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Tag Archives: Online

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) Online Refresh Limitation

September 19, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

At PowerObjects, our consultants are 100% dedicated to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Business Applications. In this blog, we would like to highlight a lesson learned from a project when we used Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) online data source connector, called Instance Web API, for Power BI reports. We published a blogpost in June 2019, “ Power BI Scheduled Refresh Impacts Power BI Report…

Source

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How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience

July 6, 2020   Big Data
 How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience

Online retailers have long lured customers with the ability to browse vast selections of merchandise from home, quickly compare prices and offers, and have goods conveniently delivered to their doorstep. But much of the in-person shopping experience has been lost, not the least of which is trying on clothes to see how they fit, how the colors work with your complexion, and so on.

Companies like Stitch Fix, Wantable, and Trunk Club have attempted to address this problem by hiring professionals to choose clothes based on your custom parameters and ship them out to you. You can try things on, keep what you like, and send back what you don’t. Stitch Fix’s version of this service is called Fixes. Customers get a personalized Style Card with an outfit inspiration. It’s algorithmically driven and helps human style experts match a garment with a particular shopper. Each Fix included a Style Card that showed clothing options to complete outfits based on the various items in a customer’s Fix. Due to popular demand, last year the company began testing a way for shoppers to buy those related items directly from Stitch Fix through a program called Shop Your Looks.

AI is a natural fit for such services, and Stitch Fix has embraced the technology to accelerate and improve Shop Your Looks. On the tech front, this puts the company in direct competition with behemoths Facebook, Amazon, and Google, all of which are aggressively building out AI-powered clothes shopping experiences.

Stitch Fix told VentureBeat that during the Shop Your Looks beta period, “more than one-third of clients who purchased through Shop Your Looks engaged with the feature multiple times, and approximately 60% of clients who purchased through the offering bought two items or more.” It’s been successful enough that the company recently expanded to include an entire shoppable collection using the same underlying technology to personalize outfit and item recommendations as you shop.

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Stitch Fix data scientists Hilary Parker and Natalia Gardiol explained to VentureBeat in an email interview what drove the company to develop Shop Your Looks; how the team used AI to build it out; and the methods they used, like factorization machines.

In this case study:

  • Problem: How to expand the scope of its service that matches outfits to online customers using a mix of algorithms and human expertise.
  • The result is “Shop Your Looks.”
  • It grew out of an experiment by a small team of Stitch Fix data scientists, then expanded across other units within the company.
  • The biggest challenge was how to determine what is a “good” outfit, when taste is so subjective and context matters.
  • Stitch Fix used a combination of human-crafted rules to store, sort, and manipulate data, along with AI models called factorization machines

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

VentureBeat: Did Stitch Fix kind of fall in love with an AI tool or technique, using that as inspiration to make a product using that tool or technique? Or did the company start with a problem or challenge and eventually settle on an AI-powered solution?

Stitch Fix: To create Shop Your Looks, we had to evolve our algorithm capabilities from matching a client with an individual item in a Fix to now matching an entire outfit based on a client’s past purchases and preferences. This is an incredibly complex challenge because it means not only understanding which items go together but also which of these outfits an individual client will actually like. For example, one person may like bold patterns mixed together and another person may prefer a bold top with a more muted bottom.

To help us solve this problem, we took advantage of our existing framework that provides Stylists with item recommendations for a Fix and determined what new information we needed to feed into that framework, and how we could collect it.

First, it’s important to understand how clients currently share information with us:

  • Style Profile: When a client signs up for Stitch Fix, we receive 90 different data points — from style to price point to size.
  • Feedback at checkout: 85% of our clients tell us why they are keeping or returning an item. This is incredibly rich data, including details on fit and style — no other retailer gets this level of feedback.
  • Style Shuffle: an interactive feature within our app and on our website where clients can “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” an image of an item or an outfit. They can do this at any time — so not just when they receive a Fix. So far, we’ve received an incredible 4 billion item ratings from clients.
  • Personalized request notes to Stylists: Clients give their Stylists specific requests, such as if they are looking for an outfit for an event, or if they’ve seen an item that they really like.

For Shop Your Looks, we supplement this with information about what items go together. The outfits in Style Cards, outfits our Creative Styling Team builds, and outfits we serve to clients in Style Shuffle give us valuable additional insight into a client’s outfit style preferences

VB: How did you go about starting this project? Did you need to hire new talent?

SF: Data science is core to what we do. We have more than 125 data scientists who work across our business, including in recommendation systems, human computation, resource management, inventory management, and apparel design.

