The statistics are in: faster-loading speeds = happier customers = more conversions. We’ve said it before, and online shoppers agree. As browser speeds continue to accelerate, customers expect faster performance. Sites with loading times over 3 seconds can expect bounce rates of 40%... or worse.

This is why so many e-commerce businesses use a content delivery network (CDN) for website speed optimization. A CDN hosts typically heavy content elements of a page such as images and stylesheets, reducing the page’s loading time and thus boosting its performance.

The benefits may seem obvious. Your shoppers love all those high-resolution full-color product images, and by hosting them in the CDN, mobile and non-mobile browsers alike will load them in a fraction of the time.

But there’s much more to a content delivery network than meets the eye. Here are three business benefits of using a CDN that might surprise you.

Higher SEO Ranking

Fast-loading web pages aren’t just important to customers. They’re important to Google.

Google’s algorithms adapt to the pace of the evolving web. In addition to evaluating websites based on content and relevance, the speed at which a site’s pages load constitutes a major element in determining its page rank.

Improve your site’s speed, improve your rank. In that way, when you use a content delivery network you significantly strengthen your SEO efforts.

Google actually makes website speed optimization easier with a free PageSpeed Insights tool. You just have to enter your URL to get an analysis of your website’s performance along with suggestions for optimization.

More Sales Than You Think (A Lot More)

The benchmark of all things e-commerce, Amazon, discovered that they lost 1% in sales for every 100 milliseconds of latency on their website.

To put that in perspective, Amazon generated almost $178 billion in revenues in 2017. So, even a 1% loss comes out to 100 very expensive milliseconds.

This isn’t just the case for e-commerce, either. Google (who, as we just mentioned, loves fast websites) takes a whopping 20% drop in traffic for every extra half-second a search page takes to load.

Now obviously Amazon and Google are titans at the top of their respective games, and even they have to play by website speed optimization rules. But look at it the other way around, and you’ll get an idea of just how much your conversions can skyrocket when you put a premium on fast pages and use a content delivery network.

Automatic Loyalty

Picture this: you’re shopping for office supplies, and the first site you’re browsing is taking forever to load. So you do what anybody else would do… you abandon the site and look for another one.

The next web store you visit loads in a snap. You place your order and it’s processed right away (because, like all smart businesses, they have an ERP-integrated e-commerce solution).

Now the question is, when it’s time for you to order more office supplies, where are you going to go? Back to the site with the slow pages? Of course not. Odds are, you’ll be returning to the business that provided good service the last time.

Just like you, online shoppers (both B2C and B2B) remember where the speed is.

While website speed optimization is only one factor in the overall user experience, it’s by far one of the most important. When two web stores offer the same products at the same prices but load at different speeds, nine times out of ten, customers will buy from the faster site.

And when you use a content delivery network, you can be the faster site.

Contact k-eCommerce today to learn more!

Microsoft launched many exciting features as a part of Embedded Intelligence in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Embedded Intelligence has key capabilities– Relationship Insight, Auto Capture, and Email Engagement, which enables you to track email statistics and engage customer more timely and effectively.

In this blog, we are going to uncover one of the key capabilities of Embedded Intelligence – Email Engagement. Email Engagement enables Dynamics 365 users to keep track of the various statistics about the email messages goes out of Dynamics 365 such as:

1. How many time email messages opened.

2. Follow if attachments are opened or not.

3. Number of time links in email clicked.

4. Replies to the email.

Along with these statistics and a chronological view of different action performed by recipients, you can also set reminders to follow up with an email and set ‘Send Later’ to match the recipient’s time zone or working hours.

How to enable Email Engagement in Dynamics 365

1. Navigate to Dynamics 365> Settings> Administration> Intelligence Configuration.

2. Under Sales Insight> Accept (Step #3).

3. The System will navigate away from the D365 page for authentication and permission to access your profile. (Step #4)

4. Come back to Email Engagement and Enable it. (Step #5)

Note: One should have Dynamics 365 administrator and Office 365 Administrator permissions to install it. Email Engagement navigation shown in this blow is as per Dynamics 365 v9.0.2.

There are few pre-requisites before enabling Email Engagement:

1. OneDrive for Business must be available to your Dynamics 365 tenant if you want to enable the ability for users to follow email attachments.

