This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
To thrive in today’s highly complex global business environment, organizations are increasingly relying upon the technological and strategic prowess of their financial leaders. We’re continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to enable finance leaders to monitor financial operations in real time, predict outcomes, and drive strategic decision-making that hinges on insight.
We are pleased to announce that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in three IDC MarketScape reports—IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US51405823, December 2023); IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Midmarket Finance and Accounting Applications 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US51405023, December 2023); and IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Small Business Finance and Accounting Applications 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48041222, December 2023).
Read the IDC excerpt
Dive deeper into the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications excerpt.
According to the IDC MarketScape for Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications, “Consider Microsoft when you are searching for a well-established provider with the resources to innovate quickly and effectively.”
Source: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US51405823, December 2023). Copyright IDC 2023.*
Boost productivity with Copilot for Dynamics 365
As the pace of business accelerates, the role of finance leaders has shifted. They are called to navigate a range of new challenges and responsibilities: reporting on the past, managing the present, and creating the future.
Today, financial leaders are responsible for much more than finance, as they are increasingly accountable for the strategic direction of the company. The scale and pace of decision-making has increased compared to the previous generation, which was called on to help make quarterly decisions. Now, finance leaders make critical financial decisions weekly—and in some cases, daily.
According to the IDC MarketScape for Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications, “We will see the demand for more analytics, reporting, and data visualization tools. This trend will continue to accelerate and shape buying decisions for financial leaders.”
Our answer to this is to provide simple solutions—focusing on collaboration, productivity, AI, and insights—to help finance leaders make data-driven decisions and drive business agility and growth. According to the IDC MarketScape for Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications, “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot brings together Azure OpenAI and ChatGPT. Copilot is embedded in Dynamics 365, working alongside business professionals to help them create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions. This enables users of all technical abilities to use AI to boost their productivity and focus on more important tasks.” A great example of this is HB Antwerp, a Belgian company redefining how natural diamonds are sourced, crafted, and sold.
In 2024, the company plans to up the value of diamonds tracked to USD 1 billion. In terms of continuing to use AI like Copilot, it said that 60% of emails are written with AI, suggesting the importance of AI to the future of the company. This enables users of all technical abilities to use AI to boost their productivity and focus on more important tasks.
“There’s an unprecedented level of maturity, collaboration, and relationship to new products like Copilot, which are crucial to growth.”
Optimize your operational workflow within Microsoft Power Automate
The IDC MarketScape for Enterprise Finance and Accounting Applications also noted, that, “These process mining capabilities simplify how work gets done by discovering workflow bottlenecks and further automation opportunities.” This is something that Microsoft customer, HB Antwerp, experienced firsthand. This Belgian diamond company set out to challenge the age-old opacity of the industry.
HB Antwerp turned to Microsoft and its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Microsoft Power Apps, using ledger technologies to record immutable data points across the diamond’s journey, ensuring sustainability and visibility every step of the way. Now HB Antwerp can predict its profit more accurately, reduce errors, increase communication, and ensure maximum value for everyone involved. Miners and governments reap the financial benefits and consumers can see how their diamond purchases contribute to transforming Botswana’s economy and the lives of its citizens.
HB Antwerp has embraced the move from being just a diamond company to a data company.
“It’s about how do you mine data and create scalability on it that attracts different humans, companies, and institutions who want to be a part of the story, and that’s how we aim to grow.”
From mining stones to mining data, Dynamics 365 embeds automation into the flow of work throughout, enabling business process optimization for business decision makers.
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including Dynamics 365 Finance Premium.
Notes:
* The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a three to five-year time frame. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce the launch of multiple benchmarks access in the Viva Glint platform, one of our many exciting product enhancements slated for this year. Customers can now select and enable additional external comparisons in the platform for managers to toggle between when reviewing their results. Access to multiple benchmarks has been among the most-requested enhancements by our customers, and we’re thrilled to start 2024 by introducing this feature.
One of the most exciting benefits of this feature is the flexibility that this will provide to managers and administrators when reviewing results. Organizations previously had to select just one external benchmark to display in the platform, but they can now choose from our full suite of benchmark comparisons to tailor the reporting experience for their company.
