This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We’re excited to announce unlimited application installs when starting with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an improvement to our license definition and installation management experience. As of June 30, 2024 we’ve removed application installation limits for Customer Insights–Journeys (real-time journeys only) and Customer Insights–Data. Previous application installations had restrictions of four per base license of the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license launched September 2023, and one if using the older, standalone Marketing license.
Unlimited application installations: What it means for you
After June 30, 2024, as an admin, you have unlimited application installs with Customer Insights – Journeys (real-time only) and Customer Insights – Data on as many production and sandbox environments in the Power Platform Admin Center as you’d like. Admins with a paid Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license on their tenant (i.e. production or sandbox environments) will no longer see the application installation counter and limits. See details on how to install Customer Insights. Customer Insights –Journeys, application install limits still apply to additional installations of legacy outbound marketing solutions. (This accommodates the high cost of the background services.) For customers using only real-time Journeys, there is no installation limit.
Access the installation management page by going to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com -> Resources -> Dynamics 365 apps -> Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing -> … -> Manage. Because it’s no longer restricted, the meter doesn’t display the count of paid application installations you’re entitled to or have used. However, trials are still limited to one per license.
If your tenant has used outbound marketing solutions, you see a meter monitoring your entitled and installed instances of outbound marketing. We count outbound marketing instances based on the previous application logic. For Dynamics 365 Marketing standalone licenses and application add-on licenses you get one install per license. For the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combined license launched September 2023, you get four outbound marketing installs per base license. Learn more about who can enable outbound marketing.
Enhancing your applications installation experience
While making this change, we took the opportunity to simplify the user experience further with the following small changes:
We removed the little gray “i” icon with the environment URL. Find the environment URL in the green checkmark.
If your tenant does not have any Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing licenses, you see a view which offers you links to learn how to buy.
We hope these license definition and user experience improvements simplify your experience installing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Building a successful sales team starts with collaboration and insights. To boost performance across the sales journey, business development professionals must be empowered to engage across internal teams to better connect with customers and easily interact with data and insights. Like any organizational transformation, adapting teams to a new way of selling requires coordination between people, process, and technology—a challenging effort for any organization.
So, how does one of the largest professional services organizations in the world—with almost 400,000 people across 700 offices in 150 countries—transform and connect a sales organization that spans nearly every corner of the globe?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Optimize your organization and transform your sales processes.
For Ernst & Young LLP (EY), one of the largest professional services member firms worldwide, its sales transformation journey included Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. EY began its extensive rollout of Dynamics 365 Sales with the simple mission to deliver exceptional client service. By equipping more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals across the globe with an intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated across marketing, sales, delivery, and insights, EY can help its clients and itself maintain a competitive edge across markets.
The sales system also sets the stage for enhanced seller productivity with Microsoft 365, including the ability to access and collaborate on customer opportunities within the flow of work from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. And Microsoft Copilot capabilities are expected to help sellers work more efficiently and improve customer experiences with email assistance, personalized sales content creation, AI-generated insights, and recommendations for next steps.
Breaking down barriers for a globally-connected team
To help their clients solve their most complex problems, EY needed a digital sales foundation that helped enable sellers to be connected, proactive, and insightful with a deeper understanding of account and opportunity data. A collaborative sales system can empower teams to help deliver consistently exceptional client services and continuously adapt to rapid changes across each client organization, industries, and entire markets.
That’s why EY turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and the latest advancements in AI to both unify and transform sales processes with a goal to improve cross-team collaboration and deepen connections with clients.
Led by a need for a more integrated approach to client relationship building focused on client value, EY identified the people who would gain the most from a global sales transformation. For example, EY pursuit leaders, who are dedicated to leading complex client relationships, could benefit from deeper insights into client and industry issues to deliver the right set of solutions when pursuing opportunities. Client-serving teams could also benefit from a system that provided targeted, meaningful information and insights, helping them to create winning proposals in less time.
In 2022, EY and Microsoft got to work on an architecture design and implementation plan for a sales platform that bridged both existing solutions and a modern, future-proof platform for insights, automation, collaboration, productivity, and reporting. These transformative solutions build on a years-long commitment to power growth and innovation of EY on Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
A new way to power a global organization
EY client-serving teams around the world are standardizing sales processes on a single, unified customer relationship management and productivity system. On this new, flexible platform, with the ability to integrate third-party applications and adapt new technologies, teams can leverage both tools they currently depend on and leverage the latest in Dynamics 365 and AI enhancements.
For example, teams will continue to manage engagements in SAP ECC, but the integration with Dynamics 365 Sales will help ensure a more seamless handoff of crucial information to delivery. This allows EY to take advantage of Microsoft capabilities, such as Microsoft Power BI data visualizations, Outlook, and Teams for enhanced collaboration and AI and automation features to streamline processes.
“We’ve brought the opportunity management process closer to where we spend our time—in Outlook, in Teams, and on the go while on mobile.”
