Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain (FSCM) is Microsoft’s flagship and most capable ERP solution. With advanced functionality, superior architecture and single source application, D365 FO is the natural choice for larger enterprises who often demand multi-site, multi-country, multi-lingual capabilities.
We have had a rich history of success with large international organisations implementing its predecessor Microsoft Dynamics AX, and D365 FSCM takes the power of AX to a different level!
It provides accessibility – anywhere, anytime via a browser-based user experience that enables users to access the system from any location and on any device.
Functionality includes: Finance (GL, AR, AP, Cash and Bank, FA, Budgets, Costing,) Sales, Purchasing, Planning, Advanced Warehouse Management, Discrete, Process and Lean Manufacturing, Master planning ATP and CATP, Retail, Project Management and Accounting, Asset Management, and Public Sector. modules. This is supported by numerous reports and dashboards and an in built Financial Reporter tool, and in built tools for case management, and workflow management.
As a Microsoft solution there is already integration with Azure technologies such as Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 office productivity tools, Power apps and Power Bi, SharePoint and much more, all wrapped around with Microsoft security and platform management .
In addition, there are also numerous Apps available which extend the standard functionality and provide additional ISV and vertical solutions for example Synergy offers its own:
GCC localised HR and Payroll further enhanced with BI Dashboards, and automated PRO and employee self service processes.
A comprehensive Real Estate solution.
If you are looking for an enterprise multi county ERP system, or seeking to move upwards and onwards from Dynamics Ax, Dynamics GP or NAV, or other ERP systems the you will appreciate all that FSCM has to offer. However, you might just be a little nervous of how go forward with a multi company system, how long will take, how much will it cost and million other questions.
Synergy Software Systems is the oldest partner in the region and was the first Gold Partner for Dynamics Ax. We have a large mature team of consultants, professionally certified by Microsoft, who have helped guide other enterprises faced with the same challenges. Consultants are based here in Dubai, and we have a manned helpdesk through our working hours – one reason we received the Highest Customer Satisfaction Award from Microsoft.
Put your worries behind you and seize the future and call us on 0097143365589 for impartial, informed advice.
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This covers the new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2022 to March 2023.
Updates in 2022 release wave 2 include:
Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.
Administration: Business Central delivers a set of features for better and improved communication about the health of each environment.
Application: Improve integration with Shopify. The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements so that users can run their business processes more efficiently.
Better with Microsoft 365: Improved the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. Users can pin cards inside Teams, and delegated admins can now use the Excel add-in.
Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.
Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive usage faster because it’s easier to discover and install apps.
Development tools: Now entirely Visual Studio Code
Power Platform: More efficient automation with Power Automate so that users can set up workflows for the specific needs of their organization.
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.
Power BI innovation never stops. For several years in a row now, it is positioned as a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, furthest to the right for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the Leaders’ quadrant.
The gaps are widening with interactive reports, paginated reports, datasets, dataflows, deployment pipelines, scorecards, dashboards, metrics, data alerts, and much more, and recently announced in public preview, self-service datamarts. No wonder, customers are adopting Power BI at an accelerated pace. Boost Office 365 productivity with Power BI integrated into PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, connect to data anywhere with hundreds of built-in connectors, leverage industry-leading AI, go quickly from insight to action with the Microsoft Power Platform, and provide best-in-class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile.
Reports can be mobile friendly, they can be paginated, and you can link into Azure Analysis Services.
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Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it will no longer be supporting SQL Server 2012
The product, on July 12, 2022, reached the end of its 10-year support model. It means that SQL Server 2012 will no longer get future security patches from Microsoft. The server continues to run under such circumstances, but organizations may be potentially exposed to future security troubles and they could get encumbered by the compliance implications of running unsupported software.
Organizations who need to stick with SQL Server products, have four options:
Organizations can upgrade to SQL Server 2019.
Organizations can continue to use SQL Server 2012 and get “Critical” security patches only via Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for up to three years.
