Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking with Iain about his gaming console selection & finding out about bulk-updating fields in Prod with the XRM Toolbox. Some UN-expected consequences, and a major cleanup operation that was needed!
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.
Looking back at the information that I’ve already posted on around Omnichannel for Microsoft Dynamics 365, I seriously can’t believe that I haven’t already done an article on how to set up a chat channel. I know I’ve talked about some of the functionality within chat itself, but it’s now time to sort this out.
This was the FIRST thing that I did when I got my first Omnichannel environment up & running. The feeling of satisfaction when it was all complete and worked was incredible. I think I may have bounded out of my chair, punching the air!
So, with that all being said, let’s see how to go about it. It’s not that difficult, and there are some helpful settings within it. The functionality has also increased with the Wave 1 2020 release, which is quite cool.
Now, you can create multiple chat channels, and position them where you want to. Each chat channel can point to a different workstream, and then feed into a different queue (more on that in another post).
To create a chat channel, go to the Omnichannel Administration Hub, select ‘Chat’ in the left hand menu, and click ‘New’
You’re then presented with a new Chat record window, to set it up. It’s actually quite simple to go through, with tabs providing different options. Don’t forget about these!
A few things to point out from the main page:
Once you’ve filled in the main information, switch to the Design tab. Here you’ll be able to configure the look & feel of things:
Now at this point in time, you’re only able to use the pre-defined theme colours for the Omnichannel chat widget. That’s not to say that you can’t work around this – if you use an Azure bot, or a custom bot (which needs to be using the Azure bot framework, admittedly), you could set a custom colour there.
You can change the logo displayed – this needs to be a publicly accessible online image. This can result in some fun looks!
You can also set Operating Hours for when the chat will be active (see https://thecrm.ninja/handling-company-hours/ for how to set this up).
Heading to the pre-chat survey tab, we can set up survey questions for the customer to answer before the chat actually starts with an agent.
There are some nice options here:
Now at this point in time, it’s not possible to use the answers given (eg with using an option-set) to route a customer to a specific queue. It would be amazing if this would happen, but it’s not there yet. Instead the information from the pre-survey questions are displayed in the agent interface. This is aimed at being able to gather information upfront, rather than the agent needing to ask for this during the chat session
The next tab allows the ability to tie the chat widget to a specific website. This means from a security point of view that if someone copies the source code from your webpage, it won’t work on a different website. If no domain is specified, the chat widget can be embedded on any website, without restrictions. It’s a useful concept that can be handy in certain scenarios.
We’re also able to capture the customer geo-location. This will prompt the customer to allow their location to be shared with the agent. If the customer doesn’t consent, then it won’t be shared. Note that this does require Bing Maps to work
Part of the Wave 1 2020 release has been additional functionality for Omnichannel agents to use. This includes abilities to call, co-browse, and screen-share during customer chat sessions.
I’m going to going into detail around these options in a separate post. I’m also going to be looking into the current solution providers for this, and seeing what each one provides above & beyond Omnichannel integration
The final tab gives the option to use custom messages for some of the system functionality. Essentially things like starting a chat, ending a chat, and chats timing out all have messages around them.
These are things like ‘An agent will be with you in a moment’:
What custom messages allows you to do is to change these. So for example, you could set up the following to be displayed:
I hope that this has been helpful in seeing how you can set up a chat channel. Stay posted for how to set up the other channels as well!
I’m quite regularly asked various things about Omnichannel. One of the most regular questions goes along the following lines:
Are we able to show a desktop notification to our agents, when they’re not on the Omnichannel Customer Hub screen?
Let me explain what this is all about. When an agent is logged into the Omnichannel Agent Hub, and a new chat comes in, they get the following prompt on their screen:
They can then accept it (which will open up a new chat session), or reject it (which will send it back to the queue).
But if they’re not on the browser tab that Omnichannel Agent Hub is open in, they won’t see any notifications. At all! So they miss out on this, and the customer isn’t engaged with. This obviously is undesirable from a business perspective, as it could even result in losing the customer. So the answer, until now, has unfortunately been ‘No’.
Now in the past when this has come up, I’ve suggested that people take a look at either:
However in my experience these haven’t really been suitable for Omnichannel. This can be due to various reasons, including the client, the requirements, or the infrastructure itself. It’s always been a real annoyance to things, and something that I (& many others) wish would be in place. Several of us have given previous feedback to the product team that this would be really useful to have.
Companies want their agents to be as productive as possible, and this therefore results in a gap in their potential productivity.
Well, the amazing news is that the Product Team for Omnichannel have listened to the feedback given. Not only that, they’ve actually acted on it!
