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What are Windows virtualization-based security features?

October 11, 2020 BI News and Info

Published: 17 Feb 2020

Windows administrators must maintain constant vigilance over their systems to prevent a vulnerability from crippling their systems or exposing data to threat actors. For shops that use Hyper-V, Microsoft offers another layer of protection through its virtualization-based security.

Virtualization-based security uses Hyper-V and the machine’s hardware virtualization features to isolate and protect an area of system memory that runs the most sensitive and critical parts of the OS kernel and user modes. Once deployed, these protected areas can guard other kernel and user-mode instances.

Virtualization-based security effectively reduces the Windows attack surface, so even if a malicious actor gains access to the OS kernel, the protected content can prevent code execution and the access of secrets, such as system credentials. In theory, these added protections would prevent malware attacks that use kernel exploits from gaining access to sensitive information.

Code examining, malware prevention among key capabilities

Virtualization-based security is a foundation technology and must be in place before adopting a range of advanced security features in Windows Server. One example is Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity (HVCI), which examines code — such as drivers — and ensures the kernel mode drivers and binaries are signed before they load into memory. Unsigned content gets denied, reducing the possibility of running malicious code.

Other advanced security capabilities that rely on virtualization-based security include Windows Defender Credential Guard, which prevents malware from accessing credentials, and the ability to create virtual trusted platform modules (TPMs) for shielded VMs.

In Windows Server 2019, Microsoft expanded its shielded VMs feature beyond the Windows platform to cover Linux workloads running on Hyper-V to prevent data leakage when the VM is both static and when it moves to another Hyper-V host.

New in Windows Server 2019 is a feature called host key attestation, which uses asymmetric key pairs to authenticate hosts covered by the Host Guardian Service in what is described as an easier deployment method by not requiring an Active Directory trust arrangement.

What are the virtualization-based security requirements?

Virtualization-based security has numerous requirements. It’s important to investigate the complete set of hardware, firmware and software requirements before adopting virtualization-based security. Any missing requirements may make it impossible to enable virtualization-based security and compromise system security features that depend on virtualization-based security support.

At the hardware level, virtualization-based security needs a 64-bit processor with virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x and AMD-V) and second-level address translation as Extended Page Tables or Rapid Virtualization Indexing. I/O virtualization must be supported through Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi. The server hardware must include TPM 2.0 or better.

System firmware must support the Windows System Management Mode Security Mitigations Table specification. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface must support memory reporting features such as the UEFI v2.6 Memory Attributes Table. Support for Secure Memory Overwrite Request v2 will inhibit in-memory attacks. All drivers must be compatible with HVCI standards.

Dig Deeper on Microsoft Hyper-V management

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Tech Insider Update Features Latest Changes to Microsoft Teams that Support Collaboration and CRM Activities

October 10, 2020 CRM News and Info

In today’s business landscape that has an increasing amount of salespeople working remotely, it is more important than ever that organizations have a collaboration platform in place that complements and supports CRM sales activities.

Interested in learning how the latest updates to Microsoft Teams improves collaboration and shared information for sales, service and the entire organization? The August 2020 Tech Insider Update from JourneyTEAM previews the most important releases, updates and changes that promote the effective collaboration your organization needs to close more deals.

The updates to Microsoft Teams include task management capabilities with a new Tasks app, Together Mode in video conferencing, integrated Yammer Communities and Lists apps.

Microsoft Teams

[embedded content]

Watch the Teams update video here.

The new Tasks app in Teams merges individual tasks from Microsoft To Do and team tasks from Microsoft Planner for complete task management. The Tasks app is now available in desktop, web and mobile experiences. Guest users will be limited only to mobile and not be able to see it on the desktop version.

Together Mode enables more engaging meetings for remote workers that may be suffering from “meeting fatigue.” This feature places video call participants in a virtual space that make it appear as though they are in the same environment, like an auditorium, sitting side-by-side. In this view, Together Mode also helps presenters better gauge audience reactions.

Yammer App Integrated with Teams

[embedded content]

Watch the Yammer and Teams update here.