Organizations can move their SQL Server 2012 workloads into Microsoft Azure virtual machines, where Microsoft provides the ESU patches at no cost.
Lastly, Microsoft advocates using Azure SQL Managed Instance, which is an Azure platform-as-a-service offering that promises high compatibility with on-premises SQL Server.
The Azure SQL Managed Instance option is similar to the Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance service, but the latter lets organizations continue to use their own infrastructure. The nuances between those two options are described in this Sept. 30, 2020 Microsoft Tech Community post.
While the ESU program offers a grace period of sorts for SQL Server 2012 users, its use with on-premises servers comes with licensing requirements. Organizations will need to have Software Assurance coverage, which is an annuity cost. However, they can only buy ESUs when they have an “Enterprise Agreement (EA), Enterprise Subscription Agreement (EAS), a Server & Cloud Enrollment (SCE) and Enrollment for Education Solutions (EES)” licensing, according to Microsoft’s end-of-support FAQ document.
The ESU program lets organization buy Critical security patches in one-year increments, for up to three years maximum. Microsoft hikes the ESU price each year by 25 percent of the base price of SQL Server 2012 license, according to the following formula:
Year 1: Approximately 75% of full license price
Year 2: Approximately 100% of full license price
Year 3: Approximately 125% of full license price
Those incremental fees no doubt are designed to prod organizations into moving their SQL Server 2012 workloads into Azure virtual machines, where Microsoft provides ESU patching for free.
For organizations making the move to cloud services, Microsoft’s Azure Migration and Modernization Program offers either Microsoft ,or partner support for moves to Azure services. This program is billed as being available to organizations of all sizes, and bearing “no additional cost” for Azure customers, per its landing page.
Microsoft has recently beefed up the funding for the Azure Migration and Modernization Program.
“We’re now investing significantly more to support your largest Windows Server and SQL Server migration and modernization projects, up to 2.5 times more than previous investments, based on project eligibility,” the announcement indicated. “This investment will help with your migration in two ways: partner assistance with planning and moving your workloads, and Azure credits that offset transition costs during your move to Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.”
The announcement also warned that Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will be reaching their end-of-support phases “next year on October 10, 2023.”
Microsoft plans to offer its ESU patch program and its Modernization migration support program for those servers as well.
Next year, in April, many of Microsoft’s 2013-branded application servers will also fal out of support
Note: Before you upgrade SQL, check the compatibility of the software that runs on it with the new version of SQL – you may be faced with the need to also update those systems to later versions for example older versions of Dynamics Ax,
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A bungled data migration of a network drive caused the deletion of 22 terabytes of information from Dallas Police Department police force’s systems – included case files in a murder trial,during a data migration exercise carried out at the end of the 2020-21 financial year
“On August 6, 2021, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) and City of Dallas Information and Technology Services Department (ITS) informed the administration of this Office that in April 2021, the City discovered that multiple terabytes of DPD data had been deleted during a data migration of a DPD network drive,” said a statement [PDF] from the Dallas County prosecutor’s office.
14TB were recovered, presumably from backups, but “approximately 8 Terabytes remain missing and are believed to be unrecoverable.”
The Home Office initially issued a statement saying the data loss was down to a “technical issue”, which had been resolved, There must have been some technical resolution because the Home Office later said it was not a technical issue after all, and in fact a “housekeeping error” with Home Secretary Priti Patel saying: “Home Office engineers continue to work to restore data lost as a result of human error during a routine housekeeping process earlier this week.”
In a letter published by The Guardian, National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) deputy chief constable Naveed Malik, lead for the organisation on the Police National Computer (PNC), said approximately 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records had potentially been deleted in error. The DNA database connected to the PNC saw 26,000 records corresponding to 21,710 subjects potentially deleted in error, “including records previously marked for indefinite retention following conviction of serious offences”. The letter also said 30,000 fingerprint records and 600 subject records may have been deleted in error.
