This year was good for me, but my the best achievement this year was something personal… I’ve lost almost 30 kg and now I run 10 km everyday (on the begining of year, I could run less than 1 km).
But on my business plan, again lot of trips, conferences, sessions, trainings… Again successful…
Happy New Year to all of you.
As is promised in the previous blog, I’m continuing with writing about Microsoft Social Engagement.
In this blog I will show you how to setup Microsoft Social Engagement. After that you will see how to connect it with your social networks, how to track posts, how to post on it, as well as you will see results of all those activities.
If you want to start with Setup in Microsoft Social Engagement you first have to make connections to your social networks.
For that, you will need these social networks usernames and passwords, and of course all admin rights (in a case if there is a fan page which you want to connect).
First step is going in to the Settings, and by clicking on the button ’+’ you will see a popup menu where you must choose which network you want to connect. After that, simply type in all necessary data.
After you’ve connected all your social networks, you can proceed to the next step.
Just to know, this step is optional. In a case if you use Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, you can connect it with Microsoft Social Engagement. Again very simply, you just have to click on a ’+’ button, and after that you will have to select name of your Dynamics 365 instance. On the end, the system will do by itself the rest of the connecting.
When you have done all these things it will be time to start with defining what you will follow.
Now, you have to find Search Setup on the menu and again simply click on ’+’ button. With that, you will start to make definitions. First you will define Categories (as your business require), after that you will define Topics in these Categories, and at the end you will define exact words which you will follow. In all these definitions there is one restriction made by Microsoft… you can define words which will not have more than 10,000 mentions in one month by their opinion. This is nicely shown by one chart which you will see immediately on entering in the Search Setup.
When you finish with all these configurations, you will have to do some additional config as well. But this time you will need to define your tracking in social center, and this will be one of the main places in this tool where you will spend your time.
Before we start with Setup, I will tell you a few things about Social Center. This is place where you can see your posts, posts where you were mentioned by your followers (or by people who just mentioned you). From here you can have direct Messaging with your Social Networks, you can directly post from here, and of course you can Like, Share, Comment, Mark, link to Dynamics 365… and all of Social Network activities. As I told you, this is place where you will spend most of your time working with this tool.
To Setup a new stream you just have to click again on ’+’ and after that you have to enter all necessary data: Name, Filters and Color.
When you have done all these things you have one new stream which you will follow at this moment.
As I mentioned you can answer on message, do all activities (like, share, retweet…), directly post. You will do all those things right here on stream, except posting.
For posting you have to click on a ’Publish’. After that, you will choose if you are going to use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Then that you will do exact same thing as for Social Network, you will write a post, choose some photo if you like, and Post it.
Your posts will be available on your stream and you can see all thins which are going on around your post.
You will spend most of your time in Social Center, but Dashboard is still most important for you. On the Dashboard you will see all important information’s about your brand and you will find out how you can improve your activities on Social Media.
Here you will see how your Conversations are going on, what about your Sentiments on your posts and mentions on social networks, Locations, so that you can focus on some specific type of Marketing on some locations and of course you will see which of Sources are the best, and what you will have do to beater of other one.
Now I will pass through few important things to follow.
Sentiment: Here you can see how much people are satisfied with your brand or product, and you can do something do make your customers more satisfied.
By saying sentiment I mean that this tool have some type of ML and AI and it knows some language’s, so it can understand what is positive comment or post, and all that what is negative, all others which he did not have understood Microsoft Social Engagement will show as Neutral sentiment.
Phrases: Microsoft Social Engagement is tracking which phrases are most mentioned with words which you have categorized on the beginning. By having this information, you can always do breather categorization of words which you want to track on Social Media.
Authors: By knowing which authors are mentioning you the most on Social Networks you can make some type of partnership with them, or you can offer something to them so they can make beater commercial for your brand.
Sources: By following all sources where your brand is mentioned you will know where you are the best, and where you have to improve yourself.
Language and Locations: By following on which Language is your brand most mentioned you can understand how you have to position your advertisement, and which language is most important for your brand, al that Location is the same thing, but with it you can track weary precisely your customers (followers).
But more about Location and rest of functionalities in Microsoft Social Engagement you will read in my next blog (last in this series about Microsoft Social Engagement).
Imagine you have a production business and global presence… or you have global or regional services offering. Probably the most important information you need is a feedback from your clients… and this is necessary as soon as it is possible. Why? If you get a late feedback, there is a big chance you will lose a huge amount of money. Sometime it is important to get a small information what you need to change, but very soon, not too late. And, where you can get the best possible feedback in 21st century? Of course, on a social networks. Social networks will provide the fastest possible noise.
If you want to follow all those social activity automatically, this Microsoft tool – Social Engagement is perfect for you. With Microsoft Social Engagement, you can connect your business with all popular social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn…).
You can find how big buzz is about your new posts, you can find out your followers are happy (they show positive or negative sentiment)… Of course, regarding this, you can track locations, countries, cities, different markets… However, the question is how you can use this information in your advantage.
Social Insights connects you with what your followers say about you or your products, services etc. You can grow a Brand Reputation using all the information you’ve collected using Social Insights. After you grow your brand reputation, you can start Social Care and focus on positive phrases and feelings of your followers.
