#Store Salesforce Files in OneDrive

[mahamsheikh23]

How Can Technology Aid in Maximizing Productivity?

In today's fast-paced business environment, maximizing productivity in the workplace has become a critical goal for organizations aiming to stay competitive. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the strategic use of technology. But how exactly can technology aid in maximizing productivity in the workplace? Let's dive into some practical ways technology can transform your productivity levels.

Streamlining Communication

Effective communication is the backbone of any productive workplace. Technology offers numerous tools that streamline communication, making it more efficient and less time-consuming.

Instant Messaging and Collaboration Tools

Applications like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom have revolutionized how teams communicate. These platforms provide instant messaging, video conferencing, and collaborative spaces where team members can share files and ideas in real-time. By reducing the need for lengthy email chains and in-person meetings, these tools help in maximizing productivity in the workplace.

Project Management Software

Project management tools such as Asana, Trello, and Monday.com allow teams to keep track of tasks, deadlines, and progress in a centralized location. This not only improves transparency but also ensures that everyone is on the same page, thereby reducing misunderstandings and delays.

Automating Routine Tasks

One of the biggest productivity killers is the time spent on repetitive, mundane tasks. Technology can help automate these processes, freeing up employees to focus on more critical tasks.

Automated Workflow Systems

Tools like Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate can integrate various apps and automate workflows. For instance, you can set up a system where an email attachment is automatically saved to a specific folder in your cloud storage and then notified on your project management tool. Such automation can significantly cut down on manual tasks, maximizing productivity in the workplace.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRM software like Salesforce and HubSpot can automate many aspects of customer relationship management, from tracking interactions to managing follow-ups. By automating these processes, sales and customer service teams can manage their time more effectively and focus on building relationships rather than handling administrative tasks.

Enhancing Data Management and Accessibility

Efficient data management is crucial for informed decision-making and overall productivity. Technology provides tools that make data more accessible and manageable.

Cloud Storage Solutions

Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive allow employees to store, access, and share files from anywhere with an internet connection. This accessibility ensures that team members can collaborate effectively, regardless of their physical location, maximizing productivity in the workplace.

Data Analytics Tools

Data analytics tools like Tableau and Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into business operations. By analyzing data, companies can identify trends, measure performance, and make data-driven decisions that enhance productivity. These tools help organizations focus their efforts on areas that yield the highest returns.

Conclusion

Maximizing productivity in the workplace is not just about working harder; it's about working smarter. Technology plays a pivotal role in achieving this by streamlining communication, automating routine tasks, and enhancing data management. By leveraging the right tools, organizations can create a more efficient, effective, and productive work environment.

Follow Our FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/bizadviseconsultancy/

[perfone]

Maximizing Collaboration with Microsoft Teams - A Comprehensive Guide

With the rise of remote work and distributed teams, having the right tools and strategies in place to facilitate collaboration has become more critical than ever. Microsoft Teams emerges as a leading platform, offering a comprehensive suite of features designed to streamline communication, enhance teamwork, and maximize collaboration across all levels of an organization.

Why Microsoft Teams? Microsoft Teams is more than just a messaging or video conferencing platform; it's a robust collaboration hub that brings together chat, meetings, calling, file sharing, and app integration into a single, unified workspace. Whether your team is working remotely, in the office, or a combination of both, Microsoft Teams provides the flexibility and functionality needed to stay connected and productive.

Key Features and Functionality

Chat and Messaging: Instantly message individuals or create group chats for real-time communication. Share files, links, and multimedia content directly within the chat interface. Utilize emojis, gifs, and stickers to add personality and engagement to conversations.

Meetings and Video Conferencing: Host virtual meetings with audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities. Schedule and manage meetings directly within Teams, integrating with Outlook calendars. Collaborate in real-time on documents and presentations during meetings.

Calling: Make and receive calls directly within Microsoft Teams using VoIP technology. Seamlessly transition between chat, meetings, and calls within the same interface. Leverage advanced calling features such as call forwarding, voicemail, and call queues.

File Sharing and Collaboration: Store, access, and share files securely within Teams using OneDrive and SharePoint integration. Collaborate on documents in real-time using Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Track document versions, comments, and edits to ensure seamless collaboration.

App Integration: Extend the functionality of Teams by integrating with third-party apps and services. Access tools like Trello, Asana, and Salesforce directly within the Teams interface. Create custom workflows and automate tasks using Microsoft Power Platform. Maximizing Collaboration with Microsoft Teams To maximize collaboration with Microsoft Teams, consider the following best practices:

Create a Collaborative Culture: Encourage open communication, knowledge sharing, and teamwork among team members.

Establish Clear Communication Channels: Define channels for different projects, departments, or topics to keep discussions organized and accessible.

Utilize Collaboration Tools: Take advantage of Teams' chat, meetings, calling, and file sharing features to facilitate collaboration across teams and locations.

