Tag: microsoftstack

Solution Dependencies & Management

Solutions are marvellous things. They enable us to be able to package up lots of components, and deploy them to different environments all together as one single package.

However, there have been changes over time as to how solutions are used. I’m not (for the most part) going to go into the Managed VS Unmanaged debate, which I leave to people who are more in the know….

Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps are installed using solutions. Third party apps provided by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) also use solutions.

In Power Apps, solutions are leveraged to transport apps and components from one environment to another or to apply a set of customisations to existing apps. A solution can contain one or more apps as well as other components such as entities, option sets, etc. You can get a solution from AppSource or from an independent software vendor (ISV).

Custom development should also take place within a solution, to allow it to be deployed appropriately.

But it’s important to take a closer look at how solutions work overall, as we can be involved on multiple projects within the same environment. Not only that, some solutions may require other solutions to be present first, in order to actually work! A great example of this is Master Data Management (or MDM), which is where companies have a ‘backbone’ of data, which other parts of the system then hangs off.

To understand this concept better, let’s take a quick look at solution layering.

Solution Layering

Layering occurs on the import of solutions and describes the dependency chain of components from the root solution introducing it, through each solution that extends or changes the components behaviours. Layers are created through an extension of an existing component (taking a dependency on it) or creation of a new component or version of a solution

Managed and unmanaged solutions exist at different levels within a Microsoft Dataverse environment. In Dataverse, there are two distinct layer levels:

  • Unmanaged layer. All imported unmanaged solutions and unmanaged customizations exist at this layer. The unmanaged layer is a single layer.
  • Managed layers. All imported managed solutions and the system solution exist at this level. When multiple managed solutions are installed, the last one installed is above the managed solution installed previously. This means that the second solution installed can customize the one installed before it. When two managed solutions have conflicting definitions, the runtime behaviour is either “Last one wins” or a merge logic is implemented. If you uninstall a managed solution, the managed solution below it takes effect. If you uninstall all managed solutions, the default behaviour defined within the system solution is applied. At the base of the managed layers level is the system layer. The system layer contains the tables and components that are required for the platform to function.

The following diagram introduces how managed and unmanaged solutions interact with the system solution to control application behavior.

  • The system solution represents the solution components defined within Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform. Without any managed solutions or customisations, the system solution defines the default application behaviour. Many of the components in the system solution are customisable and can be used in managed solutions or unmanaged customisations.
  • Managed solutions are installed on top of the system solution and can modify any customisable solution components or add more solution components. Managed solutions can also be layered on top of other managed solutions. As long as a managed solution enables customization of its solution components, other managed solutions can be installed on top of it and modify any customisable solution components that it provides.
  • Unmanaged customisations. All customisable solution components provided by the system solution or any managed solutions can be customized in the unmanaged customisations
  • Unmanaged solutions are groups of unmanaged customisations. Any unmanaged customized solution component can be associated with any number of unmanaged solutions. These can be edited & modified, regardless of the environment in which they’ve been deployed to
  • The ultimate behaviour of an instance of Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application is the culmination of the system solution, any managed solutions, and any unmanaged customisations.

The official stance of Microsoft, according to its Application Lifecyle Management (ALM) documentation, is that unmanaged solutions are used for development, and that managed solutions are released downstream to further environments. For bespoke solutions, however, this may not fit, and an appropriate balance must be found.

Data ‘Backbone’ & Solution Dependencies

Given the way that companies are adopting Power Platform (and Dynamics 365, of course!) it’s highly likely that we will build out system structures that will form the backbone for multiple applications on an on-going basis. With this in mind, it’s appropriate to put in place proper planning for this, to avoid any issues that could occur in the future with appropriate system designs

Solution Dependencies

When creating system structures within an environment, using unmanaged solutions, connecting two (or more) tables together will create dependencies on each other. In simple terms, if we connect Table A to Table B, there’s a reciprocal relationship created back from Table B to Table A:

This happens even if Table A is in Solution 1, and Table B is in Solution 2. If they’re in the same environment (& both solutions are unmanaged), it will create the two-way dependency.

This will cause issues if trying to deploy each solution individually, and will fail on import, as the system will require all items to be available in the solution

Workable scenario

The way in which to handle the issue of solution dependencies is to ensure that the ‘master backbone’ of system design is created in the main development environment, and then to use that in secondary development environments as the core of additional solutions:

This is in line with the emerging recent Microsoft Best Practise information around solution management (which is likely to be moving towards having a single environment per developer, rather than multiple developers working in the same environment).

The steps for doing this are as follows:

  1. Main ‘core solution’ exists (as unmanaged) within the main development environment
  2. When a project requires this to build upon:
    1. Secondary development environment is created
    1. ‘Core solution’ is exported as managed from the main development environment, & imported into the secondary development environment
    1. Project work is carried out within the secondary development environment
    1. Once project solution is complete (or when appropriate for deployment), it can be exported from the secondary development environment
      1. If deploying directly from the secondary development environment to downstream environments, it should be exported as managed
    1. The solution should be exported as unmanaged, and imported back into the main development environment. This will not cause dependencies to be created with the ‘core solution’ in it

Note: The main ‘core solution’ should consist of the items that are needed for core system work. If additional items are needed for multiple projects to work off (eg Account Manager field), this would need to be added to the core solution, rather than the individual project solution/s, as otherwise there could be further issues downstream.

