Disparate data is one of the biggest issues plaguing businesses today. While companies have many different types of data of their customers, they cannot easily access to make business decisions. Organizations are finding new ways to gather and utilize customer data. As customers become more informed, organizations need to understand the customer behavior to target and market them effectively. In today’s digital age, the more businesses know about their customers, the more competitive they will be.

Are you looking for a powerful, real-time customer data platform which unifies data for real-time insights? Microsoft has released Dynamics 365 Customer Insights business applications in October 2019.

Dynamics 365 Customer insights help you build a deeper understanding of your customers. The applications empower to unify customer’s data to gain deeper insights to enhance personalized experiences. Customer expectations are on the rise post COVID-19, and organizations must leverage AI and ML powered Customer Insights to support their business.

 

Top 5 Reasons to Use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

1. 1. Unify your customer data for real-time insights
      Customer Insights connects data from various transactional, behavioral, and observational sources with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create a 360-degree customer view. Customer Insights comes with a Power Platform allowing easy import of the data from different sources, including Power Apps, Power BI, JSON, Excel, Microsoft Access, Graph, and others. Microsoft has also created APIs for the most popular software on the market, which provides an easy method to connect these disparate data sources and unify data.
      Customer Insights uses a common data model to build unified customer profiles allowing your sales, marketing, and customer support to have a complete view of the customer journey. It uses AI/ML-driven recommendations to resolve customer identities.

 

1. 1. Identify customer trends and enhance intelligence using Microsoft Graph
      Customer Insights helps you recognize behavior and changes in customer trends before your competitors do. The built-in audience intelligence feature in Microsoft Graph helps you better understand and segment your customers based on their correspondences to brands and interests, letting you build rich customer profiles.

 

1. 1. Build personalized customer experiences
      Companies that deliver personalized and end-to-end customer experiences are taking their share. Dynamics 365 customer insights drive personalized engagement and customer-centric experiences and processes with AI across sales, marketing, customer success, commerce, or service to create engaging customer led-experiences using out-of-the-box, contextual customer insights and tailored customer profile cards infused into the business applications they already use every day.
      Customer Insights brings unified customer profiles and insights into your applications using a low code approach from Power Apps. It also extends the line of business experiences built on Power Platform.

 

1. 1. Key Audience Insights
      The audience insights feature in Customer Insights helps you build strong understanding of your customers.
      1. 1. Data Analysts/Admins
            1. Ingest customer data using pre-defined connectors.
            2. Leverage common data model to unify customer data.
            3. Uses Microsoft Graph to better understand and segment customers using brand affinity and interests.
            4. Identify potential issues and configure audience insights using Clicks-not-code configuration.
            5. Remove data silos and standardize customer data across different sources using ML and AI-powered recommendations.
      1. 1. Business users:
            1. Provides 360-degree customer data and insights.
            2. Provides real-time customer journey orchestration.
      1. Business analysts:
         1. Use predictive analytics to get a 360-degree view of the customer, specific to your business.
         2. Build customer trust with a unified and adaptable platform.
         3. Use out-of-the-box connectors and APIs to process the business insights.

 

1. Customer Feedback Integration
   Customer Insights incorporates customer feedback into your product profiles, providing quick insights on product ratings and customer reviews.

 

 

Conclusion

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps you build richer customer profiles by incorporating aggregated intelligence from first-party and third-party enrichments. Customer insights provide you with actionable insights into your customer data using out-of-the-box AI models or Machine Learning. It helps personalize campaigns and engagement to acquire high-value customers, accelerating transformation and growth.

Watch our on-demand webinar on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to learn how to pull together all your customer data and drive forward customer-centric experiences and processes.

If you are using another CRM solution besides Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has connectors to most of the popular brands on the market and provides you the same power and functionality. We can help you gain deeper customer insights, build custom apps with a low code development platform, Power Apps, to make your business more competitive than ever. Let us talk.

 

In today’s digital and automated age, enterprises are increasingly relying on software applications to automate project management processes. Like any other application or system, the emphasis is placed on improving data accuracy to generate reports and key performance indicators.

Cambay’s Project Management Information Solution, developed leveraging SharePoint’s modern framework, Power Automate, and Azure Functions, enables organizations to execute projects seamlessly through an intuitive and engaging interface. The mobile-enabled, multi-lingual PMIS provides a holistic view of all the projects delivering improved operational efficiency, employee engagement, and competitive advantage.

