Tag: learning

Omnichannel & Operating Hours

I’ve recently been spending time looking at, and talking about, how we can handle company hours within Omnichannel. This has covered both how to use them within chat (Handling Company Hours) as well as being able to change the chat widget functionality (Handling ‘Out of Hours’).

Imaging my surprise therefore when someone asked me ‘how do we go setting them up properly?’. When I originally looked at how to use them within chat, I used the Quick Create functionality. I had meant to come back to looking at it in more detail, but that somehow fell by the wayside. So, I’m now going to make up for it!

As a quick recap – Operating Hours are what we set to show when the company is ‘open’ (or for our purposes, active). This doesn’t need to reflect the actual store hours that might exist – customer support could well start before/end after the normal store times. It’s also the case that we usually can’t just set blanket times – we’ll need to handle holidays, seasonal occasions, etc. This is where Operating Hours really comes into its own.

So to start off, it’s simple to enter operating hours. Really simple. We go to the navigation area, select, it, and click ‘New’:

We’ll create a new record, and click Save:

Once we do that, the magic starts to happen – we get to see the ‘Working Hours’ tab. Clicking on it will give us the following screen (which I can only describe as absolutely amazing!):

I don’t know about you, but I’m loving being able to see the hours for each day in a calendar-style view. It’s so much easier than needing to scroll down a list of records, trying to find a specific date. It’s also much simpler for the eye to follow/see.

At the top, we can navigate between dates, change the view to switch between a specific day, week or month, and enter new information:

There are two options for inputting new settings here:

  • Working Hours
  • Holiday

For working hours, we can input the times, whether it repeats or not, and whether it’s a full day event or not:

We can also edit an existing Working Hours entry simply by clicking on it to change it. When we do this, we get the option as to whether to modify the single item that we’ve selected, or the entire series:

It’s important to note that we’re not limited to entering just a single range per day. We can enter multiple records for a single date, or a date range, to fit what we’re actually trying to do.

For Holidays, we don’t need as many options. We assume that by setting holiday, the company is closed. We’re therefore prompted just for a date (range) to then set this:

So what we then do is build up our calendar. This will result in (hopefully!) a full overview of our company, that we can then use.

What’s important to remember is that we could have different dimensions to our company though. We may allow Sales to be open 20 hours, but Customer Service to be open only for 12 hours.

We’d therefore create multiple Operating Hour entries for each requirement, and point each channel towards to the applicable record. If we only have a single scenario that we need to handle, we can point multiple channels towards the same operating hours record – that’s not a problem at all.

So with this, we can really tweak operating hours as we need to, for each possible usage. It’s really powerful, so easy to set up, and gives us full control over things.

Have you ever struggled with something like this? How did you overcome it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Handling ‘Out of Hours’

Let’s face it – we can be quite spoiled at times. As a customer, we can sometimes expect that companies be available 24/7 to service our requests, needs, issues, etc. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it! Imagine that you have a mobile phone issue at 2am – you could call up your provider, and have it handled (or a new handset sent out) immediately. That would be quite nice!

Unfortunately the real world doesn’t (always) quite work like that. Of course there are companies that operate on a multi-national or even global scale, and there’s always customer service available (Amazon – I’m thinking of you right now!).

Previously I’ve gone into how we can set operating hours for a company, so that the ability to contact a customer support agent is only shown during these times. Take a look at Handling Company Hours for a refresher on this.

But sometimes not showing the ability to contact support could potentially be counter-productive. Customers may think that our website isn’t working properly, and possibly attempt to try to reach us through other means. This could quite well frustrate them.

Due to this, we have a nice little piece of functionality that’s now come out in Omnichannel. It’s small, simple, but yet quite brilliant in my humble opinion. This is the ability to have a chat widget available, but let customers know that that it’s currently out of company hours.

To activate this, we need to open the Chat record in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, and go to the Design tab:

Quite helpfully, the section is labelled ‘Offline’! How much better could we get.

We do need to understand that (at the time of writing this post) it’s currently in Preview, with all of the usual caveats around how that works.

We have several items available here:

  • Show widget during offline hours. This is what actually activates the setting – leaving this to false won’t do anything for us!
  • Theme colour. This allows us to set the specific theme to be used during ‘offline’ hours. It’s actually really helpful, as it serves/gives a very visual aspect to the customer to display that it’s out of hours
  • Title. The title of the chat widget, which will be displayed to the user
  • Subtitle. This allows us to place a subtitle as well, for the user to be able to see

So what does this then look like? Well, let’s take a look:

Personally I think that being able to set a theme colour for offline access gives it that little edge. Customers will become aware of this (subconsciously) when visiting the website, and come to the point of not even trying to start a chat when they see that it’s out of hours.