The Yammer Communities app, an enterprise social networking platform that connects and engages employees through shared communication, has been brought to the Teams experience making it an even greater hub for operations and communications across the organization.

Lists App Integrated with Teams

The Microsoft Lists app helps organizations track and organize work simply, and now organizations can create lists directly within Teams with the Lists App integration that is now generally available. The Lists app will be available in individual Channels as a tab. Users that want to track a list can click the “+” button next to tabs, search for the Lists app in the tab gallery, and easily add it.

All the standard features that are available for Lists in SharePoint web are also now accessible in the Lists app for Teams, which includes the three main views – grid, gallery, and calendar, as well as custom. Users can create lists or pick from eight standard templates.

A standalone Microsoft Lists app for iOS is anticipated for Q4 this year.

SEE THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

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. Our team has a proven track record with successful Microsoft technology implementations. We have experts ready to answer your questions about the latest Teams updates that can enhance collaboration at your organization and support sales and service goals and CRM activities. Contact JourneyTEAM today.

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Must-Have AI Features for Your App

August 27, 2020 Sisense

In Augmented Apps, we examine how product teams are exploring AI and Machine Learning to make their products more intuitive and enhance the user experience.

Artificial intelligence is transforming products in surprising and ingenious ways. Whether it’s core to the product, as with a stock market forecasting algorithm in Quants, or a peripheral component, such as a healthcare domain chatbot that diagnoses diseases via dialog with a patient, building reliable AI components into products is now part of the learning curve that product teams have to manage.

Certain proven methods and use cases are invaluable in helping product teams understand how to implement AI in apps to reproduce and enhance existing successes. In the case of a stock trading AI, for example, product managers are now aware that the data required for the AI algorithm must include human emotion training data for sentiment analysis. It turns out that emotional reaction is an important variable in stock market behavior!

Developing the right data model for your in-app AI is now a critical branch of programming, because correctly prepared data is vital to the algorithm model. It follows then that data scientists are suddenly integral to building embedded AI components.

A few AI components that have already achieved a high level of performance include X-ray and symptom diagnosis in healthcare, human emotion pattern recognition in stock trading apps, and innovative virus and malware detection in software systems. We’ll explore many of these use cases to build an overview of the state of the art in AI components today, starting with innovation in antivirus software.

Safeguarding software and users: AI in cybersecurity apps

One of the most exciting AI use cases today is happening in the field of cybersecurity, where AI methods are now commonly used to detect malware and malicious virus code embedded in files before they can do harm to systems. In fact, a breakthrough in AI security research occurred last year when researchers successfully used self-organizing incremental neural networks (SOINN) to identify malware and virus code.

The SOINN method converts binary files to visual representations and in doing so has achieved over 94% accuracy in detecting files infected with viruses! SOINN could become a standard use of AI for detecting viruses in security apps. By using a visual representation of code, the virus code can be detected without running the code and endangering the test system. Previously, machine learning-based malware detection algorithms were problematic because, according to Baptista and Shiaeles:

“…they rely on a virtual environment to analyze samples; this not only affects their runtime performance, but also endangers the whole system since the samples need to be executed. In addition, the ability of malware to adapt its behavior to the execution environment, the excessive number of features that need to be extracted per sample, and the high volume of malware instances being reported, reduce the chances of accurate detection.”

Breakthroughs like this — in which the fundamental representation of the subject is transformed — will certainly reshape and expand our concept of AI while providing new benefits.

Natural Language Processing: Teaching AI to talk

Natural language processing (NLP) unifies many of the other branches of AI through a human-oriented, AI-based interface. NLP performance improves significantly when the app is trained in a specific expert knowledge domain, such as symptom diagnosis. This is because a specialized context narrows the scope of the training data used in training the dialog algorithm. An immediately related branch of data science, called natural language querying (NLQ), focuses on using NLP to achieve particular goals.

