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.

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.

March 14, 2014

What Customers Want From Partners

I attended a Convergence Pre-Game customer panel session where 4 customers talked about “what customers want from partners”. I heard some really good insights into what customer’s really want and expect from partners.

The session opened with the moderator asking “What one word describes your expectation for a long term, positive relationship with your partner.

Amaze!
Communication
Experience
Initiative

Below are my general notes regarding additional feedback and expectations.

Don’t send in junior consultants that are not experienced, we want people that know what they are doing.
Each customer has changed partners looking for the right fit (this spells opportunity)
Customers generally have their top people engaged, we expect the partners to do so as well.
Customers don’t like it when the courting phase is over. Don’t make it obvious when your energies have switched to other customers, projects, new stuff.
Partners like to trump their experience..they all say we have done thousands of implementations..the customer perspective is then “oh then we are just one if thousands”.
We just helped one of your competitors…that gets our attention.
Pair the right resources…if the customer person is technical then make sure the main person that interacts is technical.

On SOW’s and contracts.

Give good estimates.
Approach with a win win mentality.
Strive for a partnership.
Sign off on all documents.
Get people to sign off on initial project and on any changes.
Make the investment on the front side, drill into the needs then give us the pricing.
If projects are hourly, itemize the billing and don’t be too general.
Giving options is a good thing, but, recommend as well.
Be clear about what the customer can do realistically and what the partner can or should do. Let us know what can be done out of box, or if something is fairly simple. Give us some ownership.
What sources of information do customers find useful: CRMUG, collaborate with the customers, books, blogs, conferences.
Black and Veatch, ALL of their projects and consulting work is fixed fee AND they get a 30 day warranty.
Works best for them to have fixed fee…ranges are a problem.
Requirements must be clear.
A couple are ok with hourly, but for smaller projects and where the requirements may be a little loose.

Best approach from a people/person approach is to have an account manager as a single point of contact. Prefer it. It should not be the consultant or technical resource. It’s a value add person, NOT billable!

Most like over communication…feel like the partner cares…too often partners take too long to respond or provide updates, particularly on issues. Don’t make me call you to get a status update. Even if you say “we are still working on it”, this is ok.

Confront brutal facts and issues up front and head on….don’t wait.

SLAs?

Yes, expected and do track them.

Online tracking systems?

Yes, prefer to have online tracking for anytime, anywhere communication.
Also want to talk to someone Easier for me to wait if i see it online.
When I reach out to you, it’s important!

Training and other best practices

Separate sow for training, implementation and other stuff
Training up front, before the project starts, helps with developing requirements.
Want to see “English” design documents, easy to read, not just technical, execs need to read/understand them
Ask if customer has resources to translate technical docs to simpler docs
Ok with cutting back on some documentation.
Don’t discourage us from using features.
Customer should NEVER be more excited about the product than they are.
The partner should be major proponents and cheer leaders for the product.

What we expect

Integrity, customer focused, fair, honest, dependable, drive to success, amaze us, be creative, deliver measurable ROI, really understand our processes and help us improve them.

Do more than just implement. Look for partners that talk about CRM, that blog, have good content, do more than just implement.

Shared values. Flexibility. Give us the time and attention based on our needs. It cycles so be flexible.

Be proactive with solutions. Help,me make the right decision.

All in all some really great insights and well worth paying attention to!

March 12, 2014

Sales Acceleration Summit 2014

?If you?have a?focus on sales and marketing?I just ran across a free Summit/Webinar you might want to check out.

Free sales training without the travel. Choose from more than 80 sessions in 6 tracks. Discover how to accelerate revenue in your unique role.

On March 13th, the Sales Acceleration Summit launches as the largest online professional sales event ever held.

You and your entire sales and marketing teams are invited to come be inspired by the top minds in the industry. The summit is free and features over 80 sales authors, industry experts and business leaders like:

– Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Red Book of Selling
– Matt Dixon, The Challenger Sale
– Mike Bosworth, Solution Selling
– Jill Konrath, SNAP Selling
– Steve Young, NFL Hall of Fame Inductee
– And many more

Join over 20,000 viewers to watch today?s brightest minds in sales and marketing share their methods for accelerating revenue.
Registration is free ? sign up today!

October 22, 2013

New Era in Dynamics CRM 2013

Notes from CRMUG Summit 2013, Tampa, FL

I have a few posts from sessions and content from the Dynamics CRM User Group Summit held in Tampa FL the week of October 21.

