Synergy Software Systems

Azure stack beta is released

February 9th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Azure Stack essentially is Microsoft’s better bridge to using its cloud services, both the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) kinds. It uses the same code as Azure.

Scripting tools for management, such as PowerShell and command-line interfaces, will work across Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services as well as local datacenter implementations of Azure Stack. This allows a company to build a private cloud, and then easily migrate parts to a public cloud, allowing you to have a true hybrid cloud platform. Microsoft is the only company to have both a private and public cloud option.

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics Ax

Charities and Dynamics CRM – let Synergy Software Systems explain how it helps.

February 8th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

– Your website and its donations are in one database.
– Your email newsletter database is in another.
– So is your beneficiary contact history.
– That spreadsheet where you record all those contracts.
– You want to send personalised emails to your regular donors, high-value donors, and people who’ve previously donated?

Then you need an easy to use CRM system with a familiar look and feel that connects your people and your processes.

Resources in the third sector are scarce, so it’s vital they make a difference. That’s where CRM technology will help. Microsoft Dynamics enables you to reduce administration and focus greater efforts on your mission critical activities.

1. Drive Down Costs
Dynamics CRM connects all your processes and data to a single interface which reduces operational expenses by removing administration, cutting processing time, improving data quality and reducing manual tasks. Develop efficient processes using a centralised, intuitive CRM system by leveraging intelligent workflows that lower the cost of your fundraising, marketing, commercial operations and other activities.
2. Delivering Outstanding Service
Use complete detail about each contact and organisation in Dynamics CRM to transform the service you provide to beneficiaries, donors, members, investors and other stakeholders. CRM unifies your data including donations, grants, email marketing, applications, cases, outreach and other activities empowering employees and volunteers to deliver amazing service experiences across all touch points. Use guided resolution features, such as call scripting and policy adherence, and a process-driven user experience, all from a centralised view to increase agent efficiency, manage service issues faster and reduce cost per case.

3. Increase Revenues & Engagement
Whether it’s your local community, members, sponsors, service users, volunteers or your social followers Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps foster increased engagement with audiences across all channels. CRM connects with marketing automation services to profile contacts and use the power of this data to send personalised emails which increase awareness of your work to support fundraising and nurture activities.

Extended integration is available with Microsoft Social Engagement to learn more about your social audience and driving positive interactions with beneficiaries and other contacts through these channels including routing new service issues to

CRM. 4. Reporting Insight
Don’t be left in the dark any longer. Leverage inbuilt CRM dashboards and reporting tools to understand what goes on inside and outside your organisation. Unlock insights from your data by easily generating reports on the total hours volunteered, projects completed, time spent on service cases, the status of grant applications, donations received and other activities for a single source of truth and actionable insight. Remove guesswork by understanding which campaigns were most effective to replicate successful appeals and achieve your fundraising goals. Report with ease to trustees, regulatory bodies, potential donors, volunteers and the media with streamlined, accurate reporting on-demand from a single interface and data hub.
• Manage members, donors and beneficiaries
• Contain costs through efficient processes
• Complete view of donors and sponsors in a single interface
• Increase fundraising & commercial activities
• Report with ease for performance insight & governance compliance
• Increase supporter engagement
• Develop positive social sentiment towards your organisation
• Event management

Many charities and nonprofit organisations are entitled to Microsoft volume discounts on licensing for Dynamics CRM, Office 365, Windows 10 and other Microsoft solutions

These are just 4 examples to demonstrate how Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps charitable and non-profit organisations cut operating costs through efficient processes, increase revenues and delight their beneficiaries.

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft’s cloud ambitions expand with Azure stack – Hybrid cloud and Metanautix

February 7th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Microsoft unveiled its new Azure Stack offering at last year’s Ignite conference as a solution that would enable users to easily run Azure cloud services in their own on-premises datacenters, thus supporting the increasingly hybrid nature of organizations’ IT environments.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson, speaking at the 2015 Ignite keynote, described Azure Stack this way:
“This is literally us giving you all of Azure for you to run in your datacenters. What this brings you is you get that great IaaS and PaaS environment in your datacenters. You have incredible capability like a unified application model that gives you a one-click deployment experience for even the most complex, multi-tier applications and then you get that cloud-inspired infrastructure. We’re giving you the same software controller that we built for our network, the name is the same, network controller. We’re giving you our load balancing. We’re giving you all the storage innovation.”

