Tag: poweraddicts

MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst

It’s been a while since taking a Microsoft certification exam, but with the new MB-280 exam being launched in the last few days, I’ve obviously needed to take a look at it! It felt a little strange, as I’m now used to the certification renewal process (which is why I haven’t taken any exams in a while), but thankfully things went alright with the overall exam.

For those who haven’t been following the news, Microsoft made an announcement a few months back that some exams would be retiring, and the new MB-280 exam would be the replacement for this. In short, this is supposed to replace the MB-210 (Sales), MB-220 (Customer Insights – Journeys) & MB-260 (Customer Insights – Data). Malin Martnes wrote a good blog post in June – I’d suggest to take a look at it at for more general information around it.

Now I’m all up for new certifications being created & made available. However, and I know this could be considered controversial, I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA as to why this exam was created in THIS specific way. If an exam had been created, for example, to bring together the two sides of Customer Insights (ie to cover both Data & Journeys in a single exam), I think that would have been quite good.

But with having taken this, my thoughts (& feedback to Microsoft directly) is that they should un-deprecate (if that’s a word/phrase?) the MB-210 exam, and continue it forward. There’s no reason that I can see having Marketing & Sales together in a single exam – it feels like two (or technically 3?) lego bricks lumped together without any rhyme or reason.

The learning path for the exam was also launched in the last few days, and can be found at Study guide for Exam MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst | Microsoft Learn

The official description of the exam is:

As a candidate for this exam, you’re a Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience analyst who has:

  • Participated in or plans to participate in Dynamics 365 Sales implementations.
  • An understanding of an organization’s sales process.
  • An understanding of the seller’s perspective (user experience).
  • The ability to demonstrate Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys capabilities.

You’re responsible for configuring, customizing, and expanding the functionality of Dynamics 365 Sales to create business solutions that support, automate, and accelerate the company’s sales process. You use your knowledge of customer experience capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Power Platform to inform the following design and implementation tasks:

  • Configure Dynamics 365 Sales standard and premium features.
  • Implement collaboration features.
  • Configure the security model.
  • Perform Dynamics 365 Sales customizations.
  • Extend Dynamics 365 Sales with Microsoft Power Platform.
  • Deploy the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

As a candidate, you need:

  • An understanding of the Dataverse security model and features, including business units, security roles, and row ownership and sharing.
  • Experience configuring model-driven apps in Microsoft Power Apps.
  • An understanding of accounts, contacts, and activities.
  • An understanding of leads and opportunities.
  • An understanding of the components of model-driven apps, including forms, views, charts, and dashboards.
  • An understanding of model-driven app personal settings.
  • Experience working with Dataverse solutions.
  • An understanding of Dataverse, including tables, columns, and relationships.
  • Familiarity with Power Automate cloud flow concepts, such as connectors, triggers, and actions.

More can be found at the exam page itself, which is located at Exam MB-280: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Analyst (beta) – Certifications | Microsoft Learn

Now during my exam, I was looking forward to seeing the ‘new’ capability around being able to use Microsoft Learn during the exam (new to me – as I haven’t taken any other exams in the last year or so since it was announced!). However there didn’t seem to be any capability to launch Microsoft Learn – I’m not sure why it wasn’t available, as this isn’t a Fundamental level exam

Questions also used the older terms of references rather than the newer/accepted terms – ie using ‘field’ instead of ‘column’, and ‘entity’ instead of ‘table’. Again, I have no idea why this is – all other exams (including the renewals for them) are using these properly (in my summary below I have ensured I use the correct terms).

So, as I’ve posted before around my exam experiences, 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!). It’s also in beta at the moment, which means that things can obviously change.

I’ve tried to group things as best together as I feel (in my recollection), to make it easier to revise.

  • Sales Apps
    • Configuring forms, columns & tables
    • Configuring security roles & access to records
    • Configuring relationships between records (including deletion properties)
    • Sales Mobile App – security & deployment
    • Forecasting – setting up & configuring
    • Configuring Goals
    • Configuring Opportunities
    • Handling currencies
  • Copilot for Sales
    • Setting up & deploying to users
    • Configuring access
  • Outlook App
    • Deploying & setting up
    • Configuring forms & information
  • Exchange
    • Connecting to mailboxes
    • Configuring folder permissions
    • Configuring multiple domains
  • Product Families & Catalogue
    • Creating & setting up
    • Configuring options
    • Adding items to be used
  • Price Lists
    • Creating & setting up
    • Configuring options, including discounts
    • Using time-restricted price lists
    • Handling currencies
  • Document Management
    • Different document management capabilities
    • Usage of SharePoint in different ways
  • Data Import
    • Usage of Power Query
    • Data manipulation
    • Handling duplicate records
  • SMS
    • Setting up & configuring SMS provider
  • Journeys
    • Different triggers to use based on scenarios & requirements
    • How to trigger journeys
    • How to set up emails to be used within a journey
  • Segments
    • Different types of segments
    • Creating & modifying segments
  • Searching/Filtering
    • Using Advanced Find
    • Setting up/modifying queries to include/exclude records based on conditions
  • Business Process Flows
    • Modifying business process flows
    • Handling conditions within business process flows

As a Sales exam, it seemed alright. But as mentioned above, the Customer Insights questions just seemed strange to me – I’d expect a consultant to be very technically skilled in Customer Insights, but not in Sales (& vice versa), so I’m not understanding bringing these two sides together.

