If your business is struggling to find and retain talented employees, focusing on Employee Experience might be the new key to success. I recently read an article from Forbes called “2018 Will Be The Year of Employee Experience,” by Denise Lee Yohn, which defines Employee Experience (EX) and emphasizes why it’s so important. The article was published in January of 2018, and as we reflect on this last year at Integrity Data, I think Yohn’s prediction has certainly come true. I also think EX will continue to be critical in 2019 and for years beyond.

What is Employee Experience and Why Does It Matter?

As CEO of Integrity Data, it’s critical for me to stay on top of the biggest obstacles businesses are currently facing. Right now, many companies say they’re struggling to find and retain talented employees. I liked the Forbes article because it provides a big-picture perspective on how this issue is shaping business culture and operations right now. As the article mentions, companies who successfully focus on Employee Experience tend to have higher retention rates, higher profits, and higher rates of productivity. Fundamentally, good EX means staying competitive.

As Yohn defines it in her article, “EX is the sum of everything an employee experiences throughout his or her connection to the organization — every employee interaction, from the first contact as a potential recruit to the last interaction after the end of employment.”

The article also discusses what EX is NOT; don’t skip this part. It’s equally important. Components which are often mistaken as EX include improved HR, perks, employee engagement, and employer branding. As Yohn succinctly explains, each of these things is part of Employee Experience, but a singular focus on any one component doesn’t guarantee comprehensive success in the whole realm of EX.

How Can Businesses Improve Employee Experience?

It’s important to attract and keep the right candidates to power your business to success. As an employer, you should be asking “what’s my biggest issue, and who can help me address that issue?” I recommend having a conversation with your employees and colleagues to identify which components of the Employee Experience might help you stay competitive, and where you might be lacking.

Although EX is a big concept with many factors, there are technology solutions which can help you achieve certain goals. Our mission over the years has always included the human side of technology and how we can improve the experience of the people behind our customers’ organizations. Now, as talent recruitment and retention is commonly identified as one of the biggest problems our customers are facing, we’re looking for technology we can leverage to help with that. In today’s market, fulfilling our mission means thinking outside the box to help companies with EX, because they need talent in order to compete, grow and succeed.

To do that, we use our expertise to find, vet, and bring to you the most effective solutions. In this instance, we can identify technologies to help you achieve a better EX, then deploy and integrate them with the rest of your systems. The financial wellness tools we offer, for example, are designed to help employers offer voluntary benefits for their employees’ personal well being.

On the other hand, it may also be the case that new software applications aren’t what you most need to improve your EX – perhaps you can leverage your current processes more effectively, or make other changes. If you want a third-party perspective, feel free to contact us. After all, conversations like these are why we like coming to work every day!

Find resources that help you build and sustain a profitable cloud business, connect with customers and prospects, and differentiate your business. Read previous issues of the newsletter and get real-time updates about partner-related news and information on our US Partner Community Twitter channel.

Looking for partner training courses, community calls, and events? Refer to the Hot Sheet training schedule for a six-week outlook that’s updated regularly as we learn about new offerings. To stay in touch with us and connect with other partners and Microsoft sales, marketing, and product experts, join our US Partner Community on Yammer.

New posts on the US Partner Community blog

• January 2019 Hot Sheet partner training schedule
• How (and why) to bring your customers into the cloud
• Find out what’s new with Microsoft Teams for US Government Community Cloud
• Maximize the resources included in your Microsoft Partner Network membership
• Bring in the new year with savings on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Business
• SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 end of support: What you need to know
• What to know about updates to the Microsoft P-Seller Community
• 4 Microsoft training offerings to empower your teams

Upcoming US Partner Community calls

• Business Applications Partner Community call - IoT Enabled Field Service with IoT Central, January 8, 9:00 am PT 
• US Partner Investments Office Hours, January 9, 10 am PT
• SMB Partner Insider Community call, January 9, 10:00 am PT
• Public Sector Partner Community call - Microsoft Teams for Government Partners, January 10, 10:00 am PT
• Marketing SureStep Office Hours: Content Palooza, January 10, 12:30 pm PT
• Modern Workplace Productivity Partner Community call - Driving Successful Modern Workplace engagements with Adoption & Change Management, January 11, 1o am PT

