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5 jobs that you should apply for this week (before it’s too late)

March 3, 2021 Big Data

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Looking for a new job can be a pretty daunting experience that we all have to go through. It can be hard to know where to even begin — especially when you throw a global pandemic into the mix. Tricky, to say the least. Here at Venture Beat, we want to help, and try to get as many of you into jobs you love.

So, we’ve done a round-up of some pretty amazing roles that are taking applications at the moment. Check them out and start applying!

Office Administrator, Reynolds and Reynolds

The Office Administrator plays an active role in supporting the field sales organization. As the Office Administrator, you will be assigned multiple sales regions to support sales directors and representatives with their day to day responsibilities. These tasks include generating reports, coordinating meetings and travel, scheduling conference calls, and managing calendars. Other responsibilities will include assisting with the distribution of company-issued equipment and office supplies, updating or adding customer and vendor information, and other special projects as assigned. If you are detail oriented, organized, and enjoy working with people, this is the position for you!

Associate Engineer Software, Northrop Grumman

The Associate Software Engineer position supports the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) programs. The candidate should have experience with structured software development methodologies and modern software test tools and techniques. The candidate will work within a cross-functional Scrum team, and will be responsible for developing software, participating in acceptance criteria development, creating scripts and utilizing COTS tools to automate testing, documenting instructions within the wiki, and participating in integration activities. The successful candidate will need a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field in the Software / information technology industry.

Strategic Sales Executive, Finastra

The Strategic Sales Executive will generate revenue by selling Finastra software solutions and services to new prospects within assigned territory. The successful candidate will provide specific product focus from a sales perspective through the acquisition of new clients by positioning the value Finastra products and services can bring to clients. Specifically, knowledge of capital markets and treasury operations and/or commercial lending will be a plus. Experience dealing with complex sales with multiple stakeholders within enterprise and cloud based solution delivery will also be valued. Responsibilities will include creating and managing strategic territory planass that will include activities for quota attainment.

Salesforce Business Analyst, Moody’s Corporation

This individual will serve as the primary contact with business clients to elicit requirements and validate requirements and designs-developing and maintaining strong relationships, and keeping these clients informed and engaged throughout the entire project lifecycle. This individual will work as a liaison between Moody Analytics’ business groups, product management, senior internal personnel, and with the application development teams-to provide support for their work products and to act as an informed customer advocate within the development team.

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How to know if federated learning should be part of your data strategy

February 13, 2021 Big Data

AI researchers and practitioners are developing and releasing new systems and methods at an extremely fast pace, and it can be difficult for enterprises to gauge which particular AI technologies are most likely to help their businesses. This article — the first part of a two-part series — will try to help you determine if federated learning (FL), a fairly new piece of privacy-preserving AI technology, is appropriate for a use case you have in mind.

FL’s core purpose is to enable use of AI in situations where data privacy or confidentiality concerns currently block adoption. Let’s unpack this a bit. The purpose of AI systems/methods/algorithms is to take data and autonomously create pieces of software, AI models, that transform data into actionable insight. Modern AI methods typically require a lot of data, collect all the necessary data at some central location, and run a learning algorithm on the data to learn/create the model.

However, when that data is confidential, siloed, and owned by different entities, gathering the data at a central location is not possible. Federated learning very cleverly gets around this problem by moving the learning algorithm or code to the data, rather than bringing the data to the code.

As an example, consider the problem of creating an AI model to predict whether patients have COVID-19 given their lung CT-scans. The data for this problem, CT-scans, are obviously confidential, and are owned by various different entities — hospitals and medical and research facilities. They are also stored all across the world under very various different jurisdictions. You want to combine all of that data because you want your AI models to be able to detect all the forms in which the disease has manifested in CT-scans. However, combining all this data in the one location is not possible for obvious data confidentiality and jurisdictional reasons.

Here’s how federated learning bypasses the confidentiality issue: A worker node, which is a computing system capable of machine learning, is deployed at each hospital or facility. This worker node has full access to the confidential data at the location. During federated learning, each such worker node creates a local AI model using the data at the facility and sends over the model to the central FL server. Note that the confidential data never leaves the client site — only the model does. A central server combines all of the insights from the local models into a single global model. This global model is sent back to all the local worker nodes, which now have insights from all the other worker nodes without having seen their data. When you iterate on these steps many times, you end up with a model that is, in many cases, equivalent to a model that would have been built if you’d trained it on all the data in the same place. (See a schematic illustration of the process below.)

