The last week has been somewhat hectic – I was at Ignite for 2 days, started on a mentorship program (as a participant), and have been investigating some of the new functionality for Omnichannel, etc.
As a result, I’ve decided to post a video that I came across a little while back. It’s from the mid-2000’s, and takes place with Satya Nadella, who at the time was the CVP (Corporate Vice President) of the Dynamics team.
Nowadays the Dynamics and PowerPlatform space is just so large, both in terms of breadth as well as depth, that it’s almost unbelievable. At the time of writing this post there are over 30 ‘First Party’ apps – I remember when there was only one!
When watching this video, I can see the beginning of how Microsoft was planning on invigorating & expanding the Business Application side of the company, along with how important and key it was being envisioned to be at the time (and still is, of course)
Now Satya is the CEO of Microsoft, and offerings such as the Power Platform have had billions of dollars invested in them over the last few years. It’s really incredible how far things have come over the last 15 years…and who knows how they’ll continue to develop!
Well, firstly this isn’t about Omnichannel. Or any specific deep dive into technology. What is IS about is the first time I’ve gone to a Microsoft conference/exhibition. And it was amazingly awesomely wonderful.
Having seen several other write-ups from people who visited it, I thought I’d write my own, to share my perspectives and thoughts on it.
The queues to get in!
Now, it’s not the first time I’ve been to exhibitions and/or conferences. Far from it – I go to several each year (in fact these are usually where I get my t-shirts and pens/pencils from – I rarely buy these at all! My wife despairs sometimes of my very ‘tech-orientated’ t-shirt collection). I’ve frequented Service Desk (https://www.servicedeskshow.com/) for over a decade, as well as InfoSec (https://www.infosecurityeurope.com/), Counter Terror (https://www.ctexpo.co.uk/) and DsEI (https://www.dsei.co.uk/) as well.
I’ve even been to CES (https://www.ces.tech/) in Las Vegas a few years back. Now if there’s ever a place where consumer technology is showcased, that is truly the place for it. I even managed to get myself upgraded to a Press Pass there, which came with a cool backpack, early access to the exhibition floor, and free WiFi.
Ignite was different. True, it included people speaking about Microsoft technology (and these were really and truly awesome people, some of whom I know personally), showcasing and demoing it.
The famous Keith ‘I’m a Ginger’ Whatling
But what it also included, and had a deep emphasis on was Community. There were many different User Groups present, talking about how we can all enable and support each other. There were mini-sessions by speakers, un-conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. Many people from all over the UK, as well as abroad, took part in this. It really emphasised for me just how important our technical communities are, and how much we can learn from each other from them!
Of course, I attended many of the sessions that were happening. I tried to mix these up, aiming to attend both professional learning as well as personal development learning. My schedule was as follows:
Day 1:
Enabling everyone to digitize apps and processes with Power Apps and the Power Platform
Intelligent automation with Microsoft Power Automate
#HumansofIT with Tech Superpowers: How Heathrow’s Security Officer Launched 12 #PowerApps
Connecting Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, Power BI, and the Common Data Service with data
Practicing Kindness in Tech: 5 Steps to Build a Culture of Giving Back and Helping Others in the Community
Supervisor experiences in Omnichannel
Day 2:
PowerPlatform London User Group sessions
Humans of IT Empower Breakfast Panel – Interconnected Data for an Interconnected Planet: The Future of Agritech
Imposter Syndrom Banishing Spell
Azure AI & Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Property and Real Estate Market use case: Delivering significant cost reduction and tangible revenue growth
The Power People of London Town: Power Apps and Power Automate
Configuring and managing Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing – Establish connected Sales and Marketing
Responding to incidents
From Geek to Chic: Build Your Brand & Elevate Your Career in 5 Steps
There were fabulous speakers – really too many to mention (especially as I also managed to network with various others). From FINALLY meeting Samit Saini (it’s only taken 6 months) in person to hearing Dona Sarkar and Dux Raymond, from Rory Neary to Mark Wilcock, it truly was a pleasure to listen to what they had to say.
Dona, Samit & Duc
The networking opportunities available were also unbelievable. With an estimated 5000 people attending, I met up with others who I had only corresponded with digitally to date. Even more wonderful was meeting new people, sharing ideas and concepts, and already keeping in touch and corresponding with in the short time since Ignite finished here.
The sense of community involvement was indescribable. People were sharing resources, suggesting who to follow online, and who to reach out to if they had any questions about anything.
Don’t worry – someone added me to this later on!