For example, a multinational company using Glint’s global benchmark may decide to add access to the Japan benchmark so that their office in Tokyo can compare their results to a local comparison rather than global. Or, a company may choose to add access to one of Glint’s high-performing benchmarks so their executive leadership team can compare their results to a more aggressive benchmark.
In the past, additional comparisons could only be generated manually and offline; with this new functionality, administrators have the power to provide multiple benchmark comparisons to all managers with just a couple of clicks. Being able to access these comparisons directly in the platform helps managers take the next step in really understanding and owning their results.
The process of deciding which benchmark(s) to enable will not be that different than when companies could only choose one; we still recommend considering things like where the organization competes for talent, where large employee populations exist, or how aggressive you want the comparison to be. Administrators will still choose one primary, or default, benchmark that all managers will see when they log in, but now managers will be able to toggle to other external comparisons that have been enabled so they can see how their results stack up to these alternative benchmarks.
And though this new feature adds significant analytics power for managers, we all know that with great power comes great responsibility. It may be tempting to add dozens of benchmarks to give managers a wide variety of benchmarks to choose from, but it may be overwhelming and confusing for less-experienced managers who need a more curated experience. In general, we recommend choosing no more than the three most relevant external benchmarks to provide a good balance of flexibility with reasonable guardrails.
Also, think about the timing of when you choose to add additional benchmarks; you might consider launching multiple benchmarks availability with the rollout of your next survey cycle as you’re training (or refreshing) your managers on how to use the platform and interpret their results.
So how do you get started? This feature is available to our Viva Glint users starting on February 10, 2024 (and this is already available to our LinkedIn Glint customers). Your Viva Glint administrator will choose any new benchmarks to add, and they will then be immediately available to all managers. To enable this in your own platform, please click here for further instructions. For additional questions, please comment below or reach out to your Glint support team member.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are pleased to announce the security review for Microsoft Edge, version 121!
We have reviewed the new settings in Microsoft Edge version 121 and determined that there are no additional security settings that require enforcement. The Microsoft Edge version 117 security baseline continues to be our recommended configuration which can be downloaded from theMicrosoft Security Compliance Toolkit.
Microsoft Edge version 121 introduced 11 new computer settings and 11 new user settings. We have included a spreadsheet listing the new settings in the release to make it easier for you to find them.
As a friendly reminder, all available settings for Microsoft Edge are documentedhere, and all available settings for Microsoft Edge Update are documentedhere.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In a rapidly changing business landscape, organizations face numerous challenges in meeting their customers’ expectations and staying relevant. With the COVID-19 pandemic driving a sudden shift to remote work and the introduction of new technologies, many struggled to keep up with the pace of change and financial pressures.
In this blog post, we’ll showcase some of our recent success stories with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales customers in the financial services and manufacturing industries. From improving client relationships to streamlining operations and reducing overhead costs, each of these organizations uses Dynamics 365 Sales to overcome unique challenges and achieve outstanding business outcomes. So, whether you’re in financial services or manufacturing, join us as we explore real-world examples of how Dynamics 365 Sales can help you succeed in today’s market.
Succeed with Dynamics 365 Sales
Streamline operations and achieve outstanding outcomes.
Revolutionizing the finance industry: How Dynamics 365 Sales is helping financial institutions build stronger client relationships
Customers and investors of banks and insurance companies expect a personalized experience that incorporates their unique needs. Long-term clients expect these institutions to know them, and proactively approach them with services that are relevant to them. However, large financial institutions tend to spread across the globe, and different divisions must offer different services and products based not only on local markets, but also on changing regulations.
To tackle these challenges, Investec, a global financial services company, uses conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales to transcribe sales calls accurately and analyze the content. This helped build stronger client relationships, identify appropriate next steps, and ultimately save time and reduce overhead costs.
