Dynamics Square is UK’s leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, ISO 9001:2008, and NASSCOM accredited IT Consulting and software development company with a strong team of 130+ highly skilled IT experts, catering result-oriented and cost-competitive solutions to Medium to Large businesses across the globe.

Our strong domain experience with multi-technology skill sets enables us to innovate and implement best-in-class solutions for our customers across the globe.

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Full show notes available

https://www.nz365guy.com/303

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Continue Reading Nishant Rana’s Article on their blog

EWS Editor for Dynamics 365

Marcello Tonarelli Blog EWS Editor for Dynamics 365 is based off the original EWS Editor source and is designed to provide troubleshooting tools to help resolve Exchange server integration issues related to Server Side Synchronization and the E-mail Router.

Blog Syndicated with Nishant Rana’s Permission

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Thanks  in advance

Hace poco tuve el gustazo de formar parte de El Rincón Dynamics en su celebración 10+1. Fue un evento muy lindo, con tremenda producción y que generó un montón de material en español (sí, contenido en español!!!) que podes chequear por acá: El Rincón Dynamics - YouTube

Acá abajo te dejo la web del evento, para que veas las charlas disponibles y quienes son los speakers responsables.

Y acá te dejo mi charla! Para que no te pierdas de una divertida conversación sobre Dynamics 365 Human Resources, claramente, en base a tres pilares fundamentales: Colaboradores, Líderes y Áreas de Recursos Humanos.

Even if you are not a hardcore developer, but comfortable with a little bit of cut and paste development, you can utilize the Portal WebAPI to handle some simple Dataverse update and creation tasks.

Community member Omar Zaroor has created an extremely helpful tool on the XrmToolBox called the Power Portal WebAPI Helper to assist with the generation of JavaScript code in a Portal WebAPI format. Simply choose the tables, attributes and the tool will generate the corresponding JavaScript code but also setup the site settings and required Table permissions for the code to work. Take the copied JavaScript code snippet and place it on a web page or in a web template. Omar provides a great tutorial on his blog.

Even with the Power Portal WebAPI helper, you still might need to go in and modify some of the JavaScript code to work for your requirement.

Lookups

In my example, I needed to create a new record that had corresponding lookup values. At this time, the Power Portal WebAPI helper does not generate the code to set lookup values and the docs also don’t explain this very well (it seems some more details have been recently added).

Simply adding the GUID of a record will NOT work.

"avngr_Class": classid,  //this will NOT work

Digging a bit further, the Portal WebAPI is an subset of the Dataverse WebAPI, this is where I discovered the @odata.bind annotation.

The syntax follows;

"avngr_Class@odata.bind": "/avngr_classes(" + classid + ")",

What we need is the table Odata schema name, with @odata.bind appended to it. This will need to be assigned the GUID via adding a “/”, the entity set name with the GUID in brackets.

In the code you can set the GUID through a variable or even via Liquid tag (e.g. setting the currently logged in portal user)

"avngr_Student@odata.bind": "/contacts({{user.id}})"

In the end, my JavaScript function looked something like this to create a new registration record on the portal from a single button click;

    <script>
      function register(classid) {
        var dataObject = {
          "avngr_Class@odata.bind": "/avngr_classes(" + classid + ")",
          "avngr_ponumber": "Online Registration",
          "avngr_Student@odata.bind": "/contacts({{user.id}})"
        };
        webapi.safeAjax({
          type: "POST",
          url: "/_api/avngr_registrations",
          contentType: "application/json",
          data: JSON.stringify(dataObject),
          success: function(res, status, xhr) {
            //print id of newly created entity record
            console.log("entityID: " + xhr.getResponseHeader("entityid"))
            document.getElementById("register").innerHTML = "Registered!";
          }
        });
      }
    </script>

Using this code created a process that was incredibly faster and more user friendly than using something like an Advanced Form. There are other examples of where the Portal WebAPI can be helpful in creating powerful web applications. If you get stuck on a particular piece of syntax, drill down to the Dataverse API and you might discover your answer!

What to Learn More? Join me at ESPC2021!

On June 1st, I will be delivering my session: Power Up with Power Apps Portals! at ESPC21 Online.

