Tag Archives: managing
Managing and Marketing Microsoft Teams Live Events – Part 2
we told you what Microsoft Teams Live Events are and we showed you how is simple to create and market a Teams Live Event. There are 3 simple steps to follow when holding a Microsoft Teams Live Event: planning and set up, marketing, and post event wrap up. In this second part, we will cover marketing your Teams Live event – as well as post event wrap up.
Step three: Marketing your Microsoft Teams Live Event
This may be one of the most important steps in holding your live event. You need to ask yourself who it is that you want to attend your webinar. Do you want primarily new customers, existing customers, or a mix? If you are primarily marketing to existing customers, you may want to do something like add a note to your email signature or send emails to existing customers or prospects. When engaging new prospects, you may want to do something such as creating a blog about your topic and post it on social media. Don’t forget #hashtags! You may also want to consider joining and posting in LinkedIn groups related to your topic and creating LinkedIn Lead Generation forms to capture sign ups from LinkedIn.
Our marketing automation tool of choice is . ClickDimensions was made exclusively for and is natively built in . Using ClickDimensions, we built a campaign automation when planning the marketing of our webinar. Campaign automations allow you to set up dynamics paths for a contact or lead based on certain actions. In our fast paced world, campaign automations help simplify and automate daily processes. Campaign automations turn manual processes into automated ones. Campaign automations are not only simple to set up, but extremely beneficial. Not only do they give you piece of mind, campaign automations increase productivity – freeing you up to focus on other things. Below is an example of our campaign automation.
Step four: Post event wrap up of your Microsoft Teams Live Event
After your Microsoft Teams Live Event is over, you still have a few tasks to perform. You can make your job easier by simply prebuilding many of these assets and finishing them after the webinar is completed. For us, we like to upload all of our webinar videos to YouTube. We also save our PowerPoint presentation to a pdf and download both the pdf and the video to our website. You will also want to send an email to all who registered (not just attendees) – thanking them for attending and attaching links to the webinar recording on YouTube and the PowerPoint notes.
Don’t take down the webinar landing page you built for registrations. Use it to continue generating leads. Update the sign up form so that people can watch the video on demand.
In Conclusion
Webinars are among the best marketing platforms. Webinars establish you as an authority in the field and allow you direct contact with your target group. Holding webinars actually saves time and money, as they allow you a global audience without having to travel. Webinars allow you to reach a large amount of people at once. Remember, the hardest thing about doing webinars is just getting started. Decide you want to do it and just get started. You won’t be perfect. You will evolve with time and practice.
Get started today – happy planning!
How Can We Help?
If you have any questions on getting started with Microsoft Teams Live events or if we can help you with any of your Dynamics 365 needs, don’t hesitate to . We would be more than happy to assist you. is a recognized expert in helping organizations like yours get the most out of their Dynamics 365 system.
Watch for details of our upcoming webinars in 2021. Topics to be announced soon and registration will be available on our website, as well as on our Facebook page.
Visit our for other informative webinars or our for the most current and up to date information.
Managing and Marketing Teams Live Events – Part 1
What are Microsoft Teams Live Events?
So, you’ve likely used Microsoft Teams for chat, messages, and meetings, but did you also know that you can also host webinars in Teams? Microsoft Teams Live Events are an extension of Teams meetings – enabling users to broadcast video and meeting content to a large online audience. Teams Live Events are meant for one-to-many communications where the host of the event is leading the interactions and audience participation is primarily to view the content shared by host. It is simple to create and market a Teams Live Event. There are 4 simple steps to follow when holding a Microsoft Teams Live Event: brainstorming, marketing, preparation/performance, and post event wrap up. This blog is part of a two part series. Part one will cover what Teams Live events are – as well as planning setting up your Teams Live Event. Part 2 will cover marketing your Teams Live event – as well as post event wrap up.
With so with so many options for webinar hosting services, why would someone choose to use Microsoft Teams as their platform for hosting webinars?
There are many reasons someone would choose to host webinars in Microsoft Teams using Live Events.
- Cost – This is a very significant factor in choosing webinar hosting services. If you are already using Teams, why pay for another service when you already have the functionality? Getting started with Teams live events is not difficult. Initially, you may have more work to set things up, but once you have it running, the benefits simply outweigh any additional work you may have to do.
