In our line of business, people skills are essential. It’s a cruel fact that sometimes, you may have the best product or service for the customer, but if they don’t like you, it’s a hard road to travel to get them to let you help them.
So this week’s book club post is focused on the first ever bestselling self-help book in history. How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936, it has sold 15 million copies. It just shows that people skills never go out of date. Read More
I don’t know about you all, but I have a common affliction called TCOK (The Curse Of Knowledge – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge). I expect everyone to know as much about something as I know, so I am always trying to make myself remember that a lot of the things that I show in demonstrations may be completely new to my audience, and I need to ratchet the explanations back a little so that customers and prospects can follow me. Read More
Automating e-mail communication is a great way to streamline your business processed. One example of doing this would be to have sales order confirmations sent out when they are approved within the ERP system.
You can do this through workflows if you want, but in this example we will show how you can add a small function to Dynamics AX that will automatically send the confirmations through your local SMTP server, without the user having to even touch their e-mail system. Read More
Although this may not be true, I’m sure that Edward Tufte does think about it, because he is the Strunk & White for information design and visual literacy.
When you boil ERP down to the bare bones, it is just a way to gather information, and all our customers really want from an ERP system is to present the information back to them so that they can understand how they are doing. If you can do that in an elegant, and informative way then the ERP system is a success. Read More
On March 16, 2007, something terrible happened. Kathy Sierra stopped publishing her blog because of abusive tweets and threats. Thankfully she didn’t take down her TypePad account, and we can still all read the posts that she made, because they are great, and are the suggested reading for this week’s book club. Read More
Not all great reading comes with an ISBN number. There are a lot of great bloggers out there that you can subscribe to and get ideas from. So I thought that I would share a handful of the better AX blogging sites that I scour every morning to see what ideas I can steal for demonstrations. They all have RSS feeds so it’s easy to send them through to your favorite feed reader, or to send them to Google Reader like I do. Read More
The Vendor Portal is a great tool that allows you to streamline purchasing processes, and also get the vendor to update information pertaining to them. Not only does this reduce the workload on the purchasing group, but it also improves data accuracy since there is no chance for miskeying information as its being transcribed. Read More
This week’s book club book was suggested to me a couple of years ago, and even though I thought it sounded like a dumb book, about penguins that were about to all fall victim to a Poseidon Adventure style fate when their iceberg home melts under their little feet, I sucked it up and read the 160 page book over two flights and don’t regret it for a second. Read More
Welcome to the first issue of the my book club. I thought that I would start off this project by introducing a book that was suggested to me by a good friend of mine when it was first published, and I just re-purchased it to re-read after I couldn’t find my original. Although Accidental Empires was written in 1996, and has to be read old-school style since it’s not available on the Kindle, this is a great history of how all of the major tech companies that are still around got their start. Read More
Help is a great tool, but the standard Dynamics help does not include any of the company specific knowledge, because you are the only one that knows that.
In this worked example we will show how you can extend out the help system quickly and easily to include your companies own instructions and content so that the users have one place to search when they get stuck. Read More
A Tinkerers Notebook 