Kris Kuty, Global Product Manager, Ernst & Young LLP
Early signs of success
Only months after deployment, EY reports that the new sales platform is making a real impact on the way they do business. Some of the results include:
Greater access to intelligence and insights, enabling client-serving teams, financial forecasters, and business planners to be more efficient and knowledgeable, equipped to make better decisions faster, and, ultimately, make deeper connections with clients.
Standardized sales processes and unified views across accounts, using a globally consistent and streamlined system that includes a mobile Power App, Outlook, and Teams, with integrations to key EY systems for master data, risk management, and enterprise reporting. EY sales, service, and finance teams can access the information they need when they need it, right in the flow of work.
Improved pipeline visibility, giving EY client-serving teams a clear view of client pursuits across their broad services, supported by contextual insights into each sales contact and activity.
Tighter team collaboration, leading to more connected peer conversations and better outcomes for their clients’ most complex challenges.
Moving forward, the EY sales excellence journey will include AI and Copilot. To reinforce Dynamics 365 Sales as a key enabler for client serving individuals they expect to:
Provide AI-based recommendations for client communications and next best topics utilizing historical interactions as well as industry insights and trends.
Analyze seller behavior to recommend new ways of working.
Provide AI-driven recommendations for deal scoring and lead prioritization.
“We are extremely excited about what is coming and what is possible. We’ve already kicked off with Copilot and the possibilities with AI are extremely attractive as we aim to serve our clients even better. We have our integrated platform in place, with Dynamics 365 Sales at the center. Now we can build on this and continue the transformation.”
Jeremy Hallett, Global Markets Enablement Leader, Ernst & Young LLP
Better positioned to design and deliver transformative cloud solutions to organizations worldwide
The EY transformation story showcases how Dynamics 365 Sales can help complex, regulated, multi-national organizations inspire a unified, customer-focused global sales operation—empowered to move business forward with a shared vision and digital toolkit. And, as one of Microsoft’s top systems integrators, EY is well positioned to help deliver that value to organizations everywhere.
“Putting Dynamics 365 and Copilot in the hands of more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals showcases how modern architectures and the latest advancements in AI create competitive advantage. Part of embarking down this journey was to demonstrate for our clients that it can be done for even the most complex global enterprises. The time is now to create new ways of working with AI-powered transformations.”
Jim Little, Global Microsoft Alliance Leader, Ernst & Young LLP
The EY organization can help complex organizations find their own path to differentiate with Dynamics 365 and AI and surface the right data for personalized customer experiences, critical business insights, and operational agility. Applying direct learnings from their global implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as day-to-day experiences using the technology, will bring a wealth of additional perspective, insights, and guidance to every engagement.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Being able to efficiently and effectively manage your resources is key to Dynamics 365 Field Service. Today, we introduce a new Crew Allocation Tool to streamline the process of making single-day membership changes to all your crews.
We’ve heard from users that it can be tedious to manually go into crew records, take a resource out for a day, add a new resource, and reset it all at the end of the day. Now, when a technician is on leave, a piece of equipment is out of service, or you need to add some additional support for a particularly intensive day, making the necessary crew reassignments will be a seamless, intuitive experience.
Accessing the New Tool
To find the new Crew Allocation Tool, you’ll first head to the Resources page. There you can either navigate to a view with your desired crews or just select up to fifteen crews you want to work with. You’ll see a new button in the control bar titled Crew Allocation that will open the tool.
Accessing the new Crew Allocation Tool
Making Single Day Membership Changes
When you enter the new tool, you’ll see your selection of crews displayed in a grid along with all the members that are working that day. You’ll also see all the bookings that the crew has for the day listed for easy reference. To move a crew member from one crew to another is as simple as dragging and dropping one or more of these resources from their original crew to the target crew. You can also make your resource selection and use the Assign to crew button to select a new crew.
Of course, sometimes the resource you want to add to a crew is not already on another. In this case, you can use the Available Resources Panel. This section of the tool, which is based on the views you already have defined from the Resources page, is where you will find any resources working that day who are not already on a crew. From here, you can also select one or more resources, and move them to a crew either by dragging and dropping or the Assign to crew button.
Moving and updating the resources within the new Crew Allocation tool.
The last kind of single day membership change is removing a resource from a crew. Let’s say you know a particular resource is booked up with individual training that day and won’t be able to contribute to crew activities. You can simply select that resource (or more than one resource) and click on the Remove button. Additionally, if you want to start from a clean slate, you can click Remove all and start all your crews from scratch.
Removing the resources with the new Crew Allocation Tool
Updating Schedules
Once you save your changes, the crew tool updates your crews and cascades your existing crew bookings. First your membership changes will be saved, with new resources being added to a crew, and removed resources being taken out for a full day in the target crew’s time zone. Then, the impacted resources’ schedules will be updated with appropriate bookings and cancellations. This phase will happen in the background, so you’re free to go on to your other daily tasks while the booking changes cascade.
Now that all the booking changes are cascaded, your crews’ schedules will be up to date with the latest memberships and bookings.
This also means that if you create a new booking for the crew on the active day, it will populate to your new resource’s schedule like any other crew member.
We’re excited to roll this new Crew Allocation Tool streamlines process tool out to all Field Service users and look forward to hearing about your experience.