Federated learning was initially developed by Google as a way to train the Android keyboard app (GBoard) to predict what the user will type next. Here the confidential data being used is the text that the user is typing. However, it turns out that the data confidentiality issue appears in many guises across industries. Indeed, you will face this problem if you are

* a maker of autonomous vehicle and you want to combine confidential video and image data from across your vehicles to build a better vision system,

* a bank and want to build a machine learning based anti-money laundering system by combining data from various jurisdictions, possibly even other banks,

* a supply chain platform provider and you want to build a better risk assessment or route optimization system by combining confidential sales data from multiple businesses,

* a cell service provider and you want to build a machine learning model to optimize routes by combining confidential data from cell towers,

* a consortium of farmers and you want to build a model to detect crop disease using confidential disease data from the members of your consortium,

* a consortium of additive manufacturers and you want to build AI-based process controllers and quality assurance systems using confidential build data from members of your consortium.

An important point to note about the above examples is that the owner of the data can be different units of the same organization but in different jurisdictions (as in the bank and cell service provider examples) or clients of the same organization (as in the autonomous vehicle maker and supply chain service provider examples), or completely independent units (as in the consortium of farmers and additive manufacturer examples above, and the hospitals/COVID-19 example described earlier).

You can use the following checklist to see if federated learning makes sense for you:

I will end by emphasizing that, if you are able to combine your data into a central location, you should probably go for that option (barring cases where you want to, for instance, future-proof your solution). Centralizing your data may make for better final model performance than you’ll be able to achieve with federated learning, and the effort required to deploy an AI solution will be significantly lower. However, if it turns out that FL is just what you need to remove your barrier to AI adoption, part two of this series will provide you with an overview of how to do that.

M M Hassan Mahmud is a Senior AI and Machine Learning Technologist at Digital Catapult, with a background in machine learning within academia and industry.

VentureBeat is always looking for insightful guest posts related to enterprise data technology and strategy.

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Our site delivers essential information on data technologies and strategies to guide you as you lead your organizations. We invite you to become a member of our community, to access:

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our newsletters
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Big Data – VentureBeat

What Is Edge Computing (& Why Should You Care)?

February 4, 2021 BI News and Info

Benefits (and a few challenges) of edge computing

Modern edge computing architecture allows data from IoT devices to be processed at the edge of the network, either in lieu of being sent to a data center or cloud, or before being set. This arrangement presents several clear benefits:

Speed: Because it effectively eliminates lag times that come with distance, edge computing can facilitate real-time data processing without latency. This is critical for devices and applications that depend on short and predictable response times, like autonomous vehicle operating systems (as milliseconds can really matter on a busy roadway) and digital-enabled factories (where smart devices perpetually monitor the manufacturing process).
Connection: In addition to being able to improve response times, edge computing can offer complex processing (like predictions from a model) in situations where cloud connectivity is unavailable or has limited capacity, like ships at sea or rural utility substations.
Security: Cloud computing architecture is inherently centralized, which means a cloud-reliant network is especially vulnerable to a single attack or power outage. Edge computing effectively disperses this kind of risk, as data is largely processed on local devices and storage can be distributed between local servers and data centers as needed.
Cost: Edge computing helps you categorize and manage data, which can save you a lot of money associated with bandwidth and storage costs. A simple example of this is a security camera in a warehouse. Most of the time such a camera is going to be recording empty space or common activity. Sending that footage to the cloud would be a waste of both bandwidth and the cost of storage those hours of footage. If you had an AI-powered security camera, though, it could analyze imagery, detect anything out of the ordinary, and only prioritize relevant footage for cloud storage. That’s effectively how edge computing works, but on a larger scale.

As with any technological development, there are also associated challenges, namely:

Security: Yes, security is listed here as both a benefit and a challenge. That’s because while the cloud presents a centralized vulnerability, as described above, edge devices represent a distributed vulnerability, in that each device can be compromised or otherwise operate incorrectly. In the case of cloud servers, you might well be using something like AWS that has the most advanced security available, but if you’re running your own systems, you’ll have to set up security on your own.
Storage requirements: Because less data is being sent to the cloud, edge computing requires higher storage requirements on the edge devices themselves. And even though storage is less expensive than ever before, it still requires power costs, which need to be factored into any investment. As mentioned above, though, doing processing on-site can help optimize storage needs so you’re only saving essential data instead of everything.
Maintenance requirements: Maintenance issues are similar to security ones, as the distributed architecture means there are more network combinations and discrete computing nodes that have to be maintained.

