The generation of millennial workers views the world through a digital lens. They grow up with technology woven into their lives, and expect any information they need to be at their fingertips. As the move up the corporate ladder, they expect the business to capitalize on the data and technology assets that are available. They don’t have patience with disconnected and inefficient processes that put the business at a competitive disadvantage.

This is one of the key factors that is driving business application technology: cloud-based ERP, mobility and cross platform programs, integration of business apps with productivity tools and social media, with a consistent, user friendly interface. No matter the size of your company, you can now provide the digital business environment to:
• Give workers who are comfortable working from home, in the office, and on the road easy access to secure business systems. Any time anywhere access.
• Work cross platform on any device.
• Enable collaboration inside and outside your organization to build stronger relationships between vendors, customers, and employees.
• Provide project portals, inventory data, and customer information that empower remote employees to provide excellent service.
• Deliver powerful real time analytics with rich visuals

Recently Gartner highlighted 10 technology trends:

•The Device Mesh: This trend refers to what types of methods, or endpoints, people will use to access information or interact with others. According to Gartner, this includes mobile devices, wearables, home electronic devices, etc. Gartner claims that, “While devices are increasingly connected to back-end systems through various networks, they have often operated in isolation from one another. As the device mesh evolves, we expect connection models to expand and greater cooperative interaction between devices to emerge.”
Wearable technology devices are increasingly available. Enterprise Apps Today recently reported enterprise software is available on smartwatches. Business professionals can access ERP services using a wearable device, and companies are exploring how convenient ERP utilization will change their practices.
Manufacturing plants install sensors and other connected devices to monitor processes and ensure product quality. Production lines are more intelligent than ever before, which means they need vast amounts of data to operate.

•Ambient User Experience: The dawn of virtual reality is upon us, and the ambient user experience trend means that “user experience preserves continuity across boundaries of device mesh, time and space.” This means that the user can experience a blend of environments including physical, virtual and electronic that incorporates an array of different devices.

• 3D Design and Printing Materials: 3D printing is increasingly common in a wide range of industries using a wide range of materials. You can purchase 3D-printed objects on websites like Amazon! Gartner predicts that the use of 3D printing will continue to expand over the next 20 years, with an increase in the types of materials that will be printed .
3D printing is also a way of creating 3D design models for better visualization of a new product. 3D graphic tools are also providing similar advantages whether via BIM construction models (such as our AEC solution), 3D planograms, walk through real estate visuals, etc ., or with tools like Holo lens with Surface hub to support collaborative 3D design visualisation.

The process of 3-D printing – also known as layered manufacturing – creates exact replicas of items based on data loaded into the equipment. Companies can scan objects and produce precise physical copies or create their own designs.
Layered manufacturing is not as fast as traditional assembly lines, and it costs a bit more. Industry experts, however, predict more industries will adopt 3-D printing technology as the science improves. In August 2015, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first 3-D-printed pharmaceutical product. The product’s designer said layered manufacturing helped create a better performing pill. Many medical fields use 3-D printing to create items for optimal functionality and to improve outcomes with individual patients

• Information of Everything: As new devices are developed and are able to communicate with each other, more and more information is used and transmitted. “This information goes beyond textual, audio and video information to include sensory and contextual information.” Gartner predicts that information will also be able to be more easily analyzed.

• Advanced Machine Learning: “In advanced machine learning, deep neural nets (DNNs) move beyond classic computing and information management to create systems that can autonomously learn to perceive the world, on their own.” These DNNs will automate the new and complex information that comes in from different data sources. They enable machines to seemingly learn and act on their own.

• Autonomous Agents and Things: Will robots become widely used? Autonomous machines like robots, self-driving cars and other smart machines will become more common. Consider virtual personal assistants (VPAs) like Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri. “The emerging notion of assistance feeds into the ambient user experience in which an autonomous agent becomes the main user interface. Instead of interacting with menus, forms and buttons on a smartphone, the user speaks to an app, which is really an intelligent agent.”

• Internet of Things Platforms: According to Gartner, “The technologies and standards in the IoT platform form a base set of capabilities for communicating, controlling, managing and securing endpoints in the IoT.” The platform will make sure that data is transferred effectively from endpoints.

One of the recent trends fueling cloud adoption is a hybrid implementation strategy. Companies don’t want to throw out old systems and start over with a cloud-deployed service. Some companies use hybrid cloud solutions to test a change in process. They move select datasets to the cloud to see if the service offers the flexibility and convenience they predicted. Hybrid cloud options allow companies to explore functionality without making huge investments. As cloud-deployed ERP solutions prove easier to adopt, more businesses should become interested.

Ax native power BI

The next release of Dynamics AX — a product which is dropping the year as part of its name — will be an Azure-hosted service that’s more tightly integrated with a number of Microsoft’s other cloud services. Dynamics AX is moving to a cloud-first model, meaning the Azure-hosted version will debut ahead of the on-premises complement. The next on-premises version of Dynamics AX won’t be out until the latter part of calendar 2016, and will make use of new capabilities in Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016, both of which are also due for release in 2016.