One MAJOR thing to bear in mind. We’re only going to be given the option to set this when we have a value set for Operating Hours. Without this being set, we won’t be shown this option. Go try it for yourself and see!

There’s not really much else to this, to be honest. But I’m liking it. I know that from a personal perspective I’ve been on various websites, and have no idea if the support chat is actually working or not. With this in place, I’m able to see that it is available for use at the correct time, and not have to wonder about it.

Have you ever thought about implementing something like this? Have you actually done so? I’d be really interested to hear from you about how you went about it – please drop a comment below!

Reconnecting to previous chat session

We’ve all been there. We’re in the middle of a chat session with a support agent, or talking to a salesperson, etc. Suddenly things go wrong – our browser hangs, the internet loses connection, or something else…

Alternatively, I do know of situations where kids have pulled out the internet cables during ‘playtime’ – it really does happen!

Immediately we’re frustrated. Not only have we not finished what we were trying to achieve, but we’re going to need to start all over again. Perhaps the agent took notes & logged them against our contact record, but the likelihood is that it hasn’t happened. It’s going to take time to get through to an agent again, then we have to explain the whole situation from the absolute beginning. It’s heartrending, and can cause our day to absolutely go down the tubes!

Well, what if we could just re-connect to the chat session with all our data saved? Better still, what if we could go back and continue chatting with the specific agent that we had been communicating with? Sounds amazing, but wishful, right?

Well, we now have this ability within Omnichannel, to be able to enable our customers even further. There are even two ways in which we can offer this:

  • Reconnecting with a link (URL). If the agent is concerned that the chat session may be interrupted, they can provide a URL at the start of the session. If the customer becomes disconnected from the session for whatever reason, they can click the link, and it’ll take them right back to it. This works for both authenticated & unauthenticated users
  • Reconnecting through a prompt. For authenticated chat users, if the session drops they can be presented with a prompt. This will allow them to choose whether to connect to the previous session, or start a new session.

Let’s take a look at it, and how it works.

In the Omnichannel Administration Centre, we need to go to the specific Chat record that we’re wanting to set this up for. We open the record, and are now presented with the following (we do need to scroll down the screen a bit):

Note that this is in Preview currently, so just be a bit careful with it!

There are several options available. We don’t need to use each one, but let’s understand what each one does:

  • Turn on reconnect to previous chat. This is the option to enable if we’re wanting to offer this. Without it set, it’s not going to work!
  • Reconnect time limit. How long we’ll offer the option to the customer to reconnect for. See the note below around this
  • Reconnect to previous agent for. How long we’ll allow the customer to connect back to the same agent. This needs to be equal or less to the ‘Reconnect Time Limit’ value that we’ve set. During this period of time, the agent’s capacity is blocked, unless the agent uses the ‘Close’ button on their interface to end the conversation (which then releases the agents availability)
  • Portal URL. As mentioned higher up, the agent can provide a URL for the customer to auto-reconnect if the session drops. This value is the URL that the chat widget is deployed to
  • Redirection URL. If the connection drops, and the re-connection timeout occurs, we can redirect the customer to a specific web-page. If this isn’t set, the customer will see the option to start a new chat conversation

Note: The ‘Reconnect Time Limit’ value is auto-set by the system to the value specified in the work-stream that’s associated with the chat widget. It’s not possible to manually change this in the chat widget itself. Instead, the work-stream ‘Auto-close after inactivity’ value would need to be changed. This is shown below:

Note: It’s also important that the customer hasn’t closed THEIR chat window! All of this relies on the customer chat still being there. If the customer has closed their window/browser, they won’t be offered this option.

Have you ever needed to offer customer capability along these lines? How did you go about it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Dynamics 365 Admin Centre for Omnichannel

I’ll freely admit that the title for this post is a bit of a mouthful! I’ll also admit that I used the British spelling of ‘centre’, rather than what it actually is. You’ll have to excuse my grammar 😉

This post is about something that we all knew was coming. The old Admin Centre is no longer – and we shall miss it! It was inevitable that it would be moved over to the new Power Platform interface, as so many other things have already. Therefore I thought it would be good to do a quick article about where it is now, how to access it, etc.

After all, it is vitally important when needing to carry out the initial configuration for Omnichannel, or to check for upgrades to the Omnichannel installed solution!