The issues raised above are indeed challenges, but they’re problems that can easily addressed. Every network architecture will have its shortcomings, but when you integrate edge computing into your network you’re providing yourself with increased flexibility to customize as necessary.

This is especially true in circumstances where remote servers can not be immediately accessed, such as on ships at sea. Right now, for instance, the U.S. Navy is preparing to install edge computing infrastructure aboard its fleet of aircraft carriers so that these distant ships can run critical (and data-rich) applications independently of a central network.

This same problem impacts the industrial transportation industry as well, which is why cargo ships, freight trains, and even semi-trailers are implementing edge architectures to overcome communication limitations, process sensor data, analyze fuel consumption, and even assist with autonomous navigation.

The future of edge computing

For the moment, edge computing is not a replacement for the cloud, but rather a complementary piece of network technology. Cloud-based data centers are still uniquely positioned to handle large flows of data (including massive files) and run applications that are not critically time-sensitive.

But the volume of data generated from the Internet of Things will continue to grow, and edge devices and servers are going to be necessary to process it at the source. That’s why research firm Gartner has predicted that by 2025, a staggering 75 percent of enterprise data will be generated and processed at “the edge.”

Edge computing is already being leveraged in industrial and manufacturing sectors, and the use cases described ahead will spur further applications in the near future:

Increased data collection: Edge computing allows sensors to gather critical data in remote locations where cloud connections are not stable or cost-effective, such as on cargo ships (as discussed above) or at oil fields or underground mining sites.
Increased interoperability: IoT service providers offer different (and proprietary) devices, APIs, and data formats, which has led to interoperability issues. Edge computing architecture, though, provides a standard platform for IoT applications and converts communication protocols for older “legacy” machines.
Increased cost savings: Edge computing immediately reduces costs associated with bandwidth and data storage. And by facilitating real-time processing of sensor data, it can reduce energy consumption by automatically adjusting lighting, cooling, and other environmental controls and ensure machines are operating consistently and productively.

As these examples make clear, it’s not strictly edge computing itself that is so valuable, but rather how it provides a cost-effective way to scale up IoT adoption. Increased use of IoT-enabled sensors and machinery, in turn, provides greater opportunities for machine learning and AI solutions.

Wrapping up

With ever-increasing amounts of data been generated every day, we’re sure to see the demand for—and the impact of—edge computing solutions grow in the coming years. If you think an edge computing solution would be helpful for your organization, schedule a free AI assessment and we’ll show you how running AI and ML models at the edge can optimize and streamline your business.

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RapidMiner

What mean should I use for this exemple?

January 23, 2021 BI News and Info

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Recent Questions – Mathematica Stack Exchange

It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings

December 23, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

You’d be surprised at how much more you can accomplish when you’re not talking.

We’ve all attended meetings–it’s a necessary part of the job. Yet, have you ever been in a meeting discussing your CRM system, and no one can stop talking? Someone wants to discuss how to improve data tracking, while someone else wants to focus on contact management. Team leaders or managers might try to steer the conversation back on track, but everyone keeps talking.

I’ve been in a number of meetings where this exact scenario played out. Heck, I’ve even been the one that’s been talking too much. After leaving a meeting like this, I’ve gone back to my desk, frustrated and a little annoyed that nothing got done. All we did was talk–and talk and talk and talk. Maybe we were all trying to show that we deserved our job title or wanted to make sure we were on the list for a big promotion. Whatever the reason, we were all too busy talking to accomplish anything.

“However,

after spending years in the professional world,

I’ve realized these meetings aren’t a complete waste of time.

And that’s thanks to the quiet ones.”

And no, I’m not referring to the weird character in a scary movie who reveals himself as the killer. Rather, these are the people who go unnoticed during meetings. They sit quietly in meetings, watching the room fill with noise and observe. They may even be known as ‘the quiet guy’ around the office–the one notorious for never talking during a meeting.

While you may think that these individuals don’t speak because they don’t have anything to contribute or are too intimidated to speak up, this couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re thinking. They’re taking in information from the room, coming up with action items, and learning. These incredible quiet creatures do all this without uttering a word.

I’ve always been curious about these individuals, eager to know what their take is on whatever we’re talking about. But these quiet people don’t waste their words–they save them for a fortunate few.

