Introducing Popdock from eOne Solutions (Video)

Popdock by eOne Solutions integrates all data from your on-premise and cloud applications like Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central into a single app – in real time. Watch the below webinar to see it in action:

Whether you’re an accountant, salesperson, business leader, marketing guru or business owner, Popdock will display the data you need to do your job more efficiently.

Webinar Transcript:

Melissa: Hi, and welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. So, today we have eOne Solutions here we have Michelle and Chris, and they’re gonna be presenting about their new solution in Popdock. Hi, guys.

Michelle: Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having us.

Melissa: Oh, thanks for joining us.

Michelle: All right, so I think we’ll jump right in. So my name is Michelle Aune, and I’m a partner Development Manager here at eOne. And with me today I’ve got Chris Dew he is the brains behind our newest product offering called Popdock. So I’m gonna go into a real brief PowerPoint presentation to tell you about the five pillars of Popdock. And one thing I wanna point out is we’ve got the chat window open. So if you have questions as we’re going along, don’t hesitate to ask those of us. All right, so an agenda for today. What is Popdock? Then Chris will write a quick demo, and he’ll follow-up with some key takeaways for you all.

So first and foremost, what is Popdock? Popdock is an end user query tool that allows you to access your data from any system in real time. It allows you to visualize that data, sort it, and group it. So Popdock puts data in the end users’ hands and allows them to see and self-serve with that data where and when they need it.

So here’s an example, as you see on my screen of adding those filters to Popdock data to use that data as you need it. One cool thing about Popdock data, it’s always in real time. So this sets Popdock apart from tools like Power BI or SSRS, in that no data warehouse is needed. Everything you see in Popdock is in real time, all the time. As you can see my screen now, I’m showing you how to add a connector. What’s great about this it doesn’t require developer. This is just an end user popping in that connector. And that data is then immediately available.

So the next thing I wanna talk about is what data. You know, a lot of times we talk to customers, and they think it’s only Microsoft data. But with Popdock, that is not the case. So on my screen you can see the logos of some of the more common data sources that we’re seeing. But we have more than 50 pre-built connectors. And we’re always adding current or new ones to that list.

So next, I wanna talk about where that data can be displayed. And when we see anywhere, we really mean that. So we could take our Popdock widget, and take data from any of those systems and display that data inside in an application where your users are working every day. So as you can see here, this is Dynamics 365 for Sales, and embedded in it are orders from an ERP system. Vice versa, here is GP. And we’ve got users that can see account information from Dynamics CRM or Dynamics 365 for Sales, right in GP, without having to leave that ERP system.

And as I said earlier, Popdock isn’t limited to Microsoft products. Here is our Zendesk widget. And so from here, we’re helping our support agents. They’re able to see from within Zendesk on that Popdock sidebar information from Dynamics 365 for Sales. So we have that app on the Zendesk marketplace and we’re working with Zendesk partners worldwide.

So the next one I wanna talk about is Microsoft Teams. And this is one of our newest widgets that we built. And we’re really excited about it. Because it’s just so powerful. As you can see here, we’ve embedded Popdock right within a Teams channel. Oops, go back for one second. So from within this Teams channel, you can see data from anywhere, be it an ERP system, CRM, a credit card processing system, project management tool, etc. So there are really a lot of uses for putting that data inside of Teams.

Finally, the last thing I wanna talk about is actionable. So it’s important to note that we’re able to do something with the data in Popdock. Well, it’s not data integration. It’s visualization. But it is actionable. As you can see here, one of Dynamics 365 Sales account, and I’m looking at invoices. If I’m licensed appropriately, I can open up that invoice in Business Central, or GP, or whatever ERP system, and do something with that invoice. So now, I’m gonna hand it over to Chris Dew and he’s gonna give us a demo of Popdock.

Chris: Okay, so one second, I’ll flip it over here.

Michelle: I’m trying to make you the presenter, Chris. Does it pop out?

Chris: Yeah, no, it’s popping up.

Michelle: Okay, good.

