Podcasts about appsource

On this digital event Ida from Microsoft and Martin Fischer from Arrow will give you a fundamental introduction to the different marketplaces (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) to ensure your company chooses the right storefront. Massimo from Microsoft will hereby give a technical introduction and the listing types, walk you through the difference between public and private offers as well as the technical requirements.

On this digital event Ida from Microsoft and Martin Fischer from Arrow will give you a fundamental introduction to the different marketplaces (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) to ensure your company chooses the right storefront. Massimo from Microsoft will hereby give a technical introduction and the listing types, walk you through the difference between public and private offers as well as the technical requirements.

Dynamics ERP veterans Tanya Henderson and Steve Endow join the podcast to discuss their new ISV venture focused on the Dynamics 365 Business Central market, Blue Dragonfly. They also talk about their overall career journeys from a focus mostly on Dynamics GP a few years ago to now working primarily with Business Central. They bring some unique observations to what's happening in the BC space, including their outlook on how AppSource is changing, the differences in how Microsoft seems to run its BC R&D organization compared to the old GP team, and how the global community interacts more or less 24x7 around the world. They also offer some interesting ideas for what it takes for other GP professionals to get up to speed on BC. Links: Steve Endow: https://links.steveendow.com  Tanya Henderson: https://tessteam.com/ Show Notes 1:45 - How Tanya and Steve each got their start with Business Central 5:45 - The origins of their new ISV business based on Business Central: Blue Dragonfly 9:30 - The decision to develop new ISV products for the BC space 13:00 - Blue Dragonfly's first product, recurring billing 16:00 - Developing product ideas and plans 17:30 - The per-tenant extension opportunity in BC 22:00 - The decision to commit to BC: architecture, licensing, marketplace, administration, and more 25:15 - AppSource experiences as a BC ISV - why current standards can cause concerns for some apps 29:15 - Best practices for an ISV in an app-centric Business Centric world 33:00 - Using Azure services for optimal cloud-based solutions 36:00 - What to look ahead to in 2023 and the community's influence 42:00 - Microsoft's adoption of GitHub and the broader agile transformation of BC 44:45 -  Preparing to work with partners and customers in 2023 on products and services 50:45 - Steve's multi-year effort to gain expertise in BC 52:15 - 2023 conferences where you can hear from Tanya and Steve

In today's #TBT segment we try a Business Central Address Verification app from Microsoft AppSource and discuss the other Address Verification apps found on AppSource. Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-episode-27

Jeremy Thake and Ayca Bas interview John Peluso, the Chief Product Officer at AvePoint to discuss their journey building MyHub on top of Microsoft 365.   Check out MyHub on Appsource.

On this month's episode of A Shot of Business Central and A Beer Ken and Michael have the latest Business Central news, then chat with Ryan Meade from DynamicWeb about eCommerce and PIM, and finally Ken and Michael wrap things up by taking a look at a couple highly rated free Inventory Apps from AppSource. As always though, before we dive into all things Business Central we start the podcast off with ice cold beer. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-episode-43 Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ Podcast Directed by Ken Sebahar ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ Podcast Produced by Michael Intravartolo ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/

Since a bit of time has passed since the last episode, let me briefly bring you up-to-date: In June, we at NETRONIC organized an event series that we run under our "next by NETRONIC" event brand. The idea of next by NETRONIC events was to host online events in which we just play a facilitating role for having panel discussions, dive into Business Central-related topics, and avoid NETRONIC scheduling demos. Hence, the "next by NETRONIC" event brand is ideal for running an event series in which actually other ISV solutions play a key role.To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". We want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. We - by the way - will only allow presenters that have their apps in Microsoft AppSource. With the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange, we want to make it easier for our customers and partners to find manufacturing apps that close requirement gaps ... just like our visual scheduling apps do.So, the industry vertical solutions webinar was the last of the events and two industry vertical ISVs presented their solutions:Michael Bradley works in pre-sales and marketing at PrintVis, USA, the Microsoft-certified Print MIS, a software solution specifically developed for the print industry which is built directly on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Hence, Michael contributed a lot of print industry-specific knowledge to the discussion.Adri Cardol is the Product Manager at TO-INCREASE from the Netherlands. TO-INCREASE specializes in the development, delivery, and support of industry solutions, and connectivity tools for Microsoft Dynamics NAV/BC to Microsoft Dynamics partners. We had Adri in the panel discussion to share with us details about the industrial equipment manufacturing industry.

Steve shares a long list of back end work required to support a BC appAzure Functions Security:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azur...Azure SQL Security:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azur...Business Central Security and IP Protection:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dyna...Business Central AL Access Property:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dyna...Music by Philip E Morris - Good Morning - https://soundcloud.com/philipemorris

 Following last week's shopfloor discussion episode, here is the 28th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. Again, this episode originates from our Business Central Manufacturing Exchange webinar series. It is a recorded panel discussion on warehouse challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Žilvinas Lapačinskas (Software Baltic), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and James Crowter (Clever Dynamics) as my guests. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". With the event series, we want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. So, last week, we ran a warehouse solutions webinar in which three warehouse ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three warehouse experts. Namely, these are Žilvinas Lapačinskas is a supply chain management consultant at Softera Baltic from Lithuania. Softera is a well-known Business Central partner in the Baltics. They understand how manufacturing, commerce, and service companies work so that they can offer fitting industrial and process automation solutions.Mark Hamblin is President of Insight Works, a Canadian-based ISV specializing in manufacturing and distribution apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.James Crowter is a Microsoft MVP and the Managing Director at Clever Dynamics from the UK. Clever Dynamics provides a range of clever apps for smarter manufacturing and distribution that are seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.I highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Softera, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your warehouse challenges.

The 27th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show is somewhat different than all the others that you have been listening to so far. This episode is not a conversation with one guest. Instead, it is a recorded panel discussion on shopfloor challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Bent Korsgaard (Naveksa), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and Matthew Woodhouse (Clever Dynamics) as my guests.A bit of background: Recently, we at NETRONIC ran a webinar series that we called the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange. Oftentimes, when we speak to customers (and also to partners), we are confronted with requirements that are outside our scheduling core competency. Sometimes, we are asked for shopfloor solutions and time tracking. Another time, it is product configuration. And yet another time, it is that people request some warehouse functionality from us. Not seldomly, we are also asked for manufacturing solutions that are specific to one particular industry.  Hence, we grasped a general need for more transparency on the Business Central manufacturing apps and solutions landscape. We took that need seriously and launched the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange to address this need. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". So, last week, we ran a shopfloor solutions webinar in which three shopfloor ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three shopfloor expertsI highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Naveksa, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your shopfloor challenges.

This episode is sponsored by KwikTag by enChoice. To learn more about KwikTag and the benefits of SimplyAP, the cloud AP automation solution, visit kwiktag.com. The Dynamics 365 Business Central ecosystem has seen drastic changes in the last few years, thanks in large part to the product's rapid evolution. That greater maturity means the product can now address the needs of more organizations, and that has also drawn in more ISVs willing to invest in integrating their solutions. Our guests from KwikTag by enChoice, director of marketing and channel Mary Miller and VP of product Mike Fernandes, share their observations on the changes in the Business Central ecosystem, from buyer attitudes to ISV priorities. Solutions of the future will be easier to deploy (like through AppSource), provide more pre-built AI capabilities, and generally do more for less. Mary and Mike discuss the importance of enChoice's acquisition of AI-driven OCR platform provider Sypht and the launch SimplyAP for Business Central, KwikTag's new solution for BC that is designed for rapid deployment and uptake. Show Notes: 1:30 - Where do Mike and Mary see the Business Central market today? 5:00 - Important advances in Business Central that help ISVs publishing integrated products 7:00 - Improvements in Business Central APIs and solution publishing 9:00 - Why younger workers are changing expectations around making business solutions easier to find, deploy, and use 10:30 - How Kwiktag have adapted their product strategy to meet market demands 13:45 - Adjusting pricing and technology to meet the needs of growing organizations that need AP automation 15:00 - Opportunities to add intelligence to the AP process  in KwikTag's product roadmap via the Sypht acquisition 17:00 - The launch of SimplyAP for Business Central 18:30 - Planning for the second half of 2022

The guest in episode 26 of Martin's Business Central Manufacturing Show was Andrei Panko. Andrei is a program manager in the Business Central engineering team at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having a Microsoft employee as a guest on the podcast was really a novelty. In the other episodes so far, all speakers were Business Central manufacturing experts working for a Microsoft partner. So this podcast provides most interesting insider insights into how things work in the Microsoft Business Central development team.Andrei started working as a consultant, developer, and project manager in 2004 - back then it was Dynamics NAV, of course - and was an MVP for six years running. He has extensive field experience in the supply chain and has engaged in many other aspects of the Business Central application and platform as well. Besides, he is the author of the book "Supply Chain Management in Microsoft Dynamics NAV", which was published in 2008, and he holds a patent for metadata-driven machine learning for systems.Before diving into how things happen at Microsoft, Martin first wanted to know how Andrei got into manufacturing and how it does matter to him. Andrei related that one of his first customers was a small manufacturing company that needed to improve its processes and for whom he purchased and implemented Business Central.According to Andrei, the great strength of Business Central, even back then, was that it could be easily and flexibly modified to fit specific unique company processes. While Andrei and Martin agreed that this strength still exists, they both think that the way of creating these enhancements has changed quite a lot. In their opinion what had been real customizations in the past, now increasingly get turned into apps.This led to a discussion about whether Business Central has become a much more core part of Microsoft's overall strategy, by e.g., providing the AppSource infrastructure or integrating it with Power Platform.Andrei gave a short "historical" discourse from how the ERP was deployed 20 to 30 years ago to how it is done today by way of SaaS. The red thread running through this development over time is one of the core initiatives at Microsoft Business Central. The team has been helping partners reduce the number of ad-hoc developments. This not only changed the selling and deployment model of many partners but also changed the requirements for Business Central.In order to help partners and customers reduce the number of ad-hoc developments, Business Central has become tighter integrated with the Office products, tools are now much better integrated with the overall ERP and there is much more tooling support also from the power platform.In this context they talked about another way of reducing ad-hoc developments, namely listening to, and using the feedback they get from customers and partners. Andrei related two interesting facts:The development teams do not receive much direct feedback from end-users and customers.Mostly, the partners only give feedback about their own needs instead of those of the end-users, and they prefer to get tools to solve their customers' problems instead of getting solutions for these problems directly.

Today's episode focuses on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) with our guest, Global Engineering Lead for the CAF, Brian Blanchard. The CAF framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud.We discuss moving your technology and business to Microsoft Azure and talk about some best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We also talk about mistakes people can make along the way.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptThe Cloud Adoption FrameworkCloud Adoption Strategy EvaluatorCloud Adoption Framework Discover WorkshopsMicrosoft Learn ModulesAzure Migration and Modernization ProgramGuest:Brian Blanchard is the Global Engineering Lead for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF).Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We have a wonderful discussion with David Starr, a Principal Software Engineer from the Commercial Marketplace Services team (and fellow hoster of his own Podcast) to talk about the services available to ISVs and customers to get their cloud applications and solutions visibility via the Azure Marketplace so then can monetize them. We discuss Azure Managed Apps, App Source and various technical and business details around these services. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode418.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gu8N0sjnkLA Resources: Azure Marketplace - https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/ AppSource - https://appsource.microsoft.com/ Mastering the Marketplace technical learning library - https://aka.ms/MasteringTheMarketplace Azure for Executives podcast - https://aka.ms/AzureForExec Get started here - https://partner.microsoft.com   Other updates: App Service Environment version 1 and version 2 will be retired on 31 August 2024 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/app-service-environment-v1-and-v2-retirement-announcement/   http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-ondemand-capacity-reservations/   Diversifying the telecommunications supply chain with Open RAN https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/diversifying-the-telecommunications-supply-chain-with-open-ran/   Accelerate silicon design innovation on Azure with Synopsys Cloud https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/accelerate-silicon-design-innovation-on-azure-with-synopsys-cloud/   Introducing the new Azure Front Door: Reimagined for modern apps and content https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-new-azure-front-door-reimagined-for-modern-apps-and-content/   Public preview: Azure dedicated host support in AKS   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-dedicated-host-support-in-aks/

In this episode, we're talking about how Microsoft engages with the developer community. Growing and maintaining a strong community of developers has always been important to Microsoft. Our developer relations team, led by Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft Jeff Sandquist, makes the world better for developers and enables them to apply the latest technologies to create software that changes the world.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptAzure Developer Community BlogDeveloper CommunitiesMicrosoft ReactorGuest:Jeff Sandquist is the Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Hur tjänar du pengar med Microsoft . Korta ner säljcykeln, nå nya marknader och öka dina intäkter. Vem vill inte det? Hey du kan till och med få till en deal I Japan utan att ha ett kontor där. Läs mer om Azure Marketplace. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've heard this term bandied about for many years now, "Single Version of the Truth". As Jack Nicholson once said, "You can't handle the Truth!" I would paraphrase that as, "You can't afford a Single version of the Truth, and you wouldn't want it anyway!". So, let's see how many of you I can get to agree on this one :). What is Implied? From a business standpoint, "Single Version of the Truth" or SVT, is often pimped as this utopian idea that all of your data, about everything to do with your customers and your business is in one place. providing the coveted 360-degree customer view. First, no such Utopian application can be subscribed to from anyone on this planet today. However, you can subscribe to several applications and potentially spend an enormous sum of money and time to wire them all together, giving the illusion of a SVT. While some of you might be sad to hear that SVT is not "push-button", I will try to cheer you up by saying you would not want it anyway. Silos are Bad! Yes, if you read back on my blog, you will see me also preaching that data silos are bad. In fact, I used the same post image for this post. But that was then, and this is now. Back in the days before the Power Platform, when all we had was Dynamics 365, we also sang Microsoft's tune of the time that "You want all of your data in one place", meaning in a Dynamics 365 database. This was a strong argument for a customer who was considering multiple point solutions made by vendors other than Microsoft. And we had a great deal of success consolidating those multiple point solutions under a single Dynamics 365 umbrella. But to call that a SVT was a stretch. Maybe "Fewer Versions of the Truth" with a 245-degree view of the customer was a more realistic goal, as that was typically the outcome. Dynamics Silos Even under the Dynamics 365 brand there were, and still are, silos. Dynamics 365 Sales runs on top of Dataverse, while Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics 365 Finance run on their own databases. Dual-write is an ongoing effort to create the SVT illusion. Power Platform The Power Platform arrived and blew up the whole concept of SVT. Even Microsoft started singing a different tune, promoting their Center of Excellence "COE", so you could more easily manage the possibly thousands of environments (aka Data Silos) that users could now create in your enterprise tenant. So, is SVT dead? The problem was never with "Point Solutions" and their siloed data, it was with "Point Solutions" and silos from other vendors. With the Power Platform, Microsoft created a rocket engine to crank out "Point Solutions"... but these would be "inside the wall". Silos are Good! So now let me be my own devil's advocate. I will take our own organization, Forceworks for example. The Sales side of our business watches over AppSource prospects and website prospects etc. You can probably imagine that with over 50K users of our RapidStartCRM app, that means there were way more prospects than that, who did not move forward. So, we have thousands of prospects and most of these will never amount to anything, of course. Not unlike any other business where the number of prospects is typically exponentially higher than the number of actual customers. The Services side of our business works with our actual customers, not every RapidStartCRM user becomes a customer. Our customers are organizations who have engaged us to support or customize not only RapidStartCRM, but also Dynamics 365 or anything Power Platform related. So, our Service database is a fraction of the size of our Sales database. In our case, Sales runs on a customized version of RapidStartCRM in one environment, and Service runs on another customized version of RapidStartCRM in another environment. The rationale? Why should the service team have to navigate around thousands of irrelevant records?  If they are not customers, they don't need to be in the Service silo. But what about Synchronization! Much of "Synchronization" is unnecessary hype. Yet many organizations pay us tons of money to try to achieve it. Flow can handle 90% of what is actually useful. For example, when a prospect in our Sales solution becomes a customer, a simple flow creates the record in the Service solution. If a service customer asks about a new app or service, a simple flow in the service app updates the record in the Sales solution. Unintended Consequences If you have not yet built a flow that acted beyond the scope of what you intended... you have not bult enough flows. Both of our environments have multiple flows, many quite complex, automating a bunch of things. Were all of these in a single environment, the chances of a Service flow accidently scooping in some Sales records for example is much higher. So, flow development becomes much more complex. But what about my 360-degree view of the Customer? Let's face it, you are not going to get around the fact that you will have multiple sources of data. At least with Microsoft, it is possible to have all of those data sources under one roof, which I do not believe can be provided by any other company today. If you really want that 360-degree view, yet another application can give you that, Power BI (Microsoft's Business Intelligence app). Power BI can not only connect, munge together and regurgitate beautiful charts and graphs using data from all of your Microsoft sources, it can bring in most of your external data sources as well. I would still argue that the "360-Degree view" is over-rated, the only positions that might actually need that are very high senior management, and we all know they don't look at data anyway... unless it supports a personal agenda. So that's my take on this. If you are looking to shovel money to someone in pursuit of this dream, hit me up. Or if you just want business applications that "work" for your business, you can also hit me up. Feel free to leave any comment you like, as long as it supports my personal agenda, I am a CEO after all :)  

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/345 Learn more about Poland – a good place to visit and famous food  Krzysztof Bialowas' career and educational background The difference between NAV and Business Central Find out which one is good for your Business - NAV or Business Central Krzysztof's responsibilities and the things he is developing What is Microsoft AppSource – how to use it and why is it important? How does AppSource help you run your business Krzysztof's journey into becoming a Microsoft MVP Talks about Krzysztof's involvement in the MVP community  MUSIC CREDITSThe Happiness of Larry by radiotimes (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nz365guy)

In this episode James & Liam discuss the challenges faced in 2021 plus their predictions for 2022. They delve into the explosion of SaaS and how it increases your ability to manage the performance of your system as well as better protect it from security breaches like Ransomware attacks. They also cover the AppSource boom and what to look out for when downloading apps from there, as well as a new eCommerce integration coming in the new year… it's a jam packed episode! Listen today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Microsoft believes security and information privacy are fundamental rights. And Microsoft has taken this to heart with a Confidential Computing initiative as part of the overall Azure promise on trust and security.In this episode, Graham Bury, Eden Cohen, and Anna Montalat Campamar talk about what Confidential Computing is, what is Microsoft's vision for Confidential Computing in the Azure space is, pros and cons to computing confidentially on the cloud rather than a private data center, and a few stories about how partners and customers are working with Microsoft to move forward their own Confidential Computing initiatives.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptAzure Confidential ComputingKey foundations for protecting your data with Azure confidential computingCustomer stories:Accelerating healthcare AI innovation with Zero Trust technologyScaling secure enclave environments with Signal and Azure confidential computingRBC creates relevant personalized offers while protecting data privacy with Azure confidential computingMobileCoin creates fast, trusted cryptocurrency transfers with Azure confidential computingGuests:Graham Bury joined Azure's Compute organization two years ago to lead the commercialization and developer platform for confidential computing.  He brings over 15 years of experience at Microsoft across client and service products from Windows to Surface Hub and HoloLens.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Eden Cohen joined Azure's Compute organization earlier this year and leads the infrastructure product team within Confidential Computing. He is responsible for virtual machine and hardware-based products. Follow him on LinkedIn.Anna Montalat Campamar leads the product marketing efforts for Azure Security platform and Confidential Computing. She has experience in a wide array of technologies – from infancy such as quantum to growing ones, including confidential computing.Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter. Host:David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We are discussing what it means for technology executives to lead their companies through true digital transformations, both from technology and cultural change perspectives. We've mentioned digital transformation several times over various episodes. Today, we'll be making digital transformation very tangible and providing guidance for leaders looking to revamp their organizations with technically driven initiatives with our guest Merrie Williamson, the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptDigital Transformation with MicrosoftMicrosoft Learn course - Enabling Digital Transformation Microsoft Industry digital transformation blogSatya Nadella on Digital Transformation for Microsoft (Video)Guest:Merrie Williamson is the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.She is responsible for global commercial sales, strategy, and execution for the core multi-billion-dollar Azure business. She has a strong background in leading engineering and product teams and in marrying sales to engineering.Follow her on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today we're talking about opportunities partners have in marketing and selling their solutions through Microsoft's commercial marketplace. Through our commercial marketplace, partners have an opportunity to unlock access to millions of customers at a worldwide scale. Here, you'll learn how the commercial marketplace works and steps you can take to take advantage of this in your business strategy.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptISVs and Partners: Publish Your AppCustomers: Buy an appMarketplace Business Office Hours  Marketplace Developer Office HoursJoin the Microsoft Partner NetworkEventsGuest:Tanuj Bansal is the General Manager of Azure Product Marketing. He has been in various leadership roles in product marketing for the Azure business from its very early days, always championing customer and partner success. Follow him on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Heute nehmen wir wieder eine App für Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central unter die Lupe. Belege und Berichte in Business Central sind bei jedem ein Thema. Sie sollen dem CI des Unternehmens und den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen entsprechen, einfach anzupassen sein und das bitte nicht immer für viele tausende Taler in tausend Tagen. Mit der Erweiterung ForNAV soll das ganz easy sein. Jennifer Singleton, Geschäftsführerin bei ForNAV ist unser Gast in dieser Folge und gibt uns allen tolle Einblicke in die Welt von ForNAV. …und das Thema „RDLC und Word-Reports lokal drucken“ hat ForNAV auch gelöst. Da sich unsere Moderatorin Birgit und Jennifer schon seit über 10 Jahren kennen und "alte NAV / Business Central Hasen" sind, gibt's natürlich auch ne Menge Real-Talk über die gesamte Microsoft Dynamics 365 Plattform. ForNAV in bewegten Bildern findet Ihr hier: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpjnuA-F0c9PllSe-RjsBWIytWegCfvc

Welcome back to a special episode of A Shot of Business Central and A Beer, presented by Solution Systems, a Gold Microsoft Partner. In today's episode Ken and Michael will be chatting with Mike Morton. Mike is the General Manager of Business Central at Microsoft and has been in this role for almost 2 years. During this podcast Mike offers insights into what the future holds for Business Central, upcoming features, reporting, AppSource, and much more. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Podcast Show Notes ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/post/a-shot-of-business-central-and-a-beer-interview-with-mike-morton Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ Podcast Directed by Ken Sebahar ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ Podcast Produced by Michael Intravartolo ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/ #Podcast #MSDyn365bc #ERP #Microsoft #Software

Ja was ist das denn? DYNAMO APPs für Zahlungsverkehr, Finanzwesen und Kartenterminal-Anbindung in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - die machen Anwender einfach glücklich. Angelika Lanbin, erzähl doch mal was die DYNAMO APPs so alles können. Wer mich kennt weiß, dass ich seit 2004 ein Microsoft-Mädchen bin, vom Kopf bis unter die Füße. Damals hieß Business Central noch NAV (und kurz vorher noch NAVISION) und die heutige APP DYNAMO PAY hieß "Diskettenclearing / elektronischer Zahlungsverkehr". Leute, wo ist die Zeit geblieben?

Today's episode is an insightful throwback from episode 5. It's all about the apps that can be found in AppSource to help you with reporting expenses in Business Central. Listen in as Ken and Michael install some of these apps, use them, and offer their opinions. Subscribe to the Podcast on all Platforms! ➢ https://www.solsyst.com/podast-locations Microsoft Software Information: ➢ Dynamics 365 Business Central: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-business-centralMake ordering, selling, invoicing, reporting, and manufacturing easier and faster. ➢ Dynamics 365 for Sales: https://www.solsyst.com/dynamics-365-for-salesDifferentiate your business, build loyalty, and maintain your reputation with Microsoft CRM. ➢ Microsoft 365: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-365-businessFamiliar, secure, top-of-the-line productivity and collaboration tools that are always the latest version. ➢ Power BI: https://www.solsyst.com/microsoft-power-biTransform your company's data into rich visuals and spot trends as they happen and push your business further. Follow Solution Systems ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solution_systems/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Solution-Systems-Inc-354733749699/ ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Solution_System ➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solution-systems-inc- ➢ Blog: https://www.solsyst.com/blog Podcast Hosts ➢ Ken Sebahar | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-sebahar-26237515/ ➢ Michael Intravartolo | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/intravartolo/

Shortly after we launched RapidStartCRM back in 2015, a couple of competitors followed us into the emerging space we identified. They are gone now, but new ones occasionally pop up. I hear "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". First Mover Advantage As the very first simple-to-use CRM solution built on Microsoft's Business Applications platform, we did have an early advantage. We brought a lot of SMB knowledge to the offering, and SMBs were eating it up. My assumption that there was a market hungry for CRM, but turned off by the complexity of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com, proved correct. Even Microsoft was a promotor of RapidStartCRM, seeing it as a path to capture a segment of the market they were never very good at. But the first mover advantage won't carry you forever. While we may be able to forever claim we were the first, it requires ongoing work to continue to claim we are the best. First Users Advantage Being the first to market is important, but having the first users of a new product, is much more valuable. As an SMB ourselves, we could anticipate many needs for a simple CRM, and we incorporated them into the very first version. But our ability to anticipate needs pales in comparison to actual user feedback. While largely the same application (in appearance) that we launched in 2015, there have been over 25 version updates over those years. Every one of those updates was a direct result of feedback from our growing user base. I see what you did there When we launched, there was no "AppSource", the best our potential competitors could do was watch one of our videos to try and reverse-engineer what we were doing. A few tried, some even copying and pasting our web copy. I was mostly annoyed at the sheer laziness of their efforts. It's a little different today, our app is now available to anyone via AppSource, and not surprisingly of the competitors I am aware of today, each of them had installed RapidStartCRM in advance of launching their copies. Some have at least attempted to take a slightly different approach, yet others simply came up with a catchy name and are basically trying to replicate what they think we are doing. One even pretended to be a customer and reached out with questions! Even Microsoft closely dissected and reviewed RapidStartCRM as they were developing the "Business Edition", the "never launched" predecessor to the Dynamics 365 Professional offers. The Missing Link The primary reason we have had so many updates, while our competition seldom gets past their first one, is the over 50,000 users we have on our app. You don't get that many users launching a knockoff with your fingers crossed. Sure our brand recognition for RapidStartCRM is high, but that would not mean anything if the app was not excellent, and continuously updated as new capabilities come out and features are requested, as long as both of those items fit within our mantra of "Simple-to-Use". We closely evaluate any changes, to ensure we don't trip the touchy complexity wire. This is a lesson some of our aspiring competitors should learn as they replicate our concept, but then proceed to add a bunch of crap to it. Simple isn't Easy You would think that building something simple should be easier than building something advanced... it's not. Even with Microsoft's vast resources, the Dynamics 365 Professional apps that they positioned for SMB, missed the simplicity mark by a mile. The fact that so many SMBs are using the professional apps is a testament more to Microsoft's marketing might, than the apps being appropriate for most of their SMB customers. It's funny how our roles have reversed. When they were first promoting RapidStartCRM it was with an eye towards eventually moving those new customers to Dynamics 365. Instead, many Dynamics 365 customers are moving to RapidStartCRM. Of course I knew this would happen, but I continued to smile as they told me about "their" plans for RapidStartCRM. It's about the Churn In the SaaS software business "Churn" is a critical number. Basically it means that while you successfully sold a customer on your product (Yay!)... they cancelled shortly thereafter (Boo!). While Microsoft does not publish their churn rates, I am aware that for SMB customers, over the years, the churn rate for Business Applications has been very high. Not surprising since Microsoft cannot not grasp the concept of "Simple", a natural by-product of an organization comprised of thousands of engineers. RapidStartCRM's churn rate on the other hand is near zero, the one exception being future competitors of course. Healthy Competition While anyone would want to have a monopoly in their space, it is not realistic in a free enterprise economy. I look forward to "healthy" competition, something that moves the needle forward. But for now, I guess we will have to continue being the ones who move the needle, because knockoffs don't move anything. If you are thinking about a Simple CRM, think RapidStartCRM, the first, with the most users, and still the best, Simple-to-Use CRM built on the Microsoft Power Platform.

