Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking to Gustaf about Sweden, sheep, martial arts, & how he started his CRM career by being thrown into the deep end of things!
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Although I usually post around technical matters & such, occasionally I digress into personal reflection. After all, this is my personal blog, & I feel it’s sometimes good/relevant to share certain personal things. Today’s post is along those lines, though it does relate to a technical matter.
Let’s set the scene. As many of you know (either from knowing me personally, or from reading my blog posts), I’m from the ‘model-driven app’ background. Canvas apps are really cool, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a very advanced creator of them. I’m learning the whole time about them (well, when I have a free minute here & there). There are many people in the community who are extremely more advanced than I am, and I love being able to learn from them.
I’m also considered to be in ‘Delivery’, This is the fancy word for those who run/are involved in projects, rather than selling concepts to clients. I’d run a mile if someone tried to put me in a Sales role (though I do admire the power suits that Sales have, occasionally). I’ve done a bit of Pre-Sales (where I’m helping out from a technical perspective), but haven’t been heavily involved. It’s actually something that I’m trying to work on, with being a tech evangelist. After all, if people already know/rave about the tech, how can you evangelise about it to them!!
So last week I get a call from our Sales team. They’re really nice, and know their stuff. However they’re not ‘techies’. They had a situation – we’d been talking to a client about a potential project, and the client told us to pitch for it. Brilliant, right? Well…
The client told us that we had 4 days until the pitch deadline. Not only were we needing to pitch with the usual presentation pack (however would Sales operate without PowerPoint…?), we also had to do a live demo. Not for a completed product, but rather a Proof of Concept (PoC).
The only person available was….yes, you guess it…me. There wasn’t anyone else around with the necessary knowledge/skills to create the PoC in the time-frame needed. I’ll freely admit that I was absolutely slammed with existing projects, but wanted to be able to help out.
However, things then got ‘better’. And by ‘better’, I meant ‘interesting’. I got told who else was pitching to the client. Obviously I’m not going to mention any specific details here, but I knew who they are. More importantly, I figured that I had a very good idea of who from their side would be creating the tech, & doing the pitch.
Now as I’m not mentioning any identifiable details, I’m feeling free to say this. They’re not at my level of tech skills. They’re nowhere NEAR my level of tech skills. This is NOT because I’m better than they are. Totally the opposite – they’re SO far ahead of me with their knowledge of things, I can barely see the dust that they kick up in a race.
Knowing this, I knew that I couldn’t build a model-driven app (though it would have worked perfectly for the scenario/s we were given). I HAD to do a canvas app. But even with doing that, it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as what the other side would be able to put on.
The phrase ‘gibbering in fear’ does come to mind with my reaction to finding all of this out. I did feel slightly like a deer caught in the headlights. I wanted to do well, both for myself & my company, but I honestly had no idea how we could stack up.
Thankfully, my company has an extremely open culture, and I was therefore able to talk to my manager about it. He understood where I was coming from, but encouraged me to go for it & do what I would be able to create.
My wife also encouraged me to go for it. Well, actually her words were ‘it’s not sexy when a husband says that he can’t do it, so man up and go for it!’. Ha…after that I couldn’t very well NOT do it.
So I applied myself, and with some VERY late nights (I did have other projects on, as I mentioned above), managed to get something in place. Not only did I create it, I think it looked really good. There was some really nice (canvas app) functionality, and it all came together pretty well.
Everything was in place in time (including some last minute tweaks). I even decided to spice up the demo a bit, and borrowed some dinosaurs from the kids to use for personas. We were using live camera feeds for part of the demo, and suddenly the demo was joined by ‘Rexy’, the ‘Customer Service Representative’ T-Rex! They were quite amused by it (thankfully!), and our team thought it was absolutely hilarious.
I have no idea how the other partner pitched to the client, or what the decision will be from the client. It’s way too early for that.
What I do know is that sometimes we can lose track of ourselves. I’m not going to go into the subject of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ (check out Em D’Arcy if you want to read up about that). Rather that having others around to encourage us, even though others may be more skilled, can really make the difference.
