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!
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 Tabsfor 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!
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!
Anyone familiar with Dynamics 365 will of course be aware of ‘Notes’. These are the very useful ability to for system users to add notes into records. For customers, these show up within the Activity timeline. Every time a note is added, it’s added to the activity timeline to be able to be viewed. It’s also possible to add attachments to notes, which can be very handy too.
Each note is stored with it’s own date/time logged, so it’s possible to see when each one was created. Of course it’s also possible to click into a note to edit it, if it’s necessary to add additional information.
Now, what about within Omnichannel? The interface is different, as we know. So if agents need to capture notes, are they still able to?
Well, let’s take a look at the interface. As shown below, we do indeed have a Timeline section that agents can see. Here they can view the activities that have been previously carried out with this specific contact:
Not only can the agent see notes in this section, they can also see the other items in the activity history. So they’re able to then bring up previous conversations etc.
There are two ways in which agents can log notes within Omnichannel itself. The first way is the ‘usual’ way that we’re used to. Within the Activity Timeline, they can click to enter a note, and then save it:
This will then create a note against the record, in the normal way that we’re all used to. However, there’s a MUCH nicer way to do this!
See, it’s possible for the agent to create the note from the chat itself!:
Clicking this causes a HUGE notes window to appear next to the actual chat:
This is quite nice. It gives the agent a lot more screen space to capture information for the note. They could also quickly copy/paste from the customer conversation into here.
They’re not able to add attachments though through this large pane. Instead, the agent would need to save the note, which would then cause it to appear in the Activity Timeline view. Once there, the agent could click into it, and add any attachment/s that they may need to.
OK – so we’ve found out how agents can use Notes within Omnichannel. But there’s actually a really cool function from doing it directly from the chat.
When we add Notes in the ‘traditional’ style, and save them, it creates a record for each one. As mentioned above, it’s obviously possible to open up a note, edit it, and then save it again. But this can be a slight hassle at times.
Having to wade through a load of ‘ad-hoc’ notes when reviewing a record can be difficult & take a lot of time. It also doesn’t really look very neat, and can cause challengers when trying to get a good overall picture of what’s been happening. Additionally, it’s REALLY hard to search on properly, and a we all know how important (good) searches can be in our daily lives!
There will be situations where an agent captures a note, saves/closes it, then needs to come back to it. Perhaps they may need to come back to it multiple times. For example, closing notes at the end of a customer conversation.
Omnichannel facilitates this in a most marvellous way. When the agent creates the note from the chat & saves it, it saves the Note record. If the agent clicks the Note button again from the chat, they’re presented with the ‘clean’ interface again: the previous note/s don’t appear there.
However, ALL of the notes entered are saved to the SAME notes record. It doesn’t matter how many times the agent creates/saves a new note from the conversation – they all appear in the same record. This is really great in my opinion, as it means that we can have the entire view of ALL of the notes in one place.
Interestingly enough, it doesn’t put them on different lines – I’m going to look into this further, to see if this is actually what is meant to happen or not…
This in turn then facilities clean records, clean notes, and can save us a great deal of time. Aren’t clean data structures amazing.
So my question to you is – do you use Notes currently? What challenges have they presented you with, and have you come up with any workarounds? Please share – I’d love to hear!
Now there’s obviously a lot of different stuff in there, covering all of the different first party apps in Dynamics 365, as well as functionality for the different parts of the Power Platform. I’m going to focus on the Omnichannel features, as after all that’s what I (mostly) talk about 🙂
As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.
Agent suggestions for similar cases
Public preview – October 2020. No current date for GA release
Customer service agents will usually use multiple resources to efficiently handle & resolve customer cases. When doing so, the ideal is to provided consistent responses across agents & sessions. Carrying this out can involve knowledge articles, involving other agents, or reviewing active/similar cases.
The aim is to therefore improve this to enable the agents to be more efficient. Items such as being able to identify other cases that similar actions have occurred will result in a much more empowered experience.
The key highlights for this new feature include:
AI driven case suggestions bases on the context & historical success rate
Secondary actions that can be taken, such as collaboration with an expert
Continuous improvement of the recommendation model through a comprehensive feedback mechanism
Embedding chats in mobile experience
GA – October 2020
Until now, the only way possible for customers to engage with Omnichannel customer support on mobile has been through a mobile browser. This hasn’t always been the best of experiences.
