Survey finds users think SAP is too expensive

December 11th, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

An interesting finding from an SAP UK and Ireland User Group survey is that:
– SAP customers find the supplier’s account managers insufficiently knowledgeable about their businesses.
– Customers say SAP knows too little about their businesses and is too expensive
– Over 50% of respondents say that SAP account executives don’t have the level of knowledge about customers’ industry or business to help with adopting innovation.
– 74% of respondents said that SAP was bringing out technology innovations at a speed with which they were unable to cope.

SAP’s reputation for high costs was also evidenced by the survey – 15% more respondents (69%) said that SAP licensing and subscription costs were cited as an adoption barrier compared to other vendors (54%)

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics Ax, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sunsystems and Vision, Technology

SynergyMMS- Affordable Hotel Maintenance Management on the cloud

December 11th, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Hospitality maintenance is like a puzzle. The complexity of that puzzle depends on the environment in each property, the local market, and the economy.

Often, maintenance is postponed or skipped due to limited resources, but this only delays problems which are likely to become much more severe.

Maintenance isn’t just fixing things, how well you maintain a property has a major impact on guest loyalty.

All hotels have beds, televisions and marble-top sinks. What sets you apart are: your prices, your service, and the quality of the property.

The effort put forth into preserving the asset and equipment will reflect in the guest satisfaction, the life of your assets and thus your costs, and your pricing and repeat bookings and thus the bottom line.

Hospitality maintenance is not an easy task in a 24 x7 operation and it requires coordination between departments and flexibility around occupancy. Limited staffing make s it difficult to complete scheduled maintenance since so much effort is placed on reacting to day to day issues -putting out fires. The problems are the same for al hotels in all regions, and the economy has not helped matters.

SynergyMMS delivers the tools for staff members to easily capture and to process work and provides visibility and accountability for work force management.
A cloud based SaaS module means no upfront purchase of license or hardware, and no extra workload for IT.

In hospitality, occupancy is a constant challenge when it comes to PM. With SynergyMMS and a PMS interface, properties can see which rooms are unsold and plan the daily PM . This reduces backlog and assists in planning. The PM Calendar shows future PM tasks and also the parts and hours required.

SynergyMMS supports unplanned maintenance actions including guest-focused response tools. Organize open work requests into custom lists per user to focus on what is important. Real-time information keeps everyone informed of the up-to-the-minute status of any issue. Audit trails and logs ensure accountability – every transaction is tracked.

The Pooling engine in SynergyMMS automates the distribution of work in SynergyMMS ensuring the work reaches the right person. Factors like: time of day, day of week, type of work and even location determine how the work should be sent out. Pooling can distribute work to devices such as cell phones, email addresses, DECT phone systems such as Ascom and printers. The Pooling engine will even load balance the distribution of work between members of a pool to ensure no one person is over-loaded.

The SynergyMobile iOS Application is a portable window into the program. Mobile staff members can remain up on the floors while exchanging information in real-time. Work request functions include: creating, editing and completing tasks as well as performing itemized checklist inspections for rooms and equipment. The iOS application is asynchronous meaning it can operate without a consistent signal only needing a casual connection for synchronizing when available.

The Multilingual Voice Interface is an excellent tool for creating a very convenient and comfortable interface with SynergyMMS. It is convenient because is utilizes any house phone to connect to the database allowing users to create accurate and timely work requests via the key pad. Simple numeric sequences ensure accuracy of reporting as well as quick data entry. An experienced user can create an accurate work request in about 15 seconds. The interface is offered in 10 languages; English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Polish, Slavic, Bosnian, Arabic, Creole and Philipino (Tagalog). Once the user enters their numeric employee ID, SynergyMMS looks up their preferred language and the rest of the dialogue is in that language eliminating barriers to accuracy of reporting.

The Multilingual Voice Interface dramatically increases the accuracy and timeliness of reported issues resulting in a better and faster response by Engineering.

