The Rise and Fall of Microsoft SharePoint Revisited
Since a wrote an earlier version of this post in 2017, many things have changed, but Microsoft SharePoint endures. I’m still working with SharePoint capabilities in Office 365 and Dynamics 365. I have been working with SharePoint since it was Microsoft Tahoe Server in 2001, and I have a soft spot in my heart for this software. My company InfoStrat has been a Microsoft SharePoint Gold… Continue Reading...
Estimating the Cost of a Grants Manager Plus Implementation
Grants Manager Plus is a solution for tracking the full life cycle of a grant, from funding sources to publishing grant opportunities, accepting online applications, review, scoring, award, post-award reporting and closeout. The solution and its precursor Stimulus360 has been used to track over $250 billion in government grants.InfoStrat has been building grants management systems for… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com (Jim...
GovCon Information Services: A List
Updated: 9/20/2022 I was not able to find a comprehensive list of companies that provide databases to government contractors to find potential opportunities, so I created this list. Many of these sources are reviewed here. This is a blog post which I will expand based on feedback from readers and additional research.FedBizOpps: FBO from the General Services Administration is the best known… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Book Review: Building a Digital Future by Lipi Sarkar and Vinnie Bansal
Building a Digital Future: A Transformational Blueprint for Innovating with Microsoft Dynamics 365 by Lipi Sarkar and Vinnie Bansal. (Wiley, 2021) Buy on Amazon Digital transformation has been one of my favorite topics since it emerged as an industry buzzword. Many books and articles discuss digital transformation as an abstract concept, but few of them can cite specific technologies,… Continue Reading...
Top 5 Reasons to Move Your Infrastructure into Microsoft Azure
[This is a guest post from Steve Vickerage of pavliks.com. For more information, see the pavliks.com blog. ] Although it is not a new trend, we continue to see accelerated movement from on premises servers to cloud computing from our prospects. For many, the move is triggered by the need to upgrade aging server hardware. This leads to reconsideration of costs and new options to meet… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Introducing Microsoft Viva Sales
Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/sales This month Microsoft introduced Viva Sales, the first role-based offering on the Microsoft Viva employee experience suite. Viva was announced in February 2021 and included many new tools and features as well as extensive integrations with third party providers of training, collaboration, analytics and productivity tools. For… Continue Reading...
Serenic Navigator Case Study: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)
Serenic Software published a new case study on how the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) uses Serenic Navigator accounting software to support its mission of improving nutrition around the world. GAIN makes extensive use of many Serenic Navigator features such as budget plans and budget ledger. GAIN can define sub-plans, track the progress and status of multiple budgets… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Microsoft Announces Power Pages
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/introduction For me, the biggest news to come out of the Microsoft Build conference this week is the introduction of Microsoft Power Pages. Power Pages is the newest member of the Power Apps family of the low code/no code development platform. It represents the evolution of Power Apps portals (previously Dynamics Portal and before that… Continue Reading...
Azure Solves the Supply Chain for IT Hardware
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash Guest Author: Kirk Evans [this post first appeared on pavliks.com] Keep your business moving forward instead of being stuck in neutral waiting for bottlenecks in the Supply Chain to open. There are many things I miss about owning my own business. The freedom to decide on what opportunities to pursue. Decisions on how you will perform and present yourself as…...
New NaviPayroll Feature: Pay Stub Emails
Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash The latest version of Serenic NaviPayroll incorporates dozens of new features and enhancements, but the most exciting is generating pay stub emails. This feature automatically sends an electronic version of the pay stub as part of the batch processing for each pay period. You can individually configure employees to receive pay stub emails, or use filters to… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
6 Top Web Portal Scenarios
Top Portal Types Businesses, schools, governments and nonprofits use web portals in many ways. The Portal Connector has identified 6 of the most popular scenarios that require web portals: Sales. Customer portals can make it easier to add new products and conduct sales activities with fewer communications. They offer 24×7 access even when this would not be practical for sales staff. Consider… Continue...
Essential Guide to Nonprofit Accounting Software
Although the most popular accounting software products, from QuickBooks to SAP, handle the needs of businesses in many industries, nonprofits have a business model and therefore accounting standards that are different from those of manufacturers, retailers, healthcare and other commercial sectors. What makes nonprofits so special that their accounting tools must be different? How can you…...