If the project is completed, but requires further work to be carried out later on (or development support), then the following should be done:

  1. Secondary development environment is created
  2. ‘Core solution’ exported from the main development environment as a managed solution, and imported into the secondary development environment
  3. Project solution exported as unmanaged from the main development environment, and imported into the secondary development environment
  4. Work and/or support can be carried out within the secondary development environment, and released appropriately

I’m expecting further information around this to be released by Microsoft in due course (I’m a little surprised there’s not more out there at the moment, to be honest!). It’s vital that we ensure that we’re working with solutions in the right way, to stop any issues occurring later on down the line.

Have you ever had a problem around this? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear your experiences!

MB-910: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps

So here’s the thing. There used to be the MB-900 exam, which was the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals exam. This was aimed at people who had a small knowledge of Dynamics 365, and it was really the base/entry-level exam into the qualifications for it.

However, Dynamics 365 is actually comprised of two ‘parts’. There’s the ‘front office’ part that’s usually referred to as Customer Engagement (well, depending on how Microsoft wish to refer to it as, which can change from time to time!), and there’s the ‘back office’ part, which is the ERP side of things. This is the finance & operations sphere, where those functions take place.

The MB-900 was a slightly strange exam, in my opinion, because it covered both. There were questions around things like Sales, Customer Service, etc, but there were also Supply Chain Management questions as well, for example. Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t know about both ‘sides’ of the equation, but people usually (for the most part) handle one or the other. It’s generally unusual to find someone knowledgeable about both.

Furthermore, if we take a look at the more in-depth exams in the MB range, we find that there’s a definitive split there. The MB-2xx series cover Customer Engagement, whereas the MB-3xx series covers the ERP side of things. So it’s definitely not the norm to have both sides included in a single exam.

Microsoft came to the realisation around this, and have therefore decided to update the Fundamentals space. In doing this, they’ve split things out. There’s the MB-910 exam (which is what this post is about), and the MB-920 exam, which focuses specifically on the ERP space. A good move, in my opinion..

The MB-910 launched this past weekend, and I took it around a day after it went live. Let’s go take a look at it, and recap my experience with it.

The official description of the exam is:

This exam covers the features and capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps.

Candidates for this exam should have general knowledge of or relevant working experience in an Information Technology (IT) environment. They should also have a fundamental understanding of customer engagement principles and business operations.

Taking it leads to the qualification for ‘Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps (CRM)’.

The description around the qualification is:

If you’re familiar with business operations, customer relationship management (CRM), and are IT savvy—either generally or through work experience—take advantage of this certification to highlight those skills. Validate your broad exposure to the customer engagement capabilities of Dynamics 365 to enhance your career journey.

People in different roles and at various stages in their careers can benefit from this fundamentals certification. Here are some examples:

IT professionals who want to show a general understanding of the applications they work with

Business stakeholders and others who know Dynamics 365 and who want to validate their skills and experience

Developers who want to highlight their understanding of business operations and CRM

Students, recent graduates, and people changing careers who want to leverage Dynamics 365 customer engagement capabilities to move to the next level

The official page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-910 where it gives quite a good overview of things. Go take a look at it, and also take a look at the associated learning paths.

Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). This is the way that I now usually take exams (even if I could go to an exam centre, I think that I’d be unlikely to, given the travel/time needed!). Checking in for the exam went without issues (the process definitely seems to be getting smoother each time), and I was ready to go within a few minutes.

As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that 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! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.

  • Project Operations
    • Scheduling resources
    • Entering project time/costs
    • Skills
    • Roles
    • Different types of project costings
  • Customer Service
    • SLA’s, what they are, which ones to use
    • Omnichannel, including capabilities and channel functions/availabilities
    • Power Virtual Agents
  • Sales
    • Lead processes, deactivating & reactivating
    • Opportunity processes
    • LinkedIn Sales Navigator. How it interacts, which capabilities it has within it, how it works
    • Quotes. How they work, what’s required to handle them, document generation
  • Marketing
    • Website forms
    • Automation around responses
    • A/B testing
    • Event management
  • Field Service
    • Work orders
    • Route optimization
    • Scheduling boards
  • Document options
    • Attachments that users can access within the system, as well as outside of Dynamics 365
    • File collaboration tools, and integration with them
  • Timelines & activities
  • System currencies, default options, additional currencies, and updating them
  • Understanding different types of tables, and when you’d use each one
  • Reporting capabilities
    • How data is able to be reported on
    • Report Builder Wizard
    • Reporting on data held in Dataverse
    • Reports in dashboards
    • Usage of Power BI, including data gateways

I was slightly surprised with the level of detail in some of the areas. I wasn’t, for example, expecting the emphasis on Project Operations and Field Service that came up for me. Some of the level of detail seemed more fitting for an MB-2xx exam than this Fundamentals exam.

