Category: Dynamics 365

Updating User Settings with Power Automate

Here’s a scenario that could be all too familiar to us. We’re on-boarding users (to either Dynamics 365 or a Power Platform app), & they’re new to the environment that it’s deployed to. So they’re set up, and all ready to go. Suddenly they start asking why records created (or modified) by colleagues show up as having the wrong time on them.

Reverse Wall Clock Unusual Numbers Backwards Modern Decorative ...

Does this sound familiar? I’m sure it does to quite a few people out there!. See, there’s no way to set a default system-wide time zone in Dynamics 365 (or Power Platform). At least not that I’ve come across – if you know of one, please comment below with instructions as to how to do this!

As a result, users are given the default timezone, and need to change it. This is easily done through the Personalization settings area in the app. Users click here, and then select their appropriate time-zone. Brilliant…or so you’d think.

See, when it’s one or two users, it’s generally OK to tell them to do that. However, when it’s 200 or 2000 users, you’re going to get push-back. The last thing you want is for a large number of them to start contacting you to work out how to do it (read the instructions, perhaps?).

User queue stock photo © zam ri (OneO2) (#258450) | Stockfresh

I’ve had this scenario over the last week, where the client actually told us that they didn’t want us to tell users to update it manually. They wanted a better solution.

Well, there is a solution out there to update users. It’s the ‘User Settings Utility’ app that’s in the XrmToolBox (https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/MsCrmTools.UserSettingsUtility/). Really neat & nifty, and does just what it says on the box. Simple enough to select users (or all of them at a time), select the time-zone you’re wanting to apply to them, and click a button. Hey presto – it’s been updated

Hmm. But what if you didn’t want to have to do this manually. Or (and this is what I was dealing with), there were decent enough number of users being added to the app every few days, & I didn’t want to have to do this as a manual task.

So I started digging into how the time-zone setting was actually stored. It turns out that there’s an entity called ‘User Settings’, which is associated with a User record. Oh, and if you’re going to want to take a look at this entity to see what it contains, it’s NOT available through the front end. You can’t go into the entity list and just display it (though if you’ve found a way to do this through the Power Platform NATIVELY, drop me a line, please?).

Anyhow, back to things. There’s a value for ‘TimeZoneCode’, which maps to a specific time-zone. Aha, I thought! Right – now what’s the best way that I could work out to do this automatically. Checking in with some contacts in the tech community (thanks BlackOps etc!), Power Automate was suggested, so I started to see about how I could go about it…

So, I created a Power Automate Flow (haha…I got the name right there!). On creation of a new user record, it would programmatically go away and update the value to the one for the time-zone that I wanted it to be set as. This actually worked really well.

The only drawback is that through the user interface, it’s not actually shown as being updated, though it has been. Or sometimes it changes, but doesn’t reflect it accurately. This is somewhat annoying, and caused me quite some confusion between checking the front end to see if things were working, & confirming through the back end (& opening records up) to see that it was. I still have NO idea why this was happening.

Before changing my settings
After changing my time zone to USA (EST)

For my specific scenario, all of the users are in the UK, so I set it to update every user on creation to the UK time-zone. Obviously if you have users in different time-zones, you’d want to set this differently. This shouldn’t be an issue though, as you can expand the Power Automate Flow and add logic conditions/branches to be able to do this.

Now I think that this is pretty cool, and I couldn’t find anything out there for this. I’ve therefore decided to release this in a small solution, for others to be able to use. Part of this is the entire list of time-zones with their specific codes, so that you can update to whichever one you need to.

Update Timezone for New UsersDownload

I hope that this helps solve a small but annoying problem (at least it did for me). Please do provide feedback if you want to!

Introductory Training for Dynamics 365/Power Platform

This post really goes back to basics, but it’s one of basic fundamentals for any successful project. In order to lay a proper foundation base, and to ensure success for a project, users need to actually know how to use the system! When going into greenfield (new) implementations, or expanding brownfield (existing) implementations, users need to know how the system works. For new implementations, it’s highly likely that many users, if not all, will never have actually used Dynamics 365 before! Going into a completely new system, with no understanding of how it works, can be extremely daunting. If not handled in the right way, and the right skills imparted, it can be a major blocker to the project itself.