Data-driven experimentation is an important part of the team’s culture, so like many initiatives at Stitch Fix, Shop Your Looks was born out of an experiment from a small team of data scientists. As the project grew beyond the initial data collecting phase and into beta testing, the data science team worked with other groups across the business. For example, our Creative Styling Team is tuned in to customer needs and able to recommend looks that are approachable, aspirational, and inspirational.

VB: What was the biggest or most interesting challenge you had to overcome in the process of creating Shop Your Looks?

SF: Creating outfits for clients is a really complex problem because what makes a good outfit is so subjective to each individual. What one person believes is a great outfit, another might not. The toughest part of solving this problem is that an outfit is not a fixed entity — it’s fundamentally contextual. Tackling this problem required gathering new insights, not just about specific items that clients like, but also about how clients reacted to items grouped together.

And because style is so subjective, we had to rethink how we qualified a “good” outfit for our algorithms, since there’s not simply one perfect outfit that exists. Clients have different style preferences, so we believe a “good” outfit is one that a certain set of our clients like, but not necessarily all.

We learn a lot about how clients react to items grouped together when we share outfits with clients and ask them to rate them via Style Shuffle.

VB: What AI tools and techniques does Stitch Fix employ — generally, and for Shop Your Looks?

SF: Shop Your Looks combines AI models and human-crafted rules to store, sort, and manipulate data.

The system is roughly based on a class of AI models called factorization machines and has a few distinct steps. Because generating outfits is complicated, we can’t just create an outfit and call it good. In the first step, we create a pairing model, which is able to predict pairs of items that go well together, such as a pair of shoes and a skirt or a pair of pants and a T-shirt.

We then move on to the next stage — outfit assembly. Here we select a set of items that all come together to form a cohesive outfit (based on the predictions from the pairing model). In this system, we use “outfit templates,” which provide a guideline of what an outfit consists of. For example, one template is tops, pants, shoes, and a bag, and another is a dress, necklace, and shoes.

In the final phase of recommending outfits for Shop Your Looks, there are several factors that come into play. We set an anchor item, which is an item the client kept from a past Fix, which we’d like to build outfits around. The algorithm also has to factor in what inventory is available at any given time. Once that is done, the algorithm develops personalized recommendations tailored to each client’s preferences. Clients can then browse and shop these looks directly from the Shop tab on mobile or desktop. The outfit recommendations refresh throughout the day, so clients can regularly check back for new outfit inspiration.

VB: What did you learn that’s applicable to future AI projects?

SF: We introduced Shop Your Looks to a small number of our clients in the U.S. last year, and throughout this initial beta period we learned a lot about how they interact with the product and how our algorithms performed.

A key tenet of our personalization model is that the more information clients share, the better we are able to personalize their recommendations. We are usually able to adapt the model based on feedback from our clients; however, rules-based systems aren’t generally adaptive. We need the system to learn from client feedback on the outfits it recommends. We’re receiving immensely helpful feedback, from how clients engage with the outfit recommendations and also from a custom-built internal QA system. The model is in its early days, and we are continually adding more information to show clients more highly personalized outfits. For example, while seasonal trends are important overall, recommendations should be customized to a client’s local climate so that clients who experience summer weather earlier than others will start to receive summer items before those in cooler climates.

As we serve more clients, we are receiving an additional data set that strengthens the feedback loop and continues to make our personalization capabilities stronger.

VB: What’s the next AI-related project for Stitch Fix (that you can talk about)?

SF: One of the most interesting aspects of data science at Stitch Fix is the unusual degree to which the algorithms team is engaged with virtually every aspect of the business — from marketing to managing inventory and operations, and of course in helping our Stylists choose items our clients will love.

We believe that when we look to the future, the data science team will still be focused on improving personalization. This could include anything from sizing to predicting your styling needs before you even know you need something.

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Bolly4U; Choose the Best Online Streaming Website to Spend Your Time in a Quality Way

April 23, 2020   Humor
Bolly4U 696x435 Bolly4U; Choose the Best Online Streaming Website to Spend Your Time in a Quality Way

Bolly4U has been presenting quality entertaining videos for free, for over many years, and thus has become a hot topic among all the age groups. In this rapid and modern life, you might have noticed that the movies and TV series are loved, awaited, and appreciated among the young and the new generations. Bolly4U is going to be the best option for you if you want to spend your leisure time watching quality movies.

This is one of the best web-based platforms, where you can get access to the latest Hindi, Tamil, and English dubbed movies for free. The site owns a large catalog of all sorts of movies with the best ones of all times absolutely for free. In the upcoming lines, you are going to read all about this amazing website and the way to watch movies within a safe and secure environment. 

Types Of Entertaining Stuff On Bolly4u?