On this episode, we are talk about the Azure Marketplace in the retail space: how the Azure Marketplace can help retailers, and how the it may be important for your business, both as a customer or as a solution publisher with our guest, Orlando Fernandes of XNFY Labs.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptXNFYMicrosoft Cloud For RetailAzure For RetailGuests:Orlando Fernandes works in Innovation & AI for the retail segment. He has the goal to create solutions that could change paradigms and create unique value.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Or visit his blog: https://medium.com/@orlando.ribas.Sahir Anand is the Principal Category Lead for the Microsoft Azure Cloud for Retail and Data & AI.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

I have had my head down for a while working on the next version of RapidStartCRM. We also recently deployed RapidStartCRM for our own support operations. In the process, I came across a few items that I thought would be of interest to the users of our free app, and since they would also work for any Power App, including Dynamics 365, I thought I might discuss them. Next Version Before I get into this, I want to clarify what I mean by "Next Version" of RapidStartCRM. We have been developing this product since 2015 when we launched it a the Worldwide Partner Conference (Now called Inspire). Over the years we had made hundreds of updates and tweaks in direct response to users. We also refactored the solution a couple of years ago to run on the low cost Power Apps licenses in addition to Dynamics 365. Each update, with the exception of the refactoring, had progressively fewer changes as we honed in on our target customers' requirements. I am pleased to inform you that the next version will have the fewest tweaks yet... I mean it is damn near perfect already. So let's get back to our internal project. Forceworks Support We had been running our support operation on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for over 10 years. Several times I had contemplated moving it to RapidStartCRM, but as a certified partner my licenses were free, so I kept putting it on the back burner. Our support operation is not very complicated. Customers buy blocks of hours which we add to their bank, and we track our activities against those blocks. We also maintain a portal where customers can login and see their bank balance as well as review all activities. We had been using a third-party portal since before Microsoft even contemplated a portal product. The portal company had been purchased by another company for other assets of value to them and the portal product came with the package.  But portals was not a priority for them. I figured it was a matter of time before they shut it down. So the time had come to move. Dynamics 365 So, as I said I get Dynamics 365 licenses at no cost. So it might seem an obvious choice just to fire up a Power Apps Portal and connect it to our existing instance. and be done. However, as years have gone by now with us supporting customers on RapidStartCRM, many of whom had moved to it from Dynamics 365, I have come to not really like Microsoft's first-party apps very much. I truly feel they are unnecessarily complicated and bloated. And while my licenses may be free, any additional database capacity is not. Our instance, even though it was not doing all that much, was consuming the lion's share of our capacity. So I made the decision to "upgrade" our support operation off of Dynamics 365 and on to our own RapidStartCRM. Also, Power Apps Portals works the same on RapidStartCRM, so there was no reason to continue with the bloated beast. And, if for some reason I was no longer getting free licenses, my cost would be about $10 vs. $95 per user... a factor in many other customers' "upgrading". Migration We could have done this upgrade/migration in a day, but I took this opportunity to make some improvements to our process. Mainly around automation, nothing we could not have done before, but this was a good time, since we were opening things up. We started with the same RapidStartCRM solution as our customers get, and installed it from AppSource on a new environment the same way any customer would. We made use of the RapidStartCRM Accounts, Contacts and Cases. We created two custom Tables, one for Case Notes, to track time and activities, and one for Support Hours, to track the customers' purchases and banks. We also created several Cloud Flows with Power Automate... things like calculating hours and various customer notifications. In addition, we added some specific charts to the RapidStartCRM dashboards for quickly getting a view of things. We also tweaked the RapidStartCRM App to hide Opportunities and a couple of other items we were not using for this need. Lastly, we mapped and migrated all of our historical data to the new environment. I didn't even pause before I hit the "delete" button on our old bloated environment we had depended on for 10 years. Portals So I mentioned that Microsoft offers a Power Apps Portal. Again, for me it would cost nothing. Depending our your requirements, it might be a good solution for you. Unfortunately, like everything the Microsoft Business Applications group produces... it is more complicated than necessary. This is even more noticeable when your requirements are simple. Our requirement was to have a place customers could log into and see their account information, purchase history, case information and case notes. I wanted it to be clean, simple and easy to maintain. Not too complicated. Our Forceworks main website runs on WordPress, like so many other small to mid-sized businesses. So my preference was a WordPress based portal. My friend, and fellow MVP, George Doubinski had the answer. The AlexaCRM WordPress integration solution. Using Alexa, we are able to display any information we want from our RapidStartCRM environment on any WordPress posts or pages. For us, it was a better solution. AlexaCRM can do much more, I am aware of customers running full eCommerce portals with it! If you let George know that you heard about his solution from this post, he promised me he would sing you a short song of your choice. Power Automate Our previous environment had used classic workflows for everything, so this was a good time to move those to Power Automate Cloud Flows. However, I am not 100% sold on Power Automate... yet. Classic workflows still exist because Microsoft has not yet reached parity with Power Automate to be able to turn them off. The "Fullness of Time" does seem to be quite full indeed. But I decided to use Cloud Flows wherever possible. It seems that every time I look for a connector in their expansive list of hundreds, it either does not exist, or does not do what I need it to. This was the case for WordPress also. The connector exists... but is essentially useless. Once again, a fellow MVP to the rescue. Heidi Nuehauser is working with Nick Hance at Reenhanced, and they have a rock-solid Power Automate connector for WordPress that can be used with either Gravity Forms or Contact 7 forms on your WordPress site. If you use the code FORCEWORKS, you can try it out for a month for free. BTW, I did not actually need the Reenhanced connector for our Support site, but while I was under the hood, I decided to update all of the forms on our main Forceworks and RapidStartCRM websites. So now all forms submitted create a record in Dataverse automagically. Results Since our Support Portal is not public (unless you want to buy some hours), I added some screenshots below for your reference. If you would be interested in a similar solution, please contact Forceworks. Account Summary Page   Cases Page Case Details Page

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

Low Code solution creation is all the rage. A Gartner report even forecasts, “By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using low-code development tools.” In this episode we're discussing Microsoft's Low Code platform. We'll hear why it can matter for you at a strategic level in your organization and we'll also be digging down into the capabilities of the platform.Our guests today, Charles Lamanna and Ryan Cunningham, talk about what types of solutions people are building using the platform, who uses the platform and who the most common type of “Low Code” users are, Microsoft's Dataverse as a key part of the Power Platform and what it is, and how someone new to these technologies gets up and running to try it out and get started.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptLow Code Application Development on AzureMicrosoft Power Apps on AzurePower AutomatePower Automate Robotic Process AutomationGuests:Charles Lamanna is the Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications & Platform (BAP) at Microsoft. He leads the engineering teams in the business applications & platform across both Product Management and Development. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Ryan Cunningham is the GM for Power Apps at Microsoft. Power Apps is the Low Code platform used by millions of people around the world to build apps that make their working lives better.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Did you know there's now over 1400 apps that plug into your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? With a lot of them being free to download and explore, with no need to build a dedicated server for or make customisations to? No? Well you do now, and in this week's episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, we discuss why we love the AppSource so much and our top picks to compliment Business Central and your everyday operations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

COVID-19 has presented major challenges to healthcare, and lately that's included accelerating the development and delivery of vaccines and therapeutics at scale. Luckily, in recent months we've seen an acceleration in the supply lines of delivering vaccines from manufacturers to recipients.Today we are talking with Microsoft partner Schrocken's Sunil Ghogre and Yogendra Chordia, and Microsoft's David Houlding about empowering life sciences organizations to meet supply chain challenges.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptSchrockenShrocken on LinkedInAzure Marketplace OfferMicrosoft HealthAzure MarketplaceAppSourceHow to get started partnering with MicrosoftMicrosoft for StartupsIgnite Sessions:What's new in Microsoft Cloud for HealthcareLearn how Microsoft & Intel unlock the potential of edge & AI in healthcare to collect data & turn it into actionable insightsIntro to Mixed Reality Business Apps + Real-Life Use Cases in HealthcareGet started on your HealthTech JourneyGuests:Sunil Ghogre has over 30 years of diverse, global experience delivering exceptional manufacturing operations management and supply/sourcing expertise in the Pharmaceutical and Consumer industries.Follow him on LinkedIn.Yogendra Chordia is a technologist with 25+ years of enterprise software experience. At Schrocken he is focusing on applying his hi-tech supply chain experience in digitizing biopharma contract manufacturing supply chain.Follow him on LinkedIn.David Houlding is the Director of Strategic & Healthcare Engagements for Microsoft Azure. He served as Chair of the HIMSS Blockchain task force for over 2 years, and currently serves as an Advisor to the British Blockchain Association. He has technology interests and specialties in cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain and AI.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we’re talking about the IoT (Internet of Things) space and the related data that drives the industry with two industry leaders from Crate.io who specialize in IoT data management: Christian Lutz, founder, and president, and Eva Schönleitner, CEO. Data in the IoT space is unique in many ways, most notably in shape and scale.Also discussed are some of the many announcements made by Microsoft at the annual Ignite conference, which was held recently. As always, there was a lot of big news that came out of Ignite. Microsoft’s Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing gives the scoop.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptCrate.io.NET Core on GitHubPerceptAzure Percept: Edge intelligence from silicon to serviceGuests:Christian Lutz is the founder and president of Crate.io. He has over 20 years of experience as a startup entrepreneur with strong experience in enterprise software. Follow him on LinkedIn.Eva Schönleitner is CEO of Crate.io. She has extensive worldwide experience in the technology and industrial segments and has a track record of developing high-performing organizations. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.Diego Tamburini is Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing at Microsoft. He helps build the best ecosystem for software partners developing manufacturing solutions on Azure and helps them be successful. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Businesses set different thresholds for successful ERP projects, and the reasons can be complicated. With budgets that range from thousands to millions of dollars and often little room for delay or rework, it should be no surprise that some organizations end up going live with critical financial and operational business systems that an outside observer might consider sub-par. Microsoft has taken an interesting strategy with Dynamics 365 Business Central, the company's SMB ERP cloud offering, urging partners to pursue highly repeatable, fixed price deployments wherever possible. That model serves some interests, like accelerating the growth of the customer base, but it has also created tension with ERP professionals who say their years of experience and dedication to customer success have taught them to pursue other approaches to achieve the best outcomes. Alex Chow, founder of AP Commerce, is one of those ERP veterans who has charted his own path in the Microsoft channel. He says he started his own firm in 2005 to allow him to work with clients in the way he preferred. And while the firm is not the biggest or fastest growing, he says the company's philosophy has held the team on a steady path even as the product and channel trends have shifted around them. Alex recently wrote about his experiences meeting Business Central customers post-go-live that were living with problematic deployments and the concerns these cases have raised. We discuss some of those observations and more about his broader experiences with Business Central and NAV. Show Notes 2:00 - Alex's early experiences in the ERP consulting profession and how that led to him starting his own firm 6:00 - Finding other consulting models beyond billable hours, and how to make it a reality for NAV professionals 13:00 - Does traditional billable consulting still make sense for Business Central today as a SaaS offering? And how Microsoft is managing partners today. 17:00  - What makes an organization unique - or just like everyone else 19:30 - What can go wrong on a BC deployment, and what led Alex to write about it. 23:30 - The nature of fixed-price BC implementations and why it can lead to less-than-ideal outcomes 25:30 - What's unique about these companies' issues compared to ERP failures of the past 27:00 - How to improve sub-par implementations and why BC customers might be wary after go-live 31:30 - What differentiates a worker doing repeatable deployments vs specialized service 39:45 - Where to find professional help for BC 41:30 - Response to Alex's article 43:00 - If and how selling and servicing BC has changed AP Commerce 45:30 - Can customers install solutions from AppSource themselves?

Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/304

Insurance has some problems. It’s too complex, too expensive, and it doesn’t cover everyone. Our guest today, Rob Galbraith, the most interesting man in insurance and author of the book The End of Insurance as We Know It, says that tech can help though, but it must be relevant to the consumer’s needs. To support this hypothesis, he has coined the acronym S.C.A.L.E.D. to focus on the technologies he believes are transforming the insurance industry. He tells us what it means and explains each part in detail.Additionally, usual host Paul Maher takes on a guest role this week as a former CTO at Milliman and talks about what some of Microsoft’s big investments in insurance are and how Microsoft AI technologies are impacting insurers and financial services as a whole.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptThe End Of Insurance As We Know It (Rob’s book)Azure for Financial ServicesAzure for InsuranceGuest:Rob Galbraith is the most interesting man in insurance. He is a keynote speaker, media contributor, and bestselling author of The End of Insurance as We Know It. He is the Insuretech Business Series man of the year for 2020.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Special Guest:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about looking at various technologies and their impact on business and society. Our guest and digital speaker, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam, talks about cutting-edge tech like augmented reality and describes how wearables can be used by insurers to promote good health, which benefits both insurers and their clients.Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications. Additionally, he talks about the democratization of AI and what is happening there, both good and bad.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptDatafloqDatafloq on TwitterQuantum computing at MicrosoftAzure QuatumQ# and the Quantum Development KitGuests:Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is the Digital Speaker. He focuses on the Future of Work and how to build the organization of tomorrow using emerging technologies that include big data analytics, blockchain, the Internet of Things, tokenomics, and Artificial Intelligence.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit his website at thedigitalspeaker.com.Dr. van Rijmenam has also authored and co-authored several books. Check them out!Think Bigger - Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your BusinessCo-author of the book Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our WorldThe Organisation of Tomorrow (discusses how AI, blockchain, and big data turn every business into a data organization.)Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about high-performance computing (HPC). HPC is important in many industries and lets us work with data at scale, operate on large media files, work with large AI and ML workloads, and run big batches of worker jobs.Tim Carroll, Director for HPC & AI for Research at Microsoft, and Evan Burness, Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure tell us what high-performance computing is and why it’s unique, how it is being used in the industry today, benefits of the new HPC VM over what people have used in the past on Azure, and for people who are not using HPC today, how they can get it up and running!Episode Links:Episode TranscriptMicrosoft Azure HPCAzure HPC by industryMore performance and choice with new Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPCGuests:Evan Burness is the Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure.Follow him on LinkedIn.Tim Carroll is the Director for HPC & AI for Research. He is also a HPC Global Black Belt at Microsoft.Follow him on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Most organizations producing software are moving their workloads to the cloud. In doing so they are typically choosing between 3 modes of cloud service, especially regarding their product architecture. The 3 main models for cloud offerings are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.Moving solutions to the cloud, or building a cloud-native solution, requires rethinking how we sell and distribute our software. Cloud-first sales models can be very different than traditional sales pipelines. Today we are focusing on Software-as-a-Service applications as a vehicle for selling cloud-based solutions. Our guest, Ercenk Keresteci explains that SaaS applications are the de-facto model for companies licensing their software.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptWhat is SaaS?Publish solutions on the Azure MarketplaceClients for different programming languages and samplesGuest:Ercenk Keresteci is a Microsoft Principal Architect with a focus on manufacturing and the Internet of Things. He has a specific focus on these industries while helping partners onboard their solutions onto the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.Host:David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Kohei Kurihara, co-founder of Privacy by Design Lab and President of the Tokyo chapter of the Government Blockchain Association, helps us understand the difference between public and private blockchain and talks about how blockchain can be used in data privacy scenarios, how blockchain fits into the larger IT ecosystem, and which industries are taking up blockchain today.Additionally, David Houlding, Director of Healthcare Experiences at Microsoft tells us what investments in blockchain he is seeing particularly around data privacy.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptMicrosoft Azure Blockchain SolutionsAzure Blockchain ServiceAzure Blockchain WorkbenchGovernment Blockchain AssociationGuests:Kohei Kurihara is the co-founder of Privacy by Design Lab and has deep experience with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. He is the president of the Tokyo chapter of the Government Blockchain Association.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.David Houlding is Director of Healthcare Experiences at Microsoft. He has 26+ years of experience in healthcare spanning provider, payer, pharmaceutical, and life sciences segments worldwide, he also has deep experience and expertise in cloud computing, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, and AI / ML. Responsibilities include leading an expert team and program to accelerate key healthcare partners of Microsoft with Azure, Marketplace, and GTM jumpstart (co-marketing, and co-selling) to help them grow worldwide.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.HostDavid Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Join me with Haniel Croitoru, Associate Director of Protiviti, a Technology Consulting solutions provider in Toronto, Canada.  Haniel shares a story about one of his power platform projects for a not-for-profit client and shares the lessons learned about multi-language deployments, implementation approach, executive sponsorship, and change in user adoption. Our discussion covers:The importance of strong project sponsorship in projects which drive a lot of organisational change.Refining knowledge gained on a project, writing about it, presenting it, clarifying it, and making it available for others via AppSource.Using common language analogies to explain SharePoint concepts and bring them to life.Easing the challenges of change management and adoption by supporting early adopters with the aim of smoother sailing as they become champions in the user community.Staggering rollouts instead of releasing them all at once to ease the stress for users who do not deal well with change.It was great to hear how he's designed a solution for multi-language, Power Apps user interfaces, his agile approach to building business applications, and how he addresses change management and user adoption in his projects.ResourcesHaniel Croitoru on LinkedInHaniel Croitoru on TwitterProtiviti on LinkedInThe United Church of CanadaMy online Scrum for Microsoft Business Applications training courseAppSourceAmazing Applications podcast page on LinkedInAmazing Applications podcast page on PodchaserScrum for Microsoft Business Apps online course at Customery AcademyAgile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps free online mini-course at Customery AcademySupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/amazingapps)

Acknowledging the pandemic in the UK is presenting some unique challenges. Andrew Busby, the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem, talks about how is the pandemic is impacting retail in the UK and across the world and the digital technologies and trends retailers are specifically using that are really making a difference right now.We also discuss how Microsoft is taking part in some of the technologies or trends Andrew describes, and what Microsoft and other retailers are seeing in the retail space in response to COVID challenges.Episode LinksEpisode TranscriptAndrew’s ArticlesSafePremBehind the Mask PodcastSafePrem BlogSafePrem on TwitterMicrosoft in RetailRetail Trends Playbook for 2021Azure Machine LearningAzure Digital TwinsAzure Synapse AnalyticsAzure MarketplaceAppSourceGuestAndrew Busby is the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem. Andrew is a Top 20 global retail influencer, Forbes contributor, IBM Futurist, keynote speaker, retail writer & analyst.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. HostDavid Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about making data-driven decisions using DataVisor with Jamshed Patel, Vice President of Solution Engineering. Nick Leimer, Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance, explains how seeing more fraud-based solutions in the insurance industry means moving to real-time analysis, alerting, and remediation with DataVisor.While we’re seeing early adopters embrace technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help drive their businesses forward with autonomous systems, the uptake is much slower than one might expect. The number of companies willing to turn over their operations to a real-time-system vs. a report-analyze-act sort of model is surprisingly small.Some organizations have taken the approach of capturing all kinds of data in hopes they will glean insights after capturing anything and everything they can get their hands on. Jamsheed explains how using this technique has panned out for companies trying to find insights from their data estates or data lakes and shares interesting data sources he looks at to make determinations about threat vectors and real-time remediation.Episode LinksEpisode TranscriptMicrosoft Azure Synapse AnalyticsDataVisor.comDataVisor on LinkedIn and TwitterAzure MarketplaceAppSourceGuestsJamshed Patel is Vice President of Solution Engineering at DataVisor. DataVisor is a Microsoft partner and makes powerful and comprehensive fraud and risk solutions for various industries.Follow him on LinkedIn.Nick Leimer is Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance.Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare so rapidly in 2020 and whether these changes will stick in years to come.David Houlding, Director of Healthcare Experiences on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team, describes some of Microsoft’s current major initiatives around Healthcare like investing in AI.Our guests, Irma Rastegayeva and Evan Kirstel of eViRa Health talk about what interesting technology and trends are in healthcare right now, as well as how technology can best serve healthcare to be more agile in serving current strains in the healthcare system, and how we, as consumers, are now using wearables like Fitbits and Apple Watches to take in-home monitoring of our own health to the next level.Episode LinksTranscripteViRa HealthFollow eViRa Health on LinkedIn or Twitter.Microsoft HealthAzure MarketplaceAppSourcePartner Center: how to get started. HealthcareIndExp@Microsoft.comAzure MarketplaceAppSourceGuestsIrma Rastegayevais a former Googler, software engineer, and technical manager, turned Digital Storyteller and Coach for clients in healthcare, life sciences & health tech. She is particularly focused on the patient journey.Follow her on  Twitter or LinkedIn.Evan Kirstel a tech influencer and evangelist with 30 years of experience in enterprise sales, alliances, and business development. He brings a unique perspective to remote work, social, mobile, and the voice/video/web collaboration market and cloud technology.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.David Houldingis the Director of Healthcare Experiences on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in healthcare and related technologies, most recently cloud, blockchain, and AI.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, Alan Chhabra, SVP of Partners and SVP of Asia Sales at MongoDB, talks about MongoDB, a high-performance database best suited for Big Data applications and Agile software development practices. It offers a flexible data model, elastic scalability, and high performance. Microsoft Azure is one of the best places to run MongoDB workloads securely and efficiently.Alan discusses trends to be watched in the non-relational database space, MongoDB for website development, as well as the many other uses of the platform, how their experience has been from his side in offering MongoDB Atlas on Azure, and how he sees the future of MongoDB evolving within Azure.Episode LinksShow TranscriptMongoDB WebsiteAutomated MongoDB Service on Microsoft AzureFollow MongoDB on Twitter or LinkedIn.GuestAlan Chhabrais responsible for Worldwide Partners as well as running Asia Sales at MongoDB.He is a frequent speaker at industry events where he regularly leads discussions on how cloud computing, IoT, and big data can help CIOs meet their business objectives.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this special edition of the MSDW Podcast we are featuring a recent conversation between Microsoft MVP Rick McCutcheon and Microsoft global strategic ISV alliance manager John O'Donnell on how partners are utilizing Microsoft AppSource. Rick originally published this conversation as part of his Partner Talks series. Microsoft launched its AppSource ISV solution directory in 2016 as a replacement for a collection of old and fragmented systems. The initial coverage compared it to Salesforce AppExchange and Microsoft promised it would lead to higher ISV solution quality and that it would evolve quickly with. Nearly five years later, AppSource has evolved and grown, though probably not as quickly as Microsoft has wanted. Still, most ISVs in the  Dynamics 365 and Power Platform space list their solutions there, and some partners even list services offerings. Some vendors report closing sales thanks to the platform, others don't. In this conversation, O'Donnell emphasizes several strengths of the platform, from its global reach to its expanding set of offerings, beyond Dynamics 365 and Azure into other areas of Microsoft's business. They also discuss some ways vendors can optimize their listings to get the most out of the platform today.

In this episode, Dr. Louise Beaumont talks about the idea of exploiting disruption: the most meaningful and promising disrupting trends or technologies she is watching, as well as how open and accessible data changes the landscape of financial services, and the technologies driving change around data usage.She also discusses the concept of open banking and its goal to provide services we didn’t know we needed, but now can’t live without, and the value of industry vertical marketplaces.Episode LinksBanking Industry Home - For various articles and papers.Capital Markets Home - Among other things, you’ll find a great e-book on Enabling the capital markets firm of the future.Financial Services BlogGuestDr. Louise Beaumont has a soft spot in her heart for true innovation and disruption in financial services. She works with legislators and regulators to drive positive disruption with established organizations to cope with disruption, and with start-ups to exploit disruption. As such, she has a rounded perspective on FinTech’s future and the smart, open and accessible data required to fuel it.Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this second episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, Directors James and Matt discuss how projects have significantly evolved due to the current times, which has made a considerable impact on how they are delivered to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers. In this 20-minute conversation, the duo explains how the last 12 months have seen the biggest shift. They explain how the pandemic, as it has in many other areas, accelerated the change to remote project delivery - a move many Tecman customers had already started on in recognition of the sometimes-prohibitive time and costs associated with always having consultants on-site. As you delve into the podcast with James and Matt, you will hear their views on why remote working can be more valuable for your business. As Matt says, it's all about giving clients “the right person, for the right project, for the right amount of time, rather than sending a busload of experts to one location for a whole day” James and Matt also discuss: How the 1000+ Dynamics apps from AppSource have changed the way projects are delivered - and paid for! As Matt puts it: “There's an app for everything nowadays and if you decide you don't need it anymore, you just cancel the subscription”. The age-old question of whether to upgrade or re-implement when moving from an older version of Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central and how the right licensing can help How can we use Teams to improve project delivery and training (spoiler alert: lots of tips to help you maximise Teams for your business and improve communications around projects!). So, tune in to this second episode of Tecman Talks Dynamics, on your podcast player of choice, to understand how the world of Dynamics projects is transforming: https://www.tecman.co.uk/podcasts Disclaimer – all information shared in this podcast is accurate for that time. However, due to the frequent changes within Microsoft, some facts may become outdated. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is about the newly announced Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare which is now available! We delve into the capabilities of this industry-vertical cloud and get a sense of why industry clouds are starting to emerge with Microsoft’s Jenn Roth and John Doyle.Healthcare is in transition. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated healthcare technology from nice to haves to imperatives. Jenn and John talk about what the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is, why healthcare data is so difficult to manage and how the Cloud for Healthcare helps, the capabilities the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers to healthcare customers and partners compared to the standard Azure cloud, and whether or not Microsoft is looking at creating additional industry clouds.Episode LinksCloud for Healthcare Home | More resources to exploreMicrosoft Healthcare Industry HomeMicrosoft Cloud for Healthcare Services Partners’ Capabilities GuideMicrosoft’s Healthcare Industry BlogMicrosoft Cloud for Healthcare is transforming the healthcare journey by Tom McGuinnessPartnering to reimagine better experiences and better care for patients by Scott RollinsMicrosoft as Undisputed AI Leader in healthcareGuestsJohn Doyle is a director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft. He is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of the cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.Follow him on LinkedIn.Jenn Roth is the Global Product Marketing Director for the Healthcare in the Microsoft Cloud Group. Jenn joined Microsoft 2 years ago after 20+ years working in healthcare and Med Tech industries. She excels when given opportunities to lead healthcare strategy development and enhance customer experience about our company, products, and services.Follow her on LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we discuss trends and technologies influencing and supporting the financial services industry with special guest, Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.Nasir shares with us innovations that the LHoFT has given their customers and its overall mission and purpose, Luxembourg as a global financial center, financial Inclusion and its relationship to the blockchain, how blockchain is being used in Financial Technology aka Fintech, current technologies used in Fintech and what the future holds, the emerging role of data and statistical analysis in Fintech, and if he sees AI as a promising aide here.We also talk about how technology providers like Microsoft are playing a role in Fintech’s digital transformation, and what the emergence of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) means for the industry.Episode LinksThe LHoFT – Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (Twitter / LinkedIn)Banking Industry Home - Here, you’ll find various articles and papers.Capital Markets Home - Among other things, you’ll find a great e-book on enabling the capital markets firm of the future.Financial Services blogGuestNasir Zubairi is CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (or LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.Follow Nasir on Twitter or LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talked about retail and consumer goods with a focus on eCommerce and the fast-paced change the industry is seeing with our guests, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Jason Goldberg, and Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft Sahir Anand. We talk about Microsoft’s retail and consumer goods strategies, interesting technologies or trends in retail right now, the urgency for businesses to change investment priorities considering the pandemic and the strain it has put on them, and new delivery models such as last-mile home delivery and the implications for retailers.Episode LinksRetail and Consumer Good HomeRetail Trends Playbook e-bookGuestsJason Goldberg is Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis. He was voted one of retail’s top global influencers by Vend four years in a row, and in 2017 he was inducted into the National Retail Federation’s “The List” of people shaping the future of retail.Jason has a podcast of his own, the retail-focused Jason and Scot show. The home for the podcast is jasonandscot.com and it’s the top-rated iTunes podcast for eCommerce.Follow Jason on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out his blog at retailgeek.com.Sahir Anand is the Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft.In his 20-year career, Sahir has focused on building experience and expertise within retail and consumer goods industries and now works with the Cloud & AI Industry Experiences team at Microsoft.Follow Sahir on LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The Microsoft channel is ever-changing, and ISVs can spend considerable time optimizing their approach according to the latest incentives, rules, restrictions, and opportunities. Microsoft MVP Steve Mordue returns to talk about some of the latest updates in the channel. Steve is the founder of the ISV business RapidStartCRM. He's also a popular blogger for channel pros. He has also started a new site, ISVConnectED, a private community for ISVs who want to talk channel strategy and tactics, ask their peers questions, and otherwise compare notes. We discuss Microsoft's current partner programs that impact the Dynamics channel, opportunities around Power Platform, including Dataverse, the risks ISVs face when Microsoft builds similar IP, and what the Salesforce Slack deal means for Microsoft. Show Notes: 1:30 - Microsoft's ISV programs and why Steve started ISVConnectED 3:45 - Why Steve writes about the state of the Microsoft channel and why it continues to create complexity 6:30 - The complexities of Microsoft programs like Direct CSP, and the importance of large CSPs  today 15:30 - Power Platform  - the business model and special offers 20:00 - Microsoft's efforts on industry solutions and what it means for vertical-focused ISVs 24:00 - Working in Microsoft's shadow as an ISV - searching for white space 28:45 - Encouraging news on AppSource 33:00 - Dataverse rollout 36:30 - Why Dataverse is so important to Teams and Microsoft 365 43:00 - New opportunities for custom Power Platform development and the importance of governance 46:00 - The Slack acquisition by Salesforce 48:30 - How Microsoft competes with Salesforce 54:00 - Microsoft's current approach to business applications acquisitions