After all important thing is Social Selling, which you will grow using all this tools, and you will have satisfied customers and followers.
In next few texts I’ll prepare until the end of year, you will understand how to use this amazing tool.
NAV TechDays 2018 has just finished a few days ago and I can say this was the best NAV TechDays ever. I don’t know what name will be the next year NAV or BC TechDays (or something different), but I’ll be there for sure and I’m promising I’ll prepare session for next year. Now, all sessions are already published and I want to have all of them on the one place. There are all of them:
Opening Keynote
What’s new in Developing for Business Central
Practical approaches for upgrading your NAV database and moving to extensions
Performance: Business Central reloaded for the Cloud
Crazy mix of integrations: Dynamics 365 Business Central and Azure services
Add some magic to Business Central with Machine Learning
Business Central: The new face of the client
Evolution of a titan: a look at the development of NAV from an MVP angle
Designing for extensibility: Learn straight from the Application Architects
Under the hood of Business Central service
The future for developers and consultants
Real life scenarios and best practices for using NAV on Docker
CI/CD for Business Central
Having embed PowerBI in Business Central is well known fact, but recently in Fall ’18 release, Microsoft made it even better because now you have already added PowerBI reports on all pages where they were planned to be. OK, it is nice to have and it can be time saver, because you don’t need to waste your time to add reports to page-by-page.
But what if you are not satisfy with it how these reports looks like? If you want to change something? Previously it was locked, but now… Now it looks amazing. You don’t need to leave your Business Central environment… everything you need, you will find in your Web Client (of course I’m speaking about cloud version 🙂 ).
Let’s show… Find some PowerBI report and choose Manage Reports command.
When you run this command, you will open PowerBI Management in Business Central (PowerBI Designer) and you can design your reports.
You can change your existed reports or eventually add new tab with new charts… you can do as you want.
When you finish, you just need to save it or to save this new report as a copy (if you want to keep original).
When you close it and open this report in Business Central, you will see that now you have your new report. Simply, right? Amazing job!
After amazing conference in The Hague this fall – Directions EMEA, we have two another great events until the end of this year. First in Europe, NAV TechDays will come in November 22-23 and after that we will go to US on eXtreme 365, December 2-6, Austin Texas.
This event was dominantly Dynamics CRM conference for a years, but in a last few years, we have more and more topics in ERP area as well. And now it is Dynamic 365 conference and it is very important because we have more and more partners from CRM world who want to start ERP practice as well.
This time we will have a lot of interesting content there and I’ll provide six sessions about Dynamics 365 Business Central, each in 75 minutes (7,5 hours in total – not so bad).
For beginning, I’ll have session in two parts: BC02/BC03 – An Introduction to Business Central. It will be workshop for all newbies in NAV/Business Central.
After that, you can find the following sessions (two of them will be provided together with my friend and colleague Dejan Pervulov, PTA in Microsoft):
If you are in Austin in the beginning of December, come to see this great conference.
A few days ago, after the first day and first keynote of Directions NA, I’ve posted Business Central roadmap. But now after this event has finished, we can find updated roadmap for our NAV successor – Dynamics 365 Business Central and it looks very interesting:
I’ll wait Directions EMEA to collect all information and write more detailed about this, but from my point of few, big changes are coming in two years and this is the last moment to change some old habits and to continue our journey in modern business applications.
Directions NA has just started this year. Unfortunately, this year I have to miss this event, but thanks to my friends I can share some information. This time, I’ll share only the future roadmap for Dynamics 365 Business Central:
Also, something new is that from the next year, Directions will held during the spring and the next year it will be in Las Vegas, Nevada.
For all of you who want to see what I prepared for this year conference season, I can share that I’ll have sessions on two conferences this fall.
First, I’ll be on BCUG/NAVUG Summit at Phoenix, AZ, US and after that I’ll be on Directions EMEA in the Hague. On both of these conferences, I’ll have the similar sessions – How and Why You Should Combine ‘Dynamics 365 for Talent’ with ‘Dynamics 365 Business Central’ / ‘Dynamics NAV’. But the first one will be more how you can do it if you are user, a the second one how you can do it as partner and how you can make this as a model for the future implementations.
I already know terms, and it will be Wednesday, October 17 at 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM at BCUG/NAVUG Summit and Wednesday, October 31 at 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM at Directions EMEA. If you like this topic or think this topic can be interesting, join me there.
When Dynamics 365 Business Central started from April 2nd this year, we had Microsoft official localizations for the first 14 countries: US, Canada, UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. From this July we’ve got 2 another countries Australia and New Zealand and with October release we will get 3 new official localizations for Iceland, Norway and Mexico. It will be in a total 19 Microsoft official localizations +W1.
But on Inspire we could hear that we can expect partner led localizations and that Microsoft wants to encourage partners all around the world to start with partner model localizations and to publish them on AppSource. In a meantime we’ve got 3 first partner’s localizations for Korea, UAE and South Africa and they are already available on AppSource.
On Inspire and Business Apps Summit this year, we could see announced some another countries with partner led localizations and we will have the more and more in the next few months (it will not be a fair to emphasize some specific country, but we can find them on AppSource soon).
If partners want to start with localization process in their country, the best what they can do is to visit the following page: http://aka.ms/BusinessCentralLocApps.
All necessary information for submitting and development are available there.
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