Tag: empowerment

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!

Personalised Sound Notifications for Omnichannel

One of the themes running through the Wave 2 2020 update for Omnichannel is the personalisation aspect. Though systems work just fine on their own, it’s always nice to add a ‘personal touch’ to the parts that we can. Last week I shared how quick replies are now able to be personalised (Personalised Quick Replies). This week I’m going to go into how the sound notifications can be personalised as well!

These seem to be just small little features, but in my view they do bring things to the next level. Examples of this are the following:

  • If a customer session starts, wanting to know which channel it’s come in through, without needing to open the conversation
  • Many agents in a contact centre – if everyone is using the same sound, no-one knows if it’s their computer or not!
  • The different between a new conversation starting, and a new message being received on an existing conversation
  • Wanting to ensure that sound volumes aren’t too high, else they’ll disturb other people.

All of these are extremely valid scenarios, along with other ones (such as disabling sound entirely, for example!). Though this seems simple to implement, and isn’t very difficult to set it, there’s a lot of flexibility involved. I’m therefore really happy that this is now available to be used.

So, let’s see how to go about setting it up. There are two parts to this – the Omnichannel Administrator side, and what the Agent can then do

Omnichannel Administrator

In the Omnichannel Administrator Hub, the administrator should open the Notifications section, and go to the Sound Notification Settings tab:

There’s a single setting there, to toggle sound notifications on or off. Setting it to ‘Yes’ will then show the following section on the screen:

Once it’s enabled, there are then a number of system default options that are automatically loaded. Here the administrator can do the following tasks:

  • Choose to allow sounds to be played at a per channel level
  • Change the system default sound notification (more on loading in custom sounds below)
  • Allow the sound notification to be repeated until the call is answered
  • Set the maximum volume allowed for the sound (this is a lovely slider control!)

There are of course sound files that come included in the system by default. But what if we’re wanting to upload custom sound files to be used? Well, that’s not a problem. Simply by clicking in the lookup field to select a sound file, we are given the option to upload a new audio file:

Clicking this brings up the Audio File record, which we use to upload. We need to give it a name & save it, and then we’re given the ability to upload the file itself:

Note: There are specific file types that need to be used, with a maximum file size of 1MB. It does say that for best experience to use the OGG file format. There are plenty of free resources out there to download OGG files, or to convert MP3 files to the OGG file format if you need

Once we’ve uploaded the file, we get presented with a mini player to hear how it sounds. This is really cool!

All of the audio files in the system (both default & custom) are then available for agents to personalise their own experience

Note: If a company wants to upload many different custom audio files, it may be easier to add the Audio Files entity to the sitemap, and then perform this function from there

Note: To prevent agents from uploading their own audio files directly, the Omnichannel Agent security role only allows Read access, not Create/Edit access:

Omnichannel Agent

With the initial system setup performed by the Omnichannel Administrator, agents are then free to go ahead & personalise their own experience. This is done directly within the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, by selecting ‘Personalisation’ from the available menu:

Once this is selected, the agent is presented with a very similar interface to the Omnichannel Administrator:

Here the agent can change the system default for themselves (this does not affect any other Omnichannel users), change the various settings, modify the volume levels, etc.

Once saved, it’s then live & active, and will work as desired.

Incoming message alerts for active sessions

At the bottom of the sound notification settings screen, there is one further setting. This is around the behaviour of sounds for existing conversations:

This can be helpful (either from an overall system perspective, or an individual agent perspective) to either allow or turn off sounds from conversations that are already happening. Some people might find it very annoying that every time a customer sends a new message through, the system plays a sound. This is especially true when dealing with multiple conversations (which, after all, is what Omnichannel is all about!)

In summary, it’s a really good feature to have now at our convenience to use. Obviously I’d suggest not to load rock music into it, for example, unless of course your company specialises in rock music! How do you think this would be beneficial to your users? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Personalised Quick Replies

One of the things that customer service agents absolutely HATE is having to type full replies to customers. There are many things that they’ll do which are quite repetitive, and having to type the same response each & every time gets frustrating to say the least.

As I’ve covered previously at Quick Responses in Omnichannel, Omnichannel has the ability for Quick Replies. With these, agents are able to select the response that they’re wanting to use, and quickly populate it into the chat session that they’re having.

