in a prior life I was lucky to be considered a SME or subject matter expert on the development/customization of the Infor CRM product. I am/was lucky enough to have not only supported for my end customers but also worked inside on the product through the years with Sage, Swiftpage and Infor. I am lucky enough to continue my relationship with both Swiftpage (Act!) and Infor to this day and they continue to have faith in mine and my teams development skills to deliver new features to their platforms.

One of the products that I was instrumental in was the Infor XBar outlook integration. Through the years it has had additional features added including some more deep outlook integration that is outside of the core XBar implementation that is developed and maintained by a different developer I continue to be one of the only developers in the world that knows how to customize XBar.

There is nothing more that I would like to see is  Infor CRM to continue to grow and attract new customers/users/developers so I have resolved to provide how to’s in this blog to spread some knowledge and hopefully in some small part move the Infor CRM ship forward.

Mark 

To date I have not created any applications that would have needed to be posted to an App Store such as Apple, Google or Microsoft. The % to play was a great high wall to test and commoditize and application that may have limited reach. Since I am focused on business applications and CRM more specifically there is a smaller audience then would be a consumer focused application.

Well today Apple has announced that they are providing a small business rate on Applications that have less then 1 million in Sales. Given this I think I may now try to dip my toes in the mobile application pool and see if it can be a new revenue stream. Between the new amount of free time due to the Covid19 lockdowns and the reduced rates this may be the catalyst that I needed.

I will try to document my journey into the Mobile App world here. Wish me luck.

BITtelligent has been fairly singularly focused when it came to CRM software we sold and supported. For as long as we have been around and before our identity was closely tied to SalesLogix/Infor CRM. For so many years we have been in the ecosystem. Working as a partner, vendor, internal team member, and external contractor its all been a great time. There has been ups and downs with the product and relationship at various times but I can count it as the technology company and partnership that has had the second greatest impact on my life and career success. Only Microsoft has had a greater impact given the tools, contracts and life that has been built off the windows tech stack. I’d like to thank both companies for the success we have had. Its not always been easy but I am far more blessed then so many others. 

Now we continue to be very aligned to Infor, Infor CRM and now Infor CRM CE. Its a strong relationship with a great development team and I am looking forward in not only seeing what is coming next, but also working with the team to build what is coming next. BITtelligent renewed our partner agreements with Infor and look forward in continuing our rich history.

Interestingly enough as we are in the market we discover more and more that one size does not fit all. Each customer has a level of requirements, processes, users and budgets that can make Infor CRM prohibitive as a solution. For example moving to cloud with Infor CRM there is a minimum user count that can be made for a deal. This minimum does not count for on-prem licenses but that is indeed another conscious decision that would have to be made with regards to hardware costing.

To this end BITtelligent has signed up for 2 additional CRM products. Thought they are new to BITtelligent they are not new in the CRM landscape and have been proven and can be very cost effect for the SMB market. This week BITtelligent signed up to sell and support both BPM’Online and Act. Both platforms fit well into the skills and capabilities of the BITtelligent team and utilize technology stacks that we know well. Both products also have the same hosted/non-hosted capabilities giving the customer the ultimate control of where they would want their data to exist.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be going through the on-boarding process to ensure that we have the right knowledge and skills to provide the professional services and support to make all of our platforms winners regardless of the choices customers need to make.

If there are any questions about BITtelligent and our new relations with BPM’Online and Swiftpage please do not hesitate to send me an email. I’d be happy to discuss

Mark (mark.dykun@bittelligentdev.com)

This week the long awaited update for Infor CRM was released. The release contains quite a few fixes which in most case would make it a no brainer to upgrade to. That being said Infor has changed their support policy for cloud based customers to now disallow direct access to the CRM environment after 8.4.0.1 has been installed. As such the openness of creating reports and managing the environment, including promoting customizations will become more complex and require more effort from the partner, and customer CRM support from making changes to the environment. If you do need to create many reports, or in the midst of a larger development effort it may be in your best interest to hold off on the 8.4.0.1 upgrade to manage any impacts. If you have any question do not hesitate to reach out to your partner, or Infor Support for more clarification or to create a plan to lower the impact of the change. Now if you Infor CRM environment is not hosted in the cloud then moving to 8.4.0.1 is our recommendation.

My close friends at CustomerFx has created a better write up then I have, and I will point you there if you wish a little more detail https://customerfx.com/article/infor-is-making-changes-to-remote-infor-crm-cloud-access/