You may find there incredibly a huge variety of latest Bolly4U movies. The site has made it possible to find almost all types of movies available on its platform. There are different types of movies including the Telugu movies, Tamil movies, Tamil dubbed movies, Telugu dubbed movies, Hindi new movies, Hollywood latest movies, Kannada movies, Telugu dubbed Hollywood movies and Telugu AVI movies.

Relaunching with New Clone Names

Though the Bolly4U online movie streaming site has been banned many times, yet they have got tricks for this problematical issue. They are running all of their illegal activities by changing multiple clone domains. As they get shut down with one domain name, they move to the other one and resume sharing the latest movies, mega shows, and web series on their web portal. At the current time, they are running all of their unlawful activities from different domains.

Here is a small list of some of the banned, and active domain names of Bolly4U.

https://bolly4u.tube/
https://bolly4u.trade/
https://bolly4u.best/
https://bolly4u.info/
https://bolly4u.org/
All the links are going to redirect you to the official site

The old domains that were shut down

bolly4u.rocks
bolly4u.net
bolly4u.video
boll-y4u.com
boll-y4u.live
boll-y4u.rocks
boll-y4u.site
bolly4u.ninja
bolly4u.work
boll-y4u.online
boll-y4u.video
boll-y4u.asia
boll-y4u.website
boll-y4u.ninja

Incredible Video Quality with Crystal Clear Results 

Bolly4U presents the best quality movies to its visitors without charging them any monthly or annual fee. If you type some queries about the movie you want to watch in the search bar, you will get results instantly based on your search. If you are seeking a movie to download, there is also an option to choose the resolution quality like 720p, 1080p before downloading it. You will get every movie listed with additional information like name, story, duration, genre, cast, rating, and release date, etc. with the movie.

Easy to Navigate Web Portal, and User-Friendly Interface

The site has been designed with a user-friendly interface and owns an easy to navigate plan. Thus it makes its user feel comfortable while browsing the site. In this web-based free movie store, there are many sections and categories, where you can find your favorite music, movies, and shows. The navigation to the site is very simple, that you can find all your desired stuff within just a few steps or clicks. You will never find yourself alone or feel perplexed to navigate the site.

Huge Variety of Movies and Shows

When you visit the site, you may find the main menu that leads you to different sections. All the sections are categorized into different genres of the movies, TV series, and mega shows. If you want to watch romantic movies, you will get big data regarding your taste. For kids, there is a kids’ corner containing cartoons and animation movies. The women can find fashion shows on the site. If you are a sports lover, you can watch any small or major sport event. The videos about International mega shows can also be had on the site. To find it all, you have to just log on the site, and visit all the data freely.

Don’t Forget The Site is Presenting Pirated Content

Bolly4U is a well-known platform to present pirated movies from Bollywood, Hollywood, and South Indian film making industry. If you consider the site on moral values, it is not suitable for you to watch pirated movies, because it causes a lot more loss to the filmmakers. It’s therefore not appreciated to watch movies on such a site. 

The Care, You Should Take

Though you can browse the Internet without any worry, yet if you are visiting free streaming sites like Bolly4U. You are suggested to be cautious, and careful while staying on the site. If you want to be safe and secure when you are visiting such websites. You are recommended to follow the instructions, discussed in the upcoming lines.

Reliable VPN and a Quality Anti-Virus

If you are a frequent user to Bolly4U and love watching pirated content. You must remember that watching illegal and pirated movies is not encouraged by cyber law enforcement authorities and is considered a crime. Therefore you are advised to use a reliable VPN to hide your location. It would help you to be possibly secured. The site presents free stuff to its viewers, and therefore you must know that the free contents are always threatening. And never free from the danger of viruses, malware or threat to your devices. Most of the free website contains the threat of fatal viruses that can harm your Internet-connected device. You are warned to use some quality anti-virus program before staying on such websites. Watching movies on pirated streaming sites could be a straight virus threat to your pc, laptop or smartphone

Never Share Any Of Your Personal Details On The Site

The site is operated by unknown people and unknown locations. Therefore it is never wise to share your personal, financial, or business details with anyone on such platforms. At the very first you should conceal all of your financial details and share them with anyone. Second, beware of online credit card hackers; who always wander on such sites and keep on befooling the people to deprive them of their assets. 

Disclaimer

You are therefore notified that watching pirated content is illegal and not a good practice. As it is said ‘Safety First’, you should avoid visiting such sites. And use Netflix, Amazon, and HBO site to watch all the latest movies, but in a safe and secure atmosphere. On our site, we don’t recommend piracy in any way.

