Uncategorized Archives

June 9, 2025

Wax On, Wax Off: A TrueNorth IT Tale of Growth, Grit and Great PDFs

Kade’s year in industry: Inspired by the return of a classic With the new Karate Kid film hitting cinemas this month, we couldn’t resist the chance to pay tribute to the legendary dojo spirit. At TrueNorth IT, we’ve always believed in the power of mentorship, discipline and quiet determination, values that run deep in the Karate Kid universe. So, when we looked back on on the placement year that Kade has spent with us, the parallels were too perfect to […]

June 5, 2025

Unlocking the Power of Copilot: Four Essentials for Getting it Right

In our latest Ask the Expert video, Steve Drake, director of technology at TrueNorth IT, shares insights into how organisations can get the most from Microsoft Copilot. While the Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant offers huge potential, its performance depends heavily on data quality, structure and strategy. Here are four key takeaways from the conversation. 1. Copilot is only as good as your data A common misconception is that Copilot “learns” from your business data. In fact, it doesn’t. Copilot […]

December 17, 2024

10 Technological Advances of the Last 10 Years

Since TrueNorth IT was founded in 2014, we’ve witnessed extraordinary progress in technology, reshaping the way we work and the systems we create for our clients. To mark our first decade in business, we’ve created a round-up of five technological advances that have made a significant impact to the world in the last ten years. And – because we specialise in digital transformation using Microsoft tools – we’ve added five advances in the Microsoft ecosystem on which our business is […]

October 2, 2024

Creating Business Closures with the Dynamics 365 API

By Alex Radice, Senior Solution Developer, TrueNorth IT The Service Management side to Dynamics 365 includes features such as calculating the times when cases must be closed by to avoid breaching the organisation’s Service Level Agreement. Measuring resolution time requires the system to know which days count as “business days” so it maintains a list of Business Closures which are non-working days: Business Closures are also used for scheduling, work hours and within other areas of Dynamics 365. Normally a […]

August 29, 2024

Five Essential Elements of a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy

A digital transformation is not a one-off project, but instead is a continual process of digitisation. It brings huge benefits in revenue, efficiency and competitiveness. However, recent research indicates that implementing digital transformation is creating significant challenges for organisations. Currently, “88% of IT decision makers are facing costly project delays” with the cost of those delays totalling millions for some organisations. This risk can be mitigated. We find in our work on digital transformation projects that organisations which incorporate certain […]

August 22, 2024

How to Simplify Your Processes with Microsoft’s Power Automate

Recently, several of our clients have expressed an interest in Power Automate. This Microsoft service, previously called Flow, allows users to integrate applications to automate processes and tasks. Pre-built connectors to a wide range of applications, from SharePoint to Salesforce, enable you to create automated workflows and simplify your task management. You also have the option to build your own custom integrations to automate everything from small tasks to large systems. The advantages include improved productivity and increased accuracy, making […]

August 21, 2024

How we’re Eating our Own Dog Food with Dynamics 365

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth In the early 90s, during the push to develop the Windows NT operating system in record time, the engineers at Microsoft started to use early versions of the system itself. This gave them immediate feedback on any issues, and added to the motivation to stabilise the system as quickly as possible. This is a famous example of an organisation using its own products or services, which has become known as “eating your own […]

August 20, 2024

Why we Learned to Love PowerApps Portals

By Gareth Davies, Director, Client Engagement at TrueNorth Having ditched your antiquated Excel-based systems, your team are merrily and efficiently flying through their business process on your shiny new Dynamics 365/Power Platform-based system. But there’s one problem: interactions with external stakeholders are still dependent on sending sensitive information backwards and forwards via email. This is inefficient, often involving manual transcription of data, and potentially insecure. What can be done? Many business processes include interactions with external stakeholders: cases are submitted; […]

August 19, 2024

How to Achieve The Benefits of API-First Development

By Steve Drake, Director, Technology and Christian Waters, Director, Delivery “An API-first approach involves developing APIs that are consistent and reusable. This can be accomplished by using an API description language to establish a contract for how the API is supposed to behave.” swagger.io When we deliver web portals using an API-first approach, it is a simple process to expose these operations to Power Automate. This allows your users to combine your business-specific operations in innovative ways. To do this, […]