It was also truly great to see the launch of the #PowerPlatypus. I’m going to unashamedly take full credit for this marvellous creature coming to fruition (well, until anyone official from Microsoft can prove otherwise), due to the Twitter poll that I put out last year:
I’ve come away with so much learned in such a short space of time, and many notes on much more that I need to look into. Best of all, I’ve come away with many further connections, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can all come up with.
One really useful thing to note as well about Ignite – everyone who attended gets a free Microsoft Exam voucher that they can use to take any exam with!. To redeem this, find the exam you’d like to take, log in to schedule it, and then you should be given an option to use it:
This is so wonderful, and I really do appreciate Microsoft providing this (especially as Ignite the Tour is free to attend!).
I’ve already made a note to attend the tour next year (as I won’t be able to attend the main Ignite conference), and are looking forward to seeing what it brings, and who I’ll be able to meet there. Perhaps even, I might apply to speak at a session!
Talking about our shared love of motorbiking, touring around Europe (with ad-hoc repairs) & the importance of getting key people (knowledge holders) together with ‘sweating the details’ for projects!
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One of my resolutions for 2020 is to go out and get books to read, for self improvement – all in the name of getting better at stuff!
One of the books that I’ve read is The Phoenix Project (billed as a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win). It’s been a real eye opener as to how we may currently go about projects, and what would be a much better approach. The thinking behind it is to look at how to best use DevOps.
Incidentally Tricia Sinclair has recently started talking about DevOps, and is REALLY knowledgeable on the subject. I’ve had many conversations with her, and her breadth of information and understanding is second to none. I’d really recommend that you go check out her blog at https://triciasinclair.com/.
There are several ideas/concepts that I’ve taken out of it. One of the main ones (as far as I’m concerned) is about continual improvement, and doing this in small steps.
It’s not about massive changes in life. It’s about identifying something (small) that can be changed/modified, and implementing a new regime around it, or a new way of doing it. This way you can train yourself into a new habit, which will take you forward. Once it’s settled in, pick something else, and then work on that.
The effect will be gradual, but it’ll be noticeable in being better at whatever it is that you’re addressing. It doesn’t just stop there though – improvement in ONE area has shown a noticeable marked improvement in OTHER areas as well across the board.
This concept doesn’t just apply to personal habits – it also applies to technology. Gone are the days (for most people!) when the next updates and/or items were released just in new product versions, or major updates.
Yes it’s true that there are two major releases each year for Dynamics and PowerPlatform (Spring/Fall), but the Microsoft Development Teams don’t work on items and then queue them all up for the major release.
Instead there are items that are released as soon as they’re ready (take a look at https://thecrm.ninja/required-fields-on-forms-what-did-you-forget-to-fill-in/ for an example of this). This is why you’ll be using the system, and suddenly notice that you don’t have as many steps to carry out, or something looks better and works faster, etc.
Every member of the team should feel that their input is valued, and able to be used – this will reinforce the team status. In the Toyota Way (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way for more information) quality takes precedence. Anyone at all, even a ‘lowly’ factor worker, is empowered to stop a production line when they’ve identified a problem.
One of the items in the ‘Toyota Way’ is called the ‘Toyota Kata’. This is a skill-building process to shift our mindset and habits from a natural tendency to jump to conclusions, to a tendency to think and work more scientifically. It’s not difficult to pick up, and recommendations are to practise it for only 10 minutes a day!
Everyone knows that making small improvements everyday is good and everyone wants to do that. But the following questions arise:
What to improve?
How to improve?
How will I know am improving?
The Toyota Kata comprises of 4 steps:
Plan. Draw up a list of things to do over the next period of time (one or two weeks). Establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.
Do. Carry out the planned items. Small changes are usually tested, and data is gathered to see how effective the change is.
Check. The data and results gathered from the Do phase are evaluated. Data is compared to the expected outcomes to see any similarities and differences. The testing process is also evaluated to see if there were any changes from the original test created during the planning phase.
Act. This is where a process is improved upon. Records from the “Do” and “Check” phases help identify issues with the process. These issues may include problems, opportunities for improvement, inefficiencies and other issues that result in outcomes that are not optimal. The root causes of such issues are investigated, found and eliminated by modifying the process (as part of Plan in the next cycle).
Work in the next cycle Do phase should not create recurrence of the identified issues – if it does, then the previous action was not effective.
The most obvious manifestation of the Toyota Kata is the two-week improvement cycle at Toyota itself, in which every work centre supervisor must improve something (anything!) every two weeks. Mike Rother (who wrote the book for Toyota Kata) says ‘The practice of kata is the act of practising a pattern so it becomes second nature. In its day to day management, Toyota teaches a way of working—a kata—that has helped make it so successful over the last six decades.”