In a similar vein, I also wasn’t expecting Power BI and Power Automate so much. Perhaps that’s just my own perspective, though obviously with the Power Platform it would be there. However there is a PL-900 exam, around Power Platform capabilities, that I’d expect those sorts of questions to be in, rather than here in this exam.

Otherwise I think that it was generally on point for what I’d expect to find at this level of exam. The questions have definitely evolved over time, and I found myself giving more consideration to answers than I would have on the previous version.

It’s a good place to start for people who are looking to get qualified around Dynamics 365! If you do decide to take it, please drop a comment below to let me know how it was for you – I’d love to hear about your experience!

Managed Solutions, & replacing a field

Well to start with, I’m sure that I’m going to get pulled up by some people for my use of the word ‘field’ in the title. After all, officially it’s now a ‘column’! But I (still) can’t let go of calling them as I’ve done so for over a decade, so field it is.

Now to the actual topic of this blog post, which is centred around Managed Solutions. Leaving aside the whole debate about whether we should be using managed or unmanaged solutions (& when/where to do each), there is one definitive benefit of using a managed solution.

See, unmanaged solutions are additive in nature. Work is done in the development environment, then deployed. Further work is done (additional items added, etc), and deployed, and they then appear in the downstream environments. However, if you delete an item in the development environment, it’s not removed when the solution is deployed downstream.

Managed solutions, on the other hand, are both additive & detractive. As with unmanaged solutions, items added in the development environment are also added downstream when deployed. However, if an item is removed from the solution in the development environment, it will also be removed when the solution is deployed downstream. It’s one of the useful ways to ensure that you don’t end up with random unused items just lying around in Production (which have a habit then of popping up in the Advanced Find window, for example). So it’s really quite handy for a lot of reasons to go down this route.

Well, I found myself going down this route recently, but with slightly unexpected results, I’ll freely admit…

The scenario was that we had deployed a managed solution to the UAT (test) environment on a client project. Then the client changed their mind (shock & horror!!) as to a specific item, and we needed to change it from a text item to a lookup item. Obviously (as per best practise, of course) this would need to be done in the development environment, and then released downstream. Given that this is a managed solution, I’d expect this to work, without any issues. Well, it didn’t…

The change in the development environment (deleted the old item, ‘re-created’ it as a lookup with the same system name) was done, we exported it as managed, and then went to import it in the UAT environment. It took the solution file, thought about it for a while (it’s somewhat of a large solution), & then errored:

Exception type: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault] Message: Attribute mdm_field is a String, but a Lookup type was specified.

Now I was somewhat confused by this message occurring. It’s not been the first time I’ve seen it over the years, but in my previous experience I’ve seen it when handling unmanaged solutions. It’s when you delete an item in the development environment, re-create it as a different item type (with the same underlying system name), and then deploy it as unmanaged. The solution import in the second environment fails due to the different in the type (as it sees the same name). This, of course, is to be expected.

But here we’ve been using managed solutions for deployment, and as mentioned above, they’re detractive as well. The expected behaviour (at least from my side of things) would be that the system would note that the item type has changed, remove the old item, & import the new item. In my mind, that’s logical, but apparently not?

See, even managed solutions have their limitations, of which this is one of them. Having checked with several other people who I reached out to around this, I’ve discovered that it can’t work in the way that I was expecting it to. Instead, a specific process has to be followed

  1. In the development environment, remove the item, & export the solution as managed
  2. In the downstream environment(s), deploy this (interim) managed solution. This will remove the item from the environments
  3. In the development environment, re-create the item with the different system type. Then export it as managed
  4. In the downstream environments, deploy this solution. This will then add the item (with the new system type) into the environment.

This means that development & deployment teams (if separate ones) need to co-ordinate around this, to ensure it’s done in the right way. It could also be developed/exported in succession, and then imported in succession as well (either manually, or through an Azure DevOps Pipeline, for example).

This worked wonderfully for us, and to be honest, I was quite relieved after several hours of frustration with things. Even better, it was a Friday, so meant that the week could end well!

Have you ever come across this, and been frustrated as well? Have you got a similar story with something else that happened to you around solutions? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Customising Case Resolutions

Well, the title is a bit of a mouthful, I’ll admit. Hopefully though this brings some good information, and can help people out.

Cases are wonderful things, and can be used for tracking client interactions, compliments/complaints, and so many other things. What cases do have is the ability to resolve them, and provide information around the resolution.

Now, the standard way of doing this provides the following screen:

There’s the ability to set the Resolution Type (being a dropdown, aka Choice, field), & putting in free text for the Resolution itself (allowing us to track information around it). There are also time fields, which can be used for working out the time spent, as well as any time that’s going to be chargeable.

Now when going in to modify these, we’d think to open up the Case Resolution table. However, this isn’t actually the right place to do it. Instead, we’re needing to update the Case table itself, as the Care Resolution items comes from the Case Status field!