This will be my first time presenting at ESPC (European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference). The conference is always amazing, whether in-person or virtual – the best speakers, topics and audience and everyone is so engaged, so I am really excited to be speaking at this event. You can Register for free today! 

About My Session

Power Apps Portals provide a lot of functionality for external users to interact with Dataverse data. Quickly provision an external facing portal, add web pages and begin to power up your portal by allowing users to interact with Dataverse information. Apply authentication and security to the portal to provide a secure conduit for your external stakeholder to only see the information you want to. Extend your portal using HTML, CSS, Liquid, JavaScript and the new Portals WebAPI. No code and pro code unite to build powerful portal experiences!

This session covers some of the basics of using the Portals WebAPI (actually demonstrating the full working solution using the code above!)

I will be taking any questions you may have live during my session, so come prepared!  

As a speaker at ESPC21 Online I can share with you a special 25% discount on Pro Access tickets, which includes a pre-event tutorial of your choice, all event sessions on demand and more. If interested, just use code ESPCPRO when booking here. 

You can find the full event schedule here and check out some of ESPC’s reasons why you don’t want to miss this event here. I hope to see you at ESPC21 Online!  

Summary

Cover Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash

Nick Doelman is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP, a Microsoft Certified Trainer and one co-principles at https://365.training Follow Nick on twitter @readyxrm

It might sound scary at first, but we need to use a little bit of code. This is what can be used to populate the word Customer if the First Name field is empty.

{{#if (eq contact.firstname '')}}
Customer
{{else if (ne contact.firstname '')}}
{{contact.firstname}}
{{/if}}

Let’s break it down a bit. The first line states, if the Contact First Name is equal to ” which is basically checking to see if it is empty. The eq part stands for equals. Then the line below tells the email to use the word Customer, or whatever your default fall-back word of choice would be.

{{#if (eq contact.firstname '')}}
Customer

Next, we are saying if the Contact First Name does not equal ”, meaning it’s not empty, let’s do something else. The ne part stands for not equals.

{{else if (ne contact.firstname '')}}

The next line is telling the email what to use when the First Name field is not empty, which logically we will use what ever is in the First Name field on the Contact.

{{contact.firstname}}

Finally, we end the code by closing off the if statement which is done in this manner below. That stops the email from looking for any more logic in the code.

{{/if}}

We can then take this entire code and add it in to a text block on a marketing email. You can see all of the code below in Yellow with the fall-back option in Purple.

If you want to test it, you can make sure you preview it once with someone who has a first name, and once with someone who you know doesn’t. Always a good idea to have a couple of test Contacts in your environment. Here we can see Jane Doe is being used to preview the email as her. The subject includes the Contact First Name field without any code, and we see her name is displayed. We can also see it shows her name at the top of the email.

Now we preview it as Mr Smith who has no first name value on his Contact record. Notice that the Subject will just show as empty where in the example above it showed Jane’s name, so we would need to add code to make sure a fall-back is used. The top of the email shows the word Customer because our code tells the email to display that when the First Name is missing.

Consider reviewing your emails before you send them out. Make sure you really understand your data and know when values might be empty. If you are using dynamic data, having a fall-back for each option that could possibly be missing is a really good idea!

You can watch a video on this here.

From your survey, hovering your mouse over the top section will show some options. First, we can click on the Style button which is the one that looks like a paint brush.

We can now look through the style options and pick the one that suits our requirements best.

The next button is the one that looks like an artists pallet and that is for the theme colour which will change the background for you. You can pick one of the options that are part of the defaults, or use a specific HEX reference instead.

If you thought you were stuck with the image based on the style you picked, think again! The next button from the menu is for your image. Click on that and either get one of the options from the gallery, or upload your own.

Once you’ve uploaded it, the next button in the menu will be to set the focal point of the image. This means you can move it around on the screen until you are happy with the placement. Once it’s in place, click the Save button.

The next button is for a logo. Once it’s uploaded, hovering over it will give you a series of options to set its placement within the header. Hovering over the name and description on the survey will let us set the placement of that too.

The last button is the all important undo, you know, just in case.

Then we can preview the survey and make sure we are happy with the end result.

Finally, the header can also be turned off completely.

This is perfect if we want to display the survey on a website by using the embed functionality. Nice!

You can watch a video on this here.

