Tag: updates

Active or inactive, that is the question?!?!

Catchy title, right? Well I was wondering what exactly I should use for this blog post, and as you’ll see as we go through things, this is probably quite a good paraphrase to use.

So, where to start? Well, with a customer, of course! Now, this customer has been running live with a custom Dynamics 365 solution for a little while. Importantly for this story, there have not been ANY releases in quite a few months. This is of course good to bear in mind, given that we can all, um, occasionally find that a release could cause an issue, somewhere, sometimes…

Part of the capabilities that they’re using is bringing in Leads, and qualifying them appropriately. As part of this process, there are various custom attributes (aka columns) that have been added to the Lead table, along with corresponding columns added to the Contact table. There’s also some custom logic that, when a lead is qualified, copies the values from Lead to Contact record, updating it (essentially extending the standard capabilities of the system).

This has all been working well to date, and the customer team has been very happy with their system. Until it stopped working, last week. Which was strange, as nothing seemed to have changed at all?

When trying to qualify leads in the system, they were getting the following error message:

Cryptic, right? This seemed a little more interesting as well, given that when only inputting basic information into a Lead record (eg First Name, Last Name, Phone Number), it didn’t matter how many leads existed with the same information, it qualified without a problem.

However, using any custom columns that had been added to the table caused this error to occur.

The first thing that I did was to check that there had been no updates released to Production. This was confirmed as being the case. I then also checked that there had been no OTHER solutions released to Production (as this could have impacted on it). Thankfully there hadn’t – the system looked to be in as fine a shape as it’s been running for a while.

OK – on to the next step. What updates have been released by Microsoft? Well, with the fact that we were able to pinpoint the date that the functionality had stopped working, we went to find the corresponding Learn article about the release (Update 22102 – Release Notes | Microsoft Learn). Don’t worry about clicking through to read it – there’s essentially not much in it, and there’s nothing at all around the Lead table or its functionality!

Continuing to dig around, I really wasn’t sure of what was causing this, but obviously had to work it out & figure out a fix! It was quite a dilemna.

This is where the amazing Microsoft community came into play. I noticed a post by Jeroen Scheper on one of the channels that I’m on. It turns out that he was having the same issues, so we started to try collaborate on it. This both reassured me (that it wasn’t just me), but also increased the confusion, as we couldn’t work out what was going on underneath to cause this!

Raising with Microsoft (we both actually raised support incidents), I had an amazing support call almost immediately. Demonstrating the problem, I was told that it was due to Duplicate Detection rules.

Now I’ll admit that this confused me somewhat. See, I had already checked the Duplicate Detection rules, but nothing had been changed, and no new rules had been implemented.

Getting the support agent to walk me through things, they told me that I had to unpublish the rules, modify a setting on them, and then re-publish the rules. This was the setting (on each one) that had to be updated:

This again caused me to be confused. Why was the system having issues with inactive records? Surely qualified leads are active records, but just qualified (& then being locked down as a result)?

Well, it turns out that my perspective of how this works is actually incorrect. As we (hopefully) all know, whilst all records have a Status value (eg Active, Inactive), there are some records that also have a Status Reason value.

In fact, the ‘State Code’ choice value in Dataverse is restricted (we can’t access it), and seems to have some quite interesting functionality running behind it. Depending on which table is accessed, there are different options available within it.

For example, the Lead table shows:

Whereas the Contact table shows:

And the Task table shows:

Anyhow – it turns out that when a Lead record is qualified or disqualified, though it’s not shown in the user interface (nor behind the scenes), the record is actually being deactivated!

More information on this can be found at Qualify and convert leads to opportunity | Microsoft Learn.

So, this was the underlying reason behind the error message. Obviously Microsoft had updated something, which then caused this to fail. I don’t know how many different customers may have been (or still be?) experiencing the issue, but I think that the error message at least could be a little clearer? Perhaps including a link to the relevant Microsoft documentation page, for a start.

Well, thankfully this was put to bed, and I was quite thankful (as was the customer). And this is how I decided to come up with the title of this blog post!

Have you ever had something similar happen to you? 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.