Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Working out Igor’s retirement plan to be based around his love of hiking (which came from the military). Also discussing how coffee, amongst other important things, is key to rapid-speed enterprise-scale project deployments!
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Discussing mutual interests of motorsport, racing motorbikes, seeing races, & having amazing adrenaline rushes! Also covering thoughts in our heads that we might have said out loud by mistake, and some quite interesting comments around dress codes at clients.
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Finding out how exactly Beth took up golf, how that then progressed over time into relationships, and what exactly can happen when you’re too honest with people!
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Let’s face it – we can be quite spoiled at times. As a customer, we can sometimes expect that companies be available 24/7 to service our requests, needs, issues, etc. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it! Imagine that you have a mobile phone issue at 2am – you could call up your provider, and have it handled (or a new handset sent out) immediately. That would be quite nice!
Unfortunately the real world doesn’t (always) quite work like that. Of course there are companies that operate on a multi-national or even global scale, and there’s always customer service available (Amazon – I’m thinking of you right now!).
Previously I’ve gone into how we can set operating hours for a company, so that the ability to contact a customer support agent is only shown during these times. Take a look at Handling Company Hours for a refresher on this.
But sometimes not showing the ability to contact support could potentially be counter-productive. Customers may think that our website isn’t working properly, and possibly attempt to try to reach us through other means. This could quite well frustrate them.
Due to this, we have a nice little piece of functionality that’s now come out in Omnichannel. It’s small, simple, but yet quite brilliant in my humble opinion. This is the ability to have a chat widget available, but let customers know that that it’s currently out of company hours.
To activate this, we need to open the Chat record in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, and go to the Design tab:
Quite helpfully, the section is labelled ‘Offline’! How much better could we get.
We do need to understand that (at the time of writing this post) it’s currently in Preview, with all of the usual caveats around how that works.
We have several items available here:
So what does this then look like? Well, let’s take a look:
Personally I think that being able to set a theme colour for offline access gives it that little edge. Customers will become aware of this (subconsciously) when visiting the website, and come to the point of not even trying to start a chat when they see that it’s out of hours.
One MAJOR thing to bear in mind. We’re only going to be given the option to set this when we have a value set for Operating Hours. Without this being set, we won’t be shown this option. Go try it for yourself and see!
There’s not really much else to this, to be honest. But I’m liking it. I know that from a personal perspective I’ve been on various websites, and have no idea if the support chat is actually working or not. With this in place, I’m able to see that it is available for use at the correct time, and not have to wonder about it.
Have you ever thought about implementing something like this? Have you actually done so? I’d be really interested to hear from you about how you went about it – please drop a comment below!
Discussing the joys of camping in different countries, FinOps Consulting, and what exactly compromises standard functionality or not when pitching to clients!
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I’ll freely admit that the title for this post is a bit of a mouthful! I’ll also admit that I used the British spelling of ‘centre’, rather than what it actually is. You’ll have to excuse my grammar đŸ˜‰
This post is about something that we all knew was coming. The old Admin Centre is no longer – and we shall miss it! It was inevitable that it would be moved over to the new Power Platform interface, as so many other things have already. Therefore I thought it would be good to do a quick article about where it is now, how to access it, etc.
After all, it is vitally important when needing to carry out the initial configuration for Omnichannel, or to check for upgrades to the Omnichannel installed solution!
Let us, however, cast our mind back to the very familiar layout shown below. We’ve spent so many years here that it seems quite sudden. But though you may be gone, you will not be forgotten!
Right – now onto the new version of it! So this actually took me a few minutes of digging around as to how to find it & get to it.
The first thing I tried was looking in the environment settings, but alas, I didn’t find it there. So I continued digging around.
Wishing you spare you the exact itinerary of everywhere that I looked into, I’ve decided just to show you it! I can hear the sighs of relief at this point…
What we need to do is navigate to the Power Platform Admin Centre, at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/. Once there, we expand Resources on the left hand side, and select ‘Dynamics 365 apps’. Note that you do NOT have to select a specific environment first to be able to do this./
Now we can see a list of all apps installed. Nicely we’re able to scroll, which we couldn’t do in the old interface! That’s actually really helpful, and avoids needing to navigate to a different page. If we scroll down, we can see the entry for Omnichannel:
Click on ‘Manage’, and we get the following lovely popup:
Click OK to this, and we get taken to the (familiar) interface for configuring the initial items for Omnichannel:
Here we can go about the usual items, such as checking each environment to see if there are any updates available, or configure the main channels.
