Entries for the 'Consulting Services' Category

In my experience, the most widespread issues that occur for both DMC users and our external customers, happen while using Microsoft Outlook. This is partially due to the fact that Outlook is quite possibly, the most important application and definitely the most used application in the office. Outlook may live locally or in the cloud via Office 365, which offers access to Outlook, Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office tools from anywhere you can get a Web connection and from virtually any devic...

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Recently I was setting up an Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) for a new Dynamics CRM 2013 implementation. Luckily the process has not changed much since CRM 2011, and there are many blogs and even a whitepaper that cover the topic.  One of the biggest pain points is that the CRM claims based / IFD configuration publishes two access URLs, one each for internal and external use. The external url does not allow for windows integrated single-sign on, and the internal URL cannot be acces...

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If you have ever worked with SharePoint development, you may have run into a situation where it becomes necessary to test the functionality of a custom email receiver event handler on a document library. This blog will not go into detail on how to create the library programmatically (Andy Burns has a good post on that here), instead we will focus on the infrastructure necessary for testing the event handler on a development server. There are two main components that need to be present in your...

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In this brief blog post I wanted to describe the steps needed to remove unused fields from the New Form, Display Form and/or Edit Form in SharePoint 2013. While it is easy to add and remove fields from list views through SharePoint’s user interface, there isn’t a good way to do so for the three different forms which we use to add, edit and view information of individual items. We are often left with fields that should not be part of the forms. We might need hidden fields used by a...

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One of the little annoyances with SharePoint workflows is that tasks often open in a display-only mode by default, especially when you are following an email link. The extra click needed to place the task in "Edit" mode causes confusion and wastes time. In SharePoint 2007 and 2010, you could get around this by customizing the task URL in a notification email, or by having users use the "Open this Task" feature of the Outlook client. Unfortunately neither of these options w...

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DMC is proud to announce that it has achieved Microsoft’s Silver Partner Status for Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. This achievement recognizes DMC’s proven ability to help customers monitor, analyze and plan business performance based on actionable business insight. DMC’s BI service offerings are geared towards helping clients identify and define high-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), design visually appealing dashboards, and complete technical data integration.&n...

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SharePoint sites are often created for new customers, projects, and events. While it is possible to create each new site manually, having an automated process greatly reduces user training and effort. In previous versions of SharePoint, creating sites from a workflow required deploying custom actions. However, with the new Call HTTP Web Service action in SharePoint 2013, it is possible to apply some tricks and achieve the same result using only SharePoint Designer. Creating a new site usin...

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SharePoint 2013 uses the AppFabric Caching Service to centralize all caches that are used by SharePoint. The distributed cache is used by many features including Authentication, Newsfeed, Security, Page Loading, Workflows, and more. While Microsoft claims that SharePoint’s use of the Distributed Cache greatly increases performance, the service is also quite unreliable and difficult to troubleshoot. Hopefully they will write more documentation and improve the product with the release of SP1...

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DMC has earned the status of Microsoft CRM Certified Software Advisor. This certification recognizes DMC’s investment and dedication to implementing a superior CRM application while providing knowledge and support to its CRM customers. This new competency demonstrates DMC’s expertise in planning and implementing a CRM solution through customization of the CRM application to fit the needs of its customers. Microsoft awards Software Advisor Certifications to partners who have demons...

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Have you considered moving some of your business systems into the cloud? This year our Microsoft Consulting Services practice has seen a significant increase in Office 365 projects. A move from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online or choosing one of the Office 365 bundled cloud offerings is especially compelling for small and medium size businesses. To help you better understand Microsoft's cloud offerings and decide if a move to the cloud is right for your business, DMC has created a v...

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Reporting is almost a universal requirement for new projects coming into DMC these days. As part of an HMI we developed for a customer we also installed SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on a Siemens PLC. This is used to generate reports for production batches run on that PLC. The customer desired these reports to be in PDF format, which after some investigation was easy to do with SSRS. A little background on SSRS... SSRS is a web application that generates nice graphical reports from SQL...

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If you missed this Webinar, DMC has created an Office 365 Video Series that explains some of the benefits & drawbacks and allows you to see Office 365 in action. DMC will be hosting a complimentary webinar on Wednesday, August 14th (10am - 11am CDT) for organizations who are interested in learning more about Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offerings - Office Pro Plus, Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and CRM. Is your business facing any of these scenarios? Growing in...

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Recently, I encountered a very frustrating issue with SharePoint 2013. I had a working web application and everything was running fine. After configuring a few sites in my web application, I started getting emails from other users of the site saying that they were getting Access Denied errors whenever they tried to access the root site collection (ex. https://sharepoint2013/). I went to that path and was very surprised to find that I, a site collection administrator with Full Control permissi...

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What is different between the SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflow engines?  Here are a few new features we find most relevant to our clients.  With the 2013 designer, we can now:  Query almost anything:   The addition of Call HTTP web service as a designer action extends the reach of workflows without resorting to custom code.  Within SharePoint, an HTTP call can query or change list data even on other sites.  Externally, we can interface with other...

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I am very excited to announce that DMC has achieved Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner status, a distinction shared with only one percent of Microsoft partners worldwide.  The Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner Program is designed to recognize and reward high performing partners that have a proven track record of delivering Microsoft cloud solutions to their customers. DMC’s cloud services focus on Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, CRM Online,...

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If you missed this event, DMC has created an Office 365 Video Series that explains some of the benefits & drawbacks and allows you to see Office 365 in action.  DMC will be hosting complimentary breakfast events on June 18 and June 19 for organizations interested in taking advantage of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offerings.   Is your business facing any of these scenarios?   1.  Growing in size and looking for technology to help meet your bus...

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Microsoft's "New Office 365" plan lineup for 2013 is pretty extensive, providing customers with many choices to consider. Since you cannot change plan families (more on this later), it is critical to be aware of a few subtle, but key details that differentiate the new plans from one another. If you are unsure if moving to the Office 365 cloud is a good move for your organization, here are a few scenarios that often drive businesses to move to the Office ...

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SharePoint offers a little-known but incredibly useful feature allowing for bulk adds, updates, and deletes of list items via the SPWeb.ProcessBatchData method. The usage is a bit complex because you need to pass CAML markup to the method to perform the operation on multiple list items. This CAML must contain the list item ID, list GUID, and relevant column names and values in an XML collection. There are numerous examples throughout the web showing how to write this CAML for manipulating list i...

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As DMC's Marketing Coordinator, I'm proud to announce the relaunch of DMC's website. The enhanced website contains a host of new and improved features that better reflect the needs and experience of our visitors. Aiming for a more navigable and aesthetically pleasing user experience, we've employed a Metro-style (think Windows 8) layout throughout the site. Our new video library provides quick and compelling information on everything from DMC customer projects to company outin...

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Have you heard about the new SharePoint 2013 but not quite sure if you are ready to take the plunge? Here is a glimpse of what’s new that may help swing your decision.   Look and Feel  The SharePoint user interface has overall been revamped in 2013. The user interface is very graphic and updated. Graphic tiles are now used in lieu of text to display the options when visiting a page.           User Interface   Use...

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