MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CLOUD SOLUTIONS

What does ‘the cloud’ mean for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM? For Microsoft Dynamics Users there are 3 different cloud options your organisation can take each with its own advantages and challenges: Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud.

Public Cloud

When thinking about Microsoft Dynamics cloud solutions, people usually assume we are talking about the Public Cloud option. Essentially, user data is held on an external server, meaning that Microsoft Dynamics users can theoretically access it from any device with an internet connection. Public clouds represent the most diverse benefits of cloud storage. When Microsoft or an affiliate manages data on their own servers, businesses generally encounter lower upfront costs compared to other cloud solutions and traditional self-installations and deployment time is significantly reduced.

Private Cloud

Private cloud is the phrase used to describe a cloud computing platform that is implemented within the corporate firewall, under the control of the IT department. Private clouds are often most attractive to large companies with established software protocols.

As they are under the control of the IT department organisations concerned about data security may be more comfortable with this setup. However, it is important to remember that third-party security systems that are in place with the Public Cloud option are often very robust since the livelihood of those businesses depends on data integrity.

A private cloud is designed to offer the same features and benefits of public cloud systems, but removes a number of objections to the cloud computing model including control over enterprise and customer data, worries about security, and issues connected to regulatory compliance.

Hybrid Cloud

A combined form of private clouds and public clouds in which some critical data resides in the organisation’s private cloud while other data is stored in and accessible from a public cloud. Hybrid clouds seek to deliver the advantages of scalability, reliability, rapid deployment and potential cost savings of public clouds with the security and increased control and management of private clouds.

LRK BusinessSolutions LLP  has been providing Microsoft DynamicsCRM solutions to clients for over 3 years now. The team is having 5+ years of experience in successfully undertaking and implementing projects of varied difficulties for host of clients. All MS Dynamics Consultants are certified by Microsoft.

To know more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services and EXCLUSIVE OFFERS, please contact us at: LRK Business Solutions LLP 

A MUST App for BUSINESS Users: Mobile Search App Saves Valuable Time for Business Users

X1 specializes in developing search software for on-premise, virtual and cloud-based enterprise environments. A new solution named X1 Search Mobile, a revolution in Mobile environment.

X1 Mobile will enable an instantaneous and secure search of millions of documents, and years of email from a smartphone, which could prove to be a game-changing capability for today's mobile-first workforce.

X1 Search Mobile will deliver X1's award-winning user interface to the mobile setting, providing fast and precise search of email and files from anywhere at any time.

This will eliminate the time-consuming use of limited, slow and inconsistent 'Exchange-only' searches with current smartphones. X1 Search Mobile will offer the ability to conduct full email and desktop searches from mobile devices, keeping workers productive no matter where they are.

In today's 'always on' business environment, X1 Search Mobile will allow users to effortlessly find and take action on important information they require, regardless of where it is and when they might be looking for it.

"X1's approach to mobile search is ground-breaking and fills a huge productivity void in today's mobile enterprise, said John Patzakis, CEO of X1. "X1 Search Mobile provides an intuitive user interface to email that goes well beyond the native search of the mobile device, while also providing access to desktop files, SharePoint, and other critical sources of content. X1 enables true mobile productivity."

Built specifically for the enterprise, X1 Search Mobile will integrate with the leading EMM capabilities of vendors such as AirWatch and Good Technology, providing the most secure mobile search possible.

This differentiates it from other mobile search applications, in terms of the security already provided by EMM platforms, giving X1 the most robust security model available. Additionally, the X1 Search Mobile will work on both iOS and Android platforms.

Courtesy: Robbie Westacott 

LRK BusinessSolutions LLP has been providing Enterprise Mobility solutions to clients for over 3 years now.

To know more about Enterprise Mobility Solution and EXCLUSIVE OFFERS, please contact us at: LRK Business Solutions LLP 

Top 10 New Features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 : 1st Update

Companies using Microsoft Dynamics CRM will have the opportunity to implement Update 1! The update also code named as “Carina” from Microsoft. These update contains more functionality that allows companies to leverage out-of-the-box features. The following list is not in any order of preference because Microsoft Dynamics CRM is so flexible and has much to offer that it would be impossible for us to prioritize. 