Let us, however, cast our mind back to the very familiar layout shown below. We’ve spent so many years here that it seems quite sudden. But though you may be gone, you will not be forgotten!

Manage Omnichannel application

Right – now onto the new version of it! So this actually took me a few minutes of digging around as to how to find it & get to it.

The first thing I tried was looking in the environment settings, but alas, I didn’t find it there. So I continued digging around.

Wishing you spare you the exact itinerary of everywhere that I looked into, I’ve decided just to show you it! I can hear the sighs of relief at this point…

What we need to do is navigate to the Power Platform Admin Centre, at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/. Once there, we expand Resources on the left hand side, and select ‘Dynamics 365 apps’. Note that you do NOT have to select a specific environment first to be able to do this./

Now we can see a list of all apps installed. Nicely we’re able to scroll, which we couldn’t do in the old interface! That’s actually really helpful, and avoids needing to navigate to a different page. If we scroll down, we can see the entry for Omnichannel:

Click on ‘Manage’, and we get the following lovely popup:

Click OK to this, and we get taken to the (familiar) interface for configuring the initial items for Omnichannel:

Here we can go about the usual items, such as checking each environment to see if there are any updates available, or configure the main channels.

Nicely, Microsoft has actually updated (some of) their documentation, which is obviously very good. I’m now going to have to go and check through previous articles of mine, and update as necessary!

Lookup fields & Power Automate

This is an interesting post, for several reasons. Firstly, it’s the first one in 3 weeks – I was off on holiday, and decided to take an (almost) absolute break from all things digital, which included this blog. It was actually quite refreshing, though now coming back & starting to write again does seem a bit daunting, I’ll admit!

Thankfully, whilst wondering what exactly to start with, a scenario came up that I was working on. It seemed quite simple at first, but then actually got someone complicated. I therefore thought it would be helpful to others if I wrote about it, so here it is.

The scenario was as follows. We had records being auto-created in the system, and needed to create child records for them. This, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is really quite simple to do with Power Automate. We also needed to set lookup values on the child record, that were already populated on the parent record (for reference purposes).

So for example, the parent record has a lookup to Country (being a separate entity), and the child record also has a lookup to Country. These need to be the same.

Being both lookup fields, I figured that I’d be able to take the value from the parent record, and simply plop it into the corresponding field on the child record in Power Automate:

So I did that – and immediately hit an error. Not just any error, but the fabled ‘Resource not found for the segment’ error!

Obviously, I did what anyone would do at first – I put it into Google & Twitter, and took a look at what came up.

The ‘problem’ was coming from using the ‘CDS Current Environment’ connector, which is the latest version available (the old one is no longer available to use). It’s really great for a lot of things, but unfortunately not so great in a few areas. See, in the old CDS Connector, you could just drop the lookup field value into the field you were wanting to populate. Power Automate had no issues with that, & it would run just fine.

However in the ‘new’ CDS Connector, you can’t just do that. Instead, you need to use an OData reference (which I haven’t done much of before, to tell the truth). So based on the blogs I had come across, I went to work to try to get this working.

Part of the challenge was that there didn’t seem to be a unified consensus in how to do it. I came across the following variations:

  • /entityname(Lookup Field Value)
  • /entityname/(Lookup Field Value)
  • /pluralentityname(Lookup Field Value)
  • /pluralentityname/(Lookup Field Value)

Somewhat confusing, as I’m sure you’d agree. Nevertheless, I ploughed through all of the different possibilities. But nothing was working – every single time, I still got the ‘segment not found’ error message. This, as you can image, was extremely frustrating!

Thankfully, one of my good friends was around & able to help out. Namely, Tricia Sinclair came to the rescue!

We took a look at the code I was using, and she took a look at some of her own use cases (where it had worked for her). I was starting to think down the path of needing a capital letter in the entity name (some systems can be REALLY finicky around things like that), but thankfully it wasn’t.

Instead, it was the following. See, this was a custom entity. It turns out that for a custom entity (& heck, for all I know system entities as well) the syntax needed is ‘publisherprefix_pluralentityname(lookupfieldvalue)’. Now that’s not something that I had come across ANYWHERE at all!

Looking at it, I guess it makes sense. After all it would technically be possible to have multiple entities with the same name, though with different publishers. As a result, the system needs to know WHICH exact entity is being needed for the Power Automate, so uses this. Somewhat complicated (and hey – it worked without all of this in the OLD CDS Connector), but we got it to work!