As I’ve worked more closely with these individuals, I’ve changed how I react in meetings. Instead of jumping in and contributing to the throng of voices, I keep quiet and listen. I’m a long way from perfecting this skill, but already I’ve seen great results.

Silence is Actually a Sign of Intelligence

How many times have you sat in a meeting to discuss problems within a team or process pain points and felt ignored? Many problems in a professional setting come from a lack of listening. Managers are overly eager to come up with a solution that they layout in a too-long PowerPoint or team members spend too long discussing their problems that they don’t give anyone a chance to present a solution.

The endless talking happens for a number of reasons: managers eager to show they’re worthy of their job title or showcase their leadership skills, employees anxious to show off their communication skills to bump themselves upon the promotion list, over-inflated egos, and more. But perhaps the biggest reason is to look smart. Where the idea that the smartest person in the room is the one that talks the most came from, I don’t know.

I’ve found that the opposite is true. The people who sit quietly and take in all the chatter are incredibly smart. Think about how much these people learned or the action items they created while we were all too busy talking.

Even after the meeting ends and many of us linger, anxious to talk more, the quiet ones head back to their desk, ready to get started on their next action item or to further process all the information that was just presented.

“That’s one of the characteristics of quiet people:

they act instead of talk.”

Seeing the results that these silent creatures produce has changed my opinion. I’ve realized that the person who spent the entire meeting talking doesn’t know as much as they think they do. They put on a good show, sure. But the person who never said a word actually knows so much more than the rest of us.

Staying Quiet is Actually a Good Thing

When the time comes that these quiet creatures do have to speak up, it’s an incredible sight. Rather than reference a very detailed spreadsheet, repeat a lengthy conversation with a customer or an email chain between a customer and themselves, they say what they need to say, then shut up.

That’s the mindset I’m working towards but I am a long way from perfect: make your point in as little words as possible, then listen.

Already, I’ve found that I’ve learned more by listening and observing. Additionally, I’ve picked up on what people aren’t saying, which is equally as important.

Intelligent People are Focused on Listening

Focusing on listening instead of talking has, for me, been a game-changer. Primarily because I’ve been able to learn so much more about our customers, processes, and the market by listening to what others have to say rather than showing off my own knowledge.

I’ve had some practice with this throughout the years, beginning with my first job after graduating college. I accepted a job as a content writer with a large software company days after graduating. However, I was concerned about my lack of technological knowledge and was concerned about how well I could do this job. Not one to shy away from a challenge (or the salary for that matter), I accepted.

However, I quickly became known as being “the quiet one” on the team because I rarely, if ever, spoke during team or company meetings. At first, this was because I was afraid of coming off as stupid because I didn’t know much about the technology. Over time, I was able to learn more about our company’s software stack, how our business operated, and what our customers were interested in–all because I focused on listening.

Listen Meeting 1 625x418.jpeg.pagespeed.ce.GoXGmJ6ueC It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings

Enough of tooting my own horn though. I also heard an example of someone who used the art of listening to accelerate his career path and attend a meeting with the founders of Google.

Simply by offering to take notes, he gained a wealth of knowledge that allowed him to stay ahead of his competition and accelerated his career. That skill was what earned him a seat in a meeting with the two men who created Google.

I can only imagine what this man learned from these two professionals and how valuable that information is to him now. And how did he do it? He listened.

Welcome Silence

Now when I walk into a meeting, I’m focused on observing rather than adding my voice to an already noisy room. This small change has accelerated my own learning dramatically.

While this change is small, it takes time to master–I’m a long way from it like I’ve said. However, it’s not impossible to do. Rather than allowing your pride, ego, or job title take over in meetings, reign it in. Swallow your words and listen. Not only will your knowledge increase, but so will your productivity. You’ll have a list of things that need to be done rather than having to call yet another meeting to discuss action items.

A final warning I’ll leave you with: have the self-discipline to know when to talk and when to listen. Don’t become known as the guy who can’t stop talking (both in and out of meetings) because you’re actually hurting your career.

Look for the quiet ones around your office. Watch how they work. Pay attention to when they do speak up and follow their example. Again, you’d be surprised at how much more you can accomplish simply by staying quiet.

