Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
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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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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Many people in the IT scene will know of LogMeIn (https://www.logmein.com/), or LMI for short. For as long as I can remember (which means going back almost 2 decades!) they’ve been one of the main remote access solutions. With their product range, it was possible to leave your computer at home, travel abroad, and easily log into it from practically any computer anywhere.
It’s also a great product for IT professionals. Being able to deliver customer support through remote sessions, manage identity solutions, etc. The number of products over the years has grown, and been quite pleasing to watch:
Of course, LogMeIn Free (a great starter product for personal usage) was removed some years back, which to this I still believe is a great pity. Obviously the company decided to focus on the more enterprise side of things, which I can understand as a business.
So, why am I now writing about them? Quite simple, actually. LogMeIn are one of the providers that are working with Microsoft to provide Co-Browse solutions for Omnichannel! It’s a very new piece of functionality that’s been launched in the Dynamics 365 product, and there aren’t many providers out there that have integration points to it.
It’s important to understand what co-browsing is, and some useful stats:
“Co-browsing” refers to the ability to have a service provider & customer jointly navigate an application in real time through the web.
Co-browsing: The Gateway to Happy Customers & Better Financial Results, 2015
So co-browsing is useful. But just how useful can it actually be? Well, apparently it can be VITAL:
Co-browse has the potential to bridge the gap between human & AI-driven customer interaction, & to enable organisations to differentiate their customer service.
By 2022, co-browsing will be used in 2% of customer service interactions, up from 0.1% in 2017 (2000% growth).
Gartner 2017: How Co-browsing Can Differentiate Your Customer Service
LogMeIn has had their Rescue offering available on the general market for a while as a standalone product (alongside the rest of their offerings). They’ve now build it out into a new standalone product called Rescue Live Guide, and provided an integration into Omnichannel for Dynamics 365. Customers obviously need to have licenses for the product, but with these, they now have the ability to co-browse during support sessions. Not only can they see what’s going on, but they can also interact with the customer browser itself, providing an even better support experience.
So, let’s go ahead and take a look at how to set it up, the experience itself, and my thoughts on things.
When I first started testing out the LogMeIn offering, I had to go through a manual install process. This was due to the product just being released (in May 2020), but wasn’t actually that difficult to carry out.
However, they were in the process of switching over to an automatic installation through AppSource, as most of the other apps have. It’s great to be able to see that this has gone live, and is now available for users – it really does make the install that much easier!
Clicking ‘Get It Now’ takes you through the usual route of installing a solution from AppSource: selecting the environment, confirming the installation, etc. After around 5 minutes, I can now see the following:
Once it’s installed, we’ll need to set it as the co-browse provider for the channel that we’re wanting it for. To do this, open the chat record, go to Conversation Options, and select it there:
We’ll also need to put in two records for the LogMeIn co-browse configuration:
Finally, there’s a script block that needs to be added to the webpage where the chat widget is located. This enables the LogMeIn co-browsing ability from the customer side. It can be added right under the chat widget code itself; in the fullness of time, this may be able to be auto-generated as part of the chat widget code, but it’s not at the moment (this is dependent on Microsoft being able to offer it):
Right – setup all done, but before we see it in action, let’s take a quick look at the Rescue Live Guide admin console side of things.
Although the functionality is within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, administering agent licenses and groups takes places within the Rescue Live Guide admin console at https://console.logmeinrescue.com/admin. As companies will need to have Rescue Live Guide licenses, they would usually be familiar with this.
There’s the ability to create new users or groups, and manage them as well:
It’s also possible to set the names that are used for the agent & customer. These can be either the actual name of the agent, or instead potentially a job role/title:
I’m not going to go further into the admin functionality here – documentation can be found on the Rescue Live Guide site around this. Let’s instead take a look at the experience within Omnichannel, which after all is what we’re here to see!
So how does this actually work, in practise? Well, from the customer side, they start a chat like they would usually do. When the agent responds, they’re given an option for ‘Live Guide’:
When the agent clicks on this, two things happen:
Note: At the moment, the agent will have to sign in manually. LogMeIn have told me that their roadmap includes Single Sign On, so that after the initial setup they’ll be signed in automatically, and not have to perform this step in the future.