Chris: It’s popping up. Just get the right monitor. Okay, I think we’re gonna take you on a little journey here. And I’m gonna start by logging right into Popdock to do this. So let me get the right account. And at its core, Popdock is this incredibly powerful query engine that allows us to connect to basically any data, as Michelle just said. But not only connect to it, it allows us to expose that data wherever we need. So right now, I’m starting by showing you that right inside of our web application, we can access whatever data may need to be whether it’s Business Central, Dynamics 365, Customer Engagement, or CRM, or external CRM systems, to the Microsoft channel or again even if it’s maybe some on-premise type of solutions that are like GP or even something stored in a custom SQL database, we can connect to all of those things.

And so I’m gonna start by just jumping into…you can see here up at the top, I have a lot of different systems. I’m connected to everything from, like I said, CRM, to GP, to Business Central. And so, if I go ahead and click on, in this case, some Business Central data, we’re pulling live, like Michelle said, this is pulling live from this Business Central system. And so in this case, it happens to be pulling… Well, that looks interesting. Let me switch to a different list here.

Okay, we’ll just pull the customer list. I’m gonna show you a couple of really cool things though, after this comes up that, like I said, this is a live connection to your system. So this is not something that’s sitting around in the data warehouse. It’s not a day old, it’s not hours old, this is a live connection. So sometimes when… Well, that Business Central, let me switch to a different Business Central, my bad here.

Okay, for a time, I’m just gonna switch to GP for a second here. If I pull up… Now, I’ve switched to a different connector, so this is pulling some GP data, I wanna show you just a few things inside of this interface that make it really, really cool. So I happen to be pulling live inventory purchase receipts from my GP system. But the things that are inside of here allow me to do things like drag and drop configuration of this list, right.

So if I wanna see the purchase receipt type, if that’s the most important thing, I can drag that to the front. Maybe I wanted to group this by location, I can just drag that up. And now, you can see I have by each location, I get automatic sub-totaling of these fields, which I think is pretty cool. And then, if there’s other fields you want subtotaled or whatever, you can do that as well. But now I can see all those transactions that are inside of there.

For a lot of people, I think you’ve maybe been restricted on what you could actually show for the number of filters. And so we have an unlimited amount of filters. So if I wanted to filter this on, again, maybe a date received and maybe I wanted to say, you know, give me everything within, we’ll just say, greater than… And I could choose a specific date, or I could say, “Hey, give me everything greater than the start of this year.” So now I’m getting this year’s sale.

But you can keep mashing on this button and keep adding as many filters as you like. There’s really no limit and a lot of people will save these. And then, now, you have a favorite that you can quickly go back to. And again, maybe see this month’s transactions or this week’s transactions or this year, or last year, or this quarter. I mean, all those are really kind of fun things to have inside of there. And again, not having limitations is a fantastic thing to be part of this.

Okay, you can also look for specific transactions, right? So let’s say you’ve brought back 5000 records or 10,000 records, and you wanted to find a specific transaction in here, or maybe a customer calls and says, “Hey, I’m calling you about that one order. It was, I don’t know, something the 18th.” Well, now I can see here’s is all the orders. Okay, looks like we have two of them, looks like we have a receipt number for 18th. And so I can see that information and it searches through all the records as you type, which is pretty cool.

Now another thing is you’re not limited by the number of columns. Literally with one click, you’re able to add as many other columns that exists on that list. And so I could add three of those columns. And I immediately will have that data. So I have that data has been returned. And now here’s the three new columns that we had added to this. And we can change them however we want.

Another really cool thing is I can export this to Excel. And I want you to watch how fast it’s done. So, again, we only have 100 records, so it should be split second. It’s done. It’s been downloaded to my machine. It’s gonna take me longer to fire up Excel on this machine and move it over to the other monitor than it did to generate that report and download it. So there’s some pretty cool things inside of here. Also, since I had it grouped, you can see that all of our locations have been put on here and all of our sub-totaling came through as well, which is some pretty cool things right inside of this interface.

