Dynamics 365 Kanban Boards

One of the great features being released as part of Wave 1 2020 for Dynamics 365 is the ability to have Kanban boards in the system!

For those people who are unfamiliar with this functionality, “Kanban” is the Japanese word for “visual signal”. A kanban board helps make work visible using cards & columns to easily display data visually. This allows people to keep on top of things, rather than be distracted by lots of lists and data in different places.

Example of a generic kanban board:

When an item on a kanban board changes status (or whatever property the board groups by), it moves to the relevant column. This could be as simple as having PostIt notes on a wall somewhere and a member of the team physically moves it to a new column, or having a record value be updated and then it automatically moves in the view. Items can also be dragged/dropped to a new column in some systems, which then updates the status

I’ve used Pivotal Tracker for several projects that I’ve been working on over the years, which works exactly in this way.

One of the drawbacks with how data is displayed in Dynamics 365 is that the views are lists of records. You can add columns for fields that you want to reference (eg status), sort & filter on them, but visually it’s not very exciting. There’s the ability of course to have charts, graphs & Power BI objects (with the ability to drill down into these), but it’s still not the best of experiences in my opinion.

Well, that’s now no longer the case! You can now use the kanban board ability to display data more visually, as well as interacting with it (think drag/drop)

Caveat: At the moment, although you can add kanban to practically any entity, it’s actually only able to be used on Opportunity

So, the steps to enable it in your environment:

• Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments & select the environment you’re wanting to try it in
• On the right side of the page, you’ll see the Wave 1 release (see screenshot below). Select the ‘Manage’ button, and confirm the upgrade (it’s not reversible FYI). Wait patiently for it to install (it can take several hours)

• Once the installation is finished, refresh the environment, open the environment, click the cogwheel on the top right, and select ‘Advanced Settings’

• Joyfully, this takes you to the old system settings menu, as this functionality hasn’t yet been moved into the configuration available at make.powerapps.com (yet!). Click the dropdown arrow next to Settings in the menu ribbon, and select Customisations

• Open the solution up (remember, you should probably be doing this in a custom solution, rather than the default one!), expand entities, and find Opportunity. Click on it, and then click on the ‘Controls’ tab

• You’ll see the option for ‘Add Control’. Click this, then scroll down the list until you see Kanban! Add it, and it’ll show up in the list of controls

• Now, it’s VITAL that you save, and then publish the customisations.
• Close all of this, and go to the Opportunity entity. Click the 3 dots to expand the menu on the menu bar, click to slide into the Show As menu, and then select Kanban (you can of course change the default view to use Kanban, if you so desire)

• And BOOM! The screen layout will magically change, and you should now see the following sort of thing (assuming you have data for Opportunities, of course)

Incidentally, there are actually two Kanban board views available for Opportunities. One of these groups by the record status, and the other groups by where records are within the Business Process Flow timeline (which is shown in the screenshot above). You can switch between these easily by selecting the option that you want on the screen.

Now, as I stated above, this is currently only available for Opportunity (and you need a Sales Enterprise or Sales Professional license to use it). However, I really think this is great functionality, and would hope that it’ll roll out to other parts of Dynamics 365, as well as being available for Power Apps built on the CDS.

How do I see this being valuable? Good question to ask! I think that initially it could be really valuable for customer service scenarios, especially tracking negative interactions with customers (ie where the customer isn’t happy with support and/or the resolution, or there’s a fault, etc).

The ability to display this data visually, with time filters as well, should bring things into focus quite quickly to see where a company can both improve its offering, as well as pick up any issues that are occurring. Obviously regular reporting and BI will still continue to play their crucial roles, but this is another piece of functionality being added to the overall ‘toolkit’ to help get things every better!