For more articles on effective meetings, check out these:

How to Work from Home and Stay Productive

Microsoft Remote Work Tech Update: Azure, Teams, 365 Groups

…

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

It’s the Quiet Ones You Should Be Like in Meetings Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

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

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

This should help

December 3, 2020 Humor

Posted by Krisgo

via

About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon

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Deep Fried Bits

Biden All-Female Communications Team Won’t Tell Nation What’s Wrong, Nation Should Already Know

December 2, 2020 Humor

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Biden’s transition team has announced they will be appointing an all-female communications team. According to sources, the team will not tell the nation what’s wrong, since the nation should already know.

“It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, OK!?” said Jen Psaki in her first press conference as a part of Biden’s team. “Why would you think I’m not fine? Ugh… if you have to ask, I’m not going to tell you.”

Insiders close to Biden say the communications team will hold periodic press conferences where they will just glare at reporters with an icy look and make them try to guess what’s wrong. If the reporters fail to understand their highly advanced non-verbal communication, they will smile sweetly and walk out of the room before slamming the door as hard as they can.

“This is a huge step for this country,” said Communication Director Kate Bedingfield to reporters. “We need to move beyond archaic and male-centric methods of communication that use things like clear language and written words. We hope this will help deepen the country’s level of intimacy with the Biden administration and open up new channels of understanding and communication.”

The press has been frantically buying flowers, chocolates, and jewelry for the communications team in hopes of receiving some clue as to what the heck is going on. The team responded by rolling their eyes and going to bed early due to a really bad headache.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

SOMEONE SHOULD GET AN ARCHITECTURE PRIZE FOR THIS

November 8, 2020 Humor

And the people of Goiana, Brazil wasted no time naming it: “Handjob!”

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

Why database folks should care about User Research

November 5, 2020 BI News and Info

I attended a training session at Redgate this week by Chris Spalton. Chris’ session topic was “An Introduction into Planning User Research.” Chris pointed out that there’s much more to User Research, but that planning the research is particularly important as it is the foundation for everything you do later.

If you’re a database administrator or developer, you may not immediately feel that User Research is related to your job — that’s someone else’s job, right?

While that used to be true, the world of tech is changing fast. There are reasons you should reconsider.

Understanding your customer is key

One of the most important aspects of Agile development methods, DevOps, and Digital Transformations is a focus on your customer.

IT folks traditionally have thought of their colleagues as their internal “customers” — DBAs and others used to act more as a sort of internal service provider in a cost center. DevOps and Digital Transformations notably shift this and bring IT into a position to be creative and partner equally with others in the organization to generate value for external customers.

It’s easy to be a bit cynical about this and think, “That’s not the way it is in my job.” If you feel that way, I challenge you to take the initiative to change your own perspective! There is no need for database specialists to wait around for someone to give them permission to start thinking about their organization’s customers and to start being a creative collaborator with others.

Give yourself permission, and very likely it will have a positive impact on your career.

The User Research planning approach is suitable for all sorts of customer interactions

I found that a lot of what I learned about planning User Research is also useful to think about when framing all sorts of conversations:

Think carefully about how you define the problem space, as this impacts everything afterward
Remember that you are not your customer — and neither are your colleagues. In other words, try to clear your natural bias that you already understand your customer. You don’t!
Scope and prioritize your goals for learning carefully, but bring extra questions in case there is time to gain more insights
It is useful to gain insights from not only current customers — ex-customers, prospects, and others working in the space may hold valuable insights
You won’t cover everything about your research in one session. Plan your research over phases, from initial broad questions, progressing through interaction, showing proposals, and finally testing
Plan, prepare for, and structure your calls carefully in a way that respects your interviewee’s time, and allows them freedom to answer honestly and openly

After attending this session, I believe that learning more about User Research will also help me build my skills for other interactions and projects, too.

Participating in User Research connects you to your colleagues

As a DBA or database developer, you may not conduct your own user research. Quite possibly, you already have colleagues who conduct User Research. This may go by different names in different organizations, and the research may be conducted by people in software development, marketing, sales, or customer success teams.

Keep an eye out to identify where user research is happening in your organization and ask your manager and teammates if they know how and when this works. Reach out to the teams who are doing this research and ask if you are able to join in sometimes, even as an observer, so that you can learn to better understand your customers. Taking this initiative can open many doors for you and help you bring your career into a new phase.