Enable Remote Work: Provide remote workers with the tools and resources they need to stay connected and productive, regardless of their location.

Promote Training and Adoption: Offer training sessions and resources to help team members become proficient in using Teams' features and functionalities.

Monitor and Adjust: Regularly assess the effectiveness of collaboration efforts within Teams and make adjustments as needed to optimize workflows and communication.

By embracing Microsoft Teams as a central hub for collaboration, organizations can unlock new levels of productivity, innovation, and success. From real-time messaging to virtual meetings and file sharing, Teams offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to empower teams to collaborate effectively, regardless of their location or working preferences.

Maximizing collaboration is essential for driving organizational success. With Microsoft Teams, organizations can create a collaborative environment that fosters communication, teamwork, and innovation. By leveraging Teams' comprehensive features and functionalities, teams can collaborate seamlessly, regardless of their location or working preferences. Embrace the power of Microsoft Teams and unlock new possibilities for collaboration in your organization today!

[solixtechnologies]

What is Cloud Data Management?

The rise of multi-cloud, data-first architecture and the broad portfolio of advanced data-driven applications that have arrived as a result require cloud data management systems to collect, manage, govern and build pipelines for enterprise data. Cloud data management architectures span private, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments connecting to data sources not just from transaction systems, but from file servers, the Internet or multi-cloud repositories.

The scope of cloud data management includes enterprise data lake, enterprise archiving, enterprise content services, and consumer data privacy solutions. These solutions manage the utility, risk and compliance challenges of storing large amounts of data.

Cloud data platforms

Cloud data platforms are the centrepiece of cloud data management programs and provide uniform data collection and data storage at the lowest cost. Archives, data lakes, and content services enable cloud migration projects to connect, ingest, and manage any type of data from any source. For instance, cloud data platforms collect legacy and real-time data from mainframes, ERP, CRM, file stores, relational and non-relational databases, and even SaaS environments like Salesforce or Workday.

Enterprise Archiving

Studies have shown that data is accessed less frequently as it ages. Current data such as online data is accessed most frequently, but after two years, most enterprise data is hardly ever accessed. As data growth accelerates the load on production infrastructure grows, and the challenge to maintain application performance increases.

Application portfolios should be screened regularly for legacy applications that are no longer in use and those applications should be retired or decommissioned. In addition historical data from production databases should be archived to improve performance, optimize infrastructure and reduce overall costs. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) should be used to establish data governance and compliance controls.

Enterprise archiving supports all enterprise data including databases, streaming data, file servers and email. Using ILM, enterprise archiving moves less frequently accessed data from production systems to nearline repositories. The archive data remains highly accessible and is stored in low cost buckets. Large organizations operating silos of file servers across departments and divisions use enterprise archiving to consolidate these silos into a unified and compliant cloud repository.

Enterprise Data Lake

Data-driven enterprises leverage vast and complex networks of data and services, and enterprise data lakes deliver the connections necessary to move data from any source to any  target location. Enterprise data lakes handle very large volumes of data and scale horizontally using commodity cloud infrastructure to deliver data pipeline and data preparation services for downstream applications such as SQL data warehouse, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Data pipelines are a series of data flows where the output of one element is the input of the next one, and so on. Data lakes serve as the collection and access points in a data pipeline and are responsible for data organization and access control.

Data preparation makes data-fit-for-use with improved data quality. Data preparation services include data profiling, data cleansing, data enrichment and data transformation and data modeling. As an open source and industry standard solution, enterprise data lakes safely and securely collect and store large amounts of data for cloud migration, and provide enterprise grade services to explore, manage, govern, prepare and provide access control to the data.

Enterprise Content Services (ECS)

Corporate file shares are overflowing with files and long ago abandoned data. Enterprise Content Services collect and store historical enterprise data that would otherwise be spread out across various islands of storage, on personal devices, file shares, Google Drive, Dropbox, or personal OneDrives. Organizations planning cloud data migration to tackle content sprawl should consider ECS for secure and compliant file storage at the lowest cost. Cloud data migration with ECS consolidates enterprise data onto a single platform and unifies silos of file servers in innovative ways to become more efficient and reduce costs.

Consumer Data Privacy

Consumer data privacy regulations are proliferating with nearly 100 countries now adopting regulations. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are perhaps the best known laws, but new regulations are on the rise everywhere as security breaches, cyberattacks and unauthorized releases of personal information continue to grow unabated. These new regulations mandate strict controls over the handing of personally identifiable information (PII), yet variations across geographies make legal compliance a complex requirement.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) manages data throughout its lifecycle and establishes a system of controls and business rules including data retention policies and legal holds. Security and privacy tools like data classification, data masking and sensitive data discovery help data administrators achieve compliance with data governance policies such as NIST 800-53, PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR. Consumer data privacy and data governance are not only essential for legal compliance, they improve data quality as well.

What’s The Urgency?