We talked about Microsoft initiatives, solutions, and technologies in the energy sector with Darryl Willis. Darryl is the Vice President of Energy at Microsoft and he is responsible for driving digital transformation all around the world for companies within oil & gas, mining, renewables, and power & utilities.We’re all aware that energy sustainability is an important topic, and in this episode, we talk about what Microsoft is doing in this area to improve our own sustainability and highlight the great work of our customers and partners.The Energy Transition is real and is underway and it is being accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic. The Oil and Gas Industry has been delt a one / two punch…. oversupply driven by technological success, mainly in the Onshore USA associated with things like horizontal drilling (and hydraulic fracturing) which has contributed to global oversupply. This combined with demand destruction that has occurred as a result of much of the world sheltering in place during the early months of the pandemic means that as a result, for the first time ever, oil prices went negative in April 2020!  These cost pressures have created new digital transformation opportunities as oil and gas companies seek cost reductions.  And despite cost-cutting measures, much of the industry is moving more aggressively towards low-carbon and no-carbon sources of energy (by 2050 or sooner).Darryl shares some things in the forefront of the energy sector right now (i.e: trends and technologies), how AI is impacting the energy sector, and how Microsoft is helping to realize the vision of helping everyone in the world gain access to affordable heat, light, and mobility. Episode LinksMicrosoft demonstrates how to increase green energy in Ireland one rooftop at a timeAGL transforms 200+ applications, goes all in on cloud, and sets up for sustained successVattenfall and Microsoft pilot world’s first hourly matching (24/7) of renewable energyENGIE brings AI to renewable energy platform, helps decarbonize energy production with AzureMicrosoft for EnergyMicrosoft Ignite Event – Judson / Shell videoMicrosoft Transform BlogShellNorthern LightsMachine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (book)BP Energy Outlook (good stats energy)Energy Industry Inspire recordingIEA reportsJason Zander IHS fireside chat recordingMicrosoft Sustainability CalculatorGuestDarryl Willis, Vice President of Energy at Microsoft, is responsible for driving digital transformation for companies within the oil & gas, mining, renewables, and power & utility verticals globally. Darryl helps companies thrive using innovative Microsoft and partner solutions that enable operational efficiency, improve productivity, and uncover new business models that will ultimately accelerate the energy transition.Check out Darryl's Wikipedia page and follow Darryl on LinkedIn or Twitter.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, James Mastan of Audienz talks about The Business Transformation Playbook for the Azure Marketplace how to effectively go-to-market from the perspective of sales, marketing, operations, and other non-technical factors. When organizations decide to sell their solutions through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, it isn’t unusual for them to start by thinking about the technology behind the solution. There are many types of solutions in the marketplace and this can be a natural place to start focusing.However, when our team engages with a potential marketplace partner such as Audienz, we start with a business conversation because we have come to understand that the success of a solution depends heavily on factors outside of the technology involved.Episode LinksDownload the Business Transformation Playbook!Take the Microsoft Learn Module: Go to market through the commercial marketplace CompanyAudienz MarketingPractice AreasEmail marketplace@audienz.comGuestJames MastanA business and marketing leader focused on data and performance-driven, collaborative, entrepreneurial marketing and product strategies excelling at driving high ROI and tangible business results.Follow James on LinkedIn.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode explores amazing technologies and techniques that add tremendous value to organizations looking for new and better ways to bring product to market and discusses simulations of real-world situations in the Azure cloud.Andy Byers, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys, talks about product simulation priorities: more demand for compute, closing the loop between operations and engineering design, and autonomous simulation.He also shares how working with Microsoft solves for the computing power needed to run simulations, what integrating their products into the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as sellable offerings means for Ansys as a software vendor, and how their partnership with Microsoft has been beneficial to them thus far.Show TranscriptGuestsAndy Byers has always been energized by learning modern technologies and has an impact across many fields in his role as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys.In this role, he helps architect and drive strategic alliances between Ansys and others organizations to unlock new engineering capabilities for shared customers.Follow Andy on LinkedIn.Diego Tamburini is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale. He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode we discuss how Azure and our partner ecosystem supports the media and communications industries including current applicable trends and technologies. And some of the tech is pretty amazing. We cover the Azure services media and communications organizations find most valuable and the outcomes experienced by several partners and customers who have used them.This episode mainly focuses on the Media & Entertainment industry.SHOW LINKSMicrosoft Media and Communications websiteMicrosoft Media and Entertainment SummitMicrosoft Media BlogDigital Media SolutionsAzure Media ServicesIntelligent TelecommunicationsTranscriptGUESTSBob De HavenGeneral Manager, Media and Communications IndustriesBob leads Microsoft’s growing voice in the media, entertainment, & telecommunications industry, providing customers with solutions that make a lasting impact, differentiate them in the marketplace, and transform their long-term success.He leads Microsoft’s primary strategists with a visionary perspective for media, entertainment, & telco, combining the company mission & principles to act as a champion of digital transformation for industry customers.Bob on LinkedInBob’s Industry BlogJennifer CooperDirector of Business Strategy, Media and Communications IndustriesJennifer Cooper is an experienced Digital Strategy and Business Development executive with demonstrated track record and history of working in Cloud, SaaS, Consumer Applications & Enterprise software. Deep expertise in Media, Communications, Advertising, Commerce and related industries. Strong Operating, Sales and Marketing leader. Jennifer on LinkedInHOSTSPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The news roundup returns, and on this episode, we look back at top headlines from the last several weeks of executive hires, Microsoft revenue numbers, product wins, partner updates, and more. Show Notes: 0:45 - New leadership for Microsoft Business Applications group 2:35 - More insight into Dynamics 365 revenue performance 6:45 - Microsoft Lists for Teams and its implications for Project Oakdale 11:15 - Dynamics 365 Field Service: New stats and analyst recognition 14:00 - The future of AppSource 17:30 - Mercedes-Benz USA adopts D365 Remote Assist 19:40 - The future of conferences in the Microsoft space 25:45 - Remembering John Gravely

I had planned on making this two posts, but frankly I have too much on my plate at the moment, so its a twofer. The first part is about something new I launched, and the second part is about a bold move I made. ISV Connect ED I have certainly been one of the "complainers" about Microsoft's ISV programs, including ISV Connect. Well, you can only complain so much, and then, if you are in a position to, you have to take action. I decided that what ISVs were missing, was a community that was ISV Focused, instead of just being in a subcategory somewhere. The ISV Ecosystem is a big business and Microsoft seems to be grasping how important we are, particularly after a recent study they commissioned on ISVs that got their eyes-popping. Toby Bowers confirmed this in my recent chat. Speaking of Toby, he is now the new leader for ISV Connect, taking over for Guggs who is retiring from Microsoft. So, new blood, new opportunities... seemed like the time was right to launch something to help everything move along. ISV Connect ED is a membership site, so it's not free. I would love to have done it for free, but then it would not get the love it would need to succeed... and it will require a lot of love and attention. I won't go into a lot of detail here, I wrote a post on it describing what it is, and why I am doing it, here. But I will say, if you are an ISV, I want you to join and participate, otherwise you better steer clear of me when in-person events resume in the future. My Bold Move Okay, I don't know how bold this seems to you, but it was a pretty big deal to me. I tossed and turned for weeks before committing. As we were building the site for ISV Connect ED, I found us making heavy use of WordPress plugins. Almost every plugin we found had a free version, and then a "Pro" version. For about 90% of the ones we used, we ended up opting for the "Pro" version. This got me thinking about our RapidStartCRM Solutions on AppSource. While our apps have done quite well, I found myself wondering what things would look like if I had 100X the user base. The only way that would happen is either a massive marketing campaign, which would cost a ton, or... make the apps free. Either way the cost is significant. Not only would I be giving up the potential future recurring revenue for the apps, but I would have to stop charging all of our existing customers for them too! How could this work! Obviously, my plan was not to go broke, but "free" certainly does not help a bottom line. Looking at the WordPress model, most of the free plugins have basic capabilities. But if you need something more sophisticated, almost all of them offer a "Pro" version. We could certainly do that. Our core RapidStartCRM apps are intended to be simple apps, but over the years we have built some fairly sophisticated I.P. on top of them for certain use cases, like Project Management and Field Service. So we already had our "Pro" addons started. Also, most customers ended up engaging us to do further customizations, and why not, who knows our app better than us? So there's two revenue generating possibilities... would that be enough? Controlling Costs Imagining thousands of customers on the free app... that could bury us in support costs. Again, the WordPress Plugins developers' model came up. Most of them offered free support for their free apps in the form of a User Forum. Not only does this limit the effort, but more often than not, another user answers the questions raised. If you want more than forum help, you can buy it from the developer, or in some cases upgrade to their "Pro" version to get it. Brilliant! We will replicate that motion as well. Farm Betting I am taking a big risk, but I am not betting the whole farm on this. Our primary revenue source has always been Project Services, often on RapidStartCRM implementations, but about half come from other customers. So trading the potential, and existing recurring revenue from the apps, for what may come with greater scale is not crazy. Or, at least I don't think it is. Well, I hope not, since it is already underway and too late to turn back. Unlocked Again, following the WordPress model, where the plugins are not usually protected code. If you have the development skills, you can edit them yourself. So our RapidStartCRM apps are also all completely unlocked and able to be extended by the customer, another partner or... hopefully by our team at Forceworks. I may be opening a Pandora's box here, but I feel confident we will get our share. Which Apps? So we are making free four existing apps, and one more in the future pipeline: The Original RapidStartCRM, the simple to use Sales and Service app that started it all in 2015. RapidStartCRM Referral, a version for businesses that operate on a referral model. RapidStartCRM Homebuilder, a purpose built sales application for production homebuilders. How2 by RapidStartCRM, an in-app training solution that actually was always free. In our pipeline we have a new "RapidStartCRM B2C" in development for businesses who primarily sell to and engage with consumers. Worst Case The worst case scenario, is not really that bad. It is possible that many organizations will use our free apps without ever opting for a "Pro" anything, or needing any help at all. I mean there could potentially be thousands of customers being introduced to Microsoft's Business Applications as a result of our free apps... I guess that's not a bad thing either. I'll be covering our progress with this approach on the blog at ISV Connect ED, so if you want to see how this ends up, well you'll have to join that!

This episode examines Microsoft Team and other productivity tools with a special focus on remote work. The conversation includes the value of our partner ecosystem and how they have added tremendous value to Microsoft’s productivity suite of tools.Learn how Microsoft Teams has become a platform for life, work, and learning. Hear the story of Teams and its use in the NFL Draft.Many customers and use cases are explored around the state of the art in online communications. Learn how to become a partner yourself and add your add-ins and ideas to the platform.Guest InformationJared Spataro is Corporate Vice President for Modern Work at Microsoft with a special focus on emerging trends and technologies. He is responsible for product marketing, business management, and go-to-market programs for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and next generation productivity products. Follow Jared.Jared’s Blog | LinkedIn | TwitterShow LinksMicrosoft 365 BlogMicrosoft 365 Microsoft Teams BlogAppSource Azure MarketplaceTranscriptYour HostsPaul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

I recently wrote a post with suggestions for Toby Bowers, the new Leader of the Microsoft ISV Program. I assumed he had read it, but just to be sure, I ambushed him on the phone. If you are a Microsoft Business Applications ISC, this is the guy who will make or break you. We had a great discussion about his plans for ISVs. We also chatted about my latest undertaking, ISV Connect ED, he acted like it was the first time he heard about it, but I already know that it has been chatted up in the halls in Redmond :). Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript Below: Toby Bowers: Hello, this is Toby. Steve Mordue: Toby, it's  Steve Mordue. How's it going? Toby Bowers: Steve Mordue. It's going well. How are you? Long time no see. I have a suspicion on why you're calling. I read one of your recent posts, called Suggestions for Toby. Is it to talk through that? Steve Mordue: So, before you talk too much, I got to let you know, the record button is on and I'm going to publish whatever the heck we talk about in the next few days on my podcast, if that's all right. Toby Bowers: Ah, okay. Okay. I've heard about these calls, Steve. Yeah, no. That's fine. That's fine. I've been looking forward to talking to you. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool. So, news. Guggs is headed out the door, and he did the mic drop and you've picked up the mic. Toby Bowers: Yep. Yep. Steve Mordue: Which is a new role for you, but you've been in the periphery of this ISV, but you're now the guy, right? Buck's stopping at your desk, for ISVs and ISV Connect. Toby Bowers: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm excited with the opportunity. Yeah. Guggs is retiring for the company, and just with the turn of the fiscal year here at Microsoft, we took the opportunity to sort of reorganize a little bit. But as you said, Steve, I'm not new to the ISV strategy or the ISV Connect program. We've been, myself and my team, have been working really closely with Guggs and his team over the past year. Just to sort of explain where my team fits in. So, I work for Alysa Taylor and the product marketing group. We have all of our field sales enablement for all of our sellers and marketing teams around the world. We do our partner strategy all up, not just for ISV. We do customer success. We're focused on usage and adoption and migration. And we also do community work as well, for both first and third party community. So, ISV has always been a part of my core team charter, but as you said, I'm just sort of picking up the mantle with Guggs, and we'll get more actively involved. Steve Mordue: Is it a little intimidating? Toby Bowers: Oh, yeah. No, it is. I mean, obviously this is incredibly critical for us to get right as a company. Such a huge opportunity for us and for this business. I joined the dynamics team about three years ago, and we started talking about this, Steve, because we really didn't have a modern SaaS ISV program, ISV strategy. We were still coming off the old legacy days where, of course, ISVs are critical in this business in driving success with our on-prem business. But we weren't able to sort of effectively translate that into the cloud world. So, really, really important for us to get right. Why it's important for Microsoft is, to be honest, this is just a massive market. I mean, we did some sessions at Inspire recently in fact, this is a $200 billion market. It's a very fragmented market, Steve, as you know, so the better we are in building out an ISV ecosystem and driving those ISV's growth, the more share we can take in this market, and attract ISVs to build on our platform with great solutions that help solidify it in the customer base. Steve Mordue: Was that kind of an eyeopener for you guys a little bit to see the results of that study you commissioned around ISV? I mean, I know you guys had always kind of, in the back of your mind, assumed there was importance in ISVs, but was that an eye opener for you guys as well? Toby Bowers: It was. It was. I mean, the fact that over half that addressable market is going to be driven by ISVs and the cloud in the business applications market was bigger than I thought, to be honest. It's also, Steve, it's interesting. It's split pretty evenly across the sort of the medium business space and the enterprise. So, there's equal opportunity across both customer segments, but for us, the real opportunity, Steve is... And I'd love a chance to talk about the opportunity I see for the ISVs, but for us, the opportunity to take share and reach new audiences through ISVs is something we really talk a lot about in our conversations. Acquiring new cloud customers, the fact that ISVs can build vertical and sub vertical solutions and reach BDM audiences that we're just not that great at it, Microsoft, to be honest. Just represents a huge opportunity for us from a customer acquisition perspective. And then, the last thing I'd say, Steve, is we still sort of have this tactical opportunity to continue to help the remaining customers we have on on-prem dynamics products get to the cloud, and ISVs are obviously critical in doing that, in helping them sort of move their IP from the legacy stuff over to cloud. So, yeah, there's a big opportunity for Microsoft in it, but I also feel like there's a big opportunity for ISVs, just choosing us over someone else in the industry based on just the innovation we're building in and the growth that we're seeing in the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business, Steve Mordue: Well, they're choosing Microsoft to start or adding Microsoft, if they're already established elsewhere. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Both of those are good motions. There's a huge ecosystem of ISVs for Salesforce and some of the other applications out there. And I don't expect them to just drop that and come over here. But you reach a point in any business where you're kind of plateauing, right? You've got your market share and you're maintaining and you've got your steady growth, but if you're looking for a new opportunity to create brand new growth, I mean, nothing like jumping into another sandbox. Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's definitely part of it, and it kind of comes back to where we are in our journey with this strategy and this program [ISV Connect], Steve. I think back with the transition from Guggs, we sort of spent about a year in the design mode, and I know we worked with you to bounce ideas off you as a sounding board during that phase, back in the back of the day. And then last year, our fiscal year '20 was really the launch year. And obviously, we launched it at Inspire in July, but then it really didn't become operational for a couple of months. So, the bulk of last year was really helping our existing ISVs onboard and get enrolled in the program, and really the focus that we had on cleaning up app stores, getting everything all nice and certified and enrolled in the program for our existing ecosystem. And we feel pretty good about the result, that we got over 550 ISVs, 1200 apps. We have a good base now, but to your point, now we can sort of transition into going after recruits, right? And not only making our existing ISVs successful, but continuing to build out that ecosystem with new ISVs who are looking at multiple platforms to your point. Steve Mordue: I've been, I guess, probably the best way to put it would be "optimistically critical". I mean, I am an ISV, so obviously I'm bullish and have high hopes for success of the [ISV Connect] program, but the program has had its challenges. I think it's been passed around a lot. Hopefully, you'll hang around for a while with this thing. That's one of the reasons I was asking about the survey, was that it seemed like for years prior to that, like I say, there's been kind of a, yeah, we know ISVs are important, but it wasn't particularly believable messaging, you know? Because I don't know that a lot of the folks inside Microsoft had a clear picture of what that means. It's was just Salesforce is doing it, so we should be doing it too. But I was thinking that study kind of would have really opened some eyes and poured some gas on this motion. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I mean, it really has, Steve, and you're right. And look, I'll acknowledge we've had fits and starts with ISV strategies across Microsoft for several years, and I've been there to witness it. I'm a 20 plus year vet here at Microsoft, and I've worked in pretty much every side of the company from sales to marketing out in the field in different countries, and now here in product marketing working on BPOS and Office 365 in the early days, and then Azure in the early days, and now Biz Apps. We've gone through several evolutions that are related to our ISV strategy, and we've changed course and made some missteps, to be honest, here and there. I think my whole goal, again, in sort of stepping in and taking a little bit more responsibilities with this program in particular is to deliver on the value, deliver on the promise we made to partners. Last year when we launched, we talked about things like access to our field sellers in the premium tier, access to our partners, access to our customer base through app stores in the marketplace, access to platform capabilities. We've delivered some of that, but we still have a long way to go to deliver on the full promise. And so, I'm a partner guy. I had lots of partner responsibility in my previous roles at Microsoft, and I just think if we deliver on that promise and we support our partners' growth, we're going to grow. So, that's my number one goal. And we can talk about some of the specifics in it, but I hear you. And I think we need to stay the course. Now that we're in market, this is the year to really mainstream the program across the Microsoft machine and really deliver on the value that we've talked to ISVs. Steve Mordue: I think one of the challenges with the ISV Connect... well, any of the programs in there is Microsoft is a huge machine, and you've got to get a lot of parts lined up in order for anything to happen, parts that are within your control, other parts that are not in your control. I mean, it's a challenge to get all those things lined up in a groove. And I know that effort has been ongoing. We talked about AppSource as an example of something that Biz Apps doesn't own AppSource. They kind of own their door to it. And so, some things that are kind of in your control, out of your control, some things you can influence, not influence. I guess a lot of it would probably be driven by such as interest in the success of the Biz App side of the business, which is certainly higher than any of its predecessors, right? Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. We have huge sponsorship, not only in support, not only for business applications like Dynamics and Power Platform from the senior leadership team, Satya and his LT down, but even the ISV strategy within that, Steve. I mean, we get a chance to get in front of that leadership team twice a year. We often talk about this ISV strategy, the ISV Connect program, what we're doing. So, it's well known across the company. And I think to your point around the matrix here at Microsoft, and what I would say is I've been around again for a long time and I've worked in most of these teams that are going to be critical for the success of this program, whether it's Nick Parker coming in on the global partner solution side and Gavriela [Schuster], Casey McGee, or on the engineering side, James Phillips and Charlotte Yarkoni, who actually leads our commerce engineering team, including our marketplaces with Azure marketplace and AppSource. So, we've got high awareness, high prioritization to focus and improve in some of the areas, Steve, that we'll probably talk about, we know we need to focus on and improve. But the last thing I'd say in this vein is when we launched last year... Again, you probably know the way Microsoft works. I mean, we kick off Q1 in July. Everyone goes in a little hole for it for a month, takes a couple of weeks of vacation, comes back out, and we quickly get into planning mode for the fiscal year, to sit down and build the pipeline we need, think about the right plans and investments around the world to be successful. And the difference between this year, this fiscal year and last fiscal year from an ISV Connect perspective is we now have this great stable of ISVs and apps ready to go. So, we had 500 ISVs enrolled in the program on day one, July 1. We have 1200 apps. We've got a great set of premium tier apps that we're now working with our sales teams to align to their account and territory planning process. In fact, just earlier this morning, Steve, I was looking at a spreadsheet and you can imagine not to share sort of all the gory detail, but we have these things called sales plays, which are how we enable and align our sales force to go and talk to customers about our workloads and solutions. And we have six sales plays for business applications. Then, we have an industry focus. We have these industry priority scenarios. We have 13 of those. Then, we have 14 areas, we call them, around the world. These are countries and groups of countries around the world. So, if you think about a big spreadsheet with all of those, what we've done is we've mapped our ISV solutions to each one of those to say, "hey, if you're looking to focus on supply chain in the manufacturing industry in France, here's a set of ISVs that are enrolled in ISV Connect", perhaps have an app in the premium tier that you should align to your account territory planning process, so that you can go and engage with them to build pipeline. Steve Mordue: Wasn't that previously like the... What was it? The catalog? The CSP? No, what was it? Toby Bowers: That, yeah. It was the... Well, the OCP catalog is what we used internally. Steve Mordue: OCP catalog. Toby Bowers: Yep. There's a Co-Sell Solution Finder. That's more reactive, Steve. If you're talking to a customer and say, "Hey, do you know a partner that has a solution on X," you can bring up that tool and find one. What I'm talking about is more proactive, actual territory planning with the sales teams to sit down with ISVs and do that sort of engagement, to build joint pipeline, identify joint accounts. So, I just bring it up because we didn't have the opportunity to do that last year, because we were just launching the program. So, I'm optimistic, as you say, critically optimistic that that'll make a difference for us this year, at least on the Co-Sell side. Steve Mordue: When Guggs came in, I was actually pretty excited, because that's really the first time that someone who had been with Microsoft for a long time, had some clout, knew how to work the machine internally came on board, and he was on board for, what? About a year, and then retired. And I thought, "Uh-oh. Now what?" And so, hearing that you took over, I was once again, very excited. I've known you for a long time now. Obviously a completely different personality than Guggs. You are much less of a risk taker, I would say, and much more of a... You're a much more mellow kind of a guy. You seek consensus. Toby Bowers: Thank you, Steve. Steve Mordue: I've always thought you seek consensus more than... Certainly Guggs wasn't big on seeking consensus. I think that's going to be critical to your ISV success. I think... And I admit, I'm not blowing smoke up your butt. I think you're the right guy at the right time for this now, just knowing you the way I do. And obviously, a lot of ISVs will be listening to this. So, I don't want to... I've kind of gotten caught in the past of sounding overly optimistic, and then things not stepping up. But I'm feeling as optimistic as I ever have about you stepping into role and being able to really make it work for everybody. We've got some very successful ISV stories out there, but there's a lot of them that are struggling to get there. I think democratizing the process a little bit, because we definitely over-index on the big ISVs, which I get. We need to... But big ISVs didn't start as big. We need to have motions that bring all people, raise all boats. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: What are you thinking about, now that you're brand new in role? Although you're not oblivious to what's going on. You've been in the periphery there of this thing fairly deeply for a while. What are you thinking about things you want to try and attack right away that you think you can get some traction on right away? And then, maybe things that you want to focus on a little more long-term, so we can kind of see what we can expect quickly, and then what we can kind of expect down the road? Toby Bowers: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that your sentiment, Steve. We have known each other for a long time, and I know you're a straight shooter, and you're also just a great champion for the broader partner ecosystem. So, I would just say, just to put everyone at ease, I've been around almost as long as Guggs and have been behind the scenes, like we said, on this for a long time. So, I don't want anyone to feel like I'm going to come in and start cracking around and changing things up. I think to your point around risk taking, this whole design launch mainstream phasing that I talked about, the program is sound. I truly believe we have the right program in place for the long game, with the revenue sharing model, the different points of value that we need to provide to our partners. Like I said, we just need to deliver on that promise now. So, I'm not going to come in and change things drastically. I'm going to take what we have, and do my darnedest to make it successful Steve, because I truly believe it is set up for success if we have the right focus and attention. So, that sort of leads me to the way I work. I am a collaborative guy. I've got a lot of good relationships across the organizations that will be required to make this program successful, whether it's the partner team or the sales team or all the folks out in the field who are closer to where the rubber hits the road. So, I feel pretty confident about the amount of focus and energy, and what I can do to really push it forward from here. As far as short term, long term, to answer your question, Steve, and I loved your blog. I read it. In fact, I listened to it. I was out walking the dog, and I listened to it. So, thank you for reading it out loud. I don't know where you found that picture by the way. That's about a decade old, so thank you. That's very flattering. Steve Mordue: Send me a new one. Toby Bowers: Exactly. But there's a couple things. I would say to some of your suggestions around... Let's just take the first one around equalizing. We probably did over-index a bit on the Co-Sell side of things last year with our premium tier, especially, and getting those partners enrolled and engaging with our field around Co-Sell. That's what, to be honest, a lot of the larger partners were most excited about. And there's been a couple of really good examples of success there, Steve, and companies like Seismic. We just had Inspire. We talked about a few different ISVs and sort of success stories, but Seismic is a great example. Sales enablement solution, three clouds, Azure, us, Teams as well. They really got plugged quickly into the Co-Sell motion. And they talked about pipeline growth of 5X in the first 90 days. That's a smaller group of ISVs that are in that premium tier app, and they've just seen a ton of success. Sort of taking a page out of the Azure Co-Sell playbook, and now applying that and extending it to ISV Connect. So, we're going to continue to focus on that. Like I said, we're able to kick off our fiscal year with this set of ISVs. And so, I feel pretty confident about continuing to push on the Co-Sell side. Where we need to focus more, Steve, is to your point on a couple of the other value points that we talked about. First is access to our ecosystem, right? We've got massive partner ecosystem, all shapes and sizes. SIs, local SIs, regional SIs, the big guys, resellers, CSP partners. Today, we've got some partner to partner benefits, kind of matchmaking benefits as part of the program, go to market program. We've got such an opportunity in the future to tap into those channels in a bigger way. You think about incentives or our transacting partners reaching into new markets and geographies around the world. That's going to be an area of focus for me going forward. And then, the other piece around AppSource. You had some great feedback on AppSource, and I know you've been giving us feedback on AppSource, for years. Steve Mordue: Yeah, since it launched. Before it launched, actually. Toby Bowers: Yeah, exactly. This is going to be a real short term focus for me, Steve. The fact is we've been on and are on a little bit of a journey with AppSource, but we've got eyeballs in there. It's got a monthly active usage of 4 million users, right? And growing. So, what we've done in the last quarter with AppSource is really worked on some of the plumbing underneath. It was just not where it needed to be when it came to search, discoverability of apps, just block and tackle, basic stuff. So, we worked with the engineering team to really focus on just fixing up that plumbing underneath. This next few months where we're going to focus is the overall user experience. So, the website itself, focusing much more on the solutions themselves, merchandising the right apps, really helping customers who are going there find what they're looking for quickly, not just from a search perspective, but an overall user experience perspective. And that'll happen literally in the next few months. And then, from there, Steve, you know where we're going to go. We're ultimately going to light up transactability of third party IP through AppSource. That'll come together with the ISV Connect program, so that partners can really choose how they transact. But we do feel like for the right apps and the right partners, that'll really light up this big Microsoft install base of customers as a new way to sell and transact their apps. So, that's where we're going. Steve Mordue: I think that would be particularly critical for the startup ISV, or the one who's coming over from another platform. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: Because it's a big enough challenge to build a worthwhile solution, but that's only the beginning as an ISV of getting where you need to get. you've got to build some sort of a licensing construct to protect it, and you've got to build some sort of a billing platform to get paid for it. So, to the degree that you guys can offer some sort of plugin capabilities on those sorts of things, I think that's going to open up for a lot more ISVs to engage, because you've just lowered the bar of entry to really, if you've got a good solution, if you've got good IP, you can jump in here. We'll take care of more of this plumbing for you, because it's definitely, I think, kept some folks on the sidelines or a lot of people have ended up just making apps free, because they don't have a way to protect or sell them, which isn't what the goal was. Toby Bowers: Yeah, totally, Steve, and look. I'm going to be honest. We got to get better in this space. This is an area that I just see a huge opportunity for us to focus on and improve. We've seen some success there. I talked to Trevor [Nimegeers] at this company called ITRAK 365. It's like a safety management app for waste management. Again, talk about vertical focus. Yeah. But he's getting leads from AppSource. He's going... Canadian based company. He's cracking into New Zealand and winning some deals over there. And just the infrastructure that can enable that geo expansion through a marketplace like that has a lot of promise for a lot of our ISVs. But you mentioned something important as well, which I missed earlier. So, in addition to the marketing benefits, the go to market benefits, the Co-Sell benefits, we're still working really hard with the engineering teams, whether it's Charles [Lamanna] and his team, or the marketplace team on platform capabilities. So, obviously, we've got tools and stuff today with ISV Studio. We've got telemetry. We've got install telemetry today. We'll have usage telemetry tomorrow. We'll have licensed management capabilities tomorrow. That'll flow into transactability. So, a lot of those platform investments that we can make from an engineering perspective ultimately come together to sort of paint a nice picture for ISVs who are looking to tap into that. And again, strong focus and sort of commitment across the engineering teams to do that. Steve Mordue: And when you say tomorrow, so everybody is aware, you don't literally mean tomorrow. Toby Bowers: I do not mean Labor Day. That's a very... No, no, I don't. Yeah. I mean, I don't have, and I can't share specific dates, Steve, but we are on this biannual release cycle with James and his team. Obviously, you know our release cycle there with October and April. The commerce and marketplace team is on a biannual cadence as well. So, we just fit into those engineering cycles to continue to champion for what ISVs need to be successful, in that long list of work that those teams will do to just get it higher and higher on the list. And we're really moving in the right direction. Steve Mordue: And I see a little bit of a parallel with the ISV Connect motion and really the whole Power Platform motion. My last call with Charles Lamanna when I was asking him about what are the big things that they're planning next? He said, "Actually, we're going to focus on making everything we have work better." Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: We have all the parts that we need and they're all out there. They're not necessarily wired up as ideally as we'd like, and you can't just keep launching, launching, launching. At some point, you've got to take a look at the pile you've built and make sure that it's organized and sorted and working, well oiled. And I kind of feel that way about ISV Connect. All the parts are there. We don't need any new, necessarily any brand new things, some add-ons here and there. But it's really just making that whole pile of components work like a well oiled machine. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I think the table's set. We just got to get people eating. Like I said before, I think the program is sound. The elements, the business model. It's a self-fulfilling business model. The more success we have, the more we can invest and grow together. And I do think that we stay the course. It's all about execution and delivering on that promise. Now that said, there are a few things, like we were just talking about that we need to add quickly or fix, to be honest. Things like getting AppSource where it needs to be, some of the benefits. You and I have talked a lot about internal use rights, and that is a benefit. We just need to get that done. I know we've been talking about it for too long. There's a broader Microsoft dialogue going on around ISV and programs and IURs. I'm just going to move forward with the right IUR strategy for ISV Connect, because that's just something we have to deliver on, Steve Mordue: Just put your head down and crash through. Toby Bowers: Exactly. Exactly. So, that's a big one. Steve Mordue: So, I recently started a new venture myself kind of on the side, towards this ISV Connect motion. I don't know if you'd heard anything about it. Toby Bowers: No, I haven't. What are you doing? Steve Mordue: ISV Connect ED. Toby Bowers: Oh, nice. I like the play on words there, my friend. You should be in marketing. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm adding an ED to the end of it, but essentially, it's... We don't have a good external resource. I mean, you can go to Microsoft, and you can read all about ISV Connect and just read stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a community for ISVs to compare notes and... Not so much, I don't want to create a place for people to go bitch and complain. I want to create a place where people can go and learn what works, what doesn't, how to be successful, and see if we can nurture some stuff around there. So, hopefully you'll be hearing more about that. Toby Bowers: Well, that sounds intriguing to me, Steve, but yeah, I'd love to learn more. I mentioned one of the other things my team is responsible for is our community strategy. And I know you are an active member of our MVP community, our Partner Advisory Councils, our sort of partner community at large. So I'm all for what you do with that initiative, Steve. I think, to me, community, and I know we've caught up at user groups and things like that. It's just such a great listening mechanism for us. We can do all the research we want, and talk to our field and talk to partners, but that partner to partner community engagement to sort of identify common themes, and then have multiple voices bringing that back to us is just so important for us to be focusing on the right areas. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Toby Bowers: And I'm just a huge advocate. I mean, this is... In my career, I spent so much time out in the field with customers and partners, and I just feel it's so important for us to listen at this point. Again, I feel like we've got the right strategy in place, the right program [ISV Connect] in place. We need to listen to what's working and what's not working, and then act quickly that. So, I love it. I love that you're pulling that effort together, and I'd love to stay connected with you on it as far as opportunities to engage or just understand what you're learning. Steve Mordue: Oh, I'm going to lean on you, buddy. I'm going to lean on you. Toby Bowers: You can lean on me anytime. In fact, I was going to say that. Steve Mordue: One of the things that Guggs did, he kind of disbanded the ISV PAC and kind of went to that broader... But I think you definitely lose something when you've got... It's funny. When we go to any of these events, when there's a room with like 20 people in it, everybody's happy to talk. When there's 200 people, nobody says anything. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: It's like the group gets too big, and then who was it? Tony. You remember Tony de Freitas? Toby Bowers: Yeah, I do. Steve Mordue: He made a comment on one of my more critical posts recently. And he just said, "Feedback is a gift." Coming from someone who used to be on the inside of Microsoft, I know you guys are desperate for the feedback. I mean, it's all... Give me the feedback, tell us what's working, what's not working. And it doesn't help when nobody says anything or they just complain. Getting that feedback is critical, and that's part of what I'm hoping to try and accomplish here is to help you guys get some of that feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Absolutely, Steve. I mean, we can't do this in a vacuum. It's a new program. It's a new model for us. And so, feedback is critical, and there's multiple ways to get that feedback. The good news on the PAC is we're getting the band back together, so we're sort of re-establishing as we move into this next horizon. But yeah, in fact, I was going to offer, Steve. I think me coming in now, I would love to do this connection with you maybe in a few months as we sort of round out the calendar year to see what progress we've made, and you can keep me honest and I'd keep you honest. And I would love to engage with this community that you're thinking about building. Steve Mordue: Well, I hope that... I had Guggs on about once a quarter to just kind of talk about what's up. Toby Bowers: Okay. Steve Mordue: I definitely feel like you are a person who is more amenable to the feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah, yeah. Steve Mordue: More interested in hearing it, and will definitely act on it. So, anything else you want to say to folks about you coming in here, and taking the role? I mean, I'm feeling very positive. I think everybody should feel very positive. I think everybody needs to give you a fair chance to take some action, but I'm feeling very confident about it. Toby Bowers: Well, I appreciate it, Steve. No, I appreciate the call, although it was a bit unexpected. I'd just wrap up with my number one job is to deliver value to our partners. That value will come in the form of growth, plain and simple, because if our partners are successful, we're going to be successful with this. So, that's what I'm going to be maniacally focused on for this next six months. And yeah, I look forward to catching up again soon and hopefully talking about some of the mutual successes that we've had. Steve Mordue: Sounds good, man. I'll be pinging you soon. Toby Bowers: All right, Steve. Well, thanks again for the call. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat. Steve Mordue: All right. Bye bye. Toby Bowers: Bye bye.

