A lot of the office 365 subscriptions include PowerBI which is a web based business intelligence portal. This enables you to create dashboards using data from your back end CRM or ERP application combined with other data sets you have around your business. These can be on premise or cloud based sources and in a multitude of formats.
Even more interestingly it can access external sources to for instance combine commodity prices, weather reports or exchange rates with your data to show cause and effect and forecast future demand or costs for example.
In the future we will see PowerBI graphs and charts displayed within your Dynamics application itself without the need to go to a separate portal. This has already been previewed in the next version of AX and is undoubtedly on the roadmap for NAV and CRM. Building links to your data sources and then views of that data will have a great return on the investment, which is minimal if anything, more of your time to define what you want.
For now though you can see those reports via the web portal or the apps on your tablet or phone. Once the data is wired up you can design the dashboards using Excel, it’s really a straightforward end user point and click experience.
What is revolutionary is the natural language queries that you can do in PowerBI. By typing or even saying using the built in Cortana integration “show me all the customers in London with a balance overdue” will set the correct filters and display just that list. As a tool to for end users to get the queries that want quickly and effectively it’s unparalleled.
So what’s not to like, reporting is one of the biggest complaints against business systems, this is the tool in 365 that can solve those issues once and for all.
SharePoint
Office 365 gives every organisation an easy way to deploy SharePoint. It’s an application that’s been around for a while but many organisations have not picked it up. That’s probably because it’s a toolbox that needs some setting up before it can be used effectively, once it’s going though it will become key very quickly.
Note
This post is part of a 5-part series. A link to rest of the posts in this series are below;
Author: James Crowter
I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times.
Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction.
So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved.
I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand.
My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially.
I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV.
After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential.
Follow me online via my other social channels:
- Twitter: @jamescrowter
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter
Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.
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