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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, […]

By Steve Drake, Director, Technology at TrueNorth IT   In this article, I take a look at the benefits of Application Life Cycle Management in Dynamics 365, along with implementation steps.   What is Application Life Cycle Management? (ALM) As shown in the diagram below, ALM has many aspects. Microsoft defines ALM as follows: “ALM is the lifecycle management of applications, which includes governance, development, and maintenance. Moreover, it includes these disciplines: requirements management, software architecture, development, testing, maintenance, change […]

The Dynamics 365 customer engagement applications for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) help improve their interaction with customers and leads. The original ‘Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement’ bundle of licenses is now defunct. It has been replaced by the option to choose specific modules instead of the whole bundle. There are four core apps that focus on customer engagement; this article highlights some of the ways that each app can benefit an SME’s sales, marketing and service functions.   Microsoft […]

Digital transformation is the process of digitising all areas of an organisation, delivering efficiencies and improved customer service. Digital transformation projects are long-term efforts in which the organisation continually adapts its systems. This is driven by ever-changing technology and evolving customer needs. According to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformation projects fail. The main reasons include lack of investment and lack of engagement within the organisation. Furthermore, those respondents reporting success in their digital transformation efforts estimate that they have achieved […]

To mark International Women’s Day, we sat down with Simrah Khan, functional consultant at TrueNorth IT. Simrah started with us as a graduate in November 2020, originally as a solution developer. She has made great progress and is now on our functional consultant path, helping to gather requirements, delivering Power Platform solutions and using her great communication and organisational skills.   Simrah, Tell us About Your Role at TrueNorth My role as a functional consultant involves liaising with customers, gathering […]

Our new ChatGPT integration for the Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps is all about efficiency. The integration uses the ChatGPT chat bot, which is powered by artificial intelligence, to streamline customer service tasks. It simplifies the workload of customer service agents, salespeople and the marketing team. At the core of the integration is ChatGPT’s intelligent screening of customer interactions. Every touchpoint that’s captured on your Dynamics 365 system can be almost instantly analysed by the bot to create a succinct […]

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth IT TrueNorth was pleased to achieve Microsoft Gold Partnership in Cloud Platform in October 2021, after holding Silver in Cloud Platform status for several years. This article summarises what the Gold Partnership requirements are, what the benefits are, and what options there are to qualify for other elements of the partner programme.   How to Qualify for Microsoft Gold Partnership There are several different options to qualify for Gold: Azure Consumption: $100,000 of […]

TrueNorth IT has achieved Gold partnership with Microsoft in Cloud Platform. This demonstrates industry-leading ability in delivering cloud services for clients. The partnership elevates the company’s capability to deliver cloud applications on Microsoft Azure, including deploying, migrating and maintaining cloud services. TrueNorth qualified for Gold via the Cloud Consumption option, which recognises the Azure spend of the company’s Digital Partners of Record and the qualifications of its staff. In an increasingly cloud-first world, the Gold partnership is an important recognition […]

By Steve Drake, Director, Technology at TrueNorth IT Quite often we need to surface data from another system within Microsoft Dynamics. Sometimes the need is simply to display static read-only data, but we may also on occasion require: Users to be able to interact with this data Lists of data items that can be filtered External data that is aware of and can interact with the form within which it is displayed Filtering of external data using security roles of […]