My resolve is to do this – not only on my personal items, not only in my work environment, but also with the clients that I work with.
Let’s go out there and use this to make things better for everyone. Let’s challenge our clients and see how this can enable and empower them? Sounds crazy, right – but it could actually bring a massive benefit to project/s. Sit down with the business team/s, and get them to identify one point (that’s not too big) that can be (quickly) worked on (try using the 80/20 rule). Do the work on it, release it, and then get them to do it again. See the results and benefit from it!
Note: Don’t get them to build too much of a backlog around this, as release items may cause one or more of the backlog items to be non-relevant anymore!
You could even get managers to give a reward for coming up with ideas around this concept that have a major noticeable effect on productivity etc.
By bringing these concepts together, our clients (along with ourselves) can better understand what’s happening, bring better suggestions to the table in order to build better systems, and a much higher working co-efficient will evolve, empowering everyone!
We’ve all been there (well, at least I have). We’ve been having an online chat with a customer service person at a company, and we’re wanting to have a record of the actual chat that took place. Of course we could (hopefully) copy and paste the entire conversation into a document and save it, but that would be laborious, and also potentially not be legal proof of the actual conversation.
In some cases, companies may actually encourage customers to save a record of their chat history on their account (as an example, Amazon offers this at the end of each chat). Customers can then return at a later date to download the conversation to their own computer at their leisure, which can be more convenient at times (say you’re travelling on holiday, and don’t have your own computer with you!). It could even be possible to get it automatically emailed to your own email address, which would also allow a company to add additional information to it (for example a feedback survey request on your chat experience, some marketing information, etc)
Well, Omnichannel has the ability for this, in multiple ways! It can allow a user to:
Download a full transcript at the end of the chat
Email a full copy of the chat transcript
Both of these features are available from the chat window using icons, allowing a quick and easy experience for the users. You can decide if you want to allow one or the other, or both, quite easily.
Enabling this is quite simple, though there are some additional options to set for the auto-emailing feature (basically selecting the email template and user mailbox – you can set up a specific mailbox to use if you’re wanting it eg ‘customerservice@abc.xyz’).
In the Omnichannel Administration Hub, open the Chat channel that you’re wanting to enable this for. Under the ‘Chat Transcripts’ section, select the option/s that you’re wanting to enable:
Downloading the chat transcript
At any time during the chat conversation, users can click the download icon at the bottom left of the chat window, and the conversation will be downloaded to their default Downloads folder on their computer.
This saves as an HTML file, and when opened looks like this:
At the end of the chat, the person will be prompted and asked if they’d like to save the conversation, with quick instructions as to how to do so. Obviously this option will ensure that the customer has the complete conversation, rather than just a part of it, so this reminder is really nice and helpful in my opinion
Emailing the chat transcript
Customers can also get the chat transcript auto-emailed to their email address. Clicking the email icon will prompt the customer to enter their own email address (or whichever email they’d like the chat transcript to be sent to).
This option allows companies to be able to format the email template that’s used for this. Examples of things that a company might want to do could include:
Using company logo’s, images and fonts
Feedback survey information, to understand how the customer felt about the chat session
Marketing material for upcoming events
Note: When setting up the ability for chat transcripts to be emailed, don’t forget to approve and test the mailbox being used in the Email Configuration settings! If you don’t do this (or it hasn’t already been done), they won’t be emailed out!
There’s also one further piece of configuration that needs to be carried out for emailing chat transcripts. As all emails from that chat channel will be using the same email address to send out the emails, this means that the ‘Allow send on behalf of’ option must be selected on the mailbox user’s personal settings. You’ll therefore need to log into Dynamics as the mailbox user, open personal options, and set this manually
In summary, this is really helpful to customers, and a great little feature for Omnichannel.
I’ve been contacted by several people over the last few days who have been experiencing an error when trying to get Omnichannel configured. It looks something like:
The actual text of the error is: AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID ’18cc9627-776c-4142-b8f5-9cd83517e3bb’ named ‘Omnichannel for Customer Service’. Send an interactive authorization request for this user and resource. Trace ID: 36dd2358-2d41-463c-a2f6-013038636400 Correlation ID: 9ac093cd-e525-4bb4-b277-3ac8e7478b6b Timestamp: 2020-01-07 12:14:15Z
No matter what people tried, they still got it. I went through the process of setting up a completely new environment – lo and behold, I got the same issue! (the screenshot above is actually from my system). Incidentally this is why it’s so important to be able to replicate an issue, so that you can confirm what’s actually causing it to happen.
