Technology Solutions & IT News Blog | FMT Consultants

Or watch your business split quickly Dole Experiences Cybersecurity Incident – The Dole Food Company recently reported a ransomware attack that split business operations, leaving customers without some of their favorite Dole products due to US-based production shutdowns. Were bananas affected? Not this time because they are grown in equatorial regions, but salad kits were! Why are salad kits important? Understanding salad kits helps us understand how an intentional ad integrated approach to technology and Cybersecurity makes a big difference in business continuity. Let’s peel it back… CNN reports that Dole uses Fortinet security products for their email security platform. Unlike their salad-in-a-bag strategy, Dole chose to separate email filtering outside of their native email platform. They went to the technology grocery store and bought the individual components to make the same salad they tell their customers to buy in a kit. Some companies really like this approach…it can work […]

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL OUR LIVES!?! Microsoft has been quietly rolling out a new feature that I’ve been longing for – for quite some time. What feature is that? It’s ‘Reactions’ in Outlook! Reactions in Microsoft Outlook - Microsoft Support What does this feature do? What problem is it trying to solve? Organizations get email heavy… very email heavy. Entire conversations take place over the course of email, even though we all know that budding conversations are best suited for Microsoft Teams. The Harvard Business Review told us this way back in 2015 when they said: “while email is great for recaps, updates, and other informational exchanges, there are many situations where it’s not the best form of communication.” Old habits die hard and so people routinely reply back to emails with brief sentences saying ‘Thanks!’ or ‘Great idea! I’m looping in Darren for his input.’ Chatting platforms did […]

Getting more out of NetSuite can be both practical and powerful. A point of struggle for many organizations is appropriately defining approval processes within NetSuite, when our built-in option appears to just be a chain of employee:purchase approver and does not accommodate more nuanced approaches that may be necessary for larger organizations. One of the easiest ways to achieve these ends with SuiteFlow is to create an approval workflow based on a financial or custom segment that we can associate with the record. By predicting the approval logic on a segment, we can create a clear chain of approval based on a variety of factors that includes different levels of approval, alternate approvers when the original approver is out of the office, and many other permutations. This kind of SuiteFlow is also particularly beneficial because rather than stating a named user in the workflow, we can manage the list of […]

Rapidly growing NetSuite Users are sometimes surprised to learn of NetSuite’s Service Tiers.  These levels are based on transaction volumes and data storage and user counts.   It is helpful to know about and plan for these levels before you may need to upgrade or scale your NetSuite account to meet the needs of your business. NetSuite has 4 Service Tiers: Standard, Premium, Enterprise, and Ultimate. WHY UPGRADE MY Service TIER? There are 3 specific areas that determine whether your enterprise may be required to move from one NetSuite Service Tier to the next. The first area to look at is the number of full users in your NetSuite account. If your NetSuite user counts exceed the maximum quantity allowed for your Tier, this will drive a Tier Upgrade.  NetSuite will inform you if the number of licenses on an account is getting close to the maximum allowed for the Service Tier. […]

Fondly referred to as “Delores” by Salesforce professionals, the Declarative Lookup Roll-Up Summaries (DLRS) managed package was created by Andrew Fawcett, CTO of FinancialForce.com to make your analytical dreams come true. The package is an open-source community application that is constantly improving with each new release. This powerful tool allows the declarative creation of roll-up summaries between loosely related objects with lookup relationships, rather than the usual requirement of a master-detail relationship to create roll-up summary fields.Salesforce roll-up summary fields allow users to aggregate and summarize data across relationships. In the native version of Salesforce, roll-up summary fields can calculate and display the sum, minimum, maximum, or count of a set of related detail records on a parent record. This can be useful for creating a snapshot of important information, such as total sales or the number of open cases, on a parent account or opportunity record. Roll-up summary fields […]

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about many changes in the professional world. One such change was an increased focus on remote work and collaboration. Microsoft responded to this change by accelerating their rollout of Microsoft Teams – the Modern Workplace successor of Skype. As remote work became a necessity, the reality was that many companies were not equipped to handle such a transition. Bringing people together when offices were closed and people were spread out was a problem! Many companies that had previously not practiced the concept of Modern Work were compelled overnight to invest in now necessary solutions. Again, Microsoft responded to this need by allowing Teams to be deployed swiftly through trial licenses. This strategy drove adoption by giving companies the option to do test deployments in their own environments - a great way to help ease into what was an abrupt transition due to necessity. In creating these […]

