Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking to Roma about gardening in a small space, touching on pigeons, and delving into MDM. No, it’s not Master Data Management, it’s Dynamics 365 Marking 1.0!
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Interesting title to start a blog post with, right? I can’t tell you how much I tried to work out what to call this, but then I figured that I’d just put at a high level what I’m going to be talking about!
So let’s start at the beginning. Environments within Dataverse. An environment is essentially a container for all sorts of different components, such as data models, apps, code, etc.
Within the Power Platform, there are different types of environments. As a quick recap, currently we have the following:
Now, sandbox & production environments are automatically backed up – backups occur continuously, using Azure SQL Databases underneath. It’s also possible to create a manual backup instance of an environment as well, which usually takes a few seconds to carry out (restoring a backup, on the other hand, takes quite a bit longer…).
When restoring an environment, it’s not possible to restore to a production environment (though the backup could be from a production environment). It’s only possible to restore the backup to a sandbox environment – you’d then need to promote the environment from sandbox to production.
Let’s move away from backups for a moment. When we create an environment, we have the ability to select that the environment should be enabled for Dynamics 365:
This is actually a REALLY IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION! At this point in time, it’s not possible to update from a Power Platform Dataverse environment to then bring in Dynamics 365 capabilities. What this means is that if an organisation starts with just Power Apps, and then wants to expand into using Dynamics 365, IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THIS NATIVELY. Even Microsoft Support can’t do anything around this – you’d need to create a new environment, enable it for Dynamics 365, and then restore a backup to it.
It’s something that a lot of us would like be in place, but we’re not sure if it’ll ever come about. This is a tweet of mine from 2019 that Charles Lamanna responded to (I was SO thrilled that he actually responded to me!!):
However, it’s still not in place. As a result, we recommend to all clients that when they deploy a Dataverse environment, they toggle the switch above (Note: A Dynamics 365 license is NOT needed to toggle this). Once this has been toggled (without deploying any of the Dynamics 365 apps), the Dynamics 365 apps and functionality can be installed/deployed at a later point in time.
There are actually various capabilities, such as the Data Export Service (yes, I know it’s now been deprecated) that actually relied on having the environment enabled as a Dynamics 365 environment in order to work. We found this out the hard way at a client, and had to do an overnight environment re-build to get the capabilities in place.
But there’s one other thing to consider around the differences between a native Dataverse environment, and an environment which has been enabled for Dynamics 365. This is around backups.
Now, backups are of course very important (thankfully they now occur automatically, as mentioned above – I remember my onpremise days when needing to run these manually!). But there are also some important differences for backup behaviour when it comes to environment types. See, it turns out that environments aren’t actually equal in backup behaviour. This is what actually happens:
See that? Having Dynamics 365 enabled for an environment gives you FOUR TIMES as much backup retention time! That’s incredible!
So not only are you able to then upgrade to Dynamics 365 applications at a later date, you then also have more peace of mind (hopefully you don’t need to use it though!) around keeping backups for longer.
This is really cool – I hope it helps you plan your environment implementation strategy! Have you ever come up against issues when using environments, or the type/s of environment? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Chatting to Joy about her love of reading, the education system she came up in, & how getting caught up in the ‘focus zone’ can make us forget the world that’s going on around us!
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Talking about Foyin’s love of animated movies (including times away from the kids!), the ‘joys’ of DLP changes, and what might happen as a result of doing work on an app, to then find out that though you thought you were working in the Development environment, you actually weren’t!
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Talking to Rachel about her love of reading, some favourite authors, her journey into #PowerPlatform #technonolofy, Imposter Syndrome, and much more!
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Most of us are aware of the knowledge article functionality within Dynamics 365. For those who aren’t familiar with it, knowledge articles can empower users within any organisation with access to existing information.
Types of knowledge articles can include solutions to common issues, product or feature documentation, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), product briefs, and more. Being able to have access to this means that customer service agents can easily answer queries, without needing to spend (lots of) time investigating what’s happening, and find resolutions.
Note: At this point in time, the Knowledge Article functionality is still a restricted table within Dataverse. It requires either a Dynamics 365 plan, Customer Engagement plan, or Customer Service Enterprise plan
It’s great to be able to share information around within an organisation. There is native functionality for this, with the ability to share a knowledge article record directly with other users by clicking the ‘Email a link’ button:
Note: This is performed through going to the to Knowledge Article table, opening up a record, and carrying out the functionality from there. It cannot be done through access to Knowledge Articles on the Case form.
This will create an email (in Outlook) with a URL to the specific record:
This is of course very helpful, but is only internally facing. It’s not possible to send this to a customer who’s having an issue, as the customer wouldn’t be able to access the URL!