As part of Wave 1 2020 functionality, we now have Omnichannel desktop notifications! This can cover the following scenarios:
So what does this actually look like? Well, it’s quite nice & neat to see:
Very helpfully (in my opinion) it even tells you the browser that’s being used. Users can be running multiple browsers, and this helps as a reminder. If a user has multiple different browsers open, this can assist with working out which one has Omnichannel running in.
Now, there are several different actions that will happen, depending on the agent reaction to the notification:
Lets take a look again at the notification within the app itself:
There’s a ‘Wait time’ contained with it. If the wait time expires without the agent doing anything, the conversation is returned to the queue.
This value can be configured by the Omnichannel Administrator, to whichever setting fits the organisation. To do this, go to Notifications in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, open up the notification that you’re wanting to modify, and change the value shown below:
However, you’ll note on the desktop notification that there’s no ‘Wait time’ included on it. This is because the way that notification appears on the desktop doesn’t allow for it to be shown. That isn’t to say that it’s not applicable – the agent will still have the same amount of time to respond. If they don’t respond within this time, the desktop notification will disappear.
Now, there’s still something that the agent will need to do in order to have the desktop notifications to appear. They’ll need to give the browser permission to allow it to happen. The first time that it occurs, it’ll prompt the user as follows:
When the user clicks ‘Accept’, it’ll save the setting, and the desktop notifications will be pushed through. Obviously if they don’t, the desktop notifications won’t appear!
There can be occasions when this still doesn’t work. The below items should help you troubleshoot any these, or similar situations:
One thing that’s also really useful to know is that all of this isn’t just for new customer conversations. The functionality for desktop notifications also covers:
So really the whole gauntlet of agent interactions that they’d be doing on an on-going basis. Which of course is really helpful, and highly useful.
I’m really quite happy that this has come out as part of the Wave 1 2020 feature items. I’ll be continuing to go into depth around the other functionality that’s part of this release. For the moment, I’m also going to quietly wonder what the product team are going to include next – I’m sure it’ll be very helpful!
Chatting about Benedikt’s love of bouldering & rock climbing, as well as why ALM is so important. We also discussed a project of his single client that had 9 Dynamics 365 organisations that needed to be deployed to, with nothing in place to automate this at all.
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.
I decided to write this post due to currently looking at the Connections entity. This is for a current project with a very specific purpose. When this came up, my thoughts went back to a previous project some years back when we also looked to use the Connections entity. I therefore thought that it would be good to recap & share my experience.
Now, the Connections entity truly is a wonderful piece of work. It’s one of the core features that doesn’t actually get much time or effort devoted to it! However, it underpins a lot of the way that Dynamics 365 has been built to work over time.
The best way to summarise Connections is:
Connections are a very easy way to connections records without needing to have to create a custom relationship in the system. Connections can be used between records from the same entity, or from different entities.
See, you are able to connect one record to another record within the system. This could be account to account, account to contact, or contact to a custom entity. There are practically no limits, apart from the extent of your mind! All of this is done by leveraging the functionality that Connections brings to the table.
Note that I’m not talking about lookup fields here, which are also great, but work differently, and require creating a relationship between entities (or even within the same entity).
Just a quick reminder here that custom entities need to be enabled for connections – it doesn’t happen as standard when creating them. You can either do this when creating it, or you can edit the settings for it later:
In order to connect one record to another, you need to open the first record & click the Connect button on the toolbar:
You’ll then be presented with the New Connection screen, where you’ll select the record that you want. Click the ‘All Records’ item at the top & then ‘Change View’ to select the actual entity that you’re wanting to look for:
You then select the record that you’re wanting, and save. Hey presto, the two records are now connected! To see the connected records, look at the associated ‘Connections’ setting from either record:
OK, so this is really all brilliant. For the absolute majority of situations, it works, and works well. There’s nothing better for it. There are a few small issues, such as the fact that you can’t use Business Process Flows or Business Rules for custom logic, but instead need to use Javascript, but for the most part they work well.
However, there are some edge case scenarios that I’ve come up against, which is the whole purpose for writing this blog post.
What happens if you’re trying to use Connections to establish a hierarchy of records. Eg one record is a parent of another record. Well, you could use a lookup field instead, but if you wanted to define specific attributes for the actual relationship, that wouldn’t work.
Here’s the scenario. You’re needing to capture the relationship between different people, along with certain attributes (eg if they’re a legal guardian, or a trustee, or have power of attorney, etc). You’d think that Connections would work brilliantly for this. After all, you can modify the actual Connections entity to add custom fields onto it. So for example, you could have something like the following:
Note: I’m not referencing Connection Roles, as you can only have a single connection role per connection. In the scenarios I’m handling, I’m needing to have multiple attributes per connection.
So you create the connection between the two records, and you set the attributes that you require. All good. What’s also good to remember is that Connections are bi-directional. You can view them from either ‘side’ of the connection. Eg:
Record 1
Record 2
That’s actually really helpful & useful in the normal scheme of things. You can easily see connections from either side.