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is one of Microsoft’s cloud offerings geared toward a particular industry. The creation of industry-specific cloud offerings allows Microsoft and its product and implementation partners to better serve unique requirements of industry segments such as government, nonprofits, and healthcare. For instance, healthcare providers are subject to security and privacy… Continue Reading...
Software Review Sites
If you have searched for software lately, you may have noticed that the first page of Google is full of listings not from the software companies themselves but instead from software review sites. Review sites can be handy to find a list of products for a particular segment. The reviews themselves can also be helpful, although the quality of listings and reviews is mixed. Here are some of the… Continue Reading...
Your CRM Cannot Be More Successful than its User Adoption
For sales force automation, the best customer relationship management system is the one that makes users successful. For that to happen, users must adopt the CRM. It doesn’t do much good to have a brilliant design for a system that salespeople do not use. This means that you must measure adoption both in quantity and in quality of usage. How often does your sales team access CRM? Do they use… Continue...
Our Top 5 Favorite Features: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Spring Release 2022
This is my guest blog post on pavliks.com The number of new features is nearly overwhelming! Spring is nearly here, and in April the first wave of the 2022 release of Dynamics 365 will arrive. The release contains hundreds of new features for Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Insights, Human… Continue Reading...
CRM Concepts: One Opportunity or Many?
If you track your sales in a customer relationship system (CRM) such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, the most important thing to track are arguably sales opportunities. Opportunities happen in the sales cycle when you can match up a person (contact) or organization (account) that may purchase something. This seems simple so far, but there are some business decisions to make about how… Continue Reading...
Agile Marketing: Software Tools
With the ascendance of digital marketing, managing marketing initiatives has become more and more like managing software products, making Agile techniques attractive for your marketing department as well as your information technology department. I have found that Microsoft Teams is useful for managing marketing activities. It provides all these capabilities at a reasonable cost: Task… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Keep It Simple in CRM: Five Reasons Why
Simplicity is one of the keys to successful sales force automation. This is one of the lessons of implementing customer relationship management (CRM) that is good that I must keep learning it again and again. Here are my top reasons why it’s better to keep it simple than to chase perfection: Sales people need to stay focused on sales. The simpler your sales process and your tracking… Continue...
Common Finance System for Dioceses and Archdioceses
The Roman Catholic Church is organized into dioceses around the world. Dioceses ruled by an archbishop are commonly referred to as archdioceses. In the Washington, DC area, there are more than 655,000 Catholics, 139 parishes, and 92 Catholic schools under the The Archdiocese of Washington. This structure means that diocesan finances are complex, and can involve dozens or hundreds of...
What's New in Serenic Employee Central
The latest (November 2021) version of Serenic Employee Central includes several enhancements such as: Ability for Payroll Admins to view another employee’s informationAbility to submit Leave Requests from Employee CentralAbility to filter leave requests by statusAbility to sort leave request by request dateAddition of Profile, Location, Hire, and Termination date to the User Profile grid to… Continue Reading...
What's New in Serenic Navigator Fall 2021
Highlights of Serenic Navigator 18 Improvements The latest release of Serenic Navigator includes several small but impactful enhancements. Improvements to the User InterfaceFocus mode allows you to expand areas on certain pages (e.g., the Lines FastTab on a purchase document), allowing for easier data entry. See the Key Terms for the User Interface article for more information (link...
Sylogist Acquires pavliks.com and The Portal Connector
This week my company Sylogist announced the acquisition of pavliks.com and The Portal Connector. I’m excited about this news, because I have known about pavliks.com for a long time and InfoStrat is a partner for The Portal Connector. Yes, you are reading correctly that Sylogist has closed two new acquisitions in the space of a week. pavliks.com has been in business for 52 years. You can… Continue...
Sylogist Acquires Mission CRM — Dynamics 365 for Nonprofit Fundraising & Engagement
Last week our company Sylogist announced the acquisition of Mission CRM, a leader in Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Power Apps solutions for nonprofits. This is big news for us and for the nonprofit sector. Mission CRM is built a SaaS fundraising and engagement platform architecture and mindset. They were one of the first to embrace the vision of Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact organization…...
Switching from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-gp/terms/lifecycle This year Microsoft announced a date for the end of mainstream support for Dynamics 365 GP 2018 accounting software. This spurred some blogs and customers to think that they must switch from Dynamics GP to another product by January 10, 2023 when mainstream support ends. It turns out that this announcement does not cover the… Continue Reading...
