Tag: power platform

Environment types, capabilities & backups

Interesting title to start a blog post with, right? I can’t tell you how much I tried to work out what to call this, but then I figured that I’d just put at a high level what I’m going to be talking about!

So let’s start at the beginning. Environments within Dataverse. An environment is essentially a container for all sorts of different components, such as data models, apps, code, etc.

Examples of what an environment can contain

Within the Power Platform, there are different types of environments. As a quick recap, currently we have the following:

  • Default. Every Power Platform tenant has a default environment. We of course shouldn’t be using this for any proper development!
  • Production. Used for any Line of Business application
  • Sandbox. A sandbox environment is any non-production Dataverse environment. Isolated from production, a sandbox environment is the place to safely develop and test application changes with low risk.
  • Trial. Used to take out a trial
  • Trial (Subscription Based). Used to take out a trial when there’s subscription licensing in place
  • Developer. Personal environment, limited to one user. Previously called the Community plan.
  • Teams. Used when an app is created within Teams, to use a Dataverse for Teams environment. Doesn’t have full Dataverse capabilities, and has various limitations
  • Support. Only able to be created by Microsoft support during a support case. Is essentially a clone of an existing environment, used for diagnosis purposes.

Now, sandbox & production environments are automatically backed up – backups occur continuously, using Azure SQL Databases underneath. It’s also possible to create a manual backup instance of an environment as well, which usually takes a few seconds to carry out (restoring a backup, on the other hand, takes quite a bit longer…).

When restoring an environment, it’s not possible to restore to a production environment (though the backup could be from a production environment). It’s only possible to restore the backup to a sandbox environment – you’d then need to promote the environment from sandbox to production.

Let’s move away from backups for a moment. When we create an environment, we have the ability to select that the environment should be enabled for Dynamics 365:

This is actually a REALLY IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION! At this point in time, it’s not possible to update from a Power Platform Dataverse environment to then bring in Dynamics 365 capabilities. What this means is that if an organisation starts with just Power Apps, and then wants to expand into using Dynamics 365, IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THIS NATIVELY. Even Microsoft Support can’t do anything around this – you’d need to create a new environment, enable it for Dynamics 365, and then restore a backup to it.

It’s something that a lot of us would like be in place, but we’re not sure if it’ll ever come about. This is a tweet of mine from 2019 that Charles Lamanna responded to (I was SO thrilled that he actually responded to me!!):

https://twitter.com/clamanna/status/1176629306484637696

However, it’s still not in place. As a result, we recommend to all clients that when they deploy a Dataverse environment, they toggle the switch above (Note: A Dynamics 365 license is NOT needed to toggle this). Once this has been toggled (without deploying any of the Dynamics 365 apps), the Dynamics 365 apps and functionality can be installed/deployed at a later point in time.

There are actually various capabilities, such as the Data Export Service (yes, I know it’s now been deprecated) that actually relied on having the environment enabled as a Dynamics 365 environment in order to work. We found this out the hard way at a client, and had to do an overnight environment re-build to get the capabilities in place.

But there’s one other thing to consider around the differences between a native Dataverse environment, and an environment which has been enabled for Dynamics 365. This is around backups.

Now, backups are of course very important (thankfully they now occur automatically, as mentioned above – I remember my onpremise days when needing to run these manually!). But there are also some important differences for backup behaviour when it comes to environment types. See, it turns out that environments aren’t actually equal in backup behaviour. This is what actually happens:

  • Sandbox environments (all types) – backups retained for 7 days
  • Dataverse production environment (not enabled for Dynamics 365) – backups retained for 7 days
  • Dataverse production environment (enabled for Dynamics 365) – backups retained for 28 days

See that? Having Dynamics 365 enabled for an environment gives you FOUR TIMES as much backup retention time! That’s incredible!

Dataverse Environment enabled for Dynamics 365 – 28 days of backups available!

So not only are you able to then upgrade to Dynamics 365 applications at a later date, you then also have more peace of mind (hopefully you don’t need to use it though!) around keeping backups for longer.

This is really cool – I hope it helps you plan your environment implementation strategy! Have you ever come up against issues when using environments, or the type/s of environment? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Staying up to date with release information

Microsoft releasing new functionality can be an interesting experience, to say the least. As a cloud platform (SAAS – Software As A Service), functionality is released the entire time. A user could log off on Friday for the weekend, and come back on Monday morning to find that something has changed slightly, or a new button is present in the interface. Over time, most of us have come to accept this.

However this is for the ‘smaller’ functionality parts within the system, whether that’s Dynamics 365, or Power Platform related. There are of course two MAIN release announcements each year. These are the Wave 1 (Spring) and Wave 2 (Autumn) release windows, with information announced about what is included in each one publicly. This information usually starts to be available around 4-6 weeks or so before the release starts to hit.