It’s also possible, using ‘slugs’, to set up responses that will automatically populate with specific pieces of information in the system. For example, something like ‘Good morning, my name is {Agent Name}, how may I assist you?’ will automatically populate the name of the agent into the chat session.

This is great; the main drawback to date has been that Omnichannel administrators are required to set these up, as well as maintain them. That’s not so great, when you consider that agents might want to personalise their responses as well. To date, that’s not able to be done within the system.

However, with Wave 2 2020, it’s now possible to allow agents to create their own quick replies, to be able to be used within chat sessions. It’s also not particularly difficult to go about getting this into the system, as we’ll see below.

The Omnichannel Administrator simply needs to go to the Personal Quick Replies section, and change the toggle to ‘Yes’, then save. This will enable personal quick replies for agents simply & swiftly.

Once the system setting has been set, and is active (it can take a few minutes to refresh through), agents are then able to start setting up their own quick replies.

To do this, agents will need to be in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, and select the Personalisation option from the drop-down menu:

This will then open the agent personalisation tab, which has several different sections on it. The first one is the one that we’re interested in – Personal Quick Replies:

Here will list any personal quick replies that have already been set up by the agent, as well as give the option to create further ones to use:

Clicking this option brings up the familiar interface to set this up:

Note: Personal quick replies aren’t localised in Omnichannel. That’s why you need to select a Locale for the record. To be able to provide the quick response in multiple languages, create a specific response for each language, and select the locale that’s appropriate for it

Once the record is saved, it’s then possible to add tag/s to it for referencing:

Note: If you want to use the hash character (#), you can only use it at the beginning of the tag, not anywhere else in it

Once these have saved, they’re then available to be selected from the chat by the agent. The chat interface will show both system & personal quick replies. Typing ‘/q’ into the chat window will bring these up:

We can select the tab at the top to show just the personal quick replies that the agent has set up:

Alternatively, if the agent starts searching with text, they can easily distinguish between system & personal quick replies by looking at the icon against each one. System replies have a globe-style icon, whereas personal replies have a person-style icon:

So in summary, I think that this is a really great feature to add onto the original way of quick replies working. It’ll free up time for the Omnichannel Administrators, and allow agents to put their own responses in that they need. It’s also possible to share this using the OOB record sharing functionality, which means that a team lead can set them up, and then share them with the rest of the team!

How do you think this could enable or help you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

PL-200 Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant

Well, the last week has been quite busy, on many fronts! One of those is having a few new exams come out in Beta. I’ve already taken the PL-400 (see PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam for my review of it). Last Friday, the new PL-200 exam was released as well, so I scheduled it in for as soon as I could sit it.

Now the PL-200 is scheduled to be replacing the MB-200 exam at the end of this year (2020), assuming it comes out of beta by then of course. I remember sitting my MB-200, though I didn’t write up about it at the time. Compared to some of the other exams I’ve taken, it was hefty. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t pass on first go of it – it took me 3 tries to gain it! People will be required to take this as a pre-requisite for attaining the Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate badge.

So I’ve been expecting this new PL-200 to be quite similar, but with more of a Power Platform focus. It’s still heavy on Dynamics 365, and I wasn’t expecting that part to change. The existing MB-2xx series are also staying in place (for the moment, anyhow).

According to the official description for the exam:

Candidates for this exam perform discovery, capture requirements, engage subject matter experts and stakeholders, translate requirements, and configure Power Platform solutions and apps. They create application enhancements, custom user experiences, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.

Candidates implement the design provided by and in collaboration with a solution architect and the standards, branding, and artifacts established by User Experience Designers. They design integrations to provide seamless integration with third party applications and services.

Candidates actively collaborate with quality assurance team members to ensure that solutions meet functional and non-functional requirements. They identify, generate, and deliver artifacts for packaging and deployment to DevOps engineers, and provide operations and maintenance training to Power Platform administrators.

The official Microsoft Learn page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/pl-200, and I’d highly recommend people to go check it out. I didn’t use it that much, but felt that I was on reasonable grounds with existing knowledge. It’s mostly there, but (at least in my exam) there were some sneaky extras that I was NOT really expecting. Hopefully I managed to get them (mostly) accurate!

Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). The experience went without issues for once – sign in was fine, no issues with my headset during check-in, exam loaded & worked without problems at all.

So, as before, 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.

  • Environments
    • Different types of environments, what each one is used for, how to set/switch them between the different types
    • How to handle security/restrict access as necessary
  • Field types. All of the available field types, what are the benefits of each, and when each type should be used
  • Data storage types. Differences between Office documents (eg Excel), CDS, SQL Server, Azure SQL. When to use each one best
  • Charts. How they’re set up, how they can be shared with other users.
  • System views. What these are, who can access them, how to set them up
  • Entity forms. The different types of forms available, how to set them up, limitations of each. When each one should be used for a given scenarios
  • Model apps. Site map. What this is, how it’s used. Implementing/customising it, the different controls available & what each one does
  • Entity editable grids
    • What these are, how they can be used, how to enable & set them up
    • Limitations that they have within the system
  • Entity/record ownership. The different types of ownerships available, benefits of each, when each should be used for a given scenario
  • Data management
    • Data importing from different sources, different methods to import data
    • What is data mapping for import, and how it’s used
  • Duplicate detection. What it is, what it does, how it works. How to implement & configure it
  • Microsoft Word templates. How they can interact with Dynamics 365, how to set them up/adjust them, what they can be used for
  • Canvas Apps
    • Expression/function types, what they are, how they’re used
    • Handling data (eg collections)
    • Offline usage & data storage
    • Controls that can be used, navigating around, loading/saving data.
  • Power Virtual Agent/Chatbots.
    • Setting them up, deploying them onto websites, deploying them into Teams
    • Configuring topics, routing, handling unknown questions
    • Bot model data, including being able to access across multiple chatbots
    • Reporting on their usage, & how customer engagements have been processed
  • Power App portals
    • Registering users, registration code process
    • Validating/confirming user accounts
    • Forms security, displaying/hiding forms & data
  • AI capabilities. AI models available. Pre-built models vs custom training, capabilities (eg text scanning), and when to use each one.
  • Omnichannel
    • What it is, when it’s used
    • How to implement, deploy & configure customers being able to be sent through to it
  • Automation
    • Workflows, Power Automate, Business Process Flows
    • What each one is, benefits/use cases for each one, when to use each for specific scenarios
  • Power Automate
    • What are triggers, & how do they work
    • What are actions, and how do they work
    • What are connectors, and how do they work
    • Prebuilt vs custom connectors, capabilities, and when to use each one
    • How to set up each type & configure them
    • Instant vs Scheduled vs Triggered
    • Security – how to enable/disable their use by users
  • Business Process Flows
    • What they are, how they’re used, limitations that they have
    • How to handle security for them
  • Business rules
    • What they are, how they’re used, how to set up/configure
    • How to use them in different parts of the system (eg forms, apps, etc)
    • Actions vs Conditions vs Recommendations
  • UI Flows (RPA)
    • What these are, how they are used
    • Requirements in order to use them
    • Desktop vs Cloud
    • Implementation, customisation, configuration & deployment
    • Limitations of them
    • Data extraction from runs
  • Security & Compliance
    • Security roles, security teams, security groups
    • What each one is, how it’s used
    • System auditing, what it is, how it’s used, how to implement & configure
    • How to access & run user audit log reports
  • PowerBI. Setting up & sharing dashboards, setting up & configuring alerts, security options/roles & how they work with data
  • Dynamics 365 integrations. What other systems can integrate directly with Dynamics 365, & any limitations that they may have

The main surprise for me was mostly around the UI flows, and the various questions I had on them. I’ve not played around with them (yet!), but they are really cool!

If you’re going to take this, I’d love to hear how your experience of it went. Drop a comment below for me to see!

PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam

I’ve been continuing with taking new exams as they come out. Having recently taken the MB-400 exam (see MB-400 Power Apps & Dynamics 365 Developer Exam), I was slightly surprised to see the announcement that it was going to be replaced!