I’m going to be quite interested in seeing how the exam is actually launched (as it’s currently in Beta of course). Having chatted with a few others who have taken the exam (whilst obviously respecting the NDA!), they also can’t really understand the landscape. Personally, I think that if it continues like this, Microsoft is going to hear quite a few complaints around it.

I hope that this is helpful for anyone who’s thinking of taking it – good luck, and please do drop a comment below to let me know how you found it! I’d also be interested in your thoughts/opinions around the direction that Microsoft has taken for this!

Developer Environment Routing!

Recently I talked about the wider vision that organisations would be able to use, for helping users get access to the right environments (Default Environment – How to handle? » The CRM Ninja). As part of this, I discussed the Microsoft vision of having environment routing in place, to move users automatically to specific environments.

At the point of writing, there wasn’t anything that I could publicly talk about. However, overnight Microsoft have released functionality around this – what I see as being the first step that this direction is taking. The documentation for this is at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/default-environment-routing-public-preview/

The functionality released is to enable new users to Power Platform to automatically have a developer environment created for them to access, rather than landing in the Default environment within their tenant. Many organisations struggle with users creating content in the Default environment, when it’s not really (at least not in my opinion) the right place to do this.

Now, when we say ‘new users’, this doesn’t actually mean users newly created in M365 (or Entra ID/AAD). What this means is ‘users who have not accessed anything within Power Platform before’. In the back end, there’s a counter on each user record that keeps track of this, which this functionality is using to determine if users have accessed Power Platform beforehand or not.

What is important to note on this as well is that the Default environment DOES NOT need to be set to Managed for this to work. Microsoft documentation doesn’t make this clear at the moment, but hopefully it’ll be updated soon to clarify this.

Two settings do need to be toggled on within the Power Platform Admin Centre for this to work:

Once these have been set & saved, let’s take a look at how things actually happen. I’ve created a new user for testing purposes:

When signing in, it then briefly shows the general interface that we’re used to for a few seconds:

But, then we get this exciting NEW screen!

And then after a minute or so, we get placed nicely in the new environment:

Looking at the Power Platform Admin Centre, we can see the new environment that’s been created:

To be candid, during my testing things didn’t always work – I had some differing behaviour, or (on one occasion) the interface just hung. I’m going to put this down to being newly released & the product team working through potential issues (remember of course – this is in PREVIEW), and am hoping that they’re resolved very soon.

Also, it’s important to note that the developer environments created through this are MANAGED. Users will be able to create collateral in them, but to run apps etc will need premium licensing in place.

Moving forward, it would be great to have some information displayed to users if something hasn’t worked, as well as notifications to admins (configurable) so that they’re aware as well. Examples of this could include where an organisation has maxed out the number of (free) developer licenses available (yes, I know this sounds stange, but there’s a default limit of 9,999 developer licenses per org).

But I think it’s a great first step forward, and hopefully there will be many different ways that this product will be developed forward. My initial thoughts would include:

  • Creating developer environments for existing Power Platform users who don’t have a personal developer environment
  • Routing existing Power Platform users who have their own Developer environment to it
  • Being able to route to other places as well, including being able to specify which users/groups of users should be routed

It’s an exciting place to be in, and I look forward to seeing more of it!

What are your thoughts around this? Does your organisation allow users to have personal developer enviroments, or do they lock it down?

Default Environment – How to handle?

As we’re all aware, the default (Power Platform) environment in any Azure tenant is a very ‘interesting’ thing to have. It’s there by default when an Azure tenant is created, all users within the Azure tenant automatically have access to it, we’re not able to restrict users from being in it, etc etc.

Though it’s able to be backed up, it’s not able to be restored over itself, there’s no SLA/support available on it….the list goes on & on…!

Many of us have come up against issues caused by people using the default environment whilst not knowing about challenges involving it, which usually results in pulling out our hair, banging our head against the wall, and other like-minded productive approaches.

However, it is the first place that users, being new to Power Platform, land up, and instinctively they’ll start building applications, automations etc within it (though usually without using solutions as a container for the development of items). So to date, there’s not really anything that’s been able to be done around this, apart from monitoring users & chasing them after the fact.

Now, we’re all about enabling our users in the right way, helping educate & support them. Telling them a big NO doesn’t help, and can even be an initial blocker to having people start playing around & building technological solutions.

So how can we go about enabling our users, but also having the appropriate level of governance over the top? Well, there are several steps that I think we can take, which will help us with these. Now, not all of these are yet in place, though they have been talked about publicly. So let’s go take a look at them

  1. The first step, in my mind, is to start off with enabling the default environment as a managed environment (yes, this can ACTUALLY be done!). Managed environments have many different properties associated with them, but the one of most interest (for this at least) is the requirement to have a premium license in place.

