Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Close the deal today. Subscribe now.

Today's sales professionals are stretched thin. They're on double the teams as only a few years ago, sales cycles are longer and more complex, and they're more mobile than ever before. Subscribe now to stay informed on how Microsoft Dynamics 365 is enabling modern sales pros to close more deals and increase productivity with tools and capabilities that help streamline sales processes, improve collaboration, and intelligently guide them toward optimal outcomes.

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Put your finger--and business--on the pulse of the modern workplace. Subscribe today and never miss a beat.

With today's increasingly global business environment comes the need for increasingly global collaboration tools. Microsoft 365, with Teams at the heart of communications, provides the tools and capabilities today's organizations and businesses need to not only collaborate with colleagues and peers across the world, but equally important, to also take that first critical step toward transforming their traditional workspaces into modern digital workplaces. Subscribe now to stay informed on how Teams at the center of Microsoft 365 can help elevate and transform communication, collaboration, and teamwork throughout your entire organization.

View: Put your finger--and business--on the pulse of the modern workplace. Subscribe today and never miss a beat.

Empower your business with Power BI! Subscribe now and never miss a post.

Business data is multiplying exponentially. To put this data to work for your business and gain a competitive advantage, you need an end-to-end analytics solution that's not only fast, secure, and easy to use, but more important, also places this data at the fingertips of everyone in your organization, enabling anyone to transform business data into actionable insights. Microsoft Power BI and Azure offer an unbeatable combination for analytics that enables your business to maximize the potential of its data by performing real-time analytics, visualizing the results, and leveraging insights to improve business processes, increase productivity, and ultimately gain a more competitive footing. Subscribe now to learn how Power BI and Azure, and other Microsoft solutions, can help your business excel.

View: Empower your business with Power BI! Subscribe now and never miss a post.

Japanese waitress and self-taught Power BI and Azure developer digitally transforms her restaurant--and the industry

For Akiyoshi Shinobu, a waitress at Ebiya restaurant in Ise, Japan, creating superb dining experience for customers and a great place to work for colleagues has always been a passion. To accomplish both, she enrolled in a nearby computer school, and on her own time, taught herself Microsoft Power BI and Azure, and also became proficient in machine learning and A.I. Her immediate goal was to visualize the data generated by customer visits in order to improve the dining experience, deliver better service, and reduce food waste by the restaurant. Today, the applications that she developed for Ebiya have been so effective, and become so well respected, that other restaurants and larger enterprises in the food service industry are calling upon Akiyoshi to help solve their problems. Watch the video to learn more about her incredible story.

Modernize and empower sales teams with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales Professionals

On average, sellers work with 6.8 stakeholders and 16 colleagues per deal, which makes sales cycles very long and extremely complex. To further complicate matters, today's sellers are on twice as many teams as they were a few years ago. Clearly, legacy methods of storing and accessing customer information, tracking the status of deals in progress, collaborating with mobile colleagues, and maintaining a "big picture" view of every moving part are not sufficient for today's on-the-go sales professionals. That's where Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a competitive advantage. Watch this short video to learn how Dynamics 365 can help modernize seller productivity with a simpler, more streamlined way to build sales momentum, close more deals, and boost productivity.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Microsoft Teams delivers healthy, real-time global collaboration for Heart Research Institute (HRI) in Australia

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, a statistic that Australia-based Heart Research Institute (HRI) is working diligently to change. Dedicated to saving lives and minimizing the impact of heart-related illnesses on patients globally, HRI is involved with over 150 international research projects each year which require frequent collaboration with other researchers from around the world--a necessity often hampered in the past by the institute's outdated, unsecure, and largely underused collaboration tools. All that changed when Microsoft partner Dimension Data deployed Microsoft 365 across HRI, with Teams at the heart of the organization's communications. With Microsoft 365 and Teams, HRI can now compare results, share data, and collaborate on documents in real time with researchers in different countries and hemispheres, representing a critical first step for HRI toward realizing the promise of the modern workplace. Watch and share this short video to learn how Microsoft 365 and Teams are enabling cutting-edge communication for a cutting-edge research facility.

Microsoft Teams delivers healthy, real-time global collaboration for Heart Research Institute (HRI) in Australia

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, a statistic that Australia-based Heart Research Institute (HRI) is working diligently to change. Dedicated to saving lives and minimizing the impact of heart-related illnesses on patients globally, HRI is involved with over 150 international research projects each year which require frequent collaboration with other researchers from around the world--a necessity often hampered in the past by the institute's outdated, unsecure, and largely underused collaboration tools. All that changed when Microsoft partner Dimension Data deployed Microsoft 365 across HRI, with Teams at the heart of the organization's communications. With Microsoft 365 and Teams, HRI can now compare results, share data, and collaborate on documents in real time with researchers in different countries and hemispheres, representing a critical first step for HRI toward realizing the promise of the modern workplace. Watch and share this short video to learn how Microsoft 365 and Teams are enabling cutting-edge communication for a cutting-edge research facility.