Once logged in, the agent will see that the session is ready, & waiting for the customer to connect to it. Once the customer has clicked the URL provided in the chat, it will open the Rescue Live Guide session, and authorise the agent to co-browse with them. They’ll then see the following prompt. This tells them that the session is connected to the agent, and that they can begin:
Once the customer has accepted to start browsing together with the agent, they get some small extra items appearing on their screen:
It’s important to note that that the co-browse session is taking place within the specific browser (tab) that is open. Therefore if the user navigates away, the session is paused until they navigate back to it.
On the agent’s side, they can view the customers browser. They can only see what’s happening in the actual tab that’s open for the co-browse session (see below for some more information around this though). It’s quite similar to the customer’s side, though has some LogMeIn features available. Well, obviously it’s similar to the customer – the agent is seeing the customer’s browser window!
They can of course still access the Omnichannel chat itself, and send information through that as well if they wish to.
Just as the customer can see the agent’s mouse position, the agent can see the customer’s mouse position. There are also gesture indicators so that each person can see what the other clicks etc as well, which can be really helpful when walking through a process.
The functionality currently available to the agents covers scrolling (within the page), highlighting, drawing and ‘virtual tabs’. As shown in the image above, the agent is able to highlight text/images, which will then be displayed as being highlighted to the customer. Agents are also able to enter text into text fields, click on buttons, and interact with the native webpage functionality.
Note: The Rescue Live Guide admin centre provides granular controls around these, so that customers can allow agents certain rights, rather than allow them to do everything.
The agent is also able to ‘draw’ on the webpage to be able to point something out, highlight a part of the page, etc.
Note: These annotations will disappear once the customer or agent starts scrolling up/down the page again.
As I’ve mentioned above, the session is taking place within a single browser tab. If the user nagivates away (to a different tab), the session is paused. The agent isn’t able to see any other tabs. So what happens if we do indeed need to open a new tab for something?
Well, there’s a really nice feature that the agent is able to use for this. It’s sort of a ‘virtual tab’ within the browser tab. Sounds interesting!
The customer is able to see this, and can navigate between the tabs. They’re now also able to open a new virtual tab themselves (which is an update to the functionality – originally they weren’t able to, and had to request the agent to do it).
If the customer wants to pause or stop the session, the user simply has to click the ‘Stop’ button in the bottom left. They’ll then be presented with the following screen:
Whilst the session is paused, the customer can continue to use their machine as normal, but the agent won’t be able to see what’s going on. Only if the customer allows the session to resume by clicking ‘Continue Browsing’ will the agent be able to see the customer’s browser once again.
Alternatively, the agent can end the support session themselves, and the customer will be notified about this.
I’m not going to dwell too much on security, as there’s a great document available at https://logmeincdn.azureedge.net/legal/gdpr-v2/Rescue_Live_Guide_SPOC_2020.pdf which goes into quite some detail.
Suffice it to say that LogMeIn have been a market leader for many years in this sector, and I’m happy that sessions through their products are adequately encrypted & protected.
Apart from the above, which is obviously the core of the product, there’s other functionality that’s possible to enable through the LogMeIn Rescue console:
Having gone through testing out the product, I think that LogMeIn has brought a really great product of theirs into the Omnichannel experience. I used to use their products regularly (I ran an IT MSP some years back, in which we used LogMeIn products as well), and always found that they behaved well.
Now having the ability for agents to not only see, but also interact with the customer browsing experience really does take things to the next level. Audio and/or video support is great of course, but sometimes being able to see what the customer is seeing in their browser results in a much quicker resolution. This of course results in happy customers, which is what we’re striving to achieve!
As I’ve said above, I’ve used LogMeIn over the years, and always found their products to be pretty much amazing. With Rescue Live Guide, there are several differentiators that the solution brings to market:
A few things that I think would be nice to have:
At the point when new items do get released, I’ll be aiming to do a review of them, and add to the knowledge around the product.
So, with all of that, how do you think this could best help you & your customers? Please comment below – I’d love to hear!