Okay, so I first wanted to show it to you inside of this interface, and we’ll come back to maybe cover off a few more things. But what I wanna show you now is that we can take any data that was done inside of here, and I can switch it to show this type of data in other systems. And so, for example, right, I’m inside of Dynamics CRM, I have an account pulled up right now. And if I click on my ERP orders, okay, I’m getting ahead of the game here, you can see that it’s actually pulling live, and this case it’s pulling from Business Central, it’s pulling all of the orders for this account that we just created today. And so we can see we only have one order on here.

Now, there’s a couple things that we can do. I can actually see some additional details on this account. So in this case, I happen to have a tracking number. This is kind of cool. I’m actually going out to a live tracking system. Again, this one happens to be USPS. But it could be FedEx, DHL Canada Post, whatever it may be. And as long as I have a tracking number, I’m able to see the history of that. So you can see, here’s where this package went and finally came to my door at a specific time. But I could also, if I wanted, I could get a live look back into Business Central, because this is an invoice from Business Central, it’s actually gonna pull all of the line items that were ordered on that. So we can see this consistent one line item looks like they ordered one unicycle on this order.

We can also, I’ll show it to you in just one second, I can show other types of data, right. And so, for example, I’m gonna switch to a different account now, before I go back there, but I can actually see help desk tickets that have been placed on this account. And so this is coming from a system called Zendesk, which again is just keeping track of all the cases that came in. And so now I’m able to see, without leaving CRM, right, I have Popdock that’s powering this. If I spend my entire day inside of CRM, and I just need some access to, again, maybe some data coming from BC, maybe some data come from CRM, something coming from another system, a tracking system, I can make all of that available.

Now, the cool part, Michelle talked about this a little earlier, is that I can actually interact with this data as well. And so, like I said, these are help desk tickets, I could do something like add a comment. I can change the priority of this. Right now, it’s set to urgent. I can switch that and say, “You know what, it’s actually just… that’s a normal call. That doesn’t need to be urgent.” That is basically making a live update to the Zendesk system that I’m in and is now set to normal. I can also add comment.

So if we wanted to say, for the demo, I now have added a comment to that case or that ticket. And if I wanted to, I could even go see all the other comments that have been added to this one. And so this is now pulling live from Zendesk. It’s pulling all of the history of this here and you can see there’s a few of these. And where’s the last one? For the demo, there’s the one I just typed in right now.

So you can see it’s pretty cool that you can get at whatever data you need, whether it be in data coming from an external system, like maybe a credit card payment gateway. So it could be something like Square, or Braintree, or Stripe, or there’s a few other ones, PayPal. Those kinds of things, we can pull that information in. And you can see that right inside of your ERP system or CRM system.

I’ll show you one other thing as well, if I go back to this one, we can also display information in a very different way to write. So this is pulling from a custom SQL table. This is again, now exposing it to the cloud. And I’m exposed it in more of a graphical way, as opposed to, again, just a list representation of the data. So this is pretty cool that I can show a bar chart or even I think this example there’s probably nothing because we only have one order and one item on here.

So this would have a breakdown of all of the inventory items. Let’s pull that live from Business Central. And I think this one’s gonna display as a pie chart. So it’s probably gonna be the world’s worst pie chart, just saying. All we’ve ever sold to this customer is one- unicycle. But here’s what I wanna take it, you can see that we also can interact with this. Because this is Business Central in this case, I can actually do something right from CRM. And I can drill back into either see the customer or the invoice. I’ve already showed you some details on the invoice. So why don’t I drill back to the customer, and so what it’s now doing is it’s drilling back to that customer card inside of the system.

So this is one that was just created earlier. But what I want you to see is what’s loading over here right now is this is pulling this Popdock. This is another piece of Popdock, a widget that’s embedded inside of Business Central now that’s showing a live look into CRM. So it has some information on whatever we’ve entered in to CRM. We can also again see all of the orders which is just that one. So that’s the invoice that that’s come in and sits inside of Business Central. But this could be anything, right? This could be opportunities coming in, this could be like again some shipping information on a sales order or something like that. So it’s pretty cool that you can take any data that you need, and pull it into this type of system.