The PNC dates back to the 1970s. The current iteration is a Fujitsu BS2000/OSD SE700-30 mainframe based in a Hendon data centre, running Software AG’s natural programming language-using ADABAS database. The UK’s territorial and regional police forces, Serious Fraud Office, Security and Secret Intelligence Services (MI5, MI6), HM Revenue & Customs, and the National Crime Agency all make use of it. They have controlled and 24-hour access from remote terminals and through local police force systems.
These incidents highlight the importance of backups and backup and recovery processes. How often do you test whether you can restore your back ups? Does this still work for restoring older back ups when you upgrade? Has a move to the cloud changed the retention of your back ups, the frequency of upgrades, or the ease or time for restore?
Are you responsible for a busy SQL server, for example, the Finance Department’s systems, documentation management, CRM, BI, or a Web Server; perhaps a busy file and print server, or something else entirely.
Were you responsible for installing the application running the workload for your company? Is the workload business critical, i.e. TOO BIG TO FAIL?
Do users, or even worse, customers, complain about performance?
If you are responsible to keep the workloads running in your organization that would benefit from additional performance, please read on – even if you don’t consider yourself a “Techie”.
Windows and VMs are both factors of high latency that impacts performance.
Variables Affecting the Performance of the Applications
There are many variables that affect the performance of those applications. The slowest, i.e. the most restrictive of these is the “Bottleneck”. Think of water being poured from a bottle. The water can only flow as fast as the neck of the bottle, the ‘slowest’ part of the bottle.
In a computer hardware the bottleneck will almost always fit into one of the following categories:
CPU
DISK
MEMORY
NETWORK
With Windows, it is usually very easy to find out which one the bottleneck is in, and here is how to do it (like an IT Engineer):
To open Resource Monitor – click the Start menu, and type “resource monitor”, and press Enter. Microsoft includes this as part of the Windows operating system and it is already installed.
Notice the graphs in the right-hand pane. When your computer is running at peak load, or users are complaining about performance, which of the graphs are ‘maxing out’? This is a great indicator of where your workload’s bottleneck is to be found.
What You Can Do to Improve Application Performance
Once you have identified your bottleneck – the slowest part of your ‘compute environment’ then, what can you do to improve it?
The traditional approach to solving computer performance issues is to throw bigger and more powerful hardware at the solution like an extra disk or a new laptop, or putting more RAM into your workstation, or on the more extreme end, buying new servers or expensive storage solutions.
How do you decide when it is appropriate to spend money on new or additional hardware, and when it isn’t. Well the obvious answer is; ‘when you can get the performance that you need’, with the existing hardware infrastructure that you have already bought.
You don’t replace your car, just because it needs a service or tuning?
Let’s take disk speed as an example. Look at the response time column in Resource Monitor. Open the monitor to full screen or large enough to see the data. On the Overview tab, open the Disk Activity section so that you can see the Response Time column.
Do it now on the computer you’re using to read this. (You didn’t close Resource Monitor yet, did you?) This shows the Disk Response Time, or , how long is the storage taking to read and write data? Of course, a slower disk speed = a slower performance, but what is considered a good disk speed or a bad speed?
“Response Time (ms). Disk response time in milliseconds. For this metric, a lower number is definitely better; in general, anything less than 10 ms is considered good performance. If you occasionally go beyond 10 ms, you should be okay, but if the system is consistently waiting more than 20 ms for response from the storage, then you may have a problem that needs attention, and it’s likely that users will notice performance degradation. At 50 ms and greater, the problem is serious.”
I hope when you check on your computer, the Disk Response Time is below 20 milliseconds. What about those other workloads that you were thinking about earlier. What’s the Disk Response Times on that busy SQL server, the CRM or BI platform, or those Windows servers that the users complain about?
Your Two Options
When the Disk Response Times are often higher than 20 milliseconds, and you need to improve the application performance, then it’s choice time and there are two main options:
Storage workload reduction software like DymaxIO™ fast data (Diskeeper®, SSDkeeper®, and V-locity® are now new DymaxIO fast data software). This tool will reduce Disk Storage Times by allowing much e of the data that your applications need to read, to come from a RAM cache, rather than be read slower disk storage. RAM is much faster than the media in your disk storage.