Exponential data growth is a known fact, however, the implications are only being felt by enterprises in the recent couple of years. On one end, more and more data is required to support data-driven applications and analytics. On the other end, data growth results in operational inefficiencies, technical debts and increased compliance risks. Data growth is a double-edged sword if left unmanaged and delivers great value by enabling enterprises to more effectively manage their data.

[damco-solutions]

Want to improve your workflow? Use these 4 monday.com integrations

Monday.com is a popular project management software that helps businesses plan, execute, and deliver projects on time. It has become a coveted choice among many project management teams owing to its unique yet intuitive features. This may be one of the reasons why 125K+ companies choose monday.com over other project management software. 

Not to mention, monday.com offers a host of business benefits including improved communication and collaboration between teams, powerful reporting and analytics for actionable decisions, support numerous use cases, delegating tasks and tracking project progress become a breeze, and more. You may have heard many of these business benefits before but what you might not know is that monday.com can help you streamline and improve workflow by seamlessly integrating all your favorite tools in a few clicks. Let’s look at some popular monday.com integrations that you should consider in 2021 and beyond. 

1. Salesforce 

Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) tool that hardly needs any introduction. However, you can make it more powerful with Salesforce monday.com integration . By integrating Salesforce with monday.com, you can let your marketing team keep an eye on the sales pipeline as customers move through your sales funnel. Not just this, this integration also allows you to pull all your customers’ data right from Salesforce CRM into monday.com and start managing your sales pipeline leads and sales more efficiently.

2. Slack

Slack is a popular communication tool used by project management teams to share important files or documents, chat with colleagues, and cut down on email. Integrating Slack with monday.com can improve the collaboration between teams and keep them updated on changes and progress made. The moment a new task is created or changes are made in an existing project, all you need to do is drop a message on a Slack channel and everyone in the team will get an update on the same. This, in turn, removes the need for conducting meetings resulting in improved productivity. 

3. Dropbox

Similar to Google's Drive or Apple's cloud, Dropbox is a cloud-based storage solution that lets you store files on the cloud and sync them to your personal devices. However, by integrating Dropbox with monday.com, you can store or share your files or documents within the monday.com platform. In other words, collaborating with your colleagues over documents has become easier with Dropbox and monday.com integration. 

4. Zoom

Zoom has become synonymous with video conferencing, particularly, after the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, everyone is familiar with Zoom, be it school students, college youths, or working professionals who are working from remote locations. Why not integrate the Zoom application with monday.com to improve project management? With this integration, you can set your audio and video calls with your team members within the monday.com platform. 

Final thoughts

Besides these four integrations, monday.com supports a host of other integrations including OneDrive, Gmail, LinkedIn, Excel, Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zapier, Shopify, Zendesk, and many more.

[aikungfu]

This is a guest blog post by Francisco Zamore and Nicholas Burden at TensorIoT and Bratton Riley at Citibot. In their own words, “TensorIoT is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with competencies in IoT, Machine Learning, Industrial IoT and Retail. Founded by AWS alums, they have delivered end-to-end IoT and Machine Learning solutions to customers across the globe. Citibot provides tools for citizens and their governments to use for efficient and effective communication and civic change.

Citibot is a technology company that builds AI-powered chat solutions for local governments from Fort Worth, Texas to Arlington, Virginia. With Citibot, local residents can quickly get answers to city-related questions, report issues, and receive real-time alerts via text responses. To power these interactions, Citibot uses Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces for text and voice applications. Citibot built a chatbot to handle basic call queries, which allows government employees to allocate more time to higher-impact community actions.

The challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced the need for public organizations to have scalable, self-service tools that can quickly provide reliable information to its constituents. With COVID-19, Citibot call centers saw a dramatic uptick in wait times and call abandonments as citizens tried to get information about virus prevention and unemployment insurance. To increase the flexibility and robustness of their chatbot to new query types, Citibot looked to add a general search capability. Citibot wanted a solution that could outperform third-party solutions and effectively use curated FAQ content and recently published data from multiple websites such as the CDC and federal, state, and local government.

The following image shows screenshots of sample Citibot conversations.

To design this general search solution, Citibot chose TensorIoT, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that specializes in serverless application development. TensorIot developed a solution that included TensorIoT’s Web Connector Tool and Amazon Kendra, an enterprise search service. TensorIoT’s Web Connector Tool, built natively on AWS, enabled Amazon Kendra to index the content of target web pages and be a fallback search intent when Amazon Lex intents can’t provide an answer.

This new chatbot search solution helped local citizens quickly find the answers they needed and reduced wait times by up to 90%. This in turn decreased the volume of interactions handled by city officials, eased uncertainty within communities, and allowed municipal governments to focus on keeping their communities safe. As offices closed due to the pandemic, this solution provided a contactless way for residents without internet access to search for information on government websites at any time through their phones.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture for Citibot’s general search solution.