Credit where it’s due: Understanding AI credit agents

A special use case of NLP and NLQ includes helping lending agents evaluate the creditworthiness of potential borrowers who have no prior credit history — the traditional basis of lending decisions. NLP can now mine vast and diverse data stores using trained patterns on alternative data sources that can help indicate the probability of reliable loan repayment.

For example, most credit applicants use smartphones. An AI can check their internet browsing patterns and see how closely they align with those of reliable clients. This type of supervised learning requires substantial data preparation: Important factors for correlation algorithms include a potential borrower’s social media activities, geolocation data, blogging contributions, peer networks, and relationship strength and duration. In fact, training metrics for these creditworthiness algorithms may bank on thousands of variables to generate an alternative credit score and also predict its own accuracy.

sisense blog Embedded Trends 20191218 bl blog banner1 Must Have AI Features for Your App

Predictive analytics AI boosts web app performance

Extraordinary advances in diverse applications such as visitor and log analytics owe their success to AI- and machine learning (ML)-based pattern recognition. Let’s look at a few such apps and their AI components and discover how we can benefit from their use cases:

Web app visitor analytics: BI insights are derived from ML analysis of visitor stats and metrics and displayed via data visualizations
Log analytics: The effectiveness of traditional error logs is enhanced by detecting app performance issues and by intelligently alerting targeted endpoints via email and Slack to critical user concerns
Automated testing: Discovers bugs in new app releases using computer vision to determine page-rendering completeness

The potential uses of app behavior and visitor activity data stores are bounded only by the ingenuity of the data engineer. Analytics and BI platforms like Sisense can instantly provide data visualizations and alerts on visitor activity issues. Loggly and Timber likewise elevate traditional error logging by recognizing router issues as well as deployment and release failures. SmartBear and Tricentis enhance Selenium to provide AI-driven app testing automation. There is truly no limit to what can be achieved with a creative idea applied to data!

In all areas of predictive analytics, AI components perform best when the AI model can update its neural network during real-time transactions. This means feeding the client’s current preferences to the training data on the fly. AI web apps such as recommenders are the most obvious examples of real-time supervised training models that update themselves with each new transaction so that users can actually see the system learning in progress. And AI-based recommenders that update their own neural nets per transaction offer a more alive feeling in the user experience with such apps as:

Swype personalized spelling suggestions (NLP)
Ride-hailing apps’ suggesting destinations and best routes (geolocation)
“Similar to favorite” music recommenders like Spotify

Healthcare benefits from AI diagnostics

As mentioned, NLP-powered chatbots with domain-specific expert knowledge can diagnose illness after a Q&A dialog with a patient. The next level in diagnostics is an AI-powered app that also takes a tissue sample from the patient and uses the lab output in conjunction with medical records and dialog to diagnose diseases, including cancer.

This amazing biotech application of AI uses genome sequencing in conjunction with neural nets to diagnose disease, outstripping the capabilities of traditional diagnosis methods. The app takes a patient’s tissue sample as input and then compares it with a database of every known pathogen (over 37,000 sequenced genomes!). The outcome is a comprehensive diagnostic report of possible disease agents.

Securing aviation hubs with AI

For those of us who are frustrated with long security lines at airport gates, new AI applications that automate the recognition of prohibited items in carry-on luggage will come as a refreshing change to speed up a sluggish human procedure. AI is also expanding rapidly on the frontier of emotion recognition and sentiment analysis. This will change the scope of preventive security to include biometrics of passengers who pose potential threats.

AI in apps: The future is today

AI apps are the future. On every horizon, we see automated systems ready to be dedicated to our safety, security, and comfort. At the moment, these systems are insulated from each other because data preparation for AI apps is a wild frontier, and there are no mutually intelligible standards for AI systems to share outcomes with each other.

However, just as the transmission control data protocol evolved toward a standard, so will data-wrangling eventually evolve standards for AI systems to learn from each other instead of exclusive datasets. When this happens, we will witness an exponential enhancement in the capability of AI now in its infancy. It’s an exciting frontier promising to deliver breathtaking benefits for everyone. Keep checking in as we bring you more insights from the emerging world of AI.

