Category: PowerApps

MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst

It’s been a while since taking a Microsoft certification exam, but with the new MB-280 exam being launched in the last few days, I’ve obviously needed to take a look at it! It felt a little strange, as I’m now used to the certification renewal process (which is why I haven’t taken any exams in a while), but thankfully things went alright with the overall exam.

For those who haven’t been following the news, Microsoft made an announcement a few months back that some exams would be retiring, and the new MB-280 exam would be the replacement for this. In short, this is supposed to replace the MB-210 (Sales), MB-220 (Customer Insights – Journeys) & MB-260 (Customer Insights – Data). Malin Martnes wrote a good blog post in June – I’d suggest to take a look at it at for more general information around it.

Now I’m all up for new certifications being created & made available. However, and I know this could be considered controversial, I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA as to why this exam was created in THIS specific way. If an exam had been created, for example, to bring together the two sides of Customer Insights (ie to cover both Data & Journeys in a single exam), I think that would have been quite good.

But with having taken this, my thoughts (& feedback to Microsoft directly) is that they should un-deprecate (if that’s a word/phrase?) the MB-210 exam, and continue it forward. There’s no reason that I can see having Marketing & Sales together in a single exam – it feels like two (or technically 3?) lego bricks lumped together without any rhyme or reason.

The learning path for the exam was also launched in the last few days, and can be found at Study guide for Exam MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst | Microsoft Learn

The official description of the exam is:

As a candidate for this exam, you’re a Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience analyst who has:

  • Participated in or plans to participate in Dynamics 365 Sales implementations.
  • An understanding of an organization’s sales process.
  • An understanding of the seller’s perspective (user experience).
  • The ability to demonstrate Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys capabilities.

You’re responsible for configuring, customizing, and expanding the functionality of Dynamics 365 Sales to create business solutions that support, automate, and accelerate the company’s sales process. You use your knowledge of customer experience capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Power Platform to inform the following design and implementation tasks:

  • Configure Dynamics 365 Sales standard and premium features.
  • Implement collaboration features.
  • Configure the security model.
  • Perform Dynamics 365 Sales customizations.
  • Extend Dynamics 365 Sales with Microsoft Power Platform.
  • Deploy the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

As a candidate, you need:

  • An understanding of the Dataverse security model and features, including business units, security roles, and row ownership and sharing.
  • Experience configuring model-driven apps in Microsoft Power Apps.
  • An understanding of accounts, contacts, and activities.
  • An understanding of leads and opportunities.
  • An understanding of the components of model-driven apps, including forms, views, charts, and dashboards.
  • An understanding of model-driven app personal settings.
  • Experience working with Dataverse solutions.
  • An understanding of Dataverse, including tables, columns, and relationships.
  • Familiarity with Power Automate cloud flow concepts, such as connectors, triggers, and actions.

More can be found at the exam page itself, which is located at Exam MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst (beta) – Certifications | Microsoft Learn

Now during my exam, I was looking forward to seeing the ‘new’ capability around being able to use Microsoft Learn during the exam (new to me – as I haven’t taken any other exams in the last year or so since it was announced!). However there didn’t seem to be any capability to launch Microsoft Learn – I’m not sure why it wasn’t available, as this isn’t a Fundamental level exam

Questions also used the older terms of references rather than the newer/accepted terms – ie using ‘field’ instead of ‘column’, and ‘entity’ instead of ‘table’. Again, I have no idea why this is – all other exams (including the renewals for them) are using these properly (in my summary below I have ensured I use the correct terms).

So, as I’ve posted before around my exam experiences, it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else!). It’s also in beta at the moment, which means that things can obviously change.

I’ve tried to group things as best together as I feel (in my recollection), to make it easier to revise.

  • Sales Apps
    • Configuring forms, columns & tables
    • Configuring security roles & access to records
    • Configuring relationships between records (including deletion properties)
    • Sales Mobile App – security & deployment
    • Forecasting – setting up & configuring
    • Configuring Goals
    • Configuring Opportunities
    • Handling currencies
  • Copilot for Sales
    • Setting up & deploying to users
    • Configuring access
  • Outlook App
    • Deploying & setting up
    • Configuring forms & information
  • Exchange
    • Connecting to mailboxes
    • Configuring folder permissions
    • Configuring multiple domains
  • Product Families & Catalogue
    • Creating & setting up
    • Configuring options
    • Adding items to be used
  • Price Lists
    • Creating & setting up
    • Configuring options, including discounts
    • Using time-restricted price lists
    • Handling currencies
  • Document Management
    • Different document management capabilities
    • Usage of SharePoint in different ways
  • Data Import
    • Usage of Power Query
    • Data manipulation
    • Handling duplicate records
  • SMS
    • Setting up & configuring SMS provider
  • Journeys
    • Different triggers to use based on scenarios & requirements
    • How to trigger journeys
    • How to set up emails to be used within a journey
  • Segments
    • Different types of segments
    • Creating & modifying segments
  • Searching/Filtering
    • Using Advanced Find
    • Setting up/modifying queries to include/exclude records based on conditions
  • Business Process Flows
    • Modifying business process flows
    • Handling conditions within business process flows

As a Sales exam, it seemed alright. But as mentioned above, the Customer Insights questions just seemed strange to me – I’d expect a consultant to be very technically skilled in Customer Insights, but not in Sales (& vice versa), so I’m not understanding bringing these two sides together.