Now that’s not to say that everything within a Wave release is released in a ‘Big Bang’ moment. Far from it actually, based on my experience. Microsoft will announce what is coming as part of the Wave release, along with projected timeframes as to when it will be available. Obviously, just because it’s been announced for Day X doesn’t mean that actually happens, at least for some of the time.

But there’s an inherent time-sink to being on top of all of this information. Firstly, people need to download the Wave release information (there’s one for Dynamics 365, and a second one for Power Platform), wade through all of the information, and somehow then remember it. Let’s just say that this can be challenging for a lot of people…

But what if there was somewhere where we could track this? Well, to date there hasn’t been, at least not until now.

Microsoft have created & made available the ‘Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Release Planner’, which can be found at https://experience.dynamics.com/releaseplans:

So just as a start, this is already MUCH better than the downloadable PDF documents for wave release information (admittedly the information is also available online as a Microsoft document, but still it’s lacking in certain areas).

But there’s more to this functionality than simply presenting a list of areas. Let’s take a look into some of these.

To begin with, there’s the sitemap on the left hand side. This allows us to select a specific area of interest, whether it’s Dynamics 365 or Power Platform (amusingly this reminds me a little of a model-driven app!).

Once in an area, we can then select between Planned features, Coming Soon features, and Try Now features by using the options in the menu bar. This is a nice little piece of functionality, in my opinion, allowing us to see what falls under each ‘category’:

By default, the items are displayed in a list format. However, we’re also able to toggle the view from the menu bar to a release date format, which shows us all items grouped by release month:

There’s also some filtering functionality, allowing us to narrow down the results even further:

Opening a line item (regardless of whether it’s being displayed as a list, or arranged by date) will give further information around the specific item. It also includes a lovely little timeline widget, showing the release dates information, as well as where it’s actually up to currently (which I think is great to have it as a visual reference!):

In here, links are included to documentation around the release overview, as well as specific documentation around the selected functionality item.

Now if this was all that there was, I think that truthfully I would be quite satisfied. It’s a much more modern interface, and really looks nice. I know that various colleagues of mine would be quite satisfied as well.

But….it doesn’t stop there. There’s something else, which is really the cherry on top of the cake icing! So what is it? Well, it’s the ability to create a PERSONALISED release plan information overview.

So on each item of functionality, there’s a button called ‘+ To my plan’:

Note: You do need to be signed into the portal to have this option available to you

Clicking this will add it to a personalised release plan, which you can access from the left-side menu. Here, all of the items that you’ve selected will show up. This is really cool, I think, as it allows you to see the overall picture, but also then focus on just the areas that you’re interested in:

It’s still got all of the functionality available for filtering, date/item sorting, etc. It’s also possible to toggle back to the ‘main’ view of all release information.

So in summary, I think that this is really cool. Admittedly (as it says on the site), it’s in BETA currently. I’m hoping that it’ll stick around, and come out of Beta pretty soon! Regardless, I’m definitely starting to make use of this already in tracking the upcoming features that I’m interested in.

Updates to the Power Platform Admin Center

There’s a saying amongst seasoned IT professionals who deal with Microsoft software. It goes something like this – ‘Why make do with one admin centre, when you could just have MULTIPLE admin centres to carry out functions!’.

It’s a bit of a tongue-in-check response to the numerous different admin centres that Microsoft technology seems to have. Now, I/we totally understand that over time, different (standalone) products have come together to co-exist, but their administration centres still differ.

Over time, Microsoft has been applying efforts to make them work better together, but it can still sometimes be quite frustrating not to know exactly where to go to in order to carry out specific function/s, or not to be able to see capabilities holistically overall in a single place.

So for example, we have:

  • Microsoft 365 Admin Centre
  • Power BI Admin Centre
  • Power Platform Admin Centre (which, for Dynamics 365 deployments, still leads users to the Classic Advanced Settings for some of the functionality…)
  • etc….

Now when it comes to Power Platform related items, admins would usually go to the Power Platform Admin Centre (which though it has a URL of admin.powerplatform.com, this auto-resolves to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com – I have no idea why this is, given that no other admin centre seems to have this structure in place….another mystery…)

From here, we’d be presented with a list of environments, similar to the screenshot below:

The menu on the left hand side gave us a few of the different admin centres that we’re able to switch to. Alternatively, we could expand the overall menu to show us more capabilities, including other apps that we may wish to access:

So this is what we’ve been used to for the last few years. Essentially, information in different areas, and we’d need to go to each admin centre to find out what’s happening. So for example, if a Power Platform Admin user wanted to see any health advisories, they’d need to go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre to view the Service Health area there.

Not anymore! As part of the focus on unifying information across admin centres, Microsoft has now updated the functionality for this!