Erik Hougaard returns to the podcast with new perspective on Dynamics 365 Business Central development and customization. Over the last few months, Erik has been creating a rich new library of developer skills videos on his YouTube channel, covering everything from OAuth and Javascript controls to web services and String operations.   He recently created a Blast from the Past video in which he spun up an old NAV 3.56 system and explored its features, customization language (which was also called AL at the time), and interface. Looking at a 30 year old predecessor to today's Business Central was more than just a trip down memory lane, as he tells us. It can also give today's customers and professionals a better understanding of why the latest version of Business Central looks and acts the way it does. With that perspective in mind, Erik also shares his views on the latest customization trends, ISV solution adoption, SaaS support, and how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the ecosystem.   Show Notes: 1:45 - Why look at NAV 3.56 now? 4:00 - Why now is a good time to create more educational content, and how Erik develops ideas. 7:45 - Contextualizing the on-prem to cloud transition of Business Central 10:00 - How Erik circulated an easter egg through older NAV systems 11:30 - Is it good that so many features of BC today are so similar to NAV years ago? 14:00 - Features or techniques that have potential for a big impact 16:30 - As an MVP reaching the community, comparing video versus traditional blog posts 20:00 - How many companies still need customization with BC? 23:30 - Customer and partner responsibilities around managing DevOps for BC 25:15 - A current challenge around country versions with extensions management, both in development and in releasing apps to AppSource 29:00 - How are BC users doing in the context of coronavirus? 32:00 - Why is development such a big part of NAV and BC? 34:30 - Tips around developing your YouTube channel

I guess it is fairly obvious from my post yesterday, that I am pretty pissed off at Microsoft. I have always been one of those "Don't point out a problem, without suggesting a solution" kind of guys, and I have done my share of pointing out problems with Microsoft's Business Applications ISV efforts. So here are some ideas. Why ISVs? First, why should Microsoft even give a shit about ISVs? Certainly prior to sharing in ISV's revenue there did not appear to be much reason, based on how Microsoft had historically engaged with ISVs. I guess we have to thank Salesforce and their successful AppExchange for Microsoft paying any attention at all. For years I have watched various Microsoft people get up and say "ISVs are critically important to us", followed by very little in the way of tangible actions. Obviously, "We have a marketplace too!" should not be the end goal here. What Salesforce keenly grasped, was that ISVs either generate business they would never have had, or make their platform for the customers they do have, extremely sticky. We know this from our collective efforts to get customers to move away from Salesforce; very often it is some ISV solution they depend on, that is making them stay put. It has gotten easier to be sure, but mostly because of Microsoft's integrations to other Microsoft products being superior. SFDC customers are giving more weight to that now as so many of them have switched to Microsoft 365. On one side of the scale is this fully integrated Microsoft story, and on the other they have the disruption of losing a critical ISV solution for which Microsoft has no ISV comparable. What Microsoft really needs is 10X the number of ISVs they have today! It all costs money I don't recall when Salesforce started AppExchange, but I don't think it was long after they launched the company. I also don't recall whether they took a cut of ISV's revenue when they started, but they clearly do now. It would not have mattered, because at the time, they were essentially the only game in town. 800 lb Gorillas, with triple anyone else's market share, can afford to be demanding of ISVs. I have no doubt that SFDC makes a huge amount of revenue from this motion, not only for licenses that they would not have sold otherwise, but also their ISV vig. I have no idea what they invest in their ISV ecosystem, but I am sure it is not small, because building and maintaining it is not cheap. But SFDC recognizes the value. Up until recently, Microsoft apparently invested the change found in the sofas around campus. I applaud James Phillips and Charles Lamanna for seeing they were not going to win the race with SFDC on Microsoft's trajectory at the time, and pivoting into new ground. The "Citizen Application Platform" is an entirely different approach, but "Citizens" are not going to build robust mission critical applications on Dataflex. Microsoft needs customers on the big money, sticky stuff that ISVs have historically created for SFDC. Cart before the Horse? Guggs apparently realized there was no budget to create this thriving ISV ecosystem that Microsoft would be the primary beneficiary of, and decided ISVs should fund this. Let's think about this for a minute. You have a historically dismal track record for ISVs, you publicly acknowledge that, and step one towards a fix is to ask ISVs for the money to fix it. I had suggested at the PAC meeting where the Revenue Sharing idea was first floated, that maybe they should "prove" success for ISVs first, but I guess they didn't hear me. I am sure that Microsoft has had to spend some of their own money on this effort, as I doubt that the Revenue Sharing income is significant yet, but they need to spend a lot more. And they need to spend it fast and right, otherwise they should suspend the Revenue Sharing for a while until the value for ISVs is there. I can see it! When I throw my head back, and let the possibilities swirl around, I can see success for ISVs, and Microsoft. I know I have been a strong Microsoft advocate in the past, and call me a flip-flopper, but I could easily become one again. Even though SFDC does not have it perfect, I still envy their ISVs today. And, even though he is a egomaniacal as they come, Benioff still let ISVs shine, less concerned about brand positioning, than money rolling in the bank. So, what might I suggest to Toby? Stop Antagonizing Maybe they can't see it. Maybe they don't actually believe that ISVs are critical, or even necessary. Maybe they see us a necessary evil for certain edge case deals. Maybe they see an ISV ecosystem 10X the size it is today as a huge hassle. That would certainly explain things. Or maybe they don't think any of that, and simply don't know what to do to solve the problem. Launching a Revenue Sharing program at this stage, in spite of knowing full well that it was going to piss of the entire ISV ecosystem, does not appear to have been the best first step. If this is going to work, we have to all be smiling the whole way through. No pain, no gain, only works for the gym, Equalize the effort Right now, particularly in Co-Sell, my guess is that 5% of the ISVs are getting 95% of the attention from Microsoft. I understand that's where the quick money is, but that is also short-sighted, scorecard-based thinking. The goal should not make the few large ISVs even larger, it should be to make all ISVs larger. If you want to recruit a lot of ISVs, they need to see that they won't just be given the crumbs left over after the existing large ISVs have had their fill. Kind of like how many organizations and governments have a minority program, where a certain amount of projects must go to a certain population, Microsoft should come up with a similar program for small and start-up ISVs. Engineering I am aware that Toby will not have much influence over what the product teams do, but it impacts ISVs in a big way. The last thing the product teams think about when they create new features is the ISV story... it's more of an afterthought. As a result, many of these features or products are not what I call "ISV Ready" for various reasons. Every product team should have an ISV advocate, from the very first conversation about a new product or feature. I mean there's like 6,000 people in the BAG organization now, surely we can task a few of them with watching out for ISVs. AppSource One of the touchier subjects for ISVs is AppSource. If done right, AppSource could be a primary benefit to ISVs, and draw for new ISVs. I know AppExchange certainly is for SFDC. Unfortunately, AppSource for Bizapps ISVs has become little more than brochure-ware. Poorly built, hard to use, and not promoted nearly enough. I am also aware that AppSource is not "owned" by the Business Applications Group, they only own their own door to it, so again, Toby may have his hands somewhat tied. Supposedly, AppSource has been very effective for Azure, and some of the efforts have been toward trying to copy that success. But the Azure buyer is a completely different person than the BizApps ISV buyer, and AppSource is not giving that buyer what they need. What specifically might I do? First, I would reverse the process. Right now when you enter AppSource, a significant amount of the page is dedicated to showing you a bunch of "Featured" solutions. The problem is, AppSource has no idea what I might be looking for. The odds that I am looking for a solution, that you happen to be "Featuring" are pretty slim. I'm not even sure how these apps got "Featured". I would delete that whole section. The entire focus on the landing page should be helping me find what "I" am looking for. This is an area where Microsoft could actually do something better than AppExchange. Make this landing page into a "Process" that guides me easily to understand what I want and need first. Only then, show me a list of options, limited to that. Once I land on a solution that looks promising, give me the opportunity to book a time on the ISVs calendar for an in-person demo or conversation, not just a generic contact form. Circling back to the "ISV Ready" conversation, AppSource is not ISV Ready. Test Drive is clumsy and largely ineffective. Trials only really make sense for widgets, and there is no way to expire the trial unless the ISV builds that into it. The promised commerce component is nowhere in sight, and even if it was, the churn challenge will be similar for ISVs as it is for Microsoft when customers just try and deploy something on their own, again other than a widget. More important to ISVs than commerce, would be a universal licensing system that we can just plug into. Licensing schemes end up costing ISVs a lot to build and maintain, and customers end up with a different one for each solution they install. Lastly, drop the dime on promoting it. Stop being the marketplace that is down the street around two corners, and be right up on main street. I have more, but that's a good start. Benefits To offset the shock of the Revenue Sharing program there was a promise of benefits. Most of the benefits seem to be targeting new ISVs, and that's fine, but when you look at the costs of an ISV, and particularly those that Microsoft is in the unique position to help offset, there are some obvious opportunities to create value. One of them is IUR. Historically Internal Use Rights have been a benefit of Competencies. But for an ISV, competencies are not nearly as important as they are for SIs. For a short time there was an ISV Competency, that again seemed to have been put together without talking to any ISVs. It was summarily cancelled without any replacement plan. Either this should be reworked and brought back, or IUR should be a benefit of ISV Connect. It is not reasonable to expect ISVs to have to not only pay Microsoft for development platform, but then also ask for a share of the revenue earned as a result of the platform we had to pay Microsoft to use... Pick one! I am aware that IUR is not free to Microsoft, but I did say Microsoft needs to spend some money on this. I think I will leave this here, for now. I am aware that I ruffled a few feathers with my last post, and may with this one also, but to be honest, the survival of my business depends on Microsoft getting this right. I see no upside in keeping quiet.

In this episode we hear how Microsoft and its partners are focused on helping financial services organizations meet the demands of today. Specifically, the guests discuss how Microsoft is helping with the COVID-19 situation, including things like fraud detection and enabling employees.Additional topics include how Microsoft is empowering customers with high performance computing and large data volumes to help update legacy risk models to factor in today’s new risks. Further, we hear about the power of Microsoft’s three clouds that underlies the ecosystem of Microsoft and partner solutions.Show Links[Transcript]Blog Post: Agility, continuity, and risk management for financial services Blog Post: Business continuity in financial servicesMicrosoft Financial Services Industry BlogMicrosoft in Banking and Capital MarketsMicrosoft in InsuranceAzure for Financial ServicesM365 for Financial ServicesGuestsBill BordenCorporate Vice President for Worldwide Financial Services at MicrosoftBill leads development and execution of Microsoft’s global financial services strategy, including the prioritization of banking, capital markets and insurance industry solutions and their alignment to Microsoft’s worldwide digital platform and partner ecosystem.Bill on LinkedInBill Borden's BlogNick LeimerPrincipal Industry Lead for Azure for Insurance in the Microsoft Industry Experiences TeamNick recruits partners, ISVs, start-ups, and other influential organizations in the insurance industry to accelerate adoption of the Microsoft Cloud+ AI platforms. One of his core missions is to amplify how our Microsoft cloud solutions meet the business enabling needs across the globe through speaking at conferences, authoring blogs, use cases, whitepapers, and social media posts.Nick on LinkedIn and Twitter.Karen BaileyFinancial Services Lead for Banking, Capital Markets and Insurance on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team.Karen is a passionate Business Technology leader with over 25 years of diverse experiences working to develop strategies for Digital Transformation focused on opti-channel, customer-centric and hyper-personalized experiences aligning Technology Solutions to Go-to Market Strategies, Operational Needs, Growth and Profitably strategies and sector imperatives.Karen on LinkedIn

I usually avoid discussing my products or services on the blog, people seem to get annoyed. But I was having a chat with an ISV the other day, who said he had found me via this blog. He asked me how much of my ISV opinions were "theoretical", and did I actually have any ISV solutions. So if you don't want to hear about my stuff, stop reading or listening now. AppSource As many of you know, I have had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft's AppSource. Apparently I must be a masochist, because I have still not given up... on the potential anyway. Anyone else would have, and many others have, given up, but I keep falling for the rhetoric. I am in frequent contact with the team behind it, and I keep pushing as hard as I can for improvement. At this point, I pre-date any of the current team's involvement with AppSource, since I was involved with it before it even launched a few years ago. Maybe that's why I just can't let it go, I have way too much invested. I still get excited when the revolving door spins and a new leader takes over, hoping I can accomplish some incremental change, before the door spins again, and the conversation starts back at square one. The Promise AppSource is more than just Power Platform and Dynamics 365 related. It has a few other doors for Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) apps, and Azure apps. But the impetus for the Business Applications door was frankly Salesforce's AppExchange. Basically Salesforce was kicking Microsoft's ass by leading with ISV solutions making their product look highly specific to industry customers. This was not new, this has been a Salesforce strategy for a long time. I can remember sitting through many demos, that included a lot of third-party I.P., where it was not clear where Salesforce stopped and the third-party began. But it didn't matter to customers, all they saw was a targeted, relevant solution. In the meantime, the Microsoft seller in the following demo showed the generic CRM solution, and talked about the ability to customize. Game, Set, Match to Salesforce. This was not lost on James Phillips, leader of the Business Applications Group for Microsoft. It's a Freaking Store The internet is full of online marketplaces, for all kinds of things. AppExchange of course, but also Amazon, Target, etc., almost everybody has an online marketplace these days. The online marketplace technology road is well-traveled at this point, the focus is now on UI, customer conversations, cross-sell, upsell, etc. For some reason, Microsoft decided to re-invent the wheel and ignore well established norms. AppSource is an example of a poor user experience, with no excuse for it. In spite of the obvious importance, and huge competitive advantage that Salesforce made out of their Marketplace, Microsoft has just not put in the effort. Why? I have no clue, but the revolving door has not helped. Still today, I do not see the level of commitment that I think there should be, not just with AppSource, but with ISV in general. But I can't help but continue to believe that eventually, someone will have the full brightness of the lightbulb go off over their head and become the hero to all. In the meantime... In spite of a clear lack of light at the end of the tunnel, I have pressed onward. It may well prove in hindsight some day soon, that it was a complete waste of energy, but for now I am cursed to be an eternal optimist. So we have doubled down on AppSource. Our RapidStartCRM App was one of the very first apps in AppSource. I would love to say that it was based on the success of that AppSource effort, that I was compelled to create more, but that would be disingenuous (fancy word for "Big Fat Lie"). If pressed for a reason to continue, I would say that I still feel there are unmet needs out there for I.P., regardless of AppSource. I still feel compelled to build I.P., even if the success of that hinges on everything other than AppSource. At this point, we'll also put it in AppSource, with zero expectations, but why not. Our Apps We currently have five apps in AppSource, all under our "RapidStart" app brand. These were all built by my team at Forceworks Global. Four of these are horizontal, targeting the concept that Dynamics 365 is simply more complicated than it needs to be, and always has been. It's no wonder the adoption of any CRM solutions is so low. We launched our first application, the Original RapidStartCRM in 2015, targeting SMB who was struggling mightily with the first party applications. Our churn rate was near zero, so we knew we were onto something. Microsoft noticed also and made a couple of moves in our direction. The first effort was "Business Edition" targeting SMB. I was annoyed, but not for long. Microsoft's appetite for SMB comes and goes, and it went out the door before Business Edition even launched. There was one survivor of that effort however, Dynamics 365 Marketing, which was originally going to be an SMB solution. More recently Microsoft took another stab at SMB with "Sales Professional", an effort that is still ongoing. Again, I was annoyed, particularly when they would ask me for feedback on their SMB app. But again, since Microsoft does not understand the SMB customer, they built a complicated SMB app. Their SMB appetite will wane again soon, as it does perennially. One of my favorite opportunities, is when a vertical customer wants us to customize our simple horizontal application. This was what led to our first vertical version: "RapidStartCRM for Homebuilders". The key challenge to building vertical industry applications, is being able to get the domain knowledge of that vertical. It's even better when you can obtain the domain knowledge, while being paid to apply it to your I.P.. Last year we recast our apps as "Accelerators". The idea that any app is going to work perfectly for any business out-of-the-box, is not realistic. In almost every case there was a "customizations" effort, sometimes small, other times quite large. I wanted to make sure that customers understood that our app meeting their needs exactly without any effort, was not realistic, so "Accelerator" seemed a better characterization. We have three other apps. RapidStartCRM Referral, is our app for referral model businesses, which are different than businesses who sell products or services. The three apps I mentioned so far are really offered as standalone applications. We also built two applications intended to be Addons to either our applications, or any other applications built on the Common Data Service. Our How2 by RapidStart is a simple application that we offer at no cost, that basically brings your internal video training content into whatever Model Driven Application you might be using. Lastly, we built RapidStart Project, after having deployed PSA enough times to know that for most customers' needs, it too is a monster. We have four more applications in our development pipeline, that I will talk about after we launch them. Consulting Services Offers Another facet of AppSource is being able to create Consulting Services Offers. Again, I was engaged with the team long before that concept launched, and we had one of the first consulting offers in the marketplace. This has also failed to meet expectations from a marketplace, and we have tried multiple types of offers and strategies. As of this writing, we have a total of eight consulting offers, both free and paid. So far the only ones that seem to generate any interest are, of course, the free ones. I would be very interested to hear of any partner who offered a paid consulting offer that a customer took them up on via AppSource. I can't decide of this is a doomed motion or not, because again, AppSource sucks at getting the right message in front of the right customer. Not wanting to rely on AppSource, we have our paid offers on our website also, so we'll see how that goes. So that about covers it for now. For anyone who thought my ISV opinions may have been "theoretical", you can now see that they are actually the result of continuous disappointment.

Learn more about Microsoft's Commercial Marketplace: https://aka.ms/SellThroughMarketplace Paul Maher is the general manager of the Industry Experiences team at Microsoft, a group that helps partners drive technology innovation moving to the Microsoft Azure cloud and enabling online sales by using the Microsoft commercial marketplace as a new distribution model. As part of this discussion, we shared how a partnership with Microsoft, the use of the Azure cloud platform and services, and the commercial marketplace, empower Microsoft partners to innovate, while scaling and growing their business. Web: https://azure.com Twitter: @PaulJFMaher @Microsoft LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljmaher/ Microsoft's Commercial Marketplace: https://aka.ms/SellThroughMarketplace Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [01:12] Cloud is a big buzzword nowadays, and everyone is jumping on the cloud bandwagon. However, the benefit of building solutions in the cloud is not just about technology innovation, but also the ROI from a business perspective. As someone who manages a team focused on industry, can you share some more information on the business ROI of building solutions in the cloud? [02:34] The driving force behind cloud. [02:47] Data is growing to 44 zettabytes by the end of 2020 and will grow to 163 zettabytes per year by 2025. [03:15] Analysts predict analytics to be a $200M global market by 2020. [03:31] 2020 will see $1T in IT spending related to cloud. [04:38] The business benefits of cloud: Cloud provides businesses with operational agility, quicker time to market, security, and reliability. [07:51] Cloud eliminates hardware refreshes and its associated maintenance costs. [08:25] Tell us about Microsoft’s online distribution model called the Commercial Marketplace. [09:15] B2B buyers prefer to gather their own information online and not interact with a sales rep. [10:22] The online marketplace is a distribution model for partners to see their software and services. [10:40] There are 2 storefronts. The first is called Azure Marketplace which is predominately suited for IT professionals looking for technology building blocks, like API’s, etc. [10:55] The second one is called Appsource, which is focused more on line of business software solutions. [14:55] Can you share a few stories that highlight how businesses have become extremely successful by partnering with Microsoft? [21:09] Covid-19 has impacted everyone, and we’re now living in what’s called the “new normal”. Can you share with us some of the work you’re doing to help partners succeed in today’s “remote only” world? [26:06] I’ve really enjoyed hearing the success stories about the Commercial Marketplace. For people considering joining the Microsoft Partnership, how transformative is the Commercial Marketplace in helping people scale and grow their businesses? [26:40] The Commercial Marketplace is as transformative for businesses as cloud is being from a technology perspective. [30:19] Where can people go to learn more about the Commercial Marketplace? Paul: They can go to https://azure.com and https://aka.ms/SellThroughMarketplace. [31:00] And how can people connect with you, personally. Paul: You can connect with me on Twitter at @PaulJFMaher and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljmaher/. [31:18] Do you have any parting words of wisdom to share with the audience? #AskTheCEO with Paul Maher

Retail has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Shelley Bransten, Karen Garrette, and Sahir Anand join David and Paul to discuss how retailers are responding to the current crisis along with what to expect during and after recovery.We introduce the Microsoft for Retail team and how it works with partners and customers to solve the biggest retail problems and move the state of the industry forward with digital technologies. In addition we hear how Microsoft is helping the largest employment segment in the world navigate the COVID-19 crisis.Finally, we hear where Microsoft is investing in the technologies serving the future of the industry.Show Links[Transcript]Microsoft for RetailProject Zap, Retail Matchmaking ToolMcKinsey Covid Resource CenterThe Kroger BlueprintWalgreens’s Boot AllianceGuestsShelley BranstenCorporate Vice President, WW Retail & Consumer Goods Industries, MicrosoftShelley grew up in retail. She is a passionate advocate for customers and works tirelessly to ensure retailers are set up for success across their digital transformation efforts. At Microsoft, Shelley leads the thought leadership, go-to-market and solution approach to address retailers’ most important growth opportunities.Shelley on LinkedInKaren GarretteWorld Wide Retail Strategy Lead at MicrosoftHaving worked in a variety of roles from presales to consultancy, Karen has the depth and breadth of experience and deep technical understanding that allows her to translate the feature and function set into customer solutions to win against the competition.Karen on LinkedInSahir AnandPrincipal, Industry Lead – Microsoft Azure Cloud+AI for Retail & CPG at MicrosoftOver the years, Sahir has published several industry reports, blogs, whitepapers, and videos focused on retail and CPG industry business and technology areas. He is an avid speaker at industry events.Sahir on LinkedIn

Our Microsoft for Health panel looks forward to the future of healthcare. As healthcare responds to the current COVID-19 crisis, it is accelerating its adoption of technologies that would have taken years to implement before the current need for change.The panel discusses how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is impacting healthcare today and in the future. Hear how Microsoft's AI/ML technologies and the Azure cloud are being brought to bear to empower people to work differently.Not only are these technologies helping the current situation, but partners are providing the next generation of medicine today. Learn how Healthcare will be forever changed by the technology solutions currently being introduced today.TranscriptShow NotesMicrosoft for HealthcareMicrosoft Industry Health BlogMicrosoft 365 and healthcareMicrosoft for Healthcare on LinkedInMicrosoft’s Covid-19 ResponsePatient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People EverywhereCommunication for crisis managementDeliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crisesComplimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 responseEnabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcareGE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systemsLearn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiriesBuild a crisis management site to connect people and informationUse this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management templateQuickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizationsWork remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOsArtificial Intelligence in HealthcareUses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortiumThe Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resourcesThe Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labsFolding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeuticsThe Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patientsTake, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitalsGuestsGareth HallSenior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health SolutionsGareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).LinkedInJohn DoyleDirector, Cloud & AI, Microsoft HealthcareAs a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.LinkedInDavid HouldingDavid is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.LinkedInTwitter

Microsoft for Healthcare is working hard to help healthcare throughout the COVID-19 crisis and to plan for what comes after the pandemic. Our guests discuss how Microsoft is responding to the current COVID-19 crisis as well as their mission in healthcare and the future of the industry.Our guests describe how they work with partners to find the right capabilities enabled by Microsoft solutions. Additionally, we discuss several Microsoft healthcare-focused products in use today. Learn how Microsoft technologies are being used to solve real world problems related not only to the current pandemic, but other important healthcare problems.The panel discusses the partnerships occurring between competitors to combat COVID-19. Learn about Microsoft partner solutions available to help "flatten the curve" during this crisis.TranscriptShow NotesMicrosoft for HealthcareMicrosoft Industry Health BlogMicrosoft 365 and healthcareMicrosoft for Healthcare on LinkedIn Microsoft’s Covid-19 ResponsePatient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People EverywhereCommunication for crisis managementDeliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crisesComplimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 responseEnabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcareGE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systemsLearn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiriesBuild a crisis management site to connect people and informationUse this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management templateQuickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizationsWork remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOs Artificial Intelligence in HealthcareUses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortiumThe Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resourcesThe Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labsFolding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeuticsThe Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patientsTake, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitalsGuestsGareth HallSenior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health SolutionsGareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).LinkedInJohn DoyleDirector, Cloud & AI, Microsoft HealthcareAs a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.LinkedInDavid HouldingDavid is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.LinkedInTwitter