The solution enables enterprises to manage programs and projects on SharePoint Online – No additional investment for licenses, backup, and storage (except for Gantt Chart).

• Tasks – Task allocation to team members and tracking
• Approval – Phase gate approvals management
• Gantt Chart – Gantt chart view and dynamic management for effective collaboration or reporting.
• Risks – Project wise risk allocation and mitigations
• Issues – Allocate issues members and track for fixes.
• Dashboards – Resource wise projects, risks, and issues

ProPlanner Modules – The solution is easily customizable and has several modules to meet the different needs of the customers.

1. Program Management – Manages different activities of the projects enabling improved organizational efficiency.
   • Program wise list of projects
   • Program wise project schedule
2. Project Management – Assists project managers and teams to plan, track and collaborate and meet goals on time and within budget.
   • Schedule, Tasks, Risks, and Issues
   • Raid Logs, Change Register and Phase Gate Log
   • Gantt Chart, Dynamic adjusting timelines of tasks
3. Project Finance Management – Brings together planning, budgeting, reporting, and performance of the project to manage resources effectively and meet project development goals.
   • Budget, and Expenses
4. Dashboards – Provides key performance indicators and insights related to specific projects.
   • Project managers gets visual and graphical analysis of the project
   • My Projects, My Tasks, My Risks, and My Approvals
5. Reports – Provides several reports for stakeholders on how well the project is advancing towards its goal.
   • Portfolio Reports, TimeLine Reports, Millstone Reports and Task/Resources Reports.

 

Key Features

• Dynamic Configurations – Enterprise can configure their logo, any static text, and messages dynamically without any redeployments. Admins can configure language based static text that would require for their user’s preference.
• Multilingual Support – Enterprise users can configure the application in their preferred language that their enterprise configured to use without impacting other sites and users in the SharePoint Online.
• Azure CI/CD Integration – Code is fully integrated with Azure CI/CD and automated deployment.
• Built on SharePoint and Power Automate – Maximize adoption using the SharePoint applications you already use, including collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint Online.
• Fully provisioned and configured environment – Configure PMIS solution as per your team’s need and control how you manage your projects.
• Driving adoption and business value – Mobile First, Cloud First solution, pre-defined solution templates, reports empower your employees to deliver more.
• Mobile-enabled – ProPlanner, which is mobile-enabled, allows project managers and teams to manage their projects on the go. The solution helps project managers or relevant stakeholders provide the approvals on any mobile device. Besides, the solution offers stakeholders and executives to access the reports on mobile.

Our project management information system helps manage organizations more effectively with integrated project management, project tracking, and reporting. Want to learn more or need a demo of our solution and see how you can improve productivity and drive efficiency with project management solution, reach out to me at: sales@cambaycs.com

In the world of internal communications platforms, SharePoint reigns supreme. It is estimated that two-thirds of all enterprise organizations worldwide prefer SharePoint for internal communications, information sharing, business social, and resource collaboration. However, in 2019, Redmond Magazine published a Forrester Research article that revealed most of those enterprises are using legacy versions of SharePoint for managing complex business use cases and that a significant percentage of organizations have multiple versions deployed. This leads to resource contention and low user adoption of the platform.

Having an extensive SharePoint deployment, does not necessarily translate to a widely utilized deployment and as such it is essential to plan to drive successful user adoption and avoid the negative ROI of “shelfware.” Without an embracing user community, any solution can rapidly become irrelevant, with unhappy users going back to “what they know.”

 

Why do organizations think SharePoint user adoption is so difficult?

Why users resist: While companies see SharePoint as an efficient way to incorporate content management disciplines into their environments, workers are still driven by a legacy mindset that matured using shared folders, file shares, and mapped drives.

It’s not just the users: The lack of user adoption is attributed to lack of internal expertise, strategic planning, and user resistance to contributing and collaborating as the top three business issues associated with SharePoint.

 

Are there other obstacles to widespread adoption of the SharePoint platform?

Possible technical obstacles to adoption: SharePoint product managers and developers rely on user feedback to continuously improve the agility, reach, and functionality of the SharePoint platform. So, while we have focused on user adoption issues, we are equally concerned with technical product issues that may hinder adoption or limit usage.

More top issues with SharePoint:

• Issue 1: One size doesn’t fit all! The SharePoint Adoption Plan doesn’t work for all organizations.
• Issue 2: SharePoint training issues persist, like unclear, non-contextual roles and responsibilities, and specific technology gaps.
• Issue 3: Time lost duplicating work and searching for information across various systems.
• Issue 4: SharePoint is a product that often requires adaptive change on the part of users. Learning the capabilities of the product is one thing – changing entrenched collaborative practice is another altogether.