There are lots of products that claim to manage maintenance so how is ours any different?

In a recent independent study SynergyMMS was compared with 6 other leading competitors and SynergyMMS was selected as the best choice based on ease of use, feature set and price – in that order.

So what does it cost?
Unlimited users/clients per property
Hosted environment (no local server required)
No license purchase
The Cost is an annual charge which includes enhancements and support, for around $1 per room, per month, depending on the interfaces required

SynergyMMS is built on 30 years in the business specializing in a single vertical – hospitality. Our intimate understanding of hospitality operations and our appreciation for the unique levels of involvement among the different departments and personnel is what sets us apart.

In summary, a comprehensive maintenance program specifically for hotelswill save you money and improve the quality of the guest’s experience. Synergy MMS is available through Deyafa Systems for the EMEA region and it is widely used globally by leading hotel chains. It helps ensure staff efficiency and accountability.
– Room/Equipment Preventive Maintenance
– Unplanned Maintenance Requests
– Guest Requests
– Intelligent Dispatching
– Mobile Application
– Multilingual Voice Interface
– Comprehensive Reports

SynergyMMS is the software solution employed by the world‟s largest and most successful Hospitality companies. Providing tools that are designed to support the roles of the many diverse users in a hotel, SynergyMMS offers non-technical, multilingual user-friendly interfaces for intuitive operation.With SynergyMMS the many departments at a property enjoy the following benefits:
– Improved communication through multilingual tools
– Increased guest satisfaction scores based on better quality of asset and faster response to issues
– Real-time status updates of work in the system
– User-oriented screens remove clutter and help users to focus on their tasks
– Inspection results recorded in real-time
– Trend analysis and comprehensive reporting
– Accountability improvements since work is completely tracked

The primary solutions SynergyMMS offers are:

Guest Issues – priority handling and escalation of guest issues
Work Request – multilingual tools make it easy to capture issues
Preventive Maintenance – both rooms and equipment
Inspections – with each response recorded for detailed quality assurance
Contact: Madhav Baru – 009714 3240066

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Posted in Hospitality

Cloud adoption – recent analyst reports December 2014

December 6th, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Cloud adoption is increasing as companies identify more IT operations they want to migrate.

The results of IDG Enterprise’s survey of 1,672 IT decision-makers represent the practices and opinions of technology buyers whose organizations already have, or plan to have, at least one application or some portion of their infrastructure in the cloud. The pace and implementation focus vary according to company size, industry and job titles of parties involved, while security concerns persist as the top challenge to deployment. (Computerworld 11.04.2014)

A survey of more than 650 IT decision makers in Australia, Brazil, Germany, United Kingdom, North America, and Singapore by Dimensional Research that uncovers global trends in information technology (IT) strategies for 2015 found that the vast majority (77 percent) plan to implement multi-cloud architectures in the coming year. These same decision makers are seeking interconnected colocation data center environments because they offer direct connections to multiple cloud providers for increased security, reliability and performance.

CompTIA researchers at the IT advocacy and education organization has watched cloud go from potential game changer to foundational player in modern IT. That meteoric rise, and the prospects for long-tail entrenchment of cloud in business technology, continued unabated this year, with more than 90 per cent of companies now using some form of cloud computing, the latest CompTIA study finds. (Channelweb)

Most enterprise cloud users (83%) struggle to consolidate their cloud services and get a holistic view of their cloud infrastructure, software and platform services, a study from Forrester Consulting revealed. “Cloud computing has reached a tipping point for enterprises with some 83% of the enterprises we surveyed struggling to bring together all their cloud services — from IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and from public and private clouds to traditional IT,” See the study, titled Simplify and innovate the way you consume cloud. (Computer Weekly 11.19.2014)

43% of enterprises are planning to deliver the majority of new business applications over the internet next year, a new Akamai Technologies report revealed. However, half of the companies reportedly run 20% or less of their business apps over the internet, the “Trends in Application Delivery Strategies” survey report added. Akamai Web Experience Business Unit senior vice president and general manager Mike Afergan said: “Trends such as globalisation, telecommuting and mobility continue to drive the shift to Internet-delivered applications, and enterprises today are working hard to keep up. (Computer Business Review 11.18.2014)

