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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
A banner with the blog series title, “Grow with Copilot for Microsoft 365”
Welcome to Grow with Copilot for Microsoft 365, where we curate key relevant news, insights, and resources to help small and medium organizations harness the power of Copilot.
In this edition, we take a deep dive into how small and medium-sized businesses are embracing AI in their everyday workflows despite the common hurdles SMB employees often encounter in adopting AI technologies. We also highlight Floww, a FinTech firm that capitalizes on Copilot for Microsoft 365 to boost operational efficiency and communications, discuss how Copilot is tackling the pressing issue of data security and privacy, and lastly, provide resources for the adoption of Copilot and best practices for skill development to help organizations fully leverage Copilot’s capabilities.
A deeper look at the state of AI in small & medium businesses
We are witnessing how AI is reshaping work for organizations of all sizes in last month’s 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report. This month, we dove deeper into the report for findings specific to small and medium businesses.
Like large businesses, 79% of SMB leaders believe AI adoption is critical for their company to remain competitive with 61% of these leaders saying their company lacks a vision and plan for AI
From the study, leaders believe that the top three benefits being increasing employee productivity, accelerating growth and innovation, and automating and streamlining business. In addition, while 78% of SMB workers have used generative AI at work, even more so (+10 ppts) compared to large businesses, SMB workers face more challenges in AI adoption, either feeling more (+9 ppts) intimidated to learn how to use generative AI tools or (-5 ppts) having received any AI training at work.
As we continue to learn in our work with SMB customers, there is a path forward: identify a business problem and apply AI, integrate AI tools across your business, take a top down and bottoms up approach, and prioritize training. Read more from Brenna Robinson’s blog on Microsoft 365 as well as her interviews in Fortune magazine,Inc. magazine, and Entrepreneur magazine.
SMB Customer spotlight: Floww
Speaking of working with customers, we’d like to you to meet Floww, a fast-growing FinTech company with about 100 employees in the United Kingdom that has created a financial infrastructure platform that connects investors and innovators. Floww helps startups and scaleups find funding from angels, VCs, and other private equity investors, and helps investors manage their portfolios and collaborate with each other.
Floww uses Copilot for Microsoft 365 to improve efficiency and communications:
Copilot for Microsoft 365 process, analyze, and summarize large amounts of data from various sources, such as financial documents, regulatory compliance, and customer profiles. Copilot also helps Floww create mockups, draft policies, and share information with customers faster and easier.
Floww trusts Microsoft to ensure data security and compliance:
Floww works with sensitive data that requires high levels of security and compliance. Floww relies on Microsoft’s security tools and features to protect its data and maintain its ISO certification. Floww also values the trust that Microsoft provides for its customers and partners.
“Some teams are saving 10 to 20% of their time with Copilot because it’s assisting with meeting notes, generating to-do lists, summarizing complicated documents, and freeing us up so we can concentrate on the bigger tasks.”—Alex Pilsworth, Chief Technology Officer, Floww
How Copilot for Microsoft 365 delivers on data security and privacy
Like Floww, many customers have data privacy and compliance top of mind. It’s no wonder as research shows 82% of ransomware attacks are targeted at small and medium-sized businesses[1].
Our customers, when using Microsoft 365 for Business and Copilot for Microsoft 365, get peace of mind with the highest standards of data protection. Microsoft 365 for Business protects passwords, secure access, keep your business data safe, manage your devices so they stay secure, and defend your business against cyberthreats. You can learn more about our three subscriptions plans here. Additionally, as a Microsoft 365 for Business user, your Web-grounded AI chat in the browser, Outlook, M365 apps or Teams come with enterprise data protection to safeguard your business data and devices with integrated identity, security, compliance, device management, and privacy protection.
Now Copilot for Microsoft 365 also works with work & business data in the Microsoft 365 Graph – your emails, calendars, and documents you have access to. That is how it has the power to become your personal assistant at work, from recapping Teams meetings, to turning a Word document into a stunning PowerPoint. Here’s how Microsoft protects your data and gives you control over it.
A high level architecture diagram of Copilot for Microsoft 365, depicting service boundary, data flows, and prompt/response orchestration
Tenant Security
Copilot operates within the Microsoft 365 tenant, inheriting all the existing security, privacy, identity, and compliance requirements. It is built upon a foundation of trust, ensuring that organizational data is distinct and separate from other tenants. Watch this video to learn more about how Copilot is built upon a foundation of trust.
Data Defense
Data is considered the customer’s business, and Copilot respects the customer’s control over its collection, use, and distribution. It ensures that data is stored, encrypted, processed, and defended to the highest standards. Further, we don’t use your customer data to train foundation models, and Copilot adheres to existing data permissions and policies, and its responses to you based only on data that you personally can access. Watch the following video to learn how data is stored, encrypted, processed, and defended.
More highlights: Build, Mechanics, new Partner resources
Last month, Microsoft Build 2024 had over 3000 in-person attendees in Seattle and over 200K+ virtual attendees. We announced exciting news across the company, but one not-to-be-missed for SMB is Team Copilot. Available as preview later in this calendar year, Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond a personal assistant to work on behalf of a team, improving collaboration and project management. Read Jared Spataro’s blog for how it works as well as other news in Copilot for Microsoft 365. Watch the 90-Second Recap: Satya Nadella’s Keynoteif you want to get all the news announced across Microsoft.
Not to be missed: the top two Copilot videos in Microsoft Mechanics, the Microsoft official video programming to teach you how to apply Microsoft innovation to the work you do every day, explain how Copilot for Microsoft 365 works and how to get ready for Copilot in three simple set up steps.
If you are one of our CSPs, we recently launched new partner led adoption immersion experience – consisting of new click-through demos for Sales, Marketing HR, Exec personas (with more coming soon), facilitator guide to deliver this in a workshop, and participate guide for end users to follow along. Check here for the entirety of the content: aka.ms/CopilotImmersionCSPLed .Go here to quickly access the full list of demos: aka.ms/CopilotImmersion/DemosList.
That’s it for this edition! Thank you for reading. Let us know in the comments how you use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to grow your business!
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