In life, we can often face challenges. How we handle them, and how we decide to move forward, can define who we are. When dealing with technology items such as the Power Platform, where there’s constant change, it can sometimes feel very daunting, but we still need to push ahead.
Yesterday I was listening to Lisa Crosbie talking about her journey into technology (and canvas apps). As she put it – ‘there is no comfort zone here – you need to find a place to feel comfortable with this level of discomfort, and ride it to be successful’. It’s really so true. It’s not just needing to push ourselves in the traditional way, but to keep up our own confidence in our skills & abilities. With this, we can continue to drive forward, keep on learning, and continue our journey of greatness!
I’m really glad that I was able to do this, and hope that I can keep this with me. By doing so, I’ll be able to continue along my own journey.
Have you ever had a time when a challenge seemed insurmountable? How did you cope with it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Discovering the online courses that he’s creating, finding a major hole in a national website, & the importance of the right level of documentation!
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Normally when I write a blog post, it’s about sharing some cool features, new functionality, etc. However this post is going to be a little different, because I don’t actually have an answer (yet!) to what is going on here.
Let me explain the situation.
I’m needing to show some very specific data for reference purposes. For the purposes of this, let’s say that I’m looking at Contacts, and needing to report on Phone Calls. The reason is to identify Contacts who are frequent callers. My criteria are as follows:
These two conditions are separate. So the contact essentially needs to have at least 2 phone calls against them, with each one meeting one of the conditions. There can be more than 1 phone call record with the same condition – that’s not an issue here.
Back in the (good old) day, I’d have written some cool SQL to return this data. Two Left Outer Joins, and we’d be done. However I can’t do that now (I’ve recently started dipping into FetchXML, which is an entirely other story to cover at some point). So I’m having to use the Advanced Find to check that I’m getting the right data.
This isn’t the easiest of things to do. I’m needing to start from Contact, go to Phone Call, go back up to Contact, & go back down to Phone Call. But hey, this is what it looks like:
So with this set up, I run the query, and get some results (in this specific scenario/time, there are 3 results). I go through the data to check that the results are actually satisfying my requirements, which they are:
Wonderful – let’s move forward then!
My next step is to look to set this up as a system view. To do this, I go to the Power Apps Maker (http://make.powerapps.com/), open my solution & find the Contact entity. Opening it, I switch to the Views tab:
I create a new view, add the columns I need, and then open up the Filter Criteria to start setting this up. I’m using the Advanced Find as a reference guide for the conditions I’m needing to use. Going through it, I replicate the values across:
That looks about the same as the Advanced Find, right? It’s laid out slightly differently, but that’s just the designer. OK – let’s go ahead to save/publish it, and see it it in the app:
Hold on. There’s only 1 record showing up there. Admittedly it’s in the list that came from Advanced Find, but what’s happened to the other 2 records?
So I go to check the data. I had already done this before, but I thought that perhaps I overlooked something, so I checked again. Nope – all of the data is fine/correct. There should indeed be 3 records showing up in the system view, but 2 are missing…
Note: As an aside, I do know that this isn’t permissions related. I’m doing all of this as a systems administrator with full privileges to everything. So it’s not that
OK – next steps:
Even more confusing about all of this is something truly perplexing. I can open up Advanced Find, select the system view (without doing ANYTHING else) & click ‘Results’. When doing this, all of the records appear! So in the entity view they’re not, but when I use that same system view through Advanced Find, they are!
I’m scratching my head at this. It just doesn’t make sense. I have no idea why this is happening. Reaching out to others, they also don’t seem to have any idea either.
My next step (I’m feeling SO proud of this, and so dev!) was to check the FetchXML. Perhaps there was something underlying in it that’s causing this? Using the FetchXML Builder in XrmToolBox, I loaded both views up, and compared them. It’s crazy – they seem to be exactly the same! (well, some cosmetic differences with where aliases appeared on the line, but this wouldn’t affect it):
At this point, I’m thinking that there are some magic elves under the hood, squirrelling away the data. It has to be the only logical reason for this, right?