In October with a series of cloud announcements Microsoft moved to put a stake in the ground with hybrid cloud computing and emerge from the shadow of cloud rivals Google and Amazon. “This helps get Microsoft onto an equal footing with Amazon and Google, who are the most talked about cloud players today,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “It’s a smart move. It gives Microsoft a unique offering that can’t easily be matched by its competitors right now.”

Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM (IBM) announced a partnership aimed to enhance their respective positions in cloud space. The partnership will let IBM’s middleware software, known as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, and DB2 database, run in virtual machines (or VMs) on Microsoft Azure for development and deployment purposes. Although fierce rivals in the market for cloud computing services, IBM and Microsoft both pledged to make their technologies interoperable in the cloud for the sake of their users. In October thecompanies jointly announced that many Microsoft enterprise products would run on IBM’s infrastructure and platform services, and that many key IBM middleware products would be available for use on Microsoft Azure. (Computer World 10.22.2014)

Microsoft added three new big data services to its Azure cloud platform as part of its ongoing efforts to make Azure a leading platform for big data services and to make it ready to tackle the Internet of Things (IoT). “Every day, IoT is fueling vast amounts of data from millions of endpoints streaming at high velocity in the cloud,” says Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Machine Learning at Microsoft. “Examples of streaming analytics can be found across many businesses, such as stock trading, fraud detection, identity protection services, sensors, web clickstream analytics and alerts from CRM applications. In this new and fast-moving world of cloud and devices, businesses can no longer wait months or weeks for insights generated from data.” (CIO.com 10.30.2014)

Public IT cloud services spending will reach $56.6 billion in 2014 and grow to more than $127 billion in 2018, according to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). This represents a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8%, which is about six times the rate of growth for the overall IT market. In 2018, public IT cloud services will account for more than half of worldwide software, server, and storage spending growth. (BusinessWire 11.03.2014)

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Posted in Technology

Dynamics CRM, Cortana and Windows 8.1 devices

December 6th, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Dynamics CRM 2015 will ship next month with multiple enhancements, including one literally audible: using Cortana on Windows Phone 8.1 devices, users will be able to talk to the customer relationship management suite.

Tasks available via Cortana voice commands will include setting up meetings and reminders, searching for contacts, accounts and activities, calling up customer lists and creating new records. (Computer World 11.06.2014)

>”This is very significant. Salespeople spend a lot of time on the road, so this lets them leave voice memos on an account while on the go, without having, for example, to be typing and driving,” said analyst Ray Wang, chairman and founder of Constellation Research.

Nucleus Research vice president, and analyst, Rebecca Wettemann, said it’s been proven that adding mobile access to CRM drives significant productivity gains. “This is just the tip of the iceberg in vendors leveraging the voice capture and analytics technologies to deliver CRM productivity,” Wetttemann also views the integration as part of a broader and recent Microsoft trend to leverage its product portfolio to boost its enterprise applications under new CEO Satya Nadella. “The bigger story is that this is a great example of how Microsoft is bringing its product strengths to bear on CRM,” she said.

A recent example of this approach was last month’s launch of the Sales Productivity bundle, which combines Dynamics CRM Online Professional with Office 365 and Power BI.

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Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Technology

Oracle license audits survey November 2014 – user mistrust

December 6th, 2014 by Stephen Jones 31 comments »

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2843992/oracle-licensing-practices-lead-to-mistrust-among-customers-says-survey.html
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/feature/2383728/does-oracles-licensing-leave-its-customers-hostile-and-filled-with-deep-rooted-mistrust

Oracle’s relationship with customers ‘filled with mistrust’:
A survey by the Campaign for Clear Licensing has found that customers do not trust Oracle and are confused by its licensing structure.