This feature allows business with mobile applications to provide customers the ability to engage with customer service directly within the mobile app. There are two options available for this across iOS & Android devices:
By embedding the Omnichannel chat widget into an iFrame, with minimal code customisation. The colour & logo can be set through the Omnichannel Administrator app. This method includes a sample app on AppSource with examples for common scenarios
Through the React Native Mobile SDK for Omnichannel for Customer Service. This will allow developers to build fully customised chat widgets in mobile apps
Persistent messaging for chat
GA – October 2020
One of the main challenges around chat is that when a conversation is closed, the history is accessible the the chat transcript. It’s not easily visible in the chat conversation history. Asynchronous messaging channels such as WhatsApp don’t have this ‘restriction’, as the chat history is directly available in the session.
If an agent needs to go look up the chat history, it can cause a delay in responding to the customer whilst it’s located, opened & read. This in turn can degrade the customer experience.
In this new feature, admins are able to enable persistent messaging, so that the customers previous conversation shows in the actual conversation window. This in turn allows the agent to have the full context of the customers previous engagement before responding.
Outbound messaging
Public preview – August 2020. GA October 2020
There are occasions when organisations need to proactively reach out to customers. This could be to notify them of a case update, regulatory information, upcoming appointments, etc. Being able to do this via the customers preferred method of communication is important in delivery best-of-class service
With this feature, organisations will be able to dynamically message their customers based on specific events through supported channels. This includes the following capabilities:
Creating message templates that can be adopted for outbound messages
Configure outbound messages based on specific events on any entity, & send messages when these events are triggered
The customer will now be able to respond back upon receiving one of the messages. This response will be treated like any other incoming conversation in Omnichannel. It will flow through the appropriate routing & work distributions, agent assignment, etc, and the agent will be able to respond back to the customer in real time
Post-conversation surveys using Forms Pro
Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020
Until now, there was no (easy) method for post-conversation surveys to be sent out to customers. Businesses wish to ensure that customer satisfaction is met, and often make use of such things. Custom Power Automate actions could be implemented, but this obviously takes additional time &/or resource to develop.
With this new feature, Omnichannel administrators can configure post conversations surveys using Forms Pro. These can be presented natively as part of the customer experience to provide feedback. There’s also support for sending offline surverys through one of the various enabled channels.
Real-time language translation of messages
Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020
Customers would like to receive support in their native language. Businesses are not always able to do this, as it would require having staff who can communicate in different languages to their customers.
In this feature, real-time translation of messages is carried out between the customer & the support agent. It’s also available for the internal collaboration between agents. It’s enabled as a plug-in that exposes API’s to bring in 3rd party translation services, & also provides a native implementation through Azure Cognitive Services.
This is a feature that I can see being used heavily by not only multi-national organisations, but also by by smaller national-based organisations that have an international customer base
Agent personalisation of quick replies
Agents spend a considerable amount of time engaging with customers. We already have quick responses within Omnichannel to save agents time in typing replies, & to deliver consistent replies.
However these can’t be personalised for individual agents to represent their identity. This new feature allows the pre-configured quick responses to be customised by agents to represent their styles. With this, they can then address communication scenarios in a manner that’s common & personal to them.
Agent personalisation of sound notifications
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
This feature enables agents to customise sound notifications for incoming conversations so that they can easily distinguish between different sessions. It will also allow them to differentiate their sessions from others around them in a call centre setting.
Agent suggestions for knowledge
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
Agents typically use several different resources to efficiently resolve customer cases. These include knowledge articles, collaboration with other agents, and reviewing other cases. Up until now, this has all be done manually.
The new feature for this uses AI to proactively surface relevant knowledge articles, taking case context & previous history into account. It also includes a comprehensive feedback mechanism to continuously improve the recommendation model.
Experience designer for multi-session apps
Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020
The experience designer is an out-of-the-box solution that lets organisations create targeted app experiences, to be used by agents & supervisors. Administrators can select specific channels & tool to be used by these profiles, as an alternative to building & maintaining custom apps.
All in all, I think that there are some really helpful additions to the core Omnichannel product, aimed at making the customer & agent experiences more productive. I’m looking forward to getting hands on with these, and writing about them!
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:
Capture the data as we are already doing, & use Power Automate to get the relevant additional information
or
Automate this within the canvas app itself, and even give the customer service agents a bespoke address picker!
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!
The code to return the postcode data. We had to do some manipulation due to the API constraints
OK – so I had my data in the collection now:
What were my next steps? Well, I was wanting to achieve the following:
Give the customer service agents an ‘address picker’ to use. They’d enter the customer postcode, & then be presented with a list of addresses that they could pick the correct one from
Automatically populate the customer address fields on the form from the selected address
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:
I can only select a single column!