Now, with the new functionality, there’s a Home screen. On this, information is able to be presented to users, as well as applying one of several themes to the interface, such as a rainbow:

Now, in terms of information available to users, these are presented as ‘cards’. Within each card, information is shown, based on the card type:

At the moment, there are three cards to choose from:

Service Health

This section outlines any service health issues, such as outages or advisory information that users should be aware of. Clicking through it will bring users to the Service Health section of the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre:

From here, users can choose to switch across to other categories, such as Incidents, History & Reported Issues.

It’s (at least) one less click from the previous method, and I’m quite liking this. In my mind, it’s about making the information as accessible as possible (leaving aside that I think that Power Platform specific alerts should actually show within the Power Platform Admin Centre…)

Message Center

The second section is the Message Center. Here we’re able to see specific messages (yes, I know I have a LOT of messages sitting here!), and clicking on them will bring up the corresponding information directly within the same interface (which again, I’m really liking). So for example:

Nicely for messages, we also have options to filter the types of services that we want to see here. This, in my mind, is quite important, as we wouldn’t want Power Platform admins to be overwhelmed by messages that have absolutely no (usual) interest for them:

We also have the ability to specify which email notifications we want to be receiving. Again, we may be interested in some non-Power Platform notifications, but not want to see them directly within the Power Platform Admin Centre. Instead, we can specify to receive these via email – another nice touch!

Documentation

Finally, we have linked out to various Power Platform (& Dynamics 365) related resources on the Microsoft website. These are all static (ie they’re provided by Microsoft), but hopefully in the future admins will have the capability to add custom links to other resources as well.

What is nice about the documentation section though is that it’s got linked to the various Community forums. Microsoft has recently started to promote these within the products, and they can be a very helpful resource at times to be able to use!

There are also links to the Microsoft Centre of Excellence toolkit, which is a great resource that organisations should look to implement.

All in all, I think that this is a VERY good start to things. I’m hopeful that with Microsoft implementing this ‘home screen’ functionality with the ability to add cards to it, there will be additional cards that are released, bringing more information & functionality into the interface. I’m also hopeful that Microsoft will allow admins to add custom functionality here as well.

It’s a good first step – now let’s wait to see how this functionality iterates over time, and hopefully enables admin users in better ways!

‘Swarming’ for Customer Service

You might be wondering as to what I mean by ‘swarming’ in the title for this post. Don’t worry – it’ll become clear pretty soon! But first of all, let’s understand the story behind this new functionality.

Where to begin? Well, let’s take a look within an organisation. It doesn’t really matter what sort of organisation it is, as most organisations will have something similar scenarios overall. So, what are we actually talking about?

Customer Service is, of course, a very important functionality of any organisations. Customers who have purchased products may need support, or perhaps are having issues, and need them to be resolved. Customer service agents are there to handle the customer queries, and look to resolve them as soon as possible.

However, it’s possible that the customer service agents don’t actually know how to resolve the customer query/issue themselves. They can, of course, use the Knowledge Base, but that requires knowledge articles to be created & maintained.

Now within the organisation, there will be SME’s (Subject Matter Experts). These are the people who know the matter in precise detail, often being the people who have created the product and/or process to begin with. But these people aren’t usually carrying out the customer service function.

So what this means is that the customer service agents need to try to work out who might actually know the answer/s, be able to help resolve the customer issue, etc. This can take time, be laborious, and perhaps not even be able to be carried out (depending on the organisation).

Hmm. So, what if the system might be able to actually SUGGEST the right people for a problem or issue? Even better, what if the system could support them being involved directly with the record/s, regardless of whether they’re a user within Dynamics 365 or not?

Enter the swarming capability onto the Dynamics 365 scene….

The aim of swarming is to bring together the necessary experts within Dynamics 365. Now, having said that, not all users will actually be interacting directly within Dynamics 365. What happens is that a specific Teams chat is created, so that users outside of the system can see the necessary information, and give input on the situation.

This builds on the existing functionality of being able to use Teams chats directly within Dynamics 365, but takes it to a whole new level, by having the system automatically suggest relevant people within the organisation, and bring them into the swarm chat!

There are some necessary steps to configure to enable this to happen.

Firstly, Teams needs to be enabled within Dynamics 365:

Once we start to turn things on, we can then see the following. This allows us to be able to specify the types of records that we can use swarming on. This is great, as we may be building out custom functionality using other tables, and can enable swarming on these as well

Once Teams chat has been enabled, we can then start setting up the swarming capabilities:

As part of the setup, we have:

  • The ability to set the general message that users will see when they create a swarm
  • Activating the case form that’s used for swarming (as this will include the functionality for swarming on the case form)
  • A Power Automate flow that will be used for sending notifications & invites within Teams for suggested (internal) users
  • Creating swarm condition rules, which allows us to bring in specific conditions around skills etc

So, how does this work in practise, once the system has been initially configured?