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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5 Features for Savvy Email Marketing with Dynamics 365 Marketing CRM

August 25, 2020 CRM News and Info

Applying the appropriate strategies to email marketing can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Implementing comprehensive CRM solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing with apps that support marketing operations can help.

When evaluating email marketing efforts, it can often lead to this deceptively short-and-sweet question:

“Is it working?”

Without the right tools at your disposal, it is probably not an easy question to answer. But it is important as it reveals how well you leverage email marketing to create the personalized buyer experiences that transform cold leads to engaged customers.

Let’s look at five ways Dynamics 365 Marketing CRM allow you to be more strategic in your email marketing efforts:

Manage Campaigns from the Customer Journey
Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content
Perform A/B Testing
Score Your Leads
Solicit Feedback

1. Manage Campaigns from the Customer Journey

Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing allow you to:

Share information and processes across sales and marketing teams
Automate email marketing and run multichannel campaigns
Access key insights that promote smart decisions

With sales and marketing data in sync, all the information that is critical to personalizing the buyer experience can be found in one place. You can plot all marketing interactions along the journey from a visual top-level view that resembles a game board.

Customer Journeys also provide access to key email interaction data including opens, reaction time, clicks, bounces and more that can be used to fine-tune your email marketing strategy.

2. Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content

In Dynamics 365 Marketing you can optimize the email creation process with design and edit tools that support:

Standard or customized email templates
Reusable blocks of content
Dynamic content that personalizes messages

Templates and blocks of reusable content help optimize the email publishing process. Your options are flexible – from using standard templates provided by Microsoft, or creating something more custom. Using easy drag-and-drop tools, blocks of standard, pre-approved content can be placed anywhere in the email draft in seconds.

With templates and reusable content ready to go, you can spend less time writing and focus instead on tailoring the buyer experience to something much more personal.

Dynamic content can transform a generic email into a personalized one. Dynamic content can be automated into the process before a message is sent to a recipient, merging information from a recipient’s contact record.

A typical use of dynamic content is merging a first and last name to personalize an email salutation. But there are more powerful uses for dynamic content. For example, if you are emailing an existing customer, you could use purchase history data to update a dynamic content field with a blurb promoting a product upsell.

With some code work, custom logic can dictate the use of dynamic content anywhere in an email message.

3. Perform A/B testing

A/B testing capabilities offered with Dynamics 365 Marketing allow you to trial two different variations of the same email, which can reveal messaging that is proven to resonate better with recipients.

4. Score your leads

By assigning lead scores based on behaviors and conditions, you can tailor campaigns and foster growth of leads that are more likely to become engaged customers.

5. Solicit feedback

Insightful feedback from your prospects can be especially useful when planning your future email marketing efforts.

SEE THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

Ready to Go Next-Level?

Want to see how the tools offered with Dynamics Marketing 365 can take your email marketing efforts to the next level? Contact JourneyTEAM to get your organization set up with Dynamics 365 Marketing at (833) 438-2312.

Nevin Anderson – CRM Solution Engineer

| 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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Microsoft Tech Update: New Features & More in August 2020

August 20, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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

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Mobileye expands Ford partnership to power driver-assist features

July 20, 2020 Big Data

Mobileye, Intel’s driverless vehicle R&D division, today expanded its partnership with Ford to offer camera-based detection capabilities for the automaker’s advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Mobileye will provide its suite of EyeQ sensing technologies to bolster features available through Ford’s Co-Pilot 360 suite, including lane-keeping, pedestrian and cyclist detection, auto high beam headlamps, pre-collision assist with automatic emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control with stop-and-go and lane-centering.

Mobileye’s collaboration with Ford isn’t new — the two companies have been working together for years — but it’s the first time Ford has committed to the company’s solutions for the lifecycle of its cars. Moreover, it marks the start of a Ford pilot to evaluate Mobileye’s Roadbook platform, which leverages anonymized, crowdsourced data from vehicle cameras to build a high-definition map for autonomous navigation and localization.