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Microsoft Power Platform Improves Doc Mgmt for Major Online Weather Provider

March 16, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Major Online Weather and New Provider Gets Document Management Under Control with the Help of the Microsoft Power Platform

As one of the largest providers of up-to-date weather information in the world, this company offers forecasts and other weather data via the Internet, TV, radio, and print media to over 1.5 billion people each and every day. They also distribute content via more than 180,000 third-party websites and serve major global businesses.

Given their sheer size and scope, it’s no surprise that the company has to manage an enormous number of contracts and various other legal documents. Up until recently, their legal and sales teams were stuck using a complicated process for contract negotiation and management that both delayed their sales cycle and created a considerable amount of unnecessary extra work.

As any salesperson can tell you, shortening the sales cycle is essential for staying competitive and maximizing growth potential. The company wanted to shorten their sales cycle, and AKA Enterprise Solutions stepped in to help.

The Microsoft Power Platform: A Clear Solution

This company has been working with AKA Enterprise Solutions for many years. AKA has focused on providing them with the technology solutions they need as they’ve continued to grow. When they approached us regarding a better solution for contract management, we were eager to assist them.

With the help of the Microsoft Power Platform, AKA designed and developed a Power App that integrates seamlessly with the company’s existing systems, including Dynamics 365 CRM, Teams, and SharePoint. This desktop- and mobile-friendly app allows the sales team to manage contracts and communicate directly with customers, all while automatically tracking and saving important data. With the company’s attorneys using Teams to discuss contract terms, the entire process is now running smoothly — and their sales team is closing deals faster than ever.

How the Microsoft Power Platform Works

For companies like this one, the Power Platform offers dynamic solutions to complex challenges.

The Power Platform consists of three separate tools: Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), Power BI, and Power Apps. These tools were designed by Microsoft to give companies the ability to build custom apps and manage data in an efficient, cost-effective manner. They can work independently of each other, but when combined together, these tools are capable of producing custom solutions at a fraction of the cost and time typically associated with custom software.

How is this possible? The Power Platform is built on the Common Data Service for Apps (CDS), a secure Azure Cloud database. The CDS provides a unified data schema, allowing apps built on the Power Platform to integrate with other Microsoft applications (such as Dynamics 365 CRM, Office 365, and more) as well as third party applications and software platforms.

Best of all, there’s no need to alter existing systems. Apps designed and built with the Power Platform can be nested around other applications, minimizing downtime and ensuring a seamless system integration.

Let AKA Address Your Business’s Challenges with the Power Platform

Is your organization in need of the kind of dynamic solutions offered by the Power Platform? If you’re experiencing inefficiency issues or struggling with manual processes and workarounds, AKA can help.

We’ve used the Power Platform to assist more than 50 leading media companies — and we can do the same for your organization. Contact the media experts at AKA to discuss a proof of concept with the Microsoft Power Platform that can tackle your organization’s challenges.


ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!


Article by: Bryn Forrest | 212-502-3900

As Director, Government, Not for Profit, Media Industries, and Existing Customer Marketing for AKA, Bryn has more than 26 years of experience in marketing management, 17 of those with AKA. Under her leadership, AKA has been recognized by Microsoft for excellence in marketing.

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Carnegie Mellon researchers propose AI that surfaces positive online comments

January 13, 2020   Big Data
 Carnegie Mellon researchers propose AI that surfaces positive online comments

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute say they’ve developed a system that taps machine learning to analyze online comments and pick out those that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised peoples. Although it hasn’t been commercialized, they’ve used it in experiments to search for nearly a million YouTube comments, focusing on the Rohingya refugee crisis and the February 2019 Pulwama terrorist attack in Kashmir. And they hope it’ll form the foundation of a future system that’ll reduce the manual effort necessary to curate comments on publisher websites, social media, and elsewhere.

Tamping down on abusive online behavior is no easy feat, particularly considering the level of toxicity in some social circles. More than one in five respondents to a survey by the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that tracks and fights anti-Semitism, reported having been subjected to threats of violence. And nearly one in five said they’d experienced sexual harassment or stalking and sustained harassment, while upwards of 20% said the harassment was the result of their gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, occupation, or disability.

As the researchers explain, improvements in AI language models — which learn from many examples to predict what words are likely to occur in a given sentence — made it possible to analyze such large quantities of text. The study’s contribution was a technique enabling those models to digest short texts originating from South Asia, which can be difficult to interpret because they often contain spelling and grammar mistakes and combine different languages and systems of writing.

Specifically, the researchers obtained embeddings — numerical representations of words — that revealed novel language groupings or clusters. Language models create these so that words with similar meanings are represented in the same way, making it possible to compute the proximity of a word to others in a comment or post.

The team reports that in experiments, their approach worked as well or better than commercially available solutions. Random samplings of the YouTube comments showed about 10% were positive, compared with the 88% found with the AI algorithm.

