This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we’re excited to announce the upcoming launch of a new US Government cloud environment: Office 365 Government Secret which is currently in government review pending accreditation and targeting availability starting mid-2022.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed “order management” from the backend of logistics operations to the spotlight of supply chain and commerce strategies. Retailers, consumer package goods (CPG) companies, and distributors rushed to adapt their business models to fulfill the explosive growth of online orders through different digital channels. End-customers and organizations buy through various channels such as marketplaces, in-store, mobile apps, and even social media. They expect faster and more convenient ways for pickups and returns, such as pickup in-store, at a partner’s location, and for returns, drop off at the nearest location, QR codes, and even at-home pickup.
As the number of order sources and fulfillment options grow exponentially, organizations need the right order management solution to keep up with the evolving digital commerce landscape. This blog looks at three key aspects to consider when selecting an order management solution and how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management can help you.
1. Open and modern platform
The adoption of online shopping, and the addition of more consumers and businesses online for all types of transactions with the pandemic, have created a demand for convenience and personalization in digital commerce. As the number of online marketplaces grows, retailers, CPG, distributors, and manufacturers with business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-consumer (D2C) business models require to accept orders from an ever-growing external ecosystem. Receiving orders from multiple sources increases order management and supply chain complexity. Therefore, these organizations need an order management solution that helps them accept orders from anywhere to keep pace with the continuing evolution of e-commerce.
Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management has an open and modern platform that seamlessly integrates with organizations’ existing tech stack. Its architecture reduces implementation time through out-of-the-box pre-built connectors to the best-of-breed ecosystem of partners for order source, delivery, tax compliance, price calculation, and logistics services such as Adobe Commerce, J.B. Hunt, Krber, Uber Freight, Avalara, Vertex, Flexe, Big Commerce, Far Eye, Commerce Tools, Flintfox, Ship Station, and Orderful. Moreover, this platform architecture is composable and flexible to allow supply chain professionals to build in an incremental way through a modular and API-first approach and a supply chain control tower, which ultimate goal is supply chain visibility.
2. Real-time visibility and intelligent fulfillment optimization
The 2021 Gartner supply chain risk and resilience survey shows that for 83 percent of large organizations, better supply chain ecosystem visibility is a top priority.1 And another Gartner research shows that 60 percent of chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) are expected to make faster, more accurate, and consistent decisions in real-time.2 The cycle-time of business processes continues to accelerate, particularly in order management processes that serve consumers who expect faster and more convenient shipping to the location of their choice. To succeed in these conditions, companies need a solution that simplifies omnichannel order fulfillment by providing real-time visibility and AI-infused real-time data.
With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, supply chain and commerce professionals can model and automate responses to order constraints by using a journey orchestration designer and assigning rules in a low-code/no-code friendly user interface with drag and drop actions instead of coding. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management uses an intelligent fulfillment optimization service to infuse AI into order fulfillment within your supply chain network. The intelligent optimization engine works to ensure the right products are delivered from the right source in the right quantities so that you always maximize profits, minimize costs, and satisfy service-level requirements.
3. Faster deployment times
Accepting orders from anywhere carries an additional challenge: implementation. Businesses need an order management solution that allows them to get up and running quickly. Not only do they need to be able to accept orders from anywhere, but many organizations also have existing systems that they would like to augment, not replace. If you are in the process of updating your order management system and fall into this category, then understanding what is involved in the implementation process is critically important. Will custom coding be required to integrate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse management system (WMS)? How about your customer relationship management (CRM) or transportation management system (TMS)? For most, the best solution is a cloud-based integrated-service-as-a-software (iSaaS) that uses RESTful APIs and can be easily configured using a low-code/no-code user interface.
Applications that take this approach enable supply chain and commerce professionals to continue to use and benefit from legacy applications, while also providing the agility to easily connect and integrate with modern web-based solutions. This is the approach that we have taken with Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management because it delivers these benefits and accelerates the digital transformation process regardless of where a company is in its digital transformation journey.
It is essential to look for an order management solution that will give you out-of-the-box pre-built connectors to an ecosystem of partners, provide real-time order visibility, intelligent fulfillment optimization, and get up you running quickly with seamless integration with your existing tech stacks, such as ERP and CRM systems. Traditional, on-premises order management systems can lack the flexibility required to keep pace with the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce.
With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, you can leverage our modern cloud technology, integrate with your existing platforms, and quickly implement new capabilities that enable AI, automation, order flow orchestration, and on-demand scalability. Get started today with Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management free trial and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.
GARTNER is the registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
From time to time we have users who open the same question multiple times.
The Issue – direct result of duplicate threads:
(1) Supporters – People that come to help might waste their time on something that was answered in the other thread.
(2) Users – people that search for the same issue might find the thread which has less information and miss the information in the other thread.
(3) original poster (OP) – the person who asked the question will probably not remember to follow all the threads which he opened.
Supporters and Users will waste time on responds which no one will read.
OP might miss the best answer/discussion while following a different thread.
In short, this is a lose-lose case where everyone lose!
Best practice for Moderators
In each interface the features which are built-in are different so these option might not fit all forums interfaces. With that said, as I want to focus mainly on the QnA forums, I will provide my insights according to the QnA features exists at this time.
The list is sorted from the best option for first time case – note that a user which continue such action is a different story. I the OP was inform on the issue and was asked to avoid such cases, then his behavior can be considered as abusive and should be treated accordingly.
In any case, the options which prevent such issue in advance, will be best!