I’m going to be quite interested in seeing how the exam is actually launched (as it’s currently in Beta of course). Having chatted with a few others who have taken the exam (whilst obviously respecting the NDA!), they also can’t really understand the landscape. Personally, I think that if it continues like this, Microsoft is going to hear quite a few complaints around it.

I hope that this is helpful for anyone who’s thinking of taking it – good luck, and please do drop a comment below to let me know how you found it! I’d also be interested in your thoughts/opinions around the direction that Microsoft has taken for this!

Recognition as Microsoft Partner for Business Application Solutions

It’s been a little while since I’ve previously blogged around developing customer solutions and the Microsoft Specialisations. Since I spoke about it last year (Apps & Microsoft Partner Specialisations) the landscape has moved on a little, and I thought that it would be good to take a look again at it.

Currently in the Business Applications space, there’s a single specialisation. This is the ‘Microsoft Low Code Application Development Advanced Specialisation’, which is covered in detail at the Microsoft page for it (Microsoft Low Code Application Development Advanced Specialization).

In essence, this specialisation is aimed at partners who are developing Power Apps (yes, this is specifically aimed at Power Apps), and has been around for a year or so.

In order for Microsoft to track the qualifying metrics against this specialisation, it’s very important to carry out the PAL (Partner Attach Link) process. The details of how to do this is in my earlier post, which includes some of my thoughts at the time around how a partner should best implement the procedure.

Since then, my blog post has gained a good amount of traction, and several Microsoft partners have engaged with me directly to understand this better, and to implement the process into their project playbook. I’m really delighted at having been able to help others understand the process, and the reasoning behind it.

Now that’s all good for a partner who is staying in place at a customer. However there are multiple scenarios that can differ from this. Examples of this are:

  1. Multiple partners developing a single application together
  2. One partner handing over the application to a second partner for further development
  3. One partner implementing a solution, with a second partner providing support

Now, there’s really a single answer to all of the above scenarios, but it’s a matter of how to go about implementing this properly. Let me explain.

Originally, all developers would register PAL, and this would then be tracked through the environment cadence, and associated appropriately to the partner. This would be from the developers having been the creators of the apps.

This has now changed a little bit. Microsoft now recognises the capabilities of PAL using both the Owner of the app, as well as any Co-Owners of the app. This is a little more subtle, so let’s explain this in some detail.

It is possible, of course, to change the owner of an app. More commonly, however, is the practice of adding co-owner/s to an app (I always recommend this as best practice actually, to remove key-person responsibility risks).

Note: Changing the actual owner of an app requires the usage of a PowerShell command

So what happens now is that Microsoft will track the owners/co-owners of any app that’s deployed, and PAL association will flow through this. But there are a couple of caveats which it’s important to be very aware of!

  1. All owners/co-owners must have registered PAL with their user accounts (if using a service principal/service account as an owner, there’s a way of doing this using PowerShell)
  2. Microsoft will recognise the LATEST owner/co-owner association with the app as the partner organisation that will receive PAL recognition

Now if a customer adds co-owners to an app, this shouldn’t be an issue (as none of the users would have registered PAL). But if there are multiple partners in place, ONLY THE LATEST ONE WILL BE RECOGNISED.

Therefore to take the three scenarios above, let’s see how this would apply.

  1. Multiple partners developing a single app. Recognition would not work for all partners involved, just the latest one to associate with the app
  2. Partner 1 handing over app to Partner 2. Recognition would stop for Partner 1, and would then start for Partner 2
  3. Partner 1 implementing solution, Partner 2 providing support. Care would need to be taken that the appropriate partner is associated as owner/co-owner to the app, for PAL recognition.

It’s also important for both partners & customers to understand this, in the wider context of being careful about app ownership, and the recognition that it brings from Microsoft for partners delivering solutions. If a partner would go into a customer, and suddenly start taking ownership of apps that it’s not involved in, I don’t think that Microsoft would be very approving of it.

Now, all of the above is in relation to Power Apps specifically, as I’ve noted. However, the PAL article was updated last week (located at Link a partner ID to your Power Platform and Dynamics Customer Insights accounts with your Azure credentials | Microsoft Docs) and also interestingly talks about:

Note the differences between each item

Reading between the lines here, I think that we’re going to be seeing more advanced specialisations coming out at some point. Either that, or else partner status will be including these as well, as I can’t think of any other reason why PAL would need to be tracked for these as well! I’m also wondering if other capabilities (eg Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages, etc) will be added at some point as well…

Have you had any challenges with the PAL process? Is there anything more you’d like to find out about it? Drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to respond!

MB-260: Microsoft Customer Data Platform Specialist

It’s been a while since I’ve taken an exam. Admittedly, this is for two reason. Firstly, the renewal process for exams now (as updated last year) is not to take it again, but rather to re-qualify through Microsoft Learn. The second reason is that I’ve been waiting for some new exams to come out (OK – there’s the DA-100, which is still on my list of things to do…).