 

 

Driving Sustainable User Adoption

SharePoint offers a wide range of functionality to your business, making collaboration in different environments much easier and productive. It also provides extensive support for third-party integrations, custom development, and migration. Sustainable SharePoint adoption “on your terms” maximizes value with the least disruption to your organization in three key areas:

 

• Collaborate – Allowing people to work efficiently together instead of in silos drives innovation
• Manage – Managing work proactively instead of reactively reduces time to value
• Win – Build on enthusiasm over time by adding capabilities through successive iterations

 

 

5 Steps to driving sustainable user adoption:

 

• Secure stakeholder’s buy-in: The key idea is to know your shareholders, how they relate to the initiative you are trying to launch and how they can help you.
• Map to business value: Identify opportunities to map SharePoint capabilities to business goals and functions, thereby creating the best practices for enterprise consumption.
• Drive success: Pick a specific date or period to launch to allow ample time to prepare, build anticipation, and celebrate as a group. Develop proper communication and training before, during, and after the launch
• Facilitate purposeful collaboration: Focus on how your company will prioritize SharePoint initiatives into practice.
• Evaluate, adapt and iterate: Create a plan for long-term success to review achievements, maintain momentum, and adapt to new challenges.

 

A few techniques to increase user adoption:

 

1. Try to implement SharePoint in phases.
2. Training is a big part of user adoption. Identify Super Users and get them to actively use the new functionality, customize their own personal page, and provide peer training.
3. Design a flexible UI to increase acceptance.
4. Promote the adoption of new systems and solutions by evangelizing the technology through lunch and learns and incentivize users to change.
5. Monitor regularly – stay in touch with users. Course correct based on feedback!
6. Simplicity is key: stay away from things such as trying right away to identify the perfect link from 25 links available on the Quick Launch or Global menu of SharePoint.
7. Encourage an organizational culture that embraces continuous evolution.

 

I hope you find these tips and best practices effective in driving successful SharePoint user adoption in your organization. Cambay, a Microsoft Managed Partner is helping several enterprises to deploy and drive user adoption of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 toolsets. If you have also faced these issues and want to learn more about how we can help you succeed, get in touch with me at sales@cambaycs.com

In today’s world and the current corporate situation numerous enterprises have rolled out Microsoft Teams as a tool to improve collaboration, communicate effectively and manage their workforce remotely. The ease of use of using Microsoft Teams has resulted in incredible user adoption and perforation content stored in Microsoft Teams.

In this series of blogs, I will discuss the different aspects of rolling out MS Teams, managing them through their lifecycle and leveraging the best industry practices to ensure that you get the maximum ROI from your Microsoft Teams deployments.

The first key process in any enterprise that needs to be implemented to manage the Microsoft Teams deployment is how Microsoft Teams can be created or deleted. We will therefore cover that process and aspect here. By default, when Microsoft Teams access, creation and usage is turned on for all licensed users in your tenant. If you do not put guard rails around who can create and manage teams, people in your enterprise will ultimately end up with a mushroom cloud of Microsoft Teams with content spread across silos, no naming conventions or standards and users will struggle with finding relevant content within a very short period, leading to decreased productivity, end-user frustration and ultimately a poorly adopted solution.

Microsoft Power Platform has evolved into an established and comprehensive platform, and organizations using SharePoint Online workflows, can switch over to the Power Platform and have the same functionality available to them.

The next question that would naturally flow is well if we lock down the tenant and not allow users to create Microsoft Teams, we will need to provide a mechanism to let users request teams, manage team templates, and retire teams as well.

The most naturally evident business process automation tool is Microsoft PowerApps and Power Automate.

 

1. Run a script to prevent users from creating new Microsoft Teams.
2. Create an application using MS PowerApps to allow users to submit requests for new Microsoft Teams.
3. Create an approval process using Power Automate to process the requests.
4. Create an Azure Automation job to provision new teams based upon approval on the incoming request.
5. Create templates within your enterprise to provision new teams
6. Create a process to retire unused teams.

 

In the next blog, I will cover step 1 on how to design and publish our application to allow registered users in the enterprise to submit their requests. If you need more details, please feel free to connect with me at sales@cambaycs.com

Microsoft announced the Spring 2020 update for their Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic which brings some interesting new capabilities to this Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) service. In the early Fall 2019 release last year, one of the key issues was that the objects you create could not be easily administered and/or automatically managed within the Azure portal!

