It’s important to test your system to ensure the update will not interfere with your processes and, most importantly, system customizations and extensions. It is crucial to test the transactions that use any of your customizations or extensions early in a sandbox environment, lest they break in production and halt your business processes. So, we’ve put together a checklist of recommended tests to perform after Business Central is updated to the latest version, with those release wave changes.

Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature.

Depending on where you’re located and where your clients or contacts are located, there are data protection laws you must adhere to. You may have heard of GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation) that went into effect in 2018 within the EU. Other data protection laws include CAN-SPAM for email marketing in the US, and CASL in Canada. The details of these regulations are readily available online, so if you haven’t already, be sure to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with the laws you must follow depending on your and your clients’ locations. Consent management in D365 will help you adhere to whichever laws you must follow.

The general best practice is that all contacts must opt-in to receive marketing communications from you, but that they also have the ability to easily opt-out and revoke this consent at any time. So, how is marketing consent established, and how does Dynamics store it?

Sandboxes are for playing around and testing customizations and features. Production environments are where you do your actual work. Now let’s dig in a little deeper into how to work with sandboxes, and how to move your sandbox content into a production environment if/when you want to!

Power BI is an extremely powerful data visualization tool. It can handle a wide variety of reporting needs, but if you’re just starting out designing reports, or if you’ve already gotten a handle of Power BI, you may be wondering how you can use all these cool visuals and tools to create something that someone—your coworker, your manager, whomever—can get real value and insight from.

So let’s discuss some general rules that you can consider when you design in Power BI to remove barriers to use. After all, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure all our hard work goes somewhere useful.

When you’re using a system for things so important as account and order fulfillment, you want to vet that any changes you make to the system—whether it be new features or processes, or even changes to your role centers or pages—will not detract from your system’s functionality.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

Many organizations’ fiscal year-end doesn’t match up with the calendar year-end. In fact, June 30 is a pretty common fiscal year-end. So if you’re in this boat, here’s your closing procedures refresher for Business Central/NAV, plus a handful of useful resources to get you started on your close.

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

Data security is at the core of all of Microsoft’s business applications, and Business Central has several layers of protection for every user account. As a growth-minded solution, it’s equipped to handle the changing needs of your business, including scaling permissions up and dialing them back as often as you need.

There are a few basic components to the makeup of Business Central’s security setup: user access, user permissions, and general data security.

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size.

In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.

Sometimes, Dynamics GP needs to be taken offline to perform certain activities that are easiest with an empty system—such as regular maintenance, system updates, error fixes, and even year-end close. Luckily, version GP 2013 R2 and beyond have a feature that allows you to take the system offline, making these routine updates and fixes easier than ever.

Note that taking a company (or several companies—you can choose) offline only allows the offline administrator and other specified users to log into the company, but you can set a message to alert anyone who tries to access the system during that timeframe so they’re aware of the reason they aren’t able to login.

Multifactor authentication (MFA) is one way – one of the best and easiest – to protect your organization from these threats. Available in Dynamics 365 and Office 365 applications, modern authentication and, by extension, MFA are considered standard and common today. You’ve no doubt encountered MFA before, even if you don’t know it now.

Beginning October 1, 2022, Microsoft will disable basic authentication for Exchange Online, making modern authentication the only possible authentication method for email functionality in Dynamics GP. This means that some companies might experience disruptions to their email and workflow functionalities in GP if basic authentication is still being used, which is often the case for those using older versions of GP. Enabling modern authentication opens the door to using multifactor authentication (MFA), as well, which we highly recommend (but more on that later).

Not sure if this affects you or what actions to take next? Read on, and hopefully we will be able to answer those questions.

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

Welcome to the second instillation of the series “Habits of highly effective marketers,” where we explore some of the fundamental actions that marketers take to do their job and do it stunningly. In our last blog, we went deep into why and how to document your marketing strategies and processes. Next up are two similar components of marketing strategy and content development: cross linking and cross posting. Fostered from a desire to use content to its fullest extent and the wish to provide viewers valuable content at their fingertips, these two strategies can improve social media reach and SEO (when used carefully and judiciously). Let’s dig in.

Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.