Two sentences stood out for me in the release notes;

Our approach with Dynamics 365 Marketing is to unleash the power of all your data – infusing it with AI and empowering you to deliver meaningful messages to your customers. Making the product easy to use is a guiding principle for us as we build features to help you achieve your goals.

Microsoft release notes

The Marketing team wants to make the app easy for the users, and make sure you have happy customers that gets the relevant information from your company. Wonderful statement from the product team!

There are three main focus areas in this release for the Marketing app

• Deeper personalization to engage your customers
• More channels, power, and ease to reach your customers with the right messages
• Analytics to improve results and achieve your business goals

Lets take a closer look at the features in the release.

Use AI-generated segments and recency, frequency, and monetization attributes to target
high-value customers

This feature uses insights from Customer Insights to make even better segments that you can use for targeting specific customers.

Experiment with the next action in a journey to optimize for results

This is the king of A/B-testing! It lets you test different things against each other, just about everything can be compared, the doc says; “different channels with the same message, different messages with the same channel, different channels with different messages, slight variants of the same message (with different subject lines or content), or any actions in the customer journey”

Wow, this feature really lets you test out every different setup you want to test, then it lets you choose how the winner is chosen by a specific date, or send a default version of the message. Really good from the system that didn’t have ordinary A/B testing until October 2019.

Improve journey effectiveness with a new set of built-in analytics dashboards and cross-journey insights

I love pre-built dashboards and reports, they can be very helpful. This will show you statistics across your journeys and channels, you can see what is working and transfer that to other journeys and make them even better.

In real-time, monitor your customer journeys and channel KPIs

This is another analytics feature. See how your journeys are doing in real time, evaluate the steps and channels in each journey, see where your customers stop or leave the journey, so you can make it even better preforming.

Set business goals for journeys and measure progress to the goal

You should never set up a journey without having a clear goal on what you want the journey to do. Now you can set those goals in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can track customer engagement and satisfaction, general onboarding, or drive a purchase.

You can set those goal to a count or percent and choose channels and decide the outcome of A/B testing based on those goals.

Create and send SMS messages to any mobile phone

Another amazing feature that I’ve been waiting for, functionality for sending SMS and MMS messages. You can send these messages via toll-free numbers and short codes and even buy your own numbers.

Create emails quickly with low effort, and without compromises

The marketing team is continuing to improve the email editor. This time with a massive range of improvements, AI recommendations, flexible layout options, better image editor and most important (in my opinion) it automatically discovers errors!

Deliver push notifications to any Android or iOS app

New cool feature where you can send push notifications to phones, you can even create notifications with pictures, video and sound.

Search, version, manage, and tag your digital assets with a new centralized asset library

This is HUGE, you can now save all your digital assets in one place, it even shares with Dynamics 365 Commerce! This is one place where you can add all you pictures, videos and binaries which you can bulk import, you even get AI tagging the content for an easier search.

Author dynamic content with ease through a new point-and-click interface

No more need for custom code in HTML – you can now do all your dynamics content yourself no matter what your skills are with your point-and-click interface!

Create deeply personalized emails with a more flexible set of data sources

Wow, again a great new feature! You can move beyond the contact record and beyond CDS/Dataverse, you can use any data and even list data, it just keeps expanding and getting even better.

Use continuously updating, multidata source segments from Customer Insights in your marketing campaigns

Expand you segments with the use of Customer Insights. Get segments from you Customer Insights instantly, see the segment creation logic and use them in your journeys, save the segments as static segments.

Can’t wait to get my hands on all the great stuff in this release!

Read the full release notes on Dynamics 365 and The Power Platform

As someone who’s been on a home based contract since the beginning of 2016, one of the (few) positives of ‘the whole coronavirus thing’ has been how much less sensitive everyone has become about the times when real life overlaps with work. Four or five years ago, if your doorbell rang while you were on a conference call (thanks Mum), you’d have been mortified. In all likelihood, the person you were talking to was office based. The fact that you were sitting in your spare bedroom, eating food from your own fridge and wearing slippers, would have been something to not mention unless absolutely necessary, for fear of eliciting either envy, an assumption of amateurism, or worse, questions about how much you’d bothered to get dressed today (for the record, I’m one of those slightly annoying people who can’t function in pyjamas. My morning routine is the same as it was when I used to drive to an office every day).