Azure Stack represents an evolution of Microsoft’s older Cloud OS solution, which also promised to give partners and organizations the ability to build Azure environments in their datacenters, but suffered from low uptake due to its complexity. Azure Stack shares a common architecture, application model and DevOps tool set with Azure, according to Microsoft. This minimizes the work that developers need to do to make sure their apps work on both Azure and Azure Stack, as well as lets IT pros extend on-premises apps to the cloud without having to drastically change the tools they use for automation or management. Microsoft has not given a specific date for Azure Stack’s release, but because it is linked with the company’s 2016 wave of server releases, it will likely become generally available by year’s end.

While Microsoft claims 100,000 new Azure subscriptions per month, it also recognizes that many enterprises “still have business concerns around moving fully to the public cloud, such as data sovereignty or regulatory considerations.” So they are in limbo between the public cloud and on-premise; hence the need for a hybrid cloud approach that provides consistency across private, hosted, and public clouds.

Among the capabilities:
• Azure and Azure Stack feature a standardized architecture (e.g., the same portal, a unified application model, common DevOps tools); thus, developers can offer the same end-user experience as Azure delivers.
• IT professionals can transform on-premise datacenter resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services while maintaining oversight and corporate governance, using the same management and automation tools that Microsoft uses to operate Azure.

For heavily-regulated companies, control where data resides. Highly regulated companies (SOX, HIPAA, FDA, etc.) having their data hosted at a Microsoft Azure datacenter doesn’t typically meet all of their regulatory requirements. and there is a growing demand for enterprise cloud apps, with a hybrid cloud platform product that helps enterprises deploy Azure Services in a private cloud environment.

So, businesses have the freedom to decide where applications and workloads reside – overcoming one of the most vehement objections to the cloud.

Azure Stack and Dynamics
The new Dynamics AX, which will be launching on Azure first, apparently in March. The plans to bring the new AX to private cloud and on-premise customers hinge on the release of Azure Stack for the Windows Server 2016 wave of products.

Metanautix,
In December Microsoft furthered its pursuit of enterprise analytics with the acquisition of Metanautix, a company that makes it possible for businesses to pull together all their data and gain insights into it. Metanautix’s product can pull information in from a variety of private and public cloud data sources including traditional data warehouses, NoSQL databases like Cassandra and business systems like Salesforce. Once it’s aggregated, businesses can use SQL to query the resulting data pipeline in order to glean insights from the information. Microsoft isn’t saying much about its plans for Metanautix’s technology, but it can be expected to roll it into products like SQL Server and the Cortana Analytics Suite.

Why Azure anyway?
Managed Web Sites
Window Azure has a special mode of use just for 2-tier web sites, called Windows Azure Web Sites. Both Microsoft’s SQL Database or MySQL databases can be used. WAWS web sites use a shared VM pool, and provisioning happens in just seconds, not minutes. Customers can promote to reserved VMs if they choose. WAWS web sites are fast, easy, and superbly managed.

WEB FRAMEWORK SUPPORT
Window Azure Web Sites also support common open source frameworks, including DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, Orchard, and WordPress. Web developers can quickly provision web sites with their desired framework.

WEB DEPLOYMENT FREEDOM
Web developers work in different ways, and there’s no single way to deploy. Windows Azure Web Sites support several popular methods of deployment, including Web Deploy, FTP, Git, and TFS. In addition, the deployment is conveniently always to a single “server”, even when running multiple server VMs in the cloud. WAWS takes care of distributing new and updated deployment files to the individual VM instances.

IAAS
Window Azure now has Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) support, to complement the Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) support. IaaS Virtual Machines are based on VHDs which are fully portable between cloud and on-prem and those are also persistent, making Windows Azure viable at last for single-server solutions and for running server products such as AD, SQL Server, or SharePoint Server.

Non-Microsoft OS & Database support

Traditionally, Microsoft has offered platform services based on Windows Server and SQL Server. With the new platform there is support for Linux virtual machines and MySQL databases. This means a broader range of software can now run in the Microsoft cloud even SAP.

