Tag: KTL

How to Renew an SSL Certificate for CRM on ADFS 3.0

If you are using an Internet Facing Deployment for your CRM there is always that time every 1, 3, or X years where you receive the message to renew your SSL Certificate. With ADFS 3.0 no longer dependent on IIS like its previous version were it changes the process a little bit. It is not very difficult to do but it took me a little research to piece together all the steps in the right order. I wanted to share this information so that the process goes as smooth as possible and you aren’t stuck with your environment being down as you scramble to figure out how to get the CRM and ADFS applications working together again.

You will first want to remove the old certificate from the ADFS and CRM servers. If the certificate is not removed then this will cause problems later down the line.

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July 28, 2015

What a genius idea! For Dummies book series tackles sales tax

Life lessons. They’re never ending. There’s the stuff that you’d like to learn like paddle boarding, pasta rolling, conversational Spanish, and there’s the stuff that you have to learn, like web design, drywall hanging, and programming the DVR. We’re guessing sales tax falls into the latter category. Because, let’s face it, unless you’re a member of Mensa (or a masochist), sales tax is hard. And boring.

But now it doesn’t have to be. Avalara wrote the book on making sales tax easy. No seriously, we did. Okay, we had a little help on the “easy” part from the folks at For Dummies. Yes! That’s right; those massively popular bright yellow and black books that that offer useful instruction on, well, everything.

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July 24, 2015

Why Are ERP Systems Sticky?

Congratulations! You are the executive chosen to spearhead the effort to select and implement a new ERP system to replace the one that your organization originally installed a number of years ago. As you plan for this project, you may find it helpful to know what others in your position have experienced so you know what to anticipate and can craft a better plan to unstick the existing ERP system. 

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July 9, 2015

Power BI- Empower the User Conference Recap

This year at KTL’s empower the User Conference one of the hottest topics was Microsoft’s Power BI. No surprise here after it was one of the most popular categories at Microsoft Dynamic’s Convergence back in March. 

For those who haven’t heard of Power BI before here is a short synopsis. Power BI is an excel add-in tool made up of 4 components: Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Map. Power Pivot and Query are used for data preparation while power view and map are used for data visualization. These tools can take large amounts of data from virtually any system and harness it for real-time, powerful analytics. One of the huge differentiators of Power BI from other analytics tools is that you can combine resources from multiple data centers. Typically, when people want to see the profitability of an organization they look at the financial data. However, this is not always the only factor, especially in today’s world that is driven by technology and social media. 

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July 2, 2015

Uploading Vendors into Acumatica ERP

One of the most difficult decisions that has to be made during a new system implementation is how much and what kind of data to migrate from your old system to the new. How many years do we bring over? Do we bring over detailed or summarized data? Is it reconciled? Will we have access to old system for historical reporting purposes? These are all questions that are posed and answers that are debated during the process of making the decision.

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June 26, 2015

Strategies to keep your CRM data clean

With most CRM systems or for that matter any enterprise systems we often hear this saying “Garbage in Garbage out” about the data that resides in these systems. The reality is that most systems do have garbage data and each organization uses different methods to maintain/scrub/cleanse their data. Some organizations use a data warehouse where data is synced from different sources and normalized, the data warehouse is used as the master data source for all reporting and transactional data still remains in the same state. In another situation an ERP would be the source for the master data and all other systems like CRM would sync and integrate with the ERP data. But each system has its users and they too would like to maintain good data. In a modern system like Dynamics CRM, it provides a lot of methods to maintain your data. The following methods can be deployed to keep you data clean:- 

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June 23, 2015

The future of Power BI looks bright!

In April, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Datazen mobile BI platform and were adding it to their enterprise BI product suite.  This is exciting news that rounds out the Microsoft BI stack and, better yet, it’s free for SQL Server Enterprise customers who have Software Assurance agreements.

What is Datazen and what are its capabilities?

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June 19, 2015

The Amazonian Sales Tax Facing 3rd Party Sellers

Marketplace selling can be a smart strategy for merchants who want to expand their business. But what if you don’t have the time, money or resources to fulfill more orders in-house? You could consider becoming part of an order management and fulfillment network such as Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). 

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June 17, 2015

‘Ask the Expert’ Session: Desktop vs. Remote Desktop

Blogs are a way for KTL Solutions to provide information and highlight particular items and solutions to our customers and users.  In this month’s blog, I wanted to highlight KTL Solutions’ 10th Annual User Conference and, in particular, I wanted to provide a recap of the “Ask the Expert” session hosted by Dave Vora and myself.  

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June 15, 2015