Clear Policy document
In any communication interface, there must be a clear policy document which we can point the OP to. A link to the policy document must be presented in a way that no one will miss it and that everyone can view it from any page where the OP post his question. Usually it is recommended to add a clear link at the top of the page.
An intellisense feature
An intellisense feature provides information while the user type the content. It is well common in code editors in order to provide code completion, parameter info, quick info, and member lists. In the scope of the the discussion an intellisense feature will provide the user a list of previous thread according to the information he is typing.
Note! This feature existing at Microsoft QnA forums.
Insights!
Do not assume that the OP saw the forum policy or noticed the content of the intellisense information! Most people are focusing on their needs and ignore “background noises”. It may not be the most positive behavior but it is definitely a natural behavior.
Contact the OP in private
How?
If the system include an option to send internal private message then this is your best action!
The user email should be visible to other users, but if this information is available to you and there is no internal messaging feature, then send the user an email.
If there is no build-in messaging feature, then check the user profile and signature for links to his social media network (Facebook, Twitter, linkedin and so on) and send him a private message.
What?
Inform the user about the forum policy, add a link to the official policy document if exists and ask him to avoid such cases in the future. Don’t forget to send him links to all the duplicate threads which you found. Ask the user to select one of the threads, in all other thread add a link to the active thread and close the rest of the threads as duplicated.
Note! This feature not available to community moderators at Microsoft QnA forums.
Contact the OP in public
Add a response to the problematic message(s).
In most social media network a user which is not connected to you will not see your message. In this case you can add a response to one of the user last discussions. Remember that this is a public message and you should be extremally polite! Do not use this option if not must.
Provide the same information as in the case of private message
Note!
Taking actions behind the scenes has no value for the future behavior of the user and might lead the user to re-do the same, as he was not inform about an issue – this only raise the issue as it lead for more duplicate threads (actions behind the scene are for example deleting message, reporting message, and so on).
If you chose to take an action behind the scenes then you should also try to inform the OP about the taken actions!
Merge duplicate threads
By merging the duplicate threads you can ensure that no information is lost. Users who go to each of the links to the separate threads come to the same place – the merged thread. With that said, this action makes it a little difficult to orient in a discussion because one discussion combines responses from several discussions and the order of the messages can be confusing.
Note! This feature NOT existing at Microsoft QnA forums. It is exist in the MSDN forums.
Lock the duplicate thread(s) & comments
By locking the duplicate threads you can ensure that no information is lost. Users can still navigate to each of the links and watch the separate discussion. It is HIGHLY important to add a message that explain why this thread was locked and provide a link to the active thread.
In the QnA system locking the thread is done by closing the thread. It is important to know that close the thread does not prevent people from adding comments! You should go over each of the messages in the thread and lock the comment!
Note! This feature existing at Microsoft QnA forums.
Redirect the duplicate thread(s) to the one selected for continuing the discussion.
Redirecting users from a thread to another thread has a very problematic side effect: The original link still exists but it cannot be used to get the original message. This makes it harder to report the issue since the link redirect to an active thread and it make it impossible to inform the user about the issue and show him the duplicated thread.
Do not! (on the first case)
Do not treat the user as abuser! It can be a mistake.
Do not delete a message without informing the user. He might not find the message and create another new message.
Do not report the message without informing the user at the same time, since he cannot see the report and know about the issue.
Do you want to add your insights? You can add comments to this post or contact me in private if you want me to update the post, and in the meantime just remember to have fun and continue helping others.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics introduced 2 exciting new features in mapping data flows recently that we have announced as generally available this week!
Flowlets: Create reusable portions of data flow logic that you can share in other pipelines as inline transformations. Flowlets enable ETL jobs to be composed of custom or common logic components.
Change Feed connectors are available in data flow source transformations for Cosmos DB, Blob store, ADLS Gen1, ADLS Gen2, and CDM. By simply checking the box shown below, you can tell ADF to manage a checkpoint automatically for you and only read the latest rows that were updated or inserted since the last pipeline run.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Although most migrations between on-premises Exchange Server and Microsoft 365 are performed using the Migration Service’s batching functionality, a few stalwart admins have held onto the more granular control given by using the MoveRequest cmdlets directly. But as time goes on even the hardiest and most proven of tools need to be sharpened or have components replaced, and it is now time for the MoveRequest cmdlets to be refreshed a little.
We are taking this opportunity to bring these cmdlets more in line with some of our other cmdlets. Most admins who use these cmdlets will notice little to no difference in how these cmdlets function, which is intentional on our part. But some may have scripts break if they aren’t updated before the cmdlets are updated. We plan to release the updated cmdlets starting April 25th, 2022.
New-MoveRequest will change from returning a MoveRequestStatistics object to returning a MoveRequest object. Most New-* cmdlets are expected to return a data object matching their noun, which New-MoveRequest didn’t historically follow. The MoveRequest object contains less data than the MoveRequestStatistics object, but that is desirable in this case because most of the extra data is only relevant or interesting after the request has made progress.
The MoveRequest data object that is returned from Get-MoveRequest (and now New-MoveRequest) will have a slightly smaller set of properties. Compared to the old data object, it will remove several generic user properties that are not relevant to move requests in particular, which could lead to confusion. Each of those properties should remain available as output from the Get-Recipient, Get-Mailbox, Get-MailUser, etc. cmdlets instead.
The rest of the cmdlet behavior should remain the same.
There may be some other pieces deprecated in the future, such as removing SuspendWhenReadyToComplete behavior in favor of CompleteAfter, but a timeline for that will be determined at a later time.
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