April 5, 2024 - This week’s notables

Infrastructure & Support  

We continued our Dynamics 365 optimization project this week. Taylor is currently changing the form structure in Power Apps to update the solution. This is a much overdue project since inWorks LLC’s internal use of Dynamics 365 is critical to business operations, and the solution has “organically” evolved since its initial adoption, oh, 10 years ago. If only we knew back then what we know now… But now we do, and so we’re making it better for our own use. 

We also have another enhancement for our support services that we plan to introduce soon: increasing the usage of our inWorks LLC Support Portal. The portal has been mostly for internal use and not a priority, but you can use it now as well! We're looking forward to adding Microsoft Copilot (we’ve started some experimentation with Copilot Studio) as a support agent and finding more ways to utilize this powerful productivity tool. 

Devices 

This week, we continued our training on Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS). We encountered a problem with a client who received the wrong toner for automatic replenishment. The XPPS training, coincidentally, addressed the proper way of using Xerox's incident and triage process to avoid further delays in sending the right supplies for replenishment.  

Overall, the XPPS program is a productivity booster, as the automated tracking system ensures you always have toner for your devices (and no one must remember to order it, it just shows up before it’s needed!), and the included service contract gets you onsite device support if there’s ever a problem. If you have multifunction devices and don’t have automatic toner delivery and support, please let us know and we can quote you a replacement for your MFP when your current lease runs out. 

We also participated in a WatchGuard webinar that focused on WiFi security and reliability with their latest Access Points. Combining WatchGuard services and products like EPDR, WiFi Access Points and Fireboxes is an effective way to improve our efforts to secure digital environments for our customers. 

WatchGuard now has a managed service offering, (MDR) that adds 24x7 monitoring to an already robust detection & response solution! 

Operations & Growth 

As the month starts, we are ahead of schedule for completing Subscription and Services billing, which took longer in the past few months. Our distribution partner fixed (most of) their problems and we could get our billing data without any delay. We’re also happy to see some client projects come back from the bottom of the pile. 

We’re also thrilled that Microsoft decided to extend, indefinitely, their legacy Silver Partner designation for Microsoft Partners such as ourselves who had achieved that designation prior to September 30^th 2023. This lets us use quite a lot of Microsoft technologies, including Dynamics 365 Marketing, which has become a powerful outbound marketing tool we plan to take advantage of in 2024. 

In other news, art|Works Initiative (sort of a subsidiary of inWorks LLC, focused on providing technology and business platforms for artists and artisans ready to grow) hired a new Content Specialist. Amanda will post specialized content for artists and artisans to our member intranet, art|Hub, and help with inWorks LLC marketing efforts. Welcome, Amanda! 

We are also working with a local artist to set up the next show in the Longview Gallery (an extension of the art|Works Initiative with the charter to promote local artists and artisans, and especially art|Works Initiative member artists). We’ll be announcing the next show soon! 

Information Radiation

One of Ilya’s pet projects – an email marketing platform for use inside companies (rather than with prospects, customers, or vendors) – is still in mothballs as we don’t currently have enough bandwidth either from a technical or marketing perspective to resurrect it. 

We’ll also be reaching out to our contacts at StaffBase to refresh our partnership for deploying Valo Intranet products; we turned more towards native SharePoint Intranet implementations due its evolving maturity, however Valo still has a place in the ecosystem, in our opinion, especially since their Teamwork product is superior to anything Microsoft has for Teams management, governance, discovery, creation, and so on. 

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We appreciate you reading this summary of our notes and observations for the week. On Thursdays, we share the information and insights we’ve collected throughout our work week. This is important information for us, and we also think that you’ll find it interesting, engaging, and sometimes useful. We’re always looking for ways to deliver this information to you, and we have a dedicated day of the week for our practice of “Information Radiation.” 

As such, we’re happy with the launch of this ‘Notes and Observations’ newsletter. We also acknowledge that it’s not reaching as many people as we would like. That’s ok. We’re still developing the plan. In the next few editions of News and Observations, you may see this publication show up across our various channels as we work to reduce the information gap!