Reaching out to some very helpful people at Microsoft, I (thankfully) got a quick response from them
Essentially, there are some issues with Azure Active Directory (AAD) consent flows for applications at the moment (it’s not specific to Omnichannel). There’s a fix that’s being worked on, but no idea when it will be finished and rolled out.
They were nice enough to share with me how to address it, which is what I’m now sharing here! To fix this issue, carry out the following steps to manually grant permissions to the application:
Click it to open, and you’ll see a list of the enterprise applications that use AAD.
2. You’ll then want to search for the application that has the issue (in this case, Omnichannel)
You’ll want to double-check that the ‘Application ID’ is the SAME as the Application ID that you’re getting in the error message, especially if there are multiple results coming up in the search list!
Once you’re sure that it’s the correct application, click it to open it.
3. You’ll see a section in the left bar called ‘Security’, and under this should be an entry for ‘Permissions’. When this opens, you’ll see a button in the main window called ‘Grant admin consent for User‘.
4. Click this – it’ll cause a window to pop up, where you’ll grant permissions for the application. Once granted, the window will automatically close.
You can then go back to the place where you were experiencing the error, and it should work!
We’ve all been there. We’re on a website page, trying to understand it, and not really getting anywhere. Whether it’s about how to fill in a form, or technical instructions and information, our mind has gone blank. The words are on the page, but they’re just not making sense – and we don’t know what to do!
What would we say if suddenly a prompt came up, asking if we needed some help with understanding things, and offering to connect us with a live agent if we wanted some assistance? Well, quite a lot of people would be grateful for that, I’d think.
There are quite a few websites out there that have this functionality – I know that I’ve seen it on various sites I’ve been on, though it’s not always been implemented in the best of ways.
Well, now Microsoft have decided to bring in their own form of it, and it sits right within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365! It’s able to allow customers to interact either with a bot or with a live agent, depending on how you’ve configured it to work.
Currently it’s in Preview, but I’m expecting it to move to General Availability soon.
Even better, Microsoft have even released a short video around it!
There are two parts to configuring it:
Firstly, you need to enable Proactive Chat. Go to your Chat channels under Omnichannel Administration, open up the Chat record you’re wanting to have Proactive chat enabled for, and change the ‘Enable Proactive Chat’ option to Yes (obviously if you don’t have any chat channels set up, you’d need to create a new one)
Secondly, there’s some code that needs to be embedded on the actual web-page that the chat is active on. Now I know what some of you are thinking – ‘how the heck do I code’? (OK – so the developers aren’t thinking that – they’re thinking ‘oh goodie!!’. Well, I’m not from a development background myself, but I managed to get it to work quite easily. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/developer/how-to/start-proactive-chat , where several different scenarios are shown (along with sample code), and you can tweak these as required.
The result then looks like:
This is really helpful. I can then click the ‘Chat Now’ button to start the chat. What I’m also really liking about the experience is that the chat option/window floats on the bottom right side of the screen, so no matter where I am in the page, it’s available (and easily able to be seen)
There are many different ways in which this can be configured. Some of the immediate ones that come to mind (but by no means all of them) are:
Someone staying on a webpage for a long period of time
Someone who keeps coming back to the same page (perhaps they’re lost, and not able to find what they’re looking for)
Someone on a support portal looking at a support case, and wanting to see more information on it
Someone coming from a specific webpage to another page
Someone accessing the webpage from a specific location (eg country) in the world
Special offers being available during a specific time-frame, and only website visitors during that time get the option for the special offers
It’s a really helpful addition to the current Omnichannel capabilities, and I’m sure that there will be many more to come!
Talking about how running can help with things, interesting sights seen during some of the runs, managing expectations for system migrations with new fields, and the importance of involving the key business unit users as early as possible during the project process!
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Well, somewhat of a mouthful of a title for this article, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it!
You know the scenario – we’ve all been there. There’s a custom form (for a system entity, or even a custom entity). Multiple sections, tabs, and multiple fields that are required. Users are going through data entry, but SOMEHOW have forgotten to fill one (or more???) in, and they’re just not able to save the form!
Well, Microsoft has now upped the quality of the user experience, and OH BOY was I SO excited to see this!
Previously when you clicked the Save button, it just wouldn’t allow you to save. It told you that it was missing required information, and you had to go search to see WHICH field(s) you had missed out on.
But search no longer. For now the notification bar has a whole new behaviour:
Firstly, it tells you that there are notifications, and to select to view (Note: If you’ve only missed out one field, just skip to step 2!)
Then when you click on it, it tells you which (required) fields have data missing from them!
Even better, if you click on the notification for a specific missing field, it even takes you to that field – no longer do you have to try to find where it is!
This is truly amazing, and will help enable users (and relieve their frustration) so much!