Incidentally Microsoft Learn has closed the gap slightly on this. The different learning paths & courses can be really helpful to gain understanding of the system, and the basic components. I’ve done quite a few of these (the gamification angle helps with that!), and am generally quite impressed!

So with all of that in mind, I thought I’d share something. Over the last few years, I’ve noted the D365 Academy Belt Program (https://www.d365ug.com/participate/academy/blackbelt). It’s something that I’ve toyed with doing, but never got round to it.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to look over the actual material that’s used for the different belt courses. Not only have I looked over it, I’ve actually gone through all of the different belt training as well, to see how it actually is. Even with my knowledge & experience of the system, I’ve still learned/improved my knowledge in several things. I think it’s a really good structured learning system, and furthermore, actually shows clients how to become system ‘power users’!

I’ve listed below the different belts, and what’s included in each one

White Belt

  • Creating a trial – how to sign up & set one up
  • Overview of users – what they are
  • Office 365 vs Dynamics 365. The differenced in how they work when it comes to users
  • User maintenance – setting up users & teams, and handling licenses
  • System settings – how to set organisation-wide defaults
  • The basics of workflow – what a workflow is, and what it does
  • Form configuration – what is a form, modifying fields properties to display accordingly
  • Creating new fields – different field types & options
  • View configuration – creating, adding columns & filter criteria to display the data

Blue Belt

  • Security concepts – overview of how security works in Dynamics 365
  • Business Units – what they actually are, and how they help with things
  • Security Role Concepts – how they’re used, and the power that they bring to the security model
  • Security Role Applications – how to set them up, and showing practical uses with examples
  • Hierarchy Security Concepts – what exactly is a security hierarchy, and why it can be helpful
  • Hierarchy Security Application – how to set this up, and use within the system
  • Ownership Teams – why this can be helpful when using records
  • Access Teams – how are these different from the other teams, and how they can be used
  • Auditing – how Dynamics 365 has an in-built audit trail for records, and the benefits of it

Purple Belt

  • Advanced Form Configuration -sub grids, charts, navigation links & iframes
  • Creating Custom Entities – building on the knowledge of the system so far to implement these
  • Calculated & Roll Up Fields – what these are, the differences, & where to use them best.
  • Field Level Security – ways to restrict specific data fields on entities to a specific team of users
  • Charts, Dashboards & Reports – how to set these up, and the different ways in which they help
  • Document Generation – how to automatically create Word & Excel documents from templates
  • Business Rules – ‘no code’ approach to making fields required, hiding them, setting values
  • Business Process Flows – guiding users to enter data in a specific way, with making it easier
  • Branding – making your site reflect your company colours & logo
  • Site Map Editor – placing just those entities that users access to create a clean interface

Brown Belt

  • Duplicate Detection Overview – what it is, and how it works
  • Duplicate Detection Configuration – how to set up rules to enable it to work in the right way
  • Data Imports – how to configure & set them up to then import data into the system
  • Data Mapping – the key item in data imports. Getting this right is imperative
  • Bulk Deletion – carrying it out, and what to be careful of
  • Cascading Relationships – how these can be so powerful, & where to use them best
  • Data Integration – best practise thinking in how to approach integration

Black Belt

  • Workflows – what are they, understanding how they work
  • Realtime & Background – the differences between these two, and how you should use each one
  • Power Automate – how it differs from traditional workflow, & how to start configuring one
  • Document Storage – the different options available, including cost considerations.
  • Extending with 3rd Party Tools – using tools available in the XrmToolBox, and how this can help
  • Power Apps Introduction – what these are, and scenarios for them
  • Model/Canvas Apps – the differences between the two, and considerations for each

I’ve been working with Dynamics 365 for a decade now, yet there were still things that I felt I learned from the course. I feel that it’s possible to learn from everything, even from what we’d consider to be a ‘simple’ source.