Microsoft recently branded Windows Virtual Desktop to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), which brings in new security and management capabilities under preview.

The Spring 2020 update marks a shift in the virtual desktop service towards full Azure integration that now allows you to leverage Azure portal’s built-in capabilities onto AVD as if it was just any other ARM-based workload. The new AVD management portal integration is fully built on Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which means that permissions can be managed via role-based access control (RBAC). All the AVD deployment items like host pools, workspaces, etc., are objects within your Azure subscription. This makes it easier to manage and automate your VDI environment. In the below table you will see the key differences of classic AVD (non-ARM) and AVD ARM-based via the Azure Portal:

Source: Microsoft

The ‘spring refresh’ of virtual desktop provides a best-in-class virtual desktop and app user experience on Azure. Microsoft’s AVD service provides desktop virtualization with multi-session capabilities, simplified management of hosts, applications, data, and enhanced security. It allows users to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Microsoft 365 applications for the enterprise, and other third-party applications by running them remotely in Azure.

Microsoft made this announcement a few months back, but some customers had already reacted early due to COVID-19 related challenges to their work environment causing them to possibly pilot, test and deploy the Fall 2019 update. If you are such a customer, please follow the Migration from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020 update guideline from Microsoft. This can drastically shorten IT’s timeline to scale the solution by not spending too many administrative cycles and in managing a PowerShell-based environment than an Azure-integrated one.

 

How is the market reacting?

Gartner expects that by 2023, 30% of all the on-premises VDI users will access a workspace in the cloud using a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution of some sort, and based on the yearly VDI Like A Pro survey, Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop is leading the pack with 26.76% of the market share as a sought after DaaS.

Source: Gartner

With remote working becoming more popular than ever before due to the current circumstances, it is unclear what the market will look like a few months from now, but existing climate conditions dictate that this trend will continue to grow.

 

What is the value proposition?

The value proposition for desktop virtualization is that it provides a mechanism to move from your existing CAPEX-based environment to an OPEX-based cost-optimized infrastructure. The economic benefit is that you get to avoid large upfront financial commitments on deployments and can match capacity to operational needs with the end goal to be able to align hardware, software and services with changing business needs.

Azure Virtual Desktop helps achieve superior economics from significant cost savings across infrastructure, licensing as well as effort. In terms of infrastructure, it provides Windows 10 experience via multi-session which provides a more cost-effective compute and storage structure besides flexible network provisioning. Also, much of the AVD management service cost may be already included in the licensing agreement you already own such as Remote Desktop Services (RDS), CALs with multi-session deployment, extending to Windows 7 desktops granting an additional three-year Extended Security Updates (ESU) if hosted in the cloud.

Azure Virtual Desktop Architecture – why its appealing!

The AVD architecture has three major components however, the primary appeal is the paradigm shift that Microsoft has adopted by taking over management of access, gateway, broker, database and diagnostic components which contributed to much of the administrative and deployment overhead associated with traditional Remote Desktop Services (RDS). The key benefit is that the Microsoft-managed control-plane is a fully redesigned infrastructure that leverages native Azure platform services to scale automatically which enables customers like yourselves to focus on what matters – user endpoints on the client-side (on-prem or mobile) besides, hosts and applications on the server-side (in the Azure cloud).

Source: Microsoft

A simplistic use case of interaction from a remote desktop client to an Azure hosted server session is defined below:

 

1. A user launches RD client which connects to Azure AD, Azure MFA, user signs in, and Azure AD returns token.
2. RD client presents token to Web Access, Broker queries DB to determine resources authorized for the user.
3. A user selects resource, RD client connects to Gateway.
4. Broker orchestrates connection from host agent to Gateway.
5. RDP traffic now flows between RD client and session host VM over connections 3 and 4.

 

Some key takeaways that are worth looking at again as you evaluate Microsoft AVD as your next plausible VDI solution that resonate with the cost savings associated with infrastructure, licensing and labor stated earlier are listed as follows:

• ONLY Windows 10 enterprise multi-session user experience.
• MOST of your existing Windows licensing can likely carry-over.
• NO VPN client/connection needed OR firewalls ports to open.
• BYOD clients like desktop, HTML5 browsers, iOS, Android, etc.
• SINGLE pane of glass to manage your hosts, apps, and users.