Along with its EyeQ family of devices, Mobileye says it’ll supply vision-processing software to support level 1 and level 2 driver-assist systems in Ford cars globally as a part of the expanded partnership. (The Society of Automotive Engineers reserves the “level 1” designation for cars with single systems for driver assistance; “level 2” indicates greater autonomy with regard to steering and accelerating or decelerating.) New Ford vehicles will tap Mobileye’s EyeQ software and chips — specifically the EyeQ3 and EyeQ4 — to identify what the windshield cameras can see and to power the forthcoming Mustang Mach-E’s and F-150’s Active Drive Assist hands-free mode in addition to Co-Pilot 360. Both parties will work with Tier 1 providers to supply the tech for vehicle integration.

Ford previously announced that Mach-E buyers will have to purchase an aftermarket “Active 2.0 Prep Package” for autonomy, which ensures the car has the hardware necessary for Active Drive Assist. Active Drive Assist, which will work on 100,000 miles of divided highways in all 50 states an Canada, will require a separate purchase and won’t be available until later next year. Owners will get access to Co-Pilot 360 in the interim.

Mobileye, which Intel paid $ 15.3 billion to acquire in March 2017, is building two independent self-driving systems. One is based entirely on cameras and the second incorporates radar, lidar sensors, modems, GPS, and other components. Both confer the full benefits of Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) model, an open policy that imposes “common sense” constraints on the decisions driverless vehicles make, and Mobileye says the latter should be able to travel roughly 100 million hours without a crash.

Mobileye powers ADAS in 300 car models across 27 OEM partners and collects 3.7 million miles of sensor data every day, which it supplements with geospatial corpora like OS MasterMap and Ordnance Survey. The company expects to have more than 1 million vehicles in its European fleet by the end of 2020 and 1 million U.S. vehicles in 2021. By 2025, Mobileye anticipates its fleet will span more than 25 million vehicles globally.

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2020 Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 Offers Hundreds of New Features

July 10, 2020 CRM News and Info

Microsoft’s continues to invest in powering digital transformation to their customers and partners in the 2020 Dynamics 365 Release

Yesterday, Microsoft published the 2020 Dynamics 365 release wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365, a compilation of new capabilities that will be released between October 2020 and March 2021. The release demonstrates Microsoft’s continued investment in powering digital transformation to their customers and partners. Although there are not a lot of brand new functions, but there are many enhancements to current features. The emphasis of this release is on simplifying the user experience and allowing people to focus on what they need to focus on. While there are hundreds of enhancements, this blog will highlight the enhancements to the areas of Sales and Customer Service, and Field Service.

Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to emphasize simplified user experiences and enabling sellers to focus on selling. Some of the enhancements in the area of Sales are:

A new, intuitive mobile experience for quick access to customer information. Not only is it easier to find customer information through things like improved search, lists, and forms, but it is also easier to complete tasks on the go.
Gamification is commonly used to boost seller adoption, but it also drives CRM adoption, increases performance, and increases sales revenue. The admin interface is now available in the Unified Interface.
Usability Enhancements within the app to reduce friction and make it easier to use. Some of the enhancements we’ll see here are:
- Simplified duplicate detection and merge capabilities.
- Enhanced email experience.
Sales Insights – investments in digital selling across multiple areas.
- Sales acceleration
- Conversation intelligence
- Relationship intelligence
- Advanced forecasting
- Pipeline intelligence with predictive lead and opportunity scorings to help sales teams uncover top deals.
Dynamics 365 Product Visualize empowers sellers and accelerates complex sales processes by:
- Showcasing and customizing products in their real world environment.
- Sellers can now place a 3D digital twin.

Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands agent productivity capabilities by

Enabling agents to engage in multiple sessions simultaneously.
Omnichannel for customer service enhanced with additional extensibility options (to enable integration with mobile applications, Microsoft Bot framework, and outbound messaging.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights: New capabilities in this area will help agents using case suggestions to resolve customer issues more quickly and easily.