My Favorite Microsoft Power Apps Bloggers and their Blogs
Microsoft Power Apps is one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoy reading blog posts from members of this thriving technical community. Here are some of my favorite bloggers and their blogs: The Official Microsoft Power Apps Blog I have to start with the official Microsoft Power Apps blog. It has many contributors, largely Microsoft program manager, including frequent posters Denise...
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Solutions for Education
Student Portal For over three years, Microsoft has released solution accelerators based on Dynamics 365 for industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, finance, nonprofits and education. Each year we are seeing new solutions and updates to solutions based on Dynamics 365, Power Apps and the Common Data Model. In August 2021 Microsoft released the Higher Education component in… Continue Reading...
Microsoft Power App Price Cuts
This month Microsoft announced major price cuts for Power Apps. Starting October 1, 2021, the per user plan will be priced at $20/user/month, a fifty percent reduction from the previous price. The Power Apps per app plan will also be slashed in half to $5/user/app/month. There are no license minimums for these subscriptions. The Power Apps portal price has also been reduced for high volume… Continue Reading...
Understanding Software for Fund Accounting
Many organizations such as nonprofits, non-governmental agencies, K-12 school districts, state, and local government agencies depend on grants to fund some of, or in many cases, their entire operations. In the United States alone there are over 1.5 million nonprofit organizations[1]. Winning grants can be difficult, especially for competitive programs, so managing the grants that your… Continue Reading...
Microsoft Power Apps and Oracle
Recently I was demonstrating a Microsoft Power Apps solution and I was asked what options are available for handling data in Oracle along with Power Apps. Can Oracle be migrated to Power Apps and Dataverse? Can Power Apps access data stored in Oracle? Can I use Power Apps to replace Oracle Forms? Like Oracle, Power Apps offers both a front end user interface and a database (Dataverse). This… Continue Reading...
Welcoming Wen-GAGE to the Sylogist Corporate Family
In March 2021, InfoStrat’s parent company Sylogist acquired Municipal Accounting Systems Inc. (MAS), a provider of student information systems and accounting solutions to K-12 public school districts. MAS was founded in 1985 and has grown to serve nearly 85% of the Oklahoma K-12 public education market with its integrated Wen-GAGE platform. This SaaS solution includes budgeting and… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Using Analytics Software to Ask Different Questions
Analytics is one of the fastest growing categories of software. Sales of products like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Qlik and Splunk are growing rapidly and analytics is being placed in the hands of more users than ever before. Analytics tools make it easier to visualize and understand your data, but there is still plenty of work for us as analytics end users. Now that we have analytics, what… Continue Reading...
Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits: Software Grants
Microsoft makes it easy for nonprofits to get the software they need for office productivity through grants of Microsoft 365 to eligible organizations. Microsoft 365 is a suite which includes Windows and Office 365. It is available in Basic, Standard, and Premium editions which contain different products: Microsoft 365 Business Basic — Free up to 300 usersMicrosoft 365 Business Standard –… Continue...
Microsoft Power Apps Community Plan
If you follow this blog or have attended any webinars or other events where I present, you know that Microsoft Power Apps is growing like gangbusters and that many people are turning to Power Apps for their line of business solutions. But where should you start? For some organizations, the best way is to choose a Dynamics 365 app such as Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise or Customer Service and… Continue Reading...
Meet Power Fx: The Language of Microsoft Power Apps Canvas Apps
Last week Microsoft made many announcements on Power Apps. One of the most important was naming Power Fx, the unified language used in Power Apps Canvas Apps and other Power Platform products. This announcement is more than just naming a language because it unveils a long-term plan for standardizing the Power Platform stack of development tools. April Dunnam of Microsoft provides a concise… Continue Reading...
Low Code Software Tradeoffs
Recently I wrote on The Enduring Appeal of Low Code Software Development and 6 Reasons to Choose Microsoft for your Low Code Application Platform which explain why low code development is popular and why Microsoft is especially successful among the low code application development platforms. Like many decisions, moving to low code software involves tradeoffs, so this post is devoted to some… Continue Reading...
More Microsoft Clouds for Industries, Including Nonprofits
Today Microsoft announced three new industry computing clouds for financial, manufacturing and nonprofit. The new clouds join the healthcare and retail clouds. Based on Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and other Microsoft services, the industry clouds consolidate components, tools, solutions, and data models that are geared toward industry needs and standards. Since my focus… Continue...