# 1: Themes

The new update allows business enterprises to customize the themes, with options to change default colors and add a company’s logo as well. This would allow you to make your CRM to match your company’s uniqueness.

# 2: Main Menu Navigation

The main menu navigation in Dynamics CRM 2015 will look familiar and user-friendly to Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) users. The home icon present on the main menu is now replaced with a main menu option.

# 3: Recently Viewed or Pinned items

The update brings a new recently viewed icon on the top navigation bar, allowing users to quickly access most recent viewed or pinned items throughout the CRM system.

# 4: OneNote Integration

Users can now easily capture meeting details using OneNote from within CRM Online. This functionality allows the information to be available to other CRM Online users in the Social Pane.

# 5: Export to Excel Redesigned

In addition to replacing the wizard with a single click to download feature (as if that was not fabulous enough), the record limitation for both import and export has been increased to 100,000 records or 32MB!

# 6: Folder-level Email Tracking

The new upgrade empowers Exchange email users to establish a tracking folder, which drops incoming emails into the folder (automatically or manually), so that they can be tracked in CRM system.

# 7: Advanced Find Adds

With the new upgrade, Dynamics CRM users get an opportunity to access any type of information efficiently and hassle free.

# 8: Immersive Excel

Users on the go will love this functionality. When starting from a view, selecting Export to Excel and then Open in Excel Online you can quickly analyze or edit data in Excel Online.

# 9: System Administrator and Customizer Platform Improvements

·         The calculated fields get new functions

·         Business rules can now be set to null or removed

·         A date only field is now available

·         Create system rules that will automatically create or update a record based upon an incoming activity (such as an email)

# 10: Mobile on Smartphones

Windows Phone users can now use Cortana voice commands (yes, this means hands-free) and access CRM data! Additionally, the mobile app has been enhanced to provide the same mobile experience as CRM for tablets.

LRK BusinessSolutions LLP provides Microsoft DynamicsCRM solutions to clients for over 3 years now. The team is having 5+ years of experience in successfully undertaking and implementing projects of varied difficulties for host of clients. All MS Dynamics Consultants are certified by Microsoft.

To know more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services and EXCLUSIVE OFFERS, please contact us at: LRK Business Solutions LLP 

Innovative Way of Marketing and Branding...Thinking Out Of The Box

onions at 1 rupee per kilo’: a startup’s growth hack

Onions are something which we Indians love, whether in curries or in the raw form. Of late, their prices have been touching stratospheric levels, adding to the woes of every household. Being a consumer-first company Ninjacart believe that there is no greater joy than serving people what they need the most. That was when they decided to come up with this campaign of onions at Re one for a kg. Through this offer, their aim was to ease the consumer’s inconvenience caused due to the unexpected rise in onion prices. Here’s how they did it and what they learned in the process:

Preparations for the big sale

This was their most challenging campaign. Right from marketing to operations everyone was involved in ensuring that the campaign is executed to perfection. Entire team spent a few sleepless nights to drive this initiative. Except for developers, everyone was either in operations or in customer support.

                                            Selecting the ‘right’ onions

For the big day, they had procured close to 10 tonnes of Grade A (high quality) onion from a big distributor in Pune. As a company believe in delivering handpicked grocery. So after procuring onions, a good amount of time and effort was spent to ensure that only the right quality was delivered to the customers. Special packing and delivery in a eco-friendly ninjacart carry bag of one kg onions was done with a thank-you note to there customers. The most important part of this entire exercise was distribution of the packed onions to general store shops they have tied up with. General store shops form a vital part of business model. They work closely with local general stores, help them in improving their quality, stock outs etc., enabling them to take their offline businesses online.

The campaign days

Campaign started on Friday, September 4, at 5 pm and went on for two more days. During this period, they acquired more than 20,000 customers and fulfilled more than 2,800 orders each day.