Now what I wanna show you is if I go on to that customer now, we do have this embedded inside of Business Central. And so I can see all kinds of data in here if I want. And so if I click on this Popdock, you’ll see most of these are business. I think they’re all Business Central lists right now. But I could be pulling data from, again, maybe a legacy system. We have a number of customers that have chosen to upgrade from GP, to Business Central in the cloud. And so we have some of them that wanna still see their GP data right out there in the cloud.

But again, just to show you, if I pull up my inventory items, for example, I’m now pulling up the same type of data in this system, but now it looks and feels just like Business Central. It doesn’t feel like a foreign application. It doesn’t matter what data we’re showing inside of here, if it’s a Zendesk help desk data. Or if it’s, again, like in this case, it is actually Business Central data, or if it was maybe historical data from a migration from an ERP system, it’s gonna have that same look and feel of this. And again, you can quickly switch between whatever lists you may need to do. If I need to switch to like a detailed customer ledger entries, now I can pull that information in here as well. So I wanted to show you just a couple different systems that where you might be able to see this type of data.

Okay, and there we go. These are our detailed customer ledger entries. So I’m gonna quickly go back to Popdock. And I wanna show you one more thing. Okay, sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t gonna go back to Popdock, I was gonna take you to GP real quickly just to show you that the same kinds of things that I showed you inside of Business Central, right, if you’re on the GP side of things, you have the same tools at your disposal.

And so now you can see, I’ll just pick a company for this one. I’m now pulling from inside of GP. I now have a list, and this happens to be GP data. I’m pulling that list from here and it has the same look and feel. One really cool thing I didn’t show you before in the Business Central side, but you can actually…it works there as well. Because if I wanna pull data from multiple companies, I can. This is pretty cool to me because we have some customers that have over 30 companies in their ERP system and they wanna be able to create reports across 10 or more of those to get the meaningful data that they need.

And the cool thing is it actually shows you which company it’s coming from. So you would see the records coming from Fabrikam, or the records coming from the four-iron foundry, which is pretty cool. But then, like I said, I’m not limited to just GP data, I could show you other GP data. But I could also show you this help desk tickets that I showed you before. It’s pulling live from a cloud application. Again, how many times people are like, “Really? Like for GP? You can actually pull live from all of these web applications out there?” Absolutely. This is a live look into that Zendesk system. And I think a really cool thing, right? I can do all the same things, I could add a comment to that help desk ticket, right from inside of GP, which is pretty cool. And there’s no programming that needs to be done here.

All those same things, right. If I wanted to show more columns on this GP list, I can add, whichever ones I want, and I should quickly get that data back. So those are pretty cool things that we can basically publish whatever lists that we want, and not just GP data, right? This gets me that other data that I need to do my job every day. Again, whether it be credit card processing, or again, eCommerce orders or whatever it may be, we can pull all of those things in.

Additionally, I wanna show you one other really cool feature, and then we’ll jump back into just the last few things. And that is, I can attach Popdock windows to anywhere inside of GP that I want. And so if I wanted to see some live information coming from CRM, same kind of thing on this customer, right, I can see some information coming to my account or in this case, I have the opportunities that are pulling for Adam Park. So this is coming live from my CRM system, I can see that there’s three opportunities, and here’s all that information.

So without having to leave my GPS system in this case, I can see that extra data and it’s all powered by Popdock. I’ll show you one other thing inside of here, I just have one that’s pulling all of the sales transactions for Adam Park. And you can see that it’s passing that parameter in. And the cool thing is all those actions that are right or go-to, right, we call them go-tos from the smart list world, we can drill back to all those places right inside the GPU, right from here. So this is what’s pretty cool about Popdock.