Explore more on Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation and share your feedback within the Field Service product or via our ideas portal. Your input drives continuous improvement for enhanced operational performance.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Azure Storage is excited to announce customer managed Planned Failover for Azure Storage is now available in public preview.
Over the past few years Azure Storage has offered customer managed (unplanned) failover as a disaster recovery solution for geo-redundant storage accounts. This has enabled our users to meet their business requirements for disaster recovery testing and compliance. Planned failover now provides the same benefits while introducing additional benefits to our storage users.
Planned Failover provides the ability to swap your geo primary and secondary region while the storage service endpoints are still healthy. As a result, a user can now failover their storage account while keeping geo-redundancy and with no data loss or additional cost. Users will no longer need to reconfigure geo-redundant storage (GRS) after their planned failover operation which will save them both time and cost. Once the planned failover operation is completed all new writes will be made to your original secondary region, which will now be your primary region.
After the planned failover is complete, the original primary region becomes the new secondary and the original secondary region becomes the new primary.
There are multiple scenarios where Planned Failover can be utilized including:
Planned disaster recovery testing drills to validate business continuity and disaster recovery.
Recovering from a partial outage that occurs in the primary region where storage is not impacted. For example, if your storage service endpoints are healthy in both regions, but another Microsoft or 3rd party service is facing an outage in the primary region you can failover your storage services. In this scenario, once you failover the storage account and all other services your workloads can continue to work.
A proactive solution in preparation of large-scale disasters that may impact a region. To prepare for a disaster such as a hurricane, users can leverage Planned Failover to failover to their secondary region then failback once things are resolved.
Key differences between our customer managed (unplanned) failover and planned failover are highlighted below:
Unplanned Failover
Planned Failover
After an unplanned failover is completed the storage account is converted to Locally Redundant Storage(LRS) and the secondary region becomes the new primary region.
After a planned failover is completed the storage account remains Geo Redundant Storage (GRS). The secondary region becomes the new primary region, and the primary region becomes the new secondary region.
Once an unplanned failover is initiated the operation begins immediately. Writes that were pending replication to the secondary region (made after the Last Sync Time) will potentially be lost. Users can utilize their Last Sync Time to determine the recovery point of their storage account.
Once a planned failover is initiated the first step is replicating pending writes (writes made after the Last Sync Time) to the secondary region. As a result, the Last Sync Time is caught up before the and there should be no data loss.
Primary use case: a storage related outage in the primary region.
Primary use case: to test the Failover workflow or a non-storage related outage in the primary region.
An unplanned failover can be used when the primary storage endpoints are unavailable (there is a storage related outage on the primary region).
A planned failover works while the primary and secondary storage endpoints are available.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This week, I’ve been working on a service request case where we need to export multiple databases using SqlPackage. Following, I would like to share my lesson learned to export simultaneous several databases, saving the export files to the F:sql folder and the logs of the operations to the F:sqllog folder.
Few recommendations when performing these exports:
Enable Accelerated Networking: This enhances data transfer performance.
The machine should have sufficient CPU capacity, ideally between 4 to 8 CPUs, depending on the volume of operations.
Use SSD or Premium storage for better performance.
# Define the path to the SqlPackage.exe file
$SqlPackagePath = "C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerXXXDACbinSqlPackage.exe"
# Define the server, user, and password
$serverName = "servername.database.windows.net"
$username = "username"
$password = "password"
$outputFolder = "f:sql"
$logFolder = "f:sqllogs"
$databaseList = @("db1", "db2")
# Create the logs folder if it does not exist
if (-Not (Test-Path -Path $logFolder)) {
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $logFolder
}
foreach ($database in $databaseList) {
$outputFile = Join-Path -Path $outputFolder -ChildPath "$database.bacpac"
$logFile = Join-Path -Path $logFolder -ChildPath "$database.log"
$errorLogFile = Join-Path -Path $logFolder -ChildPath "$database-error.log"
$args = @(
"/Action:Export",
"/ssn:$serverName",
"/sdn:$database",
"/su:$username",
"/sp:$password",
"/tf:$outputFile"
)
# Start the background job with log redirection
Write-Host "Starting export of database $database to $outputFile in background"
Start-Job -ScriptBlock {
param($exePath, $arguments, $log, $errorLog)
& $exePath @arguments *>$log 2>$errorLog
} -ArgumentList $SqlPackagePath, $args, $logFile, $errorLogFile
}
Write-Host "Background export jobs started for all databases."
# Wait for all background jobs to complete
$jobs = Get-Job
foreach ($job in $jobs) {
Wait-Job -Job $job
$jobDetails = Receive-Job -Job $job
Write-Host "Job ID $($job.Id) completed with state: $($job.State)"
Remove-Job -Job $job
}
Write-Host "Export completed for all databases. Logs are located in the $logFolder folder."
Disclaimer
The script provided above is intended for illustrative purposes only. Before using it in a production environment, thoroughly review and test the script to ensure it meets your needs and adheres to your organization’s security and operational policies. Always safeguard sensitive information such as credentials and server details.
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