Merit Matters Blog

There is still time to register for the next MeritCare Training Session: Microsoft Office SharePoint Practices: Usage of Content Types.

Site content types in the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform are defined as a reusable group of settings for a category of content. In this training session, we will present their usage to manage the metadata, templates, and behaviors of items and documents consistently. We will show you how to organize the content of your collaboration portal in a meaningful way and associate the same capabilities to your content across your document management solution.

Date: 7/08/2009
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 CDT

Register now for the free Microsoft Office SharePoint Practices training session.

We recently posted a video showing how fast you can use the Rapid Configuration tool to configure a new instance of Microsoft Dynamics GP. This time, we are going to look at the Rapid Migration tool.

View a demo of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Rapid Migration tool. Merit Solutions demonstrates how easily the Rapid Migration tool can be used to migrate data from Intuit QuickBooks to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Learn how recent updates to the tool have made it quicker and easier to migrate key data, including master records, open transactions, and configuration settings.

View the Dynamics GP Rapid Migration Tool Demo.

There are only 5 days left to submit entries for the Rapid Configuration Contest.

A Rapid Dynamics GP Configuration under 3 minutes could win a Garmin Nuvi!

Check out the contest details at How Fast Can You Do It?

Boundaries are dissolving across economies, industries, individual companies, and business relationships. The marketplace is more than interconnected—it’s a matrix of global opportunity.

Successful businesses are weighing IT investments carefully to help them achieve their strategic goals—reducing costs, finding new markets, and taking advantage of existing markets to find new customers, expand current relationships, and grow revenues. In many cases, they are aware that by expanding their investments, they can gain the flexibility to take them through uncertain economic conditions. The right business management solution can help people to work quickly and efficiently, manage growth and change, and meet the demands of a global market.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 can deliver that solution. Familiar and easy to use, Microsoft Dynamics AX can help you to run your business across locations and countries by consolidating and standardizing processes, providing visibility across your organization, and simplifying compliance. We also offer a wide range of industry-specific solutions, extending capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics AX to fit the needs specific to any industry.

The result? A business management solution that can meet your needs now and evolve to meet future demands.

Read the Dynamics AX White Paper: Connect: Business Solutions for a World Without Borders

To address the challenges of doing more with less, competing for funds in a tighter credit market, and reassuring cautious stakeholders and investors, you need to increase visibility into your financial and operational performance. This paper addresses how Business Intelligence can help you reduce costs, make smarter operational decisions, and continue innovating so you can survive - even thrive - in today’s economy.

Read the white paper: Business Intelligence: Thriving in Economic Uncertainty

Dynamics GP is a complete and scalable business management solution that helps growing and mid-sized organizations get up and running quickly, maximizing the productivity of your people. Proven capabilities automate and connect the full range of your business operations. You’ll have the power to meet demanding, industry-specific requirements, collaborate and communicate through Web portals, and transform data with reporting and business intelligence tools that reach all your people.

Take a test drive of Microsoft Dynamics GP and see how it can impact your business:

Familiar and Role Based Test Drive - In this exercise, you will get a tour of the Dynamics GP home page. You will get a comprehensive review of the familiar look and feel, tasks, and more. At the end of the pillar you should be confident that it is the one of the most intuitive application interfaces on the market today.

Improved Business Intelligence Test Drive - In this exercise, you are going to view an email from the controller to Alicia. She has to review something that was a part of Sales. You will see how you are able to take a simple Financial Report, email it and have the capabilities to drill all the way down the account Detail of items that are in that report. We are then going to look into the actual Sales Account that is related to the P&L for The Atlanta Office.

Powerful Business Alerts Test Drive - In this exercise, you will see how to set up an alert and then see how the notifications come through the Dynamics GP home page. View a list of out of the box business alerts, and see a business alert in action.

Microsoft Dynamics AX has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Inc. Magic Quadrant for Midmarket and Tier-2 Oriented ERP for Product-Centric Companies1, a research report that evaluates global ERP products and that is specifically tailored for product-centric, midmarket companies with 100-1,000 employees.

View the Gartner report: Magic Quadrant for Midmarket and Tier 2-Oriented ERP for Product-Centric Companies

CRM in a Challenging Economy

As the economic environment continues to gyrate wildly, many organizations are asking themselves what strategies they can pursue to bring tangible business benefits while taking stock of the economic conditions. In a growth economy, businesses typically work hard to expand their customer base and spend aggressively to stoke the growth engine. When money is tight however, existing customer relationships grow in importance as organizations seek a cost-effective way to nurture business expansion. This paper will demonstrate how Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software can provide organizations with the tools and capabilities they need to successfully turn a down economy into an opportunity to grow.

Read the white paper: Customer Relationship Management: The Winning Strategy in a Challenging Economy.

Dynamics CRM Scalability

Download the Executive Summary to learn more about how Dynamics CRM delivered a new CRM industry scalability benchmark record and redefined the price-performance equation with 50,000 concurrent users and 0.12 second response times on a hardware setup that cost less than $35,000. Microsoft, together with Intel Corporation, completed benchmark testing of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 database software. Benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can scale to meet the needs of an enterprise-level, mission-critical workload of 50,000 concurrent users while maintaining performance at sub-second response times.

Read the white paper: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Scalability Benchmark

Optimizing and Maintaining Performance

Read the white paper: Optimizing and Maintaining Performance in Dynamics CRM.