How it all came together

First, TensorIoT deployed a custom Amazon Lex search intent that is triggered when the chatbot receives a question or utterance it can’t answer. The team used AWS Lambda to develop the intent’s dialog and fulfillment code hooks to manage the conversation flow and fulfillment APIs. This new search intent was developed, tested, and merged into the dev version of Citibot to ensure all the original intents worked properly.

Second, TensorIoT needed to create a search query index. They choose Amazon Kendra because it can integrate a variety of data sources and data types into Citibot’s existing technology stack. The TensorIoT and Citibot development teams determined a target group of government data sources, including the CDC website for COVID-19 data and multiple city websites for municipal data, that are checked on a routine basis. This helps the chatbot access the most recent guidelines about the virus and social distancing.

The following diagram illustrates the data sources used for Citibot’s general search solution.

Next, the teams researched the optimal format type and data storage containers for saving information and connecting to Amazon Kendra. TensorIoT knew that Amazon Kendra is trained to systematically process and index data sources to derive meaning from a variety of data formats, such as .pdf, .csv, and .html files. To increase the processing efficiency of Amazon Kendra, the TensorIoT team intelligently partitioned the data into queryable information chunks that could be relayed back to the users. The TensorIoT approach used a combination of .csv, .pdf, and .html files to provide complete data, giving a solid foundation for product build and development.

The TensorIoT team then developed a versatile Web Connector using NodeJS and the Javascript library Cheerio to crawl trusted websites and deposit that information into the data stores. Because COVID-19-related information changes frequently, TensorIoT created an Amazon DynamoDB table to store all the websites to routinely index for updated information.

With the additional information from the targeted websites, the TensorIoT and Citibot teams decided to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for data storage. Amazon Kendra provides machine learning (ML)-powered search capabilities for all unstructured data stored in AWS and offers easy-to-use native connectors for popular sources like Amazon S3, SharePoint, Salesforce, ServiceNow, RDS databases, and OneDrive. By unifying the extracted .html pages and .pdf files from the CDC website in the same S3 bucket, the development team could sync the index to the data source, providing readily available data. They also used Amazon Kendra to extract metadata files from the scraped .html pages, which provided additional file attributes such as city names to further improve answer results.

The following image shows an example of the attributes that Citibot could use to tune search results.

Without any model training, TensorIoT and Citibot could point Amazon Kendra at their content stores and start receiving specific answers to natural language queries (such as, “How can I protect myself from Covid-19?”) by extracting the answer from the most relevant document.

To test the solution, the engineers ran sample event scripts with test inputs that allowed them to verify if all the sample questions were being answered successfully. TensorIoT tested and confirmed that each question or utterance returned an answer with a valid text excerpt and link. Additionally, the team used a negative feedback API that flagged answers users had downvoted and gave Citibot the ability to revisit the search answers that were voted as unhelpful. This data helps drive continuous improvement around the answers provided by the index for specific questions.

For curated content search, the developers could also upload a .csv file of FAQs to provide direct answers to the most commonly asked questions. For Citibot, TensorIoT used this feature to fill in the specific answers for municipal information questions, and added a .csv file with relevant questions and answers (Q&A) that required a complete search engine microservice. Using these features brings numerous benefits, including accuracy, simplicity, and connectivity.

In just a few weeks, TensorIoT also built and added custom query logic and feedback submission APIs to the Amazon Lex bot, giving users better answers without requiring human interaction or extensive searching. Amazon Kendra exposes their services via API, such as the submit feedback API, which allows end-users to interact with search results. The team used the custom Amazon Lex intent and Lambda to handle the incoming queries and create a powerful search service.

The following image shows how the solution uses Amazon Lex and Lambda.

The TensorIoT solution was designed so Citibot can effortlessly add new cities to the service and disseminate information to their respective communities. The next challenge for the TensorIoT team was using city-specific information to provide more relevant search results. Combined with the additional session and request attributes of Amazon Lex, TensorIoT provided Amazon Kendra with search filters to refine the data query with specific city information. If no city was stated, the system defaulted to the call location of the user. With TensorIoT’s custom search intent deployed, search filter in place, data sources filled, and APIs built, the team started to integrate this search engine into the existing chatbot product.

Deployment

To deploy this TensorIot solution, the development teams integrated the new Amazon Lex custom search intent with Citibot and tested the bot’s ability to successfully answer queries. Using a sample phone number provided by Citibot through Twilio, TensorIoT used SMS to validate the returned results for each utterance.

With Amazon Kendra, the TensorIoT team eliminated the need for a third-party search engine and could focus on creating an automated solution for gathering information. After the chatbot was updated, the team redeployed the service with a version upgrade of the software development kit. The upgraded chatbot now uses the search power of Amazon Kendra to answer more questions for users based on the curation of document content. The resulting informational Citibot stands above the prior tools the cities had used.

Storing information in a curated content form is especially useful when combining Amazon Lex and Amazon Kendra. Amazon Kendra is perfect for customized information retrieval that is ultimately communicated to the end-user through agentless voice interactions of Amazon Lex.

