The Partner Channel Magazine Winter 2017
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Now that we've had a few months after the Dynamics 365 product launch, this issue takes a look at this concept in a variety of ways; Whether that's how you treat customers or implement tried and true best practices in marketing.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Now that we've had a few months after the Dynamics 365 product launch, this issue takes a look at this concept in a variety of ways; Whether that's how you treat customers or implement tried and true best practices in marketing.
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SALES<br />
DYNAMICS 365<br />
Needs<br />
More Cowbell!<br />
story by STEVE MORDUE<br />
illustration by SHAWN OLSON<br />
Hey, what do you think about that cool new Insights feature in Dynamics 365? Which<br />
one? Yes, it seems that the Microsoft cloud team has a new favorite word. On its own, or<br />
in conjunction with another word, “Insights” is all the rage and well on its way to being<br />
the most overused term in Microsoft’s history.<br />
WHAT THE HECK IS AN “INSIGHT”?<br />
A quick dictionary lookup returned “the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive<br />
understanding of a person or thing.” That does indeed sound quite useful. But while defined by the dictionary as a<br />
noun, Microsoft appears to have applied the term as a verb, and appended it to many things. To have a conversation<br />
about it, we must first clarify which particular “Insights” we are talking about. <strong>The</strong> other day, I was listening to a<br />
podcast of MVPs who spent a great deal of time attempting to clarify this very thing to each other. <strong>The</strong>y ended up<br />
in an uneasy détente, not entirely agreeing with each other’s definitions but content to agree to disagree. I thought if<br />
the MVPs are struggling, then the rest of the community definitely is. I will seek to clarify below, with no promises<br />
that I won’t make it even more unclear by the end of this article.<br />
THE WORLD OF INSIGHTS<br />
Before we try and drill into these, it probably helps to throw them all out on the table…or page. A Bing search,<br />
limited to Microsoft.com, returned more than 914,000 references for the term “Insights” (Google returned more<br />
than 4 million when limited to Microsoft.com; what’s up with that?). I am sure I am missing some, but here are the<br />
ones I found so far: Insights, Organization Insights, Customer Insights, Relationship Insights, Application Insights,<br />
Azure Insights, Azure Operational Insights, Domain Insights, Azure HDinsights, Power BI Quick Insights, Bing<br />
Image Insights…okay, you get the idea.<br />
Let’s drill into the ones that are relevant to Dynamics 365, with an eye towards you being able to differentiate and<br />
explain them to an SMB customer.<br />
18 WINTER <strong>2017</strong> | THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM
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