Franklin Templeton is one of the largest asset management companies in the world and prides itself on effective stewardship of its clients’ capital. After recent acquisitions, it aimed to restructure its many inherited customer relationship management (CRM) systems under one do-it-all sales platform to gather customer data efficiently. Through proof-of-concept trials, the Franklin Templeton technology team found Dynamics 365 Sales to be the best CRM solution for its pre-built integrations and user-friendly interfaces, improving its relationships with customers and streamlining its operations.
Empowering the manufacturing industry with Dynamics 365 Sales
In the manufacturing industry, companies are required to coordinate their work with multiple internal departments, partners, and customers. At the same time, buyers are looking for consistent experiences. Traditional dealer networks have been key in this industry, but now, end customers are looking for direct contact with the manufacturer. Let’s have a look at some of the successful Dynamics 365 Sales customers in this industry.
Lexmark, a global provider of printing and imaging technology, needed a sustainable path to digital transformation by overhauling its sales and reporting processes. Lack of integration between different platforms within the company and its complex product and service ecosystem made it difficult to build configurations using its old configure, price, quote (CPQ) system. Using Dynamics 365 and Experlogix CPQ, the company integrated its CRM and CPQ system, resulting in a 43% drop in quote revisions and significant reduction in time-to-quote.
Andreas Stihl AG & Co. KG, a German-based company, develops, manufactures, and distributes power tools for professional and private users in the forestry and agriculture, landscape maintenance, and construction sectors. STIHL’s customers want consistent experiences across all touchpoints—online, print, or on-site at the dealer. However, STIHL didn’t have a unified CRM system. To overcome these challenges, STIHL adopted a central solution that would bring transparency to its business processes, combining dealer and customer data. STIHL rolled out its OneCRM, basing it on Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service. This solution provides a 360-degree view of customers and specialist dealers. By implementing this solution, STIHL significantly sped up its customer support response, and improved transparency within and between its sales subsidiaries worldwide.
As a premier supplier of transportation solutions, Siemens Mobility has been for 160 years handling complex solutions that require working with many departments, customers, and partners. In spring of 2020, the company had an urgent need for a CRM solution that could keep pace with its highly collaborative selling process and intricate customer journey. In just five months, Siemens transitioned fully to the new CRM solution. Since then, Siemens Mobility has been using Dynamics 365 to personalize and streamline marketing communication and to accelerate their tender-based sales processes. Dynamics 365 is used all the way from lead acquisition to deal closure including lead generation, lead qualification, and account and opportunity management. With all these processes in the same system, Siemens can easily follow process performance across all touchpoints and continue tuning the ways of working to keep equipping the world with seamless, sustainable, and reliable transport solutions.
Dynamics 365 provides visibility on all touchpoints within a sale or service at Siemens Mobility.
Looking ahead with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales
You’ve seen how Dynamics 365 Sales has helped five customers from the financial services and manufacturing industries achieve their sales goals. Each faced unique challenges, but they all shared a common vision: to deliver more value to their customers. They’re not done yet—some of them are already exploring Microsoft Copilot for Sales capabilities to gain further insights and guidance.
“At Investec, we are very excited to see how we can leverage Copilot and AI within the Microsoft stack to connect our internal teams and to enhance our understanding further of prospective and current clients to ensure we are providing a best-in-class experience.”
—Dan Speirits, CRM Product Manager at Investec
Join our customers on their continued journey, ensuring their success and their customers’ success with the use of Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Sales.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Over the past year, generative AI has seen tremendous growth in popularity and is increasingly being adopted by people and organizations. At Microsoft, we are deeply focused on minimizing the risks of harmful use of these technologies and are committed to keeping these tools even more reliable and safer.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
There are scenarios wherein customer want to monitor their transaction log space usage. Currently there are options available to monitor Azure SQL Managed Instance metrics like CPU, RAM, IOPS etc. using Azure Monitor, but there is no inbuilt alert to monitor the transaction log space usage.
This blog will guide to setup Azure Runbook and schedule the execution of DMVs to monitor their transaction log space usage and take appropriate actions.
Overview
Microsoft Azure SQL Managed Instance enables a subset of dynamic management views (DMVs) to diagnose performance problems, which might be caused by blocked or long-running queries, resource bottlenecks, poor query plans, and so on.