Testing it out, everything worked smoothly. The Power Automates fired off without any issues, the data got created & populated, and everyone was happy.

So there you go. Another interesting little twist in syntax needed, which hopefully will NOT change in the (near) future!

Have you come across anything like this? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below around it!

Omnichannel & Knowledge Articles

One of the most useful features that Dynamics 365 has to offer (in my opinion) is the ‘Knowledge Base’ feature. The purpose that this serves is multi-faceted. It can act as a repository for internal information, serve as a FAQ store, or even be used to publish information externally.

The amount of knowledge held within any organisation can be quite staggering at times. Think back to when you’ve been trying to get an answer to an obscure question, and only Bob in Repairs knows about it. Trying to track down that answer can be quite time-intensive at times (you need to find out who to ask, where they are, etc). In the modern digitally-connected world, we have better forms of communications available. However even with those, we’re still challenged at times.

Enter the Knowledge Base. Here people can enter information that can then be searched on. It could be a simple one-line explanation, or an in-depth instruction as to how to do something very technical.

It’s also a really useful place to hold business processes in. This can come in really helpful when rare situations occur, so that customer service agents can refer to them to find out exactly what to do.

There’s already a massive amount of information (if you’ll pardon the pun!) out there around the Knowledge Base, so I’m not going to go into deep detail here around it.

However, what I DO want to talk about is the ability to use Knowledge Base within Omnichannel!

See, customer service agents are the ‘first line’ of support that customers will deal with. Admittedly they’re also the 2nd, 3rd etc (until it may get to a very technical/specific question). The types of queries that they may need to handle can be astonishing at time! Being able to refer to information ‘at their fingertips’ is therefore vital, & key in driving efficiency. This then in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction, with queries being resolved quickly & easily.

So with all of that said, let’s take a look to see how this is used within Omnichannel. Essentially, there’s a Knowledge Base tab that can be opened for the customer service agent to access:

This opens automatically when a new customer sessions starts, and is then available for the customer service agent to click into.

Note: The behaviour to open it automatically is driven from the Session Template that’s set up for the communication stream. If it’s not set up in here, it won’t automatically launch. See the screenshot below for how this is set up, and refer to Omnichannel & Application Tabs for more information around this:

Alternatively, the agent can launch this directly from the chat itself, by clicking the ellipse icon, and then selecting it from the menu:

This will then put the agent directly within the Knowledge Article search tab. When this opens, it’s blank! Don’t worry about this however – it’s only blank, as there haven’t been any searches carried out yet! When the user starts to search, it’ll then return results into the pane:

If the user wants to open the article in a new window, all they need to do is click the little ‘pop open’ icon on the article summary, which will then launch a new window with it in it. This can be helpful if the agent is needing to have several different articles open at once:

If your company has configured an external portal for sharing Knowledge Articles with the public, it’s also possible to send a link for a specific article to the customer. To do this, either click the arrow button on the article, to click the Send URL button on the menu bar:

Now, the general layout used for Knowledge Articles will be familiar to anyone who has used the same ability within Cases in Dynamics 365. However for people who are used to working directly within Knowledge Articles, it will look slightly different. There’s no ability to add a new article or edit an existing one, publish, etc.

The reason for this is that within Omnichannel itself, the functionality interface is being surfaced as a web resource. There’s no need to worry though, as users can open the familiar Knowledge Article interface as well directly from within Omnichannel. To do this, the customer service agent should click the ‘+’ button on the tab bar, and then select ‘Knowledge Articles’:

Voila! A new tab will open, and the traditional Knowledge Article experience will load. All of the expected functionality is present, and users are able to do anything that they may need to inside of here.

So in summary, this is a continuation of the empowerment of customer service agents. With the knowledge ‘at their fingertips’, they’re able to provide the best possible experience for customers. Not only that, but queries can get answered and/or resolved in less time. Customer satisfaction will (hopefully!) increase as a result of this, with everyone feeling empowered & efficient!

So here’s my question – are you currently using Knowledge Articles (it doesn’t have to be within Omnichannel)? If you are, what benefits do you see that it brings to your company? If you’re not, what could help you to adopt them? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below!

Omnichannel Agent Presence

One of the main parts of any system is to see who’s available to handle customer service queries. This is, of course, vitally important for any company – you wouldn’t want to overload an already busy agent!

In the case of Omnichannel, the system uses something called ‘Presence’ to show this. When users are set up, they have a default presence set against them. These govern system behaviour, along with having a nice friendly icon that helps from a visual perspective. Omnichannel has the following default options available:

These are available for supervisors to see from their dashboards, so that they can see the status of all agents at a single glance.

