Captain Stack

Dynemo! on-demand Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 web demos.

John J Dooley — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:01:00 GMT

Dynemo - the Dynamic Demo engine.

As part of the Road to Repeatability (R2R) partner program, we have been hard at work the last few months on the Accelerated Demo Framework (ADF) and have some great new tools and methods to help you sell the way that prospects want to buy today.

Today, we are seeing changes to our marketplace in how prospects want to learn and evaluate the solutions that are best for their organization. We need to respond to this new model more quickly than ever before.

Dynemo is a key part of this framework.

A structural goal of the R2R program is to help you shorten and streamline your sales process and showcase the value of your and our solutions to your prospects in the most efficient way.

Dynemo, is a simple, Excel-based, customized demo builder that enables you to share web-based demos and marketing assets like customer testimonials with your prospects for consumption on their schedule.

With Dynemo, your Sales and Marketing organizations can build, share & publish your own branded content along-side standard Microsoft and ISV content all together in one package to show the value of our collective solution in an agile way with your prospects.

Dynemo enables your sales people to deliver immediate customized demos on-demand to your prospects real time. “Is now good for you?’. As well, it can help your sales team accelerate opportunities by enabling the prospect to self-qualify in the early stages of engagement with your organization.

How many times have your sales teams struggled to get a basic demo of the Microsoft Dynamics GP solution to a prospect that wants it now? By leveraging Dynemo and URL-based dynamic content your sales people can now respond instantaneously to this request. “When can i see the software? I need a demo.”

The genius of Dynemo is to 'dynamically' pull content from the web from different sources into purpose-built personalized content for your prospects. It enables you to post (privately) your own URL-addressable content and add standard demo content from Microsoft and our powerful network of ISV's. This is all done in real-time, dynamically by the tool and the framework.

Ok, enough with the setup. Let's download some software.

We have two versions. One small, 500KB which is the just the Dynemo tool (spreadsheet with a few macros).

The other is a bit larger, 350MB, which contains Dynemo and the current DemoMate library of 5 short demos for Dynamics GP 2013 (of course we are building new content and will add this web and downloadable library content on a regular basis).

Here is a link for both.

Dynemo provides a simple selector with the ability for your sales people and your organization to easily organize and share web based demo content.

Here we see the Dynemo Demo Selector tab. Click to select your own branded (URL-addressable) content, Microsoft content or ISV content.

Dynemo provides the ability to pull URL-based content from anywhere on the web.

Here we see the configuration tab. Your sales team can input their own contact information and you can add your own links of other sales and marketing content to be included in the mail.

The above image is the tab where you can customize to your own contact and partner information. Dynemo allows you to pull in ISV demo content as well with a simple 'Dynemo' code if the ISV wants to post their own content for you to share.

The picture below explains at a high-level the function and flow of Dynemo.

We will output 'standardized', short & simple demos in 4 ways, from configuring live demo steps in the Dynamics GP 2013 partner demo image with matching content from within a DemoMate libary of demo (Presenter mode and Play mode) content and finally configuing an email for the prospect with links for the same URL-based content being pulled from the web and delivered in a nice package to your prospect.

You can add your own Vcard contact info, an appointment a few days in the future to meet and review the demo content with the prospect.

A flexible and compelling set of content delivered real-time to help your prospect make the best decision.

Finally, if you made it this far, thank you for reading. Now download Dynemo and let's start selling.

P.S. We are planning to offer a series of web based training to teach you and your organization how to leverage and extend Dynemo and ADF in the next few weeks and months.

Any feedback or issues: john.dooley@microsoft.com

Going with the flow

John J Dooley — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 02:59:00 GMT

As part of the Dynamics ERP Road to Repeatability (R2R) program we have built a tool to help your teams demo Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2 easily and smoothly.

Have you ever been in a demo and forget exactly what pallet/menu contains that form that you are looking for? Well I know have.. many times.

It got me thinking, the shortcuts bar in Dynamics GP could come in really handy as an easy reminder/pointer of where the form is located and also avoid that “well… it used to be here..hmmmm where is that thing…”. And make it as easy as follow the bouncing ball for demos.

