Omnichannel Macros

I’ve previously touched on macros in https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-productivity-tools/, but with some new functionality that’s now come out, I thought it would be quite interesting to dive deeper in them. By doing do, we can see how they work, the functionality that they offer, and some really cool & interesting scenarios!

Let’s have a quick reminder of what macros are all about (for those who don’t know, yet):

Macros allow customer service agents to carry out repetitive tasks that can span multiple entities. Eg opening forms (model-driven apps), pre-populating data into the form, etc. Through this, not only are there less manual tasks/steps to carry out, there’s now the ability to carry out the same tasks, without worrying about a step being missed, or the wrong data copied in, etc.

With that in mind, let’s see what there is for macros in Omnichannel. As a default, there were always the following 3 pre-defined automation actions:

With these, we’re able to do things like:

  • Opening a form to create a new record. This could be used to create a new contact automatically
  • Opening an existing record. This could be used to open an existing contact (based on pre-survey questions, such as email address etc
  • Searching the Knowledge Base using specified keywords/phrases
  • Opening an email form with a pre-defined templated
  • Linking records together

There’s now a new option available:

Hmm. This looks interesting. What happens when we select it?

We get a condition block! Clicking ‘Add an action’ will allow us to then add either one of the pre-defined automation actions, or another Control/Condition block.

OK – so you’re now thinking that I’m getting over excited about this. But hold on – let me explain further why I’m really liking this.

So when using Power Automate, frequently I’ll use condition blocks to check/satisfy things (it’s obviously available in Logic Apps as well, but I have minimal experience of those to date). Some of them can get quite advanced, but it comes in useful. However for Omnichannel macros to date, it’s not been possible to do this. We’ve been limited to just a few options, without being able to specify branching criteria based on variables.

Now we’re (finally) able to do this. The Condition field works in the same way as Power Automate does, with being able to string multiple statements together, and have actions that result from them. We’re also able to use slugs in them, to populate variables & use customer-entered data.

Let’s see an example of this. We have a customer who’s opening an Omnichannel chat session. They’ve filled in the pre-survey questions, in which we’ve asked for the following pieces of information:

  • First Name (required)
  • Last Name (required)
  • Email Address (required)
  • Company Name

With the condition check in place, we can either create just a contact record (if the customer didn’t fill in the company name field), or we can create both account & contact records, and link the two together. We could also check if the customer already exists as a contact, and then not need to create any records for them.

This means that there will be much less manual work for the agent to carry out, as they won’t have to manually create all of these records.

We’re able to string these together in ‘multi’ step scenarios, to allow things to flow on from each other:

There are also other options available to use, such as the ability to clone, and the ability to open a new application tab. I’ve covered application tabs at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-application-tabs/, so we can see how helpful this could actually be. We wouldn’t need to automatically open a specific system for all customers contacting us; instead we’re able to selectively open things based on the actual customer. This makes for a much cleaner & better agent experience, in my opinion.

In summary, this is a really helpful & useful feature that’s been added, bringing even better functionality to macros. We’ve been able to do these sorts of things elsewhere to date, and being able to do it here now as well is great. All I can say is that I’m wondering what else we could do…perhaps kick off a Power Automate Flow as well? We’ll have to wait and see 🙂

Omnichannel & Application Tabs

One of the really nice things about the Omnichannel Agent experience is that it uses tabs. The conversation itself is in the left side of the screen, with the Customer Summary open in the right side of the screen. However this isn’t fixed into place – it’s possible to open additional tabs next tot he Customer Summary tab, and navigate to various places in the system.

This allows agents to easily look up additional information on records such as contacts & cases, as well as other places.

Agents are therefore able to quickly flip between different system records, getting the information that they may need to satisfy the customer interaction.

So that’s great. Clicking the + icon on the tab allows new tabs to be opened, and the agent can select which record type they’d like to see:

The system allows movement between these if they disappear off the screen with arrow buttons being available:

So all of this is really good, and is provided as system default behaviour, without any customisation or configuration being needed to be done.