2. To use followed email attachments, you must also enable document management for email in Dynamics 365 instance to follow email attachments.

How to use Email Engagement in Dynamics 365

Navigate to the new email form, and you will notice a new section for Email Engagement is added into the lower right corner with 3 options – Don’t Follow, Send Later, Set Reminder.

Follow Emails

This option will let you know when a recipient opened an email, clicked embedded links, opened attachments, or send a reply. By default, Dynamics 365 will follow all the new emails created within Dynamics 365. You can explicitly opt out to not follow any specific emails by clicking Don’t Follow.

Users can also disable follow option permanently for a specific contact by updating its contact preferences from Follow Email to Do Not Allow.

Follow an Attachment

To track an attachment, add the attachment to the email and then click on the Follow button from the attachment window.

Once the attachment is enabled for tracking, it will show up as an attachment in email body as well.

Track Recent Activities

Once you send out an email with tracking enabled, Dynamics 365 will track who opened, along with the time and the device on which it was opened. It also tracks and shows attachment views, link clicks, and replies sent back to this email. Users can directly navigate to replies from this view:

Send Later

You can create an email at your convenience and schedule it for delivery based on recipient’s time zone or working hours, so it’s more likely to be read or responded to. Once you click on the Send Later option and specify the date and time, the system will send out an email automatically on that date and time.

Set Reminder

Now you can set reminder if a customer hasn’t opened your email or responded back to you. Alternatively, you can also set a reminder to just follow up with a specific recipient.

Reminder Options:

1. If I do not receive a reply by

2. If the email is not opened by

3. Remind me anyways at

Note that once an email is sent out, Delay Send and Reminder can be removed/disabled, however Follow can’t be removed once an email goes out of the system.

Email Engagement is available now in Dynamics 365 Online, version 8.2 onwards. Please refer to Configure and enable embedded intelligence to get more details on how to configure embedded intelligence.

Note: By enabling this feature, you consent to share data about your customers’ email activity with an external system. Data imported from external systems into Dynamics 365 are subject to our privacy statement.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 by reading our blog!

Happy Dynamics 365’ing!

This feature allows you to create new columns of data from existing columns or cleaning data in your data model. It allows you to add new columns of data to your model by simply providing one or more sample values for your new column. Using column by example allows for you to complete transformations on data without needing to know the formulas. Examples of this could be trimming blank spaces, or getting just part of a string, or concatenating data from different columns. In more complex examples you need to provide power query a few examples, so it can learn what you are trying to do.

How to use this feature

Use Query Editor

A. Click Add column

B. Choose column by example

C. Select from all columns or from selection. This will add a new column

As you type, it will show you a preview of the transformation that will be applied. In the example below, you will see that we are extracting the everything before the - character in CUSTCLAS using the Text before delimiter transformation.

You will then have to rename the column

This is a nice tool for cleaning data quickly and the best thing is that it also works in excel using power query. If you would like to learn more reach out to the GP support team or give us a call at 204-982-9890.

What's being changed?

In response to feedback on the differences in search behavior between the legacy web client interface and the Unified Interface, we have made some changes to the Unified Interface's search behavior, so it aligns with existing legacy web client interface behavior. The following is a brief overview of the existing search behavior and what's being changed starting in December.

In lookup, there are two configurations to consider:

• Display View: This defines the columns shown in your returned search results.
• Search View: This defines the columns against which the search is made.

This change affects the search view for the Unified Interface and applies to all entities. Here is as an example in Account entity lookup.

Before the change:

After the change:

In the legacy web client interface, there is no change. Display View and Search View are defined by Account Lookup View and Quick Find Active Account view respectively. Customers can define display columns and search columns independently. This is an advantage as customers can leverage the added performance of indexing by specifying search columns in Quick Find View (QFV).

Before the change, the Unified Interface uses the Account Lookup View for both display and search. This change extends the QFV capability from the legacy web client interface to the Unified Interface, so that customers can scope their search to only the columns specified in the Quick Find Active Accounts view.

How to prepare for this change

If your organization currently uses the legacy web client interface, there is no change. This change will provide a seamless experience in lookup when you upgrade to the Unified Interface.

If your organization currently uses the Unified Interface, you can adjust the Find Columns in each entity's Quick Find View to only include columns against which to search. If you want to maintain the existing behavior, which is to search all columns visible in the display view, make sure that Quick Find View has the same Find Columns as the lookup view of the same entity.