Well, there’s a new exam on the block. In fact, it’s a different type of exam – this is a ‘Speciality’ exam, rather than focusing on a specific type of application. It’s the first of its kind, though there are likely to be more to follow in the future.

It’s the MB-260, which is all around Customer Data. That’s right – it’s not about how to do sales, or customer service, or something else. It’s about taking the (holistic) approach to ALL of the data that we can hold on customers, and do something with it.

The official page for it is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260. The specification for it is:

Candidates for this exam implement solutions that provide insights into customer profiles and that track engagement activities to help improve customer experiences and increase customer retention.

Candidates should have firsthand experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and one or more additional Dynamics 365 apps, Power Query, Microsoft Dataverse, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Power Platform. They should also have direct experience with practices related to privacy, compliance, consent, security, responsible AI, and data retention policy.

Candidates need experience with processes related to KPIs, data retention, validation, visualization, preparation, matching, fragmentation, segmentation, and enhancement. They should have a general understanding of Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.

Note that there’s quite a bit of Azure in there – it’s not just about Power Platform, Dataverse, or Dynamics 365. People who handle reporting on customer data should have various Azure skills as well.

There’s also a new type of badge that will be available:

At the time of writing, there are no official Microsoft Learning paths available to use to study. I do expect this to change in the near future, and will update this article when they’re out. However the objectives/sub-objectives are available to view from the main exam page, and I’d highly recommend going ahead & taking a good look at these.

As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.

Overall, I had 51 questions, which was towards the higher number of questions that I’ve experienced in my exams over the last year or so. There was only a single case study though.

Some of the naming conventions weren’t updated to the latest methods, which I would have expected. I still had a few references to ‘entities’ and ‘fields’ come up, though for the most part ‘tables’ and ‘columns’ were used. I guess it’s a matter of time to get everything up to speed with it.

  • Differences between Audience Insights and Engagement Insights
    • What are the benefits of each
    • When would you use each one
    • What types of users will benefit from each type
    • How to create customer insights
  • Environments
    • Types of environments
    • How to create a new environment
    • What options are available when creating an environment
    • What is possible to copy from an existing environment
  • Relationships
    • Different types of relationships
    • What is each one used for
    • Limitations of different relationship types
  • Business level measures vs customer level measures
    • What each one is, and what they’re used for
  • Power Query
    • How to use
    • How to configure
    • How to load data
  • Data mapping
    • Different types available to use
    • Scenarios each type should be used for
    • Limitations of each type
    • How to set it up
  • Segments
    • What are segments, how are they set up, how are they used
      What are quick segments, how are they set up, how are they used
      What are segment overlaps, how are they set up, how are they used
      What are segment differentiators, how are they set up, how are they used
  • Measures
    • What are measures, how are they set up, how are they used
  • Data refresh
    • Automated vs manual options
    • Limitations of each type
    • Availability of each type
    • How to set up each type
    • How to apply each type
  • Data Unification
    • What is this
    • How it can be used
    • How to set it up
    • Limitations of it
    • Process validation
    • Changing existing models
  • AI for Audience Insights
    • What is this
    • What can it be used for
    • How to use it
    • Factors that can affect outcomes
  • Security
    • Using Azure Key Vault
    • Capabilities of this
    • How to set it up
    • How to use it
  • Dynamics 365
    • Capabilities for interacting with Dynamics 365
    • How to set it up
    • How to display data, and where it can be displayed
    • What actions users are able to carry out within Dynamics 365

Wow. It’s a lot of stuff. It’s definitely an exam that if you’re not already currently hands-on with the skills needed, I’d highly recommend you get a decent amount of experience with it before taking the exam!

I can’t tell you if I’ve passed it or not…YET!. Results aren’t going to be out for several months, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure how well I’ve actually done.

So, if you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!

Workaround for sharing Canvas Apps

Don’t you find it absolutely frustrating when there’s a canvas app that you want to get access to, or give other users access to, but can’t see it? It’s REALLY annoying, but it’s sort of the way that Microsoft has designed the platform (at least at this point in time).

See, when a user creates a canvas app, only the creator is able to see & launch it. If other users want to get access to it, the creator needs to share it. This can be done by sharing the app directly with another user, or by sharing it with an AAD Security Group (which is sort of best practise).

Now, of course there’s the Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence solution, which includes a very handy app to assign permissions for canvas apps. After all, if a user is on holiday, sick leave, or has left the company, there needs to be some way of assigning permissions for other users to gain access to it. It’s really helpful, but of course needs the CoE solution installed.

Let’s think of another scenario. What about if we have some canvas apps as part of a solution, that’s deployed through (proper) ALM – such as using Azure DevOps with automated pipelines. Best practise for this is to use service principals (ie non-interactive user logins). This is great, but then the canvas app/s will be owned by this user. So without the use of the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app, we’re sort of stuck, as we can’t gain access to the app.

Or can we…..?

So this is a scenario that I’ve been dealing with recently, and I’ve found a really cool workaround that doesn’t need the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app to be able to handle the situation.

The example below (amusingly, in my opinion) is actually using the Microsoft CoE solution as an example, but this works with any canvas apps that are held within a solution (against, this heavily supports using solutions for ALL development items!).