So let’s now think about several other types of scenarios, and see what could be done to enable them:

  • You want the agent to see a dashboard showing how long the production line is currently taking with different order types
  • You want to be able to look up an item in another stock system
  • You want to carry out a custom search in your distributor network

All of the above items (and many more) are things that aren’t native within Dynamics 365. It’s therefore not possible to display this with native system functionality…or is it?

Well, it is! Omnichannel has something called ‘Application Tab Templates’. These allow you to specify custom tabs to open when a chat start. With these, you’re able to point to any web-based resource, even if it’s not within Dynamics 365!

Note: It’s not possible to point to a bespoke desktop application using Application Tab Templates. The resource that you’re wanting to point to needs to be web-based. This is one of the main differentiators between Omnichannel & Unified Service Desk – USD allows you to point to a desktop/server application within the window.

Setting up a new Application Tab Template is not too difficult, thankfully:

We’re able to select what the Application Type should be. There are various options here, including web resources, ‘third party’ websites, entity lists, etc:

When we save the record, we can then input the necessary parameters for that type. These parameters are system-defined, so we have to work within these, and can’t add any additional ones (at this point in time). We can also use values from pre-chat surveys based on information that the customer has provided before the chat starts. Imagine being an agent with a new conversation, and you already have the entire purchase history for them open, or their billing records!

Note: For a full listing of the parameters available for each application type, please refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/administrator/application-tab-templates#application-types

Once this has been created, the next step is to associate it with a session template. Session templates govern the following items:

  • The behaviour of the chat by default (Docked, Minimized or Hidden
  • The name of the session
  • The application tab/s that open (you can add as many as you want to)
  • The agent scripts that are available to be used.

To do this, open the relevant session template, and then add the application tab/s to it that you want to appear:

Save & close the session template record, and refresh the agent interface. When a new chat session comes in, Hey Presto!

Using the ability to have different chat widgets, it’s possible to customise each one in a different way. So for example:

  • The Sales team could have the distributor system open, to know how long it’ll take to fulfil an order
  • The Billing team could have their invoice/finance system open, to have the customer billing history
  • The Motorbike Servicing team could have their system which tracks all work done on your motorbike open, to see the entire service history

It’s really up to you how you choose to best make use of this. I feel it’s really quite helpful, and will cut down on the time that agents need to spend to pull up different pieces of information to help the customer.

How do you think you would use it in your company? Comment below to share 🙂

Omnichannel & Sentiment Analysis (II)

I’ve previously touched upon sentiment analysis within Omnichannel in several articles (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-sentiment-analysis/ and https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-supervisor-tools/). It’s really a great feature that allows agents to quickly & easily see how the customer is interacting. It also allows for supervisors to see at a glance how interactions are going overall.

With all of that, I thought it would be helpful to take a further look into how sentiment analysis actually works, so that we can understand it a little better.

Now, the actual nuts & bolts for sentiment analysis are provided by Azure Cognitive Services. There are a wide range of tools available through this, but we have no need to go into Azure to configure this. It’s a simple setting within Omnichannel to get it working, rather than needing to fiddle around with many different things:

However, what’s actually going on during a conversation, and how is the sentiment analysis worked out/calculated? We see the pretty little face icons (with the different colours), but how are these actually being set?

Well, there are two ways in which algorithms are used to calculate the sentiment that’s shown:

  • Natural language processing (NLP)
  • Machine learning (ML) algorithms

With these two ways methods, it’s possible to not only see what the current interactions are showing, but also to enhance the model to understand sentiment better.

Note: In a session that I presented recently, one of the attendees asked if it’s possible to train the model, to result in a custom algorithm. Unfortunately this isn’t possible to do – the machine learning that takes place is the general Azure one, rather than one for a single company or customer

The following diagram shows the sentiments that are used. They’re nicely colour-coded, for ease of reference as well:

When a customer interacts through Omnichannel, the sentiment shown is based on the last 6 messages received from the customer. As a result, the sentiment shown can very well fluctuate & change during the conversation, based on how it’s going.