Admittedly, I was also surprised (in a good way) that I passed the MB-400, not being a developer! It’s been quite amusing to tell people that I’m a certified Microsoft Dynamics Developer. It definitely puts a certain look on their faces, which always cracks me up.

Then again, the general approach seems to be to move all of the ‘traditional’ Dynamics 365 exams to the new Power Platform (PL) format. This includes obviously re-doing the exams to be more Power Platform centric, covering the different parts of the platform than just the ‘first party apps’. It’s going to be interesting to see how this landscape extends & matures over time.

The learning path came out in the summer, and is located at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/pl-400. It’s actually quite good. There’s quite a lot that overlaps with the MB-400 exam material, as well as the information that’s recently been covered by Julian Sharp & Joe Griffin.

The official description of the exam is:

Candidates for this exam design, develop, secure, and troubleshoot Power Platform solutions. Candidates implement components of a solution, including application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.

Candidates must have strong applied knowledge of Power Platform services, including in-depth understanding of capabilities, boundaries, and constraints. Candidates should have a basic understanding of DevOps practices for Power Platform.

Candidates should have development experience that includes Power Platform services, JavaScript, JSON, TypeScript, C#, HTML, .NET, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, RESTful web services, ASP.NET, and Microsoft Power BI.

So the PL-400 was announced on the Wednesday of Ignite this year (at least in my timezone). Waking up to hear of the announcement, I went right ahead to book it! Unfortunately, there seemed to be some issues with the Pearson Vue booking system. It took around 12 hours to be sorted out, & I then managed to get it booked Wednesday evening, to take it Thursday.

So, as before, 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.

There were a few glitches during the actual exam. One or two questions with answers that didn’t make sense (eg line 30 does X, but the code sample finished at line 18), and question numbers that seemed to jump back & forth (first time it’s happened to me). I guess that I’ve gotten used to at least ONE glitch happening somewhere, so this was par for the course.

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

  • Model Apps.
    • Charts. How they work, what drives them, what they need in order to actually work, configuring them
    • Visualisation components for forms. What they are, examples of them, what each one does, when to use each one
    • Custom ribbon buttons. What these are, different tools able to be used to create/set them up, troubleshooting them
    • Entity alternate keys. What these are, when they should be used, how to set them up & configure them
    • Business Process Flows. What these are, how they can be used across different scenarios, limitations of them
    • Business Rules. What these are, how they can be used across different scenarios, limitations of them
  • Canvas apps
    • Different code types, expressions, how to use them & when to use them
    • Network connectivity, & how to handle this correctly within the app for data capture (this was an interesting one, which I’ve actually been looking at for a client project!)
    • Power Apps solution checker. How to run it, how to handle issues identified in it
  • Power Automates
    • Connectors – what these are, how to use them, security around them, querying/returning results in the correct way
    • Triggers. What is a trigger, how do they work, when to use/not use them
    • Actions. What these are, how they can be used, examples of them
    • Conditions. What these are, how to use them, types of conditions/expressions/data
    • Timeouts. How to use them, when to use them, how to configure
  • Power Virtual Agents. How to set them up, how to configure them, how to deploy them, how to connect them to other systems
  • Power App Portals. Different types, how to set them up, how to configure them, how they can work with underlying data & users
  • Solutions
    • Managed, unmanaged, differences between them, how to use each one.
    • Deploying solutions. Different methods that can be used to do it, best practise for each, when to use each one
    • Package Deployer & how to use it correctly
  • Security.
    • All of the different security types within Dynamics 365/Power Platform. Roles/Teams/Environment/Field level. How to set up, configure, use in the right way.
    • Hierarchy security
    • Wider platform security. How to use Azure Active Directory for authentication methods, what to know around this, how to set it up correctly to interact with CDS/Dynamics 365
    • What authentication methods are allowed, when/how they can be used, how to configure them
  • ‘Development type stuff’
    • API’s. The different API’s that can be used, methods that are valid with each one, the Organisation service
    • Discovery URL’s. What these are, which ones are able to be used, how they’d be used/queried
    • Plugins. How to set up, how to register, how to deploy. Steps needed for each
    • Plugin debugging/troubleshooting. Synchronous vs asynchronous
    • Component types. Actions/conditions/expressions/data operations. What these are, when each is used
    • Custom ribbon buttons. What these are, different tools able to be used to create/set them up, troubleshooting them
    • Javascript web resources. How to use these correctly, how to set them up on entities/forms/fields
    • Powerapps Component Framework (PCF). What these are, how to develop them, how to use them in the right way
  • System Design
    • Entity relationship types. What they are, what each one does, how they work, when to use them appropriately. Tools that can be used to display them for system design purposes
    • Storage considerations across different types, including CDS & Azure options
  • Azure items
    • Azure Consumption API. How to monitor, how to handle, how to change/update
    • Azure Event Grid. What it is, the different ways in which it can be used, when each source should be used
  • Dynamics 365 for Finance. Native functionality included in it