It’s also used by the system for auto-routing conversations. For example, if the agent status is ‘Busy’, then they won’t have new conversations routed to them. Similarly, if they’re set as ‘Away’ or ‘Offline’, they also won’t get conversations sent through to them (admittedly supervisors can override this, and assign specific conversations to agents who have one of these set).

Agents are able to change their own presence by clicking on the toolbar, and selecting the one that they wish to set:

But what happens if you want to have some custom statuses? Off the top of my head, I can think of at least half a dozen clients that would want more granularity around this.

Well, thankfully we’re in luck. Omnichannel supports the option for a ‘Custom Presence’!. They do need to be set up through the Omnichannel Administration Hub. To do this, go to ‘Custom Presence’ on the left side & select it. We can see that the default system entries are there.

Before going any further, I do want to point out that we should NOT deactivate or delete the standard Presence entries. It’s possible to do, but it’s going to create MAJOR issues in your system. So please, don’t!

Right – back to things. To create a custom presence, we click the ‘New’ button on the menu bar. We get the following window:

The 4 fields shown are as follows:

  • Name. The name of the record
  • Presence Text. The wording that the agent sees when they’re picking their status
  • Base Status. The default system status that this new status will be based on. This is important, as it will drive the icon used
  • Description. A ‘friendly’ description of what the presence/status is about. This is useful to keep track of things

Once we’ve saved the record, it’s then immediately available for agents to select! The only thing that agents need to do is refresh their browser tab. This makes a nice change from the usual ’15 minute wait’ for data to update within Omnichannel :).

So let’s go ahead and see what this then looks like. I’ve chosen a very familiar item (for most people):

When I’ve selected this new custom status, we can then see that the icon in the Ribbon Bar changes as well, to the icon for the base status that we used:

So in short, this is quite a nice little piece of functionality. Nothing too fancy or complicated to setup, but will allow companies to further segment their agents & understand what they’re up to.

Something else that we’re able to use this for is the agent ‘Default Presence’, which is set on the User record. Once we have custom presence records in place, it’s possible to select these there:

So apart from having agents segmented by Teams & Queues, we can now also use these. Some very interesting scenarios pop into mind!

So, how do you think you’d apply this in your own environment? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

PL-100: Microsoft Power Platform App Maker Exam

As many people are aware, Microsoft is changing the certification landscape somewhat. With the emergence of the Power Platform, there’s a need to test skills other than the traditional Dynamics 365 ones.

To this end, a new series (the PL-XXX) has been created. The first (main) one of these exams is the PL-100, which is the entry level exam.

You can take a look at the exam requirements & learning paths by going to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/pl-100.

Now, when I say ‘entry level’, I’m not referring to basics. This isn’t a Fundamentals exam – for that, you’ll be wanting to take a look at the PL-900 exam (which came out a while ago). To put it into perspective, the PL-200 (which is aimed to launch in September 2020) will replace the MB-200 exam!

So, the exam went live (in Beta) just over a week ago (July 17th). I’ve been waiting for this for a while, as I’ve really been wanting to see how the new exams are structured. Taking it in Beta means I’m going to have to wait (a little while) for my results to come through, but it gives me the opportunity to see the new landscape upfront.

I booked it as soon as it was available, for Wednesday July 22nd. Nicely (as mentioned above), there were already learning paths in place, so I eagerly went through them (again) in preparation. I was feeling pretty much quite prepared, but then….

See, I had signed up to attend the Power Platform Virtual Happy Hour (PPPVHH) on the same day as I had booked the exam for. Incidentally, if you haven’t come across this before, take a look. It’s hosted every month, and has some AMAZING speakers. Clarissa Gillingham presented on the ‘Infinity Form’, and it was a joy to behold. But I’m digressing.

After the event had finished, some of us remained chatting in the virtual room. Amongst them was none other than Chris Huntingford, who we all love and adore!. I mentioned that I had to sign off soon to get ready for the exam. No sooner had I mentioned this than Chris said to me something along the lines of ‘BRO….WATCH OUT!! It’s REALLY HARD!!’.

I might mention here that I have a slight (friendly) rivalry with Chris, in seeing who can take newly released exams first. I had figured that he’d be so busy with everything going on that I’d get this one before he did. Little did I know that he had ALREADY taken it.

Here I was, about to go sit down for the exam, and he got me TOTALLY freaked out. I’m not sure how much of it he did on purpose, but I’m sure that when I get him into a corner, I’ll find out…one day!