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with Steven Guggenheimer "Guggs" to get the latest on the ISV Connect program. It seems that the word is out at Microsoft about calls from me... they all seem ready now. But I still had a few surprises for him.  Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript below: Steven Guggenheimer: Hello. This is Guggs. Steve Mordue: Hey, Guggs. Steve Mordue. How you doing? Steven Guggenheimer: Good. How are you doing? Steve Mordue: You know how I'm doing. You know why I'm here. Steven Guggenheimer: I do. I do. I assume we're get to go do a little update session, and so I know or I assume you're recording and- Steve Mordue: You bet I am. Steven Guggenheimer: ... whatever I say is ready to go. Steve Mordue: You got time? Steven Guggenheimer: Sure. Yeah, I got a little time. Steve Mordue: All right. Perfect, perfect. Well, it's been a while since we talked. It's actually been a while since we've heard from you. I was looking, and I think November was the last post, kind of an update to the world of what's going on. I've been hearing the hammers banging back in the background, but lots of folks, lots of ISVs are reaching out to me for some reason or other, saying, "Hey, what's the latest? What's going on? What's happening on that ISV front?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Like you said, lots of hammers in the background. Once you get into that middle of the year, you're just mostly heads down trying to do two things, trying to solidify all the work that's going on for this year, so working with the field. The team went out and did a field tour and, on lots of calls, we have our middle of the year checkpoint. You're just grinding away on that, and you start doing the planning for the next fiscal year. It turns out our Q3, which is January, February, March, is kind of double busy. You're working pretty hard to do whatever tweaks you need for this year and you're busy planning for the next year, and so I think everybody's been pretty heads down. Steven Guggenheimer: Then you get into January and February with the virus coming out, I think you're busy trying to figure out, "Are we going to do [MBAS 00:02:13] live?" You plan for one version of it, and then you plan for a different. You're working with customers and partners. I think all of those things combined means everybody's busy. My virtual team gets together on a regular basis, and I've got a couple of calls after this, so that's where we're at. Steve Mordue: The ISVs have definitely had some challenges with Microsoft. Not all of this, of course, is within your area. You're working on the program for ISVs that will link to the products, which you're not related to the products. You're related the program. But on the product side, even, the ISVs are having some challenges. I know that there's been ISVs that... The platform keeps shifting, keeps moving around, new things added, things dropped. I even know some ISVs that have said, "Hey, they just launched something, and it kind of wiped out my whole solution." Steve Mordue: I think there's multiple things going on on the ISV side that's got a lot of them nervous, and I think they're looking for some reassurance that, "We bet on the right platform, and was that a good bet, and when are we going to see a payoff on that bet?" What kinds of things can you say to maybe reassure some of these ISVs that are out there that are scratching their heads saying, "Hmm, what's next? I mean was this a good bet?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I can't think of a better bet right now, but that's me. Of course, I'm on the wrong side of the fence for that. The- Steve Mordue: Well, we're all biased. Even us ISVs are biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, we're all biased. Steve Mordue: We're all biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people want a little reassurance that, to your point, that they made good decisions. From a platform and product perspective, there's probably never been more energy in the combination of Power Platform and D365 than we have today. I talked a lot about product truth. I didn't think there was a lot of product truth for an ISV in the platform SaaS offerings if you go back five years when we were in the DPDx days. Steven Guggenheimer: James and [Mohamed 00:04:24] and Charles have just been cranking along, and so from the breadth of the portfolio and the quality in that link to Azure going down the stack and that link to SharePoint and M365 going up the stack and the coherence in the platform. Then we've been cleaning up. I mean God bless the team for all the work they've had to do to clean up just years and years of monolithic offerings that weren't in good shape. That speaks a little bit to the change of the underlying platform. Steven Guggenheimer: We're probably as solid as we've ever been. We've got a twice-a-year release train. The notes come out early. We did an ISV session for the partners to get ahead of it. We'll do that again on an every-six-month basis. Satya is sort of heavily invested. Scott's heavily invested. Amy, our CFO, is heavily invested. I think there's both product or platform truth. There's good energy in the marketplace. I mean we're growing very well. Steven Guggenheimer: Can't say anything. Q3 will be coming up, but you look at Q2 and Q1, you look at just quarter over quarter, now the platform's growing and, if the platform's growing, that's opportunity, in particular, Power Platform, Power BI, some of the D365 services. I think all of that speaks to just incredible momentum. I see a decent number of ISVs coming into the program and the platform unsolicited wanting to take part in that. Steven Guggenheimer: Now, the one place people might feel a little discomfort is, as the platform solidifies and as the services solidify and we add things like AI and mixed reality in there, there might be places where people were making an investment or were looking to extend that we might be extending in that area. I would say, look, if you're an ISV on the Microsoft platform, historically, one of your trademarks is being somewhat nimble. I don't care if it's all the way back to the Windows days and Windows 95 working your way up through the internet era or intelligent cloud, intelligent edge. The value of a platform is that balance between giving developers something to build on and having enough coherence and consistency that both customers and ISVs can count on it. Steven Guggenheimer: There's a fine balance there in terms of where you add features or functionality or new capabilities to keep up with what your competitors are doing, to keep up with what the customers are asking for. It's a balancing act. I think the good thing, at least in the Dynamics side, is that we're always open for conversation. Whether it's myself or Greg or Mohamed or Charles, look, we'll pick up the phone and we'll have the discussion. There'll be places where people might feel uncomfortable that we've gone in that direction. Great. We'll have that conversation, and we'll talk about, roughly, where we're going without breaking NDAs on either side. Steven Guggenheimer: My feedback to ISVs has always been the, "There's always someone at Microsoft who thinks, someday, they're going to build something that competes with you, so let's focus on the 90% where we don't compete and know that there's going to be 10%." I think that's just a truism. Look, energy is really good. I mean product coherence is good. Product truth is good. If you look at what's going on, right now, during the COVID response and the pickup for the Power Platform in terms of helping hospitals and healthcare workers and quick solutions, holy crud. Steven Guggenheimer: Then the new areas are good conversation, so let's have the discussion. I mean I know a lot of the historical ISVs have been around a long time, and some of the work they did that was either custom on the product side or custom in terms of working with our field as we make that available to everybody, that feels a little less comfortable. We do a good amount of handholding for that. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I think one of the things you guys have been telling ISVs, for years, as a way to build a business but also, in a way, to protect your business is to go vertical. The more vertical you can get, the safer you are. You guys are not going to go there. A lot of horizontal ISVs, and they're... If you're horizontal, you're plugging a hole. You're always at risk that Microsoft's going to get around to the time to plug that hole. You're definitely safer going vertical. Steven Guggenheimer: That's for sure, and that's even more true today. As some of our competitors invest in the acquisition of vertical solutions, it opens up that direction more. I would say, as a company, we're making that pivot, albeit slowly but surely, to industry-led versus product-led. We've always had product conversations. We've always had audience conversations, developers or IT pros. We've always had sides of organization enterprise, but industry was always kind of a... not as strong a direction in terms of how we went to market. We pivoted the company pretty heavily, and Azure's doing a lot of this work at M365, and so is Dynamics. In industry-based solutions, those are always the ones that get the best pickup, and now our sales force is pivoting more and more in that direction. That's the way to stay aligned. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You talked about nimble. Frankly, one of the challenges some of these ISVs have is they're not that nimble. They built a bunch of IP on something, and their goal was to just sit back and collect checks, but you can't do that anymore. We're no longer in a space you just build something and sit on it for years. You may not be able to sit on it for months before you've got to go back in, modify, refactor, take advantage of some new technology or... It's a continuous motion now for ISVs. They're in continuous development mode where they didn't use to be. It was like, "We're going to go build something, sit on it, and cash in." Steven Guggenheimer: And particular in this space, and we see it a lot. I use the term, sometimes, there's this notion of lifestyle businesses where you build something and it supports the lifestyle, and there's not a lot of interest or energy in reinvesting to change it or modify it. Truthfully, that doesn't work. There are places where- Steve Mordue: Tell me about it. Steven Guggenheimer: They're- Steve Mordue: That's what I've been trying to do. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, it's not working. Part of the blog series I've been working on, it's called Continuous Transformation, and it's all... If you look at 25 years or the 26 years of Microsoft, all we've ever done is evolved and changed, and it's driven by technology and scale and culture. I can't remember a period of time where something's not upending the conversation. Steve Mordue: Yeah, but the pace is much greater in the past few years. The shift to the cloud and the catch up, really, because we were behind getting in the cloud, the catch up necessitated a pace that we have not ever seen from Microsoft, this kind of a pace. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I think, in the line of business application space or the Dynamics/Power Platform, we were further behind in that move, as a Microsoft property, than some of the others, be it Office or Azure, and so we're doing a lot of catch up, and that's why think that... I talked a lot about product truth. I think they've done a phenomenal job, but that's like a bit of a whip where we're as close to it as you can be and, the further out you get, the more you're going to have to go and make those changes, and you're playing a lot of catch up. Steven Guggenheimer: The truth is, D365, there were custom deals floating around there and custom support and all kinds of things that, as you modernize and change, that goes away. I think some [crosstalk 00:12:10]- Steve Mordue: It's not scalable, yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people get frustrated because they had this special deal. Well, look, we don't even build that product anymore or that product's not one we're trying to sell. We're off doing cloud stuff, so no, we're not going to go renew a set of terms or a set of conditions for something that we're not trying to drive anymore. The market's moved on. That's gone, and so you need to go modify and change your solution to meet the current market needs. Yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: On one hand, I get it. On the other hand, look, the time to move is now. The world is moving, and the opportunity is very good. Despite current conditions which are there, look, there's... The world, the first thing they move is their infrastructure as a service. They move the core horizontal infrastructure out, but sooner or later, the next thing they're going to do is they're going to want to go to a set of SaaS applications. They're not going to want to have a cloud-based infrastructure then run some client server on-premises solution. They're going to want to set a SaaS services. Steven Guggenheimer: Even though people may feel like it's a push or it's a hurry, that's where the world's going. We're going to go push on it, and you need to move your solutions there. Steve Mordue: I'll tell you, it's been very acute, these folks that have on-premise solutions, particularly if they're physically on premise, with this virus and the push to send everybody to work from home in organizations that really weren't set up for people to work from home from a technical standpoint. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: I'm sure there are people out there now that are thinking, "Damn, I wish we were in the cloud right now because those guys got it pretty easy working from home if you already made this transition." It's very acute right now. Steve Mordue: I was talking to Charles two weeks ago. I pounced on him, or a week ago, I pounced on him for a call. He was saying one of the things that's a- Steven Guggenheimer: You are getting a bit of a reputation, but keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. People are going to be scared and have my number blocked. Steven Guggenheimer: Nobody's going to pick up the phone. Steve Mordue: One of the things he said that was a big focus right now is making everything work better. It's like we were firing off lots of solutions, getting them to like 90%, move on to the next one, fire it off, fire it off. Now there's this effort to kind of go back to this. Let's close these gaps. As he was talking about, there's still some significant gaps in not the product truth. The product truth is there, but there's some gaps that they're now really going to focus on closing. It feels like it's kind of like it's time to do that. We've shot out tons of things. Now let's go back, tighten them all up, and then go back to revisit shooting out more things so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, I think that's right. You look for gaps and overlaps. You look for how do we take all the AI scenarios? They're kind of scattered. Can we bring some of them together? Do they make sense together? When they first came into the portfolio, they were sort of all independent, so we ran them uniquely and independently and just kept them going and, excuse me, tried to find alignment with the various SaaS services. Now you go back and you say, okay, where is their consistency? Where is the sum of the parts greater than the individual? Steven Guggenheimer: You go and you look for whether it's process automation and the work we're doing there, whether it's the power of virtual agent. If you look at what they've done in terms of for COVID-19 in terms of using a virtual agent, making it available, how do you turn these into tools that can really scale and operate and work at the levels needed? Steven Guggenheimer: I think Mohamed's got the same thing. There's a bunch of solution areas as we took ERP and CRM and took them into their natural marketing and sales and finance and operations, and we picked up some other areas. He's doing that same work. Now is a beautiful time to not necessarily double the number of offerings or add a whole bunch of new products. It's now is the time to take the momentum we've got and the offerings we've got and fill in the gaps and, where there's overlap, bring things together, make these things really operate at scale. Steven Guggenheimer: When you have the energy and you've got the interest, then what you start to get is feedback on what you're missing or what's not quite right. We want to take advantage of this time to go work on that. Steve Mordue: Let me circle this back to your space, the ISV side specifically. Over the past month, I've had two calls with some folks on your team that were looking for my opinion about some complaints they were getting, because you know I have opinions, about some complaints they were getting from some ISVs that had built their solution depending on this Team Member license and the changes to Team Member. I am actually aware of a couple of these ISVs that actually built their solution on the Team Member license without regard for the restrictions of that license. Certainly pretty easy to make your ISV solution have a lot of appeal if you've put it on a lesser license than it should be on. Steven Guggenheimer: Right. Steve Mordue: They're complaining now about the changes. Both of your folks had asked me my thought about that. I said, basically, "The hell with them." I mean I have no sympathy for somebody who built a solution on top of a license they shouldn't have. If you can't make revenue on the right license, then your solution's not right or you're thing isn't right. I mean do you have similar feelings of lack of sympathy for those folks that did those things? Steven Guggenheimer: I sort of think about it a little bit differently. Yes, look, there's people that take advantage of, it maybe intentionally or unintentionally, of licensing they shouldn't. That just has to get fixed, and we'll go work on that. Steven Guggenheimer: What there is that I think about is there are two scenarios that I think of as light use or light functionality scenarios. If you have something, a very large group of people... Students is a good example. Healthcare workers might be a good example. Pick your scenario where you have lots of people, and you have some people that are heavy users, and you have some people who might touch the solution once or twice a year or who touch the solution quite often, but they need just a very lightweight answer to it. They're not- Steve Mordue: A light touch. Steven Guggenheimer: They're users. They're users versus creators. That lightweight or light touch scenario is one we still are trying to figure out the right scenario for because there's not a great license type for this. By the way, this isn't a Dynamics-type conversation. I can say the same thing for Office for all the years it was there and people would talk about different types of workers. It's one of the- Steve Mordue: Contract workers, things like that. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. They used to use the term knowledge workers, and there was something else I can't remember. There is a collective challenge, which is how do you build a licensing framework where you can't tell between the two, light touch or light use, or you can tell but there's no consistency. If I ask the question, "What does light touch mean to one ISV or light use?" I'll get a very different answer than what I get from another one, so you can't design a licensing type that works for everyone. Steven Guggenheimer: That's one where I definitely have some empathy. It's not a sympathy term. I get it. I don't know what the answer is. To your point, ultimately, you have to design the solution to work with the licensing types that are out there. There's this funny juxtaposition between everybody wants simplicity but everybody wants all ultimate choice. Well, those two things aren't the same. You either get simple or you have the... and not as much choice or you get all the choice in the world. It's the most complex thing you'll ever seen, and so I don't know the answer to solving for this one. Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the licensing teams are very aware of it. They've had tons of these calls, in a good way, but there's not... I don't know the answer. I haven't seen anybody figure out the answer in 10-plus years of banging heads on this, and so I do think trying to design a solution for the licensing types that are out there is the right thing to do. Team doesn't serve that purpose. It's gone relative to that where people try to use it for something that it wasn't designed for, which in many cases, is that light use, light tough scenario, but it doesn't work. Steven Guggenheimer: We'll keep banging our heads. We'll keep talking to people. People do have to work within the licensing confines that are out there. We're always evolving them. We're always taking feedback. We're always trying to do better. Assuming something's going to come magically, it doesn't happen. Steve Mordue: We're not alone there. I was reading the Forrester Report on low-code solutions. We're obviously up there at the top now with a couple of others. The negative for all of the ones at the top was overly complex licensing. I was just thinking to myself, "You know what? Whoever figures that out is going to win because that's the thing holding all of the low-code platforms back a little bit is people can't figure out how to buy it." They just can't. Partners can't figure out what to sell. Customers can't figure out what to buy, too many moving parts in the licensing. Fortunately, we're not the only ones that have that problem, but whoever could figure that out is really... I'm sure you guys have got some smart people trying to figure that out. Steve Mordue: A couple of other things before I let you go. On- Steven Guggenheimer: Well, just on that one, there's also a difference between the customer angle for that and the ISV angle. Trying to figure out a licensing framework that works well for customers and ISVs, whether it's the low-code scenario or some of these others, it adds to the complexity. I highlight that in the sense that customers are a big chunk of... That's typically where we start first when we're working on a licensing framework because they're the... many times are the purchasers or it ends up as part of a broader agreement set, and so we have to figure that out, and so that- Steve Mordue: Actually, I think it's easier for ISVs because, as an ISV, I can figure out and understand what license would be necessary to run my solution and talk to a customer about, "Here's exactly what you need to run my solution." Bigger challenge, I think, for customers and SIs where a customer's like, "We want to do all these wonderful things," and then for them to try and figure out what kind of licenses they might need to accomplish those things. At least I know what I'm doing with my solution. It's pretty straightforward. I may have to shift it from a license I used to have it on to some different licensing construct as things changes, but it's a little easier for me. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: One of the things that came up in one of my calls with a pretty good size ISV recently was the lack of... I think he told me his costs this year are going to be over $90,000 for Microsoft licensing to be able to actually build and develop their solutions on between their multiple sandboxes, different things like that. It's a frustration for him that, "I'm building an ISV solution, a big one. I have lots of customers that are generating licenses and revenue for Microsoft, but I'm having to spend, as an ISV, a ton of money to even be able to do that." Steve Mordue: We had that ISV competency out for about eight minutes, decided that wasn't a good path. Some of the other paths to get IUR and those sorts of things that you would need to build on aren't always relevant for ISVs. The biggest thing the ISV competency really gave was, "Here. Here's some benefits. Here's some resources for you to go build on." What can we tell those folks that... I mean this guy's literally having to buy retail. You know? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. That's a Microsoft-level challenge in many ways. It's the what's the benefits? It really comes out of the MPN, the Microsoft Partner Network. What's the benefits? That's where that competency came from of being a partner and, if you're an ISV, how can you get access to the software you need to build a solution? Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the team is deeply aware of that. It's from the day the ISV competency went away to through all the conversations. I haven't checked in in a while to see where they are on coming up with an offering. I'll go back and ask. It's a good question. I don't know. Look, I don't know the answer, the how do you provide software? It ends up being, to your point, sandboxes or one-offs or these other things versus what's the programmatic approach that scales across Azure, Dynamics/Power Platform at M365? How do we make it available? What do you need to do to qualify, as a partner, so it's not just out there for everybody? It's an expensive offering [crosstalk 00:25:23]- Steve Mordue: Yeah, so is manning an ISV practice with developers and people to build, so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. No, they're both... That's right. Steve Mordue: Yep. Steven Guggenheimer: How do we find that balance? I don't know. Again, it's a little bit like a light-usage, lightweight licensing SKU where I haven't seen the answer to that. This is one of those ones that pops up and down in terms of, sometimes, we seem to give a lot of benefit in that direction, and sometimes we don't. Let me go back. I'll go back. It could be one of the last things I can go poke on a little bit, especially since- Steve Mordue: Yeah. That would be good. Steven Guggenheimer: Especially since I know Nick super well. Nick Parker took over the... He has the ISV remit underneath him now, so I'll go bug him about that. Steve Mordue: Yeah, we kind of kicked the can down the road when the ISV competency went away, kind of grandfathered everybody into business biz apps or some other competency while we figured it out, but now we'll be looking at people coming up on that expiring, and they'll be like, "Okay, now what do I got?" I mean it's obviously a big expense for ISVs when they're looking at partnering with Microsoft. They're thinking, "Here's something you can do for me," but other things- Steven Guggenheimer: No, that's super constant, consistent feedback. That's not a new one. We probably had that conversation the first time we did a call and- Steve Mordue: Every time since. Steven Guggenheimer: Every time since, and I still haven't... It's one I get to poke on. It's not one that I own, but it's one that I'll go poke on again. Steve Mordue: How is ISV Connect? Have you guys collected revenue yet? Are we at the point where we're collecting revenue from ISVs? Steven Guggenheimer: Oh, yeah. Yeah, collecting revenue. We crossed 1,000 ISVs that have signed the agreements. I think we've crossed 1,000 apps in AppSource now. We've done all the work to remove the ones that didn't go through certification that didn't join ISV Connect. Steven Guggenheimer: We're actually in a good in a good spot. We've got a decent number at the 20% level, and we're trying to get the ones that our field is really asking for aligned with more of the 20-percenters because those are the ones that are going to close out with the most. I feel really good about the getting people into the program. We've gotten the time to do the certification down. That's all been cleaned up. I think terms and conditions, we've been through all of that. We're heading into the next year. We won't add a lot, so keep it simple, do more of the same. Steven Guggenheimer: The place we're spending energy now is on the benefits side. We've got almost all the partners activated with their marketing benefits now, and they've had the call, and we're working on that. On the co-selling side, look, we're continuing to do the work with the field to drive that forward. Some people feel pretty good about it and we get really good feedback, and some people don't feel as good quite yet, and so we're working on both of those. Steven Guggenheimer: Now as you head into Q4 with an economic challenge around the world, everybody hunkers down a little bit, so we're going to have to work a little harder. One of my meetings later today is how do we stay focused on the right things and the fewest number of things to keep the momentum going as we head into this year and next? We're doing the planning for what would we tune for next year. Overall, it's going well. Steven Guggenheimer: The operations, a lot of the challenges we had, once you got past the people discomfort with a new program, a lot of challenges we had were operations. We're cleaning those up. We have some marketplace work to do. We've had good calls with that team. When people give us feedback, we understand it. We're doing the engineering work now. I sort of feel like we'll work our way through Q4 this year and then, as we head into the next year, we'll have both an engineering uptick on operations work, on the marketplace, on the back end. There's work going on on Partner Center because it's going to scale to more and more partners across the company. Steven Guggenheimer: I feel pretty good, not perfect. I always say these things are a journey and they take time, that's for sure, and so we'll- Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. It always takes longer than you think, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. I'm scarred enough to know that we still got another year of cranking away, but we're in a good spot given where we were. The energy's in a good place. We just got to keep focused and keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Maybe there's a way to solve both those problems. I seem to recall, at least, the initial benefits that were being, "Here, in exchange for the rev share, we're going to give you guys these benefits." A lot of those benefits were targeting brand-new ISVs. A lot of the benefits on that list for an established ISV, they were like, "Oh, I don't need this. I don't need this. I don't need a bunch of these things as an established ISV." Those are all, certainly, high value to someone brand-new to the platform, which is something we all want is more ISVs. Maybe there's a way to tie in those IURs or the benefits back to, "Okay, you don't want a marketing thing? Fine. How about if we give you some credits that you could use towards the underlying platform stuff you might need that could be a little more value to those folks?" Steven Guggenheimer: That's some of the conversations we're having is which benefits are people finding value in? Where would they like to see other benefits? The IUR is a constant one, so that one I sort of table off on the side because it's a consistent. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Definitely, benefits will be different for someone brand new to the platform who's never done anything versus someone who's been there for a long time. Let me ask- Steven Guggenheimer: Right. This is one of the trade-offs when you go... A platform is only as strong as its ecosystem. To make the ecosystem stronger, you're going to add more people in, and so you're going to bring people in. Part of what you're trying to do is attract that. Not all of those things feel great for the people that have been there and been working on it. That's where a little bit of the tuning and being agile helps because you're adapting to... Look, the platforms are going to scale and grow. It's in a good spot, so there's going to be more people you know on it, and so we have to find that the tools that work for everyone. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Thanks to your little kick, I got a call next week with about a dozen people on the AppSource team, so they're going to get an earful of all my opinions so they can put that in the mixer. Steven Guggenheimer: No, I think it'll be good because look... and they know. To be honest with you, they know. We told them, "Look, it's better to hear directly. There's a couple of folks, we're having them talk to you. They're sending me the feedback," and then they can tell you where they're at and what they're doing and why it's taking a little longer than maybe people had hoped for. That's the beauty of doing it right and getting it fixed is... not the beauty, the reality. Steve Mordue: Necessity. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, the reality or the necessity. It's a little like rebooting this program. Steve Mordue: I want to wrap up here because I don't want to take up too much of your time. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Yeah, I got somebody- Steve Mordue: You recently announced a retirement. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Steve Mordue: Coming soon. Who's going to be stepping into your shoes for this ISV motion? Figured that out yet? Has that been just thought about? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. No, we're going to move the team into another part of the organization. It'll be close to the Accelerator Team, which used to report to me anyway, and the Industry Team and with one of our real good leaders and with DSI. It'll end up in a spot with Greg and Sean still running their teams aligned with the work going on for another key part of the ecosystems, which is SIs, and the industry work, which has a ton of ISV work. It's all the accelerators. Again, that team used to report into my org, so it'll feel like a pretty natural connection into places it would fit and the people we've worked with pretty closely all along. Steve Mordue: You're going to have every single one of these issues fixed, buttoned up, running like a well-oiled machine before you walk out the door, right? Steven Guggenheimer: I'm going to stay committed to doing the best job to make sure we're set up well for our next fiscal year to transitioning well and to being there. Then I'll be around for a little longer to make sure if there's questions or engagements that are needed to done that I do them. Steve Mordue: All right, cool. Well, I'm looking forward to everything that that comes. Thanks for making the time for the call. Steven Guggenheimer: No worries. I always enjoy a surprise call on whatever day it is. Days get lost nowadays, but- Steve Mordue: Yeah. I'll bet you enjoy them, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: All right, man. Have a good one. Steven Guggenheimer: All right. We'll talk you, Steve. Take care. Bye.

Join us in this episode about the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, the way to buy and sell software from Microsoft partners. Publishers and buyers of Azure-based cloud software will be interested in this show, whether learning how to sell your solution or how to buy an offered solution.The Microsoft Commercial Marketplace consists of two storefronts, the Azure Marketplace and AppSource. Join us on this episode to learn the differences and who will be interested in each.Microsoft AppSourceMicrosoft Azure MarketplaceTranscriptJeana JorgensenAs a leader in the Cloud Commercial Community organization at Microsoft, Jeana Jorgensen is an expert in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace and the value Microsoft Azure customers and partners derive from it. She joins us on the podcast to discuss the use of the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, who should be interested, and how to get the greatest value from it as sellers or buyers of commercial software running on Microsoft Azure.LinkedIn

Most people I am talking to today are starting to think about their businesses in these odd times. Many are naturally concerned about a reduction in revenue. But the counter-part to revenue is cost. Since the revenue side may be out of our control to some degree, the cost side is more critical than ever. Athletic I work with a lot of businesses of all sizes. From my first-hand experience, the smaller the business, the leaner they operate. That is not a result of smaller profit percentage, many have very high margins. The biggest difference is that from the smaller business owner's perch, they can see better. There is not much that is missed in a small a business. As businesses grow, layers are introduced that start to obscure visibility. Undetected leaks start to form... leaks that can be hidden by high margins. BBW At the opposite end of the scale are large businesses. While their margins may be smaller, their volume is huge, and of course their costs are also huge. Well beyond the scale that a single person can have any visibility; with layers upon layers, there are leaks all over the place. We are working with a Fortune 500 customer right now that discovered a $250K/month leak that had been unnoticed for quite a while. The solution was not complicated, we are plugging the hole with a Power App at a total cost of about $15K. Of course since this was a big ass company, it took 4 months to approve the expense, and about 90 days more so far, to mobilize their side. This leak could have been plugged in two weeks, but instead another $1.5m will have leaked out first. Such is the ineptitude of large business, this could never happen in a smaller business. A Few Extra Pounds Sitting in the middle, between small and large businesses, are the midsized businesses. While a $250k/month leak will not go unnoticed for a second, the midsized business has enough layers to have many leaks. Where are these leaks? Usually some faulty, or inefficient business process. What kind of leaks? Time not captured properly, customers not billed properly, vendors not paid properly, inventory not managed properly, inefficient project management or production line management... leaks are potentially all over. Every business has leaks, some are significant enough to warrant immediate attention, and others are just considered a "cost of business", absorbed by margin. But if margins compress, every leak will start looking pretty important. Plugging Leaks Depending on the leak, you may need to use a different set of tools, but many of these leaks will be occurring in your business processes. Microsoft's Power Platform is the tool to use for those. Unlike Salesforce.com or even Dynamics 365, both of which require significant time and cost to implement, the Power Platform can solve many business process issues in days. Built on top of the Common Data Service, the Power Platform includes a suite of tools including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents. Each of these tools are low-code options that can be deployed quickly, and at a low cost, to plug leaks. If you would like to learn how you can plug leaks with the Power Platform, we offer a free briefing to get you up-to-speed. Go to Appsource.com and search "forceworks".