So what are the next steps for people looking to learn? Well, Microsoft Learn (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/learn/) of course would be a great place. Carrying on from there, you could look to start taking some of the available exams. There are plenty of these available, ranging from basic fundamentals all the way up to solution architect.

I hope that this has been useful to you – if you’ve come across other great introductory training resources, please let me know!

Omnichannel – Pre Survey Responses & Routing

I’d like to start off here by admitting that in a previous blog post that I put up, I mentioned that it’s not possible to route customers to different queues through the chat itself. That was wrong – thankfully several very nice people at Microsoft reached out to let me know how it’s done (thanks BTW for reading my blog!). I therefore thought it would make a good article, as people do ask me about this from time to time.

So, how exactly does Omnichannel facilitate this? Well, there are two parts:

  • Pre chat surveys
  • Routing rule items

Pre chat surveys

These surveys are really quick & easy to set up (or even more complicated, if you so desire). To start getting to grips with them, open a Live Chat record, and go to the ‘Pre-chat survey’ tab

Here, you’ll be able to set up your questions, which is done by clicking the ‘Add Question’ button. When you do this, you’ll get the following prompt.

So, three of the four questions are really quite simple. You need to give it a name (as every system record needs), the actual question text, and whether it’s mandatory or not. The fourth question ask you what sort of question type you’re looking for. The options available are:

  • Single line of text
  • Multiple lines of text
  • Option set
  • User consent

If you select ‘Option set’, you’ll be prompted to enter the values. These should be separated by a semi-colon character:

With our pre-chat survey questions being set up, let’s see how we go ahead and use them for routing.

Workstreams

If you go ahead and open up any workstream record, you’ll see several tabs available. Two of these tabs are Context Variables, and Routing Rule Items. There’s usually one workstream per chat channel, with setting options within it as required. Opening up the workstream for the Live Chat, we can see them there:

Let’s take a closer look at the Context Variables first. Going to this tab shows us the following:

Woah. Where did those entries come from? I didn’t enter anything here – though I can create context variables if I want to.

Well, remember those pre-chat survey questions that we created? Each time one of these is created, it creates a context variable record for the workstream that the chat is associated to. So each of my questions (and I have four of these) now have a corresponding entry.

OK – so the system does that. But how does that help me when looking at trying to route things?

Simply put, these are the building blocks that we’ll set up in the Routing Rule Items to flow the customer chat through to an appropriate location. Let’s go and create one to see what happens.

We need to set the queue that this rule to apply to. Then we’ll go ahead and set the condition/s that we’re wanting to apply for this queue. There are several different possibilities to start with:

Selecting the entity that we want to use for the rule will then allow us to pick an attribute for that entity. So;

  • Account, Contact, Case & Live Chat Context will give an option to select one of the attributes from the entity
  • Context Variables will give the available context variables to choose from

You’ll then be prompted to select an Operator. These will vary depending on the type of field (eg a number field will have additional options such as Greater Than, Smaller Than, etc)

Finally, you’ll enter the value that you’re looking to match with for the condition. This is free text (it’s not auto-populated with values). So in summary, you’ll have something like the following:

And tadaa! it’s active. Brilliant!

We’re able to stack up multiple conditions to cover specific scenarios. An example could the following:

  • Customer has a Kawasaki motorbike (not a different make)
  • Customer’s annual spend falls into the ‘high spend’ bracket

There are plenty of other scenarios that can be covered, and the conditions allow this to cover quite complex situations.

So, some things to note around workstreams & routing rule items:

  • You can have multiple routing rule items per workstream, each one routing to a different queue. These are evaluated in the order that they’re saved in. Eg if there are 4 rules, an incoming chat will be evaluated against rule 1, then rule 2, etc
  • When a routing rule condition is met, the chat gets routed to the destination. No other evaluation against the remainder of the rules is carried out

I hope that this has come in useful, and put some interesting thoughts into your mind as to how you could implement this at your organisation or clients!

Omnichannel Install/Update Errors

I’ve had an interesting time over the last week or so. Several people have contacted me about trying to either install Omnichannel, or upgrading to the latest version. These differ based on what the user was trying to do.