- More Control – This is where Microsoft Teams Live events shines bright. When it comes to moderating a webinar, it is vital to be in full control. One of the ways Microsoft Teams Live Events allows you to be more in control is in the recording of the webinar. YOU choose when you begin and end the recording, something that is not an option in many other webinar software tools. To start the recording in a Teams live event, simply click on the 3 ellipses in the meeting panel and select Start Recording. When ending the call, it is suggested to end the call for all attendees, so that attendees don’t linger. You also have control over what attendees see. You can choose to show your whole desktop or just a specific window. You can choose to put your camera on or leave it off. Another thing you have control over is the roles of the participants. There are 3 roles – presenter, producer, and attendees.
- Easy Editing – Once you have your Live Event set up, you can edit the details in Meeting Options. Here you have control over such things as who can enter the call, who needs to wait in the lobby until they are admitted, or who can present content within the meeting.
- Attendees access – Attendees will have access to the recording, as well as your PowerPoint presentation – if you choose. Attendees can easily share your content or refer to it at a later time.
Step one: Planning and Set up of your Microsoft Teams Live Event
When planning a webinar you must first make an outline for your webinar. Consider the amount of time you have and what you want to cover in that time. The basic format we follow for our webinars is as follows:
- Introduction (first five minutes or so) – during this time, we introduce who we are, state the topic of our webinar, let people know that we will be recording the webinar, and covering any rules for the webinar (i.e. – questions at end).
- Demo (the majority of the time) – Walk through your topic in a meaningful way to engage your viewers. Everyone is busy. We want people to feel that attending our webinar was a good use of their time. Make sure not to focus to much on the technical side of things – focus on the benefits!
- Wrap up – Now is the time to review questions from your audience. (You may want to have a couple questions ready to go just in case)! Let attendees know that they will be getting an email with follow ups from the webinar.
At the beginning stage of the planning for your webinar is brainstorming. You must first decide how often you want to do webinars. Will your webinar be a one-off event or part of a continual series? Another question you may want to ask yourself is how long your webinar will last. holds a monthly 30 minute webinar. Everyone is busy and we felt that for our audience, 30 minutes was appropriate.
The next thing you need to decide on is a topic. It is important to consider your audience. Think about what is new in your industry and what your audience wants to hear about. Look at the analytics of past social media posts and blogs. What has generated the most interest? Look at what your competitors are blogging about and doing webinars on. What is the best way to share your expertise? Will you have a co-presenter or will you bring in an external expert?
And of course giving yourself adequate time to prepare is key. Make sure you have enough time to perform all the work required. Practicing and doing a few trial runs is a good idea.
After deciding on a topic, it is now time to create your live event in Microsoft Teams. Simply go to your calendar and in the upper right corner, next to new meeting, click on the down arrow and choose Live Event.
It is now time to fill in details for your webinar.
When you scroll down, you will see more options, such as whether you want a Q&A session or an attendee engagement report.
*Important to note that when you invite people to your event, you have to chose the role you wish them to have. There are 3 roles: producer, presenter, and attendee. It is important in assigning roles that you understand exactly what each role can and can’t do.
- Producer – There should only be one producer. The producer is in charge on controlling the live event. The producer sends the event live and also finishes the event. The producer can share their content or that of the presenter. Once the live Q&A session has been switched on, presenters can also act as moderators.
- Presenter – There can be multiple presenters on your live event. Each presenter can share their audio, live video, or content on a screen sharing – as well as content from other presenters (if you have more than one).
- Attendee – Depending on how you set your live event up (public or private), attendees can be external or internal. Attendees can either join the live event by using their invitation link or they can choose to view the event in their web browser of Teams app.
In Conclusion
Webinars are among the best marketing platforms. Webinars establish you as an authority in the field and allow you direct contact with your target group. Holding webinars actually saves time and money, as they allow you a global audience without having to travel. Webinars allow you to reach a large amount of people at once. Remember, the hardest thing about doing webinars is just getting started. Decide you want to do it and just get started. You won’t be perfect. You will evolve with time and practice.
Get started today – happy planning!
How Can We Help?
If you have any questions on getting started with Teams Live events or if we can help you with any of your Dynamics 365 needs, don’t hesitate to . We would be more than happy to assist you. is a recognized expert in helping organizations like yours get the most out of their Dynamics 365 system.
