User Group Summit is the annual conference for users of the Microsoft Business Applications platform – featuring education on all versions of Dynamics 365, AX, CRM, GP, BC/NAV, Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow. Every year, there are hundreds of cutting edge sessions to choose from. Here are my top 5 Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) picks:

​Ask yourself this. Do you want to:

• Manage your customers?
• Engage with them?, and/or
• Create a superior customer experience?

Most, if not all, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems on the market today can help you merely manage your customers. But only Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (commonly abbreviated CE), can do all 3 of the above and perform these functions well, making the name change important.

​When Digital Transformation (DT) first became a buzz word, companies scrambled to develop their digital goals as well as step-by-step programs that would help them reach those goals. But what exactly is DT? One definition is: The novel use of digital technology to solve traditional problems in new ways and enable new types of innovation and creativity, rather than merely enhancing and supporting traditional methods. 

However, in an earlier narrower sense, DT simply referred to the concept of “digitizing,” which was basically synonymous with "going paperless.” Converting documents and data to a digital form was often the first step in a much longer journey toward a fully digital enterprise. 
 

​Bloggers are wordsmiths. I’m no exception. I might have switched 2 little words in the title of this blog, and it would have made a big difference. I might have written, “Why Should You Choose Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for Cloud ERP?” Instead, I wrote: “Why You Should Choose Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for Cloud ERP.” The former is a question. The latter is a statement.
 
I chose to make a statement because there are so many great reasons why you should indeed choose Microsoft Dynamics Business Central as your Cloud ERP solution.
 
Let’s take a step back to look at the playing field, and you’ll see that the field is crowded with options. So if you’re in the process of choosing a Cloud ERP solution for your company, you may feel compelled to conduct the traditional due diligence and explore several. That requires online research, creating a list, winnowing it down to a short list, scheduling and sitting through demos, getting input from several members of your team, making a choice, entering into negotiations with a provider, pouring over the contract…

Document (Word or Excel) templates in Dynamics 365 allow you to merge CRM data into a pre-formatted document. Details on that process can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/using-word-templates-dynamics-365.
​
Unfortunately, once you create the template, there’s no straightforward way to download the original template again from Dynamics 365. So, if you decide you want to make a change and can’t find the original document, you must go through the exercise of remapping all the Dynamics 365 data fields.
​
With the web API and a couple of online tools, though, you can get back up and running.
​

Microsoft publishes roadmaps for all the Dynamics 365 solutions here.  For purposes of this article we are going to focus on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Roadmap.  Before continuing with this article, click the link and take a look at the road map.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a wide range of business applications.  When most people think of Dynamics 365, they think of the traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions.  They are, of course, a huge part of what Dynamics 365 has to offer, but there is so much more.  Here is a quick rundown of the Dynamics 365 universe.
​

Posted by George Delp
​