“Even if there’s lots of hateful content, we can still find positive comments,” said post-doctoral research Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh, a contributing author on aforthcoming paper describing the work. He’ll present his findings with coauthors Shriphani Palakodety and Jaime Carbonell at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence annual conference next month in New York City.

The study follows the release of a data set by Jigsaw — the organization working under Google parent company Alphabet to tackle cyber bullying, censorship, disinformation, and other digital issues of the day — containing hundreds of thousands of comments and annotations with toxicity and identity labels. It’s intended to help measure bias in AI comment classification systems, which Jigsaw and others have historically measured using synthetic data from template sentences.

In a related development, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and email marketing startup Mailchimp recently proposed RECAST, an interactive tool for examining toxicity detection models by visualizing explanations for predictions and providing alternative wordings for detected toxic speech. The plan to release an open source browser extension in the near future.

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How to keep your online game running and bug-free

December 9, 2019   Big Data
 How to keep your online game running and bug free

Today’s game consoles offer functionalities — such as platform crossplay — that are something of a miracle. Because every game runs differently, especially across different systems and networks, these new perks come with backend complexities that, without the proper strategies in place for monitoring and observability, can negatively impact the gaming experience.

So, how are today’s companies staying ahead of these challenges to ensure the best game experience? The answer: monitoring tools that help them observe their infrastructure in real time and provide timely feedback and internal notifications when things go wrong, so they know before the player does.

Red alert?

In my role at Sensu, I oversee the customer reliability team and regularly hear from our customers about the overwhelming number of alerts their teams are tasked with managing and addressing on a daily basis. It’s been our experience that alert fatigue can have a huge, often negative, impact on any organization, putting stress on monitoring teams dealing with them every day. In fact, in a recent report, 72% of CIOs say that alert fatigue is a big problem affecting their team.

Given the scale and complexity of gaming companies’ legacy monitoring setups, monitoring teams are constantly faced with thousands of critical errors. With so many alerts, it can be virtually impossible to tell not only which issues to escalate, but which are impacting players (and how). Under these circumstances, team morale is understandably low, and turnover is typically very high. As games continue to make the shift to online, companies are faced with the decision to entirely re-evaluate their approach to monitoring, migrating from their legacy toolset to a next-generation solution designed for scalability.

While monitoring tools may make it easier for gaming companies to stay ahead of potential bugs and server issues, what do these behind-the-scenes technologies really mean for the player and their experience? To name a few:

  • Uninterrupted online streaming
  • Seamless crossplay
  • Quicker updates to bugs and errors
  • Less downtime, more game time

Companies such as Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Digital, Verizon Media, ArenaNet, and Activision, which includes Demonware —  a global online gaming company that creates and hosts online services for popular video games such as the Call of Duty series and Guitar Hero across various consoles — have introduced new monitoring solutions to their internal teams to replace legacy solutions that couldn’t keep up with the demand of today’s online gaming ecosystems.

Focusing on what matters

During Monitorama 2018, Demonware presented on how the company was able to reduce daily alerts and notifications by addressing underlying issues to ultimately create a more engaged monitoring team. Previously, the Demonware monitoring team felt overwhelmed with the volume of alerts and notifications they were receiving on a daily basis — they received literally thousands per day, each of which needed to be addressed with an antiquated system. Keeping up with these alerts for a team of their size was daunting, and the task of vetting these alerts and addressing the issues seemed impossible.

After implementing a modern monitoring platform that could keep up with the company’s scale and complexities across various game titles and consoles, Demonware reduced the volume of alerts by 99% — from thousands of alerts to only ten per day. With a proper monitoring solution in place, Demonware’s monitoring team better understands the issues affecting their games, and now has the data and insights needed to resolve long-standing bugs, resulting in a more reliable and quality experience for their players.

Detect and correct issues on the fly

Over the years, online video games companies have evolved from the traditional development model to the fast-paced DevOps model which provides the flexible and rapid “feedback” loop to detect and correct issues on the fly. With next-gen monitoring solutions in place, monitoring teams are able to quickly identify and resolve specific anomaly patterns in their applications which could have resulted in the game going down for an extended period of time while the issue was being addressed.

Monitoring tools have allowed for gaming companies to stay one step ahead of delays and downtimes for their players, ultimately boosting team morale and avoiding a throwdown on a subreddit (as reviews and conversations are integral pieces of the gaming community).

As the gaming industry continues to evolve, companies and their monitoring teams are challenged with keeping up with the changing landscape. From understanding new infrastructure and tooling, to navigating the complexities of a new gaming platform — effective monitoring tools can ensure a seamless experience for both the player and the monitoring team tasked with delivering that delightful end-user experience.