So, this is what the actual installed apps look like in this environment:

As we can see, there are a lot of them! But what happens if I’m logged in as my regular user? What do I see if I go to the list of apps? Well, I’ll see the following:

Now, as we can see, I’m able to see the model-driven app (as these aren’t hidden at all). But I’m not able to see ANY of the canvas app! So how can I get access to it, or share it with other users?

Well, if I take a look at the solution itself, I can see the following when browsing to the list of apps (I’m really loving the new Solution Explorer layout, I’ll freely admit!):

I can try to play the canvas app (in this case, the ‘Set App Permissions’ app) directly from the solution. But when I try to do this, I’ll get the following error message:

Now, this is of course happening because I’m not the owner of the app, & the app hasn’t been shared with me at all. So really I was expecting this error to happen.

However, if I take a look at the menu options displayed for me, I can see that the ‘Share’ option isn’t greyed out. I wonder what happens if I click it…

Now this is EXCITING! When clicking the ‘Share’ option on the menu, I’m given the regular sharing screen, where I’m able to set app permissions. So it looks like I’m able to do something here. OK – let’s go ahead & try to share the app with my own user:

So I’ve looked up my own user, and then clicked ‘Share’. This is what happens next…

Exciting moment – will this work?

Waiting with bated breath, and then…

It’s worked! The app sharing has been successful with my user.

Note: The example that I’m using here is with my own user account. However it doesn’t need to be – I can select any user account or AAD Security Group, and share accordingly.

Going to my list of apps, I can now see that the app is showing up for me:

Clicking the app to launch it presents me with the permissions dialogue, and having confirmed permissions, then launches it properly:

So this is indeed a way in which it’s possible to share canvas apps with users and/or AAD security groups, even when a user isn’t the owner of the canvas app.

It is important to note that the user carrying this out does need to have one of the following permissions in the environment:

  • System Customiser
  • System Administrator

Without having one of these roles, it’s not going to be possible to carry out the above (mostly because it’s not possible to see solutions & dig down into them).

This is a handy little trick that hopefully will help clear up one of the headaches when trying to share canvas apps! Of course it’s possible to use the Microsoft CoE tool to set app permissions, but if a customer doesn’t have it installed, then this would be another way to approach things.

Have you ever had this issue? How did you go about solving it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below…

Troubleshooting the ‘Follow’ functionality

On a recent client project, we’ve come up against an interesting situation. Some of the users have the ‘Follow’ functionality available to them, but others don’t seem to have it. This, of course, is quite confusing, so I thought it would be good to write about it, for others who may come up against this.

But first, let’s take a step back. After all, before this had happened I had never heard of the ‘follow’ functionality within the system, and I’m quite sure that many others haven’t either! So what exactly is this all about?

What is ‘Follow’?

We’ve all been there – we have some customers who are ‘priority customers’, and we want to know/see everything that’s happening around them. Obviously we can go into their specific record/s, and see what’s going on. For example, seeing new cases added for these customers, other activities, etc. But what if we don’t want to have to manually open the records each time, or set up specific views in the system for them?

Well, this is where the Follow functionality comes in. It’s possible to track activities (in ‘real-time’) for records that a user follows. Microsoft has given us the ability to set this (or unset this) on a per record basis, so that users can set their own preferences within the system. When a user follows a specific record, the details for that record then show up in the users activity feed. This can then be used further, such as displaying it within a dashboard, for example.

Follow functionality through views
Follow functionality on a specific record

It’s also possible to automatically follow records based on specific criteria.

How to set up Follow functionality

In order for records to be able to have the follow functionality available to them, they need to have the Activity Feed enabled for the specific table. The default system tables such as Accounts, Contacts & Leads already have this enabled, so these records are able to be followed without any additional configuration around them.

To enable other tables (such as custom tables that you may have created) to be able to have the records within them followed, we need to carry out the following steps:

  1. Go to the Advanced Settings menu, and open Activity Feeds Configuration

2. Find the table that we’re wanting to configure this for (if it’s not showing up, click the ‘Refresh’ button on the menu)

Here we can see that the Channel table isn’t enabled at this point

3. Click the ‘Activate’ button on the menu bar

4. Confirm the pop up screen

And voila – you’re done! Users will now be able to go into the table/s, and follow (or unfollow) records there

Troubleshooting

So we now understand what the follow functionality is, and how to enable it. But what happens when users can’t actually see it within the system, to be able to use it?

Well, there are several different things that we can do to look to solve the issue:

  • Have activity feeds been configured for the table? If they’ve not been configured, then they’ll need to have this set up (this is why I’ve put the steps above as to how to do this!)
  • Are security roles set up correctly?

The second one is what turns out to have been the issue for this project. It’s been quite confusing, as originally mentioned, that certain users did see the follow functionality, but others users didn’t see it.

The first place to check is the ‘follow’ privileges on each security role:

As you can see above, we had given organisation-level access on the security role (& actually across all security roles), though the users were still having issues. So the next step is to check a different security privilege within the security role. This is the ‘Post Configuration’ setting, which is found under the Custom Entities section (why it’s under Custom, I have NO idea):

Without this enabled, users with the security role will NOT be able to see/use the follow functionality within the system!