Using DMV’s we can also find the log growth – Find the usage in percentage and compare it to a threshold value and create an alert.
In Azure SQL Managed Instance, querying a dynamic management view requires VIEW SERVER STATE permissions.
GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO database_user;
Monitor log space use by using sys.dm_db_log_space_usage. This DMV returns information about the amount of log space currently used and indicates when the transaction log needs truncation.
For information about the current log file size, its maximum size, and the auto grow option for the file, you can also use the size, max_size, and growth columns for that log file in sys.database_files.
Solution
Below PowerShell script can be used inside an Azure Runbook and alerts can be created to notify the user about the log space used to take necessary actions.
# Ensures you do not inherit an AzContext in your runbook
Disable-AzContextAutosave -Scope Process
$Threshold = 70 # Change this to your desired threshold percentage
try
{
"Logging in to Azure..."
Connect-AzAccount -Identity
}
catch {
Write-Error -Message $_.Exception
throw $_.Exception
}
$ServerName = "tcp:xxx.xx.xxx.database.windows.net,3342"
$databaseName = "AdventureWorks2017"
$Cred = Get-AutomationPSCredential -Name "xxxx"
$Query="USE [AdventureWorks2017];"
$Query= $Query+ " "
$Query= $Query+ "SELECT ROUND(used_log_space_in_percent,0) as used_log_space_in_percent FROM sys.dm_db_log_space_usage;"
$Output = Invoke-SqlCmd -ServerInstance $ServerName -Database $databaseName -Username $Cred.UserName -Password $Cred.GetNetworkCredential().Password -Query $Query
#$LogspaceUsedPercentage = $Output.used_log_space_in_percent
#$LogspaceUsedPercentage
if($Output. used_log_space_in_percent -ge $Threshold)
{
# Raise an alert
$alertMessage = "Log space usage on database $databaseName is above the threshold. Current usage: $Output.used_log_space_in_percent%."
Write-Output "Alert: $alertMessage"
# You can send an alert using Send-Alert cmdlet or any other desired method
# Send-Alert -Message $alertMessage -Severity "High" Via EMAIL - Can call logicApp to send email, run DBCC CMDs etc.
} else {
Write-Output "Log space usage is within acceptable limits."
}
There are different alert options which you can use to send alert in case log space exceeds its limit as below.
If you have feedback or suggestions for improving this data migration asset, please contact the Data SQL Ninja Engineering Team (datasqlninja@microsoft.com). Thanks for your support!
Note: For additional information about migrating various source databases to Azure, see the Azure Database Migration Guide
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As Microsoft continues to invest in AI technologies across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, many enterprise organizations are rapidly adopting Copilot in Microsoft apps such as Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Unlike solutions in other business areas, customer service solutions are particularly sensitive for a couple of reasons.
First, the customer service team acts as the organization’s frontline, dealing directly with customer inquiries and issues. Moreover, most interactions between support agents and customers occur in real-time, leaving zero tolerance for error. Any customer frustration can easily impact the customer satisfaction rate.
Additionally, introducing a new tool like Copilot in Customer Service to customer service agents must be well-tested and validated. In the era of AI and generative AI, organizations face the critical question of how to build their testing strategy for these innovative tools.
Copilot business value
Before delving into Copilot test cases, let’s quickly discuss the business value of Copilot in Customer Service. Copilot and AI features in the customer service world act as an agent assistant. Copilot helps agents with tasks such as retrieving information from the knowledge base, drafting emails, or providing quick summaries of customer conversations or cases with long threads, multiple notes, and emails.
Leveraging Copilot in Customer Service brings quick wins to the business. For instance, reduced handle times for customer requests allow agents to focus on core tasks. And since agents can provide more accurate and timely responses, organizations see improved customer satisfaction levels.
A closer look at each Copilot feature reveals the need for agent review before presenting any information to the customer. Take, for example, the case summary feature. A disclaimer indicates that this is an AI-generated summary, emphasizing the need to “Make sure it’s appropriate and accurate before using it.” This highlights the critical role of human oversight in ensuring the accuracy and appropriateness of AI-generated content. It reinforces the value of Copilot as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for human judgment and expertise.