CCL contacted 100 global end-user organisations,
– 92% said Oracle does not clearly communicate licensing changes
Less than a quarter said the firm was helpful during an audit or contract-renewal process.
– 88% thought Oracle audit requests were unclear and difficult to manage or to respond.

Three themes emerged from CCL’s research:
• customers do not feel autonomous;
• messaging from the vendor is inconsistent;
• Oracle moves the goalposts to suit its own revenue objectives.

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Posted in Construction Software, Corporate Perfomance Management, Infor Financial solutions, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics Ax, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Technology

Middle East Banks Basel lll Capital requirements

December 1st, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

A recent study analysed the ability of a sample of 22 banks in the GCC and the Levant to meet Basel III capital requirements, and outlines the long-term opportunities for the banking sector and identifies potential roadblocks in the process of full compliance with Basel III requirements, starting by capital shortfall.

Dubai: The Basel III regulations present an opportunity for Middle East banks and regulators to embrace new rules and improve the sector’s asset quality and risk-return profiles, according to a study by management consultancy Strategy&.

The Strategy& study, (renamed from the former brand Booz & Company following its acquisition by PwC) analyses the ability of a sample of 22 banks in the GCC and the Levant to meet Basel III capital requirements, and it outlines the long-term opportunities for the banking sector and identifies potential roadblocks in the process of full compliance with Basel III requirements, starting by capital shortfall.

Complying with Basel III regulations will encourage Middle East banks to take acalculated and strategic approach to decisions about businesses, asset choices, and growth, while allocating capital toward opportunities that fit the bank’s actual risk and return profiles. This should strengthen investor and client confidence in Middle East banks and lead to profitable and well-managed growth in the financial services sector going forward.

“…. the Basel III requirements can be much more than a technical burden and a drag on growth and said Jihad K. Khalil, senior associate with Strategy&.

The new regulations force regional banks to take a closer look at their capital allocation and to deploy their capital more strategically. The study shows that the sample of 22 of the largest players in the Middle East banking sector will experience an average capital shortfall of around 25 per cent of total regulatory capital required by 2019 as per Basel III rules, assuming current growth rates.

The study encourages bank executives to develop a clear understanding of the new requirements that cover six areas of reform, to be able to support the compliance with Basel III regulations. These areas include the definition of capital; countercyclical buffers; enhanced risk coverage; new leverage ratio; new liquidity standards; and other general risk guidelines.

Liquidity standards are new to the Basel guidelines and place . greater emphasis on banks to hold high-quality liquid assets such as government debt.

A recent digital banking forum REGIONAL DIGITAL BANKING CHALLENGES indicated that Banks in the UAE and wider Middle East region have a long way to go in adopting digital and customer-centric strategies. At the same time, smartphone penetration across the GCC region continues to grow, proving a strong business case for banks to make the switch now. Within ten years time, a majority of bankers expect mobile banking to play a much bigger role in the customer experience than branches.

Modern technology will be major strategic and competitive factor for banks and will also underpin stringent compliance reporting, and internal analysis e.g. of risk and liquidity. The majority of banks in the six GCC countries are upgrading core technology not only to improve operating efficiency and customer satisfaction but also to meet more-stringent regulatory requirements and risk management. They are using the technology to enter new areas, offer new products and services, and expand market share with the provision of new distribution channels.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management

Some Financial Services Regulatory fines around the world

December 1st, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

The importance of regulatory compliance management is perhaps most evidence when the regulatory imposes swinging fines, and the additional PR and credibility damage to a financial institution. FATCA , Basel III will require even more compliance controls and systems..

US Department of Justice (USDOJ)
•Credit Suisse : sentenced for conspiracy to help U.S. taxpayers hide offshore accounts from Internal Revenue Service. USD 2.6 billion in fines and restitution.

US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)
•FINRAfined Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. $15 million for failing to adequately supervise communications between its equity research analysts and its clients and Citigroup sales and trading staff, and for permitting one of its analysts to participate indirectly in two road shows promoting IPOs to investors.