Conclusion

This use case demonstrates how TensorIot used multiple AWS services to add value in solution development. Beyond COVID-19, cities can continue to utilize the Amazon Kendra-powered chatbot to provide fast access to information about public facility hours, road closures, and events. Depending on your use case, you can easily customize the subject matter of the AWS Kendra index to provide information for emerging user needs.

The TensorIoT search engine proved to be a powerful solution to a modern-day problem, allowing communities to stay informed and connected through text. Although the primary purpose of this application was to enhance customer support services, the solution is applicable to searching internal knowledge bases for schools, banks, local businesses, and non-profit organizations. With AWS and TensorIoT, companies like Citibot can use new and powerful technologies such as Amazon Kendra to improve their existing chatbot solutions.

  About the Authors

Francisco Zamora is a Software Engineer at TensorIoT.

Nicholas Burden is a Technical Evangelist at at TensorIoT.

Bratton Riley is the CEO at Citibot.

from AWS Machine Learning Blog https://ift.tt/30Xsv8l via A.I .Kung Fu

[martechadvisor-blog]

Why Does MarTech Need Digital Asset Management?

Managing your digital media is the need of the hour. With the sheer amount of content being churned out by brands, it is now the need of the hour to bring order to this chaos. For that, you need to know how to manage your digital media. Here is why you need a digital asset management (DAM) system for your MarTech stack.

Do any of the following scenarios seem familiar to you?

Scenario 1: You have received four variations of your organization’s new logo:

logo_final.png

logo_final_ver1.png

logo_final_ver2.png

logo_final_ver3.png

Now you’re not sure which file to use as working on the wrong file means starting everything from scratch.

Scenario 2: Despite sharing the files with everyone in the team, some people will reach out to you asking for a particular file. And it is always an urgent request, so you cannot refuse. You end up wasting a lot of your valuable time during this process.

If you have been in any of these situations, I completely empathize with you; we’ve all have been there.

The rise of inbound marketing in the last decade has left companies with a voluminous amount of scattered media causing a topsy-turvy content creation process that is highly inefficient.

A solution to this is digital asset management (DAM). DAM strives to bring order to this chaos without adding any hassles to your existing responsibilities.

What is a Digital Asset?

**A digital asset is any digital media file that provides value to the organization and can be identified by its metadata.** So, essentially, a digital asset could be any of the following:

Photos

Videos

Audio files

Slide decks

Logos

Graphics

Illustrations

Animations

PDFs

Documents, spreadsheets, etc.

One of the crucial elements of any digital asset is its metadata. Metadata contains the filename, its format, keywords, author/creator, date of creation, ownership, copyright details, etc.

What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

**Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a discipline of organizing, storing, fetching, archiving and distributing digital assets.**

**A DAM system is a centralized repository to store and manage an organization's digital assets. It provides marketers with authority to manage user access permissions. **

Why Do You Need Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

1. Follow Brand Guidelines

Organizations and agencies alike have a set of brand guidelines in place to maintain consistency in their external communication. For example, a brand might have four different logo versions that are used for different purposes. Many times brand guidelines don't transition well when it comes to implementation due to many reasons. Mistakes such as using the wrong version of the logo or wrong fonts are quite common.

DAM systems have a centralized library of assets that are up-to-date allowing everyone to adhere to brand guidelines and maintain brand consistency.

Also Read: The Biggest Obstacle to Better Productivity Might Well Be Your Documents

2. Save Space and Advanced Search Capabilities

If you are already using a cloud storage solution, you might already be having problems with content duplication. If you have two different versions of an image, it will be difficult to figure out which one to use even if you try to make sense using its file details. DAM systems avoid this redundancy by streamlining your repository through metadata.

**The advanced search capability allows you to search files by applying filters such as file names, format, category, keywords, description, metadata, and other custom attributes. It further allows you to find content within text documents or filter images by colors, number of people or gender.** Certain DAM solutions also help you with face detection, celebrity identification, visual text recognition, and sentiment analysis.

Also Read: Digital Asset Management Restores Order to Fast-moving, Competitive Retail Market

3. Greater Control Over Your Content

When you use traditional communication mediums to transfer files, you have no way to track how your content is being used and who is using it. **Digital asset management gives you greater control over how you want to share your content. You also get to keep a tab on who has viewed your content and with whom it is shared.**

Also, the implementation of standard encryption protocols makes sure that the content stays safe in the vault and when it is shared.

Also Read: 10 Important Aspects to give a DAM about

4. Availability of Plugins and Integrations

DAM systems offer integrations with various products and apps across different categories which are used by designers and marketers on a daily basis. A few of them are as follows:

Project Management and Communication: JIRA, Slack, Asana, Trello, Basecamp, SmartSheet

CMS: WordPress, Drupal, OpenText, Kentico, Sitecore

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, HootSuite, Sprinklr

Marketing Automation and CRM: HubSpot, Marketo, MailChimp, Eloqua, Salesforce

Creative and Publishing: Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Apps, MS-Office

Cloud File Sharing: Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint

Along with these, DAM systems can also be integrated with e-commerce and PIM platforms, ERPs, online video platforms, etc. to import and export content swiftly.