New events and webcasts this winter

• GovBytes – Public Sector Partner Enablement Series
• Next Gen PPE Training Series
• StepUp Technical
• The Leading Edge

Learning news

• FY19 H2 Learning Partner Incentive Program details
• Complete your MVA courses before they retire on January 31, 2019
• Containerize Your Apps with Docker and Kubernetes e-book

Hi all-

Many of you would be interested in finding out what’s driving storage consumption of you Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement instance. Some would think it’s largely data for entities, i.e. Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, Custom etc. Which is true to a large extent but with few exceptions. Organization database also holds system data linked with user records. House keeping such system data is handled by Deletion Service. This post on our CRM PFE Team site explains clean up by Deletion Service. If you are not familiar with Deletion Service, I suggest you read above post to put this altogether.

Now you know the role of Deletion Service, hopefully. Hey, I take that an assumption to continue writing . I was working with a customer to prepare for an upgrade and noticed some of the system data related tables were significant in size. While it came as surprise for customer their knowledge was claiming system data should be getting cleaned by the system(aka Deletion Service). So, started digging around the Deletion Service behavior for the organization in question. Deletion service executions were successful, no errors! Further going into the details of few large tables, it came to light that system data was retaining longer than usual. Found several OrgDBOrgSettings were set differently for this Org.

We could have restored to default values but chose to discuss retention requirements, general guidance and adjusted the settings accordingly. Once we adjusted these settings, next run of Deletion Service took care of reducing size of respective tables.

From above learning, here are the OrgDBOrgSettings those control Deletion Service retention along with description:

These settings can be retrieved updated using OrgDBOrgSettings command line tool described in this KB article or OrgDBOrgSettings Solution.

Hope this helps!

Bhavesh Shastri

Directions North America, which took place this year at the beginning of October in San Diego, took the form of a typical Microsoft Dynamics conference. However, in years previous, Directions was simply a Dynamics NAV partner convention. Now, with the next generation of NAV coming in the shape of Dynamics 365 Business Central, the conference is targeted at both NAV and Business Central audiences.

The general session once again saw a leap in attendance, just as it had seen a leap in attendance the year before. The clear impetus for these increased audience numbers was the inception of Dynamics 365 two years ago. An event which once exclusively hosted Dynamics NAV partners is quickly becoming an all-hands partner event.

Day one started with a bang with the introduction of “Intelligent Edge” in the first keynote of the day. Intelligent Edge was released with the GP 2018 R2 update this past October along with other on-premise Dynamics products. These on-premise solutions will now connect to an instance of our Intelligent Cloud through Business Central. When the connection is made, Microsoft will securely replicate your on-premise data to the Intelligent Cloud. This demonstration was the first of many examples throughout the week of Microsoft’s vision for the future.

Breakout sessions provided a lot of insight from both Microsoft employees and third-party service vendors alike. One large topic of focus this year was AppSource, Business Central’s marketplace for tools. Several third-party services have not been added to AppSource yet but are promising to get there soon. Currently, a lot of them still only function as customizations within on-premise NAV. Other services, like BI360 CPM (from Solver) and Jet Reports (now Jet Global), are live on AppSource.

One session I considered a must-attend event was “Dynamics GP turned Dynamics 365” where it was clear the majority of people in the room were GP partners with no 365 or NAV exposure. As with many of the breakout sessions I attended, the popular theme of integration made its way into this presentation. The Microsoft employee leading the presentation did a demo of the clever integration tool between GP and Business Central. Master records such as Vendors were transferred with ease. However, this was not as neatly done for General Ledger historical data. The tool takes your historical GP segments and transforms them into new dimensions. For example, if you have a natural segment in GP and two other segments, the tool will not be able to segregate those segments and assign them to a dimension. It will pull in the entire fully qualified account segments and new dimensions can be added, but it is a fairly messy process. To this point, it is better to review your chart of accounts and master list data and do a manual migration as of now, as you may want to clean and improve data at that point anyway.