This campaign helped them gain a lot of traction across platforms and got us trending on app stores and various social media platforms. A lot of delighted customers tweeted about how good their experience was and they were also mentioned in some prominent Bengaluru startup groups. Overall, the campaign was a big hit and they were able to achieve a lot more than they expected. Best part, they were able to satisfy and serve the majority of our customers.

Learning from the campaign

A. Let's compare this marketing activity with any other big activity like putting up hoardings across the city. Putting up hoardings in major places for a week would easily cost more than Rs 40 lakh - 50 lakh. This would give some eye balls, but would never become viral and in very short term. The impact is less mainly because with all other marketing communications, people generally talk about what their product can do and not necessarily about what people need directly.

In comparison, we launched a very simple campaign of selling onions at Re one. The campaign worked wonders because here we were directly addressing a basic need of the consumers, as a result of which we achieved good numbers and the campaign became viral too.

-- In just 3 days, they acquired more than 20,000 customers

– Playstore organic search increased by 13 times in that week

– Play Store ranking improved drastically

– Trending on App store as well Play Store

– Cost Acquiring Customer was less than Rs 100/-

B. For pulling off this campaign, they knew delivery would be a challenge. To overcome it, they collaborated with multiple third-party delivery players and created a delivery grid system. With the help of this grid they were able to connect with various delivery networks to find the best available option at that instant. This helped them fulfill the majority of orders within two hours.

To ensure satisfaction all the orders accepted, they created a system that automated delivery slots. The shops were closed for accepting any new orders whenever the demand went higher than the maximum capacity. This was done to ensure they would serve whatever orders they got in the best possible manner.

C. This was their first big campaign and an interesting observation is that because of this campaign, a lot of other channels’ conversions have improved significantly. When they conducted a lot of below the line activities before this campaign, they saw lukewarm response. Today, many people stop by and ask them: “Are you the same guys who sold onions at Re 1?”

This kind of response reaffirms their faith that their campaign was successful in reaching out to people.

Majority Of Digital Media Consumption Now Takes Place In Mobile Apps

U.S. users are now spending the majority of their time consuming digital media within mobile applications. That means mobile apps, including the number 1 most popular app Facebook, eat up more of our time than desktop usage or mobile web surfing, accounting for 52% of the time spent using digital media. Combined with mobile web, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%.

Apps today are driving the majority of media consumption activity, the report claims, now accounting for 7 our of every 8 minutes of media consumption on mobile devices. On smartphones, app activity is even higher, at 88% usage versus 82% on tablets.

App Users

The report also details several interesting figures related to how U.S. app users are interacting with these mobile applications, noting that over one-third today download at least one application per month. The average smartphone user downloads 3 apps per month.

However, something which may not have been well understood before is that much of that download activity is concentrated within a small segment of the smartphone population: the top 7% of smartphone owners accounting for nearly half of all the download activity in a given month. Those are some serious power users, apparently.

But no matter how often consumers are actively downloading apps, they certainly are addicted to them. More than half (57%) use apps every single day, while 26% of tablet owners do. And 79% of smartphone owners use apps nearly every day, saying they use them at least 26 days per month, versus 52% for tablet users.

 

Facebook Still #1

Here’s another notable tidbit: 42% of all app time on smartphones takes place in that individual’s single most used app. 3 out of 4 minutes is spent in the individual’s top 4 apps. The top brands, which account for 9 out of the top 10 most used apps, include Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay.

Facebook is the most used app, in both audience size and share of time spent among each demographic segment.

Social Networking, Games and Radio contribute to nearly half the total time spent on apps, indicating mobile usage is heavily centered around entertainment and communication.

On iPhone, users prefer spending time consuming media, with news apps, radio, photos, social networking, and weather as the highest-ranking categories, while Android users spent more time in search (Google) and email (Gmail).

Android Vs. iPhone

ComScore’s report also heats up the ol’ Android versus iPhone war, pointing out again that iPhone users have 40% higher median incomes, and engage with more applications. (9 more hours per month).