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:
If I want to present the best option to the customer service agents (using concatenation), I can’t select different parts of the data for auto-population into fields
If I want to be able to auto-populate field values from the collection, I can’t use concatenation (& therefore can’t present user-friendly data to the customer service agents).
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?
Not me, but exactly how I was feeling!
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!
I haven’t usually been putting up posts around the exams that I take. A few months back I did decide to write one on the MB-600 exam (MB-600 Solution Architect Exam), which just took off! It was quite amazing (& pleasing) how many people were looking at it, & asking me questions around the exam.
As a result, I’ve decided to continue this, and am therefore now writing this post on the MB-400 exam.
There are several different ‘ranges’ of exams within the Dynamics 365/Power Platform space. These are aimed at different types of roles, or specific specialisation/s within a role. A good example of this is the MB-2xx range. It covers functional technology, and is split across the different ‘main’ areas of Dynamics 365.
The MB-400 (the only one in the range at the moment) is aimed at developers. According to the official description for the exam:
Candidates for this exam are Developers who work with Microsoft Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 to design, develop, secure, and extend a Dynamics 365 implementation. Candidates implement components of a solution that include application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.
Candidates must have strong applied knowledge of Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365, including in-depth understanding of customization, configuration, integration, and extensibility, as well as boundaries and constraints. Candidates should have a basic understanding of DevOps practices for Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365. Candidates must expose, store, and report on data.
Candidates should have development experience that includes JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, HTML, .NET, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, RESTful Web Services, ASP.NET, and Power BI.
As anyone who knows me will attest, I am NOT a developer. However I decided (for several reasons) to give this one a go, and see what would happen! I knew I’d be pushing myself out of my comfort zone, there would be things I wouldn’t understand/know at ALL, but hey – I was curious to see what would happen! Even more challenging, I decided to book & take it within a 24 hour period!
Now as this has been out for a little while (& isn’t in Beta), there’s thankfully some good resources on Microsoft Learn about it. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-400, where there are several learning paths that can be followed.
A big shout out as well to Julian Sharp & Joe Griffin who recently ran a multi-week course around it. The official Microsoft learning paths are great of course, but seem to miss out quite a bit of what’s actually needed to be known for this. The course that they ran covered a lot more. Hopefully there will be more courses like this run in the future!
When passing it (& assuming that you’ve passed the MB-200 as well), you get a lovely shiny badge!
I’m SO proud of this!
Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). The experience went somewhat better than previous times. Amusingly I got told off by the proctor during the exam for ‘looking down at the keyboard’, rather than looking at the screen! I explained that I was using a different computer, & kept clicking the wrong mouse button on it (leaving aside that I was exhausted when doing it!).
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!).
Configuring security for system connections (security types)
D365 Web API – how it’s used, types of calls made from/to it
Azure API – making calls to/from it
Code for importing data (debugging, variables)
Advanced Find
Types of calls (synchronous, asynchronous, )
Data modelling
Creating & deploying solutions through different methods
Publisher versioning
Identifying code variables, and saying what would happen in given scenarios
Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) – how to use, how to package components, how to deploy
PCF components & classes
JavaScript – code examples, what happens when a given scenario happens
JavaScript functions
Dynamics 365 Ribbon – what it is, what you can do with it, different types of functionality & ways to do things with it
Security & Permissions, including roles, teams, field level security, business units
Workflows, Power Automate Flows (how they’re set up, different functionality within them, how to do things with them given a specific scenario)
Business Rules (what they can/can’t do, different scopes, etc)
Field types (eg option-sets, calculated fields, roll-up fields, multi-select, etc)
Importing solutions – requirements for this, versioning, deployment between environments
Compatibility with Microsoft Teams
Now many of these (as I said above) are outside of my comfort zone. In fact, I’d say that even with absolutely cramming for a whole day for the exam, I still felt that I was guessing the answer for at least 30% of the questions. Admittedly though, as Julian Sharp says, a ‘gut feeling’ answer is usually right most of the time, coming from what the subconscious has absorbed during revision.
I was REALLY happy that I got a passing mark for this, & admittedly was VERY relieved as well. So now another lovely shiny badge in my collection, and I’m now going to go and update it on LinkedIn as well!
If you have any questions on this, feel free to drop them below, and I’ll try to help out as best as I can!