When trying to install into a new environment, the error says ‘To add this channel, you must have an active subscription to Dynamics 365 for Customer Service Chat or Digital Marketing’. This is especially strange as a trial environment (for testing purposes) doesn’t actually require these licenses. It only requires a Customer Service Enterprise license.

When trying to upgrade an existing environment, there’s a different error. This one says ‘We are unable to check for upgrade as you don’t have the required permissions. You need to be either a global administrator or a Dynamics 365 service administrator to check for upgrade. Transaction Id: 0cc1f6be-32f1-476c-8071-acc4d8475e63’. However the user has the Global Administrator role (which obviously also includes the Dynamics 365 Administrator role as well!

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Now I love being able to share my knowledge & help others. That’s one of the main reasons why I started this blog and why I share information that I feel is helpful & useful to the wider community. So I was more than happy to try to help the people who had reached out to me, and jumped on a screenshare session with them (using Microsoft Teams, I may add!).

They were indeed getting the errors mentioned. Nothing that I could suggest helped to rectify. To try to diagnose & compare, I jumped into my own environment. To my absolute surprise, I was greeted by the same issues!

Nanny Knows Best: Shock Horror Probe - People Take Responsibility ...

I knew that it hadn’t been occurring several weeks back, as I had carried out some maintenance work in my own tenant & everything was working fine. I double-checked everything on my end, and it all seemed to be set up correctly.

I therefore decided to go ahead and log a ticket with Microsoft Support. I had a sneaky feeling that it was something, somewhere, to do with the Wave 1 2020 release upgrade. This had happened 2 weeks back (since I had last been into the Omnichannel setup), and I was figuring that something could have gone wrong.

This feeling was boosted by hearing that someone else who was having the same issues had also logged a ticket with Microsoft Support, and they had resolved the issue for the affected tenant. In doing so, they had mentioned that the back-end hadn’t been configured correctly, and got it fixed.

My support agent was a lovely guy called Tomasz, based in Portugal. Emails initially exchanged, we then jumped onto a Teams screenshare session so that I could demonstrate the issues from my side. He was very helpful, and immediately got to work. Within 12 hours I had received an update from him on the situation. They had identified the problem, and were working on a fix.

I had mentioned to him that I knew it wasn’t isolated to my tenant, or even region, but that other people across the globe were also experiencing this. I suggested that whatever fix would be found should be rolled out on a global scale (if applicable).

The crux of the problem seemed to be that with the Wave 1 2020 Release, there had been a change in the architecture of the Omnichannel total solution. Everything still appeared the same through the interface, but under the hood there had been some changes (I have no idea of what actually had changed though).

For new instances (whether Trial or Production), the solution was installing with the new architecture. However all existing systems (whether Trial or Production) had the old architecture, and the Wave 1 2020 Release wasn’t upgrading it to the new one. It simply failed, giving the different error messages.

The fix that was needed was actually quite simple, and only took a few minutes. I had to spin up a new trial of Customer Service within my tenant (which would expire within 30 days). Doing this re-installed the Customer Service solution, & included the new Omnichannel architecture. As a result, after waiting around 5 minutes I was able to open the Omnichannel Administrative Settings, and upgrade my existing Omnichannel deployment. I was also able to deploy to another new environment without any issues. The problem had been solved!

Joyful Green Monster Saying Hurrah Vector Sticker Illustration ...

Overall, this support ticket was an example of how support should be/work. I’ve had times before when it’s unfortunately not gone like this, which makes me value this all the more so.

So, lessons to learn from this. Well, if there’s an issue with deploying Omnichannel to a new environment, or upgrading an existing deployment, fire up a trial of Customer Service, and that should fix it. Brill.

I do wonder how this managed to creep in. Obviously one of the main parts of deploying any new major solution is thorough testing. Perhaps it could be that due to the size of the actual Omnichannel solution, something was overlooked somewhere? It would be good if this sort of situation would be avoided for future releases, and functionality build in to automatically upgrade the Omnichannel solution if it has an old architecture.

Update. I’ve actually had feedback from the Omnichannel team around this. Essentially there’s something different about Trial environments, and this issue only affected them. Production environments (ie with paid-for licenses) wouldn’t have experience the issue. I don’t know why they’re different, but somewhere they are!