Reposted from http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/majority-of-digital-media-consumption-now-takes-place-in-mobile-apps/ 

After Dreamforce: How Microsoft Dynamics CRM Stays Ahead of Salesforce on Productivity

When Microsoft announced Dynamics CRM 2016 two weeks ago, the emphasis on productivity enhancements seemed like perhaps little more than an effort to parcel out the buzz on a release that promises a broad range of updates in December.

But with CEO Satya Nadella set to deliver a keynote address at Dreamforce 2015 ten days later to show off Microsoft's latest productivity tools working with Salesforce CRM, the urgency couldn't have been higher to get the Dynamics CRM productivity story out first.

The Microsoft-Salesforce partnership, we learned from last week's Dreamforce event, remains strong. The two firms have committed to ongoing improvements in integrating the Office productivity suite - the same software bundle that for so many years had supposedly set Microsoft's CRM apart from its rivals.

But the Dynamics CRM team's pre-emptive message was clear: we provide more Office productivity more quickly and with better features than our main CRM competitor.

The top line story out of Dreamforce is that Microsoft will continue to work with Salesforce to tie Microsoft productivity tools like Outlook, OneNote, Skype for Business, Delve, and Windows 10 into the Salesforce platform.  And they will improve on previously announced integrations for Power BI, Excel, SharePoint and OneDrive.

Let's piece together how those announcements compares with Microsoft's own productivity enhancement plans for Dynamics CRM.

1. Skype for Business Integration with Salesforce Lightning ExperienceTiming for Salesforce: "A preview is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Microsoft has offered Skype integration since at least CRM 2013 for Dynamics CRM, and Skype for Business (previously Lync) integration is also available already for use in click-to-call within the user interface.
2. OneNote Integration with Salesforce Lightning Experience:Timing for Salesforce: "A preview is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Microsoft introduced OneNote integration for Dynamics CRM earlier in 2015. And while the productivity enhancements expected in CRM 2016 don't specifically include OneNote, Microsoft has made it clear that the Office and CRM teams will be moving together on product advances together. As Microsoft's director of CRM product marketing Angela Bandlow, told us earlier in 2015, sales productivity will be shaped by both the CRM and Office teams going forward.
   "We give [the Office team] that feedback on how to evolve their tools. There is great collaboration between teams," she told MSDynamicsWorld.com in early September.
3. Salesforce Integration with Office Graph and Office DelveTiming for Salesforce: "Availability is anticipated in the second half of 2016."
   Dynamics CRM will roll out its Office Graph and Delve integration in late 2015, per the team's guidance on the CRM 2016 release.

Living with Salesforce

Remember when the Salesforce partnership news broke? It got off to an ugly start - if you were a Dynamics loyalist. Many in the Dynamics CRM channel saw it as a betrayal, and not without reason. The original messaging from CEO's Satya Nadella and Marc Benioff included some not-so-subtle digs against Microsoft's own CRM, and the news was delivered by Microsoft with seemingly little thought on how Dynamics CRM would hold up on the other side.

Credit Nadella's leadership and consistency of message in the last 16 months with reducing the discontented - at least to some extent. The move was displeasing to many, but it was also part of a strategic direction for Microsoft that most now understand is focused on a lot more than CRM.

But the one remaining concern in the Dynamics space is the question of Microsoft's commitment to making CRM, AX, GP, and NAV the showpiece business applications for Azure, Office 365, and Power BI, among others.  So far, Microsoft executives are saying exactly the right things to users, partners, and Wall Street about where Dynamics stands in the product lineup.

What's Next?

While it is clear that Microsoft is now committed to putting its productivity tools in the hands of as many business users as possible, the Dynamics CRM team also appears to be trying to create a gap between itself and third parties in terms of leveraging products from other Microsoft groups.  As Dynamics managers make a point of saying these days, the level of collaboration between themselves and coworkers on teams like Office, Outlook, Power BI, and Azure are at an all-time high. 