All users within an organisation should by default have an M365 license SKU against them (usually this would be an E3 or E5). Users with these can immediately use the seeded Power Platform capabilities within them to create Power Platform collateral (using standard connector capabilities). However, with the default environment being managed, they will NOT be able to access it!

Note: For the moment, I’m leaving out users who have premium Power Platform licenses – this is deliberate

  1. Environment routing. Announced recently is the environment routing capabilities. This will enable users to be automatically routed to an appropriate environment, based on various conditions that can be set. With this, we could create appropriate business unit ‘sandboxes’, and we could route users to these. The user experience would be that when logging in, they would automatically then go to the right environment, rather than trying to work out which environment they should actually go to. This will save on confusion, and be a good user experience (in my opinion).
  1. Just-In-Time (JIT) Environment Creation. One of the items mentioned by Charles Lamanna at the European Power Platform Conference 2023 in Dublin is a new capability that’s coming in soon (I hope!). From the sound of it, this will give the ability to automatically create a new environment for users who do not already have one.

This sounds really cool. With the recent advent of Development Environments (& the ability for all users to have multiples of these), this could work REALLY well with the environment routing capability mentioned above. When a user would log in for the first time, it could look to see if they have a developer environment – if yes, then route them to it. But if the user didn’t, then to automatically spin up & create a new developer environment, and route them to it.

Now there are some caveats with this approach, leaving aside that some of the functionality isn’t GA yet.

It would mean that organisations would need to be alright with changing the default environment to become a managed environment. Obviously, risk assessments would need to be carried out with this, and non-premium solutions migrated elsewhere.

It’s also important to call out that organisations which have a CDS 1.0 implementation (ie before Power Platform became GA etc) will only have the ability to upgrade default to managed. They are not able to downgrade back to an unmanaged default environment, given limitations of the original CDS implementation (I’ve heard some truly HORRIFIC stories around this, so be careful!)

The above, however, is just the start of things. There are many other concepts to keep in mind, such as Landing Zones, Policies, etc. I’m going to be looking to cover these in upcoming posts, so keep an eye out for them!

New Power Platform Security Role Editor

We’ve all been there. Security role wise, that is. It’s the point in any project where we start looking at configuring user security. To do this, we’ve used the Security Role section in the Settings area (once it’s actually loaded, of course):

Ah, the joys of this – dating back to CRM 3.0 (to my recollection – though it possibly might be 4.0). All of these lovely little circles, which fill up more & more as we click on them, whilst trying to work out what each one actually does:

And that’s not to mention the ‘Missing Entities’ tab (did anyone ever figure out what this was supposed to be used for), or the ‘Custom Entities’ tab which seemed like a catch all place. Plus the fact that non-table permissions (eg Export to Excel) were placed on random tabs that meant we needed to hunt through each tab to find the appropriate item.

Now many of us spend hours in here (then further hours once we started troubleshooting user issues that were down to security role misconfiguration). The absolutely ‘JOYS‘ of the header title row not being scrollable (though it was possible to hover over each permission, and it would tell you what it was). The power of clicking on the line item, and seeing ALL of the little circles fill up – if you haven’t ever done it, you’ll not have experienced the bliss that this could bring!

But all things come to an end(or as the Wheel of Time series says:’ The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend‘), and now we have a NEW security role experience.

First of all, the UI has changed. It’s cleaner, responsive, gives more information to users upfront….and the heading SCROLL!!!

We’re able to show just the tables that have permissions assigned to them (rather than wading through dozens or hundreds of entries that have no relevance), or show everything:

Oh, and those random non-table privileges that we had to try to find beforehand – these are now grouped very nicely. This is SO much easier to manage!

We can also take permissions that have been set on a specific table, and then copy them to another table (it promps us to select – and we can select MULTIPLE tables to copy to!):

But best of all is the way that we can now set permissions for items. There are several different ways of doing this.

Firstly, Microsoft has now provided us with the ability to select standard pre-defined options. Using these will set permissions across all categories for the item appropriately:

This is really neat, and is likely to save quite a bit of time overall. However if we’re needing to tweak security permissions to custom settings, we can do this as well. Instead of clicking on circles, we now have lovely dropdowns to use:

In short, I’m absolutely loving this. The interface is quick to load, intuitive, and works well without fuss.

Given how much time I’ve spent over the years in wrestling with security roles, I think this is going to be a definite timesaver for so many people (though we’ll still need to troubleshoot interesting error messages at times that testing will throw up, and work out how/what we’re needing to tweak for security access to work).

