Cloud technology is truly changing the face of modern business. Powerful tools once available only to larger businesses with hefty budgets are no longer a requirement for business competition. Businesses of all sizes now have options, and some of the options that work with the cloud are truly game-changers.

Let’s look at the field of PSA (Professional Services Automation). In the past, small and mid-sized businesses have had to rely on disparate software systems to manage their business processes, e.g., collaboration, project management, resource planning, customer management, etc. Having different systems to manage different aspects of a business meant, at best, lots of admin work, duplicate manual entry, and spreadsheets galore, and at worst, error and inefficiency. All this extra work can be done away with if systems integrate and communicate with one another, and especially if they do it through a reliable and secure Cloud.

Legacy software systems that provide PSA solutions may offer strong functionality, but they can be expensive and demand the outlay of capital up-front. Also, they were developed in the pre-Cloud era using older code. Bringing them up to date through configuration or customization will be costly, as will the need to make them mobile-friendly for remote access. Maintenance and support will also affect the budget. More and more, these legacy systems are being passed over in favor of more modern Cloud-enabled systems.

Modern “true cloud” solutions are those that are designed right from the start to operate through the Cloud. Many legacy system providers may offer their systems adapted for the cloud, hosted in a dedicated cloud, and billed monthly as software-as-a-service. But ”true cloud” solutions leverage modern cloud architecture to be faster and easier to deploy, configure, and integrate.

If you are evaluating PSA for your business, you’ll want to ask some pertinent questions about the software system you’re looking at:

Is it scalable?

Many software solutions are unable to scale to accommodate added functionality, increased user count, or fluctuating levels of data. This could be troublesome for a business that is hoping to expand.

Is it Cloud-native?

Some of the legacy software solutions have “cloud” versions, but they weren’t originally designed for the cloud. Usually, they come as an extra-expense add-on feature hosted in a dedicated, private cloud.

Does it have end-to-end capability?

Many PSA tools claim to offer all the business functionality you need in a single platform, but usually, you will have to customize to allow your current systems to integrate with one another.

How well will it integrate?

With modern software, integration is significantly simpler than with legacy software, but you need to ask questions and find out how your systems will integrate.

What about visibility and Insight?

The whole point of PSA is to help you run your business more efficiently and set yourself up for growth. The benefit of an actual end-to-end system is twofold – you get more efficient processes plus the accumulation of data needed for insightful decision-making.

Progressus, by Velosio, is next-generation Professional Services Automation (PSA) and ERP software, mobile-enabled and architected for the Microsoft Cloud.

With almost 80% of a professional services firms' cost structure predicated on people, Progressus PSA was developed to address the best utilization of personnel. Because it is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it will also optimize core financials and integrate sales and marketing functions—all critical elements that provide insight and visibility across the entire professional services lifecycle.

Cloud professional services automation for small and mid-sized businesses.

Progressus Professional Services Automation software provides the capabilities needed to manage all processes, including resource management, project management, sales and marketing, and financial management, of professional services and project-based businesses, delivering a complete cloud PSA solution. Firms of any size, operating in any geography, are empowered with role-based clients optimized for any browser or mobile device.

Progressus enables small and mid-sized Professional Service firms to compete in today's market. You can learn more about the advantages of Progressus by talking to our experts at Velosio. Contact us today and ask for a product demonstration.

By Velosio, www.velosio.com

Welcome to the US Partner Community Hot Sheet, a comprehensive schedule of partner training, webcasts, community calls, and office hours. This post is updated frequently as we learn about new offerings, so you can plan ahead. Looking for product-specific training? Try the links across the top of this blog.

• Connect and engage with us in the US Partner Community
• Guide to partner training and enablement
• Take Microsoft Azure self-paced training at no cost, from fundamentals to advanced

Community call schedule

Community calls for the US Partner Community are led by experts from across the US Partner Team, and provide practice-building and business-building guidance.

Week of October 22–26

Week of October 29–November 2

Week of November 5–9

Week of November 12–16

Week of November 19–23

Week of November 26-30

Week of December 3-7

Week of December 10-14

Week of December 17-21

Microsoft 2019 events

Microsoft Inspire 2019: July 14–18 in Las Vegas, Nevada

• Register

Microsoft Ignite 2019: November 4-8 in Orlando, FL

• Register

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 was released on the 2^nd October. In this series of posts, I’ll be going hands on and installing the majority of the components; some of them, such as Analysis Cubes for Excel, which are little used, I won’t be covering.

The series index will automatically update as posts go-live in this series.

With the web client itself verified, the final step in installing the web client is to ensure that the Web Management Console is working. To do this open your browser and navigate to the FQDN of your server followed by /WebManagementConsole:

Click on Session Manager and you’ll be shown the available session servers and any logged in clients.