Somewhat annoyingly, it’s not possible to do this through the new ‘Maker’ interface:

In order to actually handle this, we need to switch across to the Classis editor to set this up. This could be because it’s actually a situation of having both parent & child entries. What I mean by this is that there’s the actual status (being Active, Resolved or Cancelled), and then a reason under each one. Hopefully at some point it’ll be updated into the new UI, so that we can do it from there.

We’ll need to change the Status item to ‘Resolved’, & can then add in the options that we want:

After adding them, we need to save & publish, and then they’ll show up for us, and are able to be selected:

So that’s great – we’re able to customise it. But what if we’re wanting to customise the actual ‘Resolve Case’ form itself? Not everyone wants to show Time/Billable Time on it (quite a few of our clients ask us to remove it), and perhaps they want to add additional custom fields.

So from the usual perspective of doing this, we’d open up the Case Resolution table, create new fields as required, and modify the existing form (we’re not able to create any other forms for this specific table). After all, this is how we’d do it for any table in the system (whether a standard one, or a custom one). This is going to be the Main form, rather than the QuickCreate one:

We save & publish it, and then would open up a Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and expect to see it. However, that doesn’t happen, which has been most puzzlingly to me!

It turns out that there are two things needed to be done in order to get to see our ‘custom’ form (though it’s not really custom, as it’s modifying the default form, but whatever).

  1. We need to modify security permissions for users, and is a critical requirement. An example of this is shown below:
Security Role: Customer Service Representative

2. We need to enable customisable dialogues. Yes, it’s a setting that needs to be updated in order for users to see the custom layout of the form. If we don’t do this, they’re shown the default form, even though we’ve modified it! Seems a little strange that the system seems to have this concept of a ‘shadow’ form, but I guess that’s how it is.

To do this, we need to go into the Service Management settings area. I usually launch this through the Customer Service Hub app, though it’s available through several of the other standard apps as well:

Once there, we need to click into the Service Configuration menu item, and then change the ‘Resolve Case Dialogue’ option as shown below:

Remember to click the ‘Save’ button to save this.

Finally we can go back to our Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and look what appears!

So in summary, it’s definitely possible to modify & change the way that Case resolutions works in the system. It does take a little bit of fiddling around with settings in different areas, which can be confusing if we’re not used to this, but can give a great result in the end.

Have you ever come across this, and wondered how to do it? Have you developed Case Resolutions any further? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel Agent Presence Not Loading

Recently, with some of the system updates that have come out for Omnichannel, there’s been an interesting issue observed. This is essentially when the Agent Presence (which signifies the available of the agent) doesn’t load within the system.

This is of course a problem. Without agents able to set their status, it’s not possible to have conversation sessions come through to them. As a result, they’re not able to do their work!

It’s an interesting issue, and one that I’ve discussed with several other people who are deeply involved with Omnichannel for Customer Service. We’re not quite sure why it’s happening, but there seems to be some different things going on.

It can range from either the presence icon not showing up at all, to it showing up, but not being able to be selected/changed.

As there are already some stellar resources out there around this, I therefore would like to link to these, rather than just repeat information!

The first thing to try is the fix that Tricia Sinclair suggests at Omni Channel Engagement Hub: Fix Missing Presence Icon – Everything D365 (triciasinclair.com). Here Tricia points out how to use the new App Profile Manager to put a fix in. There’s even a really helpful video that she’s done to walk us through the steps!

The second thing to try is the fix that Victor Sanchez suggests at Omnichannel Error in Wave 2 | Victor Sanchez (victorsolaya.com). This involves changing the URL for the Channel Provider

Have you come across this issue, and not been able to solve it? Drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to try to help out!

Data Export Service Connection Issues

This is a slightly different post from the usually stuff that I talk about. It’s much more ‘techy/developer’ focused, but I thought it would be quite useful still for people to keep in mind.

The background to this comes from a project that I’ve been working on with some colleagues. Part of the project involves setting up an Azure SQL database, and replicating CDS data to it. Why, I hear you ask? Well, there are some downstream systems that may be heavy users of the data, and as we well know, CDS isn’t specifically build to handle a large number of queries against it. In fact, if you start hammering the CDS layer, Microsoft is likely to reach out to ask what exactly you’re trying to do!

Therefore (as most people would do), we’re putting in database layer/s within Azure to handle the volume of data requests that we’re expecting to occur.

Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Azure

So with setting up things like databases, we need to create the name for them, along with access credentials. All regular ‘run of the mill’ stuff – no surprises there. In order for adequate security, we usually use one of a handful of password generators that we keep to hand. These have many advantages to them, such as ensuring that it’s not something we (as humans) are dreaming up, that might be easier to be guessed at. I’ve used password generators over the years for many different professional & personal projects, and they really are quite good overall.

Sordum Random Password Generator Creates Random Passwords with Ease - MajorGeeks
Example of a password generation tool

Once we had the credentials & everything set up, we then logged in (using SQL Server Management Studio), and all was good. Everything that we needed was in place, and it was looking superb (from the front end, at least).