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Previously I’ve touched on how it’s possible to use Azure Active Directory for Dynamics 365 security. This can be of great benefit to an organisation, especially when needing to invite in external users. The details that I go into around it can be found at Dynamics 365 Security & AAD. As I point out there, it’s a very helpful feature, and can also help with onboarding new users within an organisation.
What I’ve found out about it, however, is that there can be some very interesting little quirks with how security actually works. Originally I thought it was a bug, and raised it with Microsoft Support, but it turns out not to be. Let me take you through the journey that I experienced last week…
The scenario is as follows. We had security set up in place, which was working perfectly (or so we thought). We’d gone through all of the following steps:
This was working exceptionally well (except, of course, when the external users hadn’t followed the setup instructions correctly). Users were logging in, searching for information, creating/updating records, etc. All was good…or so we thought.
Now, the users who are actually using the application don’t have a Dynamics 365 background. It’s the first time that they’re using the specific system, and as such, are going through a learning curve. We’re not expecting them to understand the advanced functionality at this point, though some of them are indeed venturing further/deeper into the capabilities that it brings.
One of these, of course, is the Advanced Find. Now, those experienced with Dynamics 365 will know all about it. There are good points, and there are not so good points. Functionality in it has expanded over time, though to be honest it’s still easier to run a SQL query/extract for more advanced information retrieval.
Users seemed to be fine with the Advanced Find. We showed them how it works, how to filter, set up columns, etc. We even showed them how to export data to Excel, and keep a live data connection back to refresh it! Brilliant – they were most pleased.
Then I got an email in from a user needing support. They reported that they weren’t able to save custom searches. This is of course very helpful, in order to avoid having to set up the same search/layout every time. This seemed puzzling to me, and I started to take a look into it.
I was able to replicate the problem immediately with a test user, having assigned it the same security role. Opening the log file (which can be extremely helpful at times with troubleshooting), I looked to see what the issues were. I was thinking it was a problem with security permissions – if I assigned the system administrator role to my user, everything worked just fine.
Incidentally, there’s a really good blog post at https://www.powerobjects.com/blog/2015/02/13/access-denied-identify-fix-security-role-issue/ which covers troubleshooting security role issues. I’ve used it on several occasions previously.
In my error log, there were repeated references to ‘ObjectTypeCode”:4230’. This is the View settings in the security role. I therefore went to the security role, and ensured that it was set to allow access to Saved View across all permissions:
Right – permissions set, all should be good. Let’s go ahead & try to save an Advanced Find as a view…but no! It’s still not working, and showing the same error message!
What I then tried to do was apply the security role directly to the user, rather than through the AAD security team. To my surprise (well, not really, actually), it worked. I was able to save Advanced Find views. I changed back to the user getting permissions through the security group (ie not directly), and again I had the issue.
OK – so I thought I had discovered a bug. As far as I was aware, I couldn’t see any reason why the user wouldn’t be able to save the Advanced Find view. After all, they’re able to create & save records within the system. There surely shouldn’t be any difference between saving records, and saving an Advanced Find view?
My next step was to raise a support ticket with Microsoft, and then carry out the obligatory ‘show & tell’ to the support agent. Ivan (the agent assigned to my case) was very helpful, understood exactly what I was trying to accomplish, and what the issue seemed to be. I left him with the support case, and focused on trying to find a workaround for the situation.
After a few days, Ivan came back to me with a resolution. It wasn’t a bug in the system (which was a shame – I was looking forward to having it attributed to me!), but rather a specific case of permissions.
See, there’s something called ‘privilege inheritance’. In a nutshell, there are two ways of giving access through a security role:
There’s a good article on this at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/admin/security-roles-privileges#team-members-privilege-inheritance
So what was actually happening was as follows:
Thankfully it’s quite easy to fix – on the security role itself, you change it here:
With this then in place, everything then worked just fine. The user was still getting the role through the Security Team, but was now able to save these directly.
Quite an interesting little quirk, but one that is likely to come in useful when looking at other functionality within the system.
Have you come across this before? Have you found anything else that seems a little strange? Comment below – I’d love to hear!