Okay, now I’m gonna jump out of there and go back to the web interface, and this is where I think there’s some really important things. In this system, you can see you have a million-connector setup. Guess what? It doesn’t cost you any more if you have a million of them set up. That’s one thing I absolutely love to the story of Popdock is that if you need to connect the 10 things or 3 things, it doesn’t matter. It just matters what you need to add for users.

But what I wanna show you is how easy it is to add new connectors and so we have quite a few of them everything from Microsoft Azure tables to a lot of the classic ERP systems and CRM systems. But I wanna draw your attention to two really important ones. We can connect to those on-premise, or even, hosted in the cloud Azure database. And so, it’s really cool that we can connect to those custom applications that you may need to do and expose it in the cloud interface.

Additionally, like I said, while we have quite a few connectors today, we don’t have everything out there. And again, a lot of you may find industry specific applications that you may need to connect to. We can connect to those things as long as they have a web service like a REST-based web service, we can now connect to that data. And again, you can do the same kinds of things with it, have that same interface, do the same filtering, right through here.

So I just wanted to show you those connectors. This is where you add new connectors, but let’s dive into… I’m gonna go into a GP one, maybe I’ll go into Business Central one as well in a second. But here’s the GP one that I was in earlier. And one cool thing inside of here right is all the groups that kind of matching back to my smart list. Smart list areas inside of GP. Here’s the standard a bunch of standard of them. I think for GP, there’s over 80 of them now on Business Central side of things, there’s almost 70 standard lists out of the box, but you’re not limited. This is what I think is probably one of the most key things is you’re never limited to just what we’ve done for you. You can add any kind of list.

So inside of GP, I’ll show it to you and I’ll show it to you inside of Business Central in a second, but I can add anything that has an extender window or form. I can add anything that was built with SmartList Builder. So it’s pretty cool that you can basically connect to any of those things. Even baby SmartList Builder from Microsoft, their smart list designer, I guess, what they call it. You can actually add those kinds of things right inside of here. And it’ll show up right inside the Popdock. And then even if you need to just go down to the table or view level, we can pull those things. And so it’s really wide open for you.

Another thing just to point out really quickly, but we can have custom lists. And this is where the power of Popdock really starts to shine. Because I’m no longer limited to just one piece of information. I can now connect data from multiple connectors, right? I could connect data coming from my CRM system and my Business Central system. I could join that data and see maybe a customer inside of Business Central, I could see all of the custom fields that I put inside of CRM, I could have that one list. I could do a comparison, right? Maybe I’m comparing GP customers to my CRM accounts, and I wanna see all the ones that exist in CRM that don’t exist inside the GP, or maybe just the ones that do exist in both.

I can do those kinds of lists. I can even do merge lists, right. So we have a number of people, again, that are doing migrations that they want to be able to pull data, again, maybe from a historical type of system, without migrating all the data over, they just wanna be able to see the data. But then they wanna also pull in the new, you know, sales transaction data for the customers. So you can have one list that is pulling from again, from one new system, and one from archival system and have that displayed right inside of here. Or again, maybe there’s people that are taking eCommerce orders and need to pull from something in Shopify, something in Magento, something in WooCommerce, right, I can pull all those things together and have one list of here’s today’s orders no matter where they came from.

So there’s some pretty cool things that we can do inside of here. I’m gonna jump into one of my Business Central connectors real quick just to show you it’s very similar that we can add those kinds of things. And so, if I go ahead and go into the lists here, if I add lists, this is basically pulling from all of the pages that exist inside of Business Central. And so if you’ve added new custom ones, I think you’ll see, as I scroll through these, a few of these ahead like either my name on or something, you can tell that their customer David. Here we go. We have some David list. We can pull in any data that’s a page or an inquiry inside a Popdock, which makes it incredibly powerful and we can create some really amazing reports right from this data.

We’ve done a ton of things around, maybe just some more detailed aging around AP and AR, that’s really helped a lot of customers. So we’ve provided some better inquiry. So being able to drill down so maybe somebody searches for an invoice and they wanna know the checks that paid or the payments that paid off an invoice. Or maybe the other way round, or maybe, “Hey, I paid for a group of invoices with this check, I wanna see all of the invoices.” So we’ve given a few custom lists to some of our customers just showing how much easier it is to drill down to that data and use it.