The only thing I could find in the FetchXML that might make a difference is that there’s a ‘Distinct’ clause at the top of it in the one that’s working:
Why this would cause the issue, I have NO idea. Views return distinct results in them anyhow, so I’m not sure what this is actually doing here.
Regardless, using FetchXML Builder I updated the code, and WOW – it worked! I’m now returning 3 records in my system view! Absolutely strange, but hey – if it’s working now, who am I to question it…
I’m going to try to raise this through official Microsoft Channels, and see what I might be able to find out from them. However if you’ve come across this (or similar), or have some ideas about how to work around it, I’d LOVE to hear from you!
Anyone familiar with Dynamics 365 will of course be aware of ‘Notes’. These are the very useful ability to for system users to add notes into records. For customers, these show up within the Activity timeline. Every time a note is added, it’s added to the activity timeline to be able to be viewed. It’s also possible to add attachments to notes, which can be very handy too.
Each note is stored with it’s own date/time logged, so it’s possible to see when each one was created. Of course it’s also possible to click into a note to edit it, if it’s necessary to add additional information.
Now, what about within Omnichannel? The interface is different, as we know. So if agents need to capture notes, are they still able to?
Well, let’s take a look at the interface. As shown below, we do indeed have a Timeline section that agents can see. Here they can view the activities that have been previously carried out with this specific contact:
Not only can the agent see notes in this section, they can also see the other items in the activity history. So they’re able to then bring up previous conversations etc.
There are two ways in which agents can log notes within Omnichannel itself. The first way is the ‘usual’ way that we’re used to. Within the Activity Timeline, they can click to enter a note, and then save it:
This will then create a note against the record, in the normal way that we’re all used to. However, there’s a MUCH nicer way to do this!
See, it’s possible for the agent to create the note from the chat itself!:
Clicking this causes a HUGE notes window to appear next to the actual chat:
This is quite nice. It gives the agent a lot more screen space to capture information for the note. They could also quickly copy/paste from the customer conversation into here.
They’re not able to add attachments though through this large pane. Instead, the agent would need to save the note, which would then cause it to appear in the Activity Timeline view. Once there, the agent could click into it, and add any attachment/s that they may need to.
OK – so we’ve found out how agents can use Notes within Omnichannel. But there’s actually a really cool function from doing it directly from the chat.
When we add Notes in the ‘traditional’ style, and save them, it creates a record for each one. As mentioned above, it’s obviously possible to open up a note, edit it, and then save it again. But this can be a slight hassle at times.
Having to wade through a load of ‘ad-hoc’ notes when reviewing a record can be difficult & take a lot of time. It also doesn’t really look very neat, and can cause challengers when trying to get a good overall picture of what’s been happening. Additionally, it’s REALLY hard to search on properly, and a we all know how important (good) searches can be in our daily lives!
There will be situations where an agent captures a note, saves/closes it, then needs to come back to it. Perhaps they may need to come back to it multiple times. For example, closing notes at the end of a customer conversation.
Omnichannel facilitates this in a most marvellous way. When the agent creates the note from the chat & saves it, it saves the Note record. If the agent clicks the Note button again from the chat, they’re presented with the ‘clean’ interface again: the previous note/s don’t appear there.
However, ALL of the notes entered are saved to the SAME notes record. It doesn’t matter how many times the agent creates/saves a new note from the conversation – they all appear in the same record. This is really great in my opinion, as it means that we can have the entire view of ALL of the notes in one place.
Interestingly enough, it doesn’t put them on different lines – I’m going to look into this further, to see if this is actually what is meant to happen or not…
This in turn then facilities clean records, clean notes, and can save us a great deal of time. Aren’t clean data structures amazing.
So my question to you is – do you use Notes currently? What challenges have they presented you with, and have you come up with any workarounds? Please share – I’d love to hear!
Discussing his love of opera, and how he came to make it a professional career for over a decade, including some very interesting things that happened during performances.