Dynamics AX includes an overhaul of the client, which will be a fully-browser-based HTML one available for Windows 10 Edge users, as well as users on other modern browsers on iOS. Users will be able to extend the client themselves and build business-specific mobile applications. The client app for Windows will be wrapped and made available as a Universal Windows Platform app, so it will work with Continuum on PCs, tablets and phones, he said.

The new Dynamics release also includes a new “guided” user experience that looks and works like Microsoft Office and is tightly integrated with Dynamics CRM, Office 365, Skype, Azure machine learning and Power BI.

The tighter integration with other Microsoft cloud and enterprise products and services makes sense given Microsoft’s decision earlier this year to move its Dynamics CRM and ERP engineering team to the Cloud & Enterprise division.

Another new feature in the release will be “Workspaces,” which allows users in different roles to get a different view of activities in Dynamics AX that are tailored to their roles, with all the data, processes and other information they need to complete tasks. “Task Guides” will provide on-screen guidance and support for using Dynamics AX using Cortana voice commands.

The public preview of the next Dynamics AX cloud release will be available in early December 2015. This December is also when Microsoft will talk about pricing.

Like its other software products that are evolving into regularly updated services, such as Windows 10 and System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft’s Dynamics AX product is going the same route

According to Jean-Philippe Courtois, President Microsoft International, building a digital business transformation is a team sport, and CEOs must reinvent their roles to drive the transformation. It is more than implementing a piece of technology, to become a digital business you have to adopt a digital-first mindset, reimagine your business and connect everything.

In this week’s release of Skype for Business, 10,000 people can be on a conference call at once, and documents can – for the first time ever – be live edited by multiple people while live video calling- a new feature called Skype Meeting Broadcast
Microsoft revealed that Power BI and Delve Analytics would both be coming to Office 365 immediately. This makes Office even more effective as an analytics tool, as it will now take advantage of Delve’s Graph-powered machine learning capabilities.
Microsoft’s enterprise version of Skype now has several new features, including the ability to dial into meetings from a traditional phone. The cloud-powered private branch exchange (PBX) feature enables enterprises to cut out the need for separate PBX systems required to manage calls between local and external phone lines, while PSTN calling allows Office 365 users to opt for Microsoft-managed calling plans and phone numbers.

The updates were unveiled alongside Microsoft’s introduction of its PowerApps service, a tool that allows the easy building of mobile apps with access to corporate data in enterprise

Microsoft announced the brand new CRM 2016, yes Dynamics CRM 2016 is now available!
It is deeply integrated into Office 365 and mean that office, using newly Azure-powered CRM 2016, can pull in relevant contact data on your next meeting, arrange your schedule and even suggest future sales opportunities.

Available both as CRM Online and on-premises in 130 markets and 44 languages, Dynamics CRM 2016 is focused on empowering employees to deliver the optimal experiences to customers, as well as engaging customers across all channels. We’re bringing all Microsoft has to offer in productivity and intelligence into a single experience.
Advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Cortana Analytics Suite f or intelligent, adaptive processes for sales, customer service and social:
•Intelligent selling with cross-sell recommendations so sales reps can predict which products and services a customer will need during the sales cycle.
•Intelligent customer service with knowledge articles recommendations to empower service agents with answers to questions so they can more effectively resolve customer cases and solve problems on the spot.
•Intelligent social with machine learning capabilities powering sentiment analysis, as well as the ability to process significant streams of data to detect social posts that are most likely to be customer service cases or new leads.
•Intelligent collaboration with Delve functionality to surface trending content that is most relevant to what a person is working on.

In addition, significant enhancements in productivity, mobility and customer service:
•Productivity – Capabilities in CRM 2016 are seamlessly embedded into productivity tools, including Office 365. In CRM 2016, we’ve enhanced the CRM app for Outlook, delivered templates for our immersive Excel experience, simplified the creation of personalized sales documents in Word and enabled seamless access to contextual CRM documents across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business.
•Mobility – CRM 2016 features full offline mobile capabilities for phones and tablets, the ability to create task-based mobile apps, Mobile Application Management with Microsoft Intune and next generation Cortana integration that surfaces CRM data for key sales activities, accounts and deals, and mobile marketing with SMS capabilities available with Dynamics Marketing in four countries.
•Unified Service – CRM 2016 delivers a single, unified solution for Customer Service across self-service, agent assisted service and field service. Building on the integration of Parature knowledge management in spring 2015, we now have a new role driven agent experience with the Interactive Service Hub, native Knowledge Management, surveys to capture voice of the customer and field service capabilities with our recent acquisition of FieldOne.

Microsoft also revealed that the Office 365 cloud-powered productivity suite has gained several new features. The first is a series of security and compliance features that give administrators more control over who has access to data in Office 365. The Advanced eDiscovery tool adds machine learning and text analytics to Office 365 to reduce the cost and risk of managing large quantities during e-discovery in litigation or government investigations. The second is what appears to be the tighter integration of Microsoft’s Power BI data visualisation tool, and a new feature called Delve Analytics that takes the Office Graph-powered machine learning capability of the Delve app and adds it to Office 365.