Hopefully this should then sort out all issues, and users will be able to use the functionality as required.

Have you ever had issues with this feature? Have you found a different solution to fix it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Environments & ‘Admin Mode’

With some recent events happening (both professional & personal), I’ve taken a slight step back from putting out posts on here. Thankfully things seem to be settling down, so I’m getting (back) into the swing of things!

I thought that it would be good to talk about a subject that I fell ‘foul’ of recently. This is around environments, and more specifically, the ‘admin mode’ that it’s possible to use on them.

So what exactly is this ‘admin mode’? Well, the aim of it to restrict access to certain users, namely System Administrators & System Customisers. Why would we want to do this? There are several scenarios that come into mind:

  • Performing a system upgrade (such as enabling new features)
  • Changing environment type (eg Production to Sandbox, or vice-versa)
  • Restoring an environment

Essentially, any time we have operation-type work that we’re wanting to carry out. This way whatever we’re doing won’t affect users, and anything that the users are doing won’t affect things either (symbiotic relationship there!).

So as an example, if we’re doing a major release, which changes functionality within a system, we wouldn’t want users in the system carrying out their usual work, as this could have data issue if saving during the actual release. We of course SHOULD be communicating to users that a release is going to take place, and that they shouldn’t be in the system at the time, but ‘admin mode’ is how we can truly enforce it.

Something to bear in mind as well is that if you’re going ahead & restoring an environment to a previous state (whether that’s an automatic save point, or a manual one), it will automatically put the environment into ‘admin mode’ once the restore has been completed. This is very important to keep in mind!

There are three settings around administration mode:

  1. ‘Administration Mode’. This sets whether admin mode is on or off!
  2. ‘Background Operations’. This sets whether background processes, such as workflows, power automate flows, and Exchange synchronisation are enabled (allowed to happen) or disabled (stopped from happening
  3. ‘Custom Message’. This allows you to set a custom message that users (who are not system administrator/system customiser) will see when they attempt to access the environment

So this is the scenario that tripped me up a few weeks back:

  • I was needing to restore an environment to an earlier save point (to be clear, this was NOT a production environment)
  • I went ahead with the restore, and it completed successfully
  • Given that I was doing this at night, one of my children woke up, and I had to deal with them
  • I came back to things, saw that it completed, and then went ahead with the release that I was needing to do

All seemed to go well. However, when users were testing (which admittedly was a few days later), they reported that some functionality wasn’t working. This was strange, as it had been working before the release (& the release that I did hadn’t actually touched it!).

It turned out to be Power Automate flows that just didn’t seem to be running. OK – I started to look into them, but couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t run.

Creating a test Power Automate flow didn’t seem to work either – despite running it to test it, the trigger never activated! I was quite puzzled by this, and couldn’t (initially) work out the reason.

Then I thought to check environment settings! Lo & behold, the environment was STILL in administration mode, and the Background Process option was disabled! Aha – I’ve found the source!

Flipping this out of administration mode thankfully then allowed all Power Automate flows to work/run, and users confirmed that functionality was indeed running as expected. As you can imagine, I was quite relieved!

man in white shirt and black pants standing on black concrete bench near white building during

Something that I hadn’t realised previously is that if you manually put an environment into administration mode, it doesn’t automatically disable background processes. However, if you restore an environment, it DOES disable background processes by default. So if you’re wanting to try out automation items within a restored environment that’s still in administration mode, you’re going to need to ensure that you toggle the Background Processes toggle to allow it to work!

One further thing to learn as well (which I’ve been asked already by some people, so thought that I would mention it here). I’ve mentioned above that users were in the system, but reporting that things weren’t working. Now given that the environment was in administration mode, people have asked how users could be in it! The answer is that these users actually had the system customiser role applied to them, which is why they could get in! If they hadn’t had the role, then perhaps I might have realised things a little sooner (ie that the environment was in administration mode).

So a (good) little lesson learned, and I’ll definitely take it forwards. Has this, or anything else like it, ever tripped you up? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Canvas Apps & Power Automates

So it’s been a busy few weeks here, which is why I haven’t really been putting up any articles. March/April is always a busy time for our family with stuff going on, and this year I decided not to push myself to get articles out, as otherwise I’d be running very low on sleep!

That being said, I’ve still had some great ideas about things that I’d like to share, and have been keeping a series of short notes for me to pick up. Today’s topic is one of them, which I think has been a major pain to anyone involved in canvas app development!

So, the back story to this is that we’re able to use Power Automate flows together with canvas apps. What I mean by this is that we’re able to directly trigger them from within the canvas app, rather than needing to do something like edit or create a record, and then have the Power Automate flow trigger from the record creation or modification.

There’s a specific Power Apps trigger that’s available within Power Automate exactly for this purpose:

When clicked, it gives us the trigger line in the steps as follows:

So what we’d do is within the canvas app, we would bind a button (or another control) that when selected, it would then go away & trigger the Power Automate flow. Great – so many different things that we can get to happen! One of the benefits of doing things like this is that we can then pass information from the Power Automate flow back to the canvas app directly:

This can then mean that the user can know, within the canvas app itself, that the Power Automate flow has run, and use data (or other things) that have come out of it.