Defining success metrics
Having covered the basics, it’s crucial to establish a success matrix for implementing Copilot in Customer Service. Most enterprise customers follow a standard process for introducing new tools or features. While this approach is recommended and applicable to almost all new Dynamics 365 features, the success criteria for Copilot should address several specific factors, due to its unique functionalities and impact:
Time efficiency: Measure the amount of time Copilot saves agents in performing their tasks. This can be quantified by comparing the time taken to complete tasks with and without the assistance of Copilot.
Relevance and helpfulness of responses: Evaluating Copilot’s responses isn’t as straightforward as saying they’re right or wrong. Measure their effectiveness with a percentage that shows how relevant and helpful these responses really are. When it comes to measuring Copilot’s impact, we look at it like this:
Totally irrelevant: Assistance that does not address the agent’s inquiry at all, providing no useful information for handling customer queries.
Partially helpful: Responses that offer some relevant information but may not fully equip the agent to resolve the customer’s issue, possibly requiring further clarification or additional resources.
Mostly helpful: Assistance that is largely on point, providing substantial information and guidance towards resolving the inquiry, with minimal need for further action.
Completely helpful: Responses that fully equip the agent with the necessary information and resources to address and resolve the customer’s issue without any need for additional support or clarification.
Agent satisfaction and ease of use: Assess how user-friendly and intuitive Copilot is for customer service agents. Agent satisfaction with the tool can be a key indicator of its usability and effectiveness in a real-world setting.
Impact on customer satisfaction: Monitor changes in customer satisfaction metrics. You can do this through surveys or analyzing customer feedback. See if there is a noticeable improvement due to the implementation of Copilot.
Return on investment: Consider the overall costs versus the benefits of implementing Copilot. This evaluation is crucial, as it is important to test and evaluate any feature intended for user adoption. Remember, Copilot is not a new product but a feature within Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It incurs no extra cost for most customers.
Start your Copilot journey with confidence
The best way to test and measure Copilot’s success is through real scenarios, real agents, and real customers in a production environment. This is why we recommend starting quickly with a pilot or initial phase and gradually rolling out Copilot capabilities. You can closely monitor the results and feedback during the initial phase.
We use the name ‘Copilot’ and not ‘Autopilot’ for a good reason. Essentially, Copilot in Customer Service acts as an assistant to the agents. While it proves useful in some situations, there are instances when questions or requests become too complex, requiring human expertise. However, even in these scenarios, business operations continue seamlessly, thanks to the human agents.
In Customer Service, think of each Copilot feature as being in one of two categories: those that do not rely on the knowledge base and those that do.
The easiest way to begin is with the first category, which includes summarization features. This category has minimal risk and requires less change management effort. This article provides in-depth information on this.
Test and optimize Copilot
A pilot phase is vital for testing Copilot, where you will document the results and collect feedback from your agents. The best candidates for the pilot phase are the highly skilled agents. They have the expertise to deal with customer questions efficiently, allowing them to give thorough feedback without affecting the normal call center functions. Moreover, they help ensure the proper use of Copilot, avoiding any incorrect or unverified information being passed from Copilot to customers.
During the pilot phase, you need to keep track of your success metrics and aim for ongoing improvement. This mainly involves improving the knowledge base articles. Copilot in Customer Service is not a magic tool; its performance depends on the quality of the information it can access. Providing Copilot with clear and complete knowledge articles will help it to produce clear and correct results.
Microsoft is heavily investing in integrating AI capabilities into Dynamics 365. Organizations with live implementations of Dynamics 365 Customer Service should view this as an opportunity to enhance their customer service operations. While testing remains essential, they should not hesitate to deploy these native capabilities in production mode, especially since Copilot in Customer Service comes without any extra licensing costs.
Generative AI is evolving rapidly, and organizations that start to adopt and utilize it early will secure a competitive advantage in the future!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The pace of business operations continues to accelerate daily, presenting an ongoing challenge for employees who increasingly struggle to keep up. They often find themselves overwhelmed by the very tools designed to enhance their work, leading to frequent switching between various documents, apps, and websites as they hunt for data.