New analytical view for customer service managers helps them to focus on key support areas that need attention.
These new capabilities will be included directly in the Customer Service hub – so that users can get the insights they need without having to switch applications.
Remote assist

Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service continues to add intelligence capabilities including:

A new field service dashboard for monitoring key KPIs and work order competition metrics.
Many user experience enhancements to enable proactive delivery.
Enhancement to the mobile app – including push notifications and real-time location sharing.
Scheduling enhancements: including multi-day manual scheduling and enhanced skill based matching.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about the 2020 Dynamics 365 Release, view the Dynamics 365 Release Wave plan or the downloadable PDF. The Power Platform features coming in the 2020 release wave 2 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.

Here are the key dates for the 2020 release wave 2.

xkey dates 2020 release wave 2 625x170.png.pagespeed.ic.xLEFJ70d1u 2020 Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 Offers Hundreds of New Features
*Note: Some features are available to you to opt-in as part of early access on August 3, 2020, including all mandatory changes that affect users.

As always, Microsoft is always looking for customer feedback in the Dynamics 365 community forums. They will use this feedback to make improvements

How can we help

enCloud9 has one of the most experienced Microsoft Dynamics CRM teams in the US. From pre-sales to project management, and user support, we will respond quickly with our expertise to answer your questions. Our history dates back to 2009, but our experience dates back even longer. Our consultants have been advising companies for over thirty years to give them the tools to achieve their goals. Our experience leads to your success. We use our unique approach to help small and medium-sized businesses lower their costs and boost productivity through Microsoft’s powerful range of cloud-based software.

enCloud9 has a series of Accelerators, which are prepackaged Dynamics 365 implementations designed to get your business up and running on Dynamics 365 in approximately seven days. Our Service Accelerator is designed to quickly get you up and running in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. To find out more about how you can accelerate your customer service, contact us today.

In addition, join monthly webinar in October as we preview the best new features of the Dynamics 365 October 2020 Update. Don’t miss this informative webinar. To check out our upcoming and our past webinars, visit our Facebook page or our YouTube page.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Releases Cool New Features Called Kanban Swim Lanes

May 24, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

It is now even more convenient to manage your sales pipeline. Dynamics 365 recently released some cool new features that allow you to update and manage your sales opportunities in — Kanban swim lanes.

Check out these few short steps required to for your Opportunity entity, this fantastic new feature will be at the use of your fingertips.

To achieve these views, your Admin will need to:

1. Go to the specific entity through the Advanced Settings and choose the Opportunity entity.

2. Choose the entity, click on Control tab, Add Control, choose “Kanban” then choose to enable it for your device type radio buttons.

3. When you save and publish, a command bar will offer you two “Show As” Kanban view options for Opportunities – Status and Business Process Flow (BPF).

After a view has been enabled, the Kanban will display the opportunity stage swim lanes. It will also show the complete sales pipeline cards within their respective lanes. From this point, you will now have power to click and drag “cards” between defined sales process stages with your usual Kanban ease.

Clicking and dragging opportunity cards between swim lanes in the Status view, i.e. “Open” to “Won”, dropping cards in these lanes will prompt you with a certain status dialog box.

There you will be able to fill in the required information and proceed to next steps.

When the same tasks are performed within the Business Process Flow (BPF) view, a BPF pop-up window will appear and allow you to complete or view the following information.

Moving your sales cards one direction or another will allow you to open the record and enable you to make any required updates to the system.

By default the view will display 10 cards in each lane allowing you to scroll for any additional count above that. In order for you to quickly find cards in the view, the “Search this view” option will allow you to enter keywords quickly for your perfect results.

Important Note: If customizations have been made to the default Business Process Flow (BPF) flow, the customizations (lane names, etc.) will be reflected in the BPF Kanban view and Dynamics 365 will use the BPF listed first as the default BPF for new records.

Other important things to note, is the Opportunity entity includes a small amount of Kanban functionality than other Kanban-enabled entities, (such as Activities or Cases.) Even though this option is available in other entities, there are extra views in Opportunity that will allow users to utilize their BPF view.