For example, if Account Lookup View contains columns A, B, C, and the Quick Find Active Accounts view has only columns A and C, column B will also have to be added to the Quick Find Active Accounts view if the customer expects search strings to be matched in column B.

You can do this by going to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System

Then under Components -> Entities -> Account -> Views, find and double click on Quick Find Active Accounts.

From here, select Add Find Columns. Note that the column headings that are visually shown here are View Columns for the Quick Find View. These columns are not searched unless they are also selected in Add Find Columns.

After clicking Add Find Columns, check the columns that need to be searched for the entity.

Roll out timeframe

This feature will be turned on by default at the start of December. The exact date will be determined by the deployment schedule of your geographical region. We will update this article with the version number as soon as it becomes available.

We do not expect any disruption to your lookup capabilities if the steps in “How to prepare for this change” section are followed. If you have any questions or concerns about this update, please feel free to contact unifiedfeedback@microsoft.com.
 
 
Joseph Shum, Program Manager, Dynamics 365 Engineering

When using the cloud version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, there are certain tasks which are a bit more cumbersome if you compare it with the freedom you have when running the application on-premise. When there was a need for data correction, we were used to quickly develop a job or class with x++ logic to repair data. In certain cases, we could deliver a list with identification numbers which was then used as looping to correct or delete only certain records. In this post I will explain how you can be more agile creating correction scripts using Microsoft Flow.
If you are not (yet) familiar with Microsoft Flow, you can still read this post to be able to apply similar actions on your future requirements.

The challenge

Assume, there is a need to delete a series of sales orders. E.g. a certain integration was run twice at the same time. Don’t ask me how it would be possible, but believe me, I have seen many insane issues. Due to the fact that they did run the same time, the duplicates are in between the correct sales orders. E.g.:

SO00012 correct
SO00013 correct
SO00014 duplicate
SO00015 correct
SO00016 duplicate
Etc…

Recently this happened in a Dynamics 365 environment and the support consultant made a list of all these sales orders and analyzed which order numbers should be considered as the duplicate. So, how to delete in this case over 750 sales orders as quick as possible?

The past

Previously, we were used to write a script that opens a source file with these sales orders and then delete them within a loop. It could be developed quite quickly and moving the job or class using an xpo or model made it also very agile to deploy it in a test environment. After completing the tests it could be moved to production and run it. Even within organizations with very strict procedures, this process could be completed within a day.

Now if we are using the cloud based version of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, we can still develop such job as runnable class. However the deployment will be the bottleneck for fast tackling the issue. Deployments can only be done in production when the deployable package is installed in a staging environment, tested and marked as release candidate. Then you have to log a request in advance and ensure it is installed in a maintenance window. So, what would be an alternative to be more agile when you are using the Microsoft managed cloud version?

Microsoft Flow

As of a few months, we are using Microsoft Flow at a customer to automate some user processes. E.g. I did create a Flow to import order lines where the external item number was specified. Flow did a loop and using e.g. the customer/vendor external item table, you can find the correct item number for the order. Another Flow is used to create products with a lot of details for related tables.

For this requirement, you can also use Microsoft Flow. The only thing you need as preparation is checking if there is a data entity which is public and supports correct delete actions. Then you can start building the flow. As this post is more intended to share a concept, I will not explain too much about the details how to create Flows. If you want to learn more, you can explore many examples and search on internet for some examples. I’m also considering creating more blogs about using Microsoft Flow with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

The Flow for this example looks like this:

Each Flow will start with a trigger. The list with order numbers was converted as table in Excel. The file can be picked up using the Microsoft Excel connector. Then for each row, there is a Delete record action which is using one of the instances of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations environments. In this example, I have used the Sales order headers V2 entity to delete the records. The Object id field should be filled with the company identification and the primary key of the data entity.

Creating this Flow was done very quickly. First you have to test it in a test environment to see what happens and if all is OK. When you run it, it can result in a perfect executed Flow. Deleting the order, will also delete the order lines and related inventory transactions like deleting an order manually. But be aware that also some orders might give errors. This can occur if there are order lines with e.g. a picking status. In that case, you will notice some errors and you can review them:

You can browse the results per row or directly jump to the next failed record and see what error message was returned why the order cannot be deleted.