OK – all good so far.

The main issue to date has been with deploying canvas apps together with Power Automate flows. See, as per best practise, we would create a solution, place the canvas app, flows, and anything else that’s necessary for it to work within it, and then deploy the solution to our target environment/s. And that’s where things just…didn’t go quite right.

Obviously within the development environment, the canvas app would be hooked up to the flows, and everything would work. Clicking the button would cause the flow to run, etc. User authentication would be in place (along with licenses of course!), and it was just fine.

But when deploying a solution containing canvas apps and associated flows between environments (regardless of whether it’s been manually deploying, or automated using a tool such as Azure DevOps), the connections to the flows would be broken. Ie, the canvas app would run, but the flows wouldn’t trigger. Looking at the connections in the canvas app within Studio would show something like the following:

All of the connections to Power Automate flows would show as ‘Not connected’. It’s not even possible to click the ellipse next to them and re-connect them – the only option available is to remove it from the canvas app!

So in order to get things working again, we’d need to do the following steps:

  • Open up the canvas app
  • Remove all connections to Power Automate flows
  • Add a temporary button, set it to be a Power Automate trigger
  • Click through all of the Power Automates needing to be connected (waiting for each one to connect, then go to the next one)
  • Remove the temporary button
  • Save and publish the solution

This, in a nutshell, has been a (major) headache. For example, I’ve been working with a solution that has over 30 Power Automate flows that can be triggered from the canvas app (lots of different functionality!). Each deployment has needed the above process to be carried out, which has usually added on at least an hour to the deployment process!

Now, this hasn’t been something that’s been unknown. In fact, the official Microsoft documentation noted the following:

So this is something that Microsoft has been well aware of, but it’s been a pain point that we’ve had to work with.

However, this has now ALL changed, which I (and MANY others) are really pleased about!

Microsoft has rolled out an update last month that means that canvas app connections to Power Automate flows will NOT break when they’re deployed across environments! This is such a massive time-saver, that I’m now trying to work out what to do with all of my free time! Only kidding…more project work will commence!

So what we can now do is take our solution, deploy it across the different environment/s that we need to get it out to (whether manually, or automated using tools such as Azure DevOps), publish the solution, and then everything works! Amazing!!

One small caveat though – to ensure that this work, you will need to go into the app, and re-publish it on the latest Power Apps version. This should of course be done in a development environment, and then can be exported and deployed as required.

Microsoft have also updated their documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/solutions-overview to remove the limitation text shown above. It’s a good place to keep an eye on changes that occur over time too.

This is definitely a welcome piece of development, and I know that we’ve been eagerly waiting for this for a while, and now it’s here!

PL-600: Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect

Well, it’s FINALLY here. And by finally, I guess I’m saying that I’ve been waiting for this for a while? The PL-600 exam is the new ‘Holy Grail’ for Dynamics 365/Power Platform people, being the Solution Architect (3 star) exam. Ten minutes after it went live, I booked to take it, and four hours after it went live I sat it! (I would have taken it sooner, but had to have supper first, get the kids to bed, etc…)

The first solution architect exam that Microsoft has done in this space has been the MB-600 (see my exam experience write-up on it at MB-600 Solution Architect Exam). However with the somewhat recent shift moving towards certifications for the wider Power Platform, it was inevitable that this exam would change as well.

Interestingly enough, the MB-600 now counts towards some of the Microsoft Partner qualifications. I’d expect that when it retires (currently planned for June 2021), the PL-600 will take the place of it in the required certifications to have.

So, how to discuss it? Well, the obvious first start is to link to the official Microsoft page for it, which is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/power-platform-solution-architect-expert/. According to the specification for it:

Microsoft Power Platform solution architects lead successful implementations and focus on how solutions address the broader business and technical needs of organizations.
A solution architect has functional and technical knowledge of the Power Platform, Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps, related Microsoft cloud solutions, and other third-party technologies. A solution architect applies knowledge and experience throughout an engagement. The solution architect performs proactive and preventative work to increase the value of the customer’s investment and promote organizational health. This role requires the ability to identify opportunities to solve business problems.
Solution architects have experience across functional and technical disciplines of the Power Platform. Solution architects should be able to facilitate design decisions across development, configuration, integration, infrastructure, security, availability, storage, and change management. This role balances a project’s business needs while meeting functional and non-functional requirements.

So not really changed that much from the MB-600, though obviously there’s now an expectation for solutions to bring in other parts of the Power Platform, as well as dip into Azure offerings as well. Pretty much par for the course, in my experience, with how recent projects that I’ve been on have been implemented.

At the time of writing, there are no official Microsoft Learning paths available to use to study. I do expect this to change in the near future, and will update this article when they’re out. However the objectives/sub-objectives are available to view from the main exam page, and I’d highly recommend going ahead & taking a good look at these.

Passing the exam (along with having either the PL-200 Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant or PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam qualifications as well) will result in a lovely (new) shiny badge. Oh, we do so love those three stars on it!

As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.

Overall, I had 47 questions, which is around the usual amount that I’ve experienced in my exams over the last year or so. What was slightly unusual was that instead of two case studies, I got three of them! (note that your own experience may likely vary from mine).