As an ISV I want to be able to take full advantage of everything that Microsoft's Power Platform can offer. Like SI's and customers, I get excited when I see the roadmap of features that are coming... it is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, just because something goes GA, does not mean it is "ISV Ready". ISV Connect Technical Summit I recently attended the least "technical", technical event I have ever been to. As part of Microsoft's larger "ISV Connect" effort to create excitement for ISVs, they had extended what had previously been a smaller F&O ISV focused event to encompass all of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. I missed the follow-up email suggesting that I send my technical people, and instead went myself. Cave Dwellers It seems that this majority F&O crowd, did send their technical people, who apparently all live under rocks. Many of the sessions were about things like "What is CDS?" Content I had already seen 100 times. What I found interesting, was that this far into the game, so many people still did not understand what we have all been talking about for the last two+ years. Twists and Turns I have seen the Power Platform slides many times, but these had been updated to include "Power Virtual Agents" in the mix. To be honest, I don't think Power Virtual Agents should sit at the same level as Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. It feels like the dwarf on the basketball team. If I were in charge, I would probably have renamed "Dynamics 365 Customer Insights" to "Power Insights" and given it the upper level. As a standalone product, similar to Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights does not even require Dynamics 365. Ironically, I had predicted a while back that "Dynamics 365" would eventually become the brand name for Microsoft's "finished" apps that run on the Power Platform, which is the reason I was given for this naming. But it is not that dissimilar a level of "finished" than Power BI, and we don't call that Dynamics 365 BI. Burned by GA With my ISV hat on, I have become suspicious of the GA tag. Microsoft should really clarify that a feature or product is "GA for SIs and Customers", but not ready yet for ISVs. What's the difference? Well, as an ISV, who is drinking the AppSource Koolaid, I have to look at it differently. In an ideal world, my customer can go to AppSource, click a button to install my solution, and just use it. For the most part, this turnkey dream only works for Model-Driven apps today. ISV Ready Tag In one of the session Q&As, I asked one of the Microsoft ISV leaders about the possibility of an "ISV Ready" tag. He said "Good Idea!", which I have heard many times with no subsequent action. But he was actually all over the idea, including creating a slide for his closing session about the "ISV Ready" tag, I had previously caught him in the hallway and suggested the ISV Ready tag should not be applied by the product teams, but rather by a volunteer committee of actual ISVs.... because we actually know when something is "Ready" for us. What is ISV Ready? Well, since Microsoft seems to be running with the idea, I guess we will eventually find out what they think it means. I also think it will vary from ISV to ISV. Many ISVs have an intentional services component that comes behind their IP, to perform various tasks and configurations. For me, I want turnkey. I don't want to have to get on the phone with every customer, or create some complicated instructions, for them to be able to use my solutions. It's more than just being "Solution Aware", although that is obviously part of it. I mean Power Automate is now "Solution Aware", but is not "ISV Ready" in my opinion. I recently installed Microsoft's own Center of Excellence Starter Kit solution on an instance, and then spent half a day manually connecting all of the included Flows to make it light up. I can't expect a customer to do that, as soon as it does not work as advertised, they'll just delete my solution. Customers First I get that Microsoft is going to build things that solve issues for customers first, and I am not suggesting that they hold off on GAing things until they are ISV Ready. But don't think that feature is truly done, and move on the next shiny object, until it is ISV Ready. This assumes of course that Microsoft is sincere in their desire to grown a thriving ISV ecosystem like SFDC. At the moment, I believe they are sincere, but as my ex wife used to say to me, "Actions speak louder than words".  

As an ISV, with solutions for both Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, I was encouraged about the attention that Business Applications ISVs are getting recently. Unfortunately, I.P. protection is not one of the items coming anytime soon. Managed Solution Myth Many ISVs believe that their managed solutions are safe. Having taken great pains to ensure that their managed solution never gets in the wrong hands, by requiring that their own teams install it for example. Thanks to some utilities in free open source solutions like XrmToolBox for example, managed solutions are not even close to safe. Using a tool in the XrmToolBox called "Manage Solution" for example, I can login to any instance I have access to, and view a list of both managed and unmanaged solutions. The good news is I can only download to disk a copy of unmanaged solutions. However I can copy a managed solution into an unmanaged one, and then of course download a copy. So getting an unmanaged copy, of your managed solution that is installed on an instance I have access to, would take me about 30 seconds. I can now install your unmanaged solution on another instance, and poof, I have absconded with your I.P.. I can even take Microsoft's own Managed Solutions. Plugins Many ISVs feel that Plugins are safe. Well, using the "Assembly Recovery Tool" (also in XrmToolBox), I can download any dlls, managed or unmanaged. Pop open a freely available decompiler, and poof, I now have your Plugin I.P. Power App Components Forget about it, these run client side and I can scrape your I.P. right from my browser. Reverse Engineering Using a few freely available tools, an unscrupulous party can rip off and reverse engineer anything we have today. It happens. Sometimes it is a creepy, but savvy customer who just wants to get out of paying us for our solutions. Tinker here, tweak there and boom, they have it for free. Worse yet is unscrupulous parties that will take your I.P., re-brand it as their own, and resell it. At least I have been told by Microsoft that if we see that in AppSource, they will remove it. What Helps? Shifting necessary code off of your solution to your Azure is one scenario. At least on "your" Azure you can turn it off or on. If your solution has to reach outside, to get some bit of code or information to make it run, you at least have created a minor barrier. Code obfuscation is another technique that can help, but that is also not 100%. What Works? The only defense you have, in my opinion, is marketing. You have to build a brand and a reputation, that sane people will value over some low-cost knockoff. This is easier sad than done. It has taken us almost five years to establish a brand (RapidStartCRM) and a reputation, and still I hear people confusing us with knockoffs with similar names. There is of course, nothing illegal about liking someone's idea, and creating your own variation of it. But it still sucks to the one who did it first. What is not worth the effort? Let's face it. Most I.P could be reverse engineered even if I could not get your code. Just using it and understanding what it does is enough for a smart person to go create their own version. While their at it, they may as well go ahead and improve on your idea. In our solutions we have forgone the potentially very expensive, and not very effective anyway, I.P. protection efforts. We are able to track usage, and let customers know when they are out of compliance. This works with the 95% of customers who are honest. To me it was not worth the investment to attempt to thwart the %5. In retail, they call it "shrinkage". Obviously if you have extremely valuable, or highly proprietary I.P. you may look at it differently. Windows I have used this analogy for many things about Microsoft, and ISV solutions are no different. When you think you have identified an idea, a window opens. Shortly after you go through it, others will follow. In a relatively short amount of time, that same window starts to close. Either too many people went through it and there are no margins left, or Microsoft patched the hole you found and your solution is no longer needed. Today, windows close as fast as they open. If you are going to be in the ISV game, you need to move very fast with ideas, and always been thinking about what you will do next.

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)

Learn how you can publish your SaaS solution and start generating revenue by making it available to potential buyers on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. Ercenk Keresteci joins Scott Hanselman to cover the technical details of integrating a solution with Microsoft's commercial marketplace, including how to use scripts for provisioning and de-provisioning a customer.[0:05:00] - DemoAzure Marketplace and AppSource publishing guideCreate a new SaaS offerSaaS fulfillment APIs, version 2A sample for Azure Marketplace SaaS integration (GitHub)Create a free account (Azure)

The Power Platform is on fire! Lot's of partners, developers and citizens are all creating all kinds of things at a rapid pace, it all seems so easy. Unfortunately many of them will get down the road and realize they should have taken a fork a few miles back. Let's see if we can map out the right path from the jump. Whatcha gonna do? Before thinking about where to start, you should have clear idea of where you want to end up. Depending on the problem you are trying to solve, some choices will become obvious. If you are just looking to be notified when a new file is uploaded to a SharePoint folder? Microsoft Flow is probably all you need. Not much "Architecting" required. For this post, I want to talk about bigger things you may want to do, like building a robust sales application for your team for example, or any other function for that matter. Sure, for my Sales example, the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Sales application is one option to consider, but again, here I will go for the Platform approach. Foundation Canvas apps are great for point solutions, Power BI doesn't do anything without data and Microsoft Flow is great for connecting existing things, but for most customers we recommend starting with a model-driven app on CDS. It's not the app that is the foundation, it's the Common Data Service (CDS). CDS is the heart of all things to come, and allows for everything you start to do now, to have a full future later. The App The model-driven app you will be provided with by default is fairly scant. It does include Accounts and Contacts as a common starting point for most business applications, although for a B2C scenario you may not even need Accounts. It is a nice "rolodex" at this point, but way more powerful in it's potential. From here you can "model" your data and processes that are required to solve your initial needs. To shorten this process significantly you may want to look at our RapidStart Accelerator Applications on AppSource. Regardless of your starting point, you will likely need some further development by yourself or a Microsoft Partner who specializes in Business Applications. The good news is, the effort required is significantly less than it has ever been before. Apps As you work on your model-driven CDS environment, you may see a need for more than one use case. Maybe your sales department needs something, but you also want something for the warehouse, or whatever. By the way I am just using "Sales" as an easy-to-grasp concept, but the app(s) could be for any business need. You have a decision to make with potential monetary consequences. Do you build two separate apps, or one and control access with security roles? Microsoft is launching a per/app/user license that is only $10, and it would be awesome to utilize just that. If your users are pretty segregated, and few or none of them  would have need to access both apps, you are fine. But if many of them need to access both, it will cost $10 X 2 apps. If many have to access 3 apps, it would be $30 for them. This maxes out at $40 for that 4th app as you would buy the unlimited app licenses at that point for $40/user. Still a bargain compared to past costs and other platforms. Architecting for License Cost As I said you could consider building a single app for all the different users needs and controlling who sees what, with security roles. It is more complex way to approach it, and could get unwieldy if you have many unrelated use cases, so you would have to weigh the costs of doing it that way vs. effort to make it that way. Again, this would only apply to users who wear multiple hats. Next Steps Let's say you now have a nice model-driven business application. Notice I did not say "basic", that's because it can actually be as complex and advanced as you need it to be over time. Are you done? Not even close. Now is when some of those other tools come into play on top of the foundation you have built. You have several options to go to next, one that is already covered in your $10 is a Canvas App, but this canvas app will take advantage of the CDS database you already built your model-driven app on, so all of that data is available. Also, Microsoft Flow, Power BI and Portals can be bolted on as well. So let's take a look at what these can add to your ultimate application to change the world, or at least your organization's world. Canvas Apps Canvas Apps are Task-Specific. The name Canvas comes from the design surface that you build them on, it looks a lot like PowerPoint. It is primarily a mobile application for those types of tasks that would be logically done on a mobile device. For example, adding a barcode scanner and tracking inventory in a warehouse, or a Check-in/Check-out app for corporate laptops. If this does not relate to your CDS environment, you would probably just make that Canvas App freestanding, but I'm keeping in the lanes of business applications here. Remember that the Model-Driven app you already built has full mobile capabilities also, so you will want to explore that before you complicate things with yet another app to maintain, but for the right scenarios, Canvas is awesome. Microsoft Flow Let's say your organization has some other app they are using for other things. Let's also say that it could be advantageous to have your new app talk to that app. Maybe it would be nice to pass some data back and forth when certain things happen. Microsoft Flow is your bridge to over 250 other apps and growing. Microsoft Flow sits between your new model-driven app and any of those 250+, and can pass things back and forth based on triggers or conditions. It sounds more complicated than it is. Trust me, it's not. Not long ago, to accomplish this would have required a significant development project, all gone now. Power BI Power BI is Microsoft's industry leading Business Intelligence tool. Of course you have charts and dashboards in your model-driven app, but if you really need to go deep, or mash several sources up, Power BI is the tool for that. Of course it's primary source in your case is... you guessed it... your CDS. You can create advanced visualizations in Power BI to share with anyone, and you can even embed them into your existing app's dashboard. Is it easy? Well, it's not as easy as Flow, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist either. Another option to consider is a new offering called AI Builder. This is more of a "citizen" level tool-set that is actually quite easy to use. Not as powerful as Power BI, but it can handle a lot of AI needs. Again, sitting on your CDS. Portals Things are going quite well, and you realize there would be some efficiencies gained from having customers, vendors or partners do somethings themselves. You don't really a want to give them access to your application, but some highly filtered level of access would be real handy. This is one example where Portals come into play. A web based representation of your business application, tailored for your audience, so they can interact with you touch-free. The scenarios are limitless, but take for example a case management solution. A place where your customers could create and review cases you are working on with them in your business application. A way they can be engaged with what is going on 24/7, without having to call you for an update. All running on top of the same CDS you started with. Accelerators Let's say you are in one of the industries that Microsoft has built accelerators for, and there are several and more to come. But, for example, let's say you are in the Banking business. Your path just got shorter. Microsoft offers pre-built data models at no cost to help you get to where you need to easier. Our RapidStartCRM for Banking Accelerator is actually built on top of Microsoft's Banking Accelerator giving you...umm... double acceleration! Between these two, you may already be done before you started! Summary There are other ways to approach it, but this I my recommended path that eliminates any backing up and restarting later. Regardless of where you want to get to, Microsoft has made it exponentially easier today. Start with a model-driven app on CDS, and the sky is the limit. If you want to explore how you can move a spreadsheet based process for example, onto a platform, listen to my recent podcast with a large customer who just did exactly that.    

I hinted in my last post about possibly being able to reduce your Dynamics 365 license costs by up to 92%. I may have been a little too coy, so I titled this post more overtly. Was I just bullshitting you? Well... not all of you. It Depends Follow me here as there are a lot of "ifs", but many organizations will meet them. IF, you are paying $115/user/month for the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan Licenses. IF, you are only using the basic out-of-the-box features. IF, the advanced capabilities you are using were all custom built. IF, any third-party solutions are compatible, or you can do without them. IF, your users primarily work in a single application, ie. "Sales" or "Service" but not both. IF, you are not using things like "Relationship Insights," or any of the A.I., or other advanced features. Depending on your answers to the above "Ifs", you may well be able to move to the upcoming PowerApps Per App Plan model for $10/user/month. My math says that from $115, down to $10, is a 92% savings. Is this even realistic? How is this possible? The same way it would be possible for certain people to get by fine with Notepad instead of Word... unused features. As a partner who has been involved with hundreds of deployments, I can safely say that the number of customers who use every feature of the first-party apps they are paying for is... zero. I feel quite confident that number does not change for customers using even half of the available features. Of course no two customers are alike, and the mix of features they actually do use varies significantly, but they are all paying for all of the features. Obviously my 92% scenario assumes you are currently paying the highest price ($115), and that you could ultimately be satisfied with a single PowerApp at $10. Not everyone will, and many are also paying less than $115. Free Money? Not exactly. It is not quite as easy as buying a $10 license and cancelling the others. Even if you meet the parameters I outlined, or are willing to give up a few things to do so, there is still some refactoring and a migration to be done. This too will vary significantly from customer to customer. If you are able to save some money, or a lot of money, you will have to spend some money to get there, so the ROI may be deferred. For example, let's say you fit the profile perfectly. You have 150 users and are paying (let's be more conservative here), $95/user/month for the Enterprise Sales App. Assuming your actual needs could be met with a custom built PowerApp, you could potentially save $12,750/month. Of course you need to have the PowerApp built which will cost you something (you may want to explore our RapidStartCRM accelerators in AppSource, and RapidLABS services for a fast and low-cost way to do this). I don't want this to sound like a slam dunk, for some customers the cost to do something like this may actually exceed all of the development costs they have invested so far. There are a lot of factors in this equation. Power "less" By now you may be thinking, this sounds great... for an organization with simple needs. What you will forgo in this Per App Plan are the "pre-built" capabilities of the First-Party applications. But... they are PowerApps too. With enough development funds and time, you could practically replicate them entirely, but that would be silly. Instead, you would just build exactly what you need, no more and no less. We have a customer with thousands of users, where everything but Account and Contact was custom built (Account and Contact already exist in PowerApps). In their case, the customization solution (which includes a single app) could be installed directly on a CDS instance with no changes at all, then just migrate their data, and they would be in the exact same place. There are some massive deployments out there, that with little effort could go this route. In fact, for many of my customers, the Per App Plan offers more than what they are even utilizing today. An "App" in the Per App Plan can include a Web App (aka Model-Drive App) like most customers are already using today, but that "App" can also include a Mobile App (aka Canvas App), which less of them are using, and a Web Portal which very few of them are using. The Outlook App is also available and works the same way. Is Microsoft Okay with this? I would guess that depends on how many of their existing customers, walk through this door that Microsoft created to gain new customers. In my example above, trading $14,250/month for $1,500/month may be an unintended consequence of Microsoft's new model. Make no mistake, this will not be a viable option for everybody. Again, the first-party apps bring a plethora of advanced capabilities that many customers depend on, that would not be practical to rebuild. But it will be interesting to see just how many, are using enough of the out-of-the-box advanced features. The difference in cost sets a pretty high bar for Microsoft's first-party apps. Microsoft will need about 10 net new PowerApps Per App users to make up for each D365 Plan user who makes this switch, but clearly their expectation is that the PowerApps Per App Plan model will blow up to a point where they don't really care. And why wouldn't it? This is more potential business application "power" for $10 than any other company even comes close to, and at $10 moves it into the category of: "Affordable to Anyone". Is Dynamics 365 Dead? Once again, Mark Smith's (@nz365guy) looming prediction that "Dynamics 365 is Dead", shows more life. While there will continue to be a place for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps for the foreseeable future, it's no longer the "take it or leave it" product it once was. PowerApps has created a highly viable alternative for many customers... new or existing. If you're interested in exploring this, Forceworks is offering a free Assessment, to help you see if you can take advantage.

The ground is shifting under Microsoft Business Applications ISVs. Only time will tell if it is shifting forward or backward. Regardless, to continue existing, you will need to sign a new document, so let's take a look at it. A room full of Elephants Microsoft's new "Business Applications ISV Connect Program" hopes to be a comprehensive program for ISV success, yet it's most often referred to by partners as the "Revenue Sharing Program", due to its prickliest aspect. But sharing 10% or 20% of your revenue with Microsoft is not the only thing you need to understand. In fact, that's probably the simplest thing to understand. Reversals I recently wrote a post highlighting Microsoft's plan to eliminate IUR benefits. In that post I said that I did not think they would back down... and they backed down the next day. I have been assured that this was not to make me look like an idiot. When I first wrote about the new ISV program, I also said I did not think Guggs would back down, and it looks like he is going to prove me right. So I have a 50% accuracy rate on back down predictions! The Addendum Between now and October, ISVs will need to agree to the compulsory ISV Addendum in order to continue to offer solutions (apps) that are built on, connected to, or extend Microsoft's Business Applications platform including Dynamics 365 and PowerApps, and where there is a revenue opportunity, Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Business Central and Power BI are exempt, for the time being. The Whole Truth It's not enough to just review the Addendum, as it references other documents, including the ISV Program Policies, as well as the Publisher Agreement.  I am not a fan of spreading terms across multiple documents. The Addendum is 9 pages and the Policies are only another 5 pages, with a lot of duplication between them. Why was this not a single document? This is so they can change the policies whenever they need to, without having to get you to re-sign anything. Classic lawyer games. The Publisher Agreement is an additional 47 pages, but my quick scan of it seems less related to the specifics of the Bizapps ISV Connect Program. So while everyone seems to be focused on a single aspect of this program, let's take a look at some of the other terms of these agreements. I am not a lawyer, but I do know how to read, and I'll share my "Business Owner" interpretation. Tiers Tiers are per app, and while the "Standard Tier" (10%) is compulsory, the "Premium Tier" (20%) is optional... for both sides. While there appear to be some specific requirements, Microsoft has maintained the discretion to accept or deny your Premium Tier request arbitrarily. I expect that this will cause some drama, but I see the rationale. The primary additional benefit of the Premium Tier is the activation of Co-Sell. This means Microsoft's own internal sales teams out there hawking your app, and being spiffed for doing so. Obviously salespeople, and hours in the day are both finite resources that Microsoft would rather not waste on "crappy" apps. But who judges "crapiness"? I would assume that any ISV solution that generates the sale or activation of Microsoft product licenses will pass muster, regardless of its intrinsic value, but what else? What about an app that reduces the need for additional Microsoft licenses? If you determine that you are not getting value for an app from the co-marketing and co-selling motions of the Premium Tier, you can "Down-Tier" that app back to the Standard Tier. It is not clear what percentage you will pay for any deals closed for that app while it was previously in the Premium Tier. Nor is it clear what you will pay for prior deals after you "up-tier" an app. There also does not appear to be any language preventing you from have having two versions of your app, one on each tier, possibly at different prices... I'll let that settle into your brain. What Counts? The definition of a "Business Application", that falls within this agreement is quite comprehensive. It also includes so-called "free" apps, that connect to paid services you offer, so no Trojan Horses. Fees Some math is required to figure out how much you're supposed to pay Microsoft, regardless of the tier. Basically, the total amount of your customer bill, less taxes and "non-recurring" services you perform, and your cost of any CSP licenses you may have included. So this includes your license margin also, if you sell Microsoft licenses as a part of your solution. It really feels and sounds like Microsoft does not think ISVs need to make any margin on Microsoft licenses, and while most don't... some do. It also appears to me to include any and all recurring revenue, like for example monthly or annual support plans, or any sort of managed service type offerings related to your solution. So as an ISV, if I offer a monthly support plan to the customer, I have to pay the fee, but if a reseller of my app offers the same monthly support plan, no fee would apply. The agreement includes this line: "you are solely responsible for End Customer credit decisions and Total Solution Value will not be reduced for uncollectible accounts." So you will still have to pay Microsoft, even if your customer stiffs you. I have no idea how this is supposed to work in the future when a customer purchases directly via Microsoft's AppSource Marketplace with a credit card. The agreement also includes this line: "You will accurately report each Paid Eligible Sale to Microsoft within 30 days of a Paid Eligible Sale occurring". Self-reporting always works! Of course Microsoft has the right to audit you, at their expense, and go back 3 years. Interestingly, their audit not only covers fees that may be due to them, but also appears to include your violation of any applicable laws? If they discover anything, you will foot the audit bill. Connect I think Microsoft is going to lose many Connect ISVs right out of the gate. Remember the "Connect" pattern is the one where you already have your own service, and you offer an app to connect it to D365. For example, let's say you offer some deep industry bench-marking service for the princely sum of $10,000 per month. Users typically gain access to your high-value data directly on your secure web portal. As a convenience, you decide to make a small free app, available to your paying customers, that will push your service's resulting "Account Score" field over to Account records in your customers' D365 instances. Guess what? You owe Microsoft $1,000/month for each customer that uses it. The technical definition of a "Business Application", as I read it, would also include third-party published "Connectors", based on what they do, and I am not seeing an exemption for them. So as soon as I wire up the CDS connector to some third-party's connector, is that third-party on the hook for a fee? Or, will they create an exception for connectors? If so, then won't all savvy Connect pattern ISVs just publish connectors instead? Prior Deals For any customers that you may have invested heavily in marketing and selling your solution to, possibly involving significant costs for travel, wining and dining, and ultimately heavily discounting your product to land their "Logo" account, all without any assistance from Microsoft... there is some good news. You have about a year to either raise your prices or decide to absorb the new fees. I assume many ISVs have some sort of term, and the fee will start being due if your customer has to renew between now and next July also. If you have a month-to-month auto-renewing agreement, it looks like you have until about the first of next July. Hopefully, not many ISVs had multi-year agreements with their customers. On the Ball If you sold 100 licences of your product to a customer, and Microsoft began invoicing you for their fee, and later the customer reduced their license count to 50, you better move fast. Your Microsoft fees will not be reduced for any current invoices, or any invoices that were to be sent to you within 30 days. If you somehow mess up and forget to let Microsoft know about the reduction for a while, no credits will be issued to you. In fact, it appears that no credits will ever be issued to you, regardless of... anything. Benefits I found interesting in Guggs' Inspire session, his referring to "access to Microsoft's platform" as a program "benefit". Guggs says he does not like the term "Tax", and I agree... based on this, "Tariff" seems better. This "benefit" had not come up in my past conversations with them for my post about the various benefits ISVs can expect. It looks like the catch-all for anyone trying to avoid the new program. Basically, part of what you are paying Microsoft for, is their permission to play in their playground, that they built, expand and maintain. Microsoft reserves the right to change any of the rules at anytime. So regardless of how much you may have invested to go "all-in" on D365/Power Platform, if you fail to meet some new or changed future requirement... you're out. Summary While I am optimistic about the concept, some of the execution so far feels ham-fisted. The agreements, as you would expect, are pretty one-sided. Establishing a "here's the rules" approach for new ISVs is one thing, simultaneously enforcing a "take it or leave it" approach with long-standing ISVs feels pretty arrogant, even when wrapped in a "for the good of us all" message. While some ISVs may leave, most probably have too much invested and really can't leave, even if they wanted to. Clearly Microsoft's focus is on large ISVs for enterprise customers, as they were the ISVs that were engaged to help craft this. For all other ISVs, time will tell if this is a shift forward or backward. 07/29/19 Clarifications from Microsoft You asked which revshare rate would apply when apps that change tiers.  The revshare % is “based on the App Tier in effect when the [sale] occurred” (Addendum, Section 5.a.i).  In other words, if an app’s tier changes, the new revshare rate will apply to future sales but not prior sales. You asked whether the same app can have two listings, one in Standard tier and one in Premium tier.  While not discussed explicitly, that isn’t our intent and we wouldn’t expect to approve (in certification) the second listing for the same app. You wondered if credit decisioning works differently when customers transact directly on AppSource.  I believe it works differently on direct AppSource transactions.  With respect to the ISV Connect program, please note that direct AppSource transactions are specifically excluded, since they are subject to different terms and an agency fee under the commercial marketplace agreement.  (The Addendum’s definition of a “Paid Eligible Sale” excludes sales “through a Direct AppSource Sale”). Lastly, I wanted to clarify when fees apply on pre-existing deals. On pre-existing deals (i.e., entered into before 7/1/2019 and registered by 12/1/2019), no revshare is due until 7/1/2020. This waiver period also applies to renewals (before 7/1/2020) of these pre-existing deals.  In addition, on multi-year fixed term pre-existing agreements with a term that extends beyond 7/1/2020 (without renewing), revshare doesn’t begin until it does renew/extend (even if that is after 7/1/2020).  This is the intent of Addendum Section 5.b.