 

Azure Virtual Desktop Migration – “The Cambay Way”

Cambay is a Microsoft Managed Services Partner (MSP) and early adopter of VDI solutions and has developed a proven and tested process to help you migrate your workloads to AVD. The below diagram showcases our process at high level:

• Discovery and Scope Definition: Identify, evaluate, and document workloads in your organization to be migrated. You can use Microsoft Azure templates and/or PowerShell scripts and we help you with that.
• Change Control and Communication: Create a Change Management Plan – Highlight release dates, users impacted, training plan – we will help you define these. Create a Communication Plan – Share information repeatedly through lunch and learns and other office activities. Leveraging our predefined templates and industry experience, we will help you develop a robust communication plan.
• Migration Planning: Create and document a prioritized inventory: compute servers, user profiles, storage sizing, network connections, identity requirements besides other resources that you may need for migration. We shall use our in-depth knowledge and prior project experience to help your migration planning.
• Develop and Test: Leveraging best practice models, we can develop and scale the solutions using Microsoft AVD.
• Execute and Decommission: Deploy to production, leverage your change management plan to communicate to business stakeholders, convert legacy infrastructure and workloads to read-only, and retire after postproduction support, that our experienced engineers can help you manage.
• Optimize and Govern: Create and document a governance plan that will maximize your ROI as it is critical to successfully sustaining the new platform. We have implemented such projects and can customize per your needs.

As a trusted advisor to numerous customers out there and a leading Microsoft Managed Services Partner (MSP), we at Cambay Consulting want to share some of our strategies to implement a truly innovative and world-class Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. We recently hosted a webinar where we showcased how we are helping our customers migrate their workloads to Azure Virtual Desktop. To learn more, view the on-demand webinar recording by clicking below:

If you are planning to migrate an existing VDI service and/or curious about the grassroots solution using Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, please reach out to us sales@cambaycs.com for an assessment of your as-is environment and how we can help you move to your target to-be environment. The offerings will be customized to help you accelerate your digital transformation.

Microsoft recently announced the end of life for the legacy SharePoint 2010 workflows. Organizations will have to now decide on migrating their complex business processes from the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine to a modern and capable solution.

Microsoft made this announcement a few months back, but enterprises reacted late due to challenges in their work environment and COVID-19 causing IT departments to forestall any new projects. This has resulted in a shortened timeline for IT departments to find an appropriate solution. It can cause the IT professionals and decision makers to make reactive, instead of strategic decisions in the selection of a toolset and a migration strategy; a mistake that they would want to avoid at all costs.

As a trusted advisor to numerous enterprises and a leading Microsoft Managed partner, we wanted to share our Point of View and migration strategy to implement a truly innovative and world-class business automation toolset to successfully replace and retire SharePoint 2010 workflows.

 

What is being retired?

From a technical perspective, support for workflows written on the SharePoint 2010 engine is ending.

This has implications for customers still using SharePoint 2010 On-premise workflows in their SharePoint 2010/2013 environments. Your workflows in your on-premise 2010 or 2013 environments will continue to work: in unsupported mode. For example, if you plan to deploy a patch on your on-premise server and a DLL gets updated, and your 2010 workflows stop working, Microsoft will not support you. Additionally, if you had leveraged a third-party toolset like Nintex to build workflows using the 2010 workflow engine, those workflows could potentially stop working. For customers who migrated to SharePoint Online and were using SharePoint 2010 workflows, Microsoft, as of Nov 1, 2020, will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants. If you are running workflow automation in SharePoint Online using the SharePoint 2010 workflows, you will be impacted, and your workflows will stop working.

Note that SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013-based workflows will continue to be supported for on-premises SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 Server platforms until 2026.

 

What is not being retired?

SharePoint 2013 workflows are being deprecated but will remain supported. This means SharePoint Online users can continue using SharePoint 2013 workflows, but there will be no new development of that feature. It is also expected that SharePoint 2013 workflows will potentially be retired in the next 12-18 months.

 

Power Platform! The next-Gen Business Automation Engine from Microsoft.

Microsoft Power Platform has evolved into an established and comprehensive platform, and organizations using SharePoint Online workflows, can switch over to the Power Platform and have the same functionality available to them.

The Power Platform has three major components,

 

1. The PowerApps component, where users can design Canvas Apps and Model-Driven Apps in an easy to use WSYWIG editor for form design, etc.
2. Power Automate component helps building workflows to implement complex business process automation.
3. Power BI component helps build reports and dashboards for data visualization and business intelligence purposes.