Join our January 2021 webinar about The New Search Experience in Dynamics 365. Topics for future webinars will be announced soon and registration will be available on our website, as well as on our Facebook page.
Visit our for other informative webinars or our for the most current and up to date information.
8 Steps to Managing Your Liquidity Risk
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Balancing liquidity risk is no easy feat and is perhaps one of the most important goals of any business. Ensuring that you can meet your company’s short term debts while also turning a long-term profit is a task that is more than just about balancing cash assets – it’s about ensuring the health of your entire company. And, it’s perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for any company.
As such, a liquidity risk manager’s job needs to extend beyond the balance sheet to influence other parts of the business.
But we all know that it’s challenging for any organization to know the value of the assets they hold. Add to that the ever fluctuating markets and the scenario becomes increasingly complex to accurately manage.
In this solution brief “8 Steps to Managing Liquidity Risk”, Stu Blair, Senior Solutions Engineer at TIBCO Software talks about the complex challenges you face when managing your liquidity risk and give you concrete steps to successfully manage that risk.
Enabling Risk Management with a Real-time Decision Engine
To start, you need a platform that provides a real-time decision engine. This engine should be capable of continuously iterating simulations based on historical, contemporary, and predicted future parameters, preferably using digital twins. It should also be capable of arming decision-makers with the next best action for balancing short, medium, and long investment portfolios against respective liquidity requirements.
Every organization in every industry needs an appropriate liquidity risk management capability to take advantage of opportunities while guarding against erratic events. Click To Tweet
Every organization in every industry needs an appropriate liquidity risk management capability to take advantage of opportunities while guarding against erratic events.
Survey: How Business Leaders Are Managing Through COVID-19
It’s a tough time for businesses. Leaders are faced with managing critical short-term priorities as they try to ensure their business survives the global pandemic, while also having to determine how they can set their business up for a faster rebound and long-term success.
To learn more about how business leaders are coping and what we can do to help in both the short and long term, our research team at Brainyard surveyed 174 executives and managers from small ($ 10 million or less), midsize ($ 11-50 million) and midcap ($ 51-500 million) companies in North America over the first week of April. Here’s what we found.
Almost Every Business Has Been Impacted
Businesses have been affected, some positively. But returning to normal is still far out.
- 85 percent of respondents said their businesses have been harmed by the coronavirus outbreak. 53 percent classified the harm as substantial.
- The pandemic has created increased demand for some businesses, with 14 percent of businesses bringing on more workers and 20 percent asking for more hours from their existing employees to meet growing demands.
- Almost universally, new safety and business policies/practices have been put in place. 93 percent of businesses have worked to educate staff on new safety practices; 95 percent have canceled business travel; and 89 percent have offered remote work to at least some employees.
A New 2020
Business leaders are re-evaluating spending for this year and starting to plan for the road ahead.
- Every company is re-evaluating its spending plans for the year. Capital spending will experience the biggest lost with nearly 60 percent planning large (46 percent) or small (13 percent) cuts.
- Only 17 percent of executives think they can get through this crisis without some form of financial help. When asked about the sources of financial help, 80 percent noted federal aid, 43 percent noted bank loans and 20 percent are looking for help from state led programs.
- Business leaders from companies of different sizes had very different outlooks. A quarter (25 percent) of executives from businesses with less than $ 10 million in revenue are very confident of success in the coming six months compared to only 8 percent of executives from businesses with revenues in excess of $ 10 million.
- Businesses are prioritizing technology investments. 30 percent of businesses are planning to increase spending on technology, while 31 percent expect investments in technology to remain flat from 2019 levels. In contrast, spending plans varied in other categories including payroll (48 percent), marketing (53 percent), sales (52 percent) and production (43 percent) planning cuts.
While business leaders expect this to be a difficult year for their companies and the economy, there is a sentiment of hope if they can control spending, get access to financial aid and focus on areas that deliver an immediate return.
We all know it’s a long road ahead, but every journey starts with a single step and together we can rebuild and return to growth.
Light at the end of the funnel: managing remotely, managing by proposal
The CRM is a sales manager’s “eyes upon the world.” Every lead your team is working, every opportunity in the pipeline, every task and activity can be seen, and acted upon. Whether they’re working remotely, as most every sales rep is doing in these trying times, or on-site.