It’s also not particularly useful if we think about how customer service agents work, as they’d need to be moving through different areas of Dynamics 365.
Thankfully knowledge management is built into the customer service capability within the system. So for example, when we open a case record, we have the ability to search for knowledge articles directly in here:
This of course works much better from a customer service agent perspective – they have all of the functionality that they need in just one area.
So how can we share information directly with customers? Copying and pasting the information into a chat or email interaction seems quite manual and bothersome.
But there’s no need to do this manually, thankfully! Again, we have in-built functionality to handle this:
Clicking the little email icon on a knowledge article creates an email within Dynamics 365 (so you’ll need to have email enabled for users, to make this work!) with the information copied into it:
OK – this much easier. We can send customers the exact information, so that they then have it to hand.
But here’s a new scenario – what if we wanted to send MULTIPLE knowledge articles to a customer at once? We could of course click the email icon each time, but that results in a separate email being created for each one, which means the customer will be receiving multiple emails. Not the most ideal scenario, surely?
Well, thanks to my amazing colleague Ryan Hunter-Stott, there is actually a way to do this! In fact, technically you could say that there are two approaches, but holistically it’s the same thing – it involves an email.
So, you can either:
Within the email message, we have the following option to insert a knowledge article:
Clicking this brings up an interface to be able to search for knowledge articles. Clicking the envelope icon will then insert the information in the email:
Now it’s not possible to select multiple knowledge articles in this window. BUT, it IS possible to click the button to open it up again, and insert a second one. And then a third one!
This can then be sent out to the customer, with all of the information contained in it!
It’s a nice little touch, and I think it definitely beats copying & pasting information into an email manually!
Have you ever thought about this scenario? Did you find this functionality, or end up doing it in a different way? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Talking to Joy Kirkwood about how she got into knitting to begin with, some interesting projects she’s done, and why it is SO important for us to embrace the concept of a growth mindset in order to enable us to move forward!
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Microsoft releasing new functionality can be an interesting experience, to say the least. As a cloud platform (SAAS – Software As A Service), functionality is released the entire time. A user could log off on Friday for the weekend, and come back on Monday morning to find that something has changed slightly, or a new button is present in the interface. Over time, most of us have come to accept this.
However this is for the ‘smaller’ functionality parts within the system, whether that’s Dynamics 365, or Power Platform related. There are of course two MAIN release announcements each year. These are the Wave 1 (Spring) and Wave 2 (Autumn) release windows, with information announced about what is included in each one publicly. This information usually starts to be available around 4-6 weeks or so before the release starts to hit.
Now that’s not to say that everything within a Wave release is released in a ‘Big Bang’ moment. Far from it actually, based on my experience. Microsoft will announce what is coming as part of the Wave release, along with projected timeframes as to when it will be available. Obviously, just because it’s been announced for Day X doesn’t mean that actually happens, at least for some of the time.
But there’s an inherent time-sink to being on top of all of this information. Firstly, people need to download the Wave release information (there’s one for Dynamics 365, and a second one for Power Platform), wade through all of the information, and somehow then remember it. Let’s just say that this can be challenging for a lot of people…
But what if there was somewhere where we could track this? Well, to date there hasn’t been, at least not until now.
Microsoft have created & made available the ‘Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Release Planner’, which can be found at https://experience.dynamics.com/releaseplans:
So just as a start, this is already MUCH better than the downloadable PDF documents for wave release information (admittedly the information is also available online as a Microsoft document, but still it’s lacking in certain areas).
But there’s more to this functionality than simply presenting a list of areas. Let’s take a look into some of these.
To begin with, there’s the sitemap on the left hand side. This allows us to select a specific area of interest, whether it’s Dynamics 365 or Power Platform (amusingly this reminds me a little of a model-driven app!).
Once in an area, we can then select between Planned features, Coming Soon features, and Try Now features by using the options in the menu bar. This is a nice little piece of functionality, in my opinion, allowing us to see what falls under each ‘category’:
By default, the items are displayed in a list format. However, we’re also able to toggle the view from the menu bar to a release date format, which shows us all items grouped by release month:
There’s also some filtering functionality, allowing us to narrow down the results even further:
Opening a line item (regardless of whether it’s being displayed as a list, or arranged by date) will give further information around the specific item. It also includes a lovely little timeline widget, showing the release dates information, as well as where it’s actually up to currently (which I think is great to have it as a visual reference!):
In here, links are included to documentation around the release overview, as well as specific documentation around the selected functionality item.
Now if this was all that there was, I think that truthfully I would be quite satisfied. It’s a much more modern interface, and really looks nice. I know that various colleagues of mine would be quite satisfied as well.
