Cloud-based solution boosts growth opportunities for user group administrator Dynamic Communities

Befitting the name, Dynamic Communities has grown rapidly from a group of volunteers into the premier user group organization for Microsoft business solutions. The Tampa-based company fosters the development and growth of independent user groups that provide educational, networking and knowledge-sharing programs for companies using Dynamics 365, AX, GP, NAV, SL, Power BI and customer relationship management (CRM) products, plus communities for their channel.

CEO Andy Hafer says it was clear from the outset that the organization would need to transition into a professionally run enterprise to properly manage a growing, global user group community. In the beginning, Hafer says, “We managed member information and personnel with a lot of spreadsheets and just cobbled together a back office with that. As the user groups have grown, so has our need to organize information on behalf of our members.”

The organization’s first major project was a membership system built to handle contacts and accounts based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. An independent software vendor (ISV) was retained to customize Dynamics to handle memberships, portals and calendar activities. General accounting tasks were handled with QuickBooks. Hafer characterizes integration between the two systems as “kludgy,” and it wasn’t long before they needed a more sophisticated solution.

“Our organization supports a wide range of user groups in multiple locations, and each user group is organized and led by its own independent board,” he says. “They have their own branches and chapters … so the accounting needed to keep track of everyone’s standing in these user groups is pretty complex.”

When the decision was made to move from QuickBooks to Dynamics GP, Hafer says it was the perfect opportunity to migrate all operations to the cloud. “It was an easy decision. Back in my prior career as a CIO for two different companies, my preference was to let the people who know what they’re doing support the hardware and the network and patch all the software so that the company can focus on running their business,” Hafer says. Moving to the cloud and software as a service would accomplish that.

The pressing issue was that Dynamic Communities’ employees are part of a virtual team located in different cities. It was critical to the business for employees to have access from anywhere in North America. Once the decision was made to host its applications in the cloud, the company investigated what was available in the marketplace to meet its specific business needs.

A complete cloud suite

The implementation developed for Dynamic Communities by DXC Technology included three projects: a Dynamics CRM implementation, a Dynamics GP implementation and an Office 365 implementation. All three solutions would be integrated. Each was managed as a separate project with separate managers from the company and DXC.

Even though it was a complex process, Hafer says DXC did a good job of answering the company’s questions and tackling all of its concerns. DXC assigned a single point of contact who knew exactly what needed to be done. The consultant assigned to the project was experienced in cloud migrations and made sure everything was going as planned.

“Because we don’t have in-house IT support resources, we need a super support team. DXC fit all of our criteria. The folks there are very conscientious about making sure that all of their customers are supported well. After all of the research we did, DXC was the best price for the value of what they provide. That’s the bottom line on why we went with them,” Hafer says.

Ready, set, grow

With a fully integrated Microsoft suite now running on DXC Concerto, Dynamic Communities is well equipped to handle its present workload as well as future growth. Hafer says there are other significant benefits as well. For example, this solution ensures that data will be backed up from local hard drives and accessible from any device with an internet connection and browser, regardless of OS. That provides real peace of mind.

“Last week I had a meeting with one of our partners and witnessed someone accidentally dump a whole cup of coffee onto their laptop keyboard … so having all of this data in a bulletproof environment and managed the way that a large enterprise would without breaking the bank is a huge advantage to a small business like us,” he says.

An additional benefit of the DXC Concerto Cloud is that the company can be sure that all of its software licenses are legal. That’s important, Hafer says, because when you have a lot of remote employees in different cities running around with laptops, you can never be certain where each copy of Microsoft Office or other software tools came from.

“DXC is a great partner whose one-stop-shop service model fit us best,” Hafer says. “The greatest relief of all is that with DXC Concerto Cloud, I don’t have to invest in support and IT infrastructure for a long time.”