If you have been a former Kanban user or you’re just starting—adding this feature to your everyday sales amount will provide you a user-friendly method for improving your sales management Try it out and see if it helps with your sales pipeline activities.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO

Do you need help with Dynamics 365?

Are you looking at Microsoft Dynamics 365 or are you looking to get more out of your system. JourneyTEAM is the Microsoft US 2019 Partner of the Year and has deep experience in CRM, ERP, and Business Applications across the entire Microsoft stack.

See just how easy it is to manage projects with Dynamics 365.

Article by: Eric Beins – Head of CRM | 800-439-6456

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Why Millennials Value the Collaboration Features in Microsoft Dynamics

April 15, 2020 CRM News and Info

Social networking has shaped the way millennials share ideas, solve problems, and learn new skills. Rather than working alone, they understand an organization is made stronger through collaboration. With integrated tools featuring a familiar Office 365 experience, Microsoft Dynamics supports collaboration across the organization—from marketing and sales through production and service delivery. Notice some of the many ways this helps a business:

Collaborative Selling

Working with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics supports a rich coordinated selling approach. CRM information is shared to enable strategic conversations. Sharing and co-authoring sales documents allows experts from across the organization to actively participate in sales cycles. With files stored in one central location, the entire team has easy, consistent, and secure access to the latest documents.

Effective project collaboration

Microsoft’s modular, multi-channel applications like Microsoft Dynamics and SharePoint allow project members to work together on all aspects of projects. Dashboards allow team members to monitor budgets, allocate resources, and make effective decisions with real-time insights. Project-related documents in SharePoint enable everyone to do their best work by unifying relationships, processes, and data.

Mixed reality collaboration

Microsoft Dynamics is at the forefront of the new age of collaboration. Remote Assist allows employees a world apart to share a real-time view to engage expert input, get hands-on training, or share visual experiences.

Logan Acton, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consultant at RSM, put it well when he said:

“Having grown up with the internet, millennials expect to be able to tailor their technology to fit their exact use cases. Users can customize forms in Dynamics 365 to show only the most pertinent information, and they can build out workspaces that show open tasks and relevant data.”

Millennials are extremely team-oriented and thrive off collaborating with colleagues. Tailoring an accounting system that functions how the people using it expect it to, creates an ideal environment, setting the company up for success.

To see 18 other reasons why Millennials prefer Microsoft Dynamics in the workspace and why this could be important for your company, download the full eBook “21 Reasons Millennials Prefer Microsoft Dynamics” at www.crmsoftwareblog.com/millennials.

Find a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner

By CRM Software Blog Writer, www.crmsoftwareblog.com

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Microsoft Injects New AI Features Into Dynamics 365

February 22, 2020 CRM News and Info

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled several new artificial intelligence capabilities across Dynamics 365 applications and a new solution to help project-centric services organizations transform their operations.

The AI enhancements include first- and third-party data connections in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP).

“The work in AI and CDP is new and a key part of Microsoft taking their products to an AI-driven approach,” noted Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

The company also unveiled new manual and predictive forecasting capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamic 365 Sales Insights.

“Integration with the CDP is important, but more important will be the ability to automate transactions and apply AI to drive the next best action,” Wang told CRM Buyer. “We’re seeing a need to deliver on ambient experiences which are subtle, next best actions.”

Microsoft also is making Customer Insights available to government agencies that previously could not access this feature for their cloud computing environments.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, which connects cross-functional project teams, will be generally available Oct. 1.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, slated for preview in May, will bring AI into an organization’s finance processes, automating or eliminating repetitive, time consuming and low-value daily activities so organizations can understand and act on their cash position and take proactive actions to improve it.

“Having a clear view from sales, service and finance for the marketer looking to drive growth through customer engagements that are both creative and contextual is pure gold,” observed Liz Miller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Making customer intelligence part of the workflow “helps to remove some of what makes bridging the gaps set up by data silos so hard,” she told CRM Buyer.

Beefing Up Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights’ new first- and third-party data connections add proprietary audience intelligence and data from third-party data sources to customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real time.