OK – on to getting the data actually loaded in. To do this, we’re using the Data Export Service (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/replicate-data-microsoft-azure-sql-database for further information around this). The reason for using this is that the Data Export Service intelligently synchronises the entire database initially, and thereafter synchronises on a continuous basis as changes occur (delta changes) in the system. This is really good, and means we don’t need to build anything custom to handle it. Wonderful!

Setting up the Data Export Service takes a little bit of time. I’m not going to go into the details of how to set it up – instead there’s a wonderful walkthrough by the AMAZING Scott Durow at http://develop1.net/public/post/2016/12/09/Dynamic365-Data-Export-Service. Go take a look at it if you’re needing to find out how to do it.

So we were going through the process. Part of this is needing to copy the Azure connection string into into a script that you run. When you do this, you need to re-insert the password (as Azure doesn’t include it in the string). For our purposes (as we had generated this), we copied/pasted the password, and ran things.

However all we were getting was a red star, and the error message ‘Unable to validate profile’.

As you’d expect, this was HIGHLY frustrating. We started to dig down to see what actual error log/s were available (with hopefully more information on them), but didn’t make much progress there. We logged in through the front end again – yes, no problems there, all was working fine. Back to the Export Service & scripts, but again the error. As you can imagine, we weren’t very positive about this, and were really trying to find out what could possibly be causing this. Was it a system error? Was there something that we had forgotten to do, somewhere, during the initial setup process?

It’s at these sorts of times that self-doubt can start to creep in. Did we miss something small & minor, but that was actually really important? We went over the deployment steps again & again. Each time, we couldn’t find anything that we had missed out. It was getting absolutely exasperating!

Finally, after much trial & error, we narrowed the issue down to one source. It’s something we hadn’t really expected, but had indeed caused all of this to happen!

What happened was that the password that we had auto-generated had a semi-colon (‘;’) in it. In & of itself, that’s not an issue (usually). As we had seen, we were able to log into SSMS (the ‘front-end’) successfully, with no issues at all.

However when put into code, Azure treats the semi-colon as a special character (a command separator). It was therefore not recognising the entire password, which was causing the entire thing to fail! To resolve this was simple – we regenerated the password to ensure that it didn’t include a semi-colon character within it!

Now, this is indeed something that’s quite simple, and should be at the core of programming knowledge. Most password generators will have an option to avoid this happening, but not all password generators have this. Unfortunately we had fallen subject to this, but thankfully all was resolved in the end.

The setup then carried on successfully, and we were able (after all of the effort above) to achieve what we had set out to do initially.

Have you ever had a similar issue? Either with passwords, or where something worked through a front-end system, but not in code? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Marketing & an unusual error

I’ll be the first to admit that I have limited experience of Dynamics 365 for Marketing. In fact, I think that it would be stretching the description to say that I have even ‘limited experience’! I’ve seen it one or twice, and have attended a few presentations on it, but apart from that, nada.

I do remember what it used to be like in its previous incarnation, but even then I didn’t really touch it. Customer Service (& Sales) are my forte, and I generally stick within those walls. Marketing traditionally was its own individual application, and only more recently has been rolled into the wider Dynamics 365 application suite. Even so, it still sometimes works in a somewhat interesting way, different from the rest of the system.

Inevitably I’ve had to actually do something with it for a client project, which has brought me to putting up this post. We had created a few marketing forms, surfaced them correctly, etc. It was great, and working well.

Then we realised that we needed to capture some additional information, in this case a list of Countries. There’s no standard entity for it within Dynamics 365, so we created our own, and loaded a list of countries (& associated data) into it. Fine – that was working without issues, including in the places that we needed to surface it.

Then we came to needing to surface the Country value on a marketing form, through a lookup. Simple, you’d have though? Well, not so much. We went to create the field, and got presented with the following error as we did so:

The error says: ‘The role marketing services user does not have access to the entities you’ve chosen…’

In essence, the system was telling us that we weren’t able to access the entity. Though Country is a custom entity, we were logged in as users with the System Administrator role (which has access automatically to ALL entities). This left us puzzling around what to do.

The error message, thankfully, was quite clear. It was referring to a specific security role missing privileges. In this case, it was the ‘Marketing Services User’. I therefore went to check the permissions for it, and sure enough, it didn’t have permissions on the Country entity that I had created!

Now usually if a security role is missing permissions, what we do is create a custom security role (usually copying the existing role), and add the permissions to do. Best practise is NOT to edit the default security roles. The (main) reason behind this is that Microsoft could update the security role in a later update/release, which could impact on us. We therefore use custom roles to avoid this happening (& yes, I’ve seen it happen/impact in practise!).

The fly in the soup here (lovely phrase, I know) is that we couldn’t do that here. It seems that Dynamics 365 for Marketing uses an underlying security role that’s needed. Even if we had implemented a custom role, we didn’t have any idea of how to tell the system to actually use our custom role, rather than the default one that it’s currently using. Quite frustrating, I tell you!

