Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
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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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!
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You might be wondering as to what I mean by ‘swarming’ in the title for this post. Don’t worry – it’ll become clear pretty soon! But first of all, let’s understand the story behind this new functionality.
Where to begin? Well, let’s take a look within an organisation. It doesn’t really matter what sort of organisation it is, as most organisations will have something similar scenarios overall. So, what are we actually talking about?
Customer Service is, of course, a very important functionality of any organisations. Customers who have purchased products may need support, or perhaps are having issues, and need them to be resolved. Customer service agents are there to handle the customer queries, and look to resolve them as soon as possible.
However, it’s possible that the customer service agents don’t actually know how to resolve the customer query/issue themselves. They can, of course, use the Knowledge Base, but that requires knowledge articles to be created & maintained.
Now within the organisation, there will be SME’s (Subject Matter Experts). These are the people who know the matter in precise detail, often being the people who have created the product and/or process to begin with. But these people aren’t usually carrying out the customer service function.
So what this means is that the customer service agents need to try to work out who might actually know the answer/s, be able to help resolve the customer issue, etc. This can take time, be laborious, and perhaps not even be able to be carried out (depending on the organisation).
Hmm. So, what if the system might be able to actually SUGGEST the right people for a problem or issue? Even better, what if the system could support them being involved directly with the record/s, regardless of whether they’re a user within Dynamics 365 or not?
Enter the swarming capability onto the Dynamics 365 scene….
The aim of swarming is to bring together the necessary experts within Dynamics 365. Now, having said that, not all users will actually be interacting directly within Dynamics 365. What happens is that a specific Teams chat is created, so that users outside of the system can see the necessary information, and give input on the situation.
This builds on the existing functionality of being able to use Teams chats directly within Dynamics 365, but takes it to a whole new level, by having the system automatically suggest relevant people within the organisation, and bring them into the swarm chat!
There are some necessary steps to configure to enable this to happen.
Firstly, Teams needs to be enabled within Dynamics 365:
Once we start to turn things on, we can then see the following. This allows us to be able to specify the types of records that we can use swarming on. This is great, as we may be building out custom functionality using other tables, and can enable swarming on these as well
Once Teams chat has been enabled, we can then start setting up the swarming capabilities:
As part of the setup, we have:
So, how does this work in practise, once the system has been initially configured?
Users can go to the relevant record, such as a case record. They’re able to select the ‘Create swarm’ from the menu bar:
This then allows the user to provide a summary of what the swarm is for, the scenario, as well as selecting the skills needed for the swarm. Dynamics 365 can also suggest skills that it thinks would be helpful as well:
Users from across the organisation are matched, according to the skills identified:
Notifications are sent to them within Teams, requesting their help with the matter:
When they accept the invitation, they’re then brought into the swarm:
In fact, the members of the swarm aren’t actually accessing the swarm information within Dynamics 365. Instead, they’re seeing & interacting with the swarm within Teams itself!
Once the swarm is active, information can be shared, and a solution found. The swarm can then be successfully closed down:
This is truly amazing. Obviously collaboration on issues is important, especially when considering that we’re trying to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible! I’m also really excited about this, as I was part of the initial group that Microsoft reached out to initially for feedback on the capabilities of it.
To now be able to collaborate with users who sit outside of Dynamics 365, but have them access the necessary information to help resolve things, is just mind-blowing. So many scenarios that come to mind as to how this can really empower organisations!
Can you think of a way in which this could change things in your own organisation, or at a client? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear more!
Talking to Vivek about his love of home automation (we may find out how many devices he currently has!), how he got into API usage in the first place (hence being called thatAPIguy), and lessons learned from cycling!
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Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.
Finding out from Simon about how he decided to go about starting a car collection, why he loves playing around with Tesla’s so much, and discovering just what happened one day when he was diving the English Channel!
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.
Well for a start, I know that the title of this blog post is somewhat of a mouthful. It’s definitely longer than my usual titles! However I felt it important to do so, given the functionality that I’m actually going to talk about…
So here goes!
As part of the Wave 1 2022 release, both for Power Platform as well as Dynamics 365, we have the new ‘Modern Advanced Find’ capability. This replaces the (legacy) Advanced Find interface, which has been around since almost the beginning of Microsoft CRM…that’s quite a few years!
So within a model-app (as this covers both Power Apps as well as Dynamics 365), the classic Advanced Find was a good friend. Though using the legacy interface (& sometimes being VERY slow to load initially), we could create powerful queries through it. Being able to specify conditions, span multiple tables (with needing to understand the data model), we were able to show & filter data as we needed to.
When loading the Advanced Find interface, we could select from any of the tables within the system, with a LONG list presented to us for this purpose:
Now, just because we could see all tables (system & custom) within the list didn’t mean we could view all data within the tables. Oh no – the security roles applied to users limited what we could do.
In fact, users having security roles with NO permissions on certain tables would NOT see those tables appearing in the Advanced Find interface. Even when users had permissions on tables, but these permissions were limited (such as only being able to view our own records), the data results would be filtered based on our security role access to the records within the table.
OK – all good so far. Well, in general – there have been various complaints over the years about the Advanced Find functionality. So finally, Microsoft updated it to the ‘Modern Advanced Find’.
This needs to be enabled by a system administrator in the environment settings:
So in order to access the Modern Advanced Find, we need to do the following:
After clicking this, we then get presented with the following interface:
Once we select a table (we can only select one table, as this will be the primary table used), we then switch screens to set the filters that we want to use:
Now here’s where things got a little strange. On the filter screen, we can select related tables to the primary table (ie connected through a relationship), and we get EVERY table that’s available for this. So if we’re starting with the Accounts table, we can then select from the following:
So in this list, I can see tables such as Emails, Invoices, and various others as well. In fact, it’s actually a very extensive list (limited, of course, to all tables that have a relationship in place with the Accounts table, and which the user has access to through their security role).
But if I look back at the initial list of tables, I’m MUCH more limited in my choice:
This, to me, was quite confusing. After all, what if I wanted to start the search from a different table – one that isn’t shown in this initial list?
So I started doing some digging. Initially, I thought that these tables are the ones defined in the sitemap (ie the app navigation). This could mean that I’d need to somehow create a section that shows all tables within it, just to be able to have them searchable.
Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t actually the case. What’s happening is that with the new Modern Advanced Find, tables need to be directly associated to the APP, to be able to show up and use for search purposes.
Actually, there’s some more granularity around this. The list of tables available to search on (as the primary table) need to meet ALL of the following criteria:
So essentially, the ability to search tables within an app is now limited to the tables that have been associated to the app itself! This could be very helpful in various scenarios, when users can be quite confused with seeing the entire list of tables.
To do this, we’d edit the app, and add it to the list of tables available through the app designer (note – we don’t have to include them in the sitemap, if we don’t want to display them in the app navigation):
So this now makes sense, and I think it’s a good step forward.
Also thanks to my colleague Bill (who’s an AMAZING Customer Success Manager!) for his collaboration on this.
What are your thoughts on the Modern Advanced Find? Are you finding it better for functionality? Is there something that you feel is missing, or that you’d like to see in it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!