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We are pleased to officially welcome Dynapresse Marketing SA as an Advantage client.
Dynapresse is a Swiss company founded in 1985 in Carouge, near Geneva. It was created by the Payot-Naville Distribution group and is now owned by the 7Days Group.
Dynapresse serves French publishers (also German and English) and assists them in distributing their magazines in the Swiss market. Dynapresse acts as a hybrid (both an agent and a publisher),
with its key activities being to:
- Market and sell subscriptions from various French and Swiss publishers on the Swiss market
- Manage the subscriptions, or just handle the renewal and marketing efforts (as an agent), depending on the contract established with the publisher
- Purchase the issues from the publishers and/or invoice them for the commission and services provided
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Advantage Integration with Microsoft Dynamics
On the heels of the Advantage
integration with Salesforce.com comes the Advantage integration with Microsoft Dynamics. Dynamics is a line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications which can be cloud-based or onsite. Our integration is for the CRM application, as many of our clients use it for their customer and prospect relationship management.
The integration to Advantage provides a host of additional tools, including the capability of handling subscription-based products, membership, one-off products, and conferences and events. Advantage allows the different departments inside the organization to efficiently manage any or all of these actions.
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What's your favorite thing about Advantage? Send your answer to
me and I'll add it to the list, found
here.
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Spectacular Savings on Cider
Were you at one of the Advantage User Group meetings earlier this year in San Antonio or Brussels? If so, you remember that
Dan Heffernan (our Vice President and Chief Product Manager) announced a special promotion on the Advantage eCommerce platform,
Cider. But if you missed it, this offer is still good and here it is:
- FREE Cider license for clients with a license to the Web module who begin an implementation of our eCommerce platform (Cider) by December 31, 2017. (Clients who begin Cider implementations after December 31, 2017, will need to purchase a Cider module license.)
- Plus, for Cider implementations that begin by December 31, 2017, AdvantageCS will provide 60 FREE hours for theming, branding, customizing, or training, AND a 40% discount on all other Cider implementation services through December 31, 2018.
The list of clients starting up Cider implementation projects to take advantage of this special offer is growing. But there's still room for you so get your project started this year and save! Contact your account manager today to schedule a kickoff.
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SFG - AdvantageCS Partnership - Who Wants to Outsource?
In May we announced a new partnership between AdvantageCS and SFG (see press release
here). SFG is a service and technology company located in Big Sandy, Texas, with decades of experience serving organizations in such areas as order processing, fulfillment, call center, payment processing, and lettershop services. We at AdvantageCS have been seeing a growing trend over the last 10 years: publishers want to outsource some or all of these functions. Many prospects have already outsourced them and come to a software supplier like us expecting that we will provide the software platform and we have partners that will handle the rest.
Prior to this partnership, publishers had few choices if they wanted to outsource these functions but stay on Advantage. There are a number of service bureau companies that use Advantage, but many organizations don't want to lose the control that an "in-house" system provides, so are reluctant to fully outsource their systems and processing to a service bureau/fulfillment partner.
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Forgetting a Customer (the GDPR way)
by Phil Montgomery
Forget a customer? Why would you want to do that?
The answer is: "because the customer requested it."
Welcome to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was passed in April 2016 and goes into effect in May 2018. If you have any European customers, it does involve your operation.
Here's a one-line summary of the regulation: "The aim of the GDPR is to protect all EU citizens from privacy and data breaches..." The regulation is more than 260 pages long and is keeping a lot of lawyers and system security consultants very busy. It's mainly about strengthening your system security measures, documenting them and obtaining explicit support from your organization.
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Congratulations to Oxford University Press on a Successful Upgrade
by Cindy Twiss
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the largest university press in the world, with 6,000 employees worldwide. They have been an Advantage client since 2001 and today, 25% of their 800 million GBP in sales flows through Advantage.
OUP recently completed a major upgrade from 11r2 to 2017.0 with a project that spanned 8 months and 2,000+ hours. The move provides them with key functionality that they can leverage in their business, including a move to a .NET environment, up-to-date PA-DSS security, a Rest API, Omnistream and workflow events. System administration is easier with this rev, as is integration with other systems.
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Have you seen our videos?
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Data Ownership and Consent
It was hot and humid outside. I decided to stop by a coffee shop for some refreshments, but also to get myself out of the sweltering heat. I paid for my order and went on my merry way... or so I thought. Later that evening, while checking my email, I was surprised to find an electronic receipt from the coffee shop that I had visited earlier in the day. What perplexed me even more was that I had not provided my email address to the coffee shop, so then how did they have my email address to send me that receipt?
I decided to look into this some more, and discovered that a growing number of businesses now use third-party payment providers to manage their transactions, especially for credit cards. This means that completely different businesses might be using the same provider even though they are not related. And that is exactly what happened to me.
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Customer Relationships Are Moving On
by Phil Montgomery
Starting with release 17.5 of Advantage, you can work with customers in an Accounts and Contacts mode (which parallels how Salesforce.com structures customers). You can move your customer maintenance view into this mode, search for Account customers and then view the contacts at an Account, displayed in a lower pane.
This replaces---and substantially improves---the Location Customer feature. In that feature, Advantage automatically created a "location" customer, where now it creates an "Account" customer. A "location" customer was identified by a special address code; now an Account customer is identified by the customer Account? field set to Y.
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Hope Clinic Fundraiser A Success
AdvantageCS is family-oriented in more ways than one. In conjunction with being a family-owned company, we're proud to champion causes that are important to our employees. One of the ways we do so is through our annual drive for
Hope Clinic
, a local organization that offers free medical care and dental care plus a variety of social services to those in need.
Coincidentally, Hope Clinic was founded by the father of our Vice President & Chief Product Manager, Dan Heffernan.
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Check out our blog for the most up-to-date news and information about Advantage. New posts weekly!
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Editor: Cindy Mikol Twiss
3850 Ranchero Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48108 USA
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