Users can go to the relevant record, such as a case record. They’re able to select the ‘Create swarm’ from the menu bar:

This then allows the user to provide a summary of what the swarm is for, the scenario, as well as selecting the skills needed for the swarm. Dynamics 365 can also suggest skills that it thinks would be helpful as well:

Users from across the organisation are matched, according to the skills identified:

Notifications are sent to them within Teams, requesting their help with the matter:

When they accept the invitation, they’re then brought into the swarm:

In fact, the members of the swarm aren’t actually accessing the swarm information within Dynamics 365. Instead, they’re seeing & interacting with the swarm within Teams itself!

Once the swarm is active, information can be shared, and a solution found. The swarm can then be successfully closed down:

This is truly amazing. Obviously collaboration on issues is important, especially when considering that we’re trying to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible! I’m also really excited about this, as I was part of the initial group that Microsoft reached out to initially for feedback on the capabilities of it.

To now be able to collaborate with users who sit outside of Dynamics 365, but have them access the necessary information to help resolve things, is just mind-blowing. So many scenarios that come to mind as to how this can really empower organisations!

Can you think of a way in which this could change things in your own organisation, or at a client? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear more!

Searching tables within the Modern Advanced Find

Well for a start, I know that the title of this blog post is somewhat of a mouthful. It’s definitely longer than my usual titles! However I felt it important to do so, given the functionality that I’m actually going to talk about…

So here goes!

As part of the Wave 1 2022 release, both for Power Platform as well as Dynamics 365, we have the new ‘Modern Advanced Find’ capability. This replaces the (legacy) Advanced Find interface, which has been around since almost the beginning of Microsoft CRM…that’s quite a few years!

So within a model-app (as this covers both Power Apps as well as Dynamics 365), the classic Advanced Find was a good friend. Though using the legacy interface (& sometimes being VERY slow to load initially), we could create powerful queries through it. Being able to specify conditions, span multiple tables (with needing to understand the data model), we were able to show & filter data as we needed to.

When loading the Advanced Find interface, we could select from any of the tables within the system, with a LONG list presented to us for this purpose:

Now, just because we could see all tables (system & custom) within the list didn’t mean we could view all data within the tables. Oh no – the security roles applied to users limited what we could do.

In fact, users having security roles with NO permissions on certain tables would NOT see those tables appearing in the Advanced Find interface. Even when users had permissions on tables, but these permissions were limited (such as only being able to view our own records), the data results would be filtered based on our security role access to the records within the table.

OK – all good so far. Well, in general – there have been various complaints over the years about the Advanced Find functionality. So finally, Microsoft updated it to the ‘Modern Advanced Find’.

This needs to be enabled by a system administrator in the environment settings:

So in order to access the Modern Advanced Find, we need to do the following:

  1. Click in the search box at the top of the screen
  2. At the bottom, click the ‘Search for rows in a table using advanced filters’ (that’s a mouthful as well, isn’t it!)

After clicking this, we then get presented with the following interface:

Once we select a table (we can only select one table, as this will be the primary table used), we then switch screens to set the filters that we want to use:

Now here’s where things got a little strange. On the filter screen, we can select related tables to the primary table (ie connected through a relationship), and we get EVERY table that’s available for this. So if we’re starting with the Accounts table, we can then select from the following:

So in this list, I can see tables such as Emails, Invoices, and various others as well. In fact, it’s actually a very extensive list (limited, of course, to all tables that have a relationship in place with the Accounts table, and which the user has access to through their security role).

But if I look back at the initial list of tables, I’m MUCH more limited in my choice:

This, to me, was quite confusing. After all, what if I wanted to start the search from a different table – one that isn’t shown in this initial list?

So I started doing some digging. Initially, I thought that these tables are the ones defined in the sitemap (ie the app navigation). This could mean that I’d need to somehow create a section that shows all tables within it, just to be able to have them searchable.

Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t actually the case. What’s happening is that with the new Modern Advanced Find, tables need to be directly associated to the APP, to be able to show up and use for search purposes.

Actually, there’s some more granularity around this. The list of tables available to search on (as the primary table) need to meet ALL of the following criteria:

  1. Table is part of the model-driven app
  2. Table is enabled for unified interface
  3. Table is valid for advanced find (set on the table settings)
  4. User has read access to the table (handled through security roles)

So essentially, the ability to search tables within an app is now limited to the tables that have been associated to the app itself! This could be very helpful in various scenarios, when users can be quite confused with seeing the entire list of tables.

To do this, we’d edit the app, and add it to the list of tables available through the app designer (note – we don’t have to include them in the sitemap, if we don’t want to display them in the app navigation):

So this now makes sense, and I think it’s a good step forward.

Also thanks to my colleague Bill (who’s an AMAZING Customer Success Manager!) for his collaboration on this.

