IPM Global is very pleased to announce that we have passed the Microsoft technical platform certification for IPM Project Management – “ISV Tested and Certified”.  But what does this really mean, many people ask – it essentially means peace of mind for our Channel Partners and End Users.  This technical test means that we have developed our application using best practice development  methods and that you can be confident that the product is solid and not “flakey”.  Microsoft have some very specific rules about how applications should interact with their platform.  These rules mean that we just can’t take shortcuts to get the job done, but instead we need to put in the hard yards to get it done properly so that the integrity of the platform (and therefore the application) are not compromised.

Our final Microsoft certification is just weeks away and this puts us in the highest certification bracket possible – CfMD (Certified for Microsoft Dynamics). 

So now that we have the official testing out of the way, it’s just getting down to more R&D and building in additional functionality as requested by our end users…

Regards.

Miree Le Roy
Partner Director – Channel Sales
mleroy@ipmglobal.net

This paper is designed to help you build a business case for a new integrated solution, form an effective project team, ask the right questions, identify the challenges involved and much more.

This paper outlines fresh ideas, strategies and tactics that will assist you in choosing an integrated vertical market solution for construction and project related industries. It covers the following areas:

The project game is quite a complex and risky one.  Everything revolves around business processes, from approvals,to meeting follow-ups, risk management, change management (variation) control, the list goes on.......  Typically, many of these processes are managed in one way or another, often externally via a spreadsheet, or an Outlook reminder, or quite frankly a piece of paper on the Project Manager’s desk.  And of course because every business, in fact every job, can be different, why should the software author be the one to determine what path a process should follow? 

Enter .....  the user defined Workflow Engine.  Because IPM is a Microsoft Dynamics XRM solution, it automatically assumes functions that are native to this environment – one of these being the workflow engine.  This is great news because what this means is that pretty much any business process can be defined electronically, and then triggered based on rules.   E.g. when raising a variation it needs to be routed to the client for approval and these sorts of approvals can be complex or simple depending on the project.  So there might be a simple one step approval or a more complex four or five step approval process.  Another example could be as simple as an overdue meeting task – a task has been assigned to a project team member but if they haven’t completed this within a particular timeframe, I need the system to tell me and also send them an automatic reminder.  Or maybe I have a high risk item on my Risks Register that I need something to happen on based on degree of risk.

These are all examples of workflows and as you will appreciate, each organisation will undoubtedly have different requirements, all nicely dealt with using the workflow engine inside IPM.

The Problem often is that many Project Management systems out there have not been designed for use of the Project staff – Crazy if you ask me. IPM was specifically developed to allow Project Managers and staff to be able to pick up and learn the software straight away. There is no reason why Project Management shouldn’t be this simple.

Thanks for reading this first blog entry as we are only getting warmed up – come back again  to read about my thoughts on Workflows
- Miree Le Roy