New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS)
•NYDFS has announced that the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ misled regulators – individual bank employees will resign and accept bans. it will pay an additional USD 315 million penalty
BTMU pressured its consultant, PwC, to remove key warnings to regulators on the bank’s transactions with sanctioned countries, including Iran, Sudan and Myanmar.
PwC previously received a 24-month consulting ban and paid USD25 million for misconduct in this case.

Italian Court
•Giuseppe Mussari, Antonio Vigni and Gianluca Baldassari, former chairman, chief executive and finance boss of Monte dei Paschi di Siena were sentenced to three years and six months in jail for misleading regulators in relation to a derivative trade with Nomera that according to the prosecutors was used to conceal the losses.

UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
•FCA fined three former senior executives of Swinton Group Limited £928,000. The FCA’s action follows previous enforcement against Swinton:
2013 it was fined £7.4m after it adopted an aggressive sales strategy that resulted in mis-sales of monthly add-on insurance policies;
2009 the firm was fined £770,000 for failures in its sales of PPI.
Peter Halpin, former chief executive, is banned from acting as chief executive of a financial services firm.
Anthony Clare, former finance director, and Nicholas Bowyer, former marketing director, are banned from performing significant influence functions at financial services firms.
•The FCA imposed fines on five banks £1.1 billion for failing to control business practices in their G10 spot foreign exchange (FX) trading operations.
The imposed fines totalling £1,114,918,000 are divided as follows:
Citibank N.A. £225,575,000,
HSBC Bank Plc £216,363,000,
JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. £222,166,000,
The Royal Bank of Scotland Plc £217,000,000
UBS AG £233,814,000.

•The FCA fined Chase de Vere Independent Financial Advisers Limited £560,000 for failures surrounding the sale of Keydata life settlement products. Chase de Vere did not research the Keydata products well enough to understand the risks posed to customers and did not ensure that its advisers understood those risk .
•FCA fined: the Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, National Westminster Bank Plc and Ulster Bank Ltd £42 million for IT failures and meant that the Banks’ customers could not access banking services.
According to the FCA the Banks had failed to put in place resilient IT systems which could withstand, or minimise the risk of, IT failures.

UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO)
•William Godley, a former director of investment firm Imperial Consolidated Group, (previously convicted for his part in a global fund conspiracy), has been ordered by the SFO to pay a confiscation order of £1,458,317.65 from which all the money will be paid in compensation to victims.

Central Bank of Ireland
•The Central Bank of Ireland fined Ulster Bank Ireland Limited €3,500,000 and reprimanded it in relation to IT and governance failings that resulted in approximately 600,000 customers being deprived of essential and basic banking services over a 28 day period during June and July 2012.

Brussels Judiciary Authorities
•A Belgian investigating judge has charged a Swiss private banking branch of HSBC with organized fiscal fraud, money laundering and forming a criminal organization to the benefit of over 1,000 wealthy clients, mostly people involved in the Antwerp diamond trade.
The branch is suspected of promoting and encouraging fiscal fraud by putting offshore companies in Panama and the Virgin Islands at the disposal of clients. It said the companies had no other purpose than to hide its clients’ assets.

The Reykjavik District Court
•Sigurjon Arnason, former head of Landsbanki, was jailed for 12 months for manipulating the bank’s share price and deceiving investors, creditors and the authorities in the dying days of the bank between 29 September and 3 October, 2008.

Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA)
•FINMA has ordered UBS to disgorge a total of CHF 134m. FINMA found that over an extended period of time the bank’s employees in Zurich at least attempted to manipulate foreign exchange benchmarks. Employees acted against the interests of their clients. Risk management, controls and compliance in foreign exchange trading were insufficient. By breaching control requirements and owing to the misconduct of its employees, UBS severely violated the requirements for proper business conduct.
•FINMA imposed special conditions on the Coop Bank and issued the former CEO with an order prohibiting him from acting in a management capacity at any supervised institution. From 2009 to 2013, the Coop Bank manipulated the market price of its own bearer shares. Its actions constituted a serious violation of supervisory provisions on market manipulation and an infringement of its organisational and business conduct requirements.

Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC)
•The SFC has banned Mr. Leung Wai Hung from re-entering the industry for 18 months, for failing to make proper records of the order instructions from his clients and circumventing the order recording requirements of his employer.
•The SFC has reprimanded Ms. Yue Siying, in her capacity as adviser at UBS AG and fined her $400,000 for negligence in handling a client’s trade orders. Instead of placing cross trades as initially instructed by the client, Yue and her assistant coordinated with the buyer to conduct a series of on-exchange matched trades.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management

DIFC Registrar of Companies (ROC) – Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)

December 1st, 2014 by Stephen Jones 1 comment »

The ROC recently sent out a letter clarifying their role and the reporting obligations in relation to FATCA. The UAE and the US have in principle agreed the terms of the Intergovernmental FATCA Agreement.
The DIFC is required and empowered to collect the information required under the intergovernmental FATCA agreement and the ROC is to be the point of contact.
The FATCA reporting process will flow from the Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) to the ROC on a form prescribed by the US, and this information will be forward by the ROC to the Ministry of Finance, which will consolidate it with data from federally regulated FFIs before sending it to the US Treasury.

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Posted in Uncategorized

U.A.E. National Day 2014

December 1st, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

National Day (Arabic: اليوم الوطني‎; Yawm al watani) is celebrated on December 2 each year in the United Arab Emirates. The cebrations mark the UAE’s formal nationalisation from the British Protectorate Treaties (which ended on December 1, 1971) and the eventual, federal unification of the seven emirates in 1971 which combined to form the modern-day country, headed by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the federation’s first president.

Grand celebrations are held across the country to mark the event.

A message from H.E. ABDULHAMID A K AL MULLA – UAE AMBASSADOR can be read here http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2014/11/30/national-day-of-united-arab-emirates/

Many events and activities have been planned in Dubai.
Dazzling Fireworks Show – Opposite Burj Al Arab Hotel – 6pm onwards, December 1

As part of the celebrations of UAE 43th National Day, there will be dazzling performance with the popular international magicians and spectacular fireworks shows at the Burj Al Arab. The events will take place opposite Burj Al Arab Hotel and is free of charge. However, only those who had pre-registered through the website before November 18 can only make it to the event now. The event will take place on 1st of December 2014 from 6 pm onwards.

Fireworks and ‘live’ Entertainment – : JBR beach – When: 5pm (live entertainment) and 9pm (fireworks), December 2
Expect a scintillating fireworks display at the beach opposite Jumeriah Beach Residence on Tuesday, December 2, 2014. Celebrations will be on with live entertainment from 5pm onwards and fireworks start at 9 pm.

Dance, light show, fireworks – City Walk, Al Wasl/Safa Road – Daily 2pm to 11pm, November 28 to December 2
City Walk, at the junction of Al Wasl and Al Safa Road, will be organizing events from Friday, November 28 to Tuesday, December 2. The five-day festivities will include traditional performances by Al Ayalla and Al Yolla dancers, an eventful showcase of skill by LED jugglers, face painting on the National Day, and a beautiful play on lights that illuminate the destination. The festivities will conclude on December 2 with a fireworks show that will begin at 9pm. ‘Live’ entertainment will begin at 5pm onwards each day and fireworks at 10pm.

National colours on waterfall, cultural activities, exhibitions – : Dubai Mall – till December 6
Expect several cultural activities and entertainment at the Dubai Mall to celebrate the National Day. The Watani Exhibition at the mall will offer visitors insights about the UAE’s history, including the foundation of the seven Emirates, the development of the nation and the vision of its great leaders, from November 30 to December 6, 2014, at The Dubai Mall, Star Atrium.