Some of the naming conventions weren’t updated to the latest methods, which I would have expected. I still had a few references to ‘entities’ and ‘fields’ come up, though for the most part ‘tables’ and ‘columns’ were used. I guess it’s a matter of time to get everything up to speed with it.

  • Environments
    • Region locations, handling scenarios with multiple countries
    • Analytics
    • Data migrations
  • Requirement Gathering
    • Functional
    • Non-functional
  • Data structure
    • Tables
      • Types of tables
        • Standard vs custom functionality
        • Virtual tables. What these are, when they would be used, limitations to them
        • Activity types
      • Table relationships & behaviours
      • Types of columns, what each one is suited for
      • Business rules. What they are, how they can be used
      • Business process flows. What they are, how they can be used
  • App types (differences between them, scenarios each one is best suited for
    • Model
    • Canvas
    • Portal
  • Model-driven apps
    • Form controls (standard vs custom)
    • Form layout (standard functionality vs custom functionality)
    • Formatting inputs
    • Restricting inputs
  • Automation
    • Power Automate flows. What they are, how they can be used, restrictions with them
    • Azure Logic Apps. What they are, how they can be used, restrictions with them
    • Power Virtual Agents
  • Communication channels
    • Self service abilities through Power Virtual Agent chatbots. How this works, when you’d use them, limitations that exist
    • Live agent abilities through Omnichannel. How this is implemented, how customers can connect to a live agent (directly, as well as through chatbots)
    • Teams. When this can be used, how other platform abilities can be used through it
  • Integration
    • Integration tools
    • Power Platform systems
    • Azure systems
    • Third party systems
    • Reporting across data held in different systems
    • Dynamics 365 API
  • Reporting
    • Power BI. What it is, how it’s used, how it’s configured, limitations with it, how to share information with other users
    • Interactive Dashboards. What these are, how these are set up and used, limitations to them
  • Troubleshooting
    • Canvas app issues
    • Model driven app issues
    • Data migration
  • Security
    • Data Protection. What is it, where it’s set up, how it’s used across different requirements in the platform
    • Types of users (interactive/non-interactive)
    • Azure Active Directory, and the role/s it can play, different types of AAD authentication
    • Power Platform security roles
    • Power Platform security teams, types
    • Portal security
    • Restricting who can view forms
    • Field level security
    • Hierarchy abilities
    • Auditing abilities and controls
    • Portal security

Wow. It’s a lot of stuff. Not that I’m surprised by that, as essentially it’s the sort of thing that I was expecting (being familiar with the MB-600). I think that on a ‘day to day’ basis, I cover most of these items already, so didn’t have to do a massive amount of revision for items that I wasn’t familiar with.

From my experience in taking it, I’d say that around 30% of the questions seemed to be focused on Dynamics 365, with 70% being focused on Power Platform capabilities. It’s about what I thought it would be when the exam was first announced. Obviously some people are more Dynamics 365 focused, and others are more Power Platform focused, but the aim of the exam (& qualification) is to really understand the breadth of the offerings available.

I can’t tell you if I’ve passed it or not…YET!. Results aren’t going to be out for several months, based on previous experience with Beta exams, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.

So, if you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!

Customising Case Resolutions

Well, the title is a bit of a mouthful, I’ll admit. Hopefully though this brings some good information, and can help people out.

Cases are wonderful things, and can be used for tracking client interactions, compliments/complaints, and so many other things. What cases do have is the ability to resolve them, and provide information around the resolution.

Now, the standard way of doing this provides the following screen:

There’s the ability to set the Resolution Type (being a dropdown, aka Choice, field), & putting in free text for the Resolution itself (allowing us to track information around it). There are also time fields, which can be used for working out the time spent, as well as any time that’s going to be chargeable.

Now when going in to modify these, we’d think to open up the Case Resolution table. However, this isn’t actually the right place to do it. Instead, we’re needing to update the Case table itself, as the Care Resolution items comes from the Case Status field!

Somewhat annoyingly, it’s not possible to do this through the new ‘Maker’ interface:

In order to actually handle this, we need to switch across to the Classis editor to set this up. This could be because it’s actually a situation of having both parent & child entries. What I mean by this is that there’s the actual status (being Active, Resolved or Cancelled), and then a reason under each one. Hopefully at some point it’ll be updated into the new UI, so that we can do it from there.

We’ll need to change the Status item to ‘Resolved’, & can then add in the options that we want:

After adding them, we need to save & publish, and then they’ll show up for us, and are able to be selected:

So that’s great – we’re able to customise it. But what if we’re wanting to customise the actual ‘Resolve Case’ form itself? Not everyone wants to show Time/Billable Time on it (quite a few of our clients ask us to remove it), and perhaps they want to add additional custom fields.

So from the usual perspective of doing this, we’d open up the Case Resolution table, create new fields as required, and modify the existing form (we’re not able to create any other forms for this specific table). After all, this is how we’d do it for any table in the system (whether a standard one, or a custom one). This is going to be the Main form, rather than the QuickCreate one:

We save & publish it, and then would open up a Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and expect to see it. However, that doesn’t happen, which has been most puzzlingly to me!