So those were a couple things I wanted to show you inside of here. I’m gonna show you one more thing. I don’t know if Michelle mentioned this, but this is a really cool thing that we can do. And so I’ll show you, I’ll just pull up this list. This one happens to be a list called Items Out of Stock. Now what this does, this is called a Scheduled Job where I can basically, without having to log into Popdock, without having to log into Business Central or some other system, I could get an email with an Excel report that had all of the records that were in there. Now why is this so cool? Well, a lot of people will design for, we call them exceptions. Right, I might only want to know all the items that are out of stock, I don’t wanna know all of the inventory levels, you know, maybe for all of my items, I just wanna know the ones that have maybe gone below a threshold that we’ve established.

And so if I have that list that I’ve done in Popdock, and I have that filtered out, I can basically pick the list the group, I can pick a favorite, if there’s a favorite on it, I can choose which email addresses I wanna send it to. This becomes the subject of the email, this is the time of day it runs. Now, this is kind of cool. If I did this, every day at 12:01. I would get this report if there was anything in it. If there weren’t any items out of stock, I wouldn’t get the report that day. It’s not gonna clutter up your inbox.

But I could also say, “Hey, this is something we only run on Monday and Thursday.” That’s the only two days of the week that we run this then I would just get it twice, twice a week. Or I could say, “This one runs on the first and the 15th of the month.” For a lot of people, this is a really, really efficient way of being able to work with data from those other systems with again, maybe it’s not something that I need to log into Popdock or those other systems for, I just want to know when that criteria has been met.

And then that means in turn, it’s something that I need to take action on that data. So this is a pretty cool feature. And now this is a job that’s been scheduled and will go out, I think, on the first and the 15th of the month at 12:01.

So, Michelle, I think I’ve done a lot of talking. I don’t know if you have a couple more slides, I think to wrap it up and we can answer any questions that people may have.

Michelle: Yeah, I do. If I can just click control…

Chris: So I probably need to make you the presenter again. Let me, I’ll do it.

Melissa: I just tried to pass it over to her. So.

Chris: Yep, you’re good. You beat me to it.

Melissa: Sometimes I get it.

Chris: Thank you.

Michelle: All right. Well, Chris, thanks for that demo. I know that that is something that you’re super passionate about. So it’s always fun to see you present. So finally, some key takeaways. It’s just the simplicity of Popdock for that data visualization. It’s a tool for end users that allows them to access the data that they need anywhere in real time.

All right, so on the next slide, we’ve got my contact information, you can reach out to Encore for further information, we’d be happy to set up a trial. There’s a link on the bottom of that screen to set up that trial. Do we have any questions in the queue? Melissa?

Melissa: Let me just take a look. I don’t see any questions that have come in. So we might be able to give you a little bit of time back.

Michelle: Great. Well, so my email address is in the slide deck. And feel free to reach out with questions. We’d be happy to answer those at any point. Chris, did you have anything to add to wrap up?

Chris: No, I guess maybe one more thing. I showed you a couple of examples of this data being embedded in other systems like a CRM system, GP system, Business Central, but use your imagination, right? Michelle showed something earlier where we can embed it inside of Microsoft Teams. So we know a lot more people are using Microsoft Teams, given the recent events in the world. And so we certainly use it internally. And it’s really nice having some of our lists, just having the access to it right inside of the interface. Or maybe it’s something SharePoint, right? You need something embedded inside of SharePoint, or maybe you have your own custom portal. You can embed whatever data that you need, where you need it. And that I think, truly is the power of Popdock.

Michelle: All right. Well, with that, Melissa, I think we’ll go ahead and wrap up.

Melissa: All right, that sounds great. Thanks so much to both of you for joining us today.

Michelle: Yes, thanks for having us.

Melissa: Thanks to everyone else. Goodbye.