Contact us to trial this. You don’t even need to reboot.
If you have tried the DymaxIO software, and you still need faster disk access, then, it’s time to start getting quotations for new hardware. It does make sense though, to take a couple of minutes to install DymaxIO first, to see if that can be avoided. The software solution to remove storage inefficiencies is typically a much more cost-effective solution than having to buy hardware! A software solution to a software problem.
Improve Your Application Performance by Decreasing Disk Latency like an IT Engineer – call us to learn more 0097143365589
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We’re excited to announce the ‘February 2021’ release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform. In this release, there are a number of new Snap Packs: for Marketo and Hubspot. for Marketing Automation, for Microsoft Teams and Power BI for team communication and analytics rly, and OpenAPI to connect to any OpenAPI compliant endpoints.
There is also support for Azure Synapse analytics to our ELT capability. Platform enhancements include :
higher productivity through expanded Universal search,
platform notifications to Slack,
better reliability through Snaplex level scheduling, and more.
Hassle-free connectivity with NEW Snap Packs
New Snap Packs provide out-of-the-box connectivity to key enterprise endpoints. For example the new Marketo and Hubspot Snap Packs allow you to connect seamlessly to these marketing automation systems. Easily manage marketing assets/campaigns or leads that enter your marketing funnel. While HubSpot Snap Pack supports CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, the Marketo Snap Pack allows you to do bulk operations on leads.
With these Snap Packs, quickly sync your assets and leads data across Marketing, Sales, and other functional areas and easily connect to event/survey applications such as Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, or to Demand Generation tools such as Google Ads, Linkedin, and Analytics endpoints such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
The Microsoft Power BI Snap Pack is also new and allows you to connect your Power BI instance to hundreds of data sources to bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Visualize your data and share insights across teams or embed these in your app or website. The Snap Pack helps you to post, push datasets, read, and edit so that you can easily query data, create/bind entities, import files, and update entities.
For an organization that has a heavy investment in the Microsoft ecosystem, the next Snap Pack the new Microsoft Teams Snap Pack allows you to easily integrate your Microsoft Teams into your enterprise workflows for customers, employees, and teams. This Snap Pack supports accounts such as OAuth2 User, Application, and Dynamic accounts to adhere to your enterprise security standards. Use it to send messages, perform channel operations, and perform team operations. .
Another key new Snap Pack with this release is the OpenAPI Snap Pack. Most API endpoints today adhere to the OpenAPI specification version 2 or 3. Leverage this Snap Pack to connect to any API endpoint with the published OpenAPI specification so that users can get all the needed documentation while they build their automated workflows. More efficiently connect to any generic endpoint without the need for specific Snaps.
Improved connectivity with other Snap Pack enhancements
Google Sheets Snap Pack now supports JSON based version 4 of the API rather than XML based version 3
Kafka Snap Pack updates now support reading/writing record headers and timestamps, provide option to choose one output document per batch. The later feature allows systems that don’t natively support streaming data to effectively work with Kafka messages by batching them together.
Amazon Redshift and Amazon SQS Snap Packs provide cross-account IAM support that allows organizations to trust and allocate roles with specific access privileges to specific groups or users.
Pushdown to any cloud data warehouse including Azure Synapse
Over previous releases, Snaplogic has introduced ELT support for Snowflake, Redshift cloud data warehouses so that you can do both ETL and ELT on a single platform. The ELT support is extended to Azure Synapse with this release. With ELT for Azure Synapse, you can accelerate data loading into Azure Synapse to provide ultimate flexibility to transform data by use of all computing resources across SnapLogic and Azure Synpase, thus reducing TCO and enabling a faster time-to-value.