Anyhow – I sat the exam, took most of the time available (pretty sure I hit the 2 hour mark), and found it quite good overall. One or two things that seemed to be totally random/in the wrong place, but otherwise it was fine. Definitely much better that the MB-600 (MB-600 Solution Architect Exam), and I felt much more comfortable than I did with the MB-400 (MB-400 Power Apps & Dynamics 365 Developer Exam).

It really is very cleared aimed at app developers (both model & canvas), as well as other Power Platform skills. According to the exam description:

The app maker builds solutions to simplify, automate, and transform tasks and processes for themselves and their team where they have deep expertise in the solution domain. They are skilled in key technical business analyst tasks such as data modeling, basic UX design, requirements analysis, process analysis, etc.

The app maker creates and enforces business processes, structures digital collection of information, improves efficiency of repeatable tasks, and automates business processes.

The app maker uses the maker tools of Power Platform to solve business problems. They may have experience with Visual Basic for Applications, Excel pivot tables, Teams, and other tools. They should have a basic understanding of data models, user interface, and processes. The app maker is aware of the capabilities and limitations of available tools and understands how to apply them.

The app maker is self-directed, and solution focused. They may not have formal IT training but are comfortable using technology to solve business problems with a personal growth mindset. They understand the operational need and have a vision of the desired outcome. They approach problems with phased and iterative strategies.

So, as before, it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else!).

  • Canvas App Test Studio. What it does, how to carry out tests in it, how to set up Test Suites, etc
  • Developing Power Automate Flows. Different types of connectors, different types of steps/actions. How to deploy properly between environments using solutions
  • Field Level Security. What it is, what it does, what it can/can’t be used for
  • Canvas Apps:
    • Publishing rights
    • Access rights
    • Versioning
    • Editing vs using
    • Sharing & security
    • Saving changes, & deploying them to users
    • Collections. What they are, what they do, how they work
    • Galleries. What they are, what they can do, how to configure them in different way
    • Navigation around screens. How to set this up, how to pass information from one screen to the next
    • New vs Display vs Edit forms. What each one is, how each one is used
    • Charts. Which ones are available, how they’re configured
    • Using AI features, such as text/data recognition. What’s able to be used, how are they configured, what the benefits of each are
    • Versioning. How to handle this, what the benefits are
    • Accessibility for less-abled users. What options are available to facilitate this, how are they configured
  • Data Security. Different types of security available (roles/teams/access teams/business units) etc. Configuring security roles with different levels of permissions
  • Power BI Security. Showing/hiding information for specific users/teams, and how to configure this
  • Solution publishers. How these are set up, what you can modify after they’ve been set, considerations between default & other solutions
  • Business Logic. Differences between Business Process Flows, Business Rules & Power Automate. What each one can/can’t do, and is best suited for
  • Creating environments. Where to do this, how to do this, what steps are needed
  • Connecting to data sources. Different types of data connections, what each one is suited for
  • Model Apps:
    • Forms & Views. What these are, how to set up & configure them
    • Navigation, Sitemap etc.
  • Business Rules. How they work, what the different levels of scope are, how they affect functionality
  • Automation. Workflows vs Power Automate Flows. The different types (eg On Demand, Instant, Scheduled)
  • Arrays. What they are, what they do, how they work
  • DLP (Data Loss Prevention). How this works, how to set it up, different options available
  • Data field types. What each one is, how each one is used & able to be configured
  • Calculated/Rollup vs Autonumber. What each is, when to use each one

That’s quite a lot of stuff, with an emphasis on canvas app functionality & solutions. It definitely is important to ensure that you’re really on top of these. Thankfully not too much mention of Power BI (at least not in my exam), and for that I’m quite grateful!

I do have to say that in one respect, I found something quite amusing. See, on the same day as I took the exam, Microsoft Ignite was taking place. One of the major announcements was the ‘rename/rebrand’ of CDS to Dateflex (Pro). I therefore kept laughing when questions would refer to CDS again & again! Obviously I’m expecting this to change in the exam (at some point?).

In summary, I think that this is a good start for the new range of exams, and look forward to the other ones in the series coming out!

Have you taken this? What was your experience like? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Keeping belief in oneself

Although I usually post around technical matters & such, occasionally I digress into personal reflection. After all, this is my personal blog, & I feel it’s sometimes good/relevant to share certain personal things. Today’s post is along those lines, though it does relate to a technical matter.