Click to show/hide the Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 Series Index

Read original post Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2: Verify Web Management Console Functions at azurecurve|Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant

Resource planning for pest controllers

Pest controlling has more and more become a highly complex service business, no longer being a mere matter of setting traps or placing baits but meanwhile also including making service contracts to ensure that the trap systems in the infested buildings will be checked and equipped on a regular basis. Moreover, comprehensive regular documentation is mandatory for the pest controller as well as for his customer. Pest controllers with a big customer base nowadays can’t do without consistently being supported by software. For this reason, many of them use the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics NAV that simply lets them better manage customer contracts, recurrent on-site services, invoices, and inventory.

  

If a Dynamics professional isn’t learning, they are falling behind #HoskCodeWisdom

FastTrack

Random notes

• Platform and functionality is separated (finally) e.g. functionality split (Sales, Case management) from Dynamics 365.
• Classic functionality (Sales, Marketing, Case Management) are now separate solutions imported on top of Dynamics 365 if you choose to.
• Spitting the functionality and Platform (core Dynamics, accounts, activities, contact etc) means they have removed all the dependencies
• It was painful for Microsoft to recreate the functionality solutions using the same rules as everyone else – Hosk says good.
• Unified client interface is more performant, more unified, cleaner
• Dynamics 365 is the biggest SAS service hosted on Azure, Microsoft are eating their own dog food
• 1.6 million average users (XRM + PA + Flow) – Hosk question – how much is flow bloating that stat?
• 200+ organisations

Security

If customers have security questions the best place to start is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM trust centre.  Microsoft wants to avoid answering each customer or question individually because this isn’t scalable to do on a 1-1 basis.  The answer to most security questions can be found in the trust centre so look their first.

• Microsoft Trust Centre
• Microsoft Trust Centre About Microsoft Dynamics 365

How does Microsoft Scale

This section was focusing on Azure infrastructure, scaling and backups\fail over.

• Each region has a primary and fail over
• in UK you have Cardiff and London
• In each data centre you have Site Wide Services and below that you have Scale Groups

Scale Groups

Microsoft Support analysts blamed poor performance and service problems on Scale Groups.  The Scale Group we were on suffered from a memory leak and then this spread to other scale groups, which made me wonder how it worked and how Microsoft managed it.

Scale Group contains a bunch of servers needed for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

• One scale group hosts multiple organisations
• Your Dynamics 365 instances could be in different scale groups e.g. sandbox in scale group 1, production in scale group 2.  Your instances could be in the same Scale Group, the point is you don’t know and shouldn’t care
• Every database has their own database
• There is a lot proactive monitoring in scale groups
• Microsoft move organisations based on performance not size e.g. a larger Dynamics org but which doesn’t have as much processing will be considered smaller than a smaller organisation with heavy processing.

Below you can see how Microsoft organise Scale groups inversions and this is how it would back up your

Microsoft moved Dynamics 365 to Azure, everything is now virtualised
SQL Azure database
VM Scale Sets

Moving to Azure allows Microsoft to analyse the actual cost of services offered because they know how much Azure resources they are using and the cost.

Dynamics IPs = Azure IPs
V8.2 it had specified IP – they were static
moving to Azure the IP’s change dynamically.

When servers are recycled in Azure this generates an new IP.  This means the IP’s will be in a range but you won’t know the exact IP.  This is consideration for companies wanting to allow one IP address through because they can’t, they have to let a range of IP’s through.  They might not like it but there is no alternative.

Canary scale groups

Canary Scale Group are Dynamics instances who have agreed to receive changes sooner than other scale groups, e.g. as soon as they are ready and passed internal testing.  The idea is they have volunteered to receive changes sooner so they can test them sooner. 

The Canary Scale Group will be the first ones to receive changes of the one version (that doesn’t happen weekly but it will follow the same stations and train path)

• These receive the changes early, as soon the changes happen
• It updates weekly
• Early release and part of the new release cadance

Dedicated Scale Group

Disaster recover

• Separate databases
• multiple copies
• fast fail-over
• physical backups are happening
• Fail-over
  • They copy databases using ASYNC copies across the fail over region
  • No affect on performance
  • It should take 30 minutes to pop up on a fail over

The one release and releases

• For bug fixes Microsoft want to do a weekly release with fixes and deploy this
• Every week a minor release (e.g. bug fix)
• The Canary has a weekly release

Stations

• If an issue is detected in a release train it might stop or might keep moving forward
• If it’s a minor issue with a workaround, it might not hold the train
• If major the train will probably stop (it depends)
• Update the train with an updated build incorporating the db change then the it would stop at the station and the changes were updated

Security

Netflix have created their own automated red team, enter the Chaos Monkey

The Chaos Monkey is open source – Netflix Chaos Monkey 

This is how Netflix describe it

Chaos Monkey randomly terminates virtual machine instances and containers that run inside of your production environment. Exposing engineers to failures more frequently incentivizes them to build resilient services.