Harvard Business Review addresses this issue in its article How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?, where it describes the prevalent “swivel chair” approach to work, which has become the norm for most employees. This is primarily because many software applications weren’t originally designed to connect with each other. Consequently, employees often serve as the connective tissue bridging the gap between these disparate applications. They engage in manual processes of fetching, transforming, and submitting data from one system to another, constantly shifting between apps. This practice is both time-consuming and mentally draining.
The true cost of this constant app-switching becomes apparent when we consider that the average user toggles between different apps nearly 1,200 times each day, spending approximately four hours per week reorienting themselves after switching to a new application. Annually, this adds up to a staggering five working weeks, accounting for a significant 9% of their total work time.1
What’s the solution to this productivity-sapping dilemma? The answer lies in connecting business systems and productivity tools, providing employees with easy access to the information they need without switching between applications. Seamless sharing of data across tools and applications not only simplifies access for employees but also lays the foundation for AI and Microsoft Copilot to offer proactive insights and assistance within their everyday tools.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365, businesses can establish a unified experience where data seamlessly connects with productivity apps including Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. This connectivity ensures that employees can access timely information, gain valuable insights, and collaborate directly within the tools they use daily—all without the need to switch between applications.
By harnessing connected solutions powered by real-time data, businesses can begin to unlock the full potential of AI-enabled productivity with Microsoft Copilot. With Copilot, businesses can automate tasks and guide users through assisted workflows—saving them time, improving collaboration, enhancing decision-making, and allowing employees to focus on what truly matters—driving business success.
More collaboration with Business Central and Teams
Modern workplaces are challenged by fragmented data and communication tools—employees often find themselves juggling various apps and struggling to disseminate timely information, making collaboration difficult. With Teams connected to Business Central, your organization can efficiently share and interact with real-time data, transforming Teams into a centralized hub for your daily operations.
With Business Central and Teams, employees can:
Make data accessible and collaborative. With Teams connected to Business Central, timely data can be shared in group chats or channels, transforming Teams into the hub for all and daily operations that unite employees, processes, and the data they need to work together.
Take action from the app they prefer. From Business Central, quickly share data to jumpstart conversations in Teams. From Teams, stay in the flow of work by viewing and editing business data without having to switch apps.
Streamline collaboration across departments. Empower each department to self-serve by unlocking the data they need to work better together—even without a Business Central license. Get read-only access to Business Central data in Teams at no additional cost with your Microsoft 365 license.
More productivity with Business Central and Excel
Employees often find themselves working in specific applications that align with their roles and responsibilities. For finance and operations teams, Excel is a fundamental tool that plays a pivotal role in their daily tasks. Enabling these teams to maximize their productivity within their preferred application can lead to significant productivity gains.
With Business Central and Excel, employees can:
Simplify daily tasks. Export any Business Central data to an Excel worksheet to capture data snapshots or share for review. Save time by updating records in bulk in Excel and uploading the revised records to Business Central with just a few clicks.
Go from raw data to insights faster. Get timely operational insights from Business Central as Excel reports and adapt quickly by customizing report layouts as Excel worksheets. Easily analyze transactions and business data using pivot tables, charts, and calculations to get answers quickly.
Collaborate in the tools where teams work best. Streamline team-based activities like budgeting and planning with multi-player co-authorship and functionality. Create, edit, and access Excel documents as a team, then publish the final outcomes back to Business Central.
More impact with Business Central and Outlook
At the core of most businesses lies the unwavering commitment to deliver exceptional products and services to its customers. To achieve this goal, businesses must foster strong and meaningful relationships with their clients, vendors, and stakeholders. With Business Central and Outlook working together, employees gain valuable business insights delivered directly to their inbox, so they can save time while staying focused on delivering extraordinary experiences.
With Business Central and Outlook, employees can:
Enhance customer experience directly from their inbox. Connect real-time data from Business Central to Outlook. Save time with visibility into customer and vendor information like sales, purchase details, and more without leaving their inbox.