What are your thoughts on the Modern Advanced Find? Are you finding it better for functionality? Is there something that you feel is missing, or that you’d like to see in it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Calculated columns not working with data migration

Interesting title, isn’t it? I thought to do something that might grab peoples attention, and this was the best that I could come up with! So, let’s get into the scenario, the issue experienced, and how we managed to resolve it.

The scenario on this project was as follows. We’ve been implementing a customer service solution for a sales company, that manufacture multiple products, under multiple brands. Currently there are multiple systems used for order entries, which at some point will be moved to a single system.

However for the moment, they’re wanting to be able to carry out holistic customer service across all brands, to be able to enable all customer service agents to have access to the same data, customers able to be serviced in the same way, regardless of brand, etc.

rectangular brown wooden table

As a result, Dynamics 365 Customer Service was the ticket, and has many standard capabilities that addresses the need of the customer.

Now, whilst sales (aka orders) will not be handled within Dynamics 365 itself, we didn’t want the customer service agents to have to look up order information in the ordering systems. Instead, we wanted to be able to bring the sales/order information into Dynamics 365 for reference (at some point it’s likely that the customer will actually use Dynamics 365 capabilities for sales as well).

In order to do this, we’ve had some amazing data architects bringing the data together into Azure Data Factory (ADF)) from the multiple order systems, and then pushing the data into Dynamics 365 (users have read-only view of it).

With bringing in the data, we were looking to capitalise on the native functionality of Dynamics 365, namely the ability for columns to be automatically calculated. An example of this would be bringing in the order line amount, the tax amount, and then having the total order line amount automatically calculated. This is standard system functionality, and when working in Dynamics 365, has many different uses across the system.

Now, it’s important to note here that as we’re not actually handling orders within Dynamics 365, we’re also not holding a ‘proper’ product list within Dynamics 365 itself. However, orders need to show product information on them (bit useless otherwise!), so we’re using the capability of ‘write-in products’.

Note: If you haven’t come across write-in products before, it’s actually a really great item. Essentially, it allows products to be entered for opportunities, quotes, orders etc (wherever products are used), but for when the product/s aren’t in the system product catalogue. Write-in products allow you to simply type the name of a product or service, & then type in the price. This is very useful if, for instance, a product isn’t yet available in the product catalogue, but you still want to be able to quote it. In our scenario, we’re using write-in products to avoid the need to manage the product catalogue itself. It’s also helpful for when you don’t want to use price lists, as all products need to be associated to a price list.

So we start off the data migration, and it’s looking good. No issues being reported by the integration…

But, then users go in to the UAT system to check through things, and find that when looking at orders, the totals aren’t being calculated:

Order line not calculating
Order not calculating either!

Hmm. That’s strange. So we started to look at what could have caused this problem…

  • Is the environment in ‘admin mode’? If an environment is in admin mode, then auto-calculations won’t work at all. Well, the environment wasn’t in admin mode, so it wasn’t that
  • Is there a plugin not firing correctly? Well, this is native Microsoft standard functionality within the platform, so unlikely, but we double-checked to make sure. No, there wasn’t anything causing issues in that dimension
  • Does it work for users, when it’s created manually within the system? Yes, it DOES work when users enter an order/order line with a product. Hmm…this was getting VERY confusing

For clarification, we didn’t want to auto-calculate the information within ADF, and then push it into the relevant Dynamics 365 columns. We wanted to be able to rely on the system working in the way that it should!

Finally, we found out why the calculated columns weren’t working. There’s actually a system setting that governs how this works:

With this set, the auto calculations are now working in the system:

So, thankfully we managed to get this working, and everything went smoothly from that point.

Have you ever been caught out by something similar? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below!

Security Roles & Assigning Records

Let’s face it, and call a spade a spade (or a shovel, depending on where in the world you happen to be). Security roles are very important within Dataverse, to control what users can (& can’t!) do within the system. Setting them up can be quite time-consuming, and troubleshooting them can sometimes be a bit of a nightmare.

Obviously we need to ensure that users can carry out the actions that they’re supposed to do, and stop them doing any actions that they’re not supposed to do. This, believe it or not, is generally common sense (which can be lacking at times, I’ll admit).

Depending on the size of the organisation, and of course the project, the number of security roles can range from a few, to a LOT!

Testing out security can take quite a bit of time, to ensure that testing covers all necessary functionality. It’s a very granular approach, and can often feel like opening a door, to then find another closed door behind the first one. Error messages appear, a resolution is implemented, then another appears, etc…

Most of us aren’t new to this, and understand that it’s vitally important to work through these. We’ve seen lots of different errors over our lifetime of projects, and can usually identify (quickly) what’s going on, and what we need to resolve.

Last week, however, I had something new occur, that I’ve never seen before. I therefore thought it might be good to talk about it, so that if it happens to others, they’ll know how to handle it!