Lizo | Transformation in the oil & gas industry: data analysis and visualization

Data. There's a lot of it, and it's everywhere. Azure cloud services helps organizations manage all aspects of their volumes of data. Here is an example of how a company in the oil and gas industry could utilize Azure Cosmos DB for data acquisition and Power BI for rich analytics with real-time insights. Through partnering with Microsoft, a company like Lizo would be able to actualize their vision of next-generation data analysis and visualization. Watch this and look for additional Lizo videos to demonstrate the capabilities and power of Azure!

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise BI Platforms

In a crowded field of BI solutions providers, how can customers reliably identify an industry leader? By what criteria should they make such a judgment? In this Power BI blog entry, we address both questions by citing and linking to The Forrester Wave report for Q3 2019 that recognizes Microsoft as a leader in enterprise BI platforms, where we receive the highest score in the two categories of strategy and market presence. From the blog, customers can download the full Forrester report and see how Microsoft Power BI stacks up against competing solutions, as well as explore the differentiated features in the current enterprise BI market.

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5 Ways to Inspire Creativity and Innovation in Your Employees

Scott Duffy, entrepreneur and author of the book "Breakthrough," let us in on how to foster creative teamwork by breaking your staff out of the office mindset. In this Entrepreneur Magazine article, he shares tips to help you build experimentation in your team and create comfort around risk. Read on to learn how to foster inspiration and innovation!

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Bringing remote patient care to remote patients with Microsoft Power BI and Azure

How do you deliver expert healthcare to the most remote towns and villages in South Africa, to the people who need it most? Dr. Raymond Campbell, founder of Phulukisa (which means "to heal" in the local language), turned to Microsoft for the answer. His solution: a cloud-enabled backpack that field doctors can take into remote areas across South Africa and use to screen patients for common diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV, diabetes, and heart disease. The data is then collected and uploaded to MySQL database in Azure, and the results are pushed back into Microsoft Power BI and delivered to doctors on the ground--all within a matter of minutes. Presented by Satya Nadella at the 2019 Inspire event, this short video illustrates how Microsoft solutions are enabling ordinary people with a vision to accomplish extraordinary things--and help save lives in the process.

Driving digital transformation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to create an integrated, growth-enabling workplace

After growing into one of the largest hotel chains in the U.S., the Red Lion Hotel Corporation (RLH) faced the challenge of combining its internal siloed legacy platforms into a unified system that enabled data-driven decision making. Leveraging the robust capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365, RLH obtained accurate performance data analysis, created a more efficient and productive workplace environment, and gained a revenue-increasing ecosystem that fosters integration and scalability. Watch the video to learn more about their success story, then contact Inner-City Cubes to learn how we can help your organization create its own success story.

Day in the life - IT project manager

Join Jamal, IT project manager, as he navigates his day with the help of Microsoft Teams. With the mobile app, he joins the daily stand up meeting and reviews the daily activity feed. He reviews status and trends in the dashboard and tasks by owner in the planner. With the cloud-based meeting app. he can review past meetings and he tracks finances in another tab. Check out how Microsoft Teams makes his planning so much smoother with a secure location that brings together everything teams needs to be productive.

View: Day in the life - IT project manager

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

A day in the life - Marketing

Meet Pam, a marketer who's planning an event while running the rest of her marketing operation. She can check her activity feed at home before leaving for work to see the priorities for the day. She can join a status meeting remotely using Microsoft Teams and using OneDrive-lined documents she can share documents, co-edit files in PowerPoint, Excel and access outside apps like Adobe Creative Cloud, Hootsuite and much more. Take a look and explore how Microsoft Teams can bring together everything a team needs to be productive!

View: A day in the life - Marketing

Rolls-Royce and new digital capabilities

With over 13,000 commercial aircraft engines in operation around the globe, Rolls Royce offers comprehensive maintenance services to keep them at peak performance. The company uses the Microsoft Azure platform to manage its massive volume of data coming from multiple types of equipment—all to ensure safety and efficiency for its customers. Watch this video for insight on what Rolls-Royce achieved with a Microsoft solution for field service.

Data-Minded Or Data-Blinded?

Collaboration and networks are about people not data. In this Forbes article, the CEO of Brainpool.ai, a worldwide network of AI and Machine Learning experts, explores opportunities and concerns around the use of network data analysis to transform organizations.

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SQL Server 2017

SQL Server 2017 is now available on Linux and Docker! This infographic provides an overview of the SQL Server 2017 features that drive industry-leading performance and security. Check it out for an at-a-glance look at the benefits to your business.

View: SQL Server 2017

Lowe's moves to the cloud to empower employees and personalize customer service

Lowe's is the second-largest home improvement company in the world and is headquartered in Mooresville, North Carolina. With a purpose of "helping people love where they live," the company wanted to create a modern workplace for employees and provide cloud-based productivity tools. Lowe's decided to deploy Microsoft Office 365, giving employees anytime access to productivity tools from any device. Now employees can find the information they need faster, work together more easily, and develop more attentive, personalized customer relationships.

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