First, know that you’re not alone. COVID-19 has resulted in nearly 30% of the US workforce learning to work from home.
Where your reps could once rely on IT or admins for help with systems and processes — within and outside of Dynamics — they’re now becoming a shop of one. But they still need managing.
Luckily, sales organizations have long been on the “front lines” of working remotely, all the way back to the days of The Traveling Salesman. So sales managers often have experience in managing a remote workforce.
If you’re not sure where to start, or you’re pressed for time, perhaps the easiest means of managing remote sales teams is called “managing by proposal.” Because while there are myriad success metrics you can track, none has a greater impact on your bottom line than proposals in circulation.
Not only that, but at this moment in history, it’s likely easier to close what’s in your pipeline than fill the top of the funnel.
Absolutely use what’s in D365 CE/CRM! Managing by proposal does not replace day-to-day funnel management. It simply reduces a dozen sales tracking metrics to the most essential one: closing new business.
It comes down to effective time management: if you’re a sales manager who has the time to manage each rep’s funnel from open leads to closed deals, then by all means do so!
But if you’re pressed for time, helping a team new to work remotely on other tasks as they become acclimated, managing by proposal can help you streamline management duties while keeping your eye on the bottom line.
We believe there’s no better top-of-the-funnel system than D365 CRM (whether you’re using Sales, PSA, Field Service, etc.). All the tools you need for identifying and qualifying prospects are built into the Microsoft ecosystem. However… there’s a slight blind spot at the quoting and closing process.
Let’s start with creating a quote. In CRM, sales quotes are typically generated in Word or Excel, saved as a PDF, and sent along with an email. That’s ok, but it results in a quote that looks like it was created in Word or Excel.
And when it comes to the closing process, what you’ll often find in an “out of the box” CRM is quotes sent; opportunity won; opportunity lost. That’s a dearth of details. (Like if someone described Star Wars by saying, “There were some robots in the desert. And later the good guys won.”)
To create compelling, professional looking quotes quickly, and to be able to completely track every step of the journey during the signing process, you need to .
A CPQ system will empower your sales team — rookies and veterans alike — to quickly create populated with your most compelling offers and optimal pricing in just minutes.
And the tracking tools embedded in CPQ allow you to track every step of every quote, empowering you to manage by proposal. The kinds of insights delivered by CPQ are often the most critical and pulled from what is most often CRM’s aforementioned slight blind spot — the quote singing process — hence delivering light at the end of the funnel.
Managing Power Automate Flows from a Central Location
Lately I’ve been working more with Power Automate, and one of the challenges I have found is that managing them has become very cumbersome. With some stored in solutions, some in My Flows and some in Team Flows, finding the place where I left the flow I need to check, turn on, or turn off, has become a huge burden. Usually, I end up with tons of tabs and different browsers open, and by the time I find the right flow I’ve more than likely forgotten what I was going to do with it.
A helpful solution I discovered is that Canvas Apps now have a PowerAutomateManagement connector, allowing the management of flows stored in every possible nook and cranny of a tenant from one centralized location.
The capabilities of the connector seem pretty extensive, with options for creating and updating flows, starting and stopping them, listing the connectors, connections, triggers, actions. This is great, but what I really want is to just see them all in one place, and be able to open them from that single place. Being able to turn them off and on is an added bonus.
Feel free to import and reuse this package, located here. First choose the environment dropdown to pick the environment you want to manage, on the right side of the screen.
The list you’ll be presented with should include flows in all solutions in the environment, flows outside of solutions that you own, and ones that are shared to you. To open the management page for the flow click the Manage link on the left (if you’re in a GCC tenant checking the GCC box will use the right management url compared to public domain if its unchecked). To stop a flow currently turned on, click Turn Off, to start a Flow currently turned off, click Turn On.
Hope this helps!
Matt
Managing SQL Server Docker containers in macOS
In the first part of this article series, you learned the basics of SQL Server containers for macOS, starting with a brief definition of what Docker is, how it works (architecture) and how to install it on macOS. Finally, I gave you a quick example on how to pull a Docker image from Microsoft Container registry to create a SQL Server container using the Docker command line client.