Nicely, Microsoft has actually updated (some of) their documentation, which is obviously very good. I’m now going to have to go and check through previous articles of mine, and update as necessary!
This is an interesting post, for several reasons. Firstly, it’s the first one in 3 weeks – I was off on holiday, and decided to take an (almost) absolute break from all things digital, which included this blog. It was actually quite refreshing, though now coming back & starting to write again does seem a bit daunting, I’ll admit!
Thankfully, whilst wondering what exactly to start with, a scenario came up that I was working on. It seemed quite simple at first, but then actually got someone complicated. I therefore thought it would be helpful to others if I wrote about it, so here it is.
The scenario was as follows. We had records being auto-created in the system, and needed to create child records for them. This, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is really quite simple to do with Power Automate. We also needed to set lookup values on the child record, that were already populated on the parent record (for reference purposes).
So for example, the parent record has a lookup to Country (being a separate entity), and the child record also has a lookup to Country. These need to be the same.
Being both lookup fields, I figured that I’d be able to take the value from the parent record, and simply plop it into the corresponding field on the child record in Power Automate:
So I did that – and immediately hit an error. Not just any error, but the fabled ‘Resource not found for the segment’ error!
Obviously, I did what anyone would do at first – I put it into Google & Twitter, and took a look at what came up.
The ‘problem’ was coming from using the ‘CDS Current Environment’ connector, which is the latest version available (the old one is no longer available to use). It’s really great for a lot of things, but unfortunately not so great in a few areas. See, in the old CDS Connector, you could just drop the lookup field value into the field you were wanting to populate. Power Automate had no issues with that, & it would run just fine.
However in the ‘new’ CDS Connector, you can’t just do that. Instead, you need to use an OData reference (which I haven’t done much of before, to tell the truth). So based on the blogs I had come across, I went to work to try to get this working.
Part of the challenge was that there didn’t seem to be a unified consensus in how to do it. I came across the following variations:
Somewhat confusing, as I’m sure you’d agree. Nevertheless, I ploughed through all of the different possibilities. But nothing was working – every single time, I still got the ‘segment not found’ error message. This, as you can image, was extremely frustrating!
Thankfully, one of my good friends was around & able to help out. Namely, Tricia Sinclair came to the rescue!
We took a look at the code I was using, and she took a look at some of her own use cases (where it had worked for her). I was starting to think down the path of needing a capital letter in the entity name (some systems can be REALLY finicky around things like that), but thankfully it wasn’t.
Instead, it was the following. See, this was a custom entity. It turns out that for a custom entity (& heck, for all I know system entities as well) the syntax needed is ‘publisherprefix_pluralentityname(lookupfieldvalue)’. Now that’s not something that I had come across ANYWHERE at all!
Looking at it, I guess it makes sense. After all it would technically be possible to have multiple entities with the same name, though with different publishers. As a result, the system needs to know WHICH exact entity is being needed for the Power Automate, so uses this. Somewhat complicated (and hey – it worked without all of this in the OLD CDS Connector), but we got it to work!
Testing it out, everything worked smoothly. The Power Automates fired off without any issues, the data got created & populated, and everyone was happy.
So there you go. Another interesting little twist in syntax needed, which hopefully will NOT change in the (near) future!
Have you come across anything like this? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below around it!
Finding out just how Sheryl is connected with the annual Glastonbury festival, the wonders of Direct Debit/financial payment runs, and what happens exactly when you might just be performing a backdoor system update into a database…
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Discussing how he’s constructing a mountain bike course next to his house, accessibility in apps, and PowerApps4Kids. Also diving into what happened when a client asked him to build an app that a competitor of his came up with!
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Chatting about the joys of Lego, being a Terry Pratchett uberfan, house rules, and just HOW stubborn children can actually be!
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.