Move over, Slack. Microsoft finally has a live chat environment, and it's the final brick in the wall of Microsoft Office product dominance.

We know you’ve been thinking about it. You're a small to medium-sized business, and you've had an out-of-the-box QuickBooks solution for years. You also have one legacy system for inventory management, another one for payroll, something else for sales, and so on. You know there's a lot of duplication in these systems, and it takes some effort to integrate everything together. 

What is the number one goal of business-centric software? Improving business productivity.

Improving the productivity of your business affects every department.

Finding the right partnership to help you transition to Microsoft Dynamics can make the difference between a successful implementation and feeling like you made a big mistake.

Microsoft SharePoint wants to be the communications center for your business. Microsoft has created a powerful family of products designed to drive the small to mid-size business toward success in a competitive marketplace:

Dynamics GP Integration Manager is a handy little tool that was designed to allow you to load data into GP manually. You can add data from an XML, text file or database. It's an excellent add-on that helps reinforce data integrity. We like the Integration Manager because you don’t have to be a data scientist to use it—it’s a graphically enabled interface with some cool drag-and-drop features that allow even the “non-geeks” in an office to use it efficiently.

Managing operations is an increasingly challenging and complex process fraught with changing customer dynamics and increasing competition. One of the greatest benefits of the Microsoft suite is that they offer affordable software that streamlines all of the functions in your business. Adding ecommerce to Microsoft Dynamics GP integrates all business functions—from back-end inventory to front-end customer relationship management—in order to improve organizational efficiency and give you a competitive marketplace advantage.

Even the most conservative enterprises are partnering with Software as a Service (SaaS) providers for everything from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM). In fact, Gartner predicts the public cloud services market will grow from $175 billion in 2015 to $246.8 billion in 2017.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, the social media networking tool for business professionals, in December 2016. The $26 billion deal was received as good news; analysts say the move brought together the number one name in office software with the top professional networking site in the world. Most agree there were clear benefits for both companies.

 Let’s review some of the practical implications of the merger, including how Microsoft Dynamics ERP customers will likely benefit from the interoperability of these two industry icons.