That’s all for now. Till next time!

Microsoft Dynamics CommunitySubscribe to this blogger RSS FeedMy book on Merging global address book records in AX 2012

The post How Microsoft Flow can help on data corrections in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations appeared first on Kaya Consulting.

If you are a current user of Microsoft Dynamics GP, no doubt you chose it over other solutions because it best meets the needs of your business and your budget. But you may also have been hearing about the many benefits of operating your ERP solution in the Cloud.

Now there’s a way to have the best of both worlds. Njevity’s PowerGP Online has been designed to be your path to the Cloud for Microsoft Dynamics GP customers.

When you are ready to experience the benefits of cloud computing, PowerGP Online will help you make the transition. PowerGP Online supports not only your present Dynamics GP functionality but will also include support for remote desktops, remote database access, support for all of your Dynamics GP ISVs, as well as tools like Power BI and PowerApps with built-in integration.

Now, both existing and new customers can take advantage of the cloud while using the product that they love, Dynamics GP.

Here are three good reasons to consider PowerGP Online:

1. It’s familiar
With the same look and feel of other Microsoft products, you’ll be able to benefit from remote desktops, access to your databases, and Desktop Client to keep your documents always up to date.

2. It’s flexible
PowerGP online supports all of your ISV applications, provides workflows with email approval, and can accommodate new integrations.

3. It’s feature rich
Featuring PowerGP PowerSuite, pre-built Intelligence with PowerBI, and PowerApps and Flow, you’ll have the very latest in Microsoft GP functionality.

Aside from all the bells and whistles, now is a good time to consider PowerGP Online:

Better for IT
Security: Working with SOX compliance and a team of professionals dedicated to protecting the system, Njevity’s goal is to provide you with top of the line security.

Validated Backups: Taking into account the unique needs of finance, the Njevity team understands the need for backups for up to seven years. Backups are tested regularly to be sure they are up to date.

Easy Upgrades: Our goal is to limit your upgrade pain. PowerGP Online offers free upgrades or easy upgrades with an upgrade Sandbox.

Better for Accounting and Finance

Exclusive New Features: New GP functionality such as PowerGP Import that enables you to update and import new data makes PowerGP Online easier to use.

Innovation: PowerGP Online includes a next generation API to give you more flexibility in your overall solution. It enables integration with PowerApps and Power BI as well as new cloud offerings like Expensify.

Mobility: With the web client, your team can work from anywhere there’s an internet connection. Tasks can be completed on their phones, tablets, or home computers as long as they have the necessary permissions.

Better for Business Leaders

Better Reporting: Getting knowledge out of your data is easy with PowerGP Online. We have hundreds of prebuilt reports that help you get insight and intelligence out of your data, so you can make better decisions.

Data on Demand: Your data is available even when you are out of the office. With the proper permissions, everyone who needs access to the data can get it when and where they need it via phone, tablet or PC. It’s secure and easily accessible with PowerBI and PowerApps.

Better use of Resources: Free up your primary people to help drive your business forward. PowerGP Online takes care of the hard stuff so they can be more productive.

Peace of Mind: Njevity’s services include support, consulting, and upgrades, making it easier to budget and plan for the future.

With the new functionality in PowerGP Online PowerSuite, it’s true that PowerGP Online is the path to the cloud for Dynamics GP customers because you get much more than cloud.

New Editions with New Pricing

PowerGP Online offers four subscription editions and a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) Edition. Existing GP customers not current on an enhancement plan can move to subscription without any penalties. Customers current on an enhancement plan can ditch the big annual payment and move now to subscription licensing or wait until their renewal is up and then move if they wish.

The four subscription-based editions have bundled ISV products and a GPUG membership included.

Click here to see what’s included in each of the editions as well as the pricing.

The BYOL Edition enables you to keep your current GP licenses and all of your add-ons while moving to the PowerGP Online cloud. PowerGP Online is more than just providing GP infrastructure from a hosting provider. Njevity, the GP and data experts provide a unique experience that includes the new features in the PowerGP PowerSuite.

PowerGP Online truly is the path to the Cloud for Microsoft Dynamics GP users and those who are considering Dynamics GP.

If you’d like more information about moving your Microsoft Dynamics to the Cloud, contact our experts at PowerGP Online.

By PowerGP Online, powergponline.com