But….it doesn’t stop there. There’s something else, which is really the cherry on top of the cake icing! So what is it? Well, it’s the ability to create a PERSONALISED release plan information overview.
So on each item of functionality, there’s a button called ‘+ To my plan’:
Note: You do need to be signed into the portal to have this option available to you
Clicking this will add it to a personalised release plan, which you can access from the left-side menu. Here, all of the items that you’ve selected will show up. This is really cool, I think, as it allows you to see the overall picture, but also then focus on just the areas that you’re interested in:
It’s still got all of the functionality available for filtering, date/item sorting, etc. It’s also possible to toggle back to the ‘main’ view of all release information.
So in summary, I think that this is really cool. Admittedly (as it says on the site), it’s in BETA currently. I’m hoping that it’ll stick around, and come out of Beta pretty soon! Regardless, I’m definitely starting to make use of this already in tracking the upcoming features that I’m interested in.
There’s a saying amongst seasoned IT professionals who deal with Microsoft software. It goes something like this – ‘Why make do with one admin centre, when you could just have MULTIPLE admin centres to carry out functions!’.
It’s a bit of a tongue-in-check response to the numerous different admin centres that Microsoft technology seems to have. Now, I/we totally understand that over time, different (standalone) products have come together to co-exist, but their administration centres still differ.
Over time, Microsoft has been applying efforts to make them work better together, but it can still sometimes be quite frustrating not to know exactly where to go to in order to carry out specific function/s, or not to be able to see capabilities holistically overall in a single place.
So for example, we have:
Now when it comes to Power Platform related items, admins would usually go to the Power Platform Admin Centre (which though it has a URL of admin.powerplatform.com, this auto-resolves to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com – I have no idea why this is, given that no other admin centre seems to have this structure in place….another mystery…)
From here, we’d be presented with a list of environments, similar to the screenshot below:
The menu on the left hand side gave us a few of the different admin centres that we’re able to switch to. Alternatively, we could expand the overall menu to show us more capabilities, including other apps that we may wish to access:
So this is what we’ve been used to for the last few years. Essentially, information in different areas, and we’d need to go to each admin centre to find out what’s happening. So for example, if a Power Platform Admin user wanted to see any health advisories, they’d need to go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre to view the Service Health area there.
Not anymore! As part of the focus on unifying information across admin centres, Microsoft has now updated the functionality for this!
Now, with the new functionality, there’s a Home screen. On this, information is able to be presented to users, as well as applying one of several themes to the interface, such as a rainbow:
Now, in terms of information available to users, these are presented as ‘cards’. Within each card, information is shown, based on the card type:
At the moment, there are three cards to choose from:
Service Health
This section outlines any service health issues, such as outages or advisory information that users should be aware of. Clicking through it will bring users to the Service Health section of the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre:
From here, users can choose to switch across to other categories, such as Incidents, History & Reported Issues.
It’s (at least) one less click from the previous method, and I’m quite liking this. In my mind, it’s about making the information as accessible as possible (leaving aside that I think that Power Platform specific alerts should actually show within the Power Platform Admin Centre…)
Message Center
The second section is the Message Center. Here we’re able to see specific messages (yes, I know I have a LOT of messages sitting here!), and clicking on them will bring up the corresponding information directly within the same interface (which again, I’m really liking). So for example:
Nicely for messages, we also have options to filter the types of services that we want to see here. This, in my mind, is quite important, as we wouldn’t want Power Platform admins to be overwhelmed by messages that have absolutely no (usual) interest for them:
We also have the ability to specify which email notifications we want to be receiving. Again, we may be interested in some non-Power Platform notifications, but not want to see them directly within the Power Platform Admin Centre. Instead, we can specify to receive these via email – another nice touch!
Documentation
Finally, we have linked out to various Power Platform (& Dynamics 365) related resources on the Microsoft website. These are all static (ie they’re provided by Microsoft), but hopefully in the future admins will have the capability to add custom links to other resources as well.
What is nice about the documentation section though is that it’s got linked to the various Community forums. Microsoft has recently started to promote these within the products, and they can be a very helpful resource at times to be able to use!
There are also links to the Microsoft Centre of Excellence toolkit, which is a great resource that organisations should look to implement.
All in all, I think that this is a VERY good start to things. I’m hopeful that with Microsoft implementing this ‘home screen’ functionality with the ability to add cards to it, there will be additional cards that are released, bringing more information & functionality into the interface. I’m also hopeful that Microsoft will allow admins to add custom functionality here as well.
It’s a good first step – now let’s wait to see how this functionality iterates over time, and hopefully enables admin users in better ways!
Talking to Garry about his love of #OpenSource projects, some of the amazing things that he’s working on, and what exactly ‘Agile’ means when it comes to scoping out work!
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.