The Sweetest Languages in the World - | Beyond Exclamation

Obviously, customers aren’t just going to use English to communicate. Companies are based around the world, and will use their native/local language when providing support. Omnichannel allows for this without an issue, utilising the Azure Text Translator API behind the scenes to provide this. If you’re interested to see which languages are supported for this, head to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/language-support which is the latest source of information for this.

There are some interesting things to know around how this actually works:

  • When a language other than English is used, the Text Translator API translates the text to English, and then it’s analysed/scored for sentiment
  • If a language isn’t supported by the Text Translator API, it won’t be scored
  • If profanity (eg a swearword) is detected, the sentiment will automatically be shown as Negative or Very Negative, regardless of the rest of the last 6 lines of conversation

Some people have expressed their concern to me around how accurate the Azure translation actually is, but to date I haven’t seen any major concerns resulting out from it. As with the other Azure services, Microsoft is continually refining & improving it. That being said, there are several languages with very nuanced terms. I’d like to think that these would be supported without issues.

There is, however, somewhat of an interesting behaviour when starting off the analysis at the beginning of the conversation:

  • If the initial language is detected as English, it’s assumed that all of the subsequent conversation will be in English. As a result, if the customer switches away from English, the system won’t recognise this, and a Neutral sentiment score will be shown
  • If the initial conversation is not in English, then the system will check every conversation line & re-detect the language as necessary.

This seems somewhat strange to me, as I’d have thought that the system would automatically check the language for each conversation line. I can think of plenty of scenarios where different languages are used in a single conversation, even if it does start with English being used. I’d like to think that this will be updated at some point, to make the experience better.

Matt Collins-Jones on The Oops Factor

Going into Matt’s love of films, and why we think we should set up a ‘Quiz Supper Night’ team as a service to others. Discovering the story of the first data migration that he ever did, and his discovery of the special fields to use when uplifting data into a system.

If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!

Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.

Workflows & Managed Solutions

This is about some interesting behaviour around workflows & managed solutions, which I’ve recently discovered. Let me give a bit of background first.

Currently I’m working on several COVID-19 apps for local authorities, to be able to help them assist people in need. As part of this, each local authority has a portal within the solution. The portal itself is a Power App Portal, and I haven’t really had exposure to them before.

blog.atwork.at | Hello, PowerApps Portals (and external users)!
Default portal view, not the one we implemented!

Installing a Power Apps Portal comes with quite a large number of solutions in order to get it to work. More on this below.

Due to the way in which we’re engaging with our clients, the solutions are built in a single tenancy (different environments, of course!). We’re then inviting the users in as guests through Azure Active Directory, to be able to access functionality etc. This works well – we don’t need to worry about managing user accounts, AAD permissions, etc. However it also means that we don’t have any Office 365 licenses within the environment itself.

Now we have workflows that are sending emails out around the portal – registrations, password resets, etc. These are being generated automatically by the system, but as there’s no Office 365 mailbox for the user, they’re queuing up.

It’s not possible to authenticate a mailbox belonging to an external user (we tried!), as the system needs a native (full) user with an active mailbox to be able to send out emails. This is of course unlike Power Automate, where you can create a Send Email action and use specified credentials for logging in to send an email.

So, we did what any normal system administrator/configurator would do. We opened up the relevant (managed) solution, and from there opened up the workflow that we needed to modify. Things looked normal at first – we deactivated the workflow, and started poking around it to see what made it tick.

We came across the part that actually took user credentials to send the email that was being generated, and modified this accordingly. Then we saved the workflow, which was successful. However, upon trying to then reactivate the workflow, we got the following error message (helpful, isn’t it!):

Nicely it gives the option to download the log file around the error. This can usually be quite helpful (at times), so we thought we’d take a look at it. Behold the following (I’ve had to shrink the screenshot to allow it to fit on the screen!):

Isn’t that ‘beautiful’. Don’t worry if you can’t actually make out the error information – none of it makes any sense, at least not in a practical sort of way.

Being stuck at this, I thought to reach out to one of the community Power App Portal champions, Mario Trueba. I’ve known him for a while, and he’s just simply amazing. Having asked if I could jump on a call with him for 15 minutes to diagnose (& hopefully find an answer!), we spent almost an hour!