There are still some tweaks that I think Microsoft could make to get this experience even better. My top three suggestions would include:

  • The ability to select multiple lines, and then set a permission across all of them (sort of like bulk editing)
  • Being able to have this area solution aware. When we have various different projects going on, it would be great to have the ability to filter the permissions grid by a solution. This would be a timesaver, rather than having to wade through items that aren’t relevant
  • Export to Excel. Having a report generated to save digitally or print off is amazing for documentation purposes. There are 3rd party tools (thank you XrmToolBox!), but it would be great to be built into here

Overall, I’m really quite happy and impressed with it (it’s definitely taken enough time for Microsoft to pay attention to this, and get it out), and hope that it’ll continue to improve!

What have your bugbears with the legacy security editor been over the years, and how are you liking the new experience? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Reflections on MVP Summit

A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to travel to Redmond, Seattle (in the USA), to partake in-person in the Microsoft MVP Summit. To say that this was an experience like no other is likely to be an understatement.

Some people may be unfamiliar with what MVP Summit is. As a Microsoft ‘Most Valuable Professional’, we can engage with Microsoft in various different ways. These include discussions with Microsoft Engineering (aka ‘Product Group’ or ‘PG’), trying out features before they get generally released, etc. There are various methods by which these interactions occur, though in general (especially given how MVP’s are based around the globe), these are via email, virtual calls, etc.

However, Microsoft has for many years hosted an MVP Summit at its headquarters in Redmond. This is an in-person event over multiple days, where any MVP can attend & take part. It includes up to date information on capabilities, discussions how Microsoft foresees its roadmap, etc. As an MVP, we are under NDA to Microsoft, and MVP Summit is entirely under NDA as well (well, in terms of the content discussed – selfies, however, are widely shared around social media!).

Having been awarded during the initial pandemic lockdown in October 2020, I had never had the chance to attend an MVP Summit in person before. In 2020, Microsoft switched the format to being virtual, and this was the case for 2021 & 2022. I attended both of these virtually, but didn’t find them the most amazing experience – everyone had been telling me that it was about the in-person networking, connections & more, and although I hadn’t been to one before, I could sense that this was true. Also, given that sessions were held in PST, timezones were difficult (in 2022, I actually ‘based’ myself in PST, albeit it with being physically present in London – it was definitely quite strange!).

With the 2023 MVP Summit on the horizon, MVP’s all around the world were hoping that the event would be in person, and indeed it was (though it was held slightly later in the year).

I’m grateful to Kainos, the Microsoft Partner that I work at, who sponsored my ability to go to Redmond. Without this, it would have been extremely difficult for me to be able to attend.

There were LOTS of selfies happening, with community & Microsoft people. My small ‘claim to fame’ is that I got the FIRST selfie with Scott Guthrie following the keynote!

Overall, there were several main things that I took away from attending MVP Summit:

  • Meeting community members from across the globe. Though MVP Summit was announced at somewhat short notice, MVP’s from many different areas (including APAC) managed to make it in. Meeting them in person was just amazing – including Dian Taylor for the first time – we’ve been chatting for ages, and she was the original person to nominate me for the MVP award!Everyone was just so calm & chilled, and happy to chat about anything. It really drove home what a family the community is, and how it enables so many people
  • Meeting Microsoft people in person. I’ve been interacting with various members of different Microsoft PG’s over the last number of years (Power Platform SLT, governance, adoption, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, etc). Being able to meet them in person really deepened existing relationships, as well as being able to be introduced to people who I hadn’t met before. Something that also really hit home was being able see how our feedback actually impacts & affects the Microsoft people involved. Being able to ‘rockstar’ them, and have them see our enthusiasm in person was something that I wasn’t expecting at all, and it was truly wonderful that it happens.

Now although the event this year was in-person, Microsoft trialled a new format for it – hyrbid. This enabled MVP’s who were not able to attend in person to join the sessions (though unfortunately not the networking between sessions). This, combined with also having sign-language capabilities for some of the sessions, really did go a long way to making the event as inclusive as possible.

I was quite well prepared for the week, bringing gifts from the UK (aka PROPER chocolate), and some LEGO to do a giveaway competition (congratulations to Olena G & Azure M on winning!):

Coming back from it, it has taken a little bit of time to recover (not sure if it’s been jetlag specifically, more general exhaustion, and adaption back to ‘regular’ family life’. Reflecting back, this was an experience like no other – it only developed & got more amazing throughout the entire week that I was there for. Being able to meet others, network, strengthen existing relationships…the opportunity to do this was just SO valuable.

Now, I’m really hoping that I get the opportunity to go to MVP Summit next year!

Power BI & Dataverse Solutions

With the recent announcement of Power BI being able to be included in Power Platform solutions, LOTS of people were celebrating. Finally there would be the ability to not only include Power BI reports within solutions, but we could then also automate (aka ALM) it as well! Celebrations all round….well, for the most part.

See, although the documentation (see Power Platform solutions can now include Power BI reports and datasets – Power Platform Release Plan | Microsoft Learn) states that Power BI reports & datasets can now be included in solutions, it doesn’t actually quite work like that.

