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What is Dynamics 365?

What is Dynamics 365? It is a set of connected modular SaSS applications and services designed to transform and enable core customer, employee and business activities.

Overview:

  • Combination of CRM and ERP solutions in a cloud service, which allows a more modular approach to purchasing and using business applications.
  • Each area of Dynamics 365 is a module, i.e. Sales or Operations and can be mixed and matched
  • Allows a more unified and integrated experience with fluid UX at its core
  • Bringing your business together as a cohesive unit by connecting people, processes, and data across many applications, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365, LinkedIn, and Azure.
  • Adapting the application to your needs rather than changing your business methodology. You can integrate most applications with existing systems or even customise them with Microsoft Power Platform.
  • Modernise your approach by incorporating AI, mixed reality, social, and mobile capabilities for progressive business innovation.

Modules (Organisations can choose from the following Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and features):

  1. Sales: Provides insight into prospective customer sources, personalisation of service and customer engagement data, sales productivity and performance metrics on many platforms.
  2. Marketing: Links up Dynamics CRM with Adobe Marketing Cloud to provide campaign management and targeted, personalised marketing tools that cater to the businesses unique needs.
  3. Customer Service: Offers multi-channel tools for engaging customers, tools for self-service / self-care portals as well as tools for community engagement and support agents.
  4. Field Service: Primarily used for planning and scheduling resources, managing contracts, inventory, insights into the internet of things-connected products and customer communications tools.
  5. Finance and Operations: Financial management with all the reporting and analytics tools. It also includes manufacturing tools for project management, production planning, scheduling, cost management; and warehouse and inventory control tools for supply chain management.
  6. Project Service Automation: Automate project planning, resources scheduling, time and cost management, and service analytics in an all-in-one package. Gets you what you need while making management seamless.
  7. Retail: Combined business tools, store and employee management, merchandise management and operational insights.
  8. Talent: Human resource cloud services connected with LinkedIn to manage all aspects of HR. This includes attracting, hiring, and onboarding new employees in managing HR programs.

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What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a technology used to manage interactions with customers and potential customers. A CRM system helps organisations build customer relationships and streamline processes so they can increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability.

The goal of CRM is to improve business relationships with their customers, this is achieved through customer retention and customer acquisitions (in laymen’s terms it is holding on to your current customers and the ability to gain new customers overtime).

Different uses of CRM:

  • CRM as Technology: This is a technology product, often in the cloud, that teams use to record, report and analyse interactions between the company and users. This is also called a CRM system or solution.
  • CRM as a Strategy: This is a business’ philosophy about how relationships with customers and potential customers should be managed 
  • CRM as a Process: Think of this as the system a business adopts to nurture and manage those relationships.

Benefits of CRM:

  1. Better Data Organisation: CRM software allows businesses to import their data through leads, contacts and customers which as a result allows a business to keep track of their sales and engagement with the business.
  2. Enhanced Communications: CRM software provides automatic reminders for sales teams and allows a business to create email templates speeding up the process of contacting customers.
  3. Easily Share Information within the Business: A portal that allows a business to easily share information with employees through the use of one application.
  4. Catch all Leads: Quick analytics can assign the right employee depending on customer needs and allow for a quick response from the business to the customer.
  5. Analytics: CRM provides a lot of information for a business including things like sale numbers which help keep track of revenue generated by each employee allowing for an easier way to keep track of targets.

The use of the information above CRM allows a company to take a look at the level of customer support they provide along with raw data which in return allows them to implement/change strategy depending on the business/customer needs at any time. As a result of this information provided a business should be able to increase customer satisfaction, engagement and profits. A CRM is just one of the many tools a successful business should be using as a means to improve profits and customer acquisitions.

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How to Connect frontend to the backend?

Objectives

What this blog will cover:

In this blog, I’ll walk you through the process of connecting your simple React app to a simple Node/Express API that we will create.

The objective here is to give you a practical guide on how to set up and connect the front-end client and the back-end API.

Step 1: Create a React App

This process is really straightforward.

I will be using create-react-app to easily create a react app named client:

$ npx create-react-app client
$ cd client
$ npm install
$ npm start

The commands above are simple, the first line uses node to create the React application, second moves us into the newly created directory called client which is our app. Finally, we start running the application to run it on our localhost (default localhost:3000).

Step 2: Create a Express App

I will be using the ExpressJS to quickly create an application skeleton and name it exp:

$ mkdir exp
$ cd exp

create a directory to hold your application, and make that your working directory.

$ npm init

This command prompts you for a number of things, such as the name and version of your application. For now, you can simply hit RETURN to accept the defaults for most of them, with the following exception:

$ npm install express --save

Now install Express in the exp directory and save it in the dependencies list.

Step 3: Setting up simple backend server

const express = require('express') 
const app = express() 
const port = 8080 

app.get('/', (req, res) => {   res.send('Hello World!') }) 

app.listen(port, () => {   
console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`) })

After completing step 3 within the integrated terminal we can run node index.js to deploy our backend server locally.

Once you have a simple backend server we can go back to the React application and edit the package.json file. In that file, we need to add “proxy”: http://localhost:8080″

The two applications can now talk to each other. Depending on what you want to do we can specify get and post functions in our backend and link it to our front end using Axios.

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My Top VS Code Extensions for Web Development

Visual Studio Code is the most popular text editor out there and for good reason to. I enjoy editing on VS Code because of how customizable it is, when first installed it is a very barebones environment but with some modifications to the theme, settings.json and the addition of extensions users can turn a simple text editor into their perfect IDE for their needs. So here are my top extensions:

  1. GitLens – This extension supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code. It helps you to visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more.

2. Bracket Pair Colorizer – This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. The user can define which tokens to match, and which colours to use. Users are also able to modify the settings.json with “bracket-pair-colorizer-2.colors” to change the bracket colours to their own custom ones rather than the default.

3. emojisense: – This extension lets users insert emoji’s into their code with a simple short cut of CTRL-i. No need to google for emoji’s or find hex codes online to put into your strings you have all the emoj’s at your finger tips.

4. ErrorLens – This highlights any errors or warnings users have with a short detailed message. It even combines with other extensions to provide a consistent look to your editor, for example combined with CodeSpellChecker it highlights any spelling errors in your code so they’re easily noticeable rather than a dull little warning in your status bar.

5. PowerLevel10k (Terminal Theme): A Zsh theme (github.com) – This is not so much of an extension but it is a terminal theme that uses ZSH. However this theme is not just aesthetically pleasing to look at, it is very practical too. Again it is a theme that is fully customizable by users with segments. For example, within the segments, you can add the status of your battery, your OS, time, public IP, azure account name and even the status of your VPN.

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Problem when cloning vs code project from GitHub

Problem: After cloning VS Code project I ran into the following error:

Error: No version of chokidar is available. Tried chokidar@2 and chokidar@3. chokidar@2: Error: Cannot find module ‘watchpack-chokidar2

The error would occur when trying to run ‘npm start’, it will compile the code successfully but fail to load the webpage.

Solution: In order to fix this error, I had to delete node_modules folder and the package-lock.json file. Then clear my cache and update my npm globally. Finally running ‘npm install‘ reinstalled the necessary files in order to compile the code correctly. Following these steps eradicated the error.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66734503/react-npm-start-not-working-no-version-of-chokidar-available