Inspire 2019 is coming to and end this week following a full three day schedule plus additional regional meetings and sessions. On this episode of the podcast, we get the Dynamics SMB partner perspective from QBS Group's CEO, Michael Hartmann, and VP of Business Development Nelson Tavares da Silva. They share some of the key guidance they received from Microsoft around Dynamics 365 Business Central, updates on programs including AppSource and partner benefits, and themes that they will use at their own firm and with their partners. QBS Group will also be hosting their own webcast with more event updates on July 22. Show Notes: 1:00 - How Microsoft approached the issue of trust, specifically around the issue of Internal Use Rights. 3:00 – Investments that will benefit Microsoft's partners in FY 2020: Channel incentives and field resources 5:30 – Microsoft's commitment to AppSource and to co-sell, and how partners should understand the different forces at work in the channel. 8:30 – Are there indications that Business Central ISV activity is accelerating? 11:00 – What the "sliver approach" will mean for NAV ISVs who need to get to AppSource for Business Central. 13:15 – Discounts being lowered for Dynamics Price List products, and incentives to make CSP the path forward. 15:00 – What's the overall Dynamics SMB partner sentiment at Inspire? 18:30 – What themes from Inspire will impact strategic planning by partners those aligned with QBS Group? 20:30 – The Inspire 2019 event experience, plus other exciting and impressive technology

Full show notes available here: https://www.nz365guy.com/111

Inspire 2019 is just days away, and the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) will be there as always, advocating for Microsoft partners and celebrating its 25th anniversary. On this episode we speak with Jeffrey Goldstein, president of IAMCP Americas and the managing director at Microsoft partner Queue Associates. He'll be at Inspire and he walks us through the themes that both his firm and IAMCP members will focus on, both internally and with Microsoft executives. Some of the most pressing matters should be no surprise, like how to navigate the changes to gold and silver certifications, the loss of internal use rights (IURs), and the evolving use of AppSource. But Goldstein is also helping lead Show Notes: 2:30 – Inspire 2019 event outlook, including IAMCP's 25th anniversary celebration, board of directors meetings, and Microsoft executive roundtables 8:50 – What partners can expect to hear from Microsoft at executive roundtables that's different from the event's formal keynotes. 12:00 – What are the most pressing channel issues partners are looking at today? 14:45 – IAMCP's role in encouraging winning partner-to-partner initiatives 16:00 – What can we infer about Microsoft's view of SMB partners today? 18:15 – How many partners will Microsoft realistically manage? 20:00 – How Queue Associates has adapted to changes in competencies recently. 23:00 – How IAMCP is approaching the impact of the removal of Internal Use Rights (IURs), including its statement on the matter. 30:30 – Do partners yet understand the impact of AppSource? Links: IAMCP's Inspire site Message from Toby Richards Message from Gavriella Schuster

I recently wrote a post about the coming Revenue Sharing model for Microsoft Business Applications ISV's. As expected, there is some screaming going on about forking over some of your revenue to Microsoft. But there is another side of that story... what Microsoft will be doing in return. Recap Starting soon Microsoft will be moving to a pay-to-play model for ISVs. The first reaction I am hearing from many ISVs are various "avoidance" schemes. Remember, this only applies to SaaS products. Since all of these SaaS products are hosted by Microsoft, and they have all the telemetry they want, you really will be challenged to find a way to avoid Revenue Sharing. It is not an "Optional" program. Though for the time being, you can still "side-load" your solutions, Microsoft will easily discover them. When they do, if you are not part of the program, according to Guggs, "If your solution is not on Appsource, we will tell customers not to use it --- we will get very "pointy" with this message over time". I can't think of any intelligent customer who would not heed this warning, so I suggest you drop your "avoidance" plans. Instead, focus on the promised benefits, and maximizing those. Benefits Depending on where you fall, you have several "levels" of benefits across three buckets: Technical, Marketplace and Sales. I'll share the slide first, and then we can unpack these. Understand that these are subject to change, it is a lever Microsoft can use to increase engagement. Starting Level Let's start at left most column, which is the minimum required "non-optional" option. When you publish a Bizapp solution to AppSource, and you commit to 10% as part of that process, this is what you will get, even without selling anything yet: Architectural Consultation. This is a one-on-one consultation with Microsoft. Unfortunately, you don't get this benefit until after you have published, and it probably would have been handy to have beforehand, but I can also see how Microsoft does not want to waste time with tire-kickers either. Training Vouchers. It is not clear how many of these you get, but without a specific ISV Competency anymore, they don't seem like a related benefit, but... they're not worthless. Customer Surfaced Certification. Seems all solutions will have that by default, in order to even be published. Access to ISV Studio. Ok, now we are getting somewhere.. potentially. We are in the Pilot group to help MS figure out what this can/will be. MS mentions Insights and diagnostics, which are important, and we have been missing that, but I think there is more that can be done behind a name like "ISV Studio". Time will tell, but I would keep an eye on this one. The above are all listed as "Technical Benefits", and you may notice that they are the same across all levels. This is where I expect whatever they are planning to do around IUR will probably be differentiated. Today, the differentiations between levels are really around Marketing, (Sales does not kick in until later), so let's take a look at the minimum Marketing Benefits Marketplace Listing Optimization. This is not "prioritization", it is "optimization", but it is important to understand how solutions are surfaced in AppSource so that your wonderful app is not sitting on page 26. This will include a quick consult with the MS Enablement Team, and will become more programmatic down the road. Think, built-in recommendations against what you have done, surfacing Best Practices suggestions. Marketplace Blog/Newsletter/Social. This should not be your entire "Marketing Program". It is a one-time "blast", but can be quite valuable if you time it right, and amplify it yourself through your own social channels. The $50K Club Once your app has generated $50K USD of revenue sharing fees, which is actually $500K of ISV revenue, in a rolling 12 months, you move up the the $50K Club. This is no small feat, if your solution sells for $10/Month/User, you would need to have sold about 4,200 seats. Again the technical benefits, for the moment, are the same. But you do get additional Marketing Benefits, in addition the the entry level benefits, including: Customer Story. This is a basic customer success story that you can create from Microsoft Templates, and submit for publication here. Again, you will want to amplify this with your social channels, but it is a nice "credibility" builder. Sales Enablement. This is a one-on-one workshop with one of the Microsoft vendors who specialize in helping partners build a sales engine. This goes beyond just AppSource and into your entire potential customers' lifecycle. It seems pretty extensive. P2P Consultation. If you are thinking about selling via other partners, this is a roughly 90 minute consultation on how to approach building a channel. Marketplace Category Promo. At the top of each category in AppSource is a rotating gallery of featured apps. Once you join the $50K Club you will be added to this rotation. I would not expect you to show up more than once, and probably for no more than a week. So again, an opportunity to socialize it and direct customers to it, during the time you are sitting at the top of the category page. Social Selling Coaching Program. I have mentioned socializing several of these things so far, to amplify their value. This benefit is a specific, significant one-on-one workshop to show you exactly how to do this whole "socializing" thing. The $250K Club Once your app has generated $250K USD of revenue sharing fees, you have the option to "opt-in" to the 20% revenue sharing model, but you don't have to. Understand that this means you will have sold $1.25 million USD of ISV revenue, which for your $10 solution, means about 10,500 seats. The air is starting to get thinner here, and the numbers of ISVs in this category will be smaller. But if you do get there, you will not only get additional Marketing Benefits, but you will activate the  Sales Benefits. The additional Marketing Benefits include: Co-Sell Ready Content. As part of the Co-Sell on-boarding process, you will have the opportunity to add to your seller catalog listing, Seller-Facing content, including one-pagers on your company and application, as well as a Customer Story. These are useful for MS Sellers to better understand what you are solving for, and when and where to position your solution with one of their customers. Mini-Commercial. This is a 30 video in this format. You can add this video to your AppSource listing, and of course. promote it through your social channels. PR Support. This would be a Microsoft distributed press release, that could include a quote from a key Microsoft person who would be relevant to your application. Here is an example. Again, you would be advised to amplify this release with your own social channels. P2P Readiness Workshop. For those ISVs planning on building a reseller channel, this is a much deeper dive than the previous P2P Consultation. It is an extended one-on one virtual workshop, and includes not only readiness, but also introductions to potential resellers. Marketplace Home Page Promo. As a member of the $250K Club, you will also get a spot in the rotation in the gallery for the entire marketplace, versus just your category at the $50K level. You will want to double-down on the social amplification of this as again, you will only sit there for a limited time. However, if you are blowing the doors off with your solution, you may find yourself regularly appearing here. In addition, this level kicks in the Sales Benefits, which are the same as at the top level, so I will cover those below. The $750K Club Let's say you somehow sold $3.75 Million dollars of ISV revenue, which for a $10 app, would mean that you miraculously sold about 31,250 seats. I think it is clear that there are only a handful of these ISVs, and maybe not even a whole hand. But you three will also get some additional Marketing Benefits, that include: P2P Workshop - in person. At this stage you will have already had a couple of consults and workshops on channel building. This takes that up yet a notch further as an in-person workshop at your office. This is going to get very pointy on your specific goals and requirements. Secret Shopper. A Microsoft vendor, who specializes in sales motions, will anonymously go through your entire sales process, including any sales doorways. They will come back with frank suggestions on where your sales process is either failing, or could be improved. Tele-sales campaign(s). Most of us are familiar with N3, they are one of Microsoft's key vendors for a lot of things. Working with your team, N3 will craft and execute a telesales campaign for your solution. You can target end customers or resellers depending on where you want to create new traction. Telesales campaigns are notoriously hit or miss. It is probably the most overt form of marketing that there is. N3 has been around the block on this, and will no doubt know better than you how to get the most from it. Global Expansion. If you are kicking ass in your region, Microsoft will be eager, possibly even more eager than you are, to spread your ass kicking solution around the globe. Globalization is more than just flipping a switch in AppSource. You will need to deal with the technical side, like localization, but also the introduction to the regional teams in these new geos that may not have any idea what an ass-kicker you are. Microsoft will facilitate this for you. P2P Lead Gen Webinar. Webinars are another tool for building a channel, and Microsoft will facilitate and promote a webinar for you, under their brand targeted at relevant resellers. You will want to drive additional attendance with your social channels. Seller Webinar. These are fun, I have done a couple of them, including one a few weeks ago. This is an Internal-facing webinar that MS Sellers are invited to. This is an excellent opportunity to talk directly to the MS sellers about how your solution will make them more successful. This is less about customer benefits and more about helping the sellers solve their own challenges. So angle it accordingly. These are recorded and added to a library that the sellers can access for on-demand replays. Sales Benefits Once you cross the $250K mark, and you opt-in to the 20% program, you activate the Microsoft Sales Benefits that include: Prioritized Listing. You can be listed of course without being in the $250K Club. But on the MS Internal Sellers view of the catalog, those that opt into the 20% program will be listed at the top. But it's actually more relevant that the sellers will be keenly aware, that if they sell one of these solutions, they will get paid. This is the primary the reason for the additional 10%... to create the incentives to motivate the Sellers to move your product. Think about something like CPQ where there are a few ISV solutions. While the Seller will be able to see all of them, the ones in the 20% category will have a golden glow around them. Obviously, Sellers are going to move forward with one of those first. Co-Selling Support from MS Field Teams. The field teams consist of AEs (Account Executives), SSPs (Solution Sales Professionals) and TSPs (Technical Sales Professionals). An enterprise level customer may have several SSPs assigned to them for different products, like for example, a specific SSP for Business Applications. Tethered to an SSP is a TSP, and together they are the primary force looking to sell Business Applications into their enterprise customer accounts. It is these SSP/TSP combos that you will want to engage with to bring you into these big deals. This is of course assuming that your solution is designed for enterprise customers. Up until now, they received quota reduction for the value of your ISV solution when they brought you in. That was nice, but it's not the same as money in their hands, which they will get from selling the 20% solutions. This is not a guarantee that your solution will be sold in huge numbers... or at all. For many solutions, this path will not actually do anything. In that case you would have to look to the Marketing Benefits to justify your 20%, or maybe you opt back into the 10% tier. Or maybe you did not see enough value, and never opted into the 20% tier in the first place. Regional Account planning with MS field teams. This one is a two-edged sword. You can work directly with the teams to plan how you are going to pursue targeted Enterprise customers together, which is great. But my experience with Account Planning has been that it also creates a reporting burden on your side. Not an issue if it works. A final point on Co-Selling. Microsoft is aligned strategically to industry verticals. SSP/TSP teams are not only targeting particular horizontal solutions like "Business Applications", but they are also segregated vertically along industry lines. For Example, "Business Applications in Healthcare Sector" would be a specific charge of an SSP/TSP team. In addition, depending on the size of the industry, the teams may be geographically bound also, ie. "Business Applications in Healthcare Sector for US East". Basically, there are a lot of people you would ultimately want/need to engage with. Needless to say, horizontal Solutions and "widget" solutions are probably not a good fit for Co-Selling, as should be obvious from what I wrote above. So this was a long post and I am sorry for that. To add to that, everything I wrote above is subject to change as the program rolls out. It may change a little, or it may change a lot, but as I opened with, this side of the program is a lever that Microsoft can easily adjust. For ISVs that are confused, worried, mad or acronym challenged, I am part of another consulting group called PowerISV with four other MVPs who may be able to help.

In this episode (brought to you by Kingswaysoft) we are joined with a large group of Business Applications MVP's (and one Microsoftie): George Doubinski Joel Lindstrom Steve Mordue Daryl LaBar Scott Sewell Stephan Smith Ulrik Carlsson We welcome Stephan to the MVP family as one of May's newly awarded MVP's. Topics discussed in this episode: PowerApps Components: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/create-component PowerApps Control Framework BAD Masterclass: https://crmtipoftheday.com/masterclass/ PowerControls vs web resources Changes to AppSource and revenue sharing for ISV's https://stevemordue.com/microsoft-steps-up-to-salesforces-appexchange/ What does it mean that Power Platform connectors are going open source? Flow is the gateway drug to the Power Platform Moving Flows and Canvas Apps Data Flows in Power BI

I usually wait a week or two to weigh in on new announcements from Microsoft. I like to let the noise die down a little, and see how others are responding to the news. But I am way too excited about the Public Preview launch of the PowerApps Component Framework. What's in a Name? The journey to Public Preview has been a rather long one. Originally coined the "Custom Control Framework" (CCF), which gave way to another name, "PowerApps Control Framework" (PCF), to ultimately landing on the name "PowerApps Component Framework", this "framework" has been quite the work in process. According to the new Branding Guidance, we are not supposed to use the acronym (PCF) anymore, but whoever decided that, does not write blog posts. Good Delays When PCF was first announced, there was a lot of excitement, among the MVP community in particular. We were all eager to get our hands on this new "capability" that was coming soon... but it did not come soon. It was not because there was any lack of will from the team behind it, rather it was another example of Microsoft seeing an "Opportunity". I recently discussed this "opportunistic re-trenching" that has been going on across Microsoft Business Applications on Mary Jo Foley's podcast. The source of this particular delay, was the realization that if both Model-Driven and Canvas PowerApps could share the same Component Framework, it would be way more valuable to everyone. So one step back was taken, to get two steps forward to the Preview. A frustrating delay for some, but well worth the wait. What the Hell is PCF? Is it charts? Is it Kanban boards? Is it Gantt Schedules? Buttons, dials, widgets, cameras? It is actually a way to create all of these, and many other "components". Is it a "Citizen Developer" capability? No, it is not. Building "Components" is a developer-level job, requiring Javascript/typescript and other development skills. For those of you on the development side, this is the future of what you now know of as html Web Resources... but way better. How is it better? Flexibility, portability and supportability are three things that come to my mind of why this is way better. As opposed to building a hard-coded webresource tied to something, with a Component you can package that up with parameters. This means that your Component is abstracted away from the particulars of a specific environment. For example, during the just concluded "Private Preview", we worked directly with the Microsoft development team to refactor a Gantt Chart Webresource that we had built for a specific custom project management entity in one of our ISV solutions. Our original html webresources were of course hard coded to this entity. The finished "Component" version instead included a parameters capability, meaning we could actually display our Gantt Chart "Component" on anything that met the minimum requirements to display it, which in our case was a start and end date. If additional parameters are present such as predecessors, successors or percent complete, it would take advantage of those also... very flexible. We can install our component solution on any environment, and use it wherever we want. While Citizen Developers may struggle to "build" a component, configuring one for their use is completely within their capability. From a supportability standpoint, since Microsoft developed and owns the "Framework", it falls on Microsoft to handle component lifecycle, retain application business logic and optimize for performance... instead of you. Is this All New? Well, it's new to you, but you have actually been using "components" for quite a while, possibly without even knowing it. Remember the fanfare about the addition of editable grids? That was a "component' built by Microsoft on the framework. In fact, a lot of the features you see in the new Unified Interface are actually "Components", including all of the original charts. What is new is your ability to now create your own components. Who will use this? Personally, I think the largest opportunity around the PowerApps Component Framework is for ISVs. Either building components as part of their larger solutions, or even freestanding components that they might resell individually via AppSource. There is some development effort involved, and I don't see a lot of SIs necessarily learning the nuances of building components for individual end customer needs. Better that they just incorporate components that exist, or will exist in the near future. Of course many ISVs still need to get themselves up to the Unified Interface, but that will happen pretty quickly, or they will be in a world of hurt. Are Html WebResources being deprecated? A common question today from customers and partners, whenever the Microsoft Bizapps team launches something new, is whether the old stuff will go away. Everything you are doing will eventually require change. Microsoft can only advance so fast when they are dragging a big bag of legacy behind them. This was the impetus for the One Version strategy. But even in the One Version world, a level of backward compatibility is a requirement... but for how long. How long will Microsoft allow that technical debt pile to grow? As long as they absolutely have to, and no longer. I have not heard anything about deprecating anything as a result of PowerApps Component Framework. But of course the same could have been said two years ago about other, now deprecated things. Neither the future nor Microsoft is waiting for you.

Microsoft’s $32 Billion Q2 Earnings were Inspired and Powered by PartnersMicrosoft's Revenue Highlights Microsoft's gaming revenue was up 8% year over year during the second quarter, with revenue from Xbox software and services rising 31% over that same period. Surface "had its biggest quarter ever this holiday, delivering strong double-digit growth in both consumer and commercial" according to CEO Satya Nadella Microsoft Cloud growth exploded as commercial cloud revenue was up 48% year over year, anchored by Azure revenue growth of 76%.Microsoft's Earnings by the Numbers Earnings of $1.08 a share Revenues of $32.5 billion Intelligent-cloud revenue of $9.38 billion $32 billion in revenue. That’s an incredible number that Satya Nadella and Amy Hood shared during the Q2 earnings call last week. Just as impressive is the commercial cloud revenue increase of 48 percent year-over-year to $9 billion. Did you know that 95 percent of Microsoft’s commercial revenue flows directly through our partner ecosystem? With more than 7,500 partners joining that ecosystem every month, partner growth and partner innovation are directly fueling our commercial cloud growth. One accelerant, the IP co-sell program, now has thousands of co-sell ready partners that generated an incredible $8 billion in contracted partner revenue since the program began in July 2017. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And we know that partners make more possible. As a customer-first, partner-led company, we start with the needs of our customers and work with our partners to deliver the best outcomes for each organization. We look forward to continued evolution in the Microsoft-partner relationship this year—with more innovation in AI, more co-selling opportunities, and more ways to connect partners to customers and to other partners through Azure Marketplace and AppSource. I invite you to learn more about how Microsoft leaders from the Azure, Dynamics, and ISV teams are supporting our partners, and how partners can capitalize on the opportunities ahead. Read the Full StoryIntroducing Background Blur in Skype Background blur in Skype is similar to background blur in Microsoft Teams. It takes the stress out of turning on your video and puts the focus where it belongs—on you! With a simple toggle, right-click, or even through your Skype settings, your background will be instantly and subtly blurred, leaving just you as the only focal point. Read the Full StoryBuilding AI on trust: A dialogue around Microsoft’s core values and principles Çağlayan Arkan sits down with Nick Tsilas, senior attorney for Manufacturing & Growth Industries, to discuss the potential of AI to help Microsoft build a better, more responsible, more sustainable world. Read the Full Story Microsoft Research Webinar: Machine Learning and Fairness with Jenn Wortman Vaughan and Hanna Wallach Exploring ethics and trust in AI with MicrosoftAI Design Principles Fairness Inclusive Reliability Transparency Privacy and Security AccountabilityGuidelines for human-AI interaction design The variability of current AI designs as well as high-profile reports of failures – ranging from the humorous, embarrassing or disruptive (for example, benign autocorrect errors) to the more serious, when users cannot effectively understand or control an AI system, (for example, accidents in semi-autonomous vehicles) – highlight opportunities for creating more intuitive and effective user experiences with AI. The ongoing conversation on human-centered design for AI systems shows that designers are hungry for trustworthy AI-centric design heuristics or guidelines. Read the Full StoryDataSense for Microsoft Education’s Family of Products One of Microsoft’s oldest and biggest verticals for its Azure cloud business has been education, and today it announced an acquisition that it hopes will help it deepen its reach: it has acquired DataSense — a data management platform that can be used to collect, integrate and report information from across a range of online education applications and services — from an educational technology company called BrightBytes, to integrate the functionality into Azure. DataSense is a master platform that’s used by schools and educational authorities both to ingest information as well as report it to state and other authorities, covering disparate applications and other data sources. Even before being acquired by Microsoft, it already had a lot of reach, currently being used to manage data for millions of students in the U.S., BrightBytes says. The Microsoft acquisition should supercharge its growth. Read the Full StoryKeeping Kids Safe in a Digital World With Windows 10 and Xbox Family Settings Take advantage of free, built-in features in the devices you use. Go to account.microsoft.com and set up a Microsoft account to take advantage of all the great family settings across Windows, Xbox, Microsoft Launcher for Android, and the web. Family settings are a free set of features that span devices and can help you set guardrails that work for your family – manage screen time, set permissions for games or apps purchases, enable safe browsing on the web, and more. Have an open dialog with your children about expectations and appropriate digital behavior. While there are tons of tools and apps available to track your child’s behavior or monitor their every move, there is a lot to be said for using digital time as a learning opportunity.  Set a good example. Just like our kids wanted to cook or vacuum like us when they were small, they are still looking to us as their example as they get older. The best way to teach our kids about responsible digital habits and online safety is to demonstrate good behaviors ourselves. Read the Full Story Visit microsoft.com/family for more information and tips Microsoft Launcher for AndroidApplied F# Challenge The Applied F# Challenge is a new initiative to encourage in-depth educational submissions to reveal more of the interesting, unique, and advanced applications of F#. Read the Full StoryAzure Data Studio – Setting up your environment Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform database tool for data professionals using the Microsoft family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Previously released under the preview name SQL Operations Studio, Azure Data Studio offers a modern editor experience with Intellisense, code snippets, source control integration, and an integrated terminal. It is engineered with the data platform user in mind, with built in charting of query result sets and customizable dashboards. Read the Full Story Download and Install Azure Data StudioMicrosoft Azure Sign up for 12 months of popular free services and a $200 credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, or work with the 25+ services that are always free. With your free account, you can also test and deploy enterprise apps, create custom mobile experiences, and gain insights from your data. How to sign-up for an Azure free accountIntroducing Xbox Game Studios Microsoft has rebranded Microsoft Studios to Xbox Game Studios, saying that Xbox has gone beyond a console and is now a full gaming platform. Xbox Game Studios is made up of 13 distinct game development teams responsible for beloved franchises like Age of Empires, Forza, Gears of War, Halo and Minecraft. The teams at 343 Industries, The Coalition, Compulsion Games, The Initiative, inXile Entertainment, Minecraft, Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, Playground Games, Rare, Turn 10 Studios, Undead Labs and our Global Publishing group are working hard to deliver incredible exclusives, original IP and all-new chapters from your favorite franchises. Read the Full Story Xbox Live is Coming to Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android and More Xbox Live is about to get MUCH bigger. Xbox Live is expanding from 400M gaming devices and a reach to over 68M active players to over 2B devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK. (Spotted by Windows Central)Become A Hero At Halo: Outpost Discovery Halo: Outpost Discovery is a touring fan experience for all ages, that brings the Halo video game universe to life like never before. This weekend-long event lets you step into Halo’s vast and epic world, with enthralling themed attractions, interactive in-universe encounters, the latest playable game releases and so much more. Experience details, ticket information and more are available right now at HaloOutpostDiscovery.com. Brad Groux will be representing Microsoft Today at the Houston Halo Outpost Discover on Saturday August  17th Read the Full StoryCrackdown for Xbox is Now Free To celebrate the launch of Crackdown 3, Microsoft is giving away the original Crackdown for free! Play it on your Xbox One with Backward Compatibility. Read the Full StoryThe Crackdown 3 Technical Stress Test is coming this week on Xbox One and PC! The Wrecking Zone Technical Test will begin Thursday, February 7, with installation beginning at 9 a.m. PST/5 p.m. UTC and the first playtests beginning at 12 p.m. PST/8 p.m. UTC, where you will get to play Crackdown 3’s groundbreaking PvP multiplayer mode, Wrecking Zone. Read the Full Story Crackdown 3 Alpha Tech Demo ("VM Bursting") from Gamescom 2015Astroneer Graduates From Xbox Game Preview Today Astroneer is a space sandbox exploration game where players and friends land in a solar system with the task of surviving in the uncharted frontiers of space. On this adventure, players can work together to build custom bases above or below ground, create vehicles to explore a vast solar system, and use terrain to create anything they can imagine. A player’s creativity and ingenuity are the key to thriving on exciting planetary adventures! Read the Full StoryMicrosoft Today Website The Microsoft Today website at msft.today is your one-stop shop for all official Microsoft news and announcements. We've curated and compiled the most extensive collection of sources to help you stay up to date all from a single pane of glass. 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I was recently at Extreme365 in Austin, I even had a role in Keynote! One of the sessions was a "Fireside Chat" with the Bizapps product team. Aside from there not actually being a fire that I could see, there was some great conversation. Ryan Jones, who works with Charles Lamanna on the platform team, said something that stuck in my head. Five Things When asked about what ISVs can do better in working with Microsoft and AppSource, Ryan said Microsoft focuses on five things. Availability/Reliability (This actually seems like two things) Performance Security Supportability Efficiency Depending on whether you are "Build", "Extend" or "Connect", these may have slightly different meanings to you. If you don't know what Build, Extend or Connect are, read this post. Let's dive in a little deeper on these five things. Availability/Reliability Like I said, this seem like a twofer, and really feels more like a Connect track issue more than the others. If you have an external service that your solution connects to D365, then obviously you will want to make sure you have provided for redundancy in the event something happens, so your users are not suddenly without your wonderful value-add. In addition, you will need to stay on top of changes to Microsoft's end of the platform, to make sure your solution continues to connect, day in and day out, to delight your customers. Performance For a Connect ISV, you need to make sure you have enough capacity to scale and handle whatever may come your way, without bringing your solution, or D365 to a crawl. For all ISVs this is an important consideration. Poor performance can come from many different things, but the result is that your customers suffer with a bad experience. In addition, poor performing code could put unnecessary strain and cost on Microsoft's end, which may cause you to be removed from their Christmas Card list. Microsoft recently launched the Solution Checker to help you identify performance issues. You can read about it here. Security We know that Microsoft is maniacal about security. It is a competitive advantage that they do not plan to put at risk. ISVs are a weak spot in their defense. I have seen apps in AppSource, that request you provide tenant admin credentials into a form displayed in an iframe. Seriously! Microsoft has started to focus on this "hole" more, and I expect that to tighten up significantly. It is not enough for them to waive responsibility for your app, they need to ensure that your app is not creating a security doorway. Supportability There are certain ISV apps that continuously generate support issues for Microsoft. You do not want yours to be on that list. If it is, you already know it. Deprecated code is probably the main driver of lack of supportability. Fortunately the Solution Checker and AppSource Pre-Certification tools are here to help you identify these issues. Many of these issues will also cause performance issues, so you should fix them. Microsoft has not yet launched a tool to automatically fix your crappy code, so for the foreseeable future, you will need to crack it open and do it yourself. Efficiency This one is getting tougher to keep up with. Things you built a particular way, only a year ago, are not necessarily the most efficient way to do that task today. Some thing that you wrote 500 lines of code to do, might be accomplished with a checkbox today. This is particularly true for legacy ISVs. If you have not touched your solution in the last 6 months, you are already out of sync. And we both know, many of you have not touched your solutions in years. If you did, it was just patching it up to keep working, so today you have a real house of cards. Efficiency is not even a consideration. The Stick is Coming Up until now, Microsoft has been more than forgiving of ISVs and Customer solutions that fail on one or more of the above five items. But that is neither scalable, or supportable as we rapidly move towards a single version of the product. Microsoft has tried the Carrot approach, and that has worked for a portion of you, but now it is time to switch to the Stick. I expect Microsoft to get much more aggressive around solutions complying with these five things soon. Consider yourself warned.

Episode 71: Markus Erlandsson talks to Kirsten Edmondson Wolfe from Microsoft about AppSource. Kirsten explains what AppSource is and what the difference is from its predecessors. She continues to explain what the new ISV competency is and how you as a partner can use that, then she explains the benefits for ISV and how you can get … Continue reading AppSource with Kirsten Edmondson Wolfe

I was traveling to Sweden to speak at Dynamics 365 Saturday in Stockholm when I started realizing that there were a few situations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 where there were a couple of ways to approach them, but I always defaulted to one way versus the other, sometimes perhaps even going against Microsoft or Industry Best Practices. I wrote down a list of 10 situations or functionalities that accomplish the same task and I got together a group of CRM MVPs and outstanding professionals to discuss which one they prefer and why. If you are an Dynamics 365 Pro or practitioner, listen in to what 5 CRM MVPs have to say about these items: Real-time vs. Background workflows Power BI dashboards vs. Dynamics 365 dashboards Dynamics 365 for Outlook client vs. App for Outlook Regular/Web vs. Unified Interface Power Platform and CDS vs. 3rd party Integration tools Dynamics 365 for Marketing vs. 3rd party Marketing Automation solutions AppSource vs. Google/Bing search Microsoft Portals vs. VoC surveys or 3rd Party web forms PowerApps vs. Dynamics 365 for Mobile Editable grids vs. Classic grids   Guests - CRM MVPs: Gustaf Westerlund: https://twitter.com/crmgustaf Chris Huntingford: https://twitter.com/TattooedCRMGuy Jonas Rapp: https://twitter.com/rappen Antti Pajunen: https://twitter.com/anttipajunen   Humberto Fernández-Morán: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Fern%C3%A1ndez_Mor%C3%A1n  

Solutions for either Model-driven PowerApps, or for extensions to First-party Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps share a lot in common. In fact, almost everything in common. What they do not share in common among each other, or themselves, is quality of build. Customers, Partners and ISVs all build Solutions for various reasons, and the quality is wide-ranging. Who uses Solutions? Unless your business requirements happen to fit exactly into the out of the box first-party applications, a circumstance so rare that I have never seen it, Solutions are going to come into play. They serve a few purposes, for Customer deployments, a Solution is where you, or your Partner, should do your customizations to make the product fit your needs. While many will just use the "Customize Button", which will then allow you to make changes to the "Default" Solution, I am not a fan of that. It may add a step or two, but making your customizations in a new Solution of your own will make managing them a lot easier over time. There is another reason for this approach that I will get to in a minute. Solutions are also the primary vehicle for ISVs to get their IP into your environment in a manageable way. Either by directly installing them, or installing them via AppSource. Whether it is a custom vertical solution built directly on the CDS platform, or an addon solution extending the First-party apps, Solutions is how they will get in there. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder If you were to crack open a typical solution, you would see a lot of stuff. That stuff could have been put together by a highly skilled Business Applications Developer, or a Citizen Developer who is an expert at Googling. Needless to say, the quality of the Solution will vary widely. Just because something works, does not mean it was built well. Working in the App Designer, a citizen developer can't get in too much trouble, Microsoft has abstracted some of the more complex capabilities away. You may build something that does not work, or is not efficient, but you "should" not have to worry too much about breaking anything. Pro Developer While Microsoft came up for a term for the Citizen Developer, I did not hear a term for those of us who are expert at this, so I am going to call us Pro Developers. Pro Developer sounds highfalutin, but actually the quality of build varies just as greatly there. The fact is, that anyone can hang up a shingle and call themselves a Pro Developer... how would you know. Sure there are certifications and competencies, but as many freelancers pointed out in this post, that does not prove expertise. Well Microsoft has couple of new tools to help. PowerApps Solution Checker The PowerApps Solution Checker is a new tool that will be available to both Citizen and Pro developers soon. This tool, when installed on your instance, yes it is a Solution also, will activate some capabilities for you. Once installed, you can go to https://web.powerapps.com, open up your environment, select an "unmanaged" solution that you, or your Partner are working on, and click "Go". That Solution will be run through a battery of tests, resulting in a pretty thorough report about the quality of what was done, along with areas for improvement. Shingle hangers beware. Using this report, you can go back through and modify an unmanaged solution, and keep rechecking it until it is snug as a bug in rug. Nice! This is also why you should consider creating an unmanaged solution for your customizations instead of modifying the default solution. What about ISVs? Sure, ISVs can use this same tool to check their Solutions in development, but ISVs have an even more robust tool at their disposal. The "On Demand Code Analysis" pre-certification tool. This tool is available to ISVs who plan to publish Apps on AppSource and is a more robust version of the PowerApps Solution Checker tool. With it, you can test Managed Solutions. Taming the Wild West For customers, you should ask your Partner to run the PowerApps Solution Checker on everything they do, and provide you with a clean report as part of your exit criteria. It is probably the only way you can know if they customized your environment correctly, or just built a house of cards for you to maintain. For legitimate ISVs, this should be great news! We all know that AppSource is currently loaded with a bunch of crap, hacked together by who knows who. Many Apps in AppSource will not even install today. After a few tries by a customer, the whole of AppSource gets a bad name, and your solution by association. Microsoft plans to fix that. As of now, Solutions that cannot pass the pre-certification tool, cannot be published to AppSource. This should significantly improve the quality of Apps in AppSource. Next step is to run all the existing solutions back through pre-certification and remove all that fail. Which will be many. The good news is that your quality ISV solution will be more easily discovered, now that it is not sitting in a huge pile of crap. Keeping Current To be fair, many of the existing Apps in AppSource worked fine at one time. But with the continuous, and significant upgrades to the platform, they don't work any more. Many fly-by-night ISVs could not be bothered to go and update their apps, or even remove them. That should be rectified soon. I have also been told, that as changes are made to the platform, the pre-certification tool will also be updated, and Apps will have to get "re-certified" on a regular basis. This is a major step in the right direction for AppSource, and may help lead to it becoming what we all hoped it would be. If your AppSource plan was to build shit, and throw it up there just for lead generation... you will need a new plan.