It turns out that there are two things needed to be done in order to get to see our ‘custom’ form (though it’s not really custom, as it’s modifying the default form, but whatever).

  1. We need to modify security permissions for users, and is a critical requirement. An example of this is shown below:
Security Role: Customer Service Representative

2. We need to enable customisable dialogues. Yes, it’s a setting that needs to be updated in order for users to see the custom layout of the form. If we don’t do this, they’re shown the default form, even though we’ve modified it! Seems a little strange that the system seems to have this concept of a ‘shadow’ form, but I guess that’s how it is.

To do this, we need to go into the Service Management settings area. I usually launch this through the Customer Service Hub app, though it’s available through several of the other standard apps as well:

Once there, we need to click into the Service Configuration menu item, and then change the ‘Resolve Case Dialogue’ option as shown below:

Remember to click the ‘Save’ button to save this.

Finally we can go back to our Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and look what appears!

So in summary, it’s definitely possible to modify & change the way that Case resolutions works in the system. It does take a little bit of fiddling around with settings in different areas, which can be confusing if we’re not used to this, but can give a great result in the end.

Have you ever come across this, and wondered how to do it? Have you developed Case Resolutions any further? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Data Export Service Connection Issues

This is a slightly different post from the usually stuff that I talk about. It’s much more ‘techy/developer’ focused, but I thought it would be quite useful still for people to keep in mind.

The background to this comes from a project that I’ve been working on with some colleagues. Part of the project involves setting up an Azure SQL database, and replicating CDS data to it. Why, I hear you ask? Well, there are some downstream systems that may be heavy users of the data, and as we well know, CDS isn’t specifically build to handle a large number of queries against it. In fact, if you start hammering the CDS layer, Microsoft is likely to reach out to ask what exactly you’re trying to do!

Therefore (as most people would do), we’re putting in database layer/s within Azure to handle the volume of data requests that we’re expecting to occur.

Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Azure

So with setting up things like databases, we need to create the name for them, along with access credentials. All regular ‘run of the mill’ stuff – no surprises there. In order for adequate security, we usually use one of a handful of password generators that we keep to hand. These have many advantages to them, such as ensuring that it’s not something we (as humans) are dreaming up, that might be easier to be guessed at. I’ve used password generators over the years for many different professional & personal projects, and they really are quite good overall.

Sordum Random Password Generator Creates Random Passwords with Ease - MajorGeeks
Example of a password generation tool

Once we had the credentials & everything set up, we then logged in (using SQL Server Management Studio), and all was good. Everything that we needed was in place, and it was looking superb (from the front end, at least).

OK – on to getting the data actually loaded in. To do this, we’re using the Data Export Service (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/replicate-data-microsoft-azure-sql-database for further information around this). The reason for using this is that the Data Export Service intelligently synchronises the entire database initially, and thereafter synchronises on a continuous basis as changes occur (delta changes) in the system. This is really good, and means we don’t need to build anything custom to handle it. Wonderful!

Setting up the Data Export Service takes a little bit of time. I’m not going to go into the details of how to set it up – instead there’s a wonderful walkthrough by the AMAZING Scott Durow at http://develop1.net/public/post/2016/12/09/Dynamic365-Data-Export-Service. Go take a look at it if you’re needing to find out how to do it.

So we were going through the process. Part of this is needing to copy the Azure connection string into into a script that you run. When you do this, you need to re-insert the password (as Azure doesn’t include it in the string). For our purposes (as we had generated this), we copied/pasted the password, and ran things.

However all we were getting was a red star, and the error message ‘Unable to validate profile’.

As you’d expect, this was HIGHLY frustrating. We started to dig down to see what actual error log/s were available (with hopefully more information on them), but didn’t make much progress there. We logged in through the front end again – yes, no problems there, all was working fine. Back to the Export Service & scripts, but again the error. As you can imagine, we weren’t very positive about this, and were really trying to find out what could possibly be causing this. Was it a system error? Was there something that we had forgotten to do, somewhere, during the initial setup process?

It’s at these sorts of times that self-doubt can start to creep in. Did we miss something small & minor, but that was actually really important? We went over the deployment steps again & again. Each time, we couldn’t find anything that we had missed out. It was getting absolutely exasperating!

Finally, after much trial & error, we narrowed the issue down to one source. It’s something we hadn’t really expected, but had indeed caused all of this to happen!

What happened was that the password that we had auto-generated had a semi-colon (‘;’) in it. In & of itself, that’s not an issue (usually). As we had seen, we were able to log into SSMS (the ‘front-end’) successfully, with no issues at all.

However when put into code, Azure treats the semi-colon as a special character (a command separator). It was therefore not recognising the entire password, which was causing the entire thing to fail! To resolve this was simple – we regenerated the password to ensure that it didn’t include a semi-colon character within it!

Now, this is indeed something that’s quite simple, and should be at the core of programming knowledge. Most password generators will have an option to avoid this happening, but not all password generators have this. Unfortunately we had fallen subject to this, but thankfully all was resolved in the end.

The setup then carried on successfully, and we were able (after all of the effort above) to achieve what we had set out to do initially.

Have you ever had a similar issue? Either with passwords, or where something worked through a front-end system, but not in code? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!