The scenario is as follows:

  • The client is using Leads to capture initial information (we’re not using Opportunities, but that’s a whole other story)
  • Different teams of users have varying access requirements to the Leads table. Some need to be able to view, some need to be able to create/edit, and others aren’t allowed to view it at all
  • The lead process is driven by both region (where the lead is located), as well as products (which products the lead is interested in)

Now, initially we had some issues with different teams not having the right level of access, but we managed to handle those. Typically we’d see an error message along the following lines:

We’d then use this to narrow down the necessary permissions, adjust the security role, re-test, and continue (sometimes onto the next error message, but hey, that’s par for the course!).

However, just as we thought we had figured out all of the security roles, we had a small sub-set of users report an error that I had NEVER seen before.

The scenario was as follows:

  • The users were able to access Lead records. All good there.
  • The users were able to edit Lead records. All good there.
  • The users were trying to assign records (ie change the record owner) to another user. This generally worked, but when trying to assign the record to certain users, they got the following error:

Now this was a strange error. After all, the users were able to open/edit the lead record, and on checking the permissions in the security role, everything seemed to be set up alright.

The next step was to go look at the error log. In general, error logs can be a massive help (well, most of the time), assuming that the person looking at it can interpret what it means. The error log gave us the following:

As an aside, the most amusing thing about this particular error log, in my opinion, was that the HelpLink URL provided actually didn’t work! Ah well…

So on taking a look, we see that the user is missing the Read privilege (on what we’re assuming is the Lead table). This didn’t make sense – we then went back to DOUBLE-check, and indeed the user who was trying to carry out the action had read privileges on the table. It also didn’t make sense, as the user was able to open the lead record itself (disclaimer – I’ve not yet tried doing a security role where the user has create/write access to a table, but no read access..I’m wondering what would happen in such a scenario)

Then we had a lightbulb moment.

photo of bulb artwork

In truth, we should have probably figured this out before, which I’ll freely admit. See, if we take a look at the original error that the user was getting, they were getting this when trying to assign the record to another user. We had also seen that the error was only happening when the record was being assigned to certain users (ie it wasn’t happening for all users). And finally, after all, the error message title itself says ‘Assignee does not hold the required read permissions’.

So what was the issue? Well, it was actually quite simple (in hindsight!). The error was occurring when the record was being attempted to be assigned to a user that did not have any permissions to the Lead table!

What was the resolution? Well, to simply grant (read) access to the Lead table, and ensure that all necessary users had this granted to them! Thankfully a quick resolution (once we had worked out what was going on), and users were able to continue testing out the rest of the system.

Has something like this ever happened to you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear the details!

Workaround for sharing Canvas Apps

Don’t you find it absolutely frustrating when there’s a canvas app that you want to get access to, or give other users access to, but can’t see it? It’s REALLY annoying, but it’s sort of the way that Microsoft has designed the platform (at least at this point in time).

See, when a user creates a canvas app, only the creator is able to see & launch it. If other users want to get access to it, the creator needs to share it. This can be done by sharing the app directly with another user, or by sharing it with an AAD Security Group (which is sort of best practise).

Now, of course there’s the Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence solution, which includes a very handy app to assign permissions for canvas apps. After all, if a user is on holiday, sick leave, or has left the company, there needs to be some way of assigning permissions for other users to gain access to it. It’s really helpful, but of course needs the CoE solution installed.

Let’s think of another scenario. What about if we have some canvas apps as part of a solution, that’s deployed through (proper) ALM – such as using Azure DevOps with automated pipelines. Best practise for this is to use service principals (ie non-interactive user logins). This is great, but then the canvas app/s will be owned by this user. So without the use of the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app, we’re sort of stuck, as we can’t gain access to the app.

Or can we…..?

So this is a scenario that I’ve been dealing with recently, and I’ve found a really cool workaround that doesn’t need the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app to be able to handle the situation.

The example below (amusingly, in my opinion) is actually using the Microsoft CoE solution as an example, but this works with any canvas apps that are held within a solution (against, this heavily supports using solutions for ALL development items!).

So, this is what the actual installed apps look like in this environment:

As we can see, there are a lot of them! But what happens if I’m logged in as my regular user? What do I see if I go to the list of apps? Well, I’ll see the following:

Now, as we can see, I’m able to see the model-driven app (as these aren’t hidden at all). But I’m not able to see ANY of the canvas app! So how can I get access to it, or share it with other users?

Well, if I take a look at the solution itself, I can see the following when browsing to the list of apps (I’m really loving the new Solution Explorer layout, I’ll freely admit!):

I can try to play the canvas app (in this case, the ‘Set App Permissions’ app) directly from the solution. But when I try to do this, I’ll get the following error message:

Now, this is of course happening because I’m not the owner of the app, & the app hasn’t been shared with me at all. So really I was expecting this error to happen.

