Late last year, Microsoft announced its acquisition of FieldOne, the dynamic company behind one of the most comprehensive field service management solution’s on the planet. Microsoft and FieldOne promised deep rooted integration and native functionality between their two systems that would effectively give each solution what it was missing. Fast forward to 2016 and It comes as no surprise that FieldOne Sky is now included in Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Professional license and above). The question becomes, what is it and who would use it?Essentially, FieldOne Sky provides extensions to Dynamics CRM to allow the creation and scheduling of work orders. It also provides a robust mobile application to record work completed by field technicians against said work order. Additionally, Sky allows for a high level of complex possibilities through extensive customization. This is fitting, as System Administrators of CRM can build upon the existing Cases, Contact, Account, Territories, and other CRM service entities.

If you’re like me, you use OneNote for everything from grocery lists to taking notes when meeting with customers. So you can only imagine my excitement when Microsoft announced that we can now upload OneNote notes to CRM. Once in CRM a user can link them to a customer, opportunity, case, record or whatever you choose.

Recently, we’ve been working with a customer who is in the middle of a “server move.” As one would expect, this process has been far from straightforward. Last week, when speaking with the customer’s IT provider they were shocked to hear that the CRM database was 150 GB. The IT provider was concerned that such a large database move would take considerable time and network resources that were scarce to say the least.