In this second part, you will learn in detail about the Docker command line client. My goal is to help you understand how all these commands can help you to manage your SQL Server container through its life cycle.
Container Life Cycle
You may have heard these words before: Containers are ephemeral. Let me tell you, that phrase is absolutely true. Containers are created one day for a specific task and the next day stopped or even deleted to be rebuilt from a recent version of the image that includes minimal changes in the configuration or functionality of the containerized application. That is why you want to become very familiar with the Docker command line client. The better you learn and understand all the command line client instructions to interact with the Docker daemon, the faster you will start developing, shipping and running containerized applications. In this specific case, we are looking forward to becoming proficient managing SQL Server containers.
The life cycle of a container starts by identifying the base image version you want to use for the containerized application. In the previous article, I explained the meaning of the SQL Server image tag (SQL Server Version – build number – operating system). This is the first thing you want to look for when choosing the image from Microsoft Container Registry repository.
Then, the next step is to create the container using the docker run command (see part 1). The problem comes when you don’t want to keep this container up and running all the time. You need to learn how to stop it, modify it or even delete it.
In summary, the container life cycle is basically performing some or all of the following actions:
- Stop
- Start
- Delete
Take a look at how Docker client can help perform all of these container life cycle actions.
Docker Container Management
At this point you should understand that a Docker image is required to create a container. When working with containers, it is pretty common to end up with multiple local copies of Docker images laying around in the local image repository. Probably, these images are from previous test efforts performed using different versions of the same application. SQL Server is not an exception to this problem; you can have multiple images of SQL Server 2017 from the RTM version to the latest CU.
Listing Images
The best way to understand what images are available in the local repository, is using the docker image ls command. This command simply lists all existing images including the repository where it came from, the tag, image ID and its size.
|
$ docker Image ls |
Here is what the output looks like:
As you can see, I have a significant number of images in my local repository, probably because I have been testing several versions of SQL Server 2017 and 2019. If you look closely, you will note I have different images for different operating systems (Ubuntu & RedHat).
Deleting Images
At the time I’m writing this article, SQL Server 2019 is already in GA (General availability), so there is no point for me to keep using the “2019-RC1” (Release candidate) in my local repository. Therefore, for this example I will proceed to remove that image from my local repository.
I need to use the docker image rmi command to help me with this container management action. A requirement for this container management action is to know the docker image ID beforehand, and I already have this information from the previous example:
|
$ docker image ls |
Using the highlighted image ID above, I will proceed to remove the image as follows:
|
$ docker image rmi e3be04ae2efd |
As you can see from the output, the image ID e3be04ae2efd (2019-RC1) was deleted and untagged from my local image repository.
Checking the Container Status
The Docker client provides many ways to check the status of a container. You can easily find the current state of a container and understand what is going on from within the container by checking the logs or simply learn about its CPU and memory utilization.
Now it’s time to put all these theories in practice using the Docker client commands.
docker ps
The docker ps command is a great way to find the current state of all your containers; however, you need to understand how to make the most of it. For example, if this command is executed without any options, it only shows running containers by default.
|
$ docker ps |
The output provides the following information:
- Container ID
- Image
- Command (Last command executed when this container started)
- Creation date
- Status
- Ports
- Container name
This is a good starting point; however, what happens if you want to learn more about all the other containers that are not actually running? Or filter by name or status? Don’t worry, the docker ps command provides that information and many options more.
Speaking about options, I will focus just in two:
|
Option name |
Command |
|
All |
docker ps -a |
|
Filter |
docker ps -f |
There are many more options of course; however, the two options listed above are the most useful for finding the status of the container quickly and easy.
All (docker ps -a)
This command requires to combine the docker ps command with the -a option. It will list all containers regardless of their states (running | paused | stopped). This is better than just running the docker ps command without any options, so take a look at the output:
|
$ docker ps -a |
As you can see, the command returns too much information. You may be asking yourself if there is a way to see this output cleaner or make it readable for everybody.
Many Docker client commands have an additional argument called --format just for this purpose. The format must be specified using the “Go” language which is translated to a JSON object to produce the desired output.
