Archive for January, 2021

Hg Invests in Prophix – ask Dubai partner Synergy Software Systems

January 22nd, 2021

Hg Invests in Prophix to Continue to Scale the Business and Invest Further in Product and Technology

Mississauga, Canada; New York, USA and London, UK –

Prophix, a global leader in Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software, today announced an investment from Hg, a leading global software investor. Hg’s investment is expected to accelerate and scale Prophix’s growth and fund further development of its product capabilities.

Prophix employees and management will participate to acquire the company alongside Hg, who will hold the majority investment. This will allow staff to benefit more directly from the organization’s ongoing growth.

Founded in 1987 a, Prophix is CPM software serves mid-market companies across multiple industries worldwide, providing planning, budgeting and financial reporting software into the ‘office of the CFO’. Prophix’s software hlps organizations to improve their financial reporting capabilities, while also standardizing and streamlining the budgeting process to generate significant ROI through a faster time to close, reduction in budgeting errors and an ability to reforecast in a more agile way.

Prophix has over 1,600 customers, and one of the highest industry-leading retention rates and best-in-class customer NPS.

Alok Ajmera, Chief Executive Officer of Prophix, said: “Our journey so far has shown us that there is still so much to play for in our industry. We have significant ambitions for the business and Hg’s investment and operational experience in software will help us reach these goals. We will look to serve our customers better than ever before, as we invest further in our sales and marketing functions, further our R&D capabilities, accelerate our transition to the cloud and look to scale our business across several regions, including in Europe. Hg has successfully helped businesses to accomplish these goals many times over and we’re excited to tap into some of this experience to unlock our full potential.”

Paul Barber, Founder and Executive Chairman of Prophix, said: “This is a really momentous announcement for the team at Prophix and we warmly welcome Hg as a key strategic partner today. It has been an incredible journey to date, and I am so grateful to the enormous talent that has seen us get to this stage. Together with Hg we will move forward with an unstoppable team and a very bright future for the business.”

This partnership with Prophix reinforces Hg’s focus on mission critical B2B software sitting at the intersection of Hg’s experience in ERP and Tax & Accounting. .

Jonathan Boyes, Partner at Hg, said: “Prophix sits right at the heart of a universe that we have been investing in for almost two decades. This means that we recognise high-quality when we see it and Prophix falls firmly into this category. Prophix is a great business run by an impressive team. They have created a best-in-class cloud product that serves a very satisfied customer base, with a huge runway for further growth. We’re really excited about joining the team.”

Ben Meyer, Partner and co-lead of Hg’s New York team, said: “We see significant growth opportunity from the continued adoption of CPM software by mid-market organizations, as the need for real-time financial information and the ability to budget & reforecast in a more agile way becomes increasingly important. Prophix is positioned incredibly well to benefit from this trend, which is a testament to the successful efforts of Paul, Alok and the rest of the Prophix team. We look forward to partnering with Alok and his team to help the company continue to realise its future growth potential.”

The New Dynamics 365 Project Operations – ask Synergy Software Systems, Dubai

January 16th, 2021

Almost a year ago, Muhammad Alam, Corporate Vice President Dynamics 365, shared the vision for a better product for project and service based businesses and industries. In March, Gurkan Salk was named the new General Manager for Project Operations at Microsoft.

Users of Dynamics 365 Project Operations often ask for a better way to collaborate in Microsoft Teams, and a new app experience has now arrived. (December 2020)

There are many ways in which Teams can be used to boost collaboration and efficiency while reducing reliance on email.
Add the Dynamics 365 App to Teams and use Project Operations inside Teams.
There is no need to step out of Teams for anything related to Dynamics work.
This app in general is for all the Dynamics 365 apps built upon Dataverse and the Power Platform, be it the Sales app, Customer Service, Project Operations, or others.
The benefit of working with Project Operation within Teams is the improved collaboration as project execution is in process. Many of the workflows of a typical project require constant email correspondence. That work can now be done via Teams, keeping inboxes clean and ensuring the right people stay informed.

Extended Events – Security Issue – SQL Server 2019, 2017, 2016, 2014

January 13th, 2021

Microsoft has fixed vulnerabilities in Extended Events that “may cause code to run against the SQL Server process if a certain extended event is enabled.”

-KB 4583468 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4583468/kb4583468-microsoft-sql-server-elevation-of-privilege-vulnerability
and
– CVE 2021 1636, https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/CVE-2021-1636
Lots of patching to do :
• SQL Server 2019 CU8 GDR
• SQL Server 2017 CU22 GDR
• SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU15 GDR
• SQL Server 2014 SP3 CU4 GDR
And there are GDRs for other patch levels too, like if you’re on 2016 but not on SP2 yet.

D365 Supply Chain Management: Customer Portal is Available

January 13th, 2021

D365 Supply Chain Management: Customer Portal is now in Generally Available.

The Customer portal acts as a starting point for organizations to use Power Apps portals to build an externally facing website that uses data from their Supply Chain Management installation. It helps organizations connect dual-write, Supply Chain Management, and Power Apps portals.