Microsoft is excited to announce the “35 Employee Access Starting At $34K” offer- a Microsoft Dynamics (US) promotion targeting Mid - Market businesses that wish to take advantage of the enterprise-wide ERP functionality offered by Microsoft Dynamics GP Advanced Management (AM) Edition and the Dynamics Client for Microsoft® Office and Windows® SharePoint® Services. With a combined solution of Dynamics Advanced Management user licenses and Dynamics Client for Microsoft® Office and Windows® SharePoint® Services user licenses, companies can extend the reach of data housed in their Dynamics application – giving more people in their organization data that they use to monitor the business and make decisions every day.

To take advantage of this offer, customers must purchase both Advanced Management user licenses and Dynamics Client for Microsoft® Office and Windows® SharePoint® Services user licenses. The promotion is comprised of a 20% discount on the Advanced Management user licenses when buying 11 - 25 AM user licenses and a 50% discount on the Dynamics Client for Microsoft® Office and Windows® SharePoint® Services when buying 24-50 Dynamics Client for Microsoft® Office and Windows® SharePoint® Services user licenses.

Contact Merit Solutions before Friday, June 26 to take advantage of this offer!

As a follow-up to our new website launch, we are proud to announce the creation of the Merit Solutions demo lab. A new feature of the site, the demo lab includes a library of 35+ Merit Solutions and Microsoft Dynamics demos.

We will spotlight a few demos over the next couple of weeks, so until then, use the links below to browse the demos by product:

• Dynamics AX Demos
• Dynamics GP Demos
• SharePoint Server Demos
• Advanced Lot Management Demos
• Advanced Serial Management Demos
• Enterprise Quality Management Demos
• Vendors Journal Snap In Demos

Don't Miss These...

We have also updated and increased our other Microsoft Dynamics resources. We have increased the number of whitepapers, as well as added to the list of downloadable fact sheets.

Merit Solutions, Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of our new website, www.meritsolutions.com.

As we celebrate our 10 Year Anniversary, we felt a complete website revamp was in order. The new site has been redesigned with a fresh new look and feel meant to enhance the user experience. It has been updated with information about the latest products and services, providing deeper, more content-rich landing pages.

The most significant changes to the site include:

• More Resources – We have expanded the number of Microsoft Dynamics resources. The creation of a Demo Lab has increased the number of demos on our site to 35 and counting. We have also increased the number of white papers, fact sheets, and brochures.
• Easier Navigation – The new drop-down menu allows easy navigation to all of our main pages from any screen on the site. The addition of hierarchical “breadcrumb trails” provide one-click access to higher pages within the current site folder / category.
• Going Social – We invite you to follow along as we continue to increase our presence in social networking communities. Our new page footer provides links to many of our social profiles, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Founded in 1999, Merit Solutions, Inc. is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a leading provider of Microsoft Dynamics AX, Dynamics GP, and custom application solutions. Based in the western Chicago suburb of Wheaton, IL, Merit Solutions is a Gold Certified Microsoft Solution Developer, offering consulting to companies in need of customized software. Merit Solution’s application software modules include: Manufacturing, Life Sciences, Quality and Control, and Regulatory Compliance.

Please send any site suggestions or errors to webmaster@meritsolutions.com.

Our colleagues at the Development Matters Blog have posted our newest addition to the MeritCare Training Session Calendar.

Site content types in the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform are defined as a reusable group of settings for a category of content. In this training session, we will present their usage to manage the metadata, templates, and behaviors of items and documents consistently. We will show you how to organize the content of your collaboration portal in a meaningful way and associate the same capabilities to your content across your document management solution.

Date: 7/08/2009
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 CDT

Register now for the free Microsoft Office SharePoint Practices training session.

Channel 9 has posted a test drive demo video of Microsoft's new search engine - Bing (no - not Kumo).

"At the All Things Digital Conference, Steve Ballmer just announced our new search engine called Bing. Bing is actually MORE than a search engine- we are referring to it as a "decision engine" as its goal is to help users make more informed decisions by collating and formatting information for you that is relevant to your search. It's exceptionally useful in areas like travel, shopping, weather and movie listings. Beyond there's there are a ton of new fun features and time saving capabilities. Watch as Stefan Weitz takes us on a test drive."

Read what the critics are saying about Bing.

There are all sorts of nifty little nuggets for the frugal Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 customer available on CustomerSource, Microsoft's private website for Dynamics customers.

Today, I just want to tell you about one, Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Reports. These reports are not only a helpful package of reports that you can publish on your internal website just like any SQL Server Reporting Services reports you might already have, but it also includes report models that make it easier to create more reports.

Gone are the days when you had to know cryptic table names like SOP30300 and goofy field names like ORUNTCST. The report models that are installed when you install this reporting package are easy to use, have intelligible field names and keep you from falling into traps like having to know that item shipping weight is stored in the database without decimal places as 100, when it really only weighs 1.00 lb.

So, this free reporting package that you can download from CustomerSource is a great benefit that you can take advantage of as a Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 customer. Along with Analysis Cubes for SQL Server 2005 and SQL 2008 (which I’ll go over in a later article) that are also downloadable from CustomerSource, you will have a solid platform for reporting!

Download reporting services reports and analysis cubes on CustomerSource. Login Required

DONT MISS OUT: Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 SSRS Free Training Session. Learn more about the Free MeritCare Training Sessions.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online equips business professionals with online and offline access to customer information through a full suite of marketing, sales and service solutions within a familiar Microsoft Office Outlook interface to ensure rapid user adoption and fast results. This site will introduce you to Microsoft CRM Online functions and capabilities with almost 30 product demonstrations.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Demo