Imagine you want to know more about all your containers, but you are interested to see a customized output including just the container name, the image and the last known status. Here is an example based on this need, where the output will be displayed as a tabbed table displaying just the columns included in JSON format:
|
docker ps -a <a id=“post-86135-_Hlk29456354″></a>–format “table {{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Status}}” |
095d6d460cd Exited (255) 9 months ago
master_ag2 4095d6d460cd (137) 12 months ago
This customized output looks way better than the default one, the three columns {{.Names}}, {{.Image}} and {{.Status}} are tab (\t) separated making the text clean and easy to read.
Of course, this is just an example. You are free to customize this output the way you like as this is at least a good starting point.
Filter (docker ps -f)
The filter option is just like a WHERE clause for a query; it will look up a key value to be paired with one of the supported filters:
|
Filter |
Description |
|
id |
Container’s ID |
|
name |
Container’s name |
|
label |
An arbitrary string representing either a key or a key-value pair |
|
status |
One of created, restarting, running, removing, paused, exited, or dead |
In simple terms, it allows you to search for all those containers with certain ID, name, label or even status.
Here are a few examples of the use of the filter option for different scenarios.
Filtering by Name
Imagine you want to list all those containers that start with the word “Simple.” We add the filter key name to the docker ps -f command assigning the lookup value. Let’s see how it works:
|
$ docker ps -f “name=Simple” |
The output returned is just what I expected. I can see a container with name “SimpleTalk” is listed, which by the way is in “running” status. Note that I didn’t have to specify the exact name; it just found a name that matches with the specified pattern.
Filtering by Name Regardless of the Status
The previous example works well; however, there is a problem with this filter. The results are being limited by the docker ps command because it will list only active (running) containers. In case you want to make sure all containers are listed regardless of the status, you must add the “-a” option to the previous example. This is how it works:
|
$ docker ps -a -f “name=master” |
Note that all the containers with the name “master” are listed. This is good but not quite perfect yet. What about combining everything learned so far? I mean, listing all containers regardless of the state filtered by name and limiting the output to show just the container name, image, port number and status in a tabbed table form.
Here is the command:
|
$ docker ps -a -f “name=master” –format “table {{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Status}}” |
The output looks good now, clean and easy to read. Importantly, it lists all containers with the word “master” in the name, regardless of its status.
Stopping the Container
The docker stop command is what you want to use to stop one or more containers; you just need to specify the container name. This is very similar to the previous example; however, there is something else that you need to understand, especially when stopping a SQL Server container.
There are multiple termination signals in Linux, used for slightly different purposes. Docker containers uses the SIGTERM and SIGKILL termination signals, but what they are?
SIGTERM
This is a generic signal to terminate a program, it is the traditional way to ask a program to terminate its process.
SIGKILL
This signal causes the immediate termination of a program. This signal cannot be blocked or ignored; it simply kills the program.
Putting all this together means: When the docker stop command is issued, the main process of the container in question–in this case SQL Server–will receive a SIGTERM, giving the program enough time to gracefully shutdown. After this grace period finishes (10 seconds by default), the container will receive a SIGKILL to immediately terminate SQL Server.
Run this command to stop the container:
|
$ docker stop SimpleTalk |
How cool is that! Using just a single line of code you can stop a SQL Server instance. You don’t need to worry about stopping the services anymore when using containers because everything is handled by Docker using the SIGTERM and SIGKILL signals as explained before.
Starting the Container
Booting up a VM or waiting for all the SQL Server services to be started is something from the past. Trust me, containers really change the way to ship and develop applications because of its simplicity. If you are one of those people that likes to get things done quickly and efficiently, you are going to love the container technology.
Starting up a container, requires running the docker start command followed by the name of the container. That’s so simple, right? Take a look at how it works in practice:
|
$ docker start SimpleTalk |
The command returns the name of the container as an indicator that the container called “SimpleTalk” was successfully started.
Deleting the Container
This is the last step in container management, and the obvious step when you are done with the life cycle of your container. The docker rm command has a few options It can remove a container regardless of its status (stopped | running), and it can also remove all containers including its volume.
I will focus on the traditional way, removing a container regardless of its status. Combining the docker rm with the --force option will send a SIGKILL then the container will be immediately removed.