 

Citizen developers can develop no-code or low-code solutions connected with Line of Business Applications and completely transform the enterprise landscape. Gone are the days where an IT department had to spend months solving complex business problems with technologies that needed specific development skillsets. End users can be empowered to deliver this capability to solve most of their specific business needs in a short period of time maximizing ROI.

The other real advantage of deploying and building applications in PowerApps is that they are platform agnostic, and this cross-functional capability allows users to build applications to scale that can evolve as the IT landscape changes. With multiple users working from home on unmanaged devices for example, this ability can add real business value.

SharePoint Workflow Migration Approach – The Cambay Way

Cambay, a Microsoft Managed Partner and early adopter of Power Platform has developed a proven and tested process to help you migrate your workflows to PowerApps. The below diagram showcases this process at a high level:

• Discovery and Scope Definition: Identify, evaluate, and document the workflows in your organization that need to be migrated. You can use PowerShell scripts and we can help you with that.
• Change Control and Communication: Create a Change Management Plan – Highlight release dates, users impacted, training plan – we will help you define these.
  Create a Communication Plan – Share information repeatedly through lunch and learns and other office activities. Leveraging our predefined templates and industry experience, we will help you develop a robust communication plan.
• Migration Planning: Create a prioritization inventory: Document sites, actions, connectors, data sources, and triggers that you need. Cambay will use its in-depth knowledge and prior project experience to help you migration planning.
• Develop, and Test: Leveraging the citizen developer model, we will scale and develop your solutions in PowerApps and Power Automate.
• Execute and Decommission: Deploy to production, leverage your change management plan to communicate to business stakeholders, convert legacy application sites and workflows to read-only, and retire after postproduction support, that our experienced engineers can help you manage.
• Optimize and Govern: Create and document a governance plan that will maximize your ROI. It is critical to sustain and maintain the new platform successfully. Cambay has implemented many such plans and can help customized one for your needs.

If you are planning to migrate your legacy SharePoint 2010/2013 workflows to Power Platform to boost business productivity to get more done by giving everyone the ability to automate organizational processes, please reach out us sales@cambaycs.com. We can help customize the offerings as per your business need and help accelerate business transformation.

The productivity of software development teams has been one of the most critical challenges faced by enterprises in modern times. Microsoft leveraged 15 years of its learnings, tools, and investment into this product – Azure DevOps – and rolled it out for businesses, big and small, to enable developers to ship superior-quality software faster.

DevOps allows enterprises to accelerate delivery while still delivering reliable products & services. DevOps is about bringing people together through shared common goals, increased collaboration, and a focus on improvement.

Launched in October 2018 by Microsoft, Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services launched in 2006) is a SaaS platform that offers a full spectrum of DevOps toolchain for building and deploying software. It also integrates with many available tools on the market and has successfully addressed the specific needs of many customers worldwide, irrespective of their language, platform, or cloud. Azure DevOps is rich with inbuilt functionality that empowers teams in effective project management by automating their workflows.

Azure DevOps enables the integration, testing, delivery, and deployment of applications and services to any cloud (using Azure DevOps Services) or on-premises (using Azure DevOps Server). It integrates with other widely used services like Campfire, Slack, Trello, and more.

Azure DevOps Components

 

1. Azure Boards: Deliver value to your users faster using proven agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams.
2. Azure Pipelines: Build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously.
3. Azure Repos: Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management.
4. Azure Test Plans: Test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools.
5. Azure Artifacts: Create, host, and share packages with your team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click.

 

 

Azure DevOps Pipelines

• Classic: Helps you create and configure your build and release pipelines in the web portal with the classic editor. Push your code to the version control repository, which triggers your pipeline & runs tasks such as building/testing code.
• YAML: Create a Change Management Plan – Highlight release dates, users impacted, training plan – we will help you define these.
  Create a Communication Plan – Share information repeatedly through lunch and learns and other office activities. Leveraging our predefined templates and industry experience, we will help you develop a robust communication plan.

 

Conclusion:

Microsoft Azure DevOps has everything you need to build and modernize your applications with speed. It supports agile methodology enabling reduced release management costs, improves reliability and team productivity, reduced time to market. It also integrates seamlessly with other cloud providers and tools.

Explore our whitepaper on “Azure DevOps Best Practices” to learn how DevOps simplifies and accelerates continuous delivery of products.