Also, as often times each demo is specific to the needs of the customer, wouldn’t it be great to build a library of demo flows that you could just import from something like a spreadsheet and instantly be ready with a script or scripts to help you get started for that custom demo.

That is the goal of this tool.

To enable you to build a few standard demo flows that enable easy and smooth navigation of the steps of the demo and share them out with others on your team.

It’s also a great way for the prospect to see that you have do a plan for your demo and have mapped something special to their needs. Here is a short demo of the this tool. http://youtu.be/V_lbyytXq0c

This is a really simple way to structure your demos and allow you to focus on your customer’s needs rather than hunting for forms in Dynamics GP 2010 R2 and not giving the smoothest most professional demo.

Here is a picture that shows a simple script for “Why Microsoft, Day in the Life & scenarios like Order to Cash”.

We plan to include this tool on the new Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 R2 (64 bit HyperV) image that is coming out really soon.

Here is a link to the download location for this tool. This tool uses a simple SQL Integration Services (SIS) Script to export and import steps into the Dynamics GP 2010 client.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=1e87b652b9d45232&resid=1E87B652B9D45232!611&parid=1E87B652B9D45232!601

Playing nice in the sandbox

John J Dooley — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:13:00 GMT

Office 365 offers a compelling and comprehensive set of offerings ranging from email via Exchange, to Lync to SharePoint Online in the Cloud.

This blog post explores some simple ways for you to think about leveraging both SharePoint Online with on premise solution in a “hybrid” model in your organization today.

As we consider using technologies in the Cloud, like Office 365, we also need to think about how they might impact or be impacted by on premise solutions. And seek ways in which they might be logically linked.

I found a nice demo of expense management in Excel 2010 in SharePoint Online and this got me thinking maybe Excel can be part of my on premise solution. Here is the demo http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/video-record-approve-and-manage-employee-expenses-VA102586196.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HA102604631 shows a simple demo/solution in SharePoint Online.

This is a cool demo for sure but it also got me thinking… didn’t we forget something in this demo? Like when/how do we pay the employee for the expense report?

Of course, Dynamics ERP manages AP invoices and pays employee expenses. I want to enable my expense report in the cloud to find its way to my on premise Dynamics ERP.

But how can we get from the online version of SharePoint in Office 365 to my on premise ERP solution? SharePoint Online works in what we call a “sandbox”. This means that there are some limits to the links that can happen in the cloud and calling an on premise web service is not easily supported.

Thus my challenge, leverage Office 365 for its cloud power and find a method to action something on premise.

I solved this dilemma using two simple techniques to “bridge” between SharePoint Online and my Dynamics ERP on premise.

The first technique is to use Excel both as a tool to complete the expense report in the cloud and as well as a conduit to my intranet. Once I open an Excel workbook from SharePoint Online on my local machine, I now have access to resources behind the firewall, thus providing an easy and secure way to access to local resources like a web service that can link to my on premise Dynamics ERP without all the complexity of the sandbox Silverlight callouts. Basically thru bringing the document and data on premise thru Excel.

The second technique is to leverage SharePoint Online workflow and email integration. By triggering a SharePoint Online workflow via a task approval event in SharePoint Online I can have workflow send email to an on premise process or folder in a SharePoint on premise server that enables me to action the expense report at a data level where information like Vendor Id, Document Number, Invoice Amount can move from the spreadsheet to/thru a process to a web service that handles the create/post to Dynamics ERP. This technique uses the DIP (Office Document Information Panel) to move values from Excel into SharePoint Online.

The demo of the above scenarios can be viewed here. http://tinyurl.com/7bdnpnq

As you see with both of these demos, there can be powerful "hybrid" solutions in the cloud with SharePoint Online that can connect to on premise solutions like Dynamics ERP.

In one my next posts, I will cover the technical aspects/details of this demo. Stay tuned for more details.

Welcome to Cap'n Da Stack

John J Dooley — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:06:00 GMT

This blog will explore ways to leverage SharePoint and Dynamics Technologies.

We will explore ways to extend ERP into the Enterprise thru a range of Microsoft Technologies.

We use a term in Dynamics land which is "Capping the Stack".. That's we are doing.

So get ready for some powerful waves of Microsoft Technology washing up on your shoreline.

Welcome Aboard Matey.