Arabian Pearl Exhibition, another exhibit, will provide visitors with the full history on the early days of pearl diving, traditional tools used and clothes worn, from November 28 to December 6 at The Souk Atrium.

Children’s parade featuring over 40 Emirati children, all dressed in the UAE flag colours, will march through The Dubai Mall’s ground floor reciting the National Anthem, on December 1 and 2 from 4 to 8pm. The UAE flag colours will be projected onto the mall’s Waterfall, until December 3 allowing visitors to take souvenir shots.

UAE-themed Art & Entertainment – : Dubai Outlet Mall – 10am to 12midnight, December 1-3
Dubai Outlet Mall has planned live art shows, entertainment, and a treasure hunt for the upcoming National Day celebrations. ‘Live’ painting exhibition under the central theme of ‘My UAE’ will see local artists of diverse nationalities come together Mall to create their own artworks on December 2. Artists will only use UAE flag colours – Red, Green, Black & White – in their creations. In addition, visitors can participate in a treasure hunt at the mall, with the event being broadcast live on radio.

Listen to live Arabic music: The MusicHall in Dubai is known for offering one of the most interesting and eclectic live music venues in the city. Having already attracted Arab musical stars Mashrou Leila this week it is hosting a night dedicated to Arabic music on Monday December 1. Expect a night of the all-time best Arabic hits and an all-star line-up including The Khaleeji Twins, The Chehade Brothers, Bilal Fadia Najem and more. For more information and reservations please call 971 56 270 8670.

Watch a boat parade: See boats parade up and down the Dubai Marina canal in UAE-themed decorations, including iconic buildings and indigenous wildlife. The day will also feature a line-up of family entertainment including face painting, a treasure hunt, live cooking stations and prize draws. The event is free and lasts between noon and 6pm at the Dubai Marina Yacht Club. Call 04 362 7900 for more information.

See the Graffiti scroll: If you’ve been along the Jumeirah Beach Road near Jumeirah Beach Park in the few days before UAE National Day you can’t help but have noticed an enormous graffiti wall emerging. The world record-breaking attempt at the longest ever graffiti image is a 2,180m painting called Rehlatna (Our Journey) and is a portrayal of the country’s history.

Emirati culture: The UAE has achieved much in just 43 years . There are cultural and heritage events happening all over town on National Day. Contact the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding on 04 353 661 or visit the Al Fahidi District in Bur Dubai. See the pop-up Emirati village selling local handicrafts and giving henna painting at the JA Ocean View Hotel in JBR between 5-10pm until December 3.

Please note Synergy Software Systems will be closed on 2 December.

Be aware of traffic congestion

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Posted in Events, General Synergy News

Dynamics CRM 2015 released – ask Synergy Software Systems,Dubai

November 27th, 2014 by Stephen Jones No comments »

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is now available for download, and CRM Online trials also feature the new release.

CRM 2015 enhancements, range from very specific features like hierarchical entities, Outlook and Exchange synchronization, and improved search to improvements in the tablet interfaces and new business rules capabilities.

Microsoft expects Dynamics CRM Online to reach more than 130 markets in 44 languages before the end of 2014.
CRM 2015 also marks the beginning of a new integration push.

The integration with Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) now includes a tool to bring sales teams into the marketing planning process, allowing them to review and control which accounts will receive which MDM marketing campaigns.
In addition to deepening the MDM integration, Microsoft announced new integration plans for Dynamics CRM with Capptain, Cortana, and Thunderhead.com.

A partnership between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Thunderhead.com was also recently announced by Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in a blog post. “By combining their strengths alongside Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we are going to change the way you build engagement with your customers,” he writes.

With Thunderhead.com, Stutz says, “you can very simply develop and visualize a customer journey path, with relevant activities that cross multiple channels, so that your customers can interact with you in the manner that best suits them. At the same time, you are able to garner fresh insights into their digital footprint, to see how they are interacting with you and what their behavior patterns are.”

http://www.thunderhead.com/

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics CRM