D365Ni is a D365 blog focusing on D365 Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and the Power Platform. 

Background and blog ideation 

I’m Graeme Donnell, Senior Pre-Sales Consultant at Telefónica Tech, and before I tell you a bit about my D365Ni blog, let me set the scene as to how this blog came to fruition in the first place. I started my Dynamics 365 journey back in the days of CRM 2011, before moving on to roles that exposed me to all aspects of Dynamics 365 and CRM/D365 deployment. 

Fast forward to 2021: throughout my time with Telefónica Tech I gained lots more exposure to the wider Microsoft Dynamics stack, compared to my previous consultancy roles, where I had focused solely on D365 Sales and D365 Customer Service. 

What I noticed from this greater exposure to the Microsoft Dynamics stack was a small gap in the market for a one-stop-shop blog consisting of; detailed feature reviews, demonstrations, and walk-throughs on all the main first-party apps within Dynamics and the wider Power Platform.  

So in September 2021, I set up all of the necessary web domains and got a small backlog of content ready to launch my D365Ni blog.   

Introducing D365Ni 

D365Ni is a Dynamics 365 blog focusing on D365 Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and the Power Platform. The main process of coming up with blog ideas is driven by new features being added to the Dynamics suite.  

Being a Belfast native, the blog name – D365Ni – came from the fact that although a lot of Microsoft Dynamics partners have a strong employee base in Northern Ireland, no one was really putting us on the map in the Dynamics community in terms of content creation. Of course, having people instantly recognise what the blog was about was also an important factor to me when deciding on a name so by pairing D365 and NI together, there you have it; D365Ni! 

Some of my most recent D365Ni blogs include:

• D365 Marketing and social media integration 
• Microsoft Power Platform – managed environments 
• D365 for Sales – Bulk email to leads 
• D365 Customer Service – Voice channels 
• Canvas apps – Power Automate panes 

Before I begin blogging, I try to ensure I get full visibility of the feature I’ll be writing about as early as possible, then test this fully before presenting it in a real-world scenario. Additional avenues of content creation would be to lean into customer demos. For example, if I am tasked with a particular challenge or way of doing something, I will write a blog around it while the demo build is fresh in my mind.

Building a hub of content 

In the first year of running D365Ni, I tentatively set myself a target of 50 blog posts; roughly one per week. Sometimes I’ll post more than this and then take a break for a week or two, but it’s very much driven by the ideas I have in the pipeline –  I try not to blog just for the sake of it. 

Where possible, I try and build out a series of blog posts on a given topic. I believe a post shouldn’t take longer than 5 to 6 minutes to read, so if the content stretches past that time, I will break it into multiple posts and build my series from there. At the moment I am running a series of blog posts on D365 Marketing. 

Through regular posting and by covering a wide range of offerings, I have accumulated just shy of 1,000 blog followers in just under a year. I also regularly engage with both customers and fellow D365 enthusiasts regarding my content, which is very rewarding. 

Feedback for D365Ni

Before D365Ni, I used to actively re-share and publish my blog content directly to my LinkedIn profile. Since launching D365Ni, I now have a custom platform from which to launch and structure my content, and the feedback I have received has been really encouraging. This has ranged from fellow D365 Consultants resharing my content, all the way through to Microsoft’s ‘most valuable professionals’ (MVPs) engaging with and asking for more details on certain topics. The thing that has surprised me the most is the engagement from overseas, having received feedback from places like Australia, India and America – proving just how far and wide my blogs can reach!

Future plans for the D365Ni blog are to launch a dedicated LinkedIn profile for it, allowing me to post directly to a company blog page. I have also set myself a personal goal to move into video content creation, rather than relying solely on written content. 

For me, my online blog is a great way to organise content and collateral in an easily shareable way with other community members. If you would like to more about D365Ni, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.