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Yesterday was an extremely exciting day, for a number of reason! The main reason (& the purpose of this article) is that the release notes for Wave 2 2020 dropped. This covers Dynamics 365 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave2/) and Power Platform (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave2/). I’ve been quite eager to see (& talk about) some of the features that will be in it, so here goes!
Now there’s obviously a lot of different stuff in there, covering all of the different first party apps in Dynamics 365, as well as functionality for the different parts of the Power Platform. I’m going to focus on the Omnichannel features, as after all that’s what I (mostly) talk about 🙂
As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.
Public preview – October 2020. No current date for GA release
Customer service agents will usually use multiple resources to efficiently handle & resolve customer cases. When doing so, the ideal is to provided consistent responses across agents & sessions. Carrying this out can involve knowledge articles, involving other agents, or reviewing active/similar cases.
The aim is to therefore improve this to enable the agents to be more efficient. Items such as being able to identify other cases that similar actions have occurred will result in a much more empowered experience.
The key highlights for this new feature include:
GA – October 2020
Until now, the only way possible for customers to engage with Omnichannel customer support on mobile has been through a mobile browser. This hasn’t always been the best of experiences.
This feature allows business with mobile applications to provide customers the ability to engage with customer service directly within the mobile app. There are two options available for this across iOS & Android devices:
GA – October 2020
One of the main challenges around chat is that when a conversation is closed, the history is accessible the the chat transcript. It’s not easily visible in the chat conversation history. Asynchronous messaging channels such as WhatsApp don’t have this ‘restriction’, as the chat history is directly available in the session.
If an agent needs to go look up the chat history, it can cause a delay in responding to the customer whilst it’s located, opened & read. This in turn can degrade the customer experience.
In this new feature, admins are able to enable persistent messaging, so that the customers previous conversation shows in the actual conversation window. This in turn allows the agent to have the full context of the customers previous engagement before responding.
Public preview – August 2020. GA October 2020
There are occasions when organisations need to proactively reach out to customers. This could be to notify them of a case update, regulatory information, upcoming appointments, etc. Being able to do this via the customers preferred method of communication is important in delivery best-of-class service
With this feature, organisations will be able to dynamically message their customers based on specific events through supported channels. This includes the following capabilities:
The customer will now be able to respond back upon receiving one of the messages. This response will be treated like any other incoming conversation in Omnichannel. It will flow through the appropriate routing & work distributions, agent assignment, etc, and the agent will be able to respond back to the customer in real time
Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020
Until now, there was no (easy) method for post-conversation surveys to be sent out to customers. Businesses wish to ensure that customer satisfaction is met, and often make use of such things. Custom Power Automate actions could be implemented, but this obviously takes additional time &/or resource to develop.
With this new feature, Omnichannel administrators can configure post conversations surveys using Forms Pro. These can be presented natively as part of the customer experience to provide feedback. There’s also support for sending offline surverys through one of the various enabled channels.
Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020
Customers would like to receive support in their native language. Businesses are not always able to do this, as it would require having staff who can communicate in different languages to their customers.
In this feature, real-time translation of messages is carried out between the customer & the support agent. It’s also available for the internal collaboration between agents. It’s enabled as a plug-in that exposes API’s to bring in 3rd party translation services, & also provides a native implementation through Azure Cognitive Services.
This is a feature that I can see being used heavily by not only multi-national organisations, but also by by smaller national-based organisations that have an international customer base
Agents spend a considerable amount of time engaging with customers. We already have quick responses within Omnichannel to save agents time in typing replies, & to deliver consistent replies.
However these can’t be personalised for individual agents to represent their identity. This new feature allows the pre-configured quick responses to be customised by agents to represent their styles. With this, they can then address communication scenarios in a manner that’s common & personal to them.
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
This feature enables agents to customise sound notifications for incoming conversations so that they can easily distinguish between different sessions. It will also allow them to
differentiate their sessions from others around them in a call centre setting.
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
Agents typically use several different resources to efficiently resolve customer cases. These include knowledge articles, collaboration with other agents, and reviewing other cases. Up until now, this has all be done manually.
