I was looking for a customer in Partner Center the other day. I had to scroll though like ten pages to find them, past a whole bunch of other customers, many of which we no longer had a relationship with. But I still had full access to their tenant. I …
We work on quite a few Small and Midsize customer deployments of Dynamics 365. Most go very smoothly, but I was reviewing the ones that did not, to see if I could find any correlations. I am convinced, through my unscientific study, that the number one cause is the failure …
It is a fair question, that I have heard often recently. Does anybody on the team building the new Dynamics 365 Marketing application… know anything about Marketing? Or the Microsoft partners that will be expected to sell it for that matter? How on earth will this succeed? Is it “Blind …
About a year ago, Ron Huddleston and Gavriella Schuster fired up a wave machine. You may be starting to feel a little movement already, but a hurricane is developing, and all of the spaghetti models show it tracking right into the Microsoft Partner Network.
I just returned from Extreme365 in Long Beach, which is one of my favorite events of the year. It is my “tribe”. As the largest global market, I am surprised that the US version of this event is not bigger than the European one, but actually it is about a …
Even though Dynamics 365 was not specifically designed for the SMB customer, we engage with those SMB customers on a daily basis, who are still interested in Microsoft’s Customer Engagement offering. Most of these conversations start with an explanation of the terms and concepts that are used in Customer Engagement… …
There are a lot of opinions floating around the Dynamics 365 channel today. Talk to any partner and they will say things like “If it were up to me, I would do this or that… but don’t tell anybody I said that“. Seems to me, if we don’t tell anybody …
I talk to a lot of partners… all the time… about a lot of things. One item that seems to come up increasingly more often, is about this incessant chant around “Consumption”, and Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive herding of partners towards that shining light. Many partners I talk to don’t even …
While I could not attend, I have been paying close attention to what is going on at Directions EMEA. I had suggested that Microsoft might want to run new directional change messages by a smaller group first, it looks like Directions US was that smaller group.
Like many of you that read my stuff, I too am following the Ignite Sessions related to Dynamics 365 Business Solutions. I had too many things on my calendar, to make it in-person, but the recorded sessions are the next best thing. As I watched these, I was having trouble …
Okay, I know I just wrote about AppSource last week, but the AppSource team launched a new capability for partners today that does not require you to build an App. It’s an “App-less” AppSource path for the app-challenged. It’s called “Consulting Services”. So what is this all about?
A few weeks after the initial announcements around Dynamics 365, I wrote a post titled something like “The Fog Clears”. With Microsoft’s response to the reaction from the Directions announcements, some fog is clearing, but some fog has shifted… to a different partner type.
I decided to step away from the third-rail and talk about something else. If you are a Dynamics 365 Partner, you should already know about AppSource. Maybe you have already published an App, or are thinking about it, or maybe you are just thinking about it as a place to …
So I am approaching this post with some trepidation. My last one led to a bunch of phones blowing up in Redmond, and I don’t want a repeat of that for sure. But I do want to share my thoughts, now that the dust has started to settle.
When left alone, partners tend to buzz quietly in their nests, working on their customers and offers. Lately, Microsoft has made a habit of kicking those nests, starting with the announcement of Dynamics 365 last year which sent the channel hornets flying out of their nests. Zipping all over, and …
I happened to be scrolling through a list of our past customer deployments the other day. I stopped on one we had recently “completed”, and was remembering the initial phone call we had. Things ended up a lot different.
The Common Data Service (CDS) is suddenly the talk of the town. The potential power of this service is fast becoming a significant differentiator in the competitive landscape. But did this innovative technology start life as a “Hack”?
Those of you who follow me, know that we have a product called RapidStart for Dynamics 365. Well, not “we” actually, RapidStart LLC is a separate company owned by my wife. So I guess I should say, “she” has a product called RapidStart for Dynamics 365. Anyway, that product has just …
Along with the “Cloud Revolution” comes a whole new set of required skills for Partners and Customers. These new skills are not to be added to what you already know, instead they are to replace what you already know. Because, the things you already know… nobody will need anymore.
I can certainly look back at many decisions that I made, that did not work out. I like to convince myself that, at the time, it made total sense, and I would do the same thing again. Sometimes that is even correct. But most of the time, I just wonder …