Discussing Jonas’s love of sailing, boats, and growing up with them. Covering plugin recursions, the balance between a ‘perfect system’ & one that users can actually operate in, as well as the offer of a free XrmToolBox lesson for anyone who’ll build a specific tool!
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Recently I’ve been expanding my knowledge of Power Automate, and how it works. It really is a truly amazing tool, though there can be some quirks to things! There are so many connectors to use, though I haven’t really used that many of them to date.
Truthfully, most of my work in Power Automate is around CDS & Office 365. Occasionally I’ll dip into another system, but for the most part that keeps me busy enough. It’s not to say I don’t want to explore further, but finding the time can be quite difficult!
One of the great abilities that Power Automate has is to be able to update a record. With focusing on CDS entities for the moment, we would use the inbuilt action for this:
We’d run a query to get a specific record – this would give us the record ID (or GUID, depending on your preference). With this, we’d use the Update Record action & pass in the record GUID. After all, we need to know which record we’re going to update! So for example:
What we can then do is set values for the record. So we can pass in Dynamics Content, use Expressions, etc. These can be from records that are part of our Power Automate query chain, or from elsewhere.
For example, I can say that when a contact’s postcode changes (or zip code for USA), go away, look up the new city, and update it (Note: I haven’t shown the postcode lookup part below):
So this is all really brilliant. Different fields have different behaviours, of course, and we need to respect that. Otherwise the Power Automate flow won’t run, and will error. This is, of course, the digital equivalent of not trying to force a square brick into a round hole!
What we can also do is clear a field value. If for example we’re wanting to remove a value from a field, we can use the NULL expression on the field. When the Power Automate flow runs, it’ll clear whichever value the field is currently holding:
Now, one of the the field types available within CDS is the lookup field. I’m not going to go into what this is, as we should already know this!. We can, of course, set lookup fields values to populate the field, which works as expected.
However (& thanks for bearing with me so far), what happens if we want to clear a lookup field value?
Say for example that we have a task, that’s assigned out to someone. If they reject the task, we want to be able to remove them from the task record. We wouldn’t delete the task, as we still need it (& now would need to assign it to someone else). We need a way to do this.
I can hear what you’re thinking right now – mentioned above is the use of NULL, so we’d use this! Um…well, you’d think so. You can try that, but we’ve found that doesn’t always work. Additionally, that doesn’t actually seem to remove the underlying relationship that’s been put in place.
Update: Thanks to Lin Zaw Winn, who dropped me a line to let me know further information around this. The standard CDS connector (the first one that was available) allowed this to work, but the updated CDS connector (Current Environment) doesn’t allow it. Unfortunately the different connectors aren’t at parity, which is a pity!
So, there’s another way to clear lookup field values. This involves the Unrelate action that’s also available. The steps for this are as follows:
This will then remove the relationship, which actually results in clearing the lookup field value. In practise (for our scenario), this would look like:
Let’s take a bit of a further look at the options available here:
Note: It’s VERY important to have the Entity Name & URL values in the right order. I’d suggest looking up the connected record first (ie what the lookup field is pointing to), and using that as the Entity Name value. You’d then select the record where the lookup is saved on as the URL value.
What I’d usually suggest as best practise is to have a condition before this takes place. As mentioned earlier, removing the lookup would happen on a record update. This is because you wouldn’t be removing a field value if you’re creating the record!
But you’re not always going to want it removed. In the scenario that I’ve been dealing with, we’re only wanting to remove the volunteer if they’ve rejected the assigned task. So our Power Automate flow is set out like this:
You can obviously build out other functionality within it as you so desire.
So with this in mind, how do you think you could benefit from this? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Covering his love of Brazilian JuJitsu, occasional wrestling matches with friends/colleagues, & how it can help with day to day life. Delving into a last minute RFP with a surprise inter-continental trip (such a shame that Concorde wasn’t around!), delivering a pitching session whilst carrying out discovery as well, and how the right approach can win what may seem to be an unlikely deal!
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Chatting with Thomas Sandsør about his celebrity status as one of the National Beach Football team, how he got there, and his experiences from the game. Also talking about starting on projects as a junior consultant, & why it’s SO important to ask questions & not just blindly follow instructions.
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