What happens is that when Power BI reports and datasets (depending on what you’re wanting to do) are included in solutions, though it does appear in the solution explorer window, it’s actually just a sort of shortcut to where they actually live. Exporting the solution then brings in the components into the exported solution file. This can be seen quite clearly when extracting the file on your computer:

As we can see from the image above, we now have the Power BI components within it

Note: If you were hoping to just go into it & see the Power BI report nicely, unfortunately you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, it’s exported as a ‘.pbipkg’ file, which doesn’t seem possible to open with Power BI Desktop at all!

But it’s there, and supposed to work. So let’s go ahead & import it into the destination environment. After all, this is the whole point of solutions – being able to move components between places!

Note: For the purpose of this blog post, I’m using manual ALM (ie manually exporting & importing the solution). However, the same will be true for automated ALM (eg using Azure DevOps).

Now this can be easier said than actually done. See, it’s quite possible that you could experience an error when importing the solution into the target environment, such as the following:

The error message (‘This solution contains Power BI components, so it couldn’t be imported here’) seems to be helpful – well, to a point. We know that there are Power BI components in the solution – after all, this is the point of it, but how comes we’re not able to import it!

Usually at this point I’d go to download the log file, and try to pinpoint the exact cause of the error. When presented with this specific error though, the log file doesn’t really seem to be of much help, despite trawling through each & every line in it. All it does is confirm that there indeed has been an import error, and it seems due to the Power BI components in the solution.

Just to double-check this, I did remove the Power BI components, export the solution, and then import it in a different environment. This worked absolutely fine without any errors! So indeed it’s got something to do with the Power BI components – but WHAT exactly is happening?

Well, the cause of this goes back to how Power BI components in Power Platform solutions actually work. As mentioned above, the Power BI items (report, dataset etc) are actually stored within Power BI itself. Yes, they’re included in the solution when we export it, but when importing them, they don’t actually save to Dataverse.

This is the absolutely KEY important thing to know and understand. When importing a solution with Power BI components, they come in as part of the solution, but are published to Power BI. Not only are they published to Power BI, a Power BI workspace is CREATED for them to live in (which will be specific per environment – a single Power BI workspace will not be shared with multiple Power Platform environments):

What this means in reality is that when the solution is imported, the Power BI workspace is created. However it’s not created by the system itself – underneath everything, the creation of the Power BI workspace is being driven by the USER ITSELF that’s importing the solution. Now, if the user account does NOT have permissions to create Power BI workspaces…well then, it’s going to error out, which is EXACTLY what is happening here!

So, it’s absolutely vital that if you are including Power BI components in a solution, you must ensure that however you’re importing it, the user account has privileges to create Power BI workspaces (as well as publish reports to an existing workspace). Without this in place, you’re going to be getting some very confusing errors happening!

It’s also important to note that even if the solution is managed, it is still possible (with the appropriate user permissions) to edit the Power BI report & dataset. Including it in a managed solution does not lock it.

Also, I’d like to thank Laura GB for her inspiration on this topic – with my limited Power BI knowledge, I usually turn to her for advice & help with Power BI.

Have you been considering including Power BI components in your solutions, or already been doing so? Have you run into this error/issue before? Drop a note below – I’d love to hear how you managed to work out the issue!

Metadata behaviour with solutions

Let’s start with a definition:

Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data

Crystal clear, right? Well, to anyone who’s unfamiliar with the concept of metadata, this is probably NOT so clear.

So what is metadata? Well, the way that I like to describe it is as a set of data that contains information about something. So for example, if I were describing a car, the metadata could be:

  • Manufacterer
  • Model
  • Colour
  • Engine size
  • etc

When it comes to Power Platform, the metadata is referring to the solution structure, ie tables, columns (& column types), etc. Essentially it describes the solution, but doesn’t hold any data that’s entered by users. In fact, we could describe the entire solution file as metadata, which we build & then deploy to downstream environments!

However, the solution metadata isn’t just describing the tables included in the solution, the columns etc. It also describes (& defines) the actual attributes, such as the table type, whether duplicate detection rules are activated or not, etc.

Now, when creating a new table, the metadata is created automatically for us – we don’t need to do anything about it (well, apart from setting it as we may wish it to behave). When importing a table into a solution, however, we get the lovely option to include metadata or not:

As we’re going to see, this is actually quite an important little item to be aware of.

See, if we don’t include the table metadata, we can still set the table properties within the solution. So what is the problem then? Well, there is actually an underlying challenge, which we found out about this week.

We were developing a solution for a customer, which included some standard tables (eg account, contact, etc). We added these into our (custom) solution, though on adding, we did NOT tick the ‘Include table metadata’ option.

We went ahead with creating our custom columns, forms, views etc, all normal sort of practise. However, one of the business requirements stated that auditing needed to be present. Well, there’s a standard table audit functionality available in Power Platform, so we went ahead & selected this in our custom solution:

OK – all is looking good. We finished with the development, and started to go through the ALM process.

On importing the solution to UAT, we couldn’t see any auditing going on (yes, we made sure to enable auditing in the environment settings!). Looking at the solution in UAT, the table did NOT have the auditing flag set for it.