I first read about the chaos monkey on coding horror – Working with the Chaos Monkey

Support

• Support staff have no direct access to your servers or databases
• They have to get Dynamics operation centre to do this.
• To get support access granted it has to be in the context of live site ticket.  This will be approved and audited

Express route

• This isn’t the silver bullet many people think it is
• If in doubt don’t get Express route
• This isn’t needed to access Dynamics in a secure way.
• Express route is like a VPN, it goes from the customer to Microsoft
• It doesn’t encrypt anything different
• Express route is a private network

Customer Managed Keys

• Microsoft don’t recommend this
• Not available in V9 yet
• Same encryption as SQL TDE whether used or not
• Does not change how Microsoft accesses  data while in service operational
• The Use case for CMK is purely ability of a customer to revoke access to data as a service use is terminated, all access to live service/backups will be removed.  This is mainly used for when you leave the service
• The downside is it adds responsibility on the customer to maintain key, if lost or removed data is lost forever

Technical stuff

• In April 2019 the new release cadence kicks in, the SOAP endpoint will be gone, start upgrading now
• ILMERGE is not supported as mentioned on Scott Durow blog
• We shouldn’t be using ILMERGE going forward, instead use Azure functions or some azure based functionality

DOC Coverage Focuses – Dynamics Operation centre

• Detect – Mitigate – Maintain
• Provide 24*7 monitoring
• They are doing self healing and proactive fixing.  if the self healing script doesn’t fix it then an alert gets raised.

Hosk thought – If Microsoft is doing self healing with leaks or bugs. This doesn’t really matter because it gives them time to fix it, without a loss of service.  It reminds me of how we used to restart web servers in the good old days.

The CRM core components monitored

Microsoft want to automatically fix problems or highlight problems to clients.  It should just work.

They have perf bots which email Microsoft people orgs to proactively have a conversation with.

CDS

Integration architecture is moving to CDS from service bus.  CDS is the bottom layer of Dynamics 365, it is an empty Dynamics 365 with the core entities.  The functionality is built on top of CDS, the coupling of CDS and functionality is removed.  Microsoft were trying to create so much of Dynamics in CDS, it was quicker to make Dynamics 365 into a core platform and rebuild the core functionality (sales, Case, marketing) on top as separate solutions.  When they decoupled the functionality they can use the base Dynamics 365 platform as CDS.

Recommended using Microsoft Flow.  Things don’t need to start and end in flow

PowerApps

• Canvas based apps – Model driven client (XRM)
• This allows you to create different apps for different roles.  It allows you to only include what each users really need, it cuts the noise.
• You can embed canvas apps within a form in 9.1
• PowerApps can replace dialogs by being embedded.  Also you can replace dialogs by analysing what you are doing and slightly changing the process of a dialog to work with a powerapp.

Solutions and ALM

• The publisher owns the solution
• The system solution used to exist but this doesn’t really exist any more.  It’s now more CDS solution.
• Unmanaged solution when imported, import data into the unmanaged layer.  Unlike managed solution they aren’t owned by a publisher.  They will then always exist.  Unmanaged layers don’t exist but it’s a way of thinking how it works

Solution segmentation

• Simple change but with big benefits
• Solution segmentation helps avoid collisions because you don’t need to link to all dependencies and artifacts
• The last solution imported will be the top layer

Patches

• Primarily these are for small fixes not a major release.
• For plugins you need to update the major and minor version in a patch, this is due to dependencies and effect.
• Plugin-types and versioning

Technical bits and bobs

• Unpacking the solution file, allows you to put xml files into source control
• UI Automation test library (Easy Repro)
• Increasingly important for the “One Version”
• Easy Repro can be executed as part of DevOps Pipeline

• Currently in private preview
• It does static checking on JavaScript, Plugin code etc.
• Finds performance problems
• This is what Microsoft ran when they audited a Dynamics project

Backup

Why backups are not as useful in Dynamics 365.  Microsoft are planning to release every week and a major version every 6 months.  If backups could be held for longer this wouldn’t work with the new “One Version”, you couldn’t deploy the version because it’s old and how would you add the missing patches?  if you could apply the patches what happens if they break?

You might need to consider backing up your data using the Data Export Service.

GDPR makes it tricky to keep lots of data about people

e.g.

it’s not practical to keep backups because you would never be able to deploy them

Support

• Sev A – work through the night
• Sev B – working hours

Breakfast

You need lots of these on four days of training

Dinner

Keeping up with the many rules and regulations of the ACA can be challenging for any employer. It can get particularly challenging to understand COBRA rights and how to properly report a continuation of coverage on Form 1095-C. We will discuss a few of the more confusing COBRA scenarios and how they should be coded on Form 1095-C.

