applying conditional formatting, the default color (usually blue) will appear next to the Sales Amount Label in the Legend.
  • After setting the Sales Amount color to green, click on the fx button under the Default color This will open the Default Color – Data colors screen.
  • Change the Based on Field to Sum of Delta to Goal. This value is used to determine if the Sales Amount is greater than the Sales Goal. The color of the bar will be determined by whether the delta value is greater than or less than 0.

  • Select Custom from the Minimum drop-down, enter 0 in the field below Custom and choose the color Tan from the color drop-down (in this example, a custom color D9CBA0 was used for tan).
  • Do the same for the Maximum drop-down, select Custom, enter 0 and choose the color Green. Setting the minimum and maximum values to 0 will cause any value below 0 to display the minimum color and any value greater than or equal to 0 to display the maximum color.
  • Click OK to save.

I hope this simple example will help your performance to goal visualizations really stand out. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power BI have a lot of good tools and automated presets. As a data master, you need to show data quickly and effectively. Being able to decipher data makes you a key contributor to your organization. For help with this and other tips for the Microsoft Power Platform (Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent), contact JourneyTEAM today.


Article by: Jim Hill – Senior BI & Analytics Consultant | 801-436-6636

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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Better Designer Views in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM with the use of Power Apps — Get Excited!

July 8, 2020   CRM News and Info

The popularity of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is continuing to grow and the developers at Microsoft are making improvements that push the boundaries of the CRM system.

Check out these new upgrades that the designers at Microsoft are making. Yes, as consultants at JourneyTEAM we were a little worried that the View Designer was going to get left behind. The good news, it looks like Microsoft went above and beyond and made the Views in Dynamics 365 even better.

WHAT ARE VIEWS & WHY THE IMPORTANCE?

As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said – “Data is the electricity that runs an organization.” Dynamics 365 CRM views are important because they allow you to consume that data. Views allow you to pull out ANY detailed information and filter down results to your specific need.

In other CRM systems you have to create custom reports which can take hours to build. The magic of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is they use Views—which can be built in a matter of minutes.

 

LEGACY EDITOR IN DYNAMICS 365

In the past, the legacy view editor in Dynamics 365 CRM had a clunky interface. It had outdated images and the views were not accessible to all users. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, (in use with Power Apps) allowed you to create system views — but not personal views. This sucked. This meant that only system admins could use the view designer to create custom system views.

NEW VIEW EDITOR

Microsoft spent a lot of time building out the View Designer. It was a difficult process and they did it very well. For Microsoft designers to achieve this they would have had to rebuild the designer on top of all new joins and relationships. In short, it looks like it was a very complicated process.

The end result looks much better. The new View Designer is leveraging the Power Apps interface to create a practical and effortless way of interaction with your data. This will allow any user to feel like a pro when building out their custom views.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE NEW FEATURES:

  • Updated UI and UX – Now you can easily read fields, updated icons, and Dynamics 365 has tooltips to improve functionality.
  • Click and Drag fields - This is self-explanatory but it makes it easy to build out your custom views.
  • Avoid Confusion – Now you can separate primary fields and related entities to avoid confusion. In the past when you were building out this view you had a list of all of the fields on your primary entity. It was a difficult process to get information.

Now it’s a really easy process. For example, if you look up an account Contact’s Primary Phone Number you can click over to Contact and pull in required fields of information.

  • Preview of Data. Legacy had 2 different modes – Create and Run. You used to have fields with duplicate names. You couldn’t see results due to the view. You couldn’t see the Run report till the end. Now the data has a preview so you can see data exactly as you are building it. (Awesome)

If you are new to Dynamics 365 Views — we can help. JourneyTEAM is a Microsoft Gold Partner and the 2019 US Partner of the Year. We have deep experience with CRM, ERP, Power Platform, and more. We can help you set up processes to retrieve your data and automate processes.


CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

As a Microsoft US Partner of the Year and Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work winner, JourneyTEAM helps your organization with the right guidance and technologies for you. Contact us at 800.439.6456 or info@journeyteam.com


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

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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