The new feature for this uses AI to proactively surface relevant knowledge articles, taking case context & previous history into account. It also includes a comprehensive feedback mechanism to continuously improve the recommendation model.
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
The experience designer is an out-of-the-box solution that lets organisations create targeted app experiences, to be used by agents & supervisors. Administrators can select specific channels & tool to be used by these profiles, as an alternative to building & maintaining custom apps.
All in all, I think that there are some really helpful additions to the core Omnichannel product, aimed at making the customer & agent experiences more productive. I’m looking forward to getting hands on with these, and writing about them!
This post is based around some recent work that I’ve been doing, which includes canvas apps. For those of you who aren’t familiar with canvas apps, imagine if PowerPoint & Excel had a baby! Though I’m expecting most people who are reading this to already know all about them 🙂
So enough with the waffle, let’s get on with things…let me paint the scenario for you.
The app is aimed to be used by a contact centre. Part of their function is to capture address information. So far this has been done absolutely manually. The issue with this is that data can be typed incorrectly, or in the wrong fields. We’re also needing to enhance the data with geographic-specific information (for reporting purposes). This information isn’t known by either the callers, or by the contact centre agents (for those who are curious, it’s the unique property reference number, which is unique to every address in the UK).
Thankfully, we’ve been given a source from the client which we can look this up against. In essence, we pass a postcode to it, and values are returned (in a JSON format). This includes the data that we’re looking for. Brilliant, so far.
When we got to thinking about things, there are several ways in which we could implement this:
or
Deciding to go with the second option (it was a no-brainer, really), we moved ahead with this. We had the details that we needed in order to hit the address lookup API. One of the developers on the team created the Custom Connector, and got it working. We tested it out, and amazingly we got information back!
The next step was to see how we could do this within the canvas app itself. Now I’m going to admit here that although I’ve HEARD great things about Collections, I had never used them myself. In fact not only had I NOT used them before, I had NO idea how they worked! That was to change VERY quickly though…
Within a few hours, I had learned enough about collections to get how they worked, and pull data into them. It was actually really simple – I used the ClearCollect command to create a collection that was fed by the API query, which then created the data into a collection table for me to use. I was very impressed!
OK – so I had my data in the collection now:
What were my next steps? Well, I was wanting to achieve the following:
Well, the first item (the ‘address picker’) was simple enough. Using a dropdown field, I pointed it at the collection data. This worked great, but the dropdown was only allowing me to select a single column from the collection to display. This meant that I could only select ONE column of data to return:
1 column from the collection. OK, I thought – should be simple enough to handle. Let’s go and concatenate column values in the dropdown, to present the interface I’m looking for:
Now that’s more like it! Much easier for the customer service agents to use. OK – onto the next stage. Let’s go & set the fields to point to the collection, match to the value that’s selected in the dropdown, and populate. Should be simple to do, right?
Well…um, no, it’s not simple to do. In fact, it’s actually impossible to do. I was expecting to point to the dropdown selected value, & have the columns returned (from the collection). I could then select which column to use for a specific field. This, however, was not the case:
You have to love the ‘.’ (or ‘dot’) notation used in canvas app code. It shows you what values are available, and saves having to do lots of type. In this case, however, it also showed me that there was only ONE column of data to select from to display in the field. This was the ‘Result’ column.
This got me very confused. I tried going back to basics, and stripping out the concatenation in the dropdown. Wonderfully I was then presented with all of the different collection columns to use:
So let’s sum up things so far:
Note: Leaving aside wanting to show the house number & street, one of the main reason for wanting to concatenate was to handle buildings that had flats (aka apartments) in them. This is stored in a different column in the collection. It would therefore be difficult to show these both to the customer service agents
In essence, the behaviour of the dropdown field seemed to be that I couldn’t just change the displayed values without it ‘losing’ connection to the rest of the data. There was no ID that I could use to match on, or display what I wanted to.