The “What’s new in Business Central application” was highlighted by the fact that you can copy and paste any row list to another row list or in or out of Excel. The new feature that I’m personally the most excited about is the capability to copy account schedules. Copying account schedules has been a crusade of mine ever since we were one of the very small number of partners granted early access to project Madeira, which was the code name for Dynamics 365. Account schedules are essentially your report building tool. If you want to have two different custom reports and tweak one of them, this process is now much easier.

Aside from the abundant educational presentations, I also learned a lot from the Dynamics community at large during networking hours and about the many lingering concerns among partners about having to unlearn a certain number of things to get up to speed with Business Central. However, while some partners are nervous about learning the new ins and outs of Business Central, it will substantially benefit small-to-medium sized business owners as AppSource apps will be much easier to implement.

In review, Directions was a substantially helpful conference to attend as a partner. Dynamics partners and the potential user groups of this product are very excited for the future.

Originally Posted 5/21/11

In this video, I review how to setup Report Groups and Combined Reports. This will help when you need to print multiple reports on a regular basis (e.g. Period End Reports, Audit Reports, etc. using Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM Outlook App offers a method to synchronize and track your Outlook emails, appointments, and tasks with Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, and more Dynamics 365 Entities.

Dynamics 365 Users who utilize the Outlook App, or are replacing their Outlook Client with the Outlook App need to configure these users with Security Role Permissions.

How? We explain below!

As new App functionality is released, the permissions are assigned through the “My Apps” in the Settings menu.

Here’s how to get started …

Pre-Requisites

The security role being used by the user must have “Read” and “Write” privileges on the following:

• Mailbox in the Business Management Tab – Needs “Read” and “Write” privileges at user-level or higher
• Use Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, and must be set to “Organization” in the Business Management Tab
• Entity: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• Field: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• Relationship: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• System Application MetaData: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• System Form: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• User Application MetaData: Read Access at the user-level or higher under the Customization Tab
• View: Read Access at the Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• Model-Driven App: Read Access at Organization Level under the Customization Tab
• Provide Access to the Outlook App in the “My Apps” section for all necessary Security Roles

Email Configuration

You will want to do this when you are ready to have all users utilize the Outlook App. To do this, follow these steps …

• Navigate to Settings > Email Configuration > Email Configuration Settings
• Set Email Configuration to the below (pictured) Configuration

Mailboxes

To set this up, follow these steps …

• Navigate to Settings > Email Configuration > Mailboxes, Change the “View” to “Active Mailboxes”
• In the view, check that the Server Profile is set to Exchange Online and that Incoming, Outgoing and Appointment, Contacts and Tasks are being processed by Server Side Sync
  • NOTE: You can update desired mailboxes all at once by check-marking the desired mailboxes, and click “Apply Default Email Settings” if you set up your Email Configuration Settings as above
• Check-mark the Mailboxes
• Click “Approve Email”
  • NOTE: This must be done by a Global Admin in Office 365
• Check-mark “Mailboxes”
• Click on “Test and Enable Mailboxes”
  • NOTE: To ensure this is working for your organization, you will want to open up each mailbox and click “Test and Enable” while ignoring the check-box
• Once you receive all 3 Successes, you can move on to the Deployment part of the process

Deployment Steps

To finish things up and start the deployment process, follow these steps …

• Navigate to Settings > Dynamics 365 App for Outlook
• Each person must have a “Yes” enabled for “Incoming Email” and enabled for “ACT” columns
• Check-mark the names you want to add to the Outlook App, unless you want to utilize the “Automatically Add App to Outlook” feature
• Click “Add App to Outlook”
• The process will take about 5, to 15 minutes to complete
• Once the status says “Added to Outlook”, you’re done!

Do you want more Dynamics tips and best practices like this?

Join our next Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM user group webinar, or catch up with some of our most recent ones when you watch on-demand! See the schedule and register here.

If you find yourself on the chillier side of life like the Ledgeview Partners HQ team here in Appleton, Wisconsin, you may be in need of some winter wellness tips to start your new year on the right foot.

A healthy self is a happy self! Cheesy as the saying is, it’s true.

Here are some of the top ways to practice self-care in winter 2019.

1. Wash your hands often
Winter is also flu season, which means it’s even more important to wash your hands properly during this time of year.

Before eating or handling food, or whenever you come home after being out in a public place, be mindful and wash your hands. Use soap and water, lather and rise for at least 20 seconds.