What will it take for Dynamics products to maintain a gap where they have one, or build one in areas where they still trail? Some clues come from the Dynamics ERP and CRM approach to the cloud, where they appear to be trying to accelerate the launch of features and technology asset, with on-premise delivery offered months later - or sometimes not at all. For example, according to the Dynamics CRM 2016 Release Preview Guide, CRM Online will introduce at least two improvements that CRM 2016 on-premise customers won't get for a while:

• Next generation search - This enhanced search experience provides a single list of results across entities, sorted by relevance to the search text, matched to any word across any search enabled field in any search enabled entity. The existing multi-entity Quick Find experience, which we're now call Categorized Search, available in the UI.
• Azure Machine Learning - CRM 2016 will introduce machine Learning "ML" scenario based integration with Azure ML for product cross-sell recommendations and suggested knowledge articles with text analytics.

The next major release of Dynamics AX, AX 7, will go live in Azure first, with an on-premise release to follow. And all customers will be dependent on Azure to an extent via the deployment tools of Lifecycle Services (LCS), a platform that has recently been expanded to Dynamics CRM.

Finally, Power BI access beyond the pre-built connectors for Dynamics CRM and Dynamics Marketing could become an urgent area of improvement. Salesforce has its own BI toolset in the Wave Analytics platform, with a much stronger focus on customer-centric scenarios than Power BI can offer. As Power BI momentum grows, Salesforce could continue to demand a great Microsoft BI story, but Wave also gives the company a potential point of departure and differentiation that could pressure the Dynamics CRM team to quickly up its BI game. Dynamics CRM has a long way to go in making Power BI relevant to many of its customers. CRM custom entities and fields, label mapping, date dimensions, and other factors not covered by the existing connector still leave a lot of work for someone - the customer, the partner, or perhaps an ISV - to do before building out a reporting solution that delivers real business insight.

So while the backlash against rubbing shoulders - and taking selfies - with Salesforce may have faded, both the Dynamics CRM team and its channel partners will have to maintain a careful watch on how well Microsoft charts its course on products and partnerships. It's a huge challenge, but one with few alternatives for the new Microsoft. 

**Taken from MS Dynamics World written by Jason Gumpert 

How are Instagram ads doing?

Did you know that Instagram ads could change the app industry by attracting more engaged users?

Adjust, a mobile analytic's firm just released a private beta test study of how well users engaged with the apps downloaded on photo sharing network Instagram.

Included in the study were display ads and app install ads, however the main purpose was to study the engagement of users of apps installed from Instagram ads “install now” button. Only a few metrics were released by Adjust, but the metrics that were released had “incredibly promising results” according to CEO and co-founder Christian Henschel.

In comparison to apps downloaded elsewhere, the results from the study showed that Instagram ads had 15 percent higher downloads.

What does this mean for you? With 300 million Instagram users worldwide, this will open a large new marketplace for app publishers.

Not only do the ads have higher downloads but in post- installation, users who download the app via Instagram ads spend an average of 70 percent more time in the app. These users also kept the app downloaded for 20 percent longer in comparison to other installation methods.

Which ads are gaining the most traction on Instagram?

The ads that blend in with the surrounding editorial content known as native ad formats on Instagram are getting the best engagement rates. For example, a fashion related app that is embedded within a feed of designer clothes fits in to that feed well so the engagement rates go up.

 

When did Instagram start advertising? Two years ago the photo sharing network started offering ads to a select group of advertisers with limited formats available. Recently Instagram announced that by September 30 advertising is available for all advertisers, using their “self serve” platform and are offering additional formats like 30 second video ads.
Instagram reported that it has seen boosts in app installs for ad campaigns via a blog post. For example, Gilt Groupe a fashion site ““ran a campaign that drove an 85 percent lift in app installs.” While Made.com’s “ads yielded a 10% order value increase versus its benchmark.”

 

Have you downloaded any apps from Instagram ads? If so which ones?

This article was originally published on www.instafamed.com