First up was the New Era in Dynamics CRM 2013 presentation by Param Kahlon, CRM Program Manager, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Growth in Dynamics CRM continues and in fact is increasing
* 3.5m users
* 40,000 customers
* 66% choose cloud
* 36 double digit growth quarters and accelerating

Key themes for CRM 2013 and beyond
* Performance and scalability
* Agility and process excellence
* Social in context
* Reimagined user experience
* Role tailored mobile experiences
* Richness of custom extensions

One of the key UI/UX Designers for CRM 2013, Wayne Higgins, gave us a little perspective
* Reimagined UI and UX
* All about Efficiency
* New way to get things done
* Relevant tools available (max of 5 commands, drop down nav, etc.)
* Mobile optimized
* Start up experience, easy, user friendly, informative
* Information architecture

Business process management – respond quickly to individual customer need
* Power to business users
* Agility
* Configuration not coding
* Multiple processes
* Client side logic
* Web and mobile
* Rules drive
* Plan to add business process for vertical industries

XRM a much richer platform (back to Param)
* Custom entities flow to mobile devices
* Configurable tool tips
* Quick create for custom entities
* Image data type
* Fluid form entities
* Team selling focus
* Portable business logic (formerly called PBL, now Business Rules)
* Visual process flows for custom entities
* Bing maps for custom entities
* Multiple entity quick find, enhanced search on mobile
* Custom actions and real time workflows

Future
* Online first
* Productivity and communication
* Proactive
* Business process excellence
* User experience edge
* Universal social
* Ubiquitous access
* Mobility

Next few releases
* CRM 2013 now
* Subra, Q1 2014 online only
* Mira, Q1 MarketingPilot updates
* Leo, Q2 tighter Netbreeze and MarketingPilot integration

Subra

* Netbreeze, social list ending and analytical, will be amended directly in CRM
* Scalable online service
* Office 365 integration
* General availability integrated as office 365 service

Mira

* Extended global reach
* Online service only
* Tighter CRM integration
* Multiple channelled campaign management
* Lync and Skype enhancements

Leo

* Revamped customer service
* Mobile and social improvements
* New look for customer service
* State of the art experience
* SLA and entitlement compliance

Will ensure industry templates that have been available in Marketplace will continue to work on 2013 and will add business processes to these as well. Essentially free, unsupported, accelerators.

September 16, 2013

7 Things Every Successful Medical Device Sales Rep Needs To Know

medical-device-industry-management | Photo Courtesy of Depositphotos http://depositphotos.com/3359845/stock-photo-Cute-young-female-using-a-the-help-of-the-internet-to-study.html?sqc=20&sqm=178611&sq=1hdycl

The knowledge required for medical device sales reps to succeed is constantly expanding, and sales training won?t be enough for them to keep up. A post on the Business 2 Community blog nails all the points about why reps must continuously stay up-to-date with the medical device industry, including medical device industry trends, regulations and competition.

Medical device sales CRM systems can help by bringing the information that reps are typically searching for directly into the system. It allows users to easily keep up with industry news or trends and can even send alerts about a competitor based on news articles or social media posts.

The best part is the system captures all this data from multiple sources and puts it in one place within the medical device sales CRM system. That means busy medical device sales reps don?t have to spend hours searching on the Internet for news or topics that are important to them and their customers.

The Business 2 Community article refers to an anecdote about a ?Book of Knowledge? ? not an actual publication, but a metaphor to describe the variety of information sales reps need to have at their disposal. The article lists seven extremely important things for medical devices sales reps to know from the ?Book of Knowledge.?

Who does what: Reps have to be familiar with the responsibilities and concerns of physicians, staff and administrators.
Medical knowledge: Reps should be up-to-date with the latest medical device technology, anatomy and studies relevant to their devices.
The competition: Reps must understand how their competitors? devices work.
The hospital: Reps need to know the rules for visiting labs and operating rooms.
Issues and ethics: Reps should be knowledgeable about areas such as FDA regulation and health care reform, as well as ethical standards such as Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) standards.
Economics: Reps should know how money flows through hospitals and the health care system.
Medical device sales skills: Reps must always be revising their approach to keep up with customers and medical device trends.

Keeping reps informed about everything they need to know requires input from sales trainers, managers, marketing and IT, the post explains.

How does your company keep reps up-to-date on everything they need to know? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Release Preview Guide Available

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 is right around the corner! Bob Stutz posted a blog highlighting the release of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Release Preview Guide!? I recommend you check out his blog post here and then download the Release Preview Guide for complete details!

This guide reveals the upcoming enhancements to start preparing users for the upcoming 2013 release of the next major version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The guide is broken down in five investment areas:

User experience
Process
Tablet and mobile
Enterprise collaboration
Platform enhancements

We?re very excited about the new streamlined form interface, flexible guided processes, simple business rule creation and the increased options for mobile and tablet experiences.

Feel free to contact Infinity Info Systems to learn more or request additional information.

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!

August 6, 2013

Dynamics CRM 2013 Blitz Day Technical Track Notes

CRM 2013 Blitz Day Technical Track Notes

Microsoft held the Dynamics CRM 2013 Training Blitz Day for partners on July 31. The sessions were split into two tracks, sales & marketing track and technical track. The notes below are for the ?Technical Overview for Application Consultants, Presales Consultants and Developers?.