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SQL – Simple Talk

3 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Keeping Your Attachments in Dynamics 365

October 13, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The thing about Dynamics 365 email attachments is that they take up space. Lots of space. And then you have other kinds of attachments, for example in Notes, and those take up space too…

In this article, we will start by looking at the three main reasons you should not keep your attachments inside Microsoft Dynamics. We will then examine possible actions to avoid reaching the available Dynamics storage limit and, finally, consider where to place the attachments – with minimal cost and maximum benefit.

450x263xdynamics365 crmSoftwareBlog.jpg.pagespeed.ic.zwbY7GW9Dc 3 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Keeping Your Attachments in Dynamics 365

A Real World Request from a Dynamics Admin

Let’s start with an actual request an IT expert got about Dynamics 365.

“One of our clients is having a problem with increasing database size very quickly. The huge database size is also becoming a performance issue. Besides, the client is looking for decreasing the storage costs. Current database size is 530GB.

We have checked the free add-on from Microsoft but we are reluctant about bringing it in our org full scale. Besides, looking for more functionality like extracting old and new documents.

Here’s a kicker: we have sensitive documents so we would prefer them not to run through any external service.

We also cannot employ anything outside the constraints of what we currently have in our Azure tenancy, that being: Dynamics 365 with the option of uploading custom plugins and/or custom workflow tasks or currently paid-for PaaS facilities, notably Flow. This eliminates the option of having a console-based application, or even a web app.”

Dynamics 365 & Attachments Don’t Go Well Together

This D365 admin’s request reflects a typical constraint of the cloud CRM: free storage 10GB provided as part of a Plan 1 subscription run out sooner or later. Dynamics CRM storage feels especially limited if you were previously using an on-premises version (where disk size is the limit) and then go for the cloud version (where subscription size is the limit).

Truth be told, limitations of space are not as tight as they used to be. But they are still limited, and this is Reason 1:

Free storage space on Dynamics 365 Online is limited.

On top of that, pricing and tiers for pricing keep changing, making it difficult to keep track. At the time of this writing, the last update was in Oct 2020. You can check the latest version here.

The D365 admin also mentions another frequent complaint from users: performance. In a system as critical as Dynamics 365, performance is key. Having attachments flooding it, makes the performance decrease.

This is Reason 2:

Increasing storage size can cause a performance decrease.

We come to the final reason. Although you want to have all information about customers and prospects right inside Dynamics, including the documents exchanged with your company, there is an obvious problem with storing documents there: there is no Document Management For Dynamics 365. Things like version control or collaboration on the same document are simply not available.

This is Reason 3:

Attachments are documents. The best place for them is a Document Management System.

These are the three reasons why you should avoid keeping your attachments in Dynamics 365. The question now is: what can you do about it? Let’s start with the problem presented in reason 1. To attack it, you have several possibilities you can explore.

Trying to free up Dynamics storage space

To reduce occupied Dynamics storage space, you can:

Delete records you no longer need, such as cases and opportunities
Find unnecessary email and note attachments through advanced find and then use bulk deletion to remove them
Evaluate all suspended workflows and delete the ones you no longer need
Remove bulk duplicate detection jobs, bulk import jobs and bulk deletion jobs – bulk jobs take up space themselves, so delete the ones you no longer use
Delete audit logs

Although these recommendations are sensible, the space you will be able to free up using them will vary, depending on your organization and your use of Dynamics. The problem is that, according to various estimates, 70% of storage space in Dynamics 365 is occupied with documents and attachments. If your organization tracks emails in the CRM system like most companies do, free storage shrinks quickly – beyond reversible with traditional measures.

Are Attachments Really Taking up So Much Space in My Dynamics?

Attachments can indeed be almost everywhere, meaning attached to any of the following Dynamics entities (and more):

Leads
Contacts
Accounts
Opportunities
Competitors
Products
Price lists
Quotes
Invoices
Goals
Appointments
Campaign Activities

Attachments stored in Dynamics will increase the storage space that you need. If using Dynamics 365 Online, you can view your database usage at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/resources/capacity

The Advantages of Document Management Systems

Because Dynamics 365, just like every other cloud CRM system, has been primarily designed to manage customer relations and not store documents, the best-proven practice of avoiding extra costs for document storage is forwarding each attachment to SharePoint.

It has cheaper storage AND document management capabilities. After all, Microsoft SharePoint is Microsoft’s Document Management System (DMS), so it does make sense that it is the top-of-mind solution for this problem.

xSeamless diagram.png.pagespeed.ic.mo erHXHZJ 3 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Keeping Your Attachments in Dynamics 365

Alternatively, you can have attachments saved to Azure File Storage. The cost advantage definitely applies: it has much more storage available for only a fraction of a cost than Dynamics 365. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Azure storage combination does not come with the document management capabilities, however.