Integrating Microsoft Forms Pro will bring in the customer’s voice across channels so enterprises can act on insights based on customers’ changing behavior and perception.

Customer Insights can be used with Azure Synapse Analytics, which combines customer data with enterprise and streaming data, to improve data completeness, run high-speed analytical processing, and build custom machine learning models. Those models can predict customer needs and provide guidance on the next best action to reduce churn and maximize revenue opportunities.

“This shows Microsoft bringing the power of its whole portfolio to business applications, with Azure Synapse Analytics and Forms Pro,” remarked Rebecca Wettemann, principal at
Valoir.

“Synapse Analytics is SQL Data Warehouse, so companies — and Microsoft partners — with SQL skills and resources will be well positioned to take advantage of its speed and scale,” she told CRM Buyer.

Enterprises can use prebuilt APIs to act upon these insights in real time across multiple destinations to enable Website personalization, dynamic marketing campaigns, effective ad targeting, and dealing with clients on site, said James Phillips, president of Microsoft Business Applications.

“Microsoft’s tools by nature are comparatively easy to learn and use, and this should be consistent with those expectations,” noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

However, “You break down silos with journeys and process, not integration of APIs,” Constellation’s Wang pointed out. “End-to-end flows that power decisions provide a solution.”

Tools for the Sales Team

Dynamics 365 extracts patterns from CRM data, current and historical leads, won or lost opportunities, contacts, accounts, customer interactions and other data sources, and projects these patterns into the future to provide predictive forecasting for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamic 365 Sales Insights.

These insights can be accessed without the need for data scientists or tech experts.

“The prediction and forecasting is only as good as the data, so training data will be key to success,” Wang observed. “You need more high-quality data sources in order to build precision decision models.”

A new engagement center provides sellers with their own AI-prioritized work queue — based on built-in predictive scoring from Dynamics 365 Sales Insights — that uses new, configurable sales cadences. Other embedded AI capabilities offer a path to a warm introduction and guidance from the assistant.

When considering AI, said Wang, almost every organization asks four questions:

When do I trust human judgment?
When do I augment human judgment with machines?
When do I augment a machine with a human?
When do I trust machine automation?

“Microsoft’s announcements bring us one step closer to this autonomous reality,” he remarked.

For Project Operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is built on Microsoft’s unified business cloud and leverages its expertise in front- and back-office processes and project management.

It aims to break down data silos and to optimize operations from prospect to cash.

“Project Operations is where Microsoft’s breadth capabilities, from finance collaborations to project management, will really shine,” Valoir’s Wettemann noted. “It’s another example of Microsoft bringing its portfolio game to the business apps space. The value of end-to-end visibility and collaboration is broadly applicable.”

That said, “these are data and process flow tools, but silos are often more behavioral and political rather than technical,” Enderle told CRM Buyer. “So, while these tools will certainly help, to get the full benefit managers will have to continue to train people to break these data silos.”

Finance Insights

Finance Insights will bring AI into an organization’s finance processes, automating or eliminating repetitive, time consuming and low-value daily activities so organizations can focus on working with their cash position.

“Dynamic Finance Insights can really help companies move the needle where it matters, not just by automating manual tasks but by leveraging AI to rapidly understand finance data and act on it together manage cash,” Wettemann observed.

The Big Picture

The announcements “represent an important strategic move for Microsoft, trying to beat the bigger players — Salesforce, Oracle, SAP — by having a better integrated portfolio, though the proof is yet to come,” said Nicole France, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Microsoft also is “competing with smaller, younger competitors such as Zoho, Freshworks and Zendesk, who have been building integrated capabilities that span marketing, sales, service and sometimes more, with consistent, straightforward interfaces for users,” she told CRM Buyer.

However, things like customer data integration “are not simply a technology or application integration challenge,” France noted. They require consistent definitions and improved process as well.

Good Microsoft technical skills are out there, and many enterprises already have significant internal Microsoft teams, she said, but “the big question is whether those organizations have tight links between technology experts and business experts.”

Richard%20Adhikari Microsoft Injects New AI Features Into Dynamics 365
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.

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