The primary themes for Dynamics 2013 are:

Re-imagined User Experience (Flow UI)
Process Agility
Yammer Integration
Outlook Client Improvements
New Exchange Sync
Upgrade Process
Business Rules
Client Extensibility
Extensibility on the Server and Cloud
CRM as a Platform for Business Apps

The new UI that is available in the Polaris release will be complete for all entities. This release will include additional changes with the release of a new “ribbon” toolbar?(will be called the Command Bar) at the top. I like the new UI and it seems that it will be easier to navigate with very few popups. We will see a more streamlined UI with more white space which makes the app look a lot cleaner and more modern.

?Another new paradigm is the heavy process oriented flow of the UI. We do see this a bit in the Polaris Flow UI forms, where essentially the flow of a process is spread across the top 1/3 of the screen that represents stages, with steps associated within each stage. This will be across all of the main entities, including leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and cases. From what I heard, new entities will have the same features, although not 100% confirmed yet. This could be a great differentiator, as these essentially “process flows” guide a user through an entire process. And yes, multiple processes and process switching will be supported.

Business rules and synchronous workflows are new features of Dynamics CRM 2013 and will expand the no-code capabilities of the product. Microsoft calls it “declarative” configuration; which is essentially more like the current Processes vs. the Form editor drag and drop (more descriptive, less visual). This is a new feature and DIFFERENT than Processes (Workflows & Dialogs) and different than plugins (which require code). Business Rules will support “no code required” rules; such as, if then else, change a field based on another field, comparisons, formula’s, etc. E.g. the ability to create a rule that says If field A = Red, then Set Field B = “123”. Or, If field C = “Blue” then show Tab 2. All in all a nice edition because JavaScript is required to do this today.

The mobile updates include a responsive design and ?write once? business logic. Responsive means the UI has the ability to detect the “size” of the screen and adjusts the layout automatically. The initial release will see support for Windows Phone and iPhone, with Android to follow shortly. On the tablet front, iPad and Windows 8 tablets, with no information on Android tablets, other than it’s on the roadmap.

There will be NO offline use for mobile devices in the initial release. One exception, there will be “offline” capability for Windows 8 tablets, but it’s a caching approach, so, don’t get sucked in by the marketing speak. This is not offline and merely has a few of the most recently browsed records offline. So, this means that Resco and CWR will still be the go to applications for full device offline capabilities. I suspect both will also be far more feature complete with device online capabilities as well, for the time being.

There IS still offline capability with the full Outlook client for Windows 8 tablets (Surface Pro, Convertibles, laptops, etc.). Good news on true offline, the Outlook client has been re-designed with a focus on performance and stability improvements. Technically they have created more “isolation” of running processes which is a fancy way of saying the code has been optimized. No numbers were shared but should definitely see better performance and less hit on client memory.

Editable grids is always a hot topic and we finally START to see these in CRM 2013. Initially the editable grid is on the Opportunity entity only, for easier product entry. It looks pretty good and provides in cell editing and configurable columns. Unfortunately this is the only place it will be available for now. The plan is to add it to other areas. I did not get an answer if this was a new “control” that could be re-used in other areas, I suspect not at this time.

Speaking of new controls, there will also be a new image control for adding images to entities. The one bummer about it, only 1 image control per form.

Server-to-server side sync for activities/calendar and email is long overdue and looks to be a good replacement for the email router; however email router is not going away at this time. Tracking selected individual items will still require Outlook, though. The first release will be an all or nothing approach, meaning, no rules can be configured for selective tracking of email or activities using server side sync. It will provide a way for mobile clients to finally have Calendar and email sync, which is a great step forward.

We have heard some information on the Yammer, MarketingPilot and NetBreeze acquisitions and they will play a significant role in the future of the product, but CRM 2013 will have limited integration with these products. Yammer will have the tightest integration and can essentially replace Activity Feeds (but AF is not going away just yet). The main thing to know about Yammer, it will NOT be free. In order to use the CRM-Yammer integration one will be required to purchase the Yammer Enterprise application, or, have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.? Rumors are that E1-E4 Office 365 will include Yammer integration with that platform, could not get an answer if that will include CRM if it is part of your Office 365 E-x subscription.

There will essentially be no MarketingPilot or Netbreeze integration with this initial release. There is a CRM connector for CRM-MarketingPilot today, it’s free, but currently limited to select Clients and Partners. We won’t see any real integration until the “Mira” release, sometime in 2014.

There were LOTS of questions on upgrading, what’s going to work, what will break, etc. A beta of the release is now available for downloading so we should be able to get an idea of what will happen with existing customization’s and configurations. Microsoft has claimed that MOST configuration and supported customization’s SHOULD work without issue. We shall see.

If you have been following my tweets, Yammer or i3 Community blog posts I provided an update that Microsoft is starting to announce release “dates”. No official date but indicators are late October will be the official launch of Dynamics CRM 2013

http://www.i3.infinityinfo.com/blogs/entry/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2013-official

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

7 Things Every Successful Medical Device Sales Rep Needs To Know

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

How Can Medical Device Sales Reps Better Connect With Surgeons?

CRM 2013 Blitz Day Technical Track Notes