But there’s a catch, or even (in our case above), an issue. If we open up each of the two Connection records, we’ll see the following data.
Joe Bloggs connecting to Helen Sommers:
Helen Sommers connecting to Joe Bloggs:
Can you spot the issue? Of course you can! On BOTH of the connection records, the custom fields that we set have the same values. We originally connected Joe Bloggs to Helen Sommers as the Legal Guardian, Power of Attorney & Trustee. Well, if we open up the connection record from Helen Sommers, we’re seeing the same values set, just in the opposite direction!
This is actually due to how Connections work. When you create a connection Record A to Record B, the system automatically creates a mirror Connection record from Record B to Record A. When it does this, it copies all of the values that you’ve set over to this mirror record.
So when you look at the data, you can’t actually see how the structure should work. It’s an issue. Especially if you’re passing the data to other system/s that may need to evaluate it. They just can’t understand this properly, and you’ll get some VERY unwanted results out of this.
Now, there is actually a field within Connections that shows which record is the ‘master’ (ie the one you actually created), and which one is the ‘mirror’ that the system created:
However even with this in place, we’ve found issues when using it:
With all of this in mind (& especially considering that users may create connections from the ‘wrong direction’, which is quite possible to happen), it’s important to think of the best way to architect systems for regulatory purposes. Financial, legal & other judicatory requirements need to have a system that can handle them properly & accordingly, and not leave room for error.
Therefore, if you’re looking to handle these sorts of scenarios, I’d recommend to look at implementing a custom entity for those specific connections.
Another benefit of this is to separate out these connections from the general connections entity. That way, you’ll also be able to handle security appropriately, which is usually applicable in these sorts of situations. It will allow you to easily allow only a subset of users access (read and/or write) to this data, rather than trying to apply it to Connections (which is going to be a major headache!)
Finding out about Mark getting Jon Levesque dressed in a kilt at Scottish Summit, and how that went. Also discussing how Mark’s first foray into consulting occurred, and how he learned all about project time projects for clients.
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.
For the last few days, I’ve been working on an app. Not just any app – it’s a canvas app! (It actually happens to be a COVID-19 related app, for local authorities to use to contact vulnerable people & check they’re OK etc).
Now, my background isn’t canvas apps – it’s the model-driven app approach. I’ve been doing this for years – after all, my experience goes back to Microsoft CRM 3.0! So that’s all really nice & easy for me (even with some of the more modern ‘tweaks’ that have been brought in). Canvas apps, on the other hand, are very different from what I’m used to, and are taking quite a bit of getting used to.
See, the following example is easy in a traditional model-driven app:
Create a contact, save various attributes to the contact record. Then create a task, and set the Task Regarding field to the contact that you’ve just created
Looking at that, my mind says ‘easy-peasy’!. I create the fields required for the contact entity (& task entity as well, if needed). I then add them to the entity form/s (creating or modifying the form view/s as well). Finally, I create a Business Process Flow for users on the contact entity, and append the task creation to it. Simple, and done – not much time needed to be spent.
But when needing to do this as a canvas app, things change around QUITE a bit. I can’t create that business process flow, and I have multiple screens to have all of the information on.
Now, if I could add the ‘Regarding’ field to the edit form grid, and apply formatting to it, I could hopefully then just submit & save the grid. However, that unfortunately doesn’t work. I can add the field, but when I do so, I get the following:
So that doesn’t work. Hmmm – how then should I go around doing it?
I did (obviously!!) take a look online. Here I came across this wonderful article all about polymorphic lookups (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/working-with-references). Having read, & re-read through it, I’m STILL not understanding what exactly I should be doing by this!
So I was stumped. Thankfully we have an amazing community, and on reaching out to someone within it (thanks Eric!), I was helped out. I therefore thought to write this post up, so that it can help others as well.
There are two parts to this, for my specific scenario:
So, how did I go about using the Patch statement? Well, the function is referenced here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/functions/function-patch. With Eric’s help, I soon started to see how to do it.
What I did was add the following line in my Patch statement when I was wanting to save the task: ‘Regarding:ContactForm.LastSubmit’ (‘ContactForm was the name of the form for the contact information). What this did was write into the record the GUID for the contact record that I last saved.
An alternative to this would be to use a variable instead, and set it there.
Thankfully this all worked. I’m now able to create Task records and set their Regarding field value to the Contact that I set up before them – which is the exact thing that I was trying to do!
I hope that this has been helpful – leave a note in the comments if you’ve found another way of doing this.
Finding out how Sara decided to get a dog (no, she didn’t dog-nap someone else’s!), starting out as a Dynamics 365 customer, actually getting involved in customising the solution, and why things went so wrong when updates were released.