2. Manage your stress levels
This is important to do all year, as like many of these tips are, but especially during the chillier months, as many people tend to fall under spells of seasonal depression.

Be well and take care of yourself. Give yourself a break when you feel overwhelmed.

Find support, and get in plenty of long winter naps. Some experts say spending time with family and friends is just as important to your well-being as diet and exercise!

So, be sure to make time for those who are most important to you.

3. Wear enough layers

Don’t get skimpy with your winter layers. While outdoors, as temperatures drop, you want to be sure to protect yourself.

Get your hats, gloves, scarves, and waterproof boots out, ready, and on your body.

You will be grateful for the warmth (and health) the coverage brings you.

4. Get your exams and screenings
Most people don’t like visiting the doctor, but it is crucial to attend your annual exams and screenings.

By doing this, you prevent health complications and can be assured of not just your present health, but future health.

5. Eat healthily and stay active
It’s easy to lose track of ourselves during the winter months.

In winter, be especially mindful about whether or not you are getting proper amounts of exercise, eating a healthy diet, and balancing holiday splurges out accordingly.

You don’t have to avoid the plate of sugar cookies, or whatever your holiday “poison”. Just be mindful of the quantities you consume at your remaining holiday parties.

Make exercising at home fun in the meantime! It’s all about balance and mindfulness, not complete deprivation. Find your own rhythm with individual health and wellness.

Everyone is different. You can find a variety of fun and free exercise videos and recipes online, for example!

We hope you benefit from and take action on these winter health and wellness tips.

We at Ledgeview encourage and support the health of our customers and employees, and want to be sure you’re taken care of equally.

Learn more about Ledgeview’s team and culture when you visit our “About Us” page.

Apply for open career opportunities with us to be a part of our unique work culture here.

This is the last of the 4-part series on getting the GL Account segment description into Excel.  As I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter what you want, if it’s in Dynamics GP, you can get it into Microsoft Excel.  This time we’ll use the 3^rd party product by eOne called Excel Builder.  I’ll create an Excel Refreshable Report that lives in the same location as the “out of the box” Excel Reports, either in a folder or in SharePoint.

In this series, I showed you how to achieve this using the following tools:

1. SmartList Designer (Click Here to see it)
2. Excel Power Query (Click Here to see it)
3. SmartList Builder (eOne Product – Click Here to see it)
4. Excel Builder (eOne Product)

Learn more about eOne’s Excel Report Builder by clicking Here!

Mediocre people don’t like high achievers, and high achievers don’t like mediocre people.  Nick Saban

There is no such thing as requirements so clear that no developer could misinterpret them #HoskCodeWisdom

Articles of the Month

• The successful growth of the Birmingham CRMUG
• Make higher quality Apps with Solution checker  
• Here is how to preview the April release for Dynamics 365
• Controls in Dynamics 365 for Mobile App: Bullet Graph
• Integration of Azure machine Learning with Dynamics 365
• Metro Bank uses PowerApps to improve the in-store customer experience
• How to Fix Missing Menus in the Dynamics 365 Unified Interface
• Announcing the Dynamics 365 April ’19 release timeline
• The Brand New Org Chart in Dynamics 365
• Calling D365 actions/functions from Flow
• Dynamics 365 Universal Search for XrmToolBox
• Development Tools? You don’t always need a UI!
• Data migration from ground to cloud – my experience
• Some great resource to Learn Microsoft Dynamics 365 
• Leveraging PowerApps with Microsoft Dynamics On-Premise
• Calling D365 actions/functions from Flow
• Deploy and operate Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (on-premises) 
• Sending a birthday email from CDS fields using Flow
• Podcast – Matt Barbour from Microsoft

• Why avoiding being wrong is slowing your progress 
• Why is string.GetHashCode() different each time I run my program in .NET Core?
• 9 books that helped me navigate my first time being a tech lead
• A framework for progressively decoupled Drupal
• 16 ways to build a better dev team
• Showing Kindness while Programming
• THE DON’TS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
• Keep learning, should you invest your own time?
• Optimize Your Programming Decisions for the 95%, Not the 5%
• Object Oriented Programming
• Why do developers have the toughest interviews in the world?