Also Read: Will DAM be the Future of Marketing Content?

5. Foster the Culture of Collaboration

Most of the time, various departments within an organization work in silos with little to no interaction between them. When two departments are working on a project or campaign, the department dynamics complicate the workflow. The process of ideation, creation, and approval takes a lot of time.

You can break down the silos by opting for digital asset management. A DAM system circumvents the lengthy process by making content accessible to the relevant team members and automates certain parts of the workflow by updating everyone whenever a new file is added, or edit is made. It also allows you to leave comments and feedback and track changes accordingly.

This particular feature also helps if you regularly work with an external agency on your marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

One of the major reasons organizations do not adopt a DAM software is the cost that it incurs. While the cost might come across as an unnecessary expenditure, the benefits of DAM outweigh in the efficiency and productivity aspects which directly impact the revenue. Sure, if you are a small tightly-knit department, DAM might not be ideal for you, but in other cases, it's worth considering.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[powervision1]

Office at Build 2017—announcing new opportunities for developers

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.

Today at Microsoft Build 2017, we announced new opportunities for developers in three areas—updates to the Microsoft Teams developer platform, new capabilities in the Microsoft Graph and better ways to connect Office users with partner integrations. With over 100 million monthly commercial active users, Office 365 is the largest productivity service available. Office 365 offers an incredible opportunity for developers, with its business-critical data and millions of users, combined with a platform designed to keep people in the flow of their work.

Deliver Microsoft Teams apps through the Office Store

Beginning today, Microsoft Teams is open to all developers to publish apps through the Office Store onboarding and distribution process—enabling them to engage users where they work. Published apps will surface in a new discover apps experience—making it easier for users to add and use apps within Teams. This and other new features are now available in the Developer Preview and coming to users soon.

When we launched the preview of Teams in November, we introduced a deep developer platform with tabs, bots and connectors. Today, we are announcing two new capabilities, available in the Developer Preview, enabling developers to build even more engaging experiences for users.

Compose extensions, in preview, allow users to issue commands to bring information from an app or service directly into their team chat and avoid distracting context switches.

Example compose extension in Microsoft Teams (in Developer Preview).

Third-party notifications in the activity feed allow developers to alert users of key information and updates from their service. New Teams APIs are also coming to the Microsoft Graph, in preview, allowing developers to access team and channel information. Developers can now package these capabilities—tabs, bots and connectors, compose extensions, and activity feed notifications—into a single Teams app to make it simpler to publish and manage. At Build 2017, partners such as Wrike, Sapho and Adobe will demonstrate their new Teams integrations.

Discover more about everything new with Microsoft Teams.

In addition to Teams-specific updates, there are many new opportunities to customize Office applications. Earlier this year, Office add-ins became available on Mac and iOS clients, making any add-in seamlessly exposed across many platforms. Today, we’re announcing expanded JavaScript APIs in Word and Excel, in preview, which let developers access and extend structured data within documents. We’re also previewing an easier, integrated sign-on system that streamlines the use of services such as Microsoft Graph for both developers and users.

OneDrive is adding new File Handler capabilities that allow partners to extend the experience of working with files with new web-based views and connected actions. The SharePoint Framework, available since February, let developers use modern JavaScript tools and frameworks to build web parts within SharePoint. The preview of SharePoint Framework Extensions, coming soon, will let developers use these tools to deeply customize SharePoint team sites, document libraries and lists. Find out more about SharePoint Framework Extensions.

New capabilities in the Microsoft Graph to build intelligent business processes and apps

Artificial intelligence and data can help your applications become more engaging and focused. On stage this morning, we demonstrated the upcoming Presentation Translator add-in, which leverages Microsoft’s translation APIs in PowerPoint, giving presenters the ability to add subtitles to their presentations in the same language or in different languages. Read more about the Presentation Translator and sign up for an early access.

Similarly, developers can integrate intelligence and data from around their organization to enhance the user experience and build focused business processes using the Microsoft Graph.

With brand new capabilities in addition to an expanding API set, Microsoft Graph is truly the ubiquitous API for accessing core data in an organization, and is critical to any business process or app. Today, the SharePoint site, OneNote and Planner data APIs are generally available and are ready for developers to use in production.

We are announcing new Insights APIs, coming soon in preview, which will let developers build smarter processes by leveraging relationships between users and documents. We are also expanding the library of webhooks, in preview, which includes user and group changes.

Today, we made two new core capabilities of Microsoft Graph generally available. Delta queries provide access to lists of changes for types of data, helping developers build powerful, high-performance application integrations. Custom data empowers developers to extend base types of Microsoft Graph (e.g., users, contacts) to store critical data in context.

