About HSO

HSO is a multinational information technology and management consultancy company that provides a range of services to clients across various industries. Established in the early 1990s, HSO has since grown into a leading player in the IT services market, with a presence in Europe, North America, and Asia. The company’s offerings include cloud computing, digital transformation, business process management, and customer experience management, among others. HSO’s mission is to help organizations navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape and unlock new opportunities for growth and competitiveness.

HSO has a strong reputation for delivering high-quality services and has been recognized for its expertise by industry organizations and analyst firms. The company places a strong emphasis on innovation, continuously investing in new technologies and approaches to help its clients stay ahead of the curve. HSO also prides itself on its commitment to sustainability and corporate social responsibility, actively working to minimize its impact on the environment and supporting local communities in the regions where it operates. With a focus on delivering value to its clients and making a positive difference in the world, HSO is well-positioned for continued success in the years to come.

March 19, 2019

Microsoft Data Insights Summit is almost here!

Just a quick note to let my guests and regular readers know I will be at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit next week.?http://datainsightssummit.com/

I am really looking forward to the event and just dropped a blog post over at my?AKA home. Read more about why we are going and how you can still benefit even if you are not able to attend.

https://www.akaes.com/insights/aka-to-attend-2019-microsoft-data-insights-summit/

If you are in the Seattle area or plan to be at the Summit as well, let me know. I am always open to connecting with folks.

Thanks!

Mike

June 12, 2016

Green Beacon merges with AKA Enterprise Solutions

Hello All,

Green Beacon and AKA Enterprise Solutions will be merging soon!

Two highly distinguished Microsoft Dynamics partners globally, have signed a definitive merger agreement.? Green Beacon will continue servicing current and future customers while conducting business as AKA Enterprise Solutions.

Both AKA Enterprise Solutions and Green Beacon are leading partners in the Microsoft Dynamics community. Green Beacon has earned a stellar reputation for its CRM solutions and performance in the healthcare, public sector and financial services industries and has been named to the Microsoft President?s Club. ?AKA is a leader in Microsoft Dynamics ERP, with vertical focus and intellectual property in public sector, financial services, media, life sciences, manufacturing, and distribution industries. The company has been recognized six times as Microsoft?s worldwide ERP Partner of the year winner or finalist.

With this move, AKA/Green Beacon clients will have access to a diverse set of Microsoft offerings including CRM, ERP, BI, Azure, Office 365, and mobility.

Terms of the agreement are undisclosed.

About Green Beacon

Since 2001, Green Beacon has been implementing and supporting business solutions built on leading customer relationship management platforms, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner, Green Beacon specializes in large-scale CRM implementations that put clients’ strategies into operation.

By combining deep technical expertise with years of experience in a range of industries Green Beacon works closely with organizations to transform the way they do business. This highly collaborative approach has earned us an unmatched reputation for delivering ongoing return on investment.

The company is headquartered in Newton, MA, and has with offices throughout the United States. For additional information, visit:?www.greenbeacon.com.

About?AKA Enterprise Solutions

For more than 25 years, AKA Enterprise Solutions has focused on helping organizations innovate their way to greatness through the use of technology to simplify processes while reducing risk. Specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Business Intelligence, Cloud Services, Business Process Consulting, and Custom Application Development, we combine qualities like industry and technical experience, proven methodologies, and world-class consulting to help you get to where you want to be.

To have the freedom to innovate, you need more than just applications like CRM or ERP, and you need more than just a CRM or ERP services company. You need a partner that specializes in Cloud business consulting, strategic road-mapping, upgrades, and custom development, utilizing trans-formative technologies like Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 to deliver to you a solution that starts delivering a return on your investment right away. AKA has what it takes.

The company is headquartered in New York, NY, and has with offices throughout the United States. For additional information, visit:?www.akaes.com.

March 10, 2016

I am joining Green Beacon Solutions as Director of Customer Experience

Hello All,

I have joined Green Beacon Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Dynamics CRM partner, as Director of Customer Experience.

In my new role I will focus on the intertwined worlds of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience Management (CEM). And yes, there will be a heavy dose of business intelligence and mobility as they are an important part of an overall customer focused program.

I will continue to post content here on my personal blog and will provide additional content on our Green Beacon Blog.