So in the end we decided to give the default security role the necessary permissions, and see what happened:

With having granted the security permissions to the role, & saved it, we then attempted to create the marketing form field field. This time, we were successful! No errors occurred during it, thankfully:

So in summary, I still have no idea why this has happened. I’ve taken a look around, but can’t find anything obvious as to how/why it actually works like this. I guess that I’d need to dig ‘under the hood’ somewhat to see what’s actually going on, and how to dealt with it appropriately. For the moment, the solution is in place, and is working.

We’ve also been very careful (as mentioned above) to add just the specific custom entity to the default security role. We haven’t touched anything else within it – all other security permissions are done (as per best practise) with custom security roles, which are then allocated appropriately to users &/or teams. Hopefully this will be fine in the long-term, though we’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on it to make sure!

Have you ever come across something like this? How did you decide to go about solving it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Update: Thanks to the amazing Carl Cookson, it turns out that this is due to an update from Microsoft in how Marketing works. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365/marketing/marketing-fields for more information around it. Essentially it uses this role to sync to the Azure staged Marketing service, so this role needs to have the appropriate permission

AI Translation for Omnichannel

How to start off this post? I’ve been trying to work out how exactly I can express my excitement around this new feature for Omnichannel. Included in the Wave 2 2020 release, it’s just AMAZING. That, however, doesn’t give it true justice. So let’s see how I can describe it properly to give it due respect.

Previously I’ve mentioned the ability to use skills within Omnichannel (see https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues-users-skills/). This can be used to indicate, for example, agents who can communicate in a certain language. That’s useful of course, but what happens when you don’t have anyone who can speak the language that the customer wants to use? It’s a problem, and one that’s really not easily solved. At least, not until now.

So, what exactly does this new translation feature do? Simple – it translates from one language to another. OK, it’s actually a little more awesome than just that. Having delved into it quite a bit over the last week or so, there are (in my view) three main benefits (with a bonus one as well!):

  1. It translates incoming text from the customer (through chat) from the language that they’re using to the language that the agent is using
  2. It translates outgoing text from the agent (through chat) from the language that the agent is using to the language that the customer is using
  3. It translates text between agents from one language to the other & vice versa (eg on an internal consult)

Now for the bonus. It doesn’t just translate text from one language to another. It follows the languages being used! So if the customer switches in mid-conversation to a different language, the system picks it up. Not only is the new incoming language translated into the agents language, but the replies from the agent are shown in the (new) language being used by the customer. It’ll automatically show text in the ‘last used’ language, which is really quite incredible (at least in my opinion).

There’s no fiddling around of needing agents to select the language that they need, or anything else. It’s a simple click to turn it on, and then another click to turn it off. I’m going to go through the setup of it below, as there are a few fiddly bits that did confuse me for a bit.

It’s also possible to use different translation tools. At the time of writing this post, it’s possible to use Bing, Google or Azure translation models. I’m sure that there will be other options available in the future as well to use, which really opens up possibilities for clients with differing digital estates.

Translation happens in real time, so there’s no waiting around for it to actually get on with it. It’s displayed immediately on the screen for the agent to see.

Setup for translation

I found the general guides to be alright, but weren’t too clear on a few items. I’m therefore sharing below how I went about it, in order to get things working properly. Please be aware that this isn’t in the order specified in the documentation, but in retrospect means less switching between screens:

  1. Ensure that you have the latest updates to your Omnichannel environment (this is always a good idea, regardless of anything else!)
  1. Go to https://github.com/microsoft/Dynamics365-Apps-Samples/tree/master/customer-service/omnichannel/real-time-translation & download the ‘webResourceV2.js’ file there (if you’re unfamiliar with how to do this, click to open the file, click the ‘Raw’ button, and then save the page (ensure it’s got the ‘.js’ extension when you save it!).
  1. Ensure you have an API key to enter into the web resource file! This is what tripped me up at first. You can use any text editor (I use Notepad++) to open it up. How you get the API key will depend on the provider. For example, to set up a free account in Azure, take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/translator-how-to-signup. There are also some additional things that you can configure in the web resource file, but I’m not going to go into that here
  1. Go to your solutions (this can either be through the Classic interface, or through http://make.powerapps.com). You can either create a new solution to hold the web resource file, or alternatively if you have existing solutions that you’d deploy, you can add the web resource file to that. Either:
    1. In the classic interface, navigate to Web Resources, click to create a new web resource, and upload the file (ensure you select the type to be ‘Script (JScript)’, or
    2. In the modern interface, click the ‘New’ button, select ‘Web Resource’ from the ‘Other’ section, and then follow the steps above

Once it’s saved, it’ll give you a URL. Copy that, and publish the solution.

  1. Go to the Omnichannel Administration Hub, find ‘Real Time Translation’ under Settings, and set this to Yes. You can also select a default input language from the selection. Also enter the URL that you copied above. Save it
  1. You’re all done!