Thoughts around the Connection entity

I decided to write this post due to currently looking at the Connections entity. This is for a current project with a very specific purpose. When this came up, my thoughts went back to a previous project some years back when we also looked to use the Connections entity. I therefore thought that it would be good to recap & share my experience.

What are Connections?

Now, the Connections entity truly is a wonderful piece of work. It’s one of the core features that doesn’t actually get much time or effort devoted to it! However, it underpins a lot of the way that Dynamics 365 has been built to work over time.

The best way to summarise Connections is:

Connections are a very easy way to connections records without needing to have to create a custom relationship in the system. Connections can be used between records from the same entity, or from different entities.

See, you are able to connect one record to another record within the system. This could be account to account, account to contact, or contact to a custom entity. There are practically no limits, apart from the extent of your mind! All of this is done by leveraging the functionality that Connections brings to the table.

Note that I’m not talking about lookup fields here, which are also great, but work differently, and require creating a relationship between entities (or even within the same entity).

Just a quick reminder here that custom entities need to be enabled for connections – it doesn’t happen as standard when creating them. You can either do this when creating it, or you can edit the settings for it later:

How to use Connections

In order to connect one record to another, you need to open the first record & click the Connect button on the toolbar:

You’ll then be presented with the New Connection screen, where you’ll select the record that you want. Click the ‘All Records’ item at the top & then ‘Change View’ to select the actual entity that you’re wanting to look for:

You then select the record that you’re wanting, and save. Hey presto, the two records are now connected! To see the connected records, look at the associated ‘Connections’ setting from either record:

OK, so this is really all brilliant. For the absolute majority of situations, it works, and works well. There’s nothing better for it. There are a few small issues, such as the fact that you can’t use Business Process Flows or Business Rules for custom logic, but instead need to use Javascript, but for the most part they work well.

Edge case scenarios & issues

However, there are some edge case scenarios that I’ve come up against, which is the whole purpose for writing this blog post.

What happens if you’re trying to use Connections to establish a hierarchy of records. Eg one record is a parent of another record. Well, you could use a lookup field instead, but if you wanted to define specific attributes for the actual relationship, that wouldn’t work.

Here’s the scenario. You’re needing to capture the relationship between different people, along with certain attributes (eg if they’re a legal guardian, or a trustee, or have power of attorney, etc). You’d think that Connections would work brilliantly for this. After all, you can modify the actual Connections entity to add custom fields onto it. So for example, you could have something like the following:

Note: I’m not referencing Connection Roles, as you can only have a single connection role per connection. In the scenarios I’m handling, I’m needing to have multiple attributes per connection.

So you create the connection between the two records, and you set the attributes that you require. All good. What’s also good to remember is that Connections are bi-directional. You can view them from either ‘side’ of the connection. Eg:

Record 1

Record 2

That’s actually really helpful & useful in the normal scheme of things. You can easily see connections from either side.

But there’s a catch, or even (in our case above), an issue. If we open up each of the two Connection records, we’ll see the following data.

Joe Bloggs connecting to Helen Sommers:

Helen Sommers connecting to Joe Bloggs:

Can you spot the issue? Of course you can! On BOTH of the connection records, the custom fields that we set have the same values. We originally connected Joe Bloggs to Helen Sommers as the Legal Guardian, Power of Attorney & Trustee. Well, if we open up the connection record from Helen Sommers, we’re seeing the same values set, just in the opposite direction!

This is actually due to how Connections work. When you create a connection Record A to Record B, the system automatically creates a mirror Connection record from Record B to Record A. When it does this, it copies all of the values that you’ve set over to this mirror record.

So when you look at the data, you can’t actually see how the structure should work. It’s an issue. Especially if you’re passing the data to other system/s that may need to evaluate it. They just can’t understand this properly, and you’ll get some VERY unwanted results out of this.