However, if I take a look at the menu options displayed for me, I can see that the ‘Share’ option isn’t greyed out. I wonder what happens if I click it…

Now this is EXCITING! When clicking the ‘Share’ option on the menu, I’m given the regular sharing screen, where I’m able to set app permissions. So it looks like I’m able to do something here. OK – let’s go ahead & try to share the app with my own user:

So I’ve looked up my own user, and then clicked ‘Share’. This is what happens next…

Exciting moment – will this work?

Waiting with bated breath, and then…

It’s worked! The app sharing has been successful with my user.

Note: The example that I’m using here is with my own user account. However it doesn’t need to be – I can select any user account or AAD Security Group, and share accordingly.

Going to my list of apps, I can now see that the app is showing up for me:

Clicking the app to launch it presents me with the permissions dialogue, and having confirmed permissions, then launches it properly:

So this is indeed a way in which it’s possible to share canvas apps with users and/or AAD security groups, even when a user isn’t the owner of the canvas app.

It is important to note that the user carrying this out does need to have one of the following permissions in the environment:

  • System Customiser
  • System Administrator

Without having one of these roles, it’s not going to be possible to carry out the above (mostly because it’s not possible to see solutions & dig down into them).

This is a handy little trick that hopefully will help clear up one of the headaches when trying to share canvas apps! Of course it’s possible to use the Microsoft CoE tool to set app permissions, but if a customer doesn’t have it installed, then this would be another way to approach things.

Have you ever had this issue? How did you go about solving it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below…

Omnichannel vs Customer Service Workspace

This is a question that I’m being asked on a semi-regular basis at the moment, so I thought it would be helpful to do a writeup around things. It’s definitely not clear from the outset based on existing documentation. However, being able to speak to wonderful people such as Tricia Sinclair has been amazing in being able to figure out the differences between the two applications.

So, where to start. Well, let’s first of all understand the similarities between the two applications.

Firstly, they are both multi-session apps. To put this in context (as mentioned elsewhere previously) – traditionally Dynamics 365 applications have been ‘single session’ applications. This means that users would navigate around, open/close records, create or edit as necessary. If users wanted to have multiple records open, they’d need to have multiple tabs open, or even multiple windows (yes, I still remember the days before browsers had tab functionality!).

What multi-session means in this context is that users are able to open up multiple records, and switch between them in the same tab. Open records pop into the left-hand navigation bar, and users can easily click between them. Not only that – users are also able to open further tabs within the same record pane, to access further information. These stay open whilst users switch to other records, which is really quite helpful!

So for example, a user could open a case record, then open the contact associated to the case, as well as the account related to the case. They could then further open the knowledge base to search for articles, and so on and so forth. All of these stay open.

Both apps are also web applications – they run in a browser, rather than needing to have a specific software application installed for them (unlike Unified Service Desk).

So, where do they actually differ? Well, this was a bit difficult for me to understand in the first instance, though that turned out to be because I had both Customer Service Workspace as well as Omnichannel configured within the same environment! Turns out that this wasn’t the best approach to take to compare the two, & understand their capabilities. Easily fixed though with quickly spinning up a new trial to install one in.

So with knowing how Omnichannel works (after all, I’ve written quite extensively around it), let’s take a look at the Customer Service Workspace app:

Customer Service workspace overview
  1. The session pane lists all the sessions that you are actively working on. Select the tabs to navigate among sessions.
  2. The Home session returns you to the Customer Service Agent Dashboard view.
  3. Each session has a tab in the session panel. Select a tab to navigate to the session you want to work on.
  4. Select a case to open a new session. A single click on a case replaces your view with the case form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to get back to your previous view.
  5. Select the tabs to navigate to your open activities, cases, forms and views.
  6. Select the + icon to expand the menu to view a list of forms, views, and activities. Select the one you want to open in a new tab.
  7. Select the drop-down selector to filter cases in queues you can choose to work on.
  8. Select Shift + mouse click to open a new session for an activity. A single click replaces your view with the activity form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to go back to your previous vie

Now, without Omnichannel installed in the same environment (& obviously licensed for users), it’s not possible to have native Dynamics 365 channels such as Chat, WhatsApp, etc. Conversations will not appear for customer service agents who are using the Customer Service Workspace.

Note: If you DO have Omnichannel installed in the same environment, and users are licensed to use it, then conversations will show up within the Customer Service Workspace app for them. They’ll have notifications pop up on the screen for incoming customer sessions.

That’s not to say that it’s not possible to have channels available within Customer Service Workspace. So how do they actually come in?

Well, as it turns out, channels within Customer Service Workspace need to be third party channels. There are a plethora of 3rd party add-ons for Dynamics 365, that offer different communication capabilities. Some of these do date back a while (to before any native Microsoft capabilities).