This was quite puzzling. We went back to the DEV environment, and sure enough, the auditing flag was set there. However it obviously wasn’t going through to the UAT environment.

Opening up the actual solution file exported from DEV gave us a surprise. Though we had set the auditing value in it, it wasn’t actually included in the XML:

This was quite puzzling. We decided to try again from the begining with adding the table to the solution, but also setting the ‘Include table metadata’ flag when doing so. We went through the process again of exporting the solution and opening up the file to inspect it. This time, the table audit value WAS present (along with a lot of other metadata values as well):

This was, to be honest, a little annoying. We specifically didn’t want to bring in all the table metadata, as we could potentially affect another setting.

Reaching out to Microsoft, we sought clarification on the behaviour of this. They very nicely came back to provide further information.

At the moment, the behaviour is such that if a user doesn’t include the table metadata when adding it to a solution, it doesn’t matter if the user sets any attributes/values within the solution.

There is a single flag to say whether or not all metadata of a table should be exported or skipped when a solution is exported. This will include ALL includes all attributes ‘about’ the table – display name, description, audit flags, etc. It is quite extensive (for more information on all of the metadata options, please visit EntityMetadata EntityType (Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM) | Microsoft Learn)

If we have a need to modify/change metadata behaviour, we have to set the ‘Include table metadata’ flag. At this point in time, it’s NOT possible to select which metadata we want to include – it’s all or nothing. Now, that’s not to say that this may not change in the future – I can definitely see a need for this, and have fed this back into the Microsoft team accordingly.

I’m hoping that this will come about at some point to allow selective metadata inclusion within the solution, as I think it will be of great benefit to developers!

Has this scenario ever tripped you up before? Do you have scenarios that having selective metadata options would benefit you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Power Platform Capacity Monitoring

If I look back at customer engagements over the last few years around Power Platform, whether it was a new capability or an existing capability, there was ONE thing that stood out above all. This was the ability to be able to track capacity usage over time, and to be honest, most organisations weren’t really doing very well at it.

For those who are unaware, there are actually three different types of capacity present within Power Platform environments. These are:

  • Data
  • File
  • Log

Each one is used for a specific purpose – broadly speaking, File holds all attachements that are uploaded directly into Dataverse, Log is used for auditing purposes, and Data holds everything else (hence the name)!

Now this data is shown within the Power Platform Admin Centre, under the ‘Resources/Capacity’ section’. An example of this is:

There’s also a nice little breakdown of capacity allocation through licenses etc, which essentially shows where the available capacity has come from:

If we drill down a bit further, we can open up a specific environment, and see not only the overall usage per capacity type, but also which tables are consuming the most amount of data:

All of this is well & good so far, for someone wanting to take a look at what is currently happening. But this is a manual action – it is possible to manually export the data, but again, this isn’t automated.

It’s also not possible (at least not at this point in time) to query the underlying records that hold these values. So we’re a little stuck. If an organisation wanted to see historical data usage, and/or predict data trends (such as ‘how much capacity would we need to have in 6 months if we continued our scaling’), there’s no way to do this. At least not automatically – someone would need to store the values down manually, then report on it. A hassle, to say the least.

Now when it comes to looking overall at Power Platform, the Centre of Excellence Starter Toolkit is really quite amazing. The Microsoft PowerCAT team continue to iterate existing functionality within it, as well as bring new functionality as well.

At this point in time, however, it doesn’t have any capacity monitoring in it. Well, it sort of does – we can implement notifications to alert us when capacity reaches a certain value. But this doesn’t solve the challenge as laid out above.

So with this in mind, I set out to create a solution to handle it. I’ve always wanted to create some sort of tool for giving back to the community & helping others, and I saw this as my chance to do so (I’m in awe of the various XrmToolBox tool creators, for the record).

So, I’m releasing a capacity monitoring tool. I’m using GitHub as the host, and the repo can be accessed at https://github.com/thecrmninja/Power-Platform-Capacity-Monitoring (it was a learning experience as well as how to use GitHub as a source repository, as I’ve not done that before!).

Model-Driven App:

Reporting Dashboard:

This is just the first version – I have various ideas about how to iterate on it, and tweak functionality. Each release will include release notes & important information to be aware of (such as security needing to run it). Also importantly, thanks to the amazing Matt Collins-Jones for reviewing some of my work around this.

The audience for this tool is aimed at IT/Power Platform admins who are already familiar with the Microsoft CoE toolkit solution, and have appropriate access to it.

If you find any issues, please raise an appropriate GitHub Issue item, and I’ll look into it. Also, if you have any ideas that you think could be worthwhile, please feel free to suggest them!

Finally, I’d be interested in hearing how you think this could support you or your organisation – feel free to drop a comment below!

PL-500: Microsoft Power Automate RPA Developer

RPA (or Robotic Process Automation) is a capability that Microsoft has been developing for a while within the Power Platform space. Whilst cloud flows can be used to interact with any systems that has an API in place, many organisations have (legacy) systems that have no API, so interacting with them can be challengin. RPA capabilities allow organisations to be able to interact with any system overall, thereby enabling & empowering businesses holistically.