He suggested trying to use the classic interface, as I had been doing all of this through the new UI. So off I went to open up Classic (I’ve missed this, I will freely admit). Through there, we opened up the solution, opened up the workflow, and re-activated it. Or not, as it happens – even through the Classic UI, we weren’t able to do so. We tried a variety of things, but to no avail. It just simply wasn’t happening!

I was slightly concerned that there was an underlying issues with Portals, perhaps from some legacy CafeX code. I had tried searching with Mario for error details contained within the log file, but we couldn’t find anything that would fix it.

The next morning on waking up & checking Twitter, I noticed someone tweeting around Portals, and engaged with them. They turned out to be on the Portals development team, and told me to shoot them over an email with the details, which I did. They then replied to me, saying that it wasn’t anything specific to Portals, and that I should raise a support ticket. That crossed one item off my list (a Portals issue), but I was still needing to get things resolved.

So I went off & raised a support ticket. A few hours later, a very nice tech support person called Siva gave me a call to discuss the issue. We hopped into Teams, and in what I can only describe as the SHORTEST period of time that I’ve ever experienced, the issue was resolved (it took 7 minutes in total. Yes, I know…). Don’t worry – I’m not going to leave you hanging here!

See, what the ‘issue’ (and I’m deliberately putting it in quotes) was turned out to be something quite simple, yet quite strange.

Essentially opening the workflow from the managed solution somehow (& I don’t know HOW) inherits the ‘managed’ property. This is whether we open it from the new UI, or the classic UI. As a result we’re able to deactivate it, but we CAN’T reactivate it due to the system thinking that we’re modifying a managed component (as an aside, it is interesting how I did manage to save it though?). This was what was causing things to fall over, and the error message was really not helpful at all.

It’s also not a matter of being a Microsoft (or ISV) managed solution. I’ve replicated this happening with a solution that I’ve built, exported as managed, & then imported.

So how did we do it? Well, there are two ways in which this can be dealt with:

Either we can go to System/Processes, find the workflow there, open it up, and then reactivate it:

Or we can open up the Default solution, navigate to processes, select the workflow, and then reactivate it:

Both methods work just fine, and as mentioned earlier on, I’ve since replicated this on workflows in other managed solutions.

To me, this is somewhat strange, and should work regardless. According to Siva, it’s the desired system behaviour, though I have no idea why someone should want it to work in one way, and not in another.

So if you’re reading this, and you might just happen to know someone in the necessary Microsoft engineering/development team who’d be able to answer this, could you point them my way? I’d love to engage them to find out why, how, and if they could pretty please change this?

Omnichannel Supervisor Tools

While I’ve covered a lot of different pieces of functionality from both the end customer & agent experience, I haven’t really touched on the Supervisor experience to date. With the release of a nice little piece of functionality for it around Sentiment Analysis, I’ve therefore decided that it would be a good time to take a look at it.

Now obviously supervisors exist, in the sense that any contact centre would have managers in place to manage the agents. Indeed, they may actually handle customer queries directly as well – miracles have been known to happen! 😉

Really the aim of the supervisor role within Omnichannel is intended to help customer service managers or supervisors enhance their team’s performance and improve customer satisfaction. They need to ensure that customer queries:

  • Are being responded to quickly within an accepted period of time
  • have agents that are providing the right information necessary to handle the query
  • Are handled in a satisfactory way
  • Leave the customer feeling positive & satisfied around the interaction

To this end, the supervisor role includes access to various dashboards & views on the sessions that are taking place. From this, they’re able to ensure that KPI’s are being met, that queues aren’t overflowing, and that agents are carrying out the right work.

Please note that PowerBI Pro or PowerBI Premium licenses are required for users with the Supervisor role in order to access & view these dashboards

On-going Conversation Dashboard

The on-going conversation dashboard is one of the first tools available to supervisors. In this, they can see the entire ‘landscape’ at one glance, covering:.