In those early days, I missed water cooler conversations terribly. I yearned for the little glimpses colleagues would give of what their real lives were like, as we settled in to the office day or paused for a cup of tea and a custard cream. As a remote worker those casual conversations were much harder to cultivate. I quickly learned that building meaningful relationships over Skype (this was 2016 after all) was something that needed to be done deliberately and with intention. I began unofficially adding to the agenda of every meeting an opportunity to check in on progress with Vicky’s extension, Steve’s new puppy, or Louise’s wedding plans. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was the next best thing.

For much of this year though, everyone’s been in the same boat. Working out of the back bedroom/kitchen/shed in the garden is expected, to the extent that I don’t even bother with blurring my background much any more. As a result, we’ve all got used to meetings being punctuated by washing machines beeping, dogs barking or snoring, and the occasional child wandering in and asking for a snack. The level of insight I now get into my colleagues daily lives is something I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve marvelled at the multi-tasking capabilities of customers and co-workers alike as they masterfully support children’s crafting activities, while not missing a beat discussing the intricacies of their leave and absence policies.

One particular source of joy has been the prevalence of pets sharing these new office spaces. In recent months, my almost constant office companion has been our 9 year old black and white rescue cat, Lulu. She’s made multiple appearances on camera, although to be fair it’s not always the more attractive parts of her anatomy that she chooses to present. While I used to try and mask the sound of her gently snoring in her favourite space on my desk, since March I’ve felt able to introduce her at the start of every call, explain that she likes to make her presence felt at the most inopportune moments, and apologise in advance for any impromptu breaks caused by her bringing in some kind of gift – usually alive – from the field next door. One such incident generated one of my most viewed posts on LinkedIn.

This new office dynamic has brought many new experiences to all of us. And for me this week – how to navigate the death of a pet, when that pet was familiar to colleagues and customers, to the extent that they would ask after her and expect to see her on video before we could get on with the normal order of business.

On Friday, the last day of my two week ‘summer holiday’, Lulu let it be known that the reason she’d not been quite herself recently was the presence of some fairly significant kidney issues. Not wanting to prolong her discomfort for our benefit, my partner and I made the decision that’s part and parcel of having pets. We stroked her little white nose and sobbed our hearts out while the vet did the necessary, and then came home to a house full of memories and tried to remember how to talk to each other without our favourite fluffy little conversation starter.

So now, Monday morning has rolled around, and my home office is quieter and emptier than it’s been for a long time, apart from a pile of cat paraphernalia that’s waiting to go in the loft just in case we need it again at some point. And I’m trying to work out how to tell the people who have got into the habit of asking, where Lulu is.

Maybe this will help.

The post Unexpected challenges in the new world of work appeared first on tomelliott.co.uk.

This feature (still in preview at time of writing) is called ‘Workflow experience enhancements’, you can find it in the feature management workspace.

Why should I be interested?

There’s a small, seemingly minor, change in this feature which will be of value to anyone who uses any sort of workflow in the system that needs users to log in for approvals.

The second part of this feature will be of value to anyone who has personnel actions enabled and links to workflow. Particularly if the users who are reviewing the personnel action generated workflows are not regular (anything less than daily) users of the system.

What does it do?

Enabling this feature does two things:

It immediately moves the left hand ‘Work items assigned to me’ pane on the default dashboard from the left hand column to the right hand column, above the ‘to do list’ pane. This means all the triggers that prompt a user to do something are now located in the same part of the screen, making it more intuitive and easier to use.

The default dashboard for an employer with ‘Manager’ permissions changes from this:

To this:

It also changes the options workflow participants (submitter, approver, etc) experience. In my experience, new users find workflow a little confusing. The button to trigger the next step in the workflow doesn’t particularly stand out on the page and so it’s easily missed, particularly on personnel actions workflows, where there’s a save button and a workflow button. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched users hit save and then wonder why the workflow isn’t triggered (so many times that it’s now a key part of any end user training sessions I run, including how to find the draft action and submit it to workflow after the fact).

With this feature enabled, as well as the original workflow button (the white one on the toolbar) you now get a big blue button directly on the form:

This feature is still in preview, so I haven’t tested it in a real world situation yet, but instinct says this will make it much clearer to users when a workflow is attached to a form, and how to trigger it.