Let’s set the scene. As many of you know (either from knowing me personally, or from reading my blog posts), I’m from the ‘model-driven app’ background. Canvas apps are really cool, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a very advanced creator of them. I’m learning the whole time about them (well, when I have a free minute here & there). There are many people in the community who are extremely more advanced than I am, and I love being able to learn from them.

I’m also considered to be in ‘Delivery’, This is the fancy word for those who run/are involved in projects, rather than selling concepts to clients. I’d run a mile if someone tried to put me in a Sales role (though I do admire the power suits that Sales have, occasionally). I’ve done a bit of Pre-Sales (where I’m helping out from a technical perspective), but haven’t been heavily involved. It’s actually something that I’m trying to work on, with being a tech evangelist. After all, if people already know/rave about the tech, how can you evangelise about it to them!!

Account Managers vs Sales People - davidmarkshaw

So last week I get a call from our Sales team. They’re really nice, and know their stuff. However they’re not ‘techies’. They had a situation – we’d been talking to a client about a potential project, and the client told us to pitch for it. Brilliant, right? Well…

The client told us that we had 4 days until the pitch deadline. Not only were we needing to pitch with the usual presentation pack (however would Sales operate without PowerPoint…?), we also had to do a live demo. Not for a completed product, but rather a Proof of Concept (PoC).

The only person available was….yes, you guess it…me. There wasn’t anyone else around with the necessary knowledge/skills to create the PoC in the time-frame needed. I’ll freely admit that I was absolutely slammed with existing projects, but wanted to be able to help out.

However, things then got ‘better’. And by ‘better’, I meant ‘interesting’. I got told who else was pitching to the client. Obviously I’m not going to mention any specific details here, but I knew who they are. More importantly, I figured that I had a very good idea of who from their side would be creating the tech, & doing the pitch.

Now as I’m not mentioning any identifiable details, I’m feeling free to say this. They’re not at my level of tech skills. They’re nowhere NEAR my level of tech skills. This is NOT because I’m better than they are. Totally the opposite – they’re SO far ahead of me with their knowledge of things, I can barely see the dust that they kick up in a race.

Knowing this, I knew that I couldn’t build a model-driven app (though it would have worked perfectly for the scenario/s we were given). I HAD to do a canvas app. But even with doing that, it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as what the other side would be able to put on.

The phrase ‘gibbering in fear’ does come to mind with my reaction to finding all of this out. I did feel slightly like a deer caught in the headlights. I wanted to do well, both for myself & my company, but I honestly had no idea how we could stack up.

Deer in the Headlights: By Generation Success – Generation Success
How I felt I looked like!

Thankfully, my company has an extremely open culture, and I was therefore able to talk to my manager about it. He understood where I was coming from, but encouraged me to go for it & do what I would be able to create.

My wife also encouraged me to go for it. Well, actually her words were ‘it’s not sexy when a husband says that he can’t do it, so man up and go for it!’. Ha…after that I couldn’t very well NOT do it.

So I applied myself, and with some VERY late nights (I did have other projects on, as I mentioned above), managed to get something in place. Not only did I create it, I think it looked really good. There was some really nice (canvas app) functionality, and it all came together pretty well.

Everything was in place in time (including some last minute tweaks). I even decided to spice up the demo a bit, and borrowed some dinosaurs from the kids to use for personas. We were using live camera feeds for part of the demo, and suddenly the demo was joined by ‘Rexy’, the ‘Customer Service Representative’ T-Rex! They were quite amused by it (thankfully!), and our team thought it was absolutely hilarious.

Hire A Dinosaur - Creature Events
‘Good afternoon, how may I be of assistance?’

I have no idea how the other partner pitched to the client, or what the decision will be from the client. It’s way too early for that.

What I do know is that sometimes we can lose track of ourselves. I’m not going to go into the subject of ‘Imposter Syndrome’ (check out Em D’Arcy if you want to read up about that). Rather that having others around to encourage us, even though others may be more skilled, can really make the difference.

In life, we can often face challenges. How we handle them, and how we decide to move forward, can define who we are. When dealing with technology items such as the Power Platform, where there’s constant change, it can sometimes feel very daunting, but we still need to push ahead.

Yesterday I was listening to Lisa Crosbie talking about her journey into technology (and canvas apps). As she put it – ‘there is no comfort zone here – you need to find a place to feel comfortable with this level of discomfort, and ride it to be successful’. It’s really so true. It’s not just needing to push ourselves in the traditional way, but to keep up our own confidence in our skills & abilities. With this, we can continue to drive forward, keep on learning, and continue our journey of greatness!