It is important to keep in mind that only employers with self-insured plans are required to report COBRA coverage. The insurance carrier is responsible for reporting COBRA coverage for employers with fully-insured plans.

Common COBRA Scenarios

The two most common COBRA scenarios are as follows:

• 1st Scenario: An employee terminates employment and is offered COBRA upon termination
• 2nd Scenario: An employee is laid off or goes from full-time to part-time, resulting in a reduction in hours and is offered COBRA

The instructions for Form 1095-C clearly state that an employee who is offered COBRA due to termination must be reported differently than an active employee who receives a COBRA offer due to a reduction in hours.

COBRA Offered Upon Termination Coding *Self-Insured Plans Only*

Based on the IRS instructions, an employee who elects COBRA upon termination is never reported as an offer of coverage. So essentially, this scenario is coded the same way as a regular terminated employee and the COBRA coverage will not be reflected on Part II “Employee Offer of Coverage” section of Form 1095-C.

In this example, the employee was full-time January through July and was offered COBRA in August due to termination of employment. The 1095-C should be coded as follows starting the month after termination:

• Line 14– Always use code 1H (No Offer of Coverage).
• Line 15– Blank.
• Line 16– Code 2A (Employee not employed during the month) should be used.
• Part III– Should indicate which months the employee & the employee’s dependents were covered, both under the employer’s health plan and COBRA. The employer should continue to report until COBRA coverage is terminated.

COBRA Offered Due to a Reduction in Hours *Self-Insured Plans Only*

An employee who remains employed, but is offered COBRA due to work hours being reduced, should always be reported as an offer of coverage. The rules for this scenario are the complete opposite of the rules for terminated employees. The instructions state that the codes remain the same as an active employee’s codes.

In this example, the employee lost eligibility due to a reduction in hours. So COBRA was offered to the employee and the employee’s spouse and dependents. They elected to enroll in COBRA starting in August. The 1095-C should be coded as follows starting the first month of COBRA coverage:

• Line 14– 1E should be used since COBRA was offered to the employee, spouse and dependents.
• Line 15– Enter the lowest COBRA cost for self-only coverage starting the month that COBRA is elected.
• Line 16– Code 2C can be used since the employee elected COBRA, which indicates the employee enrolled.
• Part III “Covered Individuals”– This section should include all enrollees including the employee and dependents.

In the example below, the employee was enrolled in a MEC plan with MV, but lost eligibility due to a reduction in hours. COBRA was offered to the employee, but not their dependents. The employee chose to enroll in COBRA starting on August on 1st. The 1095-C should be coded as follows starting the first month of COBRA coverage:

• Line 14–1B should be used starting in August since COBRA was ONLY offered to the employee.
• Line 15– Enter the lowest COBRA cost for self-only coverage starting the month that COBRA is elected.
• Line 16– Code 2C should be used since the employee elected COBRA, which indicates the employee enrolled.

In this example, the employee lost eligibility due to a reduction in hours and COBRA was offered to the employee, spouse and dependents. The employee chose to waive COBRA starting on August 1st. The 1095-C should be coded as follows starting the first month of the COBRA offering:

• Line 14–1E should be used since COBRA was offered to the employee, spouse and dependents, even if the employee chose to waive.
• Line 15– Enter the lowest COBRA cost for self-only coverage. This line should show an increase in cost starting in August.
• Line 16– Code 2B (Not a full-time employee) should be used since the employee waived COBRA, indicating the employee was no longer eligible for coverage.
• Part III “Covered Individuals”– This section should include the employee.

COBRA Offered to Non-Employees

This final scenario will show COBRA that is offered to an employee who terminated in a prior year, also referred to as a non-employee. An employee who was terminated during a prior year can remain on COBRA for years after their termination. The example below will show how the 1095-C form should be coded for an employee who terminated in a previous year (non-employee), but remained enrolled in COBRA.

In this example, the employee terminated in 2017, but remained enrolled in COBRA for all of 2018. The 1095-C should be coded as follows:

• Line 14– Should show code 1G (Offer to Non-Employee) * Code 1G applies for the entire year or not at all.
• Line 15– Should be blank.
• Line 16– Should be blank.
• Part III– Should be completed for each enrollee. Keep in mind that this section must be completed for non-employee as well.

This blog covers a few of the many coverage scenarios. As always, Integrity Data is here to assist you with the complexities of ACA Reporting & Compliance. Follow our blog for more in-depth ACA information, or give us a call to learn more about our ACA products and services to save you time.