The biggest surprise that I had really when thinking back to things was the inclusion of Dynamics 365 for Finance in it. Generally the world is split into ‘front of house’ (being Dynamics 365/Power Platform), and ‘back of house’ (Dynamics 365 for Finance & Supply Chain Management). The two don’t really overlap, though they’re supposed to be coming more together over time. Being that this is going to happen, I guess it’s only natural that exam questions around each other will come up!

Overall it was quite a good exam. Some of the more ‘code-style’ questions were somewhat out of my comfort zone, and I’ll freely admit to guessing some of the answers around them! Time will tell, as they say, to see how I’ve done in 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!

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Good news for Power Automate Flows!

As a starter for 10, this wasn’t actually the blog post that I was going to write today. In fact, the subject of the post wasn’t even going to be about Power Automate! However, there was some really amazing news that dropped today from Microsoft, which I just couldn’t pass up being able to talk about.

You’ve guessed it – it’s about Power Automate! Well, I suppose that the post title was somewhat of a giveaway, wasn’t it…ah well. So let’s go ahead and find out what this is all about then!

To date, we’ve been able to put Power Automate flows into a solution. Well, it wasn’t there exactly at the beginning of things, but it happened somewhere along the way. This was very convenient, as we didn’t then need to deploy each one individually to different environments. Some solutions can contain dozens & dozens of flows, and we really do love to package them all up together for ease of movement.

So that was good. But there was still a (major) ‘bugbear’ (as I like to refer to them as). This is the fact that after we deploy a Power Automate flow, we then need to go into it & (re)authenticate it. This is due to the fact that the connector/s that it uses contains what is referred to as a ‘secret’, and these can’t be moved across environments. As a result, we need to essentially recreate the ‘secret’ in the connector (ie authentication details) every time we move it. This is an annoyance (if you have one or two flows), and an absolute bloody nightmare if you have lots.

For the technical minded – every action in a flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why when moving flows across environments, users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.

For example, I’ve been working with COVID-19 triage solutions. These contain lots of flows within them, connecting to multiple different sources, and doing different things. Every time we’ve performed a release (even if it’s just a simple update), we’ve needed to manually go through each flow, (re)authenticate them, and turn them on. If you forgot one, then everything can come crashing down & not work! But there’s been no other way to do it. To represent this visually, we have the following diagram

For each & every Power Automate, the connection line gets ‘broken’ when it’s deployed, and needs to be re-made.

Until now, that is. For today, Microsoft has announced the Public Preview for ‘Connection References’. Now when something is put into Preview, I usually caveat the usage of it with saying things like ‘it might go away, or not be released for a while’. But I’m going to be quietly confident about this particular piece of functionality, as I really don’t think it’s going to be pulled!

So what exactly are these? Well, in (mostly) simple terms, Connection References provide an ‘in-between’ or ‘abstraction’ layer for the connections that use them. Let’s show this visually as well

We still need to re-authenticate the Connection Reference once we deploy things. But let’s now see how we can save ourselves a massive headache, and LOTS of time:

Oooo…now this is looking better. Instead of having to update three Power Automate flows, we only have to update the SINGLE Connection Reference that’s sitting in the middle. Now multiple that by however many flows you have (eg sending emails out, etc), and start calculating how much time you’ll now be able to spend on coffee breaks, rather than doing this manually one at a time…

We can create Connection References directly from within the solution:

We then give it a name & description, choose which connector we’re going to be using, and either select an existing connection or set a new one up:

Once we’re finished, we click ‘Create’ at the bottom. Voila – we can now see it within our solution!