Agent Experience

Depending on how you’ve configured your web resource, auto translation will either by on by default, or be off. If it’s not on by default, the agent can simply click within their chat window to select it to be active:

Once active, it’ll then start to translate everything, in both directions. Below are side by side screens of the customer & agent experiences. You’ll note that the customer is seeing the initial agent response in English, as the agent was the first in the conversation

From the agent side of things, both the original language, as well as the translated language, are shown. The customer is only shown the language that they’re actually using

If the agent isn’t sure what language the customer is using (as it’s being auto-translated for them), they can hover over the text, and it’ll show the details for it:

If the agent will consult, or transfer the session to another agent, the second agent will see the conversation in the language that they are themselves using (with the original text as well). This allows for the possibility to pass a customer to a specialist to assist them, even if they don’t speak the same language! It’s really cool to see this in action.

Even more wonderfully, this is even stored down to the transcript level:

This is really opening up major new concepts that Omnichannel can be used for, which will be supported entirely by this feature. As I said at the beginning of this post, I’m absolutely excited for it, and we’re already envisioning how this will be able to empower our clients even more.

Do you have any questions around this? Can you think of any scenarios that this could solve for you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Microsoft Stack Part 10: Dynamics 365

Microsoft: Dynamics 365

Image result for logo microsoft dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s business application suite, combining in a single system its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities. It includes four main applications: Customer Engagement, Finance and Operations, Talent and Retail.

Image result for logo microsoft dynamics 365 customer engagement

Microsoft allows organisations to pick and choose the specific applications they want to use to achieve their needs and objectives. This allows organisations to use only the applications that they need, rather than purchasing licenses to applications that may be left unused.

Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement

Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement is Microsoft’s CRM system. It contains a collection of separate applications that make up its CRM system, including: Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service and Project Service Automation.

Dynamics 365 for Sales

This application enables organisations, and the users within these organisations, to track sales across the entire sales lifecycle from beginning to end, build and maintain close customer relationships through effective management of customer accounts and gain valuable insights on the sales process. The application also includes tips, suggestions and insights which help to maintain customer relationships with ease.

Functionality includes:

  • Contacts/Accounts
  • Leads
  • Opportunities
  • Quotes
  • Orders
  • Invoices

Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Dynamics 365 for Marketing is an application which seeks to optimise the way in which organisations generate sales opportunities and turn them into business relationships. The application seeks to bring together sales and marketing strategy to create a unified approach for managing the whole sales lifecycle. Companies can use the Marketing application to create a personalised marketing strategy which uses data on previous activity to target specific individuals and deliver personalised advertisement messages.

Functionality includes:

  • Event Management
  • Portals
  • LinkedIn Integration
  • Lead Management
  • Surveys
  • Email Marketing
  • Behaviour tracking
  • Customer Journeys

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

This application provides companies with the ability to provide personalised, high quality customer service on a range of platforms. The Customer Service Hub within the application provides a centralised GUI and includes many tools that companies can use to improve and optimise the service they provide to customers. These tools provide a complete view of customer cases and enable companies to provide personalised support for customers. Users can create and view customer cases, record and monitor progress, view previous customer interactions and see an overview of all open cases, which can be broken down into categories, such as product, priority and incident type.

Functionality includes:

  • Contacts/Accounts
  • Queues
  • Cases
  • Contracts
  • Knowledge Base Articles
  • SLA’s

Dynamics 365 for Field Service

The Field Service application focuses on businesses’ operations in the field and provides companies with tools they need to successfully operate and deliver high quality service to customers when on-site. The application optimises the efficiency of resources through improved scheduling, increasing the effectiveness of staff on-site and utilises Internet of Things to identify and diagnose customer issues early on.

Functionality includes:

  • Resources
  • Bookings
  • Work Orders
  • Inventory
  • Agreements & Billing
  • Universal Resource Scheduling

Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation

Project Service Automation is an application targeted towards companies that provide project-based services and includes tools to increase productivity, efficiency and the quality of the work being delivered. The application includes tools to assist these organisation through the whole project lifecycle and allows users to plan projects, track progress, forecast price and profitability, monitor the scope, review and assess costs and time, optimise resource scheduling, amongst other things

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is Microsoft’s integrated ERP system. It includes a variety of features such as supply chain management, intelligent analytics, financial management, operations support and human resources management. One of the central features of Finance and Operations is its financial management capabilities. This platform allows organisations to use features such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, banking, budgeting and forecasting, fixed asset management and tax management.

Finance and Operations also includes a number of capabilities which aid organisations to manage and optimise their supply chain operations. Some of these capabilities include sourcing and procurement, inventory and warehouse management, materials requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing management. These capabilities enable organisations to optimise and automate their supply chain at every point throughout the process.