Stay in the flow of work. Use templates to quickly send payment reminders, order confirmations, and other emails directly from Business Central connected to a shared mailbox.
Go from quote to cash without leaving Outlook. Set up customers or vendors, create quotes, submit invoices, and more from within Outlook so employees can focus on the task at hand.
Embrace the future of work with AI and Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365
When Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365 work together, small and medium-sized businesses can boost productivity and redefine how work gets done. With data delivered directly to familiar apps like Excel, Outlook, and Teams, employees get the information they need without switching between applications. Using next-generation AI with Microsoft Copilot, employees can further streamline routine tasks like drafting content, summarizing meetings, providing email follow up, and quickly finding answers to questions—all within the tools where they work best.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Ready to take your productivity to the next level with Copilot for Microsoft 365? FastTrack for Microsoft 365 is here to help you get started! FastTrack is a service designed to help organizations seamlessly deploy Microsoft 365 solutions to better allow users to work effectively and productively. FastTrack assistance is available for customer tenants with 150 or more licenses from one of the eligible plans from the following Microsoft product families: Microsoft 365, Office 365, Microsoft Viva, Enterprise Mobility & Security, and Windows 10/11. These plans can be for an individual product (like Exchange Online) or a suite of products (Office 365 E3).
FastTrack is a benefit that supports the readiness of customers to prepare for Copilot enablement. With FastTrack, you can confirm that you meet the minimum required prerequisites to enable Copilot across your users and find opportunities for optimizing the Copilot experience. This would include the deployment of Intune, Microsoft 365 Apps, Purview Information Protection, and Teams Meetings. As part of this process, FastTrack can also recommend best practices for driving healthy usage across your organization.
Tenant admins can click here to leverage the FastTrack self-service deployment guide for Copilot for Microsoft 365 to start implementing the pre-requisites, allowing your organization to transform collaboration and take advantage of AI to automate tasks such as writing, editing, and data visualization across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot also simplifies the creation of meeting summaries, making it easier to catch up and collaborate asynchronously. Our setup guide facilitates smooth integration, allowing your organization to automate work processes and enhance collaboration seamlessly.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Context
Azure OpenAI Service’s Provisioned Throughput Units (known as “PTUs”)have been all the rage over the past few months. Every enterprise customer has been wanting to get their hands on their own slice of Azure Open AI Service. With PTUs, they can run their GenAI workloads in production at scalewith predictable latency and without having to worry about noisy neighbors. Customers of all sizes and from all verticals have been developing groundbreaking applications, usually starting with the Pay-as-you-go (PayGo) flavor of Azure Open AI.When the time comes to deploy an enterprise–grade application to production however, most rely on reserving capacity with PTUs. These are deployed within your own Azure Subscription and allow you to enjoy unencumbered access to the latest models from Open AI such as GPT-4 Turbo. Because PTUs are available 24/7 throughout the month for use, customers need to shift the paradigm of utilizing tokens into utilizing time when considering cost. With this shift often comes the challenge of knowing how to right-size their PTUs.
To aid in that exercise, Microsoft provides tools such as the PTU calculator within the AI Studio experience. These tools, however, make assumptions such as PTUs being able to handle peak load. While this could be avalid approach in many cases, it’s only one way of thinking about choosing the right size for a deployment. Customers often need to consider more variables, including sophisticated architectures to get the best return on their investment.
One pattern that we have seen emerge is the spillover, or bursting, pattern. With this pattern, you do not provision PTUs for peak traffic. Instead, you define the amount of PTU serviced traffic that the business can agree upon, and you route the overflow to a PayGo deployment. For example, your business may decide that it’s acceptable to have 90% of the traffic serviced by the PTU deployment with a known latency and to have 10% of overflow traffic serviced with unpredictable performancethrough a PayGodeployment. I’ll go into detail below on when to invoke this pattern more precisely, but if you are looking for a technical solution to implement this, you may check out this post: Enable GPT failover with Azure OpenAI and Azure API Management – Microsoft Community Hub .The twist is that depending on the profile of your application, this 10%degraded performance can save you north of 50% in unused PTU cost.