  • Which conversations are currently active
  • The queue that the conversation has come through
  • The channel that the conversation has come through
  • Which agent is currently handing the interaction
  • The sentiment of the customer experience (more on this below)

Through this, there’s a wealth of knowledge that the supervisor can use. If a conversation doesn’t appear to be going well, they can reach out to the agent who’s handling it, and ask if they need assistance. They can be ready to offer escalation resolution should it be needed.

Supervisors are also able to allocate any conversation that’s an in ‘Open’ state (ie it hasn’t yet started) to a specific agent, or to a specific queue.. They would do this by selecting the conversation in the window, clicking the Assign button (which appears when the conversation is selected), & selecting either Agent or Queue. Depending on which option is selected, they can then select the agent or queue that they wish to.

Furthermore, supervisors are also able to monitor any conversation that is happening (as long as it’s in the Active or Wrap Up stage). When doing this, the customer & the agent don’t know that the supervisor is monitoring the conversation (unless the agent requests it, of course). Through this, they can keep an eye on how things are going, and if they feel it’s necessary, they can join it (without needing to be invited to it). Of course when they join the conversation as an active party, the customer is then notified about it.

To do this, a supervisor would select the conversation (providing it is in the ‘Active’ or Wrap Up’ state) and then can click ‘Monitor’. This action triggers a new session for the supervisor to be pulled into the conversation.

Sentiment Analysis for Supervisors

So one of the really cool features (in my opinion) that’s recently appeared is the ability to use sentiment analysis to automatically alert supervisors.

You’re able to choose the level of sentiment that you want supervisors to be alerted on. When a conversation reaches the predefined level, the supervisor will get a prompt like this:

Sentiment analysis notification

They can then click through to either monitor the conversation (& help out if necessary), or to ignore it. This can be really helpful as it’s allowing the supervisor to be proactive, rather then needing to keep a close eye all the time on the supervisor dashboards. Indeed for a large contact centre, there could be dozens or even hundreds of conversations happening at the same time, so this will immediately flag these conversations to them.

Intraday Insights Dashboard

The Intraday Insights dashboard gives information around KPI’s that are in place for the company. This does need to be configured before supervisors are able to access it – I’d recommend looking at the extensive guide on how to do this at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/administrator/configure-intraday-dashboard-supervisor.

There are two sections that are included:

  • Conversations insights
  • Agent insights

Conversation Insights

This section gives supervisors insights into conversations that have occurred over the last 24 hours, against a range of KPI’s. This is therefore a ‘rolling state’ dashboard, without the ability to go back further over time, or pick a specific date-range. If this ability is needed, then the Agent Insights dashboard will be used.

Conversations insights dashboard

As you can see from the image above, we’re looking at metrics across different sorts of KPI’s:

  • Average wait times
  • Average handling times
  • Conversations exceeding specified criteria

This can be very helpful on an on-going basis to see how the contact centre is performing overall, over the time period. Drilling down into these items can help identify bottlenecks & choke points, which can then be worked on to provide better service & efficiencies.

Agent Insights

This part of the dashboard gives information across various health & status items on any given day. Using this, supervisors can drill down into issues that may not be visible through the conversation insights dashboard.

From the screen above, we can see that things like conversation states, agent status & participation modes are available to view.

Because these are PowerBI dashboards, it’s possible to drill down further into them, filter by item (eg queue, agent, etc), and see very specific stats about items.

I hope that this proves to be helpful in understanding some of the tools that are available within Omnichannel for supervisors, and the help that they can give in running an efficient and productive contact centre!

Ramon Tebar on The Oops Factor

Finding out what Ramon misses about Spain, and the wonders that he’s discovered in London. If you’re ever in the mood for a stroll along South Bank, drop him a line!
Going into details around his background as a pure .Net developer, and what happened on a project for a contact that didn’t go through proper requirement gathering. Quite an interesting story.

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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!

Ben Vollmer on The Oops Factor

Talking through Ben’s love of cars & sound systems (he has friends who have been on Pimp My Ride), how he actually really respond to long emails (and the outcomes from that), and what he really thinks of Outlook-reminder style app. Also touching on the important of empathy in the workplace, and getting better from mistakes.

If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!

Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.

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!