I’ve been aware for a while that there’s been an exam coming out for RPA, though it’s taken a bit of time to land. That’s fine though – I can’t really think of any absolute rush to have it in place. I do think that over time, just as with some of the other certifications, it will become a required for solution or specialisation status.

The official page for it is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/certifications/exams/pl-500. The specification for it is:

Candidates for this exam automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks by using Microsoft Power Automate. They review solution requirements, create process documentation, and design, develop, troubleshoot, and evaluate solutions.

Candidates work with business stakeholders to improve and automate business workflows. They collaborate with administrators to deploy solutions to production environments, and they support solutions.

Additionally, candidates should have experience with JSON, cloud flows and desktop flows, integrating solutions with REST and SOAP services, analyzing data by using Microsoft Excel, VBScript, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), HTML, JavaScript, one or more programming languages, and the Microsoft Power Platform suite of tools (AI Builder, Power Apps, Dataverse, and Power Virtual Agents).

Now here’s the thing. I occasionally work in the automation space, either on customer projects, or when training users in the technologies. I wouldn’t describe myself as an advanced automation developer (whether cloud or RPA capabilities). I’m most definitely NOWHERE near the level of legends such as Matt Collins-Jones, for example (go check him out if you don’t know about him!).

So I knew that I may be a bit challenged when taking the exam, especially in the more ‘pro dev’ space (aka JSON etc). In fact, I didn’t actually realise that the exam specification included that sort of thing. I know, I should have – it’s aimed at developers overall…shows that I need to brush up on reading things properly!

Also, there’s still quite a bit of a focus on Power Automate cloud flows – it’s not JUST about RPA capabilities.

Now, really nicely, there are already Microsoft Learn pathways available (which have been around for a while, and updated appropriately). This really is a big help, I feel, especially for people who are new’ish to RPA.

Of course, there’s a lovely shiny two star badge awarded when passing the exam, along with the title of ‘Microsoft Certified: Power Automate RPA Developer Associate’:

As with previous exams, I sat it from home (the proctored experience). Learning from previous times that I’ve taken exams, I ensured that my workspace was entirely clear from everything. As a result, the check-in process happened automatically, and I didn’t need to engage with any proctors at all (which was quite nice actually).

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.

  • Cloud flows vs RPA flows
    • Capabilities of each
    • When to use each (ie how to handle different scenarios)
    • How to trigger each one
  • Cloud flows
    • Different types of triggers, & when each type should be used
    • Different types of actions, and the capabilities of them (at a high’ish level – expected to know common Microsoft actions, but not need to know all of the hundreds of different ones!)
    • Controls/operators. What they are, how they can be used to accomplish different requirements
    • JSON formatting & syntax
  • Business Process flow vs Business Rules
    • What each is
    • When to use each one
    • Capabilities
  • RPA flows
    • Common actions, how they work, capabilities of them
    • How expression syntax works within them
    • Debugging capabilities, and what to use when
    • How to interact with desktop applications
    • How to interact with websites
      • How data values can be used
      • How data tables can be used
      • How to use data that’s extracted from a website
    • Troubleshooting functionality
  • Usage of automation capabilities from Office 365 applications such as Excel & Visio
  • Loops
    • How they work for cloud & RPA flows
    • Troubleshooting
    • Implementing success/fail criteria
    • Error handling
  • Process Advisor
    • What it is
    • What it does
    • How it can help organisations
    • Limitations
    • What it cannot do
    • Process Mining vs Task Mining, & the important differences between them
  • Variables
    • How to handle variables across different environments
    • How to declare them (cloud flow vs RPA flow)
  • Runtime operations
    • How flows are triggered (async vs sync)
    • How flows are queued (cloud vs RPA)
    • How RPA flows are carried out when using machine groups
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities
    • How AI can be used within flows
    • Different AI capability types (what each one can be used for)
    • AI within Power Platform, & AI within Azure Cognitive Services
  • Sharing flows
    • Different ways to share cloud flows
    • Different ways to share RPA flows
  • Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
    • Solutions (managed vs unmanaged). Capabilities of each, when to use each type
    • AzureDevOps (ADO). What it is, when/how to use it, capabilities
    • Solution imports
    • Solution layers. What these are, troubleshooting functionality
    • Upgrade/Stage for Upgrade/Update. Which each is, what each does, how/when to use each one
    • Moving desktop flows between users
  • Security
    • Security roles needed to create
    • Security roles needed to share/modify
    • Security roles needed to register machine for RPA
    • Security roles needed to register machine groups for RPA
    • Security requirements to run different types of RPA flows (how it interacts with desktop/s)
    • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) – how it affects creation & runtime of flows

Overall, I had 46 questions, with a single case study. I’m used to having at least two case studies, so it was nice to have just one of them this time.

So….it’s a lot of stuff. Definitely targeted much more at the ‘pro-developer’ end of the scale that someone who might occasionally automate things. It’s absolutely necessary to understand coding conventions, ALM, etc.