If as you’re reading this, you have found yourself in this predicament, you have come to the right place. In this blog post, we try to convey the message that PTUs done right are not necessarily expensive by characterizing customer’s scenarios anecdotally. The three application scenarios we will review are known as:The Unicorn, The No-Brainer, and The Problem Child.
The Unicorn
We will go quickly over the unicorn since nobody has ever seen it and it might not even exist. But just in case, the Unicorn application sends/receives token on a perfectly steady basis, weekdays, weekends, daytime, nighttime. If you ever have one of those, PTU makes perfect sense, you get maximum value and leave no crumb on the table. And if your throughput is meaningful in addition to being constant, you will likely also save lots of money compared to a PayGo deployment, in addition from reaping the predictable and low latency that comes with PTUs.
The No–Brainer
Next up is our No-Brainer application. The No-Brainer application profile has mild peaks and valleys. The application sends a constant baseline of tokens to the model, but perhaps there are a couple of peak hours during the day where the application sends a little more. In this case, you sure could provision your PTU deployment to cover the valley traffic and send anything extra to a PayGo deployment. However, in the No-Brainer application, the distance between our peak and valley is minimal, and, in this case, the juice might now be worth the squeeze. Do we want to add complexity to our application? Do we want to invest the engineering time and effort to add routing logic? Do we want to introduce possibly-degraded service to our application andperhaps not even be able to provision a lesser amount of PTUs increments? Again, it all comes down the distance between your peaks and valleys. If those are close, purchase enough PTU to cover for peak. No brainer.
The Problem Child
The Problem Child is that application where the traffic is bursty in nature and the variance in throughput is high. Perhaps the end of the quarter is near, and the company is behind on revenue, so every seller is hitting their sales copilot hard for a couple daysin an attempt to bridge the gap to quota. How do we best cover the Problem Child with PTUs?
Option 1: Provision for peak
As we discussed above, our first inclination could be to provision for peak and that is also what most calculators will assume that you want to do so that you can cover all demand conservatively.In this instance, you maximize user experience because 100% of your traffic is covered by your PTU deployment and there is no such thing as degraded service. Everyone gets the same latency for the same request every time. However, this is the costly way to manage this application. If you cannot use your PTU deployment outside peak time, you are leaving PTU value on the table. Some customers are lucky enough to have both real-time and batch use cases. In this case, the real-time use cases utilize the PTU deployment during business hours; during downtime, the customer is then free to utilize the deployment for the batch inferencing use cases and still reap the PTU value. Other customers operate on several time zones and when one team goes offline for the day, somewhere 8 hours behind, another team comes online, and the application maintains a steady stream of tokens to the PTU deployment. But for a lot of customers, there isn’t a way to use the PTU deployment outside of peak time and provisioning for peak might not always be the soundest business decision. It depends on budgets, UX constraints and importantly, how narrow, talland frequent the peak is.
Option 2: Provision for baseline
In option 2, the business is amenable to a trade-off. With this tradeoff, we bring our Azure Open AI cost significantly down at the expense of “some” user experience. And the hard part is to determine how much of the user experience we are willing to sacrifice and at what monetary gain. The idea here is to evaluate the application on a PayGo deployment and see how it performs. We can consider this to be our degraded user experience. If it so happens that our peaks are tall, narrow and rare, and if we are willing to say that it’s acceptable for a small slice of our traffic to experience degraded performance during peak time, then it is highly conceivable that sacrificing 5% of your requests by sending them to a Paygo deployment could yield, 30%, 40% maybe 50% savings compared to the option 1 and provisioning for peak.
The recognized savings will be a function of the area in green below.
Conclusion
PTUs can be perceived as expensive. But this could be that provisioning for peak is assumed. And this could be the best way to go if your business is such that you want to always ensure minimum latency and the best possible user experience. However, if you are willing to combine PTU with a little bit of PayGo (if your application profile lends itself to it), you could realize significant savings and reinvest the leftovers in your next GenAI project on Microsoft Azure… and also buy me a latte.
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