See my first post on the Green Beacon Blog here: https://www.greenbeacon.com/insights/what-is-the-role-of-a-director-of-customer-experience-and-what-does-it-mean-for-our-customers/

An interesting factoid on “what is a green beacon”. Beacons, in the maritime world, are directional markers. You can think of them as “traffic signals” that guide operators safely along the waterways. They also identify dangerous areas and give directions and information.

I find that so appropriate to what we do; provide direction and help companies and people safely navigate through their CRM journeys. Pretty cool.

About Green Beacon

The company is headquartered in Newton, MA, and has with offices throughout the United States. For additional information, visit: www.greenbeacon.com.

February 9, 2016

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2016

Microsoft in Leaders Quadrant…Again!

As I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago?http://www.michaelhammons.com/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-bi-and-analytics-2015/ the latest?Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2016 has been officially released.

If you didn?t catch last year?s MQ, here is a link: Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2015

And here is a link to the 2016 version: Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics 2016

A summary of the 2016 highlights of Gartner’s?assessment on Microsoft BI below.

Microsoft is seeing strong uptake due in large part to?substantial product improvements?as well as very aggressive pricing. The Pro version is a very affordable $9.99 per user per month. Compared to pretty much any other BI and Analytics options available, it is the most cost effective.

Here is one of my favorite quotes “Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders quadrant, with strong uptake of the latest release, major product improvements, an increase in sales and marketing awareness efforts, new leadership and a clearer, more visionary product roadmap.” Well said, Gartner.

Key Strengths Summary

Microsoft provides a cloud-based delivery model and one of the lowest per-user pricing / TCO ? Ease of use for business users and the availability of skilled resources rounds out this strength.?
Microsoft received?high scores for online tutorials, community support, conferences and documentation. I have to agree here whole-heartedly as they have done a really good job on tutorials, blog posts, and learning materials. Something I have seen in the Dynamics CRM world as well. All this helps business achieve?product success much more quickly and cost effectively.
Microsoft continues to expand the number and variety of data sources for?connectors and content that includes pre-built reports and dashboards. These too help users get up and running and connected very quickly. In today’s world, agility and rapid time to value are key requirements to success.

If you haven’t checked out Power BI yet, do it, and as quickly as you can. If you would like some help to get up to speed quickly, feel free to reach out to me via my social channels or the contact form on this page:?http://www.michaelhammons.com/about-mike-hammons/?

January 19, 2016

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2015

Microsoft in Leaders Quadrant

It’s almost that time again and we shall soon see the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2016.

If you didn’t catch last year’s MQ, here is a link: Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics 2015

I will paraphrase the highlights of their assessment below.

In Gartner’s view (and I share much of this), Microsoft’s leadership position BI and Analytics is driven by product vision and road map. In addition, and this one is spot on, Microsoft has a “clear understanding of the market’s desire for a platform that can support systems-of-record requirements and deliver easy-to-use data discovery capabilities”.

Power BI is gaining traction as it matures and cloud adoption grows. I concur and have seen a rapid increase in interest and adoption. I am confident we will see an uptick in the position as Microsoft has been rapidly adding new capabilities to the Power BI platform and it is near parity with the BI applications that have traditionally been selected over it. Add the fact that the “other” BI applications are currently much higher priced; in both acquisition and? deployment costs. This is also noted by? Gartner, “Overall cost of ownership and license cost remain the top reasons customers choose Microsoft.”

To give you an idea of the “power” of this great application, below is an example proof of concept that was provided to a customer recently. There was some shock in awe in that what typically takes them a couple of days to collate the date, do all the Excel lookups and filters and cleanup took several days to complete. This took less than a day to create and is now completely automated.

That’s why I am so excited about Power BI.

To wrap up this post, a great Power BI learning event is upcoming called the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, March 22-23, 2016.? At this event Microsoft will be hosting hands on training, advice from some great experts in Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Excel. I plan on being there so please reach out if you would like to connect. Go here to see more detail and register: http://www.datainsightssummit.com

December 18, 2015

Power BI Is Going to be Huge

I just have to say, that Microsoft Power BI is completely awesome and amazing.? I?ll explain more in upcoming posts, but it just keeps getting better; almost on a daily basis.

Quite simply:? Power BI, is going to be huge, just huge, and I’m mean enormously huge.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am rarely quick to endorse or embrace a particular product or technology platform.? For me, I have to see it, experience it and believe it before I give my unequivocal support.? So let me just say that I am jazzed and excited about Microsoft Power BI; and more importantly what it can do for you and your business, and I want to share that with you.

No more waiting. No more wasted effort. Far, far less expense.