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.
I originally had a different article planned for today, but with the current situation that’s happening over the world, I decided to change what I was going to talk about.
The world has gone crazy, in so many ways. There’s plenty of information out there around what’s happening, and with best advice to people as to how to deal with things, cope, etc. I’m not going to cover that (besides, it’s likely that things will change over time, which means that anything I write could be out of date soon).
Instead, I’m going to address one of the specific issues that I’m seeing again and again. This is the bottleneck that people are facing when trying to contact companies, whether the company is their bank, their utility provider, their health provider, or even travel companies.
Regardless of whether people are trying to cancel an existing holiday & get a refund, speak to their bank to get a mortgage holiday, or get medical advice, they’re facing the same major issue – they’re not the only ones trying to get through. Phone lines are jammed (assuming that they’ve not been stopped due to agents being sick), static forms where you fill in information aren’t liked (as you don’t know what the actual status of things are), and online chat takes an absolute age. I had an online chat session with Amazon two days ago, and it took over an hour for one of their associates to join my session to help me.
Go to any major company website, and you’ll probably see something like the following (this is from British Airways):
I’d like to be clear – companies couldn’t really have forecast all of this happening, if you’d go back several months.
But what companies can, and should have in place, are clear communication protocols that actually enable them to handle a massive scale-up of customers contacting them. It’s not going to be perfect, but can help mitigate the bottleneck to certain degrees.
Having an efficient system can allow a single agent to handle multiple communication streams at the same time. Indeed, it’s not just about handling multiple web-chat sessions concurrently – it’s also about handling communication across different mediums. So agents can handle webchat, Facebook messages, Twitter DM’s, etc.
This is, I believe, where products such as Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 can really come into their own, and shine through. Using it, companies can ensure that their workforce (which is likely to be impacted as well by the situation) can be as best empowered as possible, and assist customers as speedily as they are able to.
Hopefully the current situation will resolve itself as soon as possible, and coming out from it, we should look to carry out any efficiencies that we are able to. This will allow companies to better serve their customers moving forward, and streamline communication channels.
I hope & pray that everyone stays safe & healthy through this crisis, and that we help each other out (to the best of our abilities) to get through it.
Having applied the Wave 1 2020 release to several of my test environments, I was browsing around to see the new functionality within it, which is pretty good. However, there was something that I wasn’t expecting, which was a little startling to see! This is around the way that the search behaviour is now working within the system.
What am I talking about? Well, for years, users have asked me if they could search within a specific view. Ie if we had a view set up for ‘My accounts’, where the user is set as the account manager, it would show only the accounts where that condition applies. However when using the search functionality, the system would search & return ALL results that match the search criteria (eg if searching for ‘Apple’, it would return all accounts with the word ‘apple’ in them, regardless if the user was set up as the account manager or not).
Explaining this to users was probably the most complicated thing, in my experience (well, that, and having to then trawl through hundreds, if not thousands of records, where it’s a common word). But for the most part, they accepted it. OK – we all moved on.
Let’s see an example of this. The screenshot below shows an account that exists within one of my Sandbox environments (which has the Wave 1 2020 update applied to it):
I’m now going to search for it within the entity itself (more about Global Search at the end of this post):
Hold on – it’s not showing up! What is happening here – is the system OK???
Let me explain what’s happening. Previously (before the Wave 1 2020 update was applied) it would indeed show up in the search results.
But this has now changed! The system is now performing searches ONLY within the view that the user is using. The reason why it’s not showing up here? Well, it’s because I’m not set as the owner of the account – a different user is (and I’m using the ‘My Accounts’ view, as seen in the previous screenshot):
If I now change my view to ‘All Accounts’ and repeat the search again, the record now shows up:
I hadn’t come across this in my perusal of the release notes. On going back to it and digging deep, I found the mention here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/microsoft-powerapps/improvements-quick-find-search-experience-grid.
Amusingly there’s actually even a little hint within the system for this. If you look at the entity search box, this is now the text that’s being displayed within it:
There’s also an additional feature as part of this – if you’ve prefiltered a view using column value, searching within the entity will RESPECT the pre-filtering!. OK – now this is indeed incredible:
My thoughts on this is that it’s going to be a double-edged sword. For years, we’ve been educating customers about how searching works, and now this has the potential to change things up.
Thankfully it’s actually possible to turn this off, and revert back to the way that searching has always worked – this is likely to be needed to be done quite a bit. To do this, go to Settings, Administration, System Settings, and change the value for Categorised Search to ‘Yes’ (it’s about 1/3 of the way down the page):
It would have been nice if Microsoft had made people more aware of this, in my opinion.
Please note that this only applies to searching within an entity itself. Global Search (for the moment) still uses the Quick Find view, and returns all results (regardless of filters).