I am fresh back from the Microsoft Dynamics Partner Advisory Council meetings last week. AppSource, and the whole ISV strategy was a central topic. Unfortunately I cannot share too much because of NDA handcuffs, but I can share some public themes, and my opinions. You have said this before Yes, I am aware that I have written much about AppSource in the past, in fact, exactly 18 posts. In many of those posts I said something along the lines of "Now is the time to get onboard with AppSource", and I am about to say it again. I am familiar with the story of the "Boy who cried Wolf". So how is this time any different? AppSource has come up short I am keenly aware that when it comes to Business Applications, AppSource, and the larger OCP "Sell-With" motion, have not lived up to our expectations... okay, it's been a shit show. ISVs, some possibly at my encouragement, have gone down the path and invested a lot of time and money, for little or no result. So why would I have the balls to even suggest you look at it again? Are ISVs Important? Looking at the primary competition in the business applications space, Salesforce.com, it is hard to argue that ISVs are not key. AppExchange is a major driver for Salesforce's success, just like Google Play is a major driver for Android and the Apple Store is a major drive for iPhones. If your goal is to be a platform company, then ISVs are the only way to ever get there. Microsoft telegraphed their recognition of this not long ago, with the hiring of the now late Ron Huddleston, the purported "architect" of AppExchange. Birth of OCP Ron skipped right over the low-hanging fruit, and instead aimed straight for the top of the tree with the One Commercial Partner program (OCP). Ron was not a guy who wanted to fix things, he wanted to re-invent them. He put all of these vaguely defined, not fully bought into plans, for OCP in motion towards a big fuzzy goal, and then left the company long before the goal was achieved. When Ron departed, the reins of all of those motions were let go, and the meandering began. It's not like ISVs had a clear understanding of what Ron was doing in the first place, he was one of those "Trust me, it will all make sense in the end" kind of guys. Is AppSource and OCP a Failure? If you are a Business Applications ISV, I think it clearly has not been a success yet. But we are not the only players in AppSource or OCP. Azure partners are in there also,  on the other side of the wall. I am not sure who picked up the dropped reins on the Azure team, but they are blowing the lid off of it. Azure ISVs via AppSource or OCP Co-Sell are seeing every bit of the success we had hoped for. So... it is working... just not for us. Why not? Leaderless Up until now, AppSource and OCP efforts for Business Applications have been driven by a smattering of people on the team, each with a very narrow slice of responsibility, and little or no authority to do very much. There was a lot of shoulder shrugging going on. Many of the dropped reigns were laying on the floor. Some of the people on this team have responsibility for recruiting new ISVs to this dysfunctional platform. I assume James Phillips is the one we can credit for reaching out and asking for a "Fixer"... and his wish was granted. Meet "Guggs" Steven Guggenheimer (Guggs), is a 25 year Microsoft veteran, and has been a Corporate Vice President for at least the last 10 of those. For us, he is a "Fixer" who has been brought into the Business Applications group to fix the ISV business for James. I have certainly heard his voice echoed before over the years, like hearing a battle cry from the leader of another group, down the hall from ours, but he was never engaged with our teams. Where I was previously betting on a concept I believed in, now I am shifting my bets to the man who might finally make it happen. Step One As content is being throw at you rapid-fire at these PAC meetings, there is an assumption of NDA. Occasionally, someone will ask if some particular item can be publicly shared. It becomes hard to remember which items were green-lighted for sharing, so I seldom share anything. But one item was clear, and that was around a new high-level taxonomy for ISVs. Up until now, we were all just ISVs, which meant you had to level-set with everyone at MS where you played. We now have three high-level buckets, "Build", "Extend", and "Connect". You may have solutions in more than one, but each solution should mostly fit into one of these 3 buckets. Saying "I am an ISV on the Build track", should shorten your conversations in the near future. So what exactly are these buckets? Build "Build" refers to a new type of ISV, one who builds on the CDS platform, without using any first-party apps. Our RapidStart CRM was the first end-to-end solution built on the "Build" track. Needless to say, I am a big believer that this new motion will be huge for Microsoft and ISVs. Extend This is probably one of the largest tracks, and includes ISV solutions that were built to run on top of one or more of the first-party applications. I think we will see some of these "Extend" solutions, transition over to the "Build" track over time. Connect Connect is for ISVs who have external IP that "connects" with either Build, Extend or first-party solutions, for example:  DocuSign or InsideView. What's coming for ISVs? Like I said, I lost track of what we could and could not share, but there is a lot. Guggs has been given a mission, he has the track record, he has the authority, he has the support, he knows how to navigate Microsoft, and he is in-charge. He seems like a "no-nonsense" kind of guy, who already is grabbing up the loose reins. So is now finally the "real" time to jump in? At the risk of crying wolf again, I say Yes... again.

Some of you may know, that one of several things I am involved with, is an ISV Consulting Collaborative called Power ISV. Together with four other ISV-focused Business Applications MVPs, we are helping existing ISVs to modernize, new ISVs get started, and guiding ISVs on other platforms over to the Microsoft Cloud. We also want to reverse the adage, "Those that can't do, Teach", into "Those that are doing it, Teach". Imagine, if you will Looking around the Microsoft ISV space today, and specifically looking at AppSource, there seems to be a lack of imagination. It feels like the "inspiration" for many ISV solutions, is seeing existing ISV solutions, leading to either very similar ISV solutions being built, or ones with minimal advancement of an existing idea. Looking around AppSource you will see a lot of "copies" of similar things, and frankly most of those "things" are for solving simple problems. Don't get me wrong, we all appreciate a nicely built widget. But are those really going to get us to "empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more"? Achieving More How does one actually "achieve more" with technology? It is not simply being able to respond to emails twice as fast... a typing class solves that. Replacing paper processes with digital ones? Yeah, that would put you in position to achieve more. Being able to collaborate with my team or customers better? Sure, but are we not already burnt out on the whole collaboration "Kumbaya" theme. I think "Achieving More" was a great goal at the time it was stated, and probably tied nicely into the Office 365 push at the time, but now what? Building a Toolbox As I look at what Microsoft has been doing in recent years, particularly around the Azure and Business Applications space, they seem to have spent a great deal of effort creating new technologies. Like IoT, AI, ML, [Insert Acronym Here], etc. The palette of capabilities has grown fast. Some ISVs have embraced parts of this new palette, but many are either oblivious, or just... uninspired. I understand, that if you have your own technology, your focus is going to be on plugging that into the Microsoft machine. But where is the disruption? What is Disruption? Maybe you have built a disruptive technology externally, and your goal is simply to bring your disruptive force to a broader base by moving it to the Microsoft engine. I am waiting to see the disruption being borne out of the Microsoft platform. Microsoft has been disruptive in the way they are providing, and growing the tools, but I am looking for the Uber, and so is Microsoft. Microsoft won't build the next Uber, but they have built all of the tools necessary for an ISV to build it. Disruption is all around us. Home Depot disrupted the hardware industry, but that was not so much a technological disruption, as it was a scale and distribution disruption. Uber is probably one of the best known "Technology-driven" disruptions. An industry, that was over 100 years old, was turned upside-down... by an app. Can you make a Unicorn? From a pure technology only standpoint, it is hard to top Uber. Uber was not built on Microsoft technologies, but today, it could have been, and probably at a fraction of the time and cost that Uber has invested. When you break it down into its parts... it's a freaking mobile App! It incorporates a bunch of things we already know, GPS, Ratings, Matching, eCommerce, etc. All parts, and many more, that are available to any of us in Microsoft's Cloud portfolio. But it is not about the parts. It was about that day in the cab, when some guy thought: "This sucks ass". Inception to Disruption For any of us, several times a week, we engage with something that Sucks. Sure, maybe it is the way that Dynamics 365 deals with some thing, that inspires you to create a widget. That is not disruptive, that is convenience. Clearly, most of us will aspire to the convenience, and there is nothing wrong with that, you might even make a few bucks. But a few of you, have it within you to not only recognize an opportunity to truly disrupt, but see the actual path through the vast Microsoft toolbox "illuminated". Walk the Talk So the team at Power ISV, is going to attempt to "Practice what we Preach", and journey down the "Inception to Disruption" path, utilizing nothing but the Microsoft Cloud toolbox. I can't share the "idea" just yet as we are still wrapping our heads around it, but I can tell you the current experience Sucks. We will be chronicling every step of our journey, as we seek to create an "Inception to Disruption" roadmap. "What's Next" indeed! Shining the Spotlight You can learn more about Power ISV here, but in case you don't get to it, I wanted to highlight the MVPs who are part of the team. Myself of course, as well as Mark Smith, David Yack, Scott Durow and George Doubinski. Another thing we will be thoroughly testing, is the ability of a bunch of "know-it-alls" to work together as a team. That may prove the biggest hurdle.  

Getting on AppSource Part 2 Full Show Notes: https://www.nz365guy.com/28

Getting on AppSource Full Show Notes: https://www.nz365guy.com/24

Part of the huge April wave of feature releases for Dynamics 365, were some license tweaks and a some new license types. I already discussed the new Dynamics 365 for Marketing license here, but in this post, I want to focus on the new Dynamics 365 Sales Professional License. A Little History Bear with me, but we need to take a short walk down memory lane to get back to today. When Dynamics CRM Online first launched in 2011 it was aggressively priced at $44/user/month. Compared to Salesforce this was a real bargain. It was also one offering that included multiple workloads, including Sales and Service. Some time later the price was increased to $65, or $50 as an addon to Office 365. I think there was some customer concern that the price was actually too low for the product to be very good. If the competing product is more than double, then this must be a lesser product. When the brand consolidation to Dynamics 365 took place, the Sales app was renamed Enterprise Sales app and the price shot up to $95. Still less than Salesforce, but not so much less that customers were leery of it. To offset this jump several "transitional" licenses were introduced to "step up" existing customers over time. In addition, a new "Promo" license was introduced specifically for Small and Midsized Businesses (SMB) Sales at $40. Shortly after that a second SMB Sales and Service license was added for $65. The sale of these "promo" licenses to new customers ended the first of this week. Evolution of Business Edition to Pro You may have heard the term "Business Edition" floating around, and in fact it still pops up on some Microsoft documentation that has not yet been scrubbed. Business Edition was conceived as a plan for SMB Customers. The first, and only, product that launched under the Business Edition concept was a light version of NAV that had been SaaSified. In the pipeline were also Business Edition Sales App, Service App and a new Marketing App. These "Apps" were intended to be lower cost (+/- $40), and would have limited features, parsing out the Enterprise stuff that SMB did not need. Seemed like a great idea! But, well into the development of the Business Edition apps, Microsoft had an epiphany. "Why develop a specific app to target a customer by size? We should really focus on a solution that targets users with simpler needs, regardless of size." As big a fan of the SMB idea as I was, I could not argue with this logic, and it still worked for SMB, even if SMB was no longer the specific target. For the Marketing App, this meant any size customer could use it, if it met their needs, and why not. But what happened to this Simpler Business Edition Sales App that was being built? The idea of a limited App for users with more basic needs still made sense, regardless of customer size. But did it still need a specific "simplified" App? Could they not just use the same sales app as Enterprise, with some limitations placed on it? It is certainly one less thing to support. And the Dynamics 365 Sales Professional License was born. It is a new app, but it is the same app as Enterprise, but with some limitations placed on this new app. Limitations are fair, since it is priced at $65 vs $95. So as you absorb the information below, remember, there is a difference of $30/user/month. Limitations Whenever you attempt to apply any kind of limits to anything, partners and customers will bitch and complain. Nevermind that it costs less.. "why can't it cost less, and be the same as the full priced one?" This seemed to be the prevailing argument that I was hearing, which makes no sense at all of course. "Why isn't the Big Mac on the Dollar Menu?" I get that nobody likes limits, but even Mercedes Benz sells a shitload of their entry-level vehicles... so clearly there is a market. The better question to ask, is how many of my customers' users can fit within these limits, allowing me to help lower their total cost... where it makes sense. This is really no different than the exercise we undertake for the Team Member license, a severely restricted, but very low cost, license. Who can get by with it? I watched Microsoft over the last year or so, tweak and fiddle with these limitations, trying to get the recipe just right. They needed to balance providing enough capabilities, while not so many capabilities that they cannibalize the full Enterprise license/app. Clearly there will be some cannibalization, but there is an alternative goal.  To revisit the Mercedes Benz analogy, some people who bought the entry-level car, might have bought a more expensive Mercedes if it did not exist. However, most of the buyers of that entry-level car would probably not have bought a Mercedes at all, if the entry-level did not exist. Mercedes opened up their brand to an entirely new audience, many of which will upgrade from the entry-level car eventually. So let's dive into these "limitations". Excluded Completely There are quite a few features of the full Enterprise Sales License/App that are not included at all in the Sales Professional License/App. A few that you should be aware of, that might help your decision process are, Sales goals and Territory Management. For most SMB customers this will not be an issue, but for larger customers these may be important. A few of the other completely excluded existing features are Social Engagement, Gamification, Voice of the Customer (surveys) and Mobile offline Synchronization. A brand new feature called Dynamics 365 for Sales Intelligence is also not included. One more item that is not included, that could be a key point, depending on your plans, is PowerApps. This one bothers me a bit for SMB, as I saw PowerApps coming not play there in the near future. But Microsoft can always adjust this later if it makes sense. The Case for a New Case The Customer Service capabilities of Dynamics 365 are quite significant. They are also part of a separate license/app. A license that might make sense for your Customer Service Organization, but what about the occasional case that needs to be created by a Salesperson. A missing part, or some other issue the customer shared with the Salesperson. The Salesperson certainly does not need the full Customer Service capabilities, but they do need some way to engage and initiate simple cases. Microsoft recognized this need and created a new "Lite" case management capability, specifically for this scenario. It is included with either the Professional or Enterprise Sales license/app. A Salesperson can create, assign and resolve these types of cases themselves, without needing the full-blown Customer Service license. This is an important factor to consider. Specific Limits Microsoft took a two-pronged approach to the Sales Professional limitations. The first was to completely eliminate some features that they felt their target user would not need. The second was to apply some "limits" to other features. This is probably where most of the partner controversy came from. But again, partners would like a full-blown product at a lower cost, because it's easier to sell. Duh. This is also the area where Microsoft spent the most time refining. I recall a conversation where someone on the team told me, and I am paraphrasing here, "We can always raise a limit that is determined to be too low, but we could not easily lower one that was too high". So consider this a test for a brand new license/app, if it does not accomplish the goals, Microsoft can adjust the levers. Freaking out is not required... yet. Custom Entities are limited to a maximum of 15. Business Process Flows are limited to a maximum of 5. Custom Workflows are limited to a maximum of 15. You can install a maximum of 10 3rd party apps (ISV solutions). Each entity can have a maximum of 2 forms. You are also limited to 5 custom reports. I will take credit for the 2nd form, as I reacted almost violently to an earlier plan with a single form. There are some further caveats to understand. 3rd party ISV solutions do not count against the limits of custom entities, process flows or workflows... however those third party apps may be subject to those limits in their own solution. I am seeking clarification on that now. But, if that is the case, then an ISV solution that you install, could itself have no more than 15 custom entities, 5 business flows or 15 workflows. Why might this be the case? Because partners and ISVs are sneaky. Without these limits an ISV would just backfill a customer's Sales App with all of the things that were limited out, and we're right back to cannibalization of the full product license. That's cheating. But again, I am seeking clarification, and will update this post when I get the official public answer. How will this work? This is a question I posed to Microsoft. You can mix-and-match Enterprise Licenses with Professional Licenses. This got my head spinning. If half of my users have limits, and the other half do not, how does that work in a single instance? With different App modules. So beyond just a specific license for Sales Professional, there is also a specific app for Sales Professional. A person who has an Enterprise Sales License can access a Sales Professional app, however, they will be subject to the same limitations, because the Limitations are being applied at the app level. This particular caveat will make you think a little harder about this. Why have an Enterprise Sales license at all for a Sales Professional app? The thinking here is that an Enterprise customer might have people in multiple roles. For example a full app for the main business unit, and maybe a Sales Pro app for another business unit, as one example. An Enterprise user could access both; a Sales Pro user could not access all of the mothership from their app. How will these limits be applied to the Sales Pro App? It will be your responsibility to not expose within your Sales Pro App, any more capabilities than are allowed. Eventually, there will be some telemetry to let you know if you strayed out-of-bounds. Of course, Microsoft will have this telemetry also, so cheaters beware. Upgrading For many customers the Sales Professional License/App will be a great long-term solution. For others, it will be a great introduction. So there will absolutely be circumstances where a customer who started on the Sales Professional License/App will want upgrade to the Enterprise Sales License/App. What does that look like? Simple, just apply an Enterprise Sales License to the user, and give them access to the Enterprise Sales App. This is way better than an earlier discussed concept of separate instances. So that's all I got on the new Sales Professional App. I'll update this post when I have the other answers. Update: 04/09/18 I got the answer from Microsoft. While it was discussed previously, there is no limit on the size of the actual solutions that are installed from AppSource, just a limit on the number of them.

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 what we think, we should not be entitled to complain about any results! "Microsoft wouldn't listen to me" This is the most common response I get, when I suggest to someone that they should share their opinions with Microsoft. Whispering to each other in the corners is not going to accomplish anything. If you have built a practice that is dependent on Microsoft, you have an obligation to yourself and your company to make yourself heard; and I have found that Microsoft is not just willing to listen, but is usually eager to hear! That does not mean that they will act on your particular suggestion, but as a Partner Led company, partner opinions are core to everything they need to accomplish. If they built some thing that no partner liked or agreed with, then no partner would sell it! In fact, Microsoft has significant motions in place to get this exact kind of Feedback, from the MVP Communities to Partner Advisory Councils, and more, including the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Pilot for a Day You know those flight simulators that they train pilots in, so Microsoft has a secret one, 24 levels below a non-descript building on campus. What if James Phillips were to say to you, "Okay smart guy, you take a turn in our "D365 Strategy Simulator". Umm... it is one thing to voice an opinion about some particular aspect that impacts your particular footprint, we could all do that pretty easily. But that is only navigating for your practice, at the end of the day, even if a course could be plotted that satisfied every partners' viewport, it would crash and burn. While Microsoft may be Partner-Led, partners are not the customers. So, let's try that again, but this time, don't solve for partners, solve for customers. The Invite So I get this email from Phillips, "Steve, we have identified you as an opinionated know-it-all, and wanted to invite you and some other opinionated know-it-alls, to spend a day in our Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. Be on campus this Friday at 5AM at bus stop #12452". So I arrive at exactly 5AM and there are already several other partners, that we all know very well. We all get on the bus, and the blindfolding process seems to take longer than it should, but we are eventually underway. After about 30 minutes the bus stops, and I can hear a big garage door closing. We are all led, still blindfolded, down a corridor and guided into an elevator, as the door closes, we are told we can remove our blindfolds. The elevator has only one button, and Phillips pushes it and we start to go down. The ride takes a full 3 minutes, but stops smoothly and the door opens to a cavernous room. In the middle of the room is a large capsule, with a door on the back of it, sitting on a bunch of metal arms and levers. I snuck a photo of it when Phillip's back was turned. Pre-Flight We are ushered into a small auditorium, and sent down two rows to sit, I am in the back row. The first problem is that I am sitting right behind James Crowter, and he's pretty tall so I have to crane my neck to see. I look to my right to see who is talking, when we are supposed be be quiet, of course... Joel Lindstrom. Anyway, on the stage stands Phillips, and right behind him from left to right are Marko, Param and some AX guy I don't know. Above their heads are three large monitors, side by side. Each monitor is displaying various data about a particular platform like pricing, structure, licensing, functionality, etc. From left to right the monitors are NAV, CRM and AX. As Phillips opens his mouth to speak, George Doubinski jumps up from his seat and says "I am the only real developer here... just saying" and sits back down. Phillips looks at him for a few seconds, and then continues, "Behind me you will see an overview of the items that you will be able to control in the simulator. Each of you will have full control over every aspect of these items". I hear Mark Smith say, just loud enough for everyone to hear: "Brilliant!". Then I notice that Marko is kind of tipping his head, and darting his eyes up, motioning towards the NAV monitor. Phillips catches this out of the corner of his eye, and turns to Marko, who smiles sheepishly and stops. Param rolls his eyes, but the AX guy didn't notice. I also see Alysa Taylor, over by the door, whispering to some guy I have not met before, his name tag says, "Hi, I'm Hayden". We will be taken, one at a time from here to the simulator, and Crowter goes first. He stands and passes Sarah Critchley, who I can see is laser focused on her phone, I lean forward to see what is so important, at a time like this, and see she is editing a new cat emoji. The Simulator About an hour passes, and Crowter re-enters the auditorium. I can't tell from his face, whether he passed or failed, and he is not letting on. Before I get a chance to lean in and ask him how it went, my name is called. "Right Now Mordue!" Ugh. Phillips leads me into the main room, and the door is opened on the back of the capsule, and a staircase unfolds. He motions for me to enter, apparently I was climbing the stairs too slowly, because he kinda pushed me over the last one, and then slammed the door shut. It is quite dark, just a red glow, enough where I can make out shapes. There's a chair in front of me that looks like Captain Kirk's Star Trek chair, and I circle around and sit in it. As I sit, a metal seat-belt comes out of the left side and crosses my stomach and clicks into the right side. I look at the armrests, and it looks like almost all of the padding has been scratched off, and even the metal underneath has what looks like claw marks. Suddenly, I am awash in bright light as three monitors fire to life, in the same orientation as the auditorium. Below each monitor are switches, levers and dials to adjust what is on them. Below the middle monitor is a small LED that says "Mission One: Solve for Enterprise". It flashes a few times and then says "Begin", I feel a slight jolt as the simulator comes to life. Mission One Hmm, Solve for Enterprise... not my area of expertise, but I'll take a shot, because it doesn't look like I can skip it. First, I reach to the left, under the NAV monitor. I am remembering Marko saying that NAV can be used for SMB, all the way up to Enterprise, but most of the NAV partners I know, are not focused on Enterprise. I don't know AX that well either, but understand it to be a more complex product aimed at enterprise. So I turn off all of the NAV capabilities, and on the right, I crank up all of the AX levers. In the middle, where the CRM label has been crossed through with a sharpie, and Customer Engagement has been hand written below, I also start turning up levers. Field Service: On, Project Service: On, anything marked "Insights": On. A new monitor lights up below, that I had not noticed before, it is not very tall, but it spans across and under all three of the big monitors, and flashes CDS before showing a whole bunch of other dials, and I see a new set of levers below it. I flip them all on. I sit for minute... thinking... looking at the glowing green button on the right armrest labeled "Start Simulation"... I press it. I hear laughing erupt outside of the capsule, apparently the crew has seen this configuration before, I fear that I won't do well, but hey, this is not my area of expertise. I have no doubt that Joel will crush my score on this one. The capsule rocks around for a bit and then stops, all monitors go dark, the LED says "Simulation Completed". It did not say "Mission Accomplished", so I have no idea what happened, but before I can even think further about it, the LED flashes, "Mission Two : Solve for SMB". Mission Two Now we're talking, SMB is my wheelhouse. The three big monitors light up again, the same as they started in the first simulation. The first thing I do, is turn everything on the right (AX) side off. When Microsoft says SMB, I assume they are really meaning upper small to middle sized companies, as nobody makes any money on the 5 seat deals, so that is the lens I am thinking about. I look at CRM, ugh, I mean Customer Engagement next, as that is what I know. First thing, turn off Field Service and Project Service. My goal is to solve for the meat of the SMB market, not the fringes, so I go ahead and turn off Customer Service for now also. This is going to focus on Sales, the door that 90% of SMBs enter from. Insights? Too complex for most SMBs, at least to start, so I push those levers down, but not all the way. Appsource? Yes, yes, that one goes full to the top, SMB would rather buy than build any day. Plus, some of the enterprise features I turned off, will be filled by SMB focused products from Appsource. As I make adjustments, new windows appear, based on the selections I have made, a new one pops up in the corner now, it is labeled Business Edition in a crossed through font with a question mark next to it. I know that regardless of that they end up calling it, this is the simplified UI, so I push all of those levers to the top. A box flashes at the bottom of the window, "Do you want to change the default price of $40/user?", I check "No". I lean back, feeling pretty good about this configuration, I let me head loll to the left, and I am facing the NAV monitor. Hmm, NAV, I am not an NAV partner, but something is telling me that is is important for this simulation. I look down to the LED and it is flashing: "Create a branch of this simulation?" I think about this. Many customers that I have encountered in the SMB space have been looking for just a sales solution. Is that because they are not interested in an end-to-end solution, or because I do not know enough to offer one? If I did, and I offered it, wouldn't that give me an even stronger competitive advantage? I decide to create a branch of what I started and find out. I look at the NAV monitor... it does not say Tenerife yet, but that just came out and the guy with the Sharpie hasn't got to it yet. I see a lot of items on the screen that I do not understand, and the levers look foreign also, but I do recognize a few. One says SaaS on the top and on-premise on the bottom. I place it to about 80% SaaS, because I know there will still be some customers who are ignorant to the cloud. I tweak a few other levers that I really don't understand, but I need to move them somewhere, as I am sure the defaults are not what I want. I notice another lever that says "re-factor platform?" Looking down at the LED, I see that I can create yet another branch of the simulation from here. I press it. When I select "re-factor platform" for my new branch, I notice some new grab handles on the windows. I had just talked to Crowter the other day, and he floated an idea by me as a CRM guy, for my opinion. Hoping he did not notice the "Create a Branch" option, I am going to steal it and see if can beat him in this simulation with his own idea... I'm not proud. I take the grab handle at the top of the NAV screen, and drag the entire screen over to the middle one, and drop it on top of the XRM box. What if NAV were actually a CRM App built on XRM? That would take care of any integration challenges. I know we have CDS, but would this not be easier. One UI, a platform within a platform instead of next to it... I'm liking this idea, thanks Crowter, ya sucker. A box appears, "Do you want to change the default price of "TBD?" Hmm, this is a good question. Knowing that in the App model, different users could use different things, and I already accepted the $40 price for Sales only, I decide that for this NAV App a good price would be $75/user. It does not give me an option to create a price for Sales and NAV, but that may not come up that often anyway. I press the button on the armrest to start all simulations. The capsule rocks back and forth for what seems like a long time, and then everything goes dark again, just the red glow. Nothing is happening. The seat belt slides back open, so I assume I'm done. I stand and turn towards the door and it opens, I squint from the light and I see Phillips waving me out. He leads me back to the auditorium, and as I enter I hear, "Right Now Lindstom!" Post Flight As my eyes adjust, I notice Crowter sitting in front of me. I lean in and say "James, did you see the branching option?", and he says "what branching option?". I lean back and smile. Several hours pass, and finally everyone has returned to the auditorium. The last one to return is Chris Cognetta, he is backing into the room, still turned towards the simulator, I think he is explaining to the simulator crew how simulators work. It's quiet now, but I can hear George grumbling about a lever in the simulator that was sticking, and obviously not well designed. Marko, Param and the AX guy are nowhere to be seen. Alysa is still whispering to "Hi, I'm Hayden", and pointing at some of us, although I can't tell who. Phillips clears his throat, and says "Thank you for your participation, the crew will re-blindfold you and return you to the bus stop". Before I can stop myself, I blurt out "Wait!! Who won?", Phillips shoots me a glance, pauses, and says, "Hopefully, we all did". Next steps for you As you can clearly see, Microsoft is extremely willing to take feedback from partners. The next time you see Phillips, Marko, Param, Alysa, "Hi I'm Hayden", or the AX guy. Tell them you want to crack at the Dynamics 365 Strategy Simulator. They will probably deny its existence, and I will probably get some serious heat from them for exposing it. But don't take no for an answer.