Cameron Johnston is the VP of Customer Reliability at Sensu, where he helps customers solve their stickiest monitoring challenges.

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Cyber Security: Keeping Your Data And Online Possessions Safe

September 15, 2019   SAP
 Cyber Security: Keeping Your Data And Online Possessions Safe

The year is 2019. The news keeps screaming about data breaches of staggering magnitude happening every few days, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk. With our dependence on digital technology, having one’s personal data stolen can have consequences that are nothing short of catastrophic. Yet people still make the same face-palm-inducing mistakes: for example, the 25 worst weak passwords still constitute up to 10% of all passwords used worldwide.

Do you want to stay safe online? Then read on – we will tell you about the most critical cyber-security rules.

1. Remember that you are the target

It is not paranoia: They really are after you. Many individuals and small business owners are pretty laid back about online security because they believe that only big corporations become hackers’ targets. In reality, quite often the opposite is true. Big companies have enormous security budgets, which makes them tough nuts to crack. That’s why hackers turn their attention to small businesses en masse – exactly because they are easier targets.

2. Use a VPN

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a tool that allows you to create a secure and, ideally, untraceable connection to another network using the regular Internet. Many people still do not realize this, but when you use the Internet, all your activity is completely transparent for many different parties: your Internet provider, your boss, the owner of the website you are visiting and, with a little effort, a hacker trying to steal your personal and financial data.

VPNs have multiple uses, from accessing region-locked websites to hiding your identity on the web. From the security perspective, its most important abilities are protection from tracing and data collection. It gives you a significant degree of anonymity and prevents hackers from spying on you while, for example, you use a dubious Wi-Fi hotspot.

However, not all VPNs are created equal. Some are registered in the countries that actively try to undermine the idea of anonymity on the Internet. Free VPNs can collect your data themselves and sell it to third parties. It is essential to use a trustworthy VPN with a long-standing reputation.

3. Use proper password hygiene

Have an individual strong password (longer than eight symbols, containing lowercase and uppercase letters, figures, and symbols) for each service you are using. If you use the same password in all your registrations, it means that if one of them gets hacked, your entire online presence will be at risk. Taking into account that an average person today is registered on dozens and probably hundreds of different websites, services, and apps, the only way to go is to use a password manager. To protect your account on a password manager itself, make sure you use two-factor authentication.

4. Do not overshare on social media

Not all people out there are your friends. When hackers target individuals rather than randomly collect information, they often use social media accounts to gather personal data. It can be used for a variety of purposes – for example, to answer a security question on your email. If hackers really want to get to you, they can even befriend you on social media to have you tell them a vital piece of information.

5. Follow the rules of physical cyber security

Hacking does not necessarily happen over the web. You can just as easily compromise your data by allowing physical access to your devices. Therefore, always lock your mobile devices and use access passwords on laptop computers, especially if you have a habit of leaving them unattended.

It does not matter whether you are acting as a private person or a business owner. Hackers can find a use for any personal and financial information they can get their hands on. If you do not follow at least the basic rules of cyber security, you turn your data into a low-hanging fruit – and if you become a victim of identity theft, there will be nobody to blame but yourself.

For more on cybersecurity, see “Staying Ahead Of Insidious New Breeds Of Cyber Attacks.”

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Setup Postman to use Web API for Dynamics 365 CE Online

September 6, 2019   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Postman is a popular tool that allows authentication to Dynamics 365 CE instance and then compose and send Web API requests and view responses. Since Dynamics 365 would use Azure Active Directory for identity management so requests from Postman would have to be permitted by AAD. As Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) uses OAuth 2.0 to enable you to authorize access to web applications and web APIs in your Azure AD tenant – so Postman uses OAuth 2.0 to request the data from Dynamics 365.

Before setting up Postman environment you would have to grant permission for D365 in the associated Azure Active Directory so that an application can access Dynamics 365 WebAPI’s.

Follow Steps to register an app in Azure Active Directory.  These Steps are generic for registering any application/tool that would connect to Dynamics.

Best way to make sure app registration happens in correct AAD associated with Dynamics 365 is – navigate to AAD through Admin Portal . 

You would need to be a Global Administrator to complete the registration. If you are testing this in your own trial Dynamics 365 CE instance you most probably are already Global Admin on your instance and should be able to access the associated AAD.

If you are logged in as an administrator and do not see admin centers – you can Customize navigation and ensure you are seeing all admin centers.

If you have already registered the app then you would now edit the app registered so from Azure Portal you would 

1) Set Redirect URI . 

2) Validate and optionally modify manifest. 