Note: Interestingly enough I couldn’t actually see this within the solution after I created it, even with the component selector set to show ‘All’. How I actually got them to display was changing the component selector to ‘Connection Reference’, and they then showed up. I’m thinking that this is due to it being new today/in the process of rolling out, and am expecting it to display without any issues in the near future

Let’s take a look at a Power Automate flow itself now to see how it’s referenced. When we open an item with a connector, we can now see the following:

We’re able to select the Connection Reference that we’re wanting to use. Simple, yet so powerful.

When importing a solution containing a Connection Reference, we will be prompted during the import process to set the actual connection that should be used with it:

If you don’t have any connections set up already in the environment, you’ll be able to create a new one from the dropdown.

Some things to note around this:

  • During the preview phase, Microsoft has specified that a single Connection Reference can only be used by up to 16 flows. This limitation will be removed once it goes GA
  • Existing flows will not be automatically upgraded. What you can do though is export the unmanaged solution, re-import it to the same environment, and then they will be automatically created for you. The flow/s can then be edited to update them to the correct connection reference record
  • The connection name and connection reference name are not currently synchronised. They can be different. Therefore it’s best to keep the naming conventions the same. Don’t set different names for connections and their associated connection references.

In summary – this is an awesome step forward with Power Automate functionality. I’m already tasking some of the developers on the team to re-do existing solutions to use it for ease of use. How do you think it’ll best benefit you? Drop a comment below!

Lookup fields & Power Automate

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:

  • /entityname(Lookup Field Value)
  • /entityname/(Lookup Field Value)
  • /pluralentityname(Lookup Field Value)
  • /pluralentityname/(Lookup Field Value)

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!

Omnichannel & Knowledge Articles

One of the most useful features that Dynamics 365 has to offer (in my opinion) is the ‘Knowledge Base’ feature. The purpose that this serves is multi-faceted. It can act as a repository for internal information, serve as a FAQ store, or even be used to publish information externally.

The amount of knowledge held within any organisation can be quite staggering at times. Think back to when you’ve been trying to get an answer to an obscure question, and only Bob in Repairs knows about it. Trying to track down that answer can be quite time-intensive at times (you need to find out who to ask, where they are, etc). In the modern digitally-connected world, we have better forms of communications available. However even with those, we’re still challenged at times.

Enter the Knowledge Base. Here people can enter information that can then be searched on. It could be a simple one-line explanation, or an in-depth instruction as to how to do something very technical.

It’s also a really useful place to hold business processes in. This can come in really helpful when rare situations occur, so that customer service agents can refer to them to find out exactly what to do.

There’s already a massive amount of information (if you’ll pardon the pun!) out there around the Knowledge Base, so I’m not going to go into deep detail here around it.

However, what I DO want to talk about is the ability to use Knowledge Base within Omnichannel!

See, customer service agents are the ‘first line’ of support that customers will deal with. Admittedly they’re also the 2nd, 3rd etc (until it may get to a very technical/specific question). The types of queries that they may need to handle can be astonishing at time! Being able to refer to information ‘at their fingertips’ is therefore vital, & key in driving efficiency. This then in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction, with queries being resolved quickly & easily.

So with all of that said, let’s take a look to see how this is used within Omnichannel. Essentially, there’s a Knowledge Base tab that can be opened for the customer service agent to access:

This opens automatically when a new customer sessions starts, and is then available for the customer service agent to click into.

Note: The behaviour to open it automatically is driven from the Session Template that’s set up for the communication stream. If it’s not set up in here, it won’t automatically launch. See the screenshot below for how this is set up, and refer to Omnichannel & Application Tabs for more information around this:

Alternatively, the agent can launch this directly from the chat itself, by clicking the ellipse icon, and then selecting it from the menu:

This will then put the agent directly within the Knowledge Article search tab. When this opens, it’s blank! Don’t worry about this however – it’s only blank, as there haven’t been any searches carried out yet! When the user starts to search, it’ll then return results into the pane:

If the user wants to open the article in a new window, all they need to do is click the little ‘pop open’ icon on the article summary, which will then launch a new window with it in it. This can be helpful if the agent is needing to have several different articles open at once:

If your company has configured an external portal for sharing Knowledge Articles with the public, it’s also possible to send a link for a specific article to the customer. To do this, either click the arrow button on the article, to click the Send URL button on the menu bar:

Now, the general layout used for Knowledge Articles will be familiar to anyone who has used the same ability within Cases in Dynamics 365. However for people who are used to working directly within Knowledge Articles, it will look slightly different. There’s no ability to add a new article or edit an existing one, publish, etc.