Finally, you can have attachments saved to Azure Blob Storage. Azure Blob is a Microsoft Azure cloud-based storage solution that you can use to store and retrieve Binary Large Objects (BLOBs). It allows users/organizations to expose their unstructured data to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage. Using Azure Blob Storage For Storing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Attachments is also a cost-saving option that provides no document management capabilities.

How to Synchronize Dynamics 365 with SharePoint, Azure Storage, or Azure Blob

Once you have decided to store your attachments elsewhere, the question becomes how to automatically save email attachments to Azure or SharePoint. No one wants to have to handle this task manually, as that would make all the productivity and cost gains go to waste.

What you need is an attachment extractor for Dynamics 365, and, fortunately, the software market currently offers several solutions for getting attachments out of Dynamics 365 with varying features and functionality.

One of these is a free solution from Microsoft Labs. Attachment Management is an add-on for Dynamics 365 CRM. When a user adds a note or email attachment in Dynamics 365, it creates an attachment in Azure and deletes the file in Dynamics after the file has been created in Azure Blob storage.

However, Dynamics 365 experts recommend using this free add-on with caution. The main reason for this caution is that Microsoft does not officially support it. “The purpose is to show the possibility of an alternate storage platform for Dynamics 365 (…). This solution should not be used in a Production instance as this is not officially supported. It should only be used in a Non-Production instance such Dev or a Test”, writes CRMTipoftheday.

Tech support for free software is usually limited, so you may have to rely on yourself in case of any trouble. And finally, the solution only works if you want to save email attachments to Azure Blob, so should you want to save email attachments to SharePoint with its document collaboration advantages, you need to look for other synchronization options.

CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor

At Connecting Software, we developed CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor. Given the market results since its release in 2019, we are convinced that we have a best-in-class solution. But we don’t expect you to take our word for it. Check out the features, watch the demo video, and ask for your free trial to see it for yourself.

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Like the name states, CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor is an attachment extractor for Dynamics 365. The solution transfers any attachment files from the CRM to other configured storage, but this is transparent for the end-user. It looks as if the attachment is still in Dynamics (hence, the Seamless in the name), the user can still work with them the normal way. As a matter of fact, they are offloaded automatically to another file storage (SharePoint, Azure File Storage, or Azure Blob Storage) as soon as they are created.

With this solution, documents will not occupy storage space in D365 and, at the same time, as our experts point out, documents will be reachable to users who have access to the respective record in Dynamics365 without any modification of their workflows with D365 files. Any additional change of the Dynamics365 files will be passed on to the configured external file storage automatically.

What Is Special About CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor

Its most outstanding feature is security. Unlike some solutions on the market, with CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor, your documents do not go through any external service, just Dynamics and the chosen destination storage. This is important for GDPR compliance and for protecting sensitive data.

Another unique feature, that users find convenient, is the ability to compress/decompress files on-the-fly and also encrypt/decrypt them with AES256 encryption – yes, the encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government and that is now used worldwide.

On top of that, this solution “First Pass” will automatically go through the attachments that existed prior to installing the app and move them to SharePoint, Azure Blob, or other location to your choice. This makes all the difference if you already short for space when you install the solution. Instead of just fixing it for future attachments, it fixes it for all attachments: Dynamics 365 attachment management at its best!

What Are the Versions that CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor Supports?

CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor runs between Dynamics 365 online and the supported storage options:

Office 365
SharePoint
- Online
- 2019
- 2016
- 2013
Azure File Storage
Azure blob storage

We encourage you to ask our experts for more details and to find out how this can work for you.

Dynamics 365 attachments don’t belong in Dynamics 365. Take advantage of being able to move them out automatically. Save email attachments and other attachments automatically to SharePoint, Azure Blob, or Azure Storage. Allow CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor to take care of the health of your Dynamics 365 while you focus on more important tasks.

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By Ana Neto, Connecting Software. Connecting Software creates integration and synchronization software. Connecting Software is a 15-year-old company, with 40 employees spread in 4 different countries.

We are also a proud “Top Member 2019″ at CRMSoftwareBlog. You can read all our articles at CRMSoftwareBlog.

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