These actions and activities can be orchestrated with Microsoft Flow. With Flow, every user can add actions and conditions in response to operations across Office 365. Developers can extend Flows easily with code hosted in Azure. Today, we are excited to announce an offer for Microsoft Azure ISV customers that enables them to directly provide new PowerApps and Flow Connectors to the broad audience of Office 365 customers. With expanding Microsoft Graph data from across the organization, a great development platform with Azure and native integration of Flow with applications such as SharePoint—it is now much easier to create focused, tailored business processes.

Last fall, we previewed Actionable Messages in Outlook on the web, which enabled users to take quick actions such as approving an expense report or assigning a project task to a team member from within Outlook. We are rolling out Actionable Messages to more Office 365 users in Microsoft Teams as well as in Outlook 2016 for Windows (in Insider Fast), with new integrations from Salesforce, Freshdesk, Wrike and more. We are also announcing new Actionable Message tools for developers. Learn more about building Actionable Messages for Outlook and Teams.

Actionable Messages let you take quick actions right from a conversation in Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

New ways to connect Office users with the partner integrations that matter to them

Finally, we are adding several new paths to get apps and add-ins in the hands of users.

The Office Store is now connected to Microsoft AppSource, making it easier for organizations to find the most relevant apps and add-ins to their work. With Office 365 apps and solutions available in Microsoft AppSource, business users can stay connected to relevant business apps and partners in one place.

Centralized deployment of Office add-ins is currently available in preview, allowing administrators to automatically deploy add-ins to their organization, making selected Office add-ins directly accessible from the ribbon and other key user experiences within Office, with general availability coming soon. Today, we’re announcing that centralized deployment is supported on Office for Mac and Office Online, allowing you to deploy add-ins from the Office Store as well as via a set of deployment scripts.

Office at Build—new capabilities to make every user more productive

For developers, Office continues to grow across all dimensions, with new development scenarios in Microsoft Teams and across Office applications, increased depth and data access with Microsoft Graph, and new ways to reach users with applications and integrations. The best time to transform work in organizations is now. At Build and through our online videos, developers can explore all that is new with the Office platform. Sign up for the Office Developer Program to stay connected to updates across these APIs.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

The post Office at Build 2017—announcing new opportunities for developers appeared first on Office Blogs.

from Office Blogs http://ift.tt/2q6mt0T via IFTTT

[annadianecass]

eperi sets sights on the UK for rapid growth

eperi, the leading provider of cloud data protection (CDP) solutions, has announced expansion to the UK market to address cloud data protection in the wake of high Microsoft Office 365 adoption and the impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.  A recent winner of Microsoft Partner of the Year in the Open Source on Azure category, eperi hopes to capitalise on this trusted status to help UK businesses succeed in the cloud.

The eperi Gateway CDP solution helps pave the way to the cloud for many companies who have regulatory and compliance needs to secure their data in the cloud.  By focusing on data itself and providing the highest levels of encryption and tokenisation, eperi solutions allow users to securely process their data while rendering it unreadable, and therefore useless, to unauthorised parties and hackers.

“The eperi Gateway allows Office 365, Dynamics CRM and Azure users to process even highly sensitive data in the Cloud without taking risks, so the market potential, especially in the UK is vast, ” said Elmar Eperiesi-Beck, Founder and CEO of eperi. “All user data outside of the customer’s company is always encrypted or tokenised and because only the customer holds the keys, the data is unreadable even in case of theft. The technology satisfies strict regulatory compliance requirements, including GDPR, which deals with the movement and protection of data in and out of Europe.”

To manage demand and continue to build partner relationships, the company has also hired respected industry veteran, Ravi Pather as Senior Vice President of Global Sales to coordinate the worldwide sales and marketing activities of eperi, including direct sales and distribution via channel partners. Since 1999 Pather has been responsible for the successful marketing and sales strategies for various IT companies such as Voltage Security, Perspecsys and Blue Coat Systems. The focus of his work was cloud data protection and data compliance through encryption. His field of activity focused on leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) partners such as Salesforce, Service Now and Oracle.

“eperi has everything that is necessary for international success,” said Pather. “I am impressed by the technology leadership of the company, which makes the cloud secure for enterprises, as well as the highly ambitioned team and the existing partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce, T-Systems and others. I am thrilled to be able to facilitate the company’s journey in this crucial phase. ”

The eperi Gateway is the market-leading gateway solution that encrypts or tokenises data in cloud applications, databases, and files before they are processed. This also includes data in Salesforce or database software such as Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle. It allows organisations to encrypt Office 365 emails, tasks, calendars, and files for SharePoint and OneDrive before they are stored and processed outside the organisation. For the ever-increasing number of decentralised cloud products in all areas of corporate IT, the eperi gateway represents the most flexible and secure data protection solution possible. It is a simple way for companies to meet even the most stringent data protection laws.

