Wednesdays with Will: Making Your Business Intelligent

By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist

You are a Business Owner or Operations Manager who is always looking for a way to improve efficiencies in your organization. Recently you heard about Office 365 and were wondering if it would be the right fit for you and your employees. There are a few reasons why you are considering it. You realize your 5 year old email server has seen better days. It hasn’t been functioning as it should and is possibly costing you business because employees are not able to send and receive email communications internally and externally as they should. You also realize that the version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc...) is not the same throughout your organization so additional time is needed by employees to change formatting when sharing and opening documents. This costs the company time and causes frustration for your employees. Your workforce is becoming more mobile and some of your employees work remotely from the office. Last but not least, you are looking for an easier way to collaborate on the latest version of documents and spreadsheets. For these reasons and possibly more, you decided it was time to look for a way to improve your situation.

Microsoft Office 365 is typically considered because it is a versatile solution that can address these individual scenarios or all of them. This means you can just use the parts you need such as Exchange (Email, Contacts, Calendaring), Office Pro Plus (the current version of Office Suite), Skype for Business (IM, Presence, Video Conferencing), SharePoint (Intranet Portal, Document Storage) or more. It doesn’t require additional hardware and you can add each piece of the solution as needed. This allows you to easily operationalize your costs while providing your employees the latest tools to be successful in their job. Under this model, Microsoft is now able to revise and improve the product more frequently at no additional cost. This also improves user experience and adoption because the changes now are much more subtle and less drastic to a complete version change.

Microsoft recently extended its Office 365 Platform to include Dynamics CRM. If you are not familiar with Dynamics CRM or what a CRM is in general, let me tell you why you’ll want to know. The most basic description for a CRM is that it’s a business intelligence tool that can be leveraged by your Sales, Marketing, Services, and Management teams improving customer engagement and customer experience. This will help your organization generate more business and improve client satisfaction. The analytics gathered will also allow you to maneuver more fluidly with the changes in the businesses you work with as well as the current environment. Over the next few weeks I will be taking a deeper dive into:

• How Dynamics CRM integrates with Office 365

• How Dynamics CRM is used in each team setting (Sales, Marketing, Services, & Management)

• How Dynamics CRM is used by different industries

Hopefully you enjoyed my article and if you’d like to read more you can follow me here. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…

About the author:

Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.

Other articles by Will Marchesano:

• Wednesdays with Will: Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Office 365 – Working In Perfect Harmony

• Wednesdays with Will: Making Your Business Intelligent

For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.