I’m really glad that I was able to do this, and hope that I can keep this with me. By doing so, I’ll be able to continue along my own journey.

Have you ever had a time when a challenge seemed insurmountable? How did you cope with it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Strange behaviour with views

Normally when I write a blog post, it’s about sharing some cool features, new functionality, etc. However this post is going to be a little different, because I don’t actually have an answer (yet!) to what is going on here.

Let me explain the situation.

I’m needing to show some very specific data for reference purposes. For the purposes of this, let’s say that I’m looking at Contacts, and needing to report on Phone Calls. The reason is to identify Contacts who are frequent callers. My criteria are as follows:

  • At least one phone call (that has the Contact as the Regarding value) need to have a specific field set
  • At least one phone call (that has the Contact as the Regarding value) needs to have its Activity Status as Open

These two conditions are separate. So the contact essentially needs to have at least 2 phone calls against them, with each one meeting one of the conditions. There can be more than 1 phone call record with the same condition – that’s not an issue here.

Back in the (good old) day, I’d have written some cool SQL to return this data. Two Left Outer Joins, and we’d be done. However I can’t do that now (I’ve recently started dipping into FetchXML, which is an entirely other story to cover at some point). So I’m having to use the Advanced Find to check that I’m getting the right data.

This isn’t the easiest of things to do. I’m needing to start from Contact, go to Phone Call, go back up to Contact, & go back down to Phone Call. But hey, this is what it looks like:

So with this set up, I run the query, and get some results (in this specific scenario/time, there are 3 results). I go through the data to check that the results are actually satisfying my requirements, which they are:

Wonderful – let’s move forward then!

My next step is to look to set this up as a system view. To do this, I go to the Power Apps Maker (http://make.powerapps.com/), open my solution & find the Contact entity. Opening it, I switch to the Views tab:

I create a new view, add the columns I need, and then open up the Filter Criteria to start setting this up. I’m using the Advanced Find as a reference guide for the conditions I’m needing to use. Going through it, I replicate the values across:

That looks about the same as the Advanced Find, right? It’s laid out slightly differently, but that’s just the designer. OK – let’s go ahead to save/publish it, and see it it in the app:

Hold on. There’s only 1 record showing up there. Admittedly it’s in the list that came from Advanced Find, but what’s happened to the other 2 records?

So I go to check the data. I had already done this before, but I thought that perhaps I overlooked something, so I checked again. Nope – all of the data is fine/correct. There should indeed be 3 records showing up in the system view, but 2 are missing…

Note: As an aside, I do know that this isn’t permissions related. I’m doing all of this as a systems administrator with full privileges to everything. So it’s not that

OK – next steps:

  • Clear browser cache, reload and see if they’re showing up (useful tip – Control+F5 does this!). Nope, they’re not showing
  • Use Incognito mode, log in and see if they’re showing there. No, they’re still hiding away
  • Use a different browser, with a different system administrator login. Unbelievably they’re still being very shy, and refusing to appear!

Even more confusing about all of this is something truly perplexing. I can open up Advanced Find, select the system view (without doing ANYTHING else) & click ‘Results’. When doing this, all of the records appear! So in the entity view they’re not, but when I use that same system view through Advanced Find, they are!

I’m scratching my head at this. It just doesn’t make sense. I have no idea why this is happening. Reaching out to others, they also don’t seem to have any idea either.

My next step (I’m feeling SO proud of this, and so dev!) was to check the FetchXML. Perhaps there was something underlying in it that’s causing this? Using the FetchXML Builder in XrmToolBox, I loaded both views up, and compared them. It’s crazy – they seem to be exactly the same! (well, some cosmetic differences with where aliases appeared on the line, but this wouldn’t affect it):

At this point, I’m thinking that there are some magic elves under the hood, squirrelling away the data. It has to be the only logical reason for this, right?

The only thing I could find in the FetchXML that might make a difference is that there’s a ‘Distinct’ clause at the top of it in the one that’s working:

Why this would cause the issue, I have NO idea. Views return distinct results in them anyhow, so I’m not sure what this is actually doing here.

Regardless, using FetchXML Builder I updated the code, and WOW – it worked! I’m now returning 3 records in my system view! Absolutely strange, but hey – if it’s working now, who am I to question it…

I’m going to try to raise this through official Microsoft Channels, and see what I might be able to find out from them. However if you’ve come across this (or similar), or have some ideas about how to work around it, I’d LOVE to hear from you!