The post eperi sets sights on the UK for rapid growth appeared first on IT SECURITY GURU.

from eperi sets sights on the UK for rapid growth

[martechadvisor-blog]

Is the Open Data Initiative as Good as it Sounds? MTA looks at this data alliance

Almost three months after teaming with Google, Facebook and Twitter to form the Data Transfer Project, Microsoft is back with Adobe and SAP for an Open Data Initiative. When it comes to the digital world, data is like currency. Those who rule data, rule the digital economy. It’s no wonder then that Microsoft decided to go for an Open Data Initiative along with Adobe and SAP. Through this project, the three giants of the digital world will be able to help companies reimagine customer experience management (CXM) by empowering them to derive more value from their data. Experts are calling this a ‘cloud war’ with Microsoft trying to take on Amazon’s AWS and Google’s GCP.

“The trilateral coalition between three of the world’s most influential enterprise software companies tackles one of the key challenges all enterprises face: siloed data,” writes Alex Atzberger, President, SAP Customer Experience, in his blog announcing the alliance, adding, “Only by unlocking and harmonizing data can companies increase the velocity at which they provide great customer experiences and solve customer needs in real time. Enterprises should be able to do this with the data that they control but the reality looks different.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that one should “take data and think of it as a renewable resource.” Adobe's customer experience platform, Microsoft's Dynamics 365, and SAP's C/4HANA and S/4HANA platforms will all be able to use a “one data model”, following the launch of the Open Data Initiative, which was announced on Monday, September 24, 2018 at Microsoft Ignite. Nadella said that the initiative aims to help brands overcome the hurdle of siloed data, thereby enhancing their customer experience.

A similar initiative by Google and Microsoft, along with Facebook and Twitter, announced in July 2018, allowed users to directly transfer their data from one online service provider to another. Titled the Data Transfer Project, the initiative was built on Google’s on-going work of data transfer between individual cloud data storage services, called Download Your Data. The Data Transfer Project permitted users to transfer their Google Drive files directly to Dropbox, Box, or MS OneDrive accounts.

While the Data Transfer Project was user-centric in approach, the Open Data Initiative is meant for brands. As Nadella clarified at the conference, while announcing the initiative, the Open Data Initiative is the “first, critical step to help companies achieve a level of customer and business understanding that has never before been possible. Organizations have a massive opportunity to build Artificial Intelligence-powered digital feedback loops for predictive power, automated workflows and improved business outcomes.” He added, “You have transaction data from SAP, behavioral data from Adobe; you use Microsoft cloud platform Azure to unify all this using a single data model.”

And what does this mean for data sharing, especially in the light of the strict privacy regulations post-GDPR? According to the single data model Nadella talks about, there will be a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. This unified data store will allow customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

The press release Microsoft shared post-announcement of the initiative, says that with the Open Data Initiative, companies will be able to:

1. Unlock and harmonize siloed data to create new value

2. Bi-directionally move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake based on their preference or needs

3. Create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact, while also helping to enable their security and privacy compliance initiatives

4. Build and adopt intelligent applications that natively understand data, relationships, and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partners

Both Nadella and SAP CEO Bill McDermott have emphasized that the Open Data Initiative allows the customer to have ownership and control of his or her data, enables AI-driven business outcomes, and is open and extensible.

David Raab, one of Martech Advisor’s category advisors, and founder of the Customer Data Platform Institute, writes in his blogpost about the Open Data Initiative. “Each of these vendors has multiple systems with data models that are highly tuned to specific purposes and are still typically customized or supplemented with custom objects during implementation. It’s easy to decide there’s an entity called “customer” but hard to agree on one definition that will apply across all channels and back-office processes. In practice, different systems have different definitions that suit their particular needs.”

“Standardizing on a common data model and having a universal Customer 360 ID is important, but such efforts have been historically insufficient. While common IDs and tight coupling of applications can solve some immediate problems, this creates new islands of data. It’s akin to removing data from one set of silos only to put it in another, bigger one,” says Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio.

Sood adds that the notion of customer 360 implies a comprehensive view of your customers. “This means that both legacy systems that utilize separate silos of customer data and new applications that operate across a universal customer data store need to be supported. Companies that bet only on the Open Data Initiative or Salesforce Universal Customer ID effort will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage and won’t be capable of delivering full customer 360 experiences.” He recommends an approach that leverages modern Master Data Management (MDM) technologies, uses a foundation of trusted, reliable data, manages relationships across all data types, including interactions and transactions, and includes analytics and machine learning (ML) to ultimately deliver the best customer experiences.

Raab adds that the announcement is important as a sign that enterprise software vendors are (finally) recognizing that their clients need unified customer data. “But it’s early days for the initiative, which may not deliver on its promises and may not promise what marketers actually want or need.”

Raab is right. We need to wait and watch how this pans out.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor