Month: December 2014

2015 KTL Office Holiday Party

On Friday, December 12th, KTL Solutions continued on with their yearly office holiday party tradition. Renting out a cozy room in an Italian Restaurant not far from their office, the vast majority of KTL employees began filling the space with their significant others trailing behind. It wasn’t long before the open bar was packed to the nines with good cheers and chatter from all that were welcome.

Pleased with the outcome of the attendees (employees, family, friends, and many local clients), Kim and Tim ushered everyone along to tend to their seated 3 course dinners. The room was filled with holiday cheer as the candlelight set a warm and family atmosphere, the food left a delicious aroma lingering in the air, and the laughter reminded us that KTL is a family unit powered by it’s devoted employees.

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A 40 hour week in 60 minutes – The Status Report

In college during a project management class the instructor was looking for 2 volunteers to act as scribes and present an executive level status report of the course being taught that day. When we met the following week each of us had a 5-page document that covered every aspect of the previous class in great detail. The detail part is a superb quality for a project manager but the instructor actually went around the class, collecting everyone’s copy of the report and promptly dropped it into the recycle bin.

The moral of the story was clear to us: Most people do not have enough time to read what is already on their desk so why clutter their “To Do” list with a 5 page thesis.

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Dynamics CRM: A Team Effort

I’d like to break down the difference between two types of teams found in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. Most people who are familiar with teams in Dynamics CRM know about what are called, “Owner Teams.” These are the traditional teams that have been around since CRM 4. In Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft has introduced a new type of team called an, “Access Team.” The purpose of creating Access Teams appears to be for the benefit of working around and with some of Dynamics CRM’s security features.

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3 quick tips to reduce audit risk

Growing your business? Congratulations! Business growth is major backbone of the US economy and you should be proud of your success. Unfortunately, business growth usually comes with some pretty complex tax obligations and audit risk. Before you take expansion too far, understand how it affects your tax obligations and what you can do to keep risk in check. Here are 3 quick ways you can limit audit exposure as you expand: 

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Kick-Start Your Data Warehousing

Many of the projects that I’ve been working on over the last 12 months have evolved integrating data into a data warehouse. Specifically companies are looking to import more data from other systems to do various types of analysis.  Data integration is nothing new, companies have been doing it for a long time, but usually with a very manual process that includes vast Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

What Is a Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a database designed to enable reporting and data analysis activities.  Data warehouses store current and historical data from one or more disparate sources.  Some of these sources may include:

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KTL becomes a Platinum Partner

Frederick, MD – KTL Solutions, a leading Microsoft Dynamics and Acumatica partner, is pleased to announce their Platinum partnership with Solver USA. Solver is a leading provider of complete BI solutions for today’s mid-market enterprise and the company is at the forefront of Business Intelligence (BI) technology for cloud and on-premise ERPs.

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PaperSave Version 6.0 – Document Management at the next level

I have been involved in a new PaperSave implementation utilizing the newest version of PaperSave – PaperSave Version 6 and I wanted to provide a summary of my findings.  In PaperSave version 6, they have added several new features and have further taken advantage of the browser based technologies.  Overall, I was impressed with the product and I think it would be a good addition to any ERP system. 

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What’s New in CRM 2015

Dynamics CRM 2015 is around the corner and there is a lot of excitement building up towards its launch. CRM 2013 completely changed things by introducing a whole new user interface and CRM 2015 is building on top of it by adding and improving existing features. CRM 2015 has introduced a lot of platform enhancements that make it a solid and great CRM experience. I have listed a few exciting features here but it’s a big list and we will explore through them as we approach the CRM 2015 launch.

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Making the Case for Microsoft SharePoint

So you have probably heard it all when it comes to SharePoint, huh?

Throughout my Client ventures, I still hear the questions, “Well, what can SharePoint do for me?” “Our business is too small, does it make sense for us to deploy?”  “What hardware or resources will I need?” “What’s my ROI?” and finally, “Can we use that in the cloud?”

In past years, SharePoint was a larger on-Premise more complicated platform that needed Administration, Developers, Maintenance, Site managers, and sometimes full team collaboration to make a successful best practices deployment and positive user experiences. This is still needed in some environments, but clearly some things have changed.

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