Featured Discussion posted on the Dynamics Elite Group on LinkedIn

Hi all 

my thanks to Jade Banham for the invitation. Since i am not a practicing Dynamics professional at the moment, why am i here. 

i have been associated with products like Navision from the mid 90's before it became part of Dynamics. Plus we have built our own very successful ERP solutions. So we understand the needs of this market very well. 

My current love affair is with Groove / Workspaces, and i am the MVP for Groove and a founding partner of the development community from 2001. 

There is a reason for my enthusiasm for Groove because it resolves the single bissgest problem i faced in 20 years of ERP. How to get real time data across multiple locations integrated seamlessly into the backend, and do this with 100% reliability and 100% security. Top that with no need for special servers, replication engines, special communications, IT administration or any other overhead and at a cost that the smallest factory can afford. 

In the last 2 years we have built a number of solutions from Point of Sale to an ERP for Garment manufacturers, based on Groove and they provide a level of efficiency and reliability not matched by an distributed server based systems. 

More, Groove itself out of the box makes a wonderful customer support tool to create interactive help desks and has loads of other features, that give customers that warm nosed feeling, and ensure satisfaction. 

But we as a company don't want to be in the ERP implementation space at this point in time - requires too many people - so I have been seriously thinking of how we can use groove to add that last mile capability and other value, to the Dynamics range of solutions, from Navision to CRM or whatever. 

Using Groove Forms to capture data from the smallest factory in Tirupur, to goods movement across warehouses across india, is so simple it can be deployed in days, with full data validation at source of entry, something even most SAP extension / Dynamics tools cannot do, 

Groove is a complement to any existing Dynamics implementation and i would be happy to share ideas on how best this can be done. Typical ROI is less than 3 months. 

rgds 

ashok

some thoughts i just shared with a colleague at MS

what can i say, you should be using Groove :-) But then i am a believer, not in a product as much, as a way of working. And i could say the same of the groove team and partners i have known for a long time now.

So much else happening is very similar, from Sharepoint, to Mesh to Vine and Azure - a way of computing where sharing of information is natural. Groove was the precussor, way back in 2001, and the reason why Bill Gates brought Ray Ozzie to take over from him.

It's Ray's philosophy that excites us, as expressed in the product. He was determined to produce something that was disruptive, that changed the way people did things, like the Fax or the Cell Phone. Those of us who have worked with it for 8 years believe he achieved that.

At a cost of < 125 $ you get a product that installs and is up and running in minutes, takes less than a day to get the hang off, has no real settings etc that it expects you to twiddle, works with no IT admin or infrastructure support .... i could go on. Groove changes traditional IT equations.

Truly a remarkable platform and concept, It's rebranding today as Sharepoint workspaces is sad in some ways yet apt in others. We have always wanted a true thin client access to our Groove data (don't always have a laptop around) and SP could now well be that. :-)

Won't burden you here with more info here - I have a couple of presentations if you are interested as well as some groups here where we share some of the really powerful stuff you can do with groove. mail me at apwizard@usa.net

rgds