The reason for this is that within Omnichannel itself, the functionality interface is being surfaced as a web resource. There’s no need to worry though, as users can open the familiar Knowledge Article interface as well directly from within Omnichannel. To do this, the customer service agent should click the ‘+’ button on the tab bar, and then select ‘Knowledge Articles’:

Voila! A new tab will open, and the traditional Knowledge Article experience will load. All of the expected functionality is present, and users are able to do anything that they may need to inside of here.

So in summary, this is a continuation of the empowerment of customer service agents. With the knowledge ‘at their fingertips’, they’re able to provide the best possible experience for customers. Not only that, but queries can get answered and/or resolved in less time. Customer satisfaction will (hopefully!) increase as a result of this, with everyone feeling empowered & efficient!

So here’s my question – are you currently using Knowledge Articles (it doesn’t have to be within Omnichannel)? If you are, what benefits do you see that it brings to your company? If you’re not, what could help you to adopt them? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below!

Omnichannel Agent Presence

One of the main parts of any system is to see who’s available to handle customer service queries. This is, of course, vitally important for any company – you wouldn’t want to overload an already busy agent!

In the case of Omnichannel, the system uses something called ‘Presence’ to show this. When users are set up, they have a default presence set against them. These govern system behaviour, along with having a nice friendly icon that helps from a visual perspective. Omnichannel has the following default options available:

These are available for supervisors to see from their dashboards, so that they can see the status of all agents at a single glance.

It’s also used by the system for auto-routing conversations. For example, if the agent status is ‘Busy’, then they won’t have new conversations routed to them. Similarly, if they’re set as ‘Away’ or ‘Offline’, they also won’t get conversations sent through to them (admittedly supervisors can override this, and assign specific conversations to agents who have one of these set).

Agents are able to change their own presence by clicking on the toolbar, and selecting the one that they wish to set:

But what happens if you want to have some custom statuses? Off the top of my head, I can think of at least half a dozen clients that would want more granularity around this.

Well, thankfully we’re in luck. Omnichannel supports the option for a ‘Custom Presence’!. They do need to be set up through the Omnichannel Administration Hub. To do this, go to ‘Custom Presence’ on the left side & select it. We can see that the default system entries are there.

Before going any further, I do want to point out that we should NOT deactivate or delete the standard Presence entries. It’s possible to do, but it’s going to create MAJOR issues in your system. So please, don’t!

Right – back to things. To create a custom presence, we click the ‘New’ button on the menu bar. We get the following window:

The 4 fields shown are as follows:

  • Name. The name of the record
  • Presence Text. The wording that the agent sees when they’re picking their status
  • Base Status. The default system status that this new status will be based on. This is important, as it will drive the icon used
  • Description. A ‘friendly’ description of what the presence/status is about. This is useful to keep track of things

Once we’ve saved the record, it’s then immediately available for agents to select! The only thing that agents need to do is refresh their browser tab. This makes a nice change from the usual ’15 minute wait’ for data to update within Omnichannel :).

So let’s go ahead and see what this then looks like. I’ve chosen a very familiar item (for most people):

When I’ve selected this new custom status, we can then see that the icon in the Ribbon Bar changes as well, to the icon for the base status that we used:

So in short, this is quite a nice little piece of functionality. Nothing too fancy or complicated to setup, but will allow companies to further segment their agents & understand what they’re up to.

Something else that we’re able to use this for is the agent ‘Default Presence’, which is set on the User record. Once we have custom presence records in place, it’s possible to select these there:

So apart from having agents segmented by Teams & Queues, we can now also use these. Some very interesting scenarios pop into mind!

So, how do you think you’d apply this in your own environment? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!