It’s definitely an exam that if you’re not already currently hands-on with the skills needed, I’d highly recommend you get a decent amount of experience with it before taking the exam! I’d highly recommend ensuring that you have an environment in which you’re able to be hands on with all types of automation (cloud & desktop flows), and really understand how they can be handled with an eye on the enterprise scale!

If you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!

Wave 2 2022 – Omnichannel

I know it’s taken me a week (or two) to get round to this, but I’ve had other things on the go (such as starting my new job, for instance). However it wouldn’t be this time of year without doing a summary of new features for the Wave 2 2022 release.

As with previous posts in this area, I’ll be focusing on the Customer Service side of things, and also more precisely with a focus on the Omnichannel capabilities. However, whilst previously I’ve tended to focus just on the Omnichannel items, Customer Service is now being much more tied together with the Omnichannel offering, so it makes sense to broaden things out a bit.

So let’s start taking a look at the wonders that will (hopefully!) be in store for us within a few months:

Customer Service Workspace – enhanced layout

Public Preview – August 2022. GA – October 2022

I’ve previously taken a look at some of the capabilities of the Customer Service Workspace (see Omnichannel vs Customer Service Workspace), and how they compare to Omnichannel. With Microsoft now rollowing out the ability to have multi-session capabilities within it, it’s sometimes a hard decision for organisations to decide which one to use (there are some key differences though).

With the upcoming release, there are going to be new layouts for the site map (navigation menu), sessions & tabs. Some of the key changes coming are:

  • Sessions and child tabs are displayed horizontally
  • Improved handling of overflowing tabs and sessions
  • Tab bar is visible only if multiple tabs are present in a session
  • Improved site map that’s accessed from the hamburger icon with support for grouping and areas
  • Improved accessibility with 400% zoom mode
  • Increased predictability of session closure in multisession apps
  • In-app notifications aligned with the multisession navigation

These look to be quite good (I definitely wouldn’t have thought of all of them!), and I can’t wait to try them out for myself.

Single sign-on capabilities

GA – October 2022

One of the things that can be quite frustrating for customers is that if they’re interacting through live chat capabilities, and then switch over to a Power Virtual Agent, they need to re-authenticate. This is of course not quite optimal for a seamless customer experience.

Microsoft are therefore enabling single sign-on capabilities. What this means in practise is the following:

  • Authenticant contexts are shared between Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel live chat sessions. If a user authenticates in one of them, then they become authenticated across all of the capabilities. There’s no need to authenticate per communication type
  • Customers can start with an unauthenticated conversation, and then authenticate at a later point in the conversation. This will then continue as authenticated across the different channels that they’re communicating through

Voice channel – expansion of availability

GA – October 2022

The voice channel (which I still need to do a write up on!) is really amazing, allowing customers to call in directly via phone etc. It’s been rolled out already to several regions, but customers in other regions have been asking for it.

Microsoft has now confirmed that the voice channel will now be available in the following countries:

  • United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • India
  • Switzerland

This is a great move – it still doesn’t mean that every country has the voice channel available, so I expect that Microsoft will keep on adding more countries for the availability of this (I know that there’s a decent amount of back-end systems that are needed, which is why it’s taking this long to get in place).

Voicemails

GA – January 2023

This one is getting me really excited. Obviously, being able to connect to a customer service agent is important. But what if the agent isn’t around? We could of course send an email, but if we’re already connected through a specific method of contact, ideally we’d like to continue with that method.

Especially when it comes to actually calling into an organisation, it can be quite frustrating to not reach the person we’re trying to get hold of, and then need to send an email.
Voicemail capabilities, coming in early 2023, will mean that customers will be able to leave voicemails for customer service agents to pick up. The agents will be able to set up welcome messages, as well as manage & playback voicemails that have been left.
This is really cool – I’m wondering if there are going to be AI capabilities included in this in the future, so as to automatically transcibe voicemails for the agents, for instance. I don’t think that it would take a LOT more technical capabilities – we already have Azure Cognitive Services that audio can be fed through to for a written transcription to be produced.

Customer Callbacks

GA – January 2023

One of the frustrations that I think is shared universally is when contacting an organisation, and being told that you’re in a queue. Not only are you in a queue, but there may be dozens/hundreds/thousands of people ahead of you…and the number doesn’t seem to be decreasing at a rapid rate.

Some organisations offer the ability to ‘reserve’ your spot in the queue, and will call you back when you’re next. To date, this hasn’t been a feature of Omnichannel.

However, coming in early 2023, this feature will be rolling out!. It will give customers the ability to keep their queue position, and to choose if they’d like a callback to happen when they’re at the front of the queue. Note that this would require a phone number to be provided, for the customer service agent to use to contact the customer.

I think that this is a nice feature, but will be curious to see how it plays out ‘in the real world’. I know that when my local doctor surgery implemented this, it was supposed to be great, but in practise actually didn’t work well.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities when they land, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!