This seemed to be a massive Catch-22. I tried various things, but couldn’t see a way out of this. I started to try to create a second collection, & concatenate fields from the first collection. This seemed like a good idea, though (with being totally new to it), I got lost. I tried various things; I even ended up managing to collect the entire data from the collection into a new column for EACH ROW!!
Thankfully, the community helped me out, in the forms of Peter Bryant & Clarissa Gillingham (I had posted about my issues on Twitter – the hashtag #poweraddicts is really great!).
With the help provided, I managed to work out the CORRECT syntax to use for the ‘AddColumns’ command. This now being in hand, I was successfully able to create a second collection & add concatenated field values to it:
Now for the moments of truth. Would the dropdown show this new column, & could I point the form fields to auto-populate specific columns?
The answer….was YES! It was working! I felt SO relieved. Let’s take a peek:
This was brilliant! We’re also populating other data in the background, but that doesn’t need to be visible to the customer service agents.
So in summary, I learned about collections, & how to use them. I also learned about the limitations of dropdown controls (when referencing them from other places), but came up with a way around it. Finally I achieved the result that I was aiming for. Very pleasing all round!
Have you come across something like this in an implementation? How did you manage to handle it (if you did)? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear all about it!
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I haven’t usually been putting up posts around the exams that I take. A few months back I did decide to write one on the MB-600 exam (MB-600 Solution Architect Exam), which just took off! It was quite amazing (& pleasing) how many people were looking at it, & asking me questions around the exam.
As a result, I’ve decided to continue this, and am therefore now writing this post on the MB-400 exam.
There are several different ‘ranges’ of exams within the Dynamics 365/Power Platform space. These are aimed at different types of roles, or specific specialisation/s within a role. A good example of this is the MB-2xx range. It covers functional technology, and is split across the different ‘main’ areas of Dynamics 365.
The MB-400 (the only one in the range at the moment) is aimed at developers. According to the official description for the exam:
Candidates for this exam are Developers who work with Microsoft Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 to design, develop, secure, and extend a Dynamics 365 implementation. Candidates implement components of a solution that include application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.
Candidates must have strong applied knowledge of Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365, including in-depth understanding of customization, configuration, integration, and extensibility, as well as boundaries and constraints. Candidates should have a basic understanding of DevOps practices for Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365. Candidates must expose, store, and report on data.
Candidates should have development experience that includes JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, HTML, .NET, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, RESTful Web Services, ASP.NET, and Power BI.
As anyone who knows me will attest, I am NOT a developer. However I decided (for several reasons) to give this one a go, and see what would happen! I knew I’d be pushing myself out of my comfort zone, there would be things I wouldn’t understand/know at ALL, but hey – I was curious to see what would happen! Even more challenging, I decided to book & take it within a 24 hour period!
Now as this has been out for a little while (& isn’t in Beta), there’s thankfully some good resources on Microsoft Learn about it. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-400, where there are several learning paths that can be followed.
A big shout out as well to Julian Sharp & Joe Griffin who recently ran a multi-week course around it. The official Microsoft learning paths are great of course, but seem to miss out quite a bit of what’s actually needed to be known for this. The course that they ran covered a lot more. Hopefully there will be more courses like this run in the future!
When passing it (& assuming that you’ve passed the MB-200 as well), you get a lovely shiny badge!
Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). The experience went somewhat better than previous times. Amusingly I got told off by the proctor during the exam for ‘looking down at the keyboard’, rather than looking at the screen! I explained that I was using a different computer, & kept clicking the wrong mouse button on it (leaving aside that I was exhausted when doing it!).
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!).
Now many of these (as I said above) are outside of my comfort zone. In fact, I’d say that even with absolutely cramming for a whole day for the exam, I still felt that I was guessing the answer for at least 30% of the questions. Admittedly though, as Julian Sharp says, a ‘gut feeling’ answer is usually right most of the time, coming from what the subconscious has absorbed during revision.
I was REALLY happy that I got a passing mark for this, & admittedly was VERY relieved as well. So now another lovely shiny badge in my collection, and I’m now going to go and update it on LinkedIn as well!
If you have any questions on this, feel free to drop them below, and I’ll try to help out as best as I can!