Set Redirect URI

Add Type Web – Redirect URI – https://app.getpostman.com/oauth2/callback

In Implicit Grant option towards the bottom make sure to check Access Tokens as that’s how Postman is going to request token. 

Modifying Manifest

Set “oauth2AllowUrlPathMatching”: true,

This is not mandatory but if you keep running into exception AADSTS50011 – by setting oauth2AllowUrlPathMatching to true you are requesting AAD to relax exact pattern matching for url.

Below attributes should have been true from the checkbox while setting Redirect URI.

Set “oauth2AllowIdTokenImplicitFlow”: true,

Set  “oauth2AllowImplicitFlow”: true,

Postman allows for different Grant Types

  1. Authorization Code
  2. Implicit
  3. Password Credentials
  4. Client Credentials

As we would be using Implicit flow so oauth2AllowImplicitFlow is to be set to true.

You can go through Description for oauth2AllowImplicitFlow. 

After successfully configuring Postman registration in Azure Active Directory we would setup an environment in Postman.

Brief description for variables you have set in Postman environment.

  1. url : Your Dynamics 365 instance 
  2. clientid : You get from the app registration done in Azure Active Directory.
  3. version: Required to create the other variable webapiurl correctly
  4. webapiurl: combines url + version variables from above. This will inform Postman which Dynamics 365 instance we need the token for.
  5. callback: Redirect URI you would have set in Azure Portal -> Azure Active Directory
  6. authurl: https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/authorize?resource={https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminthefield/posts/setup-postman-to-use-web-api-for-dynamics-365-ce-online-}

In authurl we are requesting Microsoft Identity Platform (https://login.microsoftonline.com/)  to authorize the request using oauth2 protocol for the resource (Dynamics 365 instance) .

Note: Ongoing issue with posting the blog with images which is being worked by site administrators. 

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3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurant’s Online Reputation

July 18, 2019   NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

A healthy online reputation is absolutely critical to the success of a business and restaurants are no exception. Consider this: 75% of respondents to the 2019 Brand Disinformation Impact Study report that the public reputation of a brand will impact their purchase decisions.

At the same time, the public reputation of a brand can be largely outside of its direct control. In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 65% of participants named search engines as their most trusted source when performing research on a business.

Regardless of where and what potential guests hear about your restaurant, public perception has a significant impact. Among companies responding to Deloitte’s Reputation@Risk 41% experienced a negative reputation event and reported a corresponding decrease in brand value and revenue.

But there is an upside: for restaurants participating in a Harvard study on Yelp reviews, those included received a 9% increase in revenue based on every one-star boost in their Yelp rating. That means there could be an 18% difference in revenue for a restaurant with a 3-star rating and one with a 5-star rating – a difference that could make or break any small business.

So how can busy restaurant owners work to establish, maintain and protect their online brand reputation to maximize sales and minimize negative brand events? Here are our top 3 recommendations:

1. Ensure Consistency Across All Channels

Restaurant owners strive to create a strong brand presence inside their brick-and-mortar outlets. A strong color scheme, images and menu design that fit the brand, and themed decorations can all work in unison to convey the brand message. But if that brand consistency doesn’t translate to the online sphere, it can wreak havoc on a restaurant’s online reputation.

Let’s say a potential guest hears about your restaurant and runs a Google search to see what comes up. Maybe there’s an address, a photo of your restaurant, and a link to the website, but no online ordering mechanism.

Then the guest tries searching on Facebook or Yelp and finds a page with no menu images and a different phone number than the Google listing. There’s nothing there that conveys the brand presence you’ve worked so hard to build inside your restaurant. Now what?

In order to create a unified brand presence, restaurants must consider every platform potential guests might interact with. That list can include the Google business page associated with your restaurant, your restaurant’s website, Yelp listing (and associated reviews), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts, and GrubHub and Favor ordering systems.

Take a look at Torchy’s Tacos, a local taco chain in Austin, Texas. It has a very distinct brand presence which is equal parts dirty, decadent and devilish. And the chain really nailed cross-channel consistency, as evidenced by the listings on nearly every platform. Here are a few:

Torchy’s Google search results:

Google%20Screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Torchy’s Facebook page:

Facebook%20Screemshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Torchy’s Yelp page:

Yelp%20Sreenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

And its brand consistency continues across Favor, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.

2. Develop an Easy, Intuitive Website

Having a website that is consistent with your restaurant’s brand promise is one thing, but making it simple and straightforward for potential guests to find what they need is a totally different ballgame.