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:
Pro handles unattended remote access for up to 10 computers, and is aimed at small businesses
Central takes this up to the next level, covering 250 computers, but has all of the admin features that larger businesses want
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.
What is Co-Browse?
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.
Setup
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.
Rescue Live Guide Admin Console
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!
Agent Experience
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:
Firstly, there’s a URL that’s posted in the chat. This contains a link for the customer to click, with an auto-generated ID number
The agent is taken to the LogMeIn Rescue site page in a new tab.
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:
They can see that there is indeed a shared browsing session happening
They can also see where the agent’s mouse cursor is pointing to (by default, without the agent actually doing anything)
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).
Customer view of the support session
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.
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.
Other functionality
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:
Session recordings. It’s possible to record these for playback, which is then available from the LogMeIn portal. All recordings are carried out from the agent’s viewpoint, not the customers – there is therefore no issue that sensitive information from the customers side could be seen
Data masking. It’s possible to use data masking to hide sensitive information. At the moment the setup for this is a very manual process, so I’m not going to go into how to set it up it here. Having played with it a little, it’s really quite useful. Agents can’t see sensitive information on their screen, and if a customer needs to enter/update information, the session pauses whilst this is being done. However I understand that part of the LogMeIn roadmap for the near future is to make the setup process much more user friendly. When this is released & available, I’m planning to do a post on this
Reporting happens through the LogMeIn portal (see my thoughts below on this). It looks nice, and can be downloaded as a CSV file. Again, the functionality of this is going to be expanded in the near future.
Reporting in the LogMeIn website console
My thoughts
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:
For the standalone solution of Rescue Live Guide dedicated web resources aren’t needed. It’s an easy solution to set up, and for the customer to engage with – all it requires is a URL to be provided to them to get the session going. Obviously, as mentioned above, there is some slight coding needed for the Omnichannel integration, but this is really minor. Any company having Omnichannel installed/configured will already have power users/admin familiar with what’s needed for this, so it’s a very small additional step
It’s possible to co-browse on any website that the customer wants to, not just a single specific website. Once the co-browse session is active, the customer can change to any other website, as long as they do so within the co-browse session tab. Most other co-browse solutions out there can’t do this, so this is a really strong point in favour of this solution.
The data masking is really cool, and for most customers, will be a ‘must have’ rather than ‘nice to have’. I’m looking forward to when the setup for this is updated to be more business-user friendly, and will then do a separate blog post around it, together with a video!
A few things that I think would be nice to have:
The agent is already able to draw on a webpage during the co-browse session, and select different colours for this. It would be great if the agent could also type text in to display on the screen (not in a specific field) in colour. Sometimes being able to see an example written in front of you (without it going into the actual field) can be quite handy.
Being able to transfer the co-browse session to another agent. This could be either another Omnichannel agent, or a separate specialist team. It is of course possible to transfer the chat session to another Omnichannel agent, but then they’d have to start the whole co-browse session again (with a new PIN, etc)
Reporting (for the most part) all occurs in LogMeIn at the moment, as Dynamics 365 only has very limited reporting on this natively. However I understand that this is due to change at some point this year, with the ability to report properly on it within Dynamics 365 itself.
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!
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:
Create Dynamics 365 security role/s with appropriate permissions
Create AAD security group
Create Dynamics 365 AAD Security Team, and link it to the AAD security group
Assign users to the AAD security group
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.
Always download the error log file – it can be SO useful!
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.
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:
It’s only possible to set User-level permissions for Saved Views
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:
User privileges. This is when the user is given the permissions directly
Team privileges. This is when the user is given the permissions as a member of the team. If they don’t have User privileges of their own, they can only create records with the team as the owner
Users were able to read, create, update records without issues, as the team was the owner of these records
However as views need to be owned by a user (though they can be shared with a team), the user was unable to save them!
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!
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:
Get the related record (lookup the record type, pass in the GUID for it)
Use the Unrelate action to remove the connection
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:
The Relationship field is the relationship between the two entities (eg here it’s Contact & Task). Thankfully you don’t need to manually type this – it’s easily selected from a dropdown list.
The URL field is the linked record itself
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:
When Task record is updated
Filtering on the field for ‘Task Accepted’, as we could have other things being updated on the Task record that we don’t want to trigger this particular process
Condition to check the ‘Task Accepted’ field value
When it’s something other than ‘Rejected’, cancel the flow
When it’s ‘Rejected’, run the Unrelate process set out above, and stop flow
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!