VM Image Gallery
When creating Virtual Machines, select from a gallery of pre-configured images. For example, install Windows Server 2008 plain, or with SQL Server also installed or add your own VM images to the gallery.

VM Composition

Window Azure virtual machines is easily provisioned, configured, and managed in the Windows Azure portal. Once you connect to and set up a VM, capture its disk to create a reusable image that is added to your VM image gallery.

Cloud Services

The traditional Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) mode–now known as Cloud Services–not only remains, it’s getting new and updated services. An expanded virtual networking capability can interface with enterprise VPN appliances to enable hybrid cloud scenarios where segments of your local network are joined to your cloud assets. Windows Azure Media Services, a new service in limited preview right now, will allow uploading, transcoding, and delivery of media content such as video. A new identity service is coming that will extend the identity federation we currently have in the Access Control Service with expanded capabilities.

The New Portal

Window Azure gets a huge usability boost in a cutting-edge new . HTML-based, management portal that can also be used on mobile devices such as iPads and Windows 8 slates. The new portal also provides a view of built-in metrics for WAWS, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines.

New Data Centers

Two new data centres were added recently (West US and East US), bringing the number of Windows Azure data centers to 8 (four in the US, two in Europe, and two in Asia). In addition, there is supporting worldwide infrastructure including a 24-node edge cache CDN network.

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Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics Ax, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and EPM, SQL, Technology

Education – school scheduling – Mimosa version 6.5.9 – Synergy Software Systems, Dubai

February 4th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Mimosa version 6.5.9 update = We are pleased to announce another new update to Mimosa Scheduling Software. This new Mimosa version includes the following features and bug fixes:
• For schools or universities applying personalised (or student-based) timetables, Mimosa offers renewed Selection optimisation in Tools menu.
Based on the comparison of currently selected and required courses by students, this tool automatically finds the course selection solution for students which satisfies the set requirements and uses the available capacity evenly and effectively.
Selection optimisation can also run also after some or all of the periods schedules are fixed • The user interface in

Timetables view
• New Help file content and images added. Mimosa proactively eliminates all possible conflicts in timetables

Mimosa prices (www.mimosasoftware.com/prices) are still the same as last year.

Simplify your classroom, subject, class and teacher scheduling with this proven solution used by thousands of schools, colleges and universities across the world.
Call us for more information 00097143365589

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Posted in schools, Technology

Edge from IE upgrade – did you miss the 12 January 2016 deadline?

February 3rd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

The upgrade-or-lose-support deadline of Jan. 12 has come and gone, and, a substantial minority of IE users remain on an outdated version.

The 17% of IE users running IE8, for example, are all on a browser that Microsoft will no longer patch; the same goes for most of the 7.3% who ran IE7 last month and for at least two-thirds of the 12.7% who have stuck with IE9. (The last will continue to receive security updates only if it’s running on Windows Vista, the 2007 OS that accounted for fewer than 2% of all Windows copies in use during January.)

If you have not yet upgraded then maybe its time to think about it!

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Posted in Microsoft, Technology

Why Dynamics Ax for 2016 – ask Synergy Software Systems, Dubai

January 31st, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Once it gets started this is a good overview of the new user interface and how to personalise it.

Ask us for a live demonstration.

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics Ax

Ax 2012 R3 CU 10 compatible with SQL 2012 Sp3

January 24th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Cumulative Update 10 and AX 2012 R2 Cumulative Update 9 are now compatible with SQL Server 2012 SP3.

The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 System Requirements are updated to reflect this change.

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Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics Ax, SQL

SQL Server 2005 – supports ends April 2016 – are you ready?

January 24th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will reach the end of extended support on April 12, 2016.
With the end of support, security updates and hotfixes will no longer be available from Microsoft
Note also that Windows 2003 support ends in July 2016

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Posted in Microsoft, SQL

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Manufacturing

January 23rd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Although there is much excitement about the new Dynamics Ax there is much to be excited about also in the current releases and most of the functionality discussed here works the same at the new release.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 and R3 Manufacturing- takes look at lean – once the introductions are over (around the 5-6 min mark) you will see some ‘day in the life walk’ through demonstrations this includes: kanbans, cycle times,, agile, time booking, with aspects of mrp, QA, subcontract etc.