Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking with Girish about the wonders of having a child (hint – she may be advanced in certain scientific items already!), his love of cricket, and being able to keep positive through very challenging situations.
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Interesting title, isn’t it? I thought to do something that might grab peoples attention, and this was the best that I could come up with! So, let’s get into the scenario, the issue experienced, and how we managed to resolve it.
The scenario on this project was as follows. We’ve been implementing a customer service solution for a sales company, that manufacture multiple products, under multiple brands. Currently there are multiple systems used for order entries, which at some point will be moved to a single system.
However for the moment, they’re wanting to be able to carry out holistic customer service across all brands, to be able to enable all customer service agents to have access to the same data, customers able to be serviced in the same way, regardless of brand, etc.
As a result, Dynamics 365 Customer Service was the ticket, and has many standard capabilities that addresses the need of the customer.
Now, whilst sales (aka orders) will not be handled within Dynamics 365 itself, we didn’t want the customer service agents to have to look up order information in the ordering systems. Instead, we wanted to be able to bring the sales/order information into Dynamics 365 for reference (at some point it’s likely that the customer will actually use Dynamics 365 capabilities for sales as well).
In order to do this, we’ve had some amazing data architects bringing the data together into Azure Data Factory (ADF)) from the multiple order systems, and then pushing the data into Dynamics 365 (users have read-only view of it).
With bringing in the data, we were looking to capitalise on the native functionality of Dynamics 365, namely the ability for columns to be automatically calculated. An example of this would be bringing in the order line amount, the tax amount, and then having the total order line amount automatically calculated. This is standard system functionality, and when working in Dynamics 365, has many different uses across the system.
Now, it’s important to note here that as we’re not actually handling orders within Dynamics 365, we’re also not holding a ‘proper’ product list within Dynamics 365 itself. However, orders need to show product information on them (bit useless otherwise!), so we’re using the capability of ‘write-in products’.
Note: If you haven’t come across write-in products before, it’s actually a really great item. Essentially, it allows products to be entered for opportunities, quotes, orders etc (wherever products are used), but for when the product/s aren’t in the system product catalogue. Write-in products allow you to simply type the name of a product or service, & then type in the price. This is very useful if, for instance, a product isn’t yet available in the product catalogue, but you still want to be able to quote it. In our scenario, we’re using write-in products to avoid the need to manage the product catalogue itself. It’s also helpful for when you don’t want to use price lists, as all products need to be associated to a price list.
So we start off the data migration, and it’s looking good. No issues being reported by the integration…
But, then users go in to the UAT system to check through things, and find that when looking at orders, the totals aren’t being calculated:
Hmm. That’s strange. So we started to look at what could have caused this problem…
For clarification, we didn’t want to auto-calculate the information within ADF, and then push it into the relevant Dynamics 365 columns. We wanted to be able to rely on the system working in the way that it should!
Finally, we found out why the calculated columns weren’t working. There’s actually a system setting that governs how this works:
With this set, the auto calculations are now working in the system:
So, thankfully we managed to get this working, and everything went smoothly from that point.
Have you ever been caught out by something similar? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below!
Talking to Zoe on our shared interest of low & slow BBQ, the importance of UI/UX in app development, and how imposter syndrome can affect us all.
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Chatting to Jeff around how he got into cooking, model/canvas app integration, and the benefits that OCM can bring to projects – quite interesting!
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Chatting to Michelle about her long-time interest in anime/manga, the wonders of #PowerAutomate cloud flows, & what might happen as a result of an unexpected loop…
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Chatting with Yash on a multiple of topics, including #cryptocurrency, #blockchain, and the importance of having a good network in place!
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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.
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!
Speaking to Antti around whiskey collecting (something that a lot of the #community seems to enjoy?), and the importance of PROPER requirements gathering during projects (especially around ‘low code’!)
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Over the holiday period, I’ve been playing around with solution deployments. OK – don’t judge me too much…I also took the necessary time off to relax & get time off work!
But with some spare time in the evenings, I decided to look a bit deeper into the world of DevOps (more specifically, Azure DevOps), and how it works. I’ll admit that I did have some ulterior motives around it (for a project that I’m working on), but it was good to be able to get some time to do this.
So why am I writing this post? Well, there’s a variety of great material out there already around DevOps, such as https://benediktbergmann.eu/ by Benedikt (check out his Twitter here), who’s really great at this. I chat to him from time to time around DevOps, to be able to understand it better.
However, I ran into some quite interesting behaviour (which I STILL have no idea why it’s the case, but more on this later), and thought that I would document it.
Right – let’s start off with manual deployments. As we know, manual deployments are done through the user interface. A user (with necessary permissions) would do the following:
Pretty simple, right?
Now, from an DevOps point of view, the process is similar, though not quite the same. Let’s see how it works:
All of that runs (usually) quite smoothly, which is great.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about managed solutions. I’m not going to get into the (heated) discussion around managed vs unmanaged solutions. There’s enough that’s been written, said, and debated on around the topic to date, and I’m sure it will continue. Obviously we all know that the Microsoft Best Practise approach is to use managed solutions in all non-DEV environments..
Anyway – why am I bringing this up? Well, there’s one key different in behaviour when deploying a managed solution vs an unmanaged solution (for a newer solution version), and this is to do with removing functionality from the solution in the DEV environment:
Now most of us know this already, which is great. It’s a very useful way to handle matters, and can assist with handling a variety of scenarios.
So, let’s go back to my first question – why am I writing this post? Well..it’s because of the different behaviour in manual vs automated deployment, which I discovered. Let’s look at this.
When deploying manually, we get the following options:
The default behaviour (outlined above) is to UPGRADE the solution. This will apply the solution with both additive & detractive behaviour. This is what we’re generally used to, and essentially the behaviour that we’d expect with a managed solution.
Now, when running a release pipeline from Azure DevOps, we’d expect this to work in the same way. After all, systems should be build to all work in the same way, right?
Well, no, that’s not actually what happens. See, when an Azure DevOps release pipeline runs, the default behaviour is NOT to import the solution (we’re talking managed solutions here) as an upgrade. Instead (by default), it imports it as an UPDATE!!!
This is what was really confusing me. I had removed functionality in DEV, ran the build pipeline, then ran the release pipeline. However the functionality (which I had removed from DEV) was still present in UAT! It took me a while to find out what was actually happening underneath…
So how can we handle this? Well, apart from suggesting to Microsoft that they should (perhaps) make everything work in the SAME way, there’s a way to handle it within the release pipeline. For this, it’s necessary to do two things:
Firstly, on the ‘Import Solution’ task, we need to set it to import as a holding solution.
Secondly, we then need to use the ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’ task in the release pipeline
What this will do is then upgrade the existing solution in the target environment with the holding solution that’s just been deployed.
Note: You will need to change the solution version to a higher solution number, in order for this to work properly. I’m going to write more about this another time, but it is important to know!
So in my view, this is a bit annoying, and perhaps Microsoft will change the default behaviour within DevOps at some point. But for the moment, it’s necessary to do.
Has this (or something similar) tripped you up in the past? How did you figure it out? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Starting off #2022 by talking with the AMAZING Azure. Delving into her #couponing habit, & her history of cars ‘not working’…
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.