First, check the status of the “SimpleTalk” container:
|
$ docker ps -a –format “table {{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Status}}” |
As you can from the output above, this container has been up and running for the last 4 minutes. Now delete it using the docker rm --force command:
|
$ docker rm –force SimpleTalk |
The command returned just the name of the removed container. To make sure it happened correctly, check the status of all the containers again:
The “SimpleTalk” container is gone from the list, which means this container was successfully removed.
Conclusion
Understanding the container life cycle is important, it really helps you to understand better what exactly you are doing when interacting with the Docker daemon through the Docker client commands.
At this point, you should be able to perform all the following actions using Docker for macOS:
- Pull an image
- Create a container
- Check the status of a container
- Stop, start and delete a container
Please join me in the next article series, where I will focus on examining the Docker container to learn more about its metadata and to connect using a database productivity tool like SQLCMD or Azure Data Studio for macOS.
Managing Experience And Costs On Retail’s 2020 To-Do List
Apparently, in the early 1900s, the various products of the earth could be ordered quite easily, if one were “of above-average capacity or character,” middle class, and happened to live in London. For recipients of my 2019 Christmas presents, the good news is that I could choose gifts originating far beyond the shores of the UK without a capacity, character, or class test.
Although this was good for my nearest and dearest (otherwise they might not have got so much as a tangerine), it’s not clear it was good for the UK’s retail sector. I haven’t seen any figures that go up to December 25, but it seems the Black Friday figures were pretty good – even for the High Street, at least in terms of volume. However, the travails of the UK retail sector are not demand but margin driven; demand remains reasonably buoyant. In October 2019, ONS reported that year-on-year growth in the quantity bought increased by 3.1%, with growth across all sectors except household goods stores.
However, McKinsey research has already shown that UK consumers are twice as likely to trade down – i.e., to buy a cheaper product – than trade up. Cost-cutting is just one weapon in the retailer’s armory in their fight for their share of consumer spending. The research suggests that savings from indirect procurement are an important source of margin improvement for retailers. In particular, marketing, private label packaging, and supplier managed costs are all identified as categories that can deliver double-digit savings. The strategy house also recommends retailers look to clean sheeting, consumer insights, and design to value combined with digital analytics to unlock value.
Retail products and product mix are also undergoing rapid change. Nielsen’s 2018 report the Rise and Rise Again of Private Label showcases an important component of that change. Getting private label right helped Tesco make the top 10 of Deloitte’s 2019 Global Powers of Retailing. In 2018, with the aim of cutting its own-label costs, the company announced a strategic partnership with Carrefour.
Innovation at pace and being able to scale what works also at a pace are, as Deloitte has highlighted, crucial for retailers. With this frenetic pace of activity, it is important not to evaluate products in a binary “ditch” / “scale” manner. Tracking a customer’s product experience journey can reap huge dividends helping organizations make changes to realize value without having to go back to the drawing board.
Learn how Belkin uses the Qualtrics XM Platform to track product insights in real-time across all stages of the customer journey, which enabled its product teams to intervene post-product launch and successfully close an $ 80 million gap against sales targets.
For more on how SAP Ariba supports retail, read my colleague Florian’s post, and see my colleague James’ post on the importance of being able to combine experience data with operational data.
Managing Business Credit Risk for CSP and Recurring Billing with Work 365
Payments at Risk
Not all customers are created equal. This is especially true when it comes to payment timeliness – businesses that offer pro-rated or ongoing services in advance of payment are taking on risk and can be affected by slow or missed customer payments.
Evaluating the extent of that risk and coordinating that risk can be difficult when invoices, payments, and services are all on different systems. With cloud services and recurring billing, we need to apply a different mindset to provisioning, invoicing and payment collection.
In a previous post, we shared best practices on Subscription Billing. Subscription billing cannot be treated the same way that we handle one-time items or paper-based licenses or even project-based invoices. It’s commonplace to apply protections like Billing in advance to ensure that the payment is received before incurring any costs.
Subscription Billing or Cloud services have these characteristics:
- Generally long term in nature
- Customers tend to purchase with options like Monthly or Annual billing
- Purchases are not always large
- Cloud Services tend to be essential services that are commonly used to run the business like Email
Credit Hold Functionality
Regardless when there is a new relationship – financial and accounting processes need to be in place in order to streamline and Sales and Billing operations. Credit management is one such item. Dynamics 365 Sales provides out of the box fields like Credit Limit and Credit Hold. These fields are exactly what they are meant to be which is to flag a customer for Credit Hold and specify a Credit limit for the customer.
