Today we continue with the blog series D365 V9.0 – A Feature a Day, and I am enjoying the self-discovery process of all the new improvements that have been made to the V9.0 platform. Today’s feature will be focusing on changes to sub grid controls.
Author: Andrew Ly (Page 7 of 11)
Microsoft Business Applications MVP, based out of Adelaide Australia.
Welcome to my new blog series – D365 V9.0 – Andrew Ly’s – A Feature a Day, as most of you are aware by now Microsoft Dynamics 365 Version 9.0 has been official released to the public. And it is stunning.
So, I’ll be doing a bit of self-discovery over the next few weeks, focusing on some of the items that I’m interested in and sharing my thoughts with you. They’ll be brief but frequent postings, and I’ll try to stick strictly to one feature a day.
Today’s Feature – Label Wrapping
I was treated to a preview of ClickDimensions Social Engagement (8.8) in the last week, and I was left exceedingly impressed with the capabilities of this new platform. Released to partners at the end of July, it is available now for existing ClickDimension customers.
What is ClickDimensions Social Engagement (CSE)?
CSE is a brand new offering from ClickDimensions, and is supplied as an add-on module to existing ClickDimension customers. ClickDimensions has partnered with Social Media solution vendor Oktopost to provide a lot of the functionality you’re about to see.
At a high level, CSE provides your organisation with a simple yet powerful platform to manage all your social media activity.
The key features of the solution are:
Does this mean that we won’t need Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE)? What are the differences?
In short no, while they do overlap in certain features they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you can schedule all your posts to a calendar (incredibly useful!), whereas MSE posts your material immediately to various social platforms (no scheduling). While MSE comes with inbuilt rules that convert your posts to leads/cases, whereas CSE converts posts and stores them in what is known as the Inbox that presumably you could build workflows and do the same. Sentiment analysis is also only available to the MSE platform. So they have similar features but work in very different ways. In my opinion CSE is targeted more for marketing whilst MSE caters more for social analytics.
What does it look like?
Once the solution is installed, it opens in a separate window and provides you with your social listening dashboard. Configuration is achieved through the settings menu where you can specify social connectors, search phrases and so forth.
The analytics and scheduling system is pretty impressive, packed with a lot of useful information such as knowing when is the best time of day/week to post.
And a basic breakdown of which networks are your customers engaging on.
The leader board system is something quite refreshing, introducing new tools that score your social engagement efforts among team members (game on!).
Final thoughts
Social Engagement tools have come a long way particularly in the Microsoft Dynamics ISV space. It has been pretty obvious that social selling, social engagement and social perception of companies is becoming more of a priority to companies and the maturity of the tools you see today really reflect that.
The ClickDimensions winning feature in my opinion is how easy it is to schedule your posts, across networks, and from your marketing teams. This is core to the solution, and the process couldn’t be more simple. Though I haven’t read too much about potential extensions on the platform, it would be really good to be able to have the ability to create business rules that redirect inbound social posts to queues, cases and leads like MSE does. But overall, this is a fantastic product and cost/benefit wise it’s an exceptional offering aimed exactly at the right audience (SMEs, B2Bs). Looking forward to seeing more of this new platform!
Did you know that 70% of Australia’s GDP comes from the Services industry? But scarily in Australia, 23% of employees leave a job within the first 12 months. And many reports show that the average cost of employee turnover is equivalent to a year’s wage. So it goes without saying that Employees are our most valuable asset, and managing them well is critical to your organisation’s success, your quality of service, and our countries future.
Cognitive Computing is being used all around you, and you probably don’t even know it. Facebook is listening to your conversations and showing you advertisements based on the words you use and the emotions you show. Facebook auto-tags people in photos based on facial recognition. Call centres are recording conversations and determining sentiment en-mass (ideally to provide you a better service ). Casinos are watching you walk in and matching you against criminal databases.
Microsoft is investing heavily in this space also:
”Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with powerful algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication, with just a few lines of code. Easily add intelligent features, such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, language understanding, knowledge and search, into your app, across devices and platforms, such as iOS, Android and Windows, keep improving and are easy to set up.”
In case you missed the announcement last night, Dynamics 365 for Talent has now entered General Availability. 60 Day trials are now available to the general public. And the Ideas.Microsoft.com forums have been going hot with new ideas to improve the product going forward, so hopefully we’ll have an Update 1 release in the not too distant future.
Here’s the MSFT press release:
Hi All
By now you’ve probably heard that Adobe and Microsoft have come together to form a partnership that promises to accelerate digital transformation. The partnership includes the integration of Adobe Marketing Cloud with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, and will allow brands to deliver experiences taking all customer engagements into account – from reach and acquisition to retention and loyalty.
Microsoft recently released the Technical Preview of Microsoft Dynamics for Talent, and I had the opportunity to test drive this new offering in trying to understand what it is all about. And the short version of this blog, is that I am impressed how they’ve brought so many HR functions together into one simple solution.
So what is Dynamics 365 for Talent?
Dynamics 365 for Talent aims to be an Employee Centric solution that takes your common HR functions and brings them together in a meaningful way to both your managers, HR staff and your prospective and current employees.
The solution can be thought of as three separate workloads (or experiences). They are at a high level:
Human Resources
Attract
Onboard
Let’s have a closer look at each experience and what it offers.
The following is a tip on how to show how often a product is being added to an opportunity. It involves create a rollup field that counts the number of related opportunities. Once you have this variable it is easy to include into charts, reports and views.
The following is a handy tip for appending the last modified date and user details to the description field of any entity. In this case I’ll be using the Phone Activity. This may be useful for providing a visual guide for your team members in quickly seeing a history log of when this record was last touched.