Until relatively recently, turning data into actionable insight has been overwhelmingly a chore that simply takes far more time, effort and expense than it should.

Time waiting on a Business Intelligence (BI) team to finish their last project before they get to yours; and that’s only if other priorities don’t keep knocking it further down the road.
Effort required to get access to the data; and in a usable format that can easily be used by non-techy types. More often; it still requires a collection of spreadsheets and exports and imports and vlookups and filters and, and, and… ? very repetitive, labor intensive, and chaotic.
Expense unless you are doing the aforementioned Excel dance; most applications and tools have been very expensive. I mean thousands of dollars $$ per user per year expensive. Plus all the time and expense required to learn the darn things.

Power BI can literally transform your data into rich visuals and dashboards to see, understand and act on on what matters to you. Stay in the know, spot trends as they happen, and push your business further.

I’ll be posting more content in the coming weeks and months that I believe will get you as excited as I am about this new(ish) platform.

For starters, here are the slides and a link to a webinar I did recently titled “Power Up with Power BI”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK1sfN2BTsw

Welcome to your brave new world!

May 19, 2014

Dynamics CRM 2013 Spring Release Preview Guide

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Spring Release Preview Guide is now available.

You can download it from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=395005

The CRM 2013 Spring Release Preview Guide highlights the new features and capabilities that will be released soon. The Spring Wave is one of the biggest updates?to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.?This is going to be HUGE! There are lots?of something for everyone in this release, including marketing, sales and service.

Marketing

Microsoft Social Listening enables you to identify who’s having social conversations about your company, products, competitors or another topics. Track buzz, trends and sentiment related to things like your customers, campaigns and competitors.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, provides?email marketing, landing pages, social campaigns and more on par to most of the third party marketing automation systems available today. Quickly and easily deliver qualified leads to your?sales teams and measure the return on marketing investment. It also includes lead nurturing and scoring, improved dashboards and analytics, and an awesome campaign visual designer.

Email Marketing

Send highly personalized E-mail messages to drive improved open rates. Personalize the content per sender, recipient, subject & content allowing you to send fewer emails with greater business results.

Deliver mass and transactional emails scalable to millions of emails to customers per day
Cross campaign rules to build sophisticated nurture and drip email campaigns.
Manage and control how many emails a contact can receive in a given time period to improve email performance.

Sales

For sales teams, there are enhancements to the CRM Tablet apps. We’ll see Social Insights right inside the mobile experience. Social Insights provides real-time company and contact information like financials, breaking news, social buzz and social connections. It’s very powerful for marketing, sales and account management professionals to help you engage more effectively to win more deals and spend less time spent researching and more time selling.

If you are an Android fan, the mobility updates will include a version for Android devices.?As before, the iPad is also supported.

The mobile experience will also be extended to include Customer Service capabilities optimized for people who want to?keep an eye on high priority Cases, monitor Queues?or route items across the queues to deliver amazing experiences no matter where you?are.

Customer Service

There’s lots of new “stuff” for customer service professionals?from the powerful self-service capabilities in the?recently acquired Parature, to the multi-channel capabilities coming in CRM including the Unified Service Desk to empower contact center agents to resolve customer issues with ease.

Parature includes lots of awesomeness including:

Parature Portal: a 24/7 customer support center that is seamlessly integrated into your?current website. It includes a searchable knowledge, submit help tickets, track its progress and receive automatic email notifications.
Parature Mobile Self-Service: Provides mobile friendly, responsive designs of the portal?that work?across desktop and mobile devices.?
Parature Facebook Portal: Seamlessly provides?FAQs and KB searches, or create help desk tickets from inside of Facebook.?
Parature Real-time Chat: provides instant live online support to provide?assisted support online. ?
Parature Knowledgebase: provides quick answers to common questions and support issues, plus essential downloads including forms, how-to videos, product manuals, knowledge base information updates and more.?

Server-side Synchronization Updates

Server-side synchronization allows administrators to easily manage the synchronization of email, tasks, appointments
and contacts between CRM and Exchange. No additional cost….unlike some other solutions out there!

The original release synchronized ?data?between Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Exchange on-premises deployments only. We will now see support for both?Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Exchange Online as well as the continued on-premise option. POP3/SMTP3 providers are also supported for sending and synchronization of Email.

SharePoint Integration Enhancements

Simplified integration between CRM Online and SharePoint Online will be managed inside of?Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. If you have?Dynamics CRM Online and SharePoint Online you will no longer need to install and configure the CRM List Component to enable the Document Management integration. Woo-hoo!