For example, there are ISV add-ons for Customer Service that can embed a call dialler into the experience, so that customer service agents can call directly from a record. Or alternatively an add-on such as a 3rd party web chat application, that can then surface these within the Customer Service Workspace. Each of these obviously would need to be purchased, licensed & integrated appropriately with your Dynamics 365 solution as necessary too.

Now both applications also have other similar functionality, such as the Productivity Pane, Agent Scripts, Smart Assist & Knowledge Search. However there can be differences between them. For more information, I’d suggest taking a look at Tricia’s blog article that goes into depth on this.

So to summarise, Omnichannel is for the native Microsoft channels, giving customer service agents the ability to service customers using them. Licensing (currently) is with Customer Service Enterprise, and then either the Digital Chat or Digital Messaging add-on SKU’s.

Customer Service Workspace, on the other hand, allows customer service agents to be able to have a multi-session application for their work, as well as allowing communications through third-party channels. Licensing is as per the different Customer Service SKU’s, with any 3rd party add-on being licensed appropriately.

Hopefully this helps clarify the different between these two, and make them less confusing. If you have any further questions around this, please drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to respond!

Environments & ‘Admin Mode’

With some recent events happening (both professional & personal), I’ve taken a slight step back from putting out posts on here. Thankfully things seem to be settling down, so I’m getting (back) into the swing of things!

I thought that it would be good to talk about a subject that I fell ‘foul’ of recently. This is around environments, and more specifically, the ‘admin mode’ that it’s possible to use on them.

So what exactly is this ‘admin mode’? Well, the aim of it to restrict access to certain users, namely System Administrators & System Customisers. Why would we want to do this? There are several scenarios that come into mind:

  • Performing a system upgrade (such as enabling new features)
  • Changing environment type (eg Production to Sandbox, or vice-versa)
  • Restoring an environment

Essentially, any time we have operation-type work that we’re wanting to carry out. This way whatever we’re doing won’t affect users, and anything that the users are doing won’t affect things either (symbiotic relationship there!).

So as an example, if we’re doing a major release, which changes functionality within a system, we wouldn’t want users in the system carrying out their usual work, as this could have data issue if saving during the actual release. We of course SHOULD be communicating to users that a release is going to take place, and that they shouldn’t be in the system at the time, but ‘admin mode’ is how we can truly enforce it.

Something to bear in mind as well is that if you’re going ahead & restoring an environment to a previous state (whether that’s an automatic save point, or a manual one), it will automatically put the environment into ‘admin mode’ once the restore has been completed. This is very important to keep in mind!

There are three settings around administration mode:

  1. ‘Administration Mode’. This sets whether admin mode is on or off!
  2. ‘Background Operations’. This sets whether background processes, such as workflows, power automate flows, and Exchange synchronisation are enabled (allowed to happen) or disabled (stopped from happening
  3. ‘Custom Message’. This allows you to set a custom message that users (who are not system administrator/system customiser) will see when they attempt to access the environment

So this is the scenario that tripped me up a few weeks back:

  • I was needing to restore an environment to an earlier save point (to be clear, this was NOT a production environment)
  • I went ahead with the restore, and it completed successfully
  • Given that I was doing this at night, one of my children woke up, and I had to deal with them
  • I came back to things, saw that it completed, and then went ahead with the release that I was needing to do

All seemed to go well. However, when users were testing (which admittedly was a few days later), they reported that some functionality wasn’t working. This was strange, as it had been working before the release (& the release that I did hadn’t actually touched it!).

It turned out to be Power Automate flows that just didn’t seem to be running. OK – I started to look into them, but couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t run.

Creating a test Power Automate flow didn’t seem to work either – despite running it to test it, the trigger never activated! I was quite puzzled by this, and couldn’t (initially) work out the reason.

Then I thought to check environment settings! Lo & behold, the environment was STILL in administration mode, and the Background Process option was disabled! Aha – I’ve found the source!

Flipping this out of administration mode thankfully then allowed all Power Automate flows to work/run, and users confirmed that functionality was indeed running as expected. As you can imagine, I was quite relieved!

man in white shirt and black pants standing on black concrete bench near white building during

Something that I hadn’t realised previously is that if you manually put an environment into administration mode, it doesn’t automatically disable background processes. However, if you restore an environment, it DOES disable background processes by default. So if you’re wanting to try out automation items within a restored environment that’s still in administration mode, you’re going to need to ensure that you toggle the Background Processes toggle to allow it to work!

One further thing to learn as well (which I’ve been asked already by some people, so thought that I would mention it here). I’ve mentioned above that users were in the system, but reporting that things weren’t working. Now given that the environment was in administration mode, people have asked how users could be in it! The answer is that these users actually had the system customiser role applied to them, which is why they could get in! If they hadn’t had the role, then perhaps I might have realised things a little sooner (ie that the environment was in administration mode).

So a (good) little lesson learned, and I’ll definitely take it forwards. Has this, or anything else like it, ever tripped you up? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!