How do I set it up?

Go to the feature management workspace (System Administration > Feature Management) and locate the feature in the list. For me it was in ‘New’, but for you it may be in ‘Not enabled’. Enable the feature. No additional set up is required.

Anything else I should be aware of?

Always.

Currently the workflow enhancements do not apply to all workflows. At the moment it’s aimed at workflows that can be linked to personnel actions, so you won’t see any changes on, for example, leave request approvals. I’m told that the scope is being broadened though and that leave requests are definitely in the plan.

The post What’s new – Workflow experience enhancements appeared first on tomelliott.co.uk.

• A revamped customer journey designer experience.
• Microsoft Teams integration for webinars
• Improved social posting and analytics
• The ability to use natural language to create segments

What are the features and when will they be in Public Preview (PP), what will be in Early access (EA) and when will they be General available (GA)? Keep reading.

Use continuously updating, multidata source segments from Customer Insights in your marketing campaigns – GA October ’20

The important integration with Customer Insights keep getting better. From October marketers can see the segment creation logic and discover CI segments instantly. The segments from CI are automatically updated, but can also be saved static segments in Marketing. The marketer can now also choose if they want to use native Marketing dynamic segments or CI segments in a customer journey. Better flexibility for the marketer and a very good way of utilizing the dynamic Customer Insights segments!

Create customized emails faster – EA August ’20. GA October ’20

The email editor will be improved, you now don’t need to use HTML as much. You’ll be able to add more than three columns to the email, better support for Outlook rendering and improved email editing performance, including faster loading and element interaction.

Collect data from form submissions more easily with expanded entity
options – EA August ’20. GA October ’20

Yes, yes, yes, yes! I’ve been waiting for this! Marketers now get the ability to collect form submissions and store them under another entity! They can now manage form submission data as they want, and create workflows to store the form submissions as any other entity. Gone is the restriction where you need to connect a form to a Lead or a Contact.

Run webinars and meetings using direct integration with Microsoft Teams – EA August ’20. GA October ’20

Yet another BIG feature from the Marketing team. Marketing now includes a direct integration with Microsoft Teams live events and meetings! Marketers can create and host live events with Microsoft Teams as the webinar provider. Webinar are setup as a Teams live event or a Teams meeting, these can then be integrated directly into Marketing events. Who doesn’t love Microsoft Teams!

Build customer journeys more efficiently using the new canvas experience – EA August ’20. GA October ’20

The Marketing team has completely redesigned the customer journey canvas, they’ve made it more intuitive and efficient. Just look at this list of features

• Enhanced performance and reliability when building complex, multi-step journeys
• Simplified time-related journey actions
• Negative journey paths!!!!
• Horizontal and vertical views

Create and manage content-rich social media posts and easily monitor performance – EA August ’20. GA October ’20

Redesigning and making things work even better seems to be core to this release of Marketing. That’s also what they’ve done with the social posting, redesigned the post creation experience and the scheduling experience.

Use natural language to create targeted segments – PP October ’20

This feature is only coming in Public Preview in October, with no GA date. With this you can use simple words to specify the attributes and logic for segments, so you can find the exact audience you want. You can create the segment of “customers who live in Norway, but not in Oslo and work in tech.”

Read the full release notes on Dynamics 365 and on the Power Platform.

We get to know more about what they do and how they keep pace with our ever-changing platform, their experience of speaking at events and with imposter syndrome, before moving on to the important stuff: how awesome dogs are.

This episode was recorded on 24th Sept, 2019.

If you’d like to get in touch with Lee, Sara or Matt you can find them on Twitter:

• Sara Lagerquist @lagerquistsara
• Matt Beard @MattyBeard
• Lee Baker @LeeMBaker

Mentioned in this episode were:

• Event: Oct 5th 2019 – Power Platform Saturday Sweden, that Sara is helping to organise
• Event: Oct 15th-18th 2019 – User Group Summit Orlando
• Docs: Dynamics 365 2019 Release Wave 2
• Docs: PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) Getting Started
• Podcast: Emma D’Arcy’s excellent talk on dealing with imposter syndrome (link TBC)