Tag: roles

Troubleshooting the ‘Follow’ functionality

On a recent client project, we’ve come up against an interesting situation. Some of the users have the ‘Follow’ functionality available to them, but others don’t seem to have it. This, of course, is quite confusing, so I thought it would be good to write about it, for others who may come up against this.

But first, let’s take a step back. After all, before this had happened I had never heard of the ‘follow’ functionality within the system, and I’m quite sure that many others haven’t either! So what exactly is this all about?

What is ‘Follow’?

We’ve all been there – we have some customers who are ‘priority customers’, and we want to know/see everything that’s happening around them. Obviously we can go into their specific record/s, and see what’s going on. For example, seeing new cases added for these customers, other activities, etc. But what if we don’t want to have to manually open the records each time, or set up specific views in the system for them?

Well, this is where the Follow functionality comes in. It’s possible to track activities (in ‘real-time’) for records that a user follows. Microsoft has given us the ability to set this (or unset this) on a per record basis, so that users can set their own preferences within the system. When a user follows a specific record, the details for that record then show up in the users activity feed. This can then be used further, such as displaying it within a dashboard, for example.

Follow functionality through views
Follow functionality on a specific record

It’s also possible to automatically follow records based on specific criteria.

How to set up Follow functionality

In order for records to be able to have the follow functionality available to them, they need to have the Activity Feed enabled for the specific table. The default system tables such as Accounts, Contacts & Leads already have this enabled, so these records are able to be followed without any additional configuration around them.

To enable other tables (such as custom tables that you may have created) to be able to have the records within them followed, we need to carry out the following steps:

  1. Go to the Advanced Settings menu, and open Activity Feeds Configuration

2. Find the table that we’re wanting to configure this for (if it’s not showing up, click the ‘Refresh’ button on the menu)

Here we can see that the Channel table isn’t enabled at this point

3. Click the ‘Activate’ button on the menu bar

4. Confirm the pop up screen

And voila – you’re done! Users will now be able to go into the table/s, and follow (or unfollow) records there

Troubleshooting

So we now understand what the follow functionality is, and how to enable it. But what happens when users can’t actually see it within the system, to be able to use it?

Well, there are several different things that we can do to look to solve the issue:

  • Have activity feeds been configured for the table? If they’ve not been configured, then they’ll need to have this set up (this is why I’ve put the steps above as to how to do this!)
  • Are security roles set up correctly?

The second one is what turns out to have been the issue for this project. It’s been quite confusing, as originally mentioned, that certain users did see the follow functionality, but others users didn’t see it.

The first place to check is the ‘follow’ privileges on each security role:

As you can see above, we had given organisation-level access on the security role (& actually across all security roles), though the users were still having issues. So the next step is to check a different security privilege within the security role. This is the ‘Post Configuration’ setting, which is found under the Custom Entities section (why it’s under Custom, I have NO idea):

Without this enabled, users with the security role will NOT be able to see/use the follow functionality within the system!

Hopefully this should then sort out all issues, and users will be able to use the functionality as required.

Have you ever had issues with this feature? Have you found a different solution to fix it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Marketing & an unusual error

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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