What is the Customer portal?
Modern supply chain systems rely on integration. They require that inventory, customer demand, and sales departments be integrated instead of residing in separate silos. The Customer portal helps organizations that run Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhance this integration and more effectively keep their customers informed.
The Customer portal template has all the customization capabilities that the portals feature of Power Apps offers. The template can easily be modified to represent the company’s brand, add increased functionality, and change the user experience. All the functionality that the template offers out of the box can be modified as desired.By itself, the template isn’t expected to be completely functional. It just serves as an enabler for customers who want to create an externally facing website so that enterprise customers can engage with data from Supply Chain Management.

The Customer portal documentation is directed at admins, customizers, and system integrators who will set up the Customer portal for a Supply Chain Management installation. It uses the terms customer and user to describe people who are customers of the organization that is running Supply Chain Management, and who will use the final portal itself.

Who should use it?
The Customer portal is designed for companies that run Supply Chain Management and have these characteristics:
• They want to build an externally facing website that communicates order processing information (such as order status or account information) directly from their Supply Chain Management system to their enterprise customers.
• They are transitioning from Dynamics AX 2012 to Supply Chain Management and previously used the AX 2012 Customer self-service portal.
The following types of organizations are not good candidates for implementing the Customer portal:
• Companies that want to build a website for non-enterprise customers. These companies should consider creating a Dynamics 365 Commerce e-commerce website.
• Companies that are already using an existing Power Apps portals website for a similar purpose. These companies won’t receive any additional benefits from the Customer portal. The Customer portal is delivered as a template that acts as a guide and a starting point for customers who want to “connect the dots” between dual-write, Supply Chain Management, and Power Apps portals.

If you’ve already set up a website that serves this purpose, then you might not gain much value from using the Customer portal template to re-provision that website.

The Customer portal is provided as a Power Apps portals template. It depends on Power Apps portals and dual-write.

Power Apps portals is a feature that lets users create an externally facing website into which people from outside the organization can sign in . Little to no coding is required to make portals. The Customer portal is one of many Dynamics 365 portal templates that are available from Microsoft.

Dual-write is an out-of-box infrastructure product that provides near-real-time interaction between customer engagements apps and Finance and Operations apps. Dual-write provides bidirectional integration between Finance and Operations apps and Microsoft Dataverse. Therefore, it provides an integrated user experience across the apps. The Customer portal depends on tables that are synced with dual-write. Before data from Supply Chain Management can be surfaced in the Customer portal, dual-write must be enabled for all the appropriate tables.

(The Common Data Service was renamed to Microsoft Dataverse in November 2020)

What is the true cost of software development?

January 9th, 2021

There ahs been much talk of both devops and citizen developers.
While these new paradigms are welcome and bring many benefits that does not mean that they replace other proven systems of software development.

There are reason why some consultancies quote significantly lower times to develop than other- usually tis lack of knowledge/awareness of what needs to be considered or they deliberately cut corners in areas like security, validation, documentation, testing, and so on.

If that sounds harsh then take a look a this recent post:
A report published last week by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) estimates poor software quality collectively cost companies in the U.S. an estimated $2.08 trillion in 2020.

Wi-Fi-6E is coming in 2021

January 9th, 2021

Many of this year’s new phones, laptops, TVs, routers, and more will come with support for Wi-Fi 6E,

Wi-Fi 6 and previous generations of Wi-Fi use the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radio bands. A “Wi-Fi 6E” device is one that is capable of also operating on the 6 GHz band,

This new upgrade to Wi-Fi is like expanding your wireless connection from a two-lane road to an eight-lane highway. It’s the biggest upgrade to Wi-Fi in 20 years, and connections should be faster and a lot more reliable because of it.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, is starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E. Phones, PCs, and laptops with support should reach the market in the first months of 2021, according to the IDC research group, and TVs and VR devices with support are expected to arrive by the middle of the year. Intel announced that it will have WI-Fi 6E chips available in January 2021, The new Snapdragon 888 processor chip includes support for Wi-Fi 6E so it should be present in many of this year’s top Android phones. It’ll be some time before most new devices are shipping with Wi-Fi 6E, even by the start of 2022, IDC only expects 20 percent of shipping Wi-Fi 6 products to also support Wi-Fi 6E.

Wi-Fi 6E devices will be backward compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and previous Wi-Fi standards. But, to take advantage of those new 6 GHz channels in Wi-Fi 6E, you’ll need to be using devices that support it. In other words, you’ll be using Wi-Fi 6E once you pair a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled client device (like a laptop or smartphone) and a WI-Fi 6E-enabled access point. With Wi-Fi 6 devices and a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled router, none of your devices will communicate over Wi-FI 6E. They’ll all be using Wi-Fi 6 on the typical 5 GHz or 2.4 GHz channels.

Wi-Fi 6E relies on a huge expansion of the wireless airwaves available to consumer devices .Existing Wi-Fi devices operate on two spectrum bands, 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Wi-Fi 6E adds a third — 6GHz — and there’s a lot more of it, thus quadrupling the total amount of airwaves used for typical Wi-Fi. We can have larger, higher-speed connections, and the airwaves are less likely to be congested. In an apartment building, for instance, your neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks might interfere with your own. With Wi-Fi 6E, there’s a lot more bandwidth to go around, so there’s less of fighting over the exact same airwaves.

Though the US has approved use of 6GHz airwaves, communications regulators in other countries also need to approve the spectrum for Wi-Fi use, The UK, EU, South Korea, Chile, and United Arab Emirates have all given a green light on allowing 6GHz usage for Wi-Fi, while regulators in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Japan are among others where progress is being made.