Sandbox Environments

A big request from larger customers and those that prefer dev/test and production environments. It will be point and click simple to configure isolated, non-production online environments. Administrators can make a copy of a CRM Online instance into a Sandbox Instance.

Minimal Copy only includes customizations & schema from source
Full Copy includes all application data, users, and customizations from source
Administrators can reset a Sandbox Instance back to factory settings (e.g. delete and re-provision)
Administrators can take/restore a snapshot of a Sandbox Instance??(only one snapshot per instance at any time)

And lots more good stuff!

Microsoft plans to deliver the Spring Wave features to CRM online customers as an automatic service update with the option to opt in for additional Customer Service capabilities, and to the on-premises customers as an installable service pack (SP1).

Market smarter. Sell effectively. Care everywhere.

September 12, 2013

Infinity Info Systems Presenting at CRM Users Group (CRMUG)

Infinity Info Systems Presenting at CRM Users Group (CRMUG) in Tampa!

Tampa, Florida is the place to be October 20 ? 24, 2013 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers, partners, and prospective customers.

Infinity Info Systems is once again contributing our time and talented people in sharing impactful information for increasing your CRM success. Bob Peskin and Mike Hammons will both be presenting some really great content.

CRM Reporting 201: C-Level Visibility with Dynamics CRM Dashboards
Managing Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Office 365 Environments
Techie Talk: Upgrading Complex Systems
Techie Talk: Reporting Panel
Techie Talk: Upgrading Complex Systems
User Adoption: Making Progress with Social CRM
User Adoption: Taking Advantage of the Outlook Client

Another great reason for attending this year, Microsoft will be providing the first public, comprehensive review of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013…including about thirty minutes of live demonstrations by Param Kahlon, Group Manager at Microsoft.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, formerly code named ‘Orion,’ will be featured in the CRM keynotes for both The Partner Connections Event and CRMUG Summit. You don?t want to miss this! The sessions that follow Param?s will dive deeper into new features and functionality that will blow Dynamics CRM customers away.

Keynote Times and Dates:

For CRMUG Summit, Tuesday, October 22nd from 8:00 am ? 9:30 am
For Partners – The Partner Connections Event, Sunday, October 20th from 1:00 ? 1:45 pm

A quick note for our Partner friends and colleagues. The Partner Connections Event is the premier opportunity for Microsoft Dynamics Partners to build sales, marketing, leadership, consultant, and developer/architect skills by networking and learning from each other and industry experts. We hope to see you there!

This weekend (September 15) is your last chance to save $100 on Summit registrations – don’t wait any longer to sign up!

July 29, 2013

Power BI for Office 365

Here is a quick update from an announcement made at the Microsoft WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference). Power BI for Office 365 is a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365. Power BI users have data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify business insights from their on-premises and cloud data. One of the most exciting new features of Power BI is Q&A, a natural language based experience for interacting with data. Microsoft still has not really made clear exactly what Power BI is, e.g. is it a new product, a re-branding, a new service? From what I can tell it looks like a little bit of rebranding of Power Pivot with some new features thrown in. Hopefully soon Microsoft will provide more details on exactly what this is, what are the costs, how is it configured and all those other fun questions. In the meantime, a little more about the Q&A feature. Q&A builds upon allows the use of natural language to find, understand, and report on your data. Here are a few examples: ?Show London clients? In this example, an Excel workbook with data about customers and their locations has been saved to Office 365. Q&A is interpreting the search query and displaying corresponding information from the workbook to create a list of customers that are based in London. ?Show number of products? Similarly, ?show number of products? is being interpreted to count the number of products found in the data source. ?Number of songs per year? Further, Q&A automatically chooses a suitable visualization based on what is requested. ?Total number of employees for finance, HR, marketing in Europe by employee country? In this example, Q&A automatically chose to display three maps, one for each division. It opted to display maps because the country column is marked as a geography data column. ?Show our sales pipeline with opportunity size greater than $20,000? So what will you need to get Power BI Q&A to work with your organization?s dataset? An Excel spreadsheet with a Power Pivot model saved to a Power BI site in Office 365. So, if you are using Excel and Power Pivot today, you are on the right track to use Q&A over your own data once it is available. Microsoft will be posting more about the features included in Power BI so stay tuned here for more updates. In the meantime head over to http://www.powerbi.com and check out more details.