Beyond duplicating the branding from your brick-and-mortar location on the website, potential guests must be able to quickly find what they need and complete any actions easily. Are they able to:

  • View menu items with easy-to-navigate categories
  • Find your restaurant’s contact information (and different locations, if applicable)
  • Make reservations
  • Place online orders
  • View specials like happy hours, fixed-price days, or brunches
  • Submit catering requests

Do all these actions flow seamlessly off your website’s main homepage? Could the online ordering system use an overhaul to simplify the process? Is it easier for guests to use your reservation system or a plug-in from OpenTable or Resy? These are all questions to ask when designing the optimal experience for your website.

Consider Via 313, a Detroit-style, Austin-based pizza restaurant with five locations. Its homepage provides easy access to a variety of menu categories right off the bat. The left nav offers a direct link to the full menu, online ordering from both its trailers and brick-and-mortar restaurants and a list of locations.

website%20screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Ordering pizza can get complex pretty quickly, with requests for different types of crusts and swapping out toppings. However, Via 313’s online ordering platform makes it straightforward to sub out ricotta cheese for standard gorgonzola cheese on the restaurant’s popular Cadillac pizza:

order%20screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

The only improvement here would be a clear link to large catering orders for groups.

3. Create (and Enforce) a Clear Employee Communication Plan

Restaurant staff are trained on how to interact with guests when they’re on the floor. However, they may not consider the impact of their words when they’re off the clock. And that’s not just talking about your restaurant in particular, it’s anything they say or do.

Anyone who works for your restaurant may update their social media profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any number of platforms to display their occupation, immediately connecting them to your brand on social media. Anything they say can then be affiliated with the restaurant.

Let’s say you run a farm-to-table restaurant that focuses on sustainability in the food chain. Your marketing efforts are consistent across channels. You have an easy, intuitive website. Business is good. Then one of your employees starts tweeting articles in opposition to the sustainability movement. All of a sudden, your brand is connected to the opposite side of the argument, and your guests may notice and take action.

Given the ramifications, it’s critical that brands train employees to use the same discretion on social media as they would when they’re working in your restaurant. Otherwise you might end up with:

  • Employees airing your business’s accounting mistakes on Facebook, as in the case of Triple Play Sports Bar & Grill in Watertown, Connecticut.
  • Staff who aren’t even working for you yet (!) tweeting their choice words for their new job at your establishment, like the Texas teenager who was scheduled to start working at Jet’s Pizzeria in Mansfield, Texas. (She was fired before even starting her job.)
  • A huge backlash on your hands, like Applebee’s experienced with its decision to fire Chelsea Welch, a waitress who posted a photo of a customer’s receipt that included a note about why he doesn’t tip.

Don’t Want to Do It All Yourself?

For a new restaurant with a small staff, finding the time to create the framework for a solid online reputation may seem pretty overwhelming – and nearly impossible. However, there are marketing agencies that specialize in working with restaurants to build, grow and maintain their online reputations.

And even if you don’t have the budget to hire an agency, try working on your restaurant’s online reputation one chunk at a time. The first priority items might be your Google business listing, website, Yelp page and employee communication plan. Next, set up online ordering via a platform like UberEats or GrubHub, and put processes in place to read and respond to reviews.

Make no mistake: safeguarding your restaurant’s reputation will take time and attention from your staff that can sometimes be difficult to divert. However, consider it your insurance policy against brand-damaging events that could impact your restaurant over the long term.

Posted on Thu, July 18, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Cybersecurity: How to Protect Yourself Online (Video)

July 7, 2019   FICO
Cyber Crime Cybersecurity: How to Protect Yourself Online (Video)

Want to protect yourself online – and protect your family – from data compromise and identity theft?

FICO’s Doug Clare, vice president for cybersecurity solutions, offers some advice in this interview with NBC King 5 News in Seattle. He was interviewed in conjunction with his talk at the US Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity Series, where he spoke about cyber risk and third-party risk management.

“It’s important for consumers to realize that when they do business with somebody, they may be doing business with more than one party,” Clare said. “Everybody’s got a supply chain.”

For consumers, protection means paying close attention. “It’s important to stay vigilant, particularly about email,” Clare said. “If you get an email with a link, check it out, and don’t click it until you’re sure. Make sure the email is coming from who you think it’s coming from, that the domain name on the email address is correct. Email is a big challenge, be careful.”

Clare also urged viewers, “Have that conversation with your kids and your parents.”

Third-party risk management is a hot issue in the world of cybersecurity, since vulnerabilities in a firm’s supply chain, partner or vendor networks can expose sensitive data. It’s estimated that half of all data breaches occur through third parties.

According to Ponemon Institute’s 2018 Data Risk in the Third-Party Ecosystem, more than 60 percent of US CISOs have indicated being the victim of a third-party breach incident.

More tips on how to protect yourself online are discussed in this blog post and video.

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