Now, there is actually a field within Connections that shows which record is the ‘master’ (ie the one you actually created), and which one is the ‘mirror’ that the system created:

However even with this in place, we’ve found issues when using it:

  • If you’re relying on people looking at the record to see the information, they’re going to make mistakes (ie not checking this value). With the fact that the values are also displayed on the mirror record, this is very prone to user error, and isn’t a good way to do things
  • If passing information to another system (ie the record & the values), you need to program it to only allow it to pass records with this flag set correctly. If the other system is writing back data, it also needs to be configured to write back to the same record.

Summary

With all of this in mind (& especially considering that users may create connections from the ‘wrong direction’, which is quite possible to happen), it’s important to think of the best way to architect systems for regulatory purposes. Financial, legal & other judicatory requirements need to have a system that can handle them properly & accordingly, and not leave room for error.

Therefore, if you’re looking to handle these sorts of scenarios, I’d recommend to look at implementing a custom entity for those specific connections.

Another benefit of this is to separate out these connections from the general connections entity. That way, you’ll also be able to handle security appropriately, which is usually applicable in these sorts of situations. It will allow you to easily allow only a subset of users access (read and/or write) to this data, rather than trying to apply it to Connections (which is going to be a major headache!)

Farewell to the Outlook Add-In

From the first time that I used Microsoft Dynamics CRM (all the way back in the day), I remember the Outlook add-in. Or rather, I should say that I remember the PAIN that the Outlook add-in was!

You remember what I’m talking about, I hope. Here’s a screenshot of the ‘fabled’ toolbar:

The installation of this was a nightmare, to be honest. From the pre-requisites that it needed to install (and download – even if the machine already had them installed), to just hanging there, it wasn’t ever something that I looked forward to putting on machines.

It was a memory hog, slowed performance, and occasionally crashed Outlook, seemingly just because it felt like it! In addition, trying to carry out a mass roll-out of it (through SCCM, or Group Policy, or even other methods) never seemed to work properly at all.

In one of my roles we had to install this for dozens of users. Randomly, even on brand new machines (with nothing else installed), it would fail to install or initialise. Long hours were spent poring through logs, trying to work out error messages, and frantically get it working. Users were VERY used to seeing the following error happen:

In short, it’s been around for a VERY long time, as the following diagram shows (I’m loving how they compress 12 years into just a short space):

In late 2017, Microsoft announced that they were going to deprecate the Outlook add-in. There were several other options around, such as proper server-side sync, and the Dynamics 365 app for users. These were supposed to be being used instead.

The response from clients was crazy – so crazy in fact, that Microsoft did something that it very rarely does. They reversed the decision to deprecate it, and instead confirmed that it would still be sticking around. They realised that the other options weren’t at parity with the Outlook add-in for desktop, and didn’t want to deprive users of the essential functionality that they were needing.

In 2018, I was at Summit EMEA in Dublin. One of the more interesting conversations that I had with one of the senior Microsoft people was around the Outlook add-in. They told me that from the moment that Microsoft had announced that it was deprecated, every client had asked them about it. Even to non-technical people (eg sales, etc). It was due to this, in part, that they decided to un-deprecate it!

Moving on several years, the landscape has now matured. A lot of users are using Outlook through browsers, rather than the desktop version. They natively plug-into Dynamics 365 through the web as well. The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook has gotten better, along with the way that it works:

Users, on the whole, seem to have generally adopted the latest technology, and have therefore moved on from relying on the Outlook add-in for desktop. There’s also the new Unified Interface, which the Outlook add-in doesn’t support (and which will be being rolled out to all users on Dynamics 365 during 2020!).

Microsoft has therefore announced that as of March 2020 (which has just passed), the Outlook add-in has now been deprecated (once again). Support, security & other critical updates will be continue to be provided until October 1st 202, but customers will need to transition to the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook by then.

Very nicely, they’ve provided a playbook (which can be found at https://aka.ms/OutlookCOMPlaybook). This details the upgrade path, and has some good information in it for customers who will need to upgrade from it.

So if you’re still on the old version, take a look now, and work out the best way for you & your organisation to upgrade. It’ll give you newer & better functionality, work easier, and above all, shouldn’t crash your machine!

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions around this, and I’ll do my best to help you out.