With the SnapLogic platform yextract data from SaaS applications and databases with a vast number of Snaps. Once the data is in the staging area in Azure Cloud Storage, visually define data transformations, no need to write SQL. These visual transformations are converted into SQL statements and pushed to Azure Synapse for execution.
New features added to SnapLogic ELT make it easy to discover schema and SQL functions in the target cloud data warehouse. The platform provides suggestions for column names during LOAD, INSERT SELECT or MERGE INTO operations. The platform also provides SQL function suggestions when working with your target cloud data warehouse. To deal with large number of SQL functions various cloud data warehouses support, are grouped into different categories to simplify discovery.
Better Ease of Use and improved resiliency with the Platform Updates
The SnapLogic Intelligent Integration platform continues to evolve to make it easy for integration developers, whether they are technical or non-technical, to build and monitor integrations.
Universal Search, as the name suggests helps you search everything related to SnapLogic, all from a single search box. With the February release, it now performs pipeline searches in addition to the searches in Community, Configured Snaps and Documentation. This is not just a simple text based search. The Iris AI integration assistant provides more relevant search results across generic content (in community and documentation) and specific content from your org (such as pipelines or configured Snaps that you have access to). T
Figure 1: Universal search now supports pipeline searches
To efficiently monitor your integrations use the platform notifications to Slack. Users then get notified via Slack for any notifications from SnapLogic platform such as Daily API Usage, Snaplex Congestion, CPU usage, user activity, in addition to email notifications. Send notifications either on Slack Channels or directly to users.
Figure 2: Configuring Notifications to Slack
Enable Snaplex levels scheduling for all the scheduled tasks. This update reduces the time difference between the scheduled time of task execution and the actual time of task execution. With this update, your scheduled tasks won’t be affected by network disruption of the control plane helping your reliably deliver data that advances business processes and delivers insights.
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The performance degradation of applications running on Windows, and VMs is getting inherently worse. This includes latency issues, queries or reports timing out, crashes, missed SLAs, back office batch jobs bleeding over into production hours, and the litany of “shadow IT” problems that wreak havoc.
Even after migrating to a brand-new flash array, performance problems return because the root source of the problem still exists. The fact is, 30-40% of performance is being robbed by small, fractured, random I/O being generated due to operating system I/O inefficiencies. This is a software problem that is solved by our software.
DymaxIO™ fast data software will quickly:
Increase performance automatically – no tuning required. Simply install and watch performance problems disappear.
Optimizes writes so maximum payload is carried with every I/O operation.
Speed up I/O intensive applications like MS-SQL/Oracle, CRM, ERP, File Servers, Imaging, Web Servers, Backups, VDI.
Install our software on your most troublesome servers and see 30-50% or more of the noisy, garbage I/O offloaded and performance dramatically improved.
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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.
Endpoint security has never been more important, more complex—or more challenging— than it is today. Given the multitude of solutions and of vendors , it is very difficult to sort through all of the competing claims to find what’s truly effective.
1. Will this solution run on all the devices in my environment?
2. How long will deployment take?
3. What will the members of my team need to know or learn in order to work with this platform
4. What types of preventative controls are in place?
5.From where does the vendor get its threat intelligence?
6. How does this solution integrate with incident response workflows? 7 Is 24×7 professional support available from the vendor?
7. Can this solution be integrated with other security services, products, or platforms from the same vendor to reduce costs and complexity?
Why Comodo?- Zero Percent Infection and Breaches for Customers
Comodo offers the only cybersecurity that stops undetectable threats.
Cloud-native cybersecurity with auto-containment stops ro-day threats that AI, ML, & other technologies miss.
Historical s scores and statistics from millions of endpoints on thousands of different networks of enterprise customers. It shows zero percent infection and breaches.
With Comodo you can “Protect without Detection.” The cloud-native framework delivers you zero day protection against undetectable threats while defending your endpoints from known threat signatures. Automatic signature updates simplifies deployment across your entire environment to lower operational costs
Contact us about Advanced Endpoint Protection 0097143365589
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