Dynamics 365 for Talent

Dynamics 365 for talent, Microsoft’s human capital management application, provides organisations with the tools they need to optimise the way in which they manage and engage with their workforce. Talent is made up of three central parts:

  • Attract
  • Onboard
  • Core HR

Attract focuses on the all parts of the recruitment process, from finding suitable candidates to submitting offers to successful applicants. Once successful applicants become new employees, the Onboard part of Talent helps to assimilate new joiners into the organisation. Finally, Core HR is designed to enrich the experience of employees and managers in organisations by creating a self-service portal. Within this portal employees can request time off, set and track performance goals, receive feedback and monitor skills and capabilities.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest talent database and often the primary system that recruiters use to find, communicate with, and source candidates for the jobs that recruiters are looking to fill. LinkedIn Recruiter integration with Dynamics 365 for Talent (Attract) makes it easier for users to hire, and to keep the data in sync between the two systems

Dynamics 365 for Retail

Dynamics 365 for Retail works to bring together both front and back office function to assists businesses in optimising inventory, merchandising, store operations and hardware to create a unified multi-channel sales approach that delivers a high-quality shopping experience.

Retail shares functionality with both Finance and Operations, and Talent.

Dynamics 365 for Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-based, all-in-one business management solution which enables customers to upgrade from their entry-level accounting software or legacy ERP system to one single, comprehensive solution to manage finances, operations, sales and customer service. Helping organisations streamline their processes, improve customer relations and enable growth through:

  • Business without silos—connecting businesses and boosting efficiency with automated tasks and workflows, all within the familiar Microsoft interface of applications such as Word, Outlook and Excel.
  • Actionable insights—achieving more and gaining a complete view of the business with connected data, business analytics and guidance delivered by Microsoft’s leading intelligent technologies.
  • Solutions built to evolve—get started quickly, growing and adapting in real time with a flexible platform that makes it easy to extend beyond Business Central based on evolving business needs.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Essentials includes the following functionality:

  • Financial Management—general ledger, workflows and audit trails, bank management, budgets, deferrals, bank reconciliation, dimensions, fixed assets and currencies.
  • Customer Relational Management—contacts, campaigns, opportunity management and built-in integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales.
  • Supply Chain Management—sales order management, basic receivables, purchase order management, locations, item transfers, and basic warehousing.
  • Human Resources—employees and expense management.
  • Project Management—resources, estimates, jobs and time sheets.
  • Other—multiple languages, reason codes, extended text, Intrastat reporting, scheduled tasks and Outlook integration

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium will include the above functionality, plus:

  • Service Order Management—service orders, service price management, service item management, service contract management, planning and dispatching.
  • Manufacturing—production orders, version management, agile manufacturing, basic supply planning, demand forecasting, capacity planning, machine centres and finite loading

Microsoft Stack Part 8: Communication & Social Networking

Microsoft: Communication and social networking

Teams

Image result for logo microsoft teams

Microsoft Teams is a communications tool that enables the growth of interaction and collaboration by enabling text and video chat between team members. In teams, users can participate in group chat room threads, send and receive instant private messages and video call with two or more users. However, Team is more than just a messaging tool, uses can also view, edit and share documents on OneDrive without leaving the application. Users with Enterprise, Business Essentials or Business premium can access Teams.

Team is available through an internet browser, desktop application and mobile app.

It is possible to use to use teams externally as well as internally. Meetings can be set up and held with people who are external to a company, simply by sending through Team Meeting link. Attendees can then connect to the meeting through whichever device they prefer, or can call in from a phone (in which case there won’t be any option for video).

Native integration with Microsoft Office services include Word and Excel, but also SharePoint, OneNote, PowerPoint, Planner, Power BI, Delve and cloud storage. Among the benefits of the latter is that all team members can view the latest version of data, as content is synced and stored instantly. This can allow members of a team to instantly view and collaborate on documents together – this can also be done whilst on a Team meeting call.

Key benefits of Teams:

  • One centralised hub
  • Office 365 integration
  • Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
  • Enterprise security & compliance
  • Azure Active Directory integration
  • No extra cost to Office 365 users

It was announced that from October 2019, Teams would absorb the capabilities of StaffHub, which will be discontinued. StaffHub is a scheduling and work planning application which helps organisations with the onboarding of new staff, deliver training and assign tasks.

Yammer

Image result for logo microsoft yammer

Yammer is an enterprise social network which allows social networking and communication within organisations. It present a less-formal alternative to email communication, and it creates a space for engagement where employees can respond to the announcements made by management.

Whereas Teams is used for instant messaging in relatively small teams, Yammer can be used for engaging with organisations or departments as a whole. Yammer can be used to send out task reminders, announce recent successes or changes to the business, praise employees and introduce new joiners, for example. Another key feature is that external individuals can be added to the organisation’s Yammer, aiding greater collaboration and engagement with external stakeholders.

Yammer can be described as an organic knowledge repository of information and idea sharing. It’s not uncommon for people to send emails (this is how we traditionally conducted business) but it is also not uncommon for things to get lost in email.

Skype for Business

Image result for logo microsoft skype for business

Skype for Business is a communications enterprise software that can be used on the cloud, known as Skype for Business Online, or on premise, known as Skype for Business Server. It enables users to communicate via instant messaging, as well as audio and video calling.

In September 2017, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would be replaced by Teams.