Work 365 leverages these features to limit the exposure and synchronize the process between sales->service and finance. A new or existing customer may be on credit hold as the sales team closes their first sale and even set up subscriptions and billing contracts. While the Account is on credit hold the system doesn’t provision any services thereby allowing the finance team to complete any credit management processes like requesting a payment profile or collecting documentation. Once the Credit management process is completed and the Credit hold is lifted the system automatically provisions any items that are in the awaiting state.
Another use case is when a credit hold is placed for non-payment. The customer’s account can be put on credit hold preventing them from making further changes or adding subscriptions. Sales and service teams can indicate to the customer that the account is on credit hold and not something they are able to workaround. Giving your finance and sales teams further leverage to collect payments while also providing adequate system-based responses. This credit hold feature prevents revenue loss from unpaid balances. This is also another example of how Work 365 leverages the Dynamics 365 Sales application to synchronize the tasks between Sales, Service, and the finance teams.
Work 365 syncs account and system information from sales and accounting and streamline the credit check process to make sure all information is accurate and up-to-date. Holds can be immediately paused or un-paused based on the customer’s payment and credit history with your services. These features, coupled with invoice integration for automated billing, help Cloud Solution Providers to control their cloud business even more than before, saving time and money.
Check out our customer to learn more about the problems our CSP customers faced.
From Payday to Promotions: Managing Your People More Effectively
Posted by Jonathan D’Sa, Director Outbound Product Management
Every company has people that need to be paid, managed and motivated.
Two of NetSuite’s customers, Advanced Product Piping Manufacturing (APP) and Fisher Unitech, are in different industries, generate different revenues and have completely different backgrounds and growth stories. But they do share one thing in common: they both made the move to bring together their HR processes and financials into a single application using NetSuite ERP and SuitePeople.
Advanced Piping Products Prioritizes Its People
APP is a manufacturing company based in Houston, Texas that stocks and sells above-ground pipe supports across the U.S. In a recent webcast, the President of APP, Carrie Reese, explained that when she and her husband took over the company, the company was shifting their strategy from outsourcing to in-house manufacturing. It needed a scalable HR and payroll system to grow with the business while also connecting to the ERP system, which is what led APP to consider SuitePeople.
After going live on NetSuite ERP, implementing the natively built SuitePeople as its HR and Payroll solution was an easy decision.
The benefits are tangible:
- Time to process payroll decreased by 85%
- Five backend systems decreased to just two
But best of all, SuitePeople has helped APP foster a sense of culture tied to the organization’s values. The company even makes shirts for its employees that receive SuitePeople Kudos!
By adding NetSuite’s HR capabilities, APP now has a single system to run the entire business, eliminating manual entry of payroll data, remaining HR compliant and increasing productivity. Carrie and her husband can now focus their newly acquired time and energy on growing their business rather than managing a multitude of systems.
Fisher Unitech Says Goodbye to Manual Processes and Hello to Growth
Fisher Unitech is a leading provider of product lifecycle management solutions. Unfortunately, as it expanded it lacked a backend financial system that could manage its rapid growth goals, including its rapidly increasing headcount.
Initially, Fisher Unitech was manually running the business in Excel, email and even sometimes spiral notebooks. When it decided to implement NetSuite ERP, Patrick Scally – Fisher Unitech’s HR Director – began exploring options to upgrade payroll processes to fit within the company’s new ERP system, he said in a recent webinar. The appeal of an integrated, simplified solution that could scale with Fisher Unitech’s high-growth business led it to SuitePeople.
SuitePeople’s payroll functionality built on the ERP system provides a unified source of truth for the company. As the business grew, the need for a more comprehensive HR system became more apparent as well; Patrick says the driving force to implement SuitePeople HR functionality was pure scalability of the solution. With SuitePeople HR and Payroll, Patrick’s confident that Fisher Unitech now has a scalable suite of business applications that the company can trust while continuing to accelerate growth.
Interested in hearing more about the success of how NetSuite customers are using SuitePeople? Check out the on-demand webinars featuring APP and Fisher Unitech.
by NetSuite filed under