December 2022 – Southwest suffers from a major operational emergency, leaving thousands of customers stranded during holiday travels. Was weather to blame for part of this catastrophe? Sure, but one could argue that Mother Nature blessed all airlines with the same challenge. So what was the differentiator that CNN reports caused Southwest to cancel 86% of all cancelled flights in the United States? IT infrastructure or a lack thereof! Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, the vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, Capt. Mike Santoro, said the problems facing Southwest were the worst disruptions he'd experienced in 16 years at the airline. He described last week's storm as a catalyst that helped trigger major technical issues. "What went wrong is that our IT infrastructure for scheduling software is vastly outdated," he said. "It can't handle the number of pilots, flight attendants that we have in the system, with our […]

What are you waiting for? The clever sales folks at Microsoft state that Microsoft 365 Business Premium is “One solution to run your business securely from anywhere”, but is it true? Let’s check the boxes and find out! Office Applications M365 Business Premium includes full featured web versions of Microsoft’s best in class productivity suite AND the desktop versions as well. Work how you want, where you want. What competitor offers this? Cloud Storage 1 Terabyte of integrated storage to save all your work? Yes, please and it’s included - no need to pay for another 3rd party solution like Box, Dropbox, etc. Email and Calendaring Business class services here! These did not grow from consumer products. You have enterprise grade email included and integrated with the rest of the suite that keeps your team running. Instant Messaging and Online Meetings All included again. Microsoft Teams provides this functionality so […]

Are you like most organizations, today? Compelled towards a hybrid workplace with a disconnected workforce? This has allowed your remote workers to add their own devices to your organization’s IT ecosystem. This has introduced a unique challenge with most organizations grappling with the reality of how difficult it is to manage endpoints. Intune offers a modern solution enabling you to manage devices from anywhere. This Microsoft cloud-based platform eliminates the traditional management constraints by allowing you to maintain these endpoints with Windows Autopilot. Imagine managing your endpoints by simplifying device provisioning and offering the ability to give new devices to end-users as the need arises without having to build or maintain a custom operating system image. Intune can also manage policies, profiles, and security settings, making Windows endpoint management relatively more straightforward. What is Windows Autopilot? Windows Autopilot includes a set of technologies you can leverage to set up and […]

The Salesforce platform has revolutionized the business world by increasing revenue, ending manual processes, and centralizing data management. But Salesforce’s full power is still dependent on human interaction with the platform. Low Salesforce user adoption leads to low/negative ROI, missed opportunities, and wasted resources. To avoid these five pitfalls, follow these five strategies to increase Salesforce user adoption: 1. Prioritize and Simplify Salesforce Projects – User adoption starts at the beginning of a Salesforce project. When a project is initialized, each stakeholder group often has different priorities. Leadership stakeholders may prioritize large-scale projects that affect the entire organization. User stakeholders may want projects that will improve their day-to-day work life. To ensure project success and high user adoption, prioritize initiatives that are manageable, achievable, and scalable. In addition, try to keep projects as simple as possible. If projects are complicated or too much of a leap, there is a risk […]

As many of us are aware Microsoft is deprecating the use of “basic authentication” in Exchange Online. This change started October 1, 2022 and affects many of our GP clients who are using the emailing function in GP or other ISV products. Navigating the impact of this change has been difficult for many of our clients due to the complexity of the environments involved, software layers included, and version cut offs for various products. FMT has leveraged our extensive experience and knowledge to best assess each client’s environment with some recommended options below. Each of these options have a cost, consulting services or user’s time, and timeline associated. This communication will need to have a follow-up call to dive into the details of each option and choose the best path moving forward for your business needs. FMT is a top Microsoft Partner and is best positioned to provide recommendations. To […]

Do you have trusted connections between your NetSuite, Salesforce or Microsoft systems throughout your supply chain? If not, you are missing out on an opportunity to strengthen your business, decrease costs, and improve value. Your disconnected systems increase expensive manual processes and limit access to timely, accurate and immediately useful information. Isolated information creates disconnected decision making. How do you solve this challenge? Integrate your systems. Build the bridges! Integrations improve productivity and efficiency when they join two places that complement each other data or process wise.  Integrations have a positive economic impact! When bridging two systems together and integrating them, what is your keystone? Merriam-Webster defines a keystone as ‘the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place’. What keystone should you have between your systems to support each platform? Key business processes like moving invoice information between the ERP and the […]