Multi-Channel Customer Support
Customer service automation is evolving rapidly, and I experienced this myself this week. Here is an example of excellent use of multi-channel customer service from SiriusXM Satellite radio. The entire transaction when smoothly even though it switched between four channels. Channel 1: Mail I received a letter telling me that my SiriusXM Satellite Radio subscription was up for renewal, and my… Continue Reading...
More on Microsoft Power Apps: Model-driven Apps, Canvas Apps and Portals
As I have written elsewhere in this blog, Microsoft is one of the leading providers of low code software development platforms with its Power Apps family including Power Automate, Power BI and much more. One of your key design decisions is when to use model-driven apps, canvas apps and portals. One place to start is with your database. The most low code approach is to use model-driven apps… Continue Reading...
The Enduring Appeal of Low Code Software Development
As we bid farewell to 2020, we can look back on the tech trends that shaped the world response to the COVID crisis. The shock of COVID and resulting lockdowns accelerated existing trends such as digital transformation, remote work, and even software development methodologies and tools. For decades, organizations could only choose between off-the-shelf products and custom software… Continue Reading...
My Debt to SharePoint
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper announced last week that SharePoint is now reaching 200 million cloud users worldwide. This is an impressive milestone by any standard, even the high adoption normal for Microsoft. This announcement made me realize that I owe a professional debt to SharePoint. Back in 1999, my company InfoStrat was one of the first Microsoft Gold Partners to… Continue Reading...
6 Reasons to Choose Microsoft for your Low Code Application Platform
Low code software development has been in the news in 2020. The COVID crisis has disrupted many businesses, and they have been forced to transform themselves rapidly. We have never seen so much digital transformation since that term was coined in 2012. Low code development platforms have been chosen for many of these efforts because they can bring software solutions to fruition more… Continue Reading...
Governing the Dataverse: Peaceful Living with Microsoft Power Apps
Microsoft has created a business software platform which not only includes complete commercial products such as accounting and CRM, but also development tools which may be used by professional software developers and power users. Microsoft is enpowering power users, sometimes called citizen developers, with tools that require less coding and more configuration through templates and… Continue Reading noreply@blogger.com...
Understanding Microsoft Unified Support
Microsoft has recently added a new support option for its enterprise customers: Microsoft Unified Support. This offering is in addition to the Microsoft Premier service offering which may be familiar to large organizations that rely on Microsoft software. Microsoft Unified Support is designed to reduce downtime through on demand risk assessments, improve productivity through enhanced user… Continue Reading...
Microsoft Power Apps for Nonprofits and the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator
Microsoft Power Apps and Dynamics 365 provide prebuilt apps and a framework for building custom apps for a wide range of the software needs of nonprofits. Dynamics 365 is a family of products which include accounting, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software. Power Apps was derived from Dynamics 365 and offers a framework for building standalone web apps… Continue Reading...
Managing Grants through Microsoft Power Apps Portals
Microsoft has overhauled the portal capabilities of the Dynamics Portal product which was formerly available as an add-on component for Dynamics 365 apps such Sales and Customer Service, now making these capabilities available as Power Apps portal. Power Apps portals allows you to build websites with static pages and content as well as, more importantly, forms and views to display data from… Continue Reading...
Microsoft Power Apps and Power Platform: Build Apps without Limits
Microsoft is not only a leader in packaged software products for business productivity, operating systems and accounting, but also in providing the development platforms for creating custom solutions. The Microsoft Power Platform is a family of products that are seeing rapid growth. The Power Platform includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual agents. It features… Continue...
Constant Change: The Hidden Cost of Cloud Computing
The benefits of cloud computing are widely known, and most organizations have moved or are planning to move from their on premises data centers to cloud facilities hosted by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google or other providers. One of the cloud computing benefits is that the cloud provider is responsible for continuously improving the environment that hosts, and that these updates and… Continue Reading...
Azure Stream Analytics for Real-Time Fraud Detection
The following is a guest blog post by Dmitri Riz from the InfoStrat Tech Blog. Microsoft Azure Logic Apps is a service that allows you to design and build scalable solutions for app integration, data integration, system integration, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) communication, whether in the cloud, on premises, or both. One of the features I wanted to… Continue Reading...
Solicitations for Cloud Computing Need to Reflect Cloud Reality
For several years the information technology industry has been migrating from traditional on premises deployment of software in the data center to cloud computing hosted by industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Solicitations for new software often fail to reflect the reality of cloud computing. Here are some of the ways that solicitations (also called tenders and… Continue Reading...