As you may have noticed, Microsoft has a fantastic speed with which it updates its SaaS (software as a service) products under the Office 365 umbrella. And not only that. For the entire Microsoft cloud platform, the speed of changes is spectacular. Today, some of the news.
Outlook Customer Manager – or how to keep your customer and opportunity information in one place. The easy way.
Announced last year and now in preview for Office 365 Business Premium plans, Outlook Customer Manager is exactly the missing product. Whether you use a file excel for contact and opportunity management, whether you use lists and flows in SharePoint, early enough in the development of the sales process you start to need more capabilities. However, an advanced solution like Dynamics 365 for Sales or Dynamics Crm Online can be too much for a small company. Especially if you only use the contact or opportunity management part.
Based on user feedback, Microsoft comes up with a solution that covers exactly this need. All information about customers, opportunities, sales activities (whether we are talking about tasks, emails or phone calls) is kept in one place. Finally, we have a simple, easy-to-use tool that will bring major benefits both in terms of speed and consistency of the sales process. With a direct effect on the amounts collected.
We are waiting for the roll-out for all customers and we encourage you to contact us to learn more about Outlook Customer Manager. In the first sprints we have the Outlook version (add-in) and the mobile version (as we are used to lately, IOS is the first supported platform :)). We want to see the Android versions launched as soon as possible, but especially the web version. Along with Planner and Teams, but also the announced To Do, OCM will probably become one of the heroes of modern productivity.
Power BI – or how to monitor updates to keep up with the features :)
We don't know how project management is implemented in dev teams, but looking from the outside, we could bet that the shortest sprints are in Power BI teams. The speed with which new versions, templates, views are launched is fabulous. Therefore, in our reporting projects too, the agile methodology is by far the most used. It fits perfectly with the product and the dynamic way in which modern business evolves.
A super interesting novelty in this area. In March, Microsoft released a set of Power BI templates for the PSA (Project Service Automation) solution within Dynamics 365. This set contains a set of reports for several roles within organizations, in order to optimize one of the most difficult processes: brain allocation management :). If you want to see them in action, the first step is here: sales at koding dot ro.
Azure aka Microsoft Cloud
If the speed of Power BI is fantastic, due to the complexity, Microsoft Azure can no longer be managed with small teams. Not even from an understanding perspective. From certain angles, you can already say that on Azure you can do anything (from an IT perspective). What else do we want (and we know it's coming): MySql as a service. Yes, we're tired of managing servers. We've gotten used to the laziness of PaaS :) (platform as a service). Like in the famous picture with pizza as a service.
The current MySql in app variants (for web apps running on IIS) or third party solutions are not enough for us. And then, we often end up managing non-Microsoft database servers ourselves. Already for SQL Server and SQL Data Warehouse (Microsoft's hero products) the maturity is sufficient for complex enterprise scenarios. We want the same for open source platforms for database management.
We know it can. Why? Microsoft loves Linux.
