So strange… until analyzing its installed per-tenant extensions, we discovered an extension with a code like…

Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their blog

Dynamics 365 Business Central: be careful when using the OnCompanyOpen trigger

Today I was helping a partner on discovering performance issues on its Dynamics 365 Business Central online tenant. When analyzing the telemetry data with Application Insights, we discovered a lot of Long Running Query signals (event id RT0005) linked to the OnCompanyOpen trigger. So strange… until analyzing its installed per-tenant extensions, we discovered an extension…

Blog Syndicated with demiliani’s Permission

The post Dynamics 365 Business Central: be careful when using the OnCompanyOpen trigger appeared first on 365 Community.

This post is on the TLS 1.2 System enhancement.

I discovered in January 2020 that I’d…

Continue Reading Ian Grieve’s Article on their blog

https://www.azurecurve.co.uk/2020/11/microsoft-dynamics-gp-fall-2020-release-new-feature-tls-1-2/

Blog Syndicated with Ian Grieve’s Permission

The post Microsoft Dynamics GP Fall 2020 Release New Features: TLS 1.2 appeared first on 365 Community.

Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their blog

DataFlow – Merge Queries (aka Join Tables)

A long while Back Carina Claesson wrote about joining data with DataFlows. I had created a dataflow with 2 tables and used a specialized “behind the scenes” connecting several “CRM Keys” together. It was a little buggy, so I thought I would give it a try to follow her blog: Combining information from multiple data…

Blog Syndicated with Thomas Sandsør’s Permission

The post DataFlow – Merge Queries (aka Join Tables) appeared first on 365 Community.

You may have already noticed some of the data in the recordings and heatmaps have dots on them rather than the actual data. That’s because by default, sensitive content is already masked before it gets sent to Clarity. I had notice this with my own website data, and sometimes in places that didn’t make sense to me. I could understand if I was asking people to put in passwords or user names to log in to something, but one thing that was masked was this item below.

You can see on my website, this is just the date of the blog post. It’s not sensitive and it actually could be helpful to see, if I want to know how old the post was that someone was viewing, and I didn’t want to have to jump back to my website to check.

This is where we can set this specific element of our website to be unmasked using a tiny bit of code. For many websites, my own included, the person who created the theme, or did any coding for it was likely to have used something called a div which breaks up, or defines different blocks or areas on your site. So I have a div for the title of the blog post, a div for the main content, and a div where the date of the post displays. This makes it easy from a styling perspective to add CSS (or the colours, fonts etc.) to that specific part of the site or web page. This is good news for me, because in order to unmask the date, I need to add an attribute to that div.

The attribute to add is simply this. Stating that this part of the website should be unmasked and passed through to Clarity.

data-clarity-unmask="True"

The new bit of code now looks like this, with data-clarity-unmask=”True” added right after the div class. Once this has been added, and new data starts being passed through to Clarity, the area unmasked will now show up. Any data prior to this will still show as masked when you review recordings or heatmaps.

Using the unmask function is helpful when data that is useful and NOT sensitive should still be sent back to Clarity. What if you are getting data that might be deemed sensitive? One thing that is on my website is a lot of comments. Although it’s not sensitive (it’s public), if I have my Clarity project set up and shared with others on a Team, there might be stuff I don’t want those people getting back and reviewing. So in this instance just as an example, I am going to mask the image and name of the person commenting. Here it is unmasked (with the awesome Chris Huntingford from Microsoft right at the top).

This one is has a div of comment-author vcard, which covers the avatar image and the comment authors name. So this is where I want to add my code.

For this one, we need to add the following attribute:

data-clarity-mask="True"

We can see it here in the code. Just a side note, it wasn’t quite as easy to get access to the div for this one. If you use WordPress, it involves editing the comments.php and editing your functions.php file too…. so this is not for everyone, I get that Now we can see that the information about the person making each comment is masked.

You can watch a video on how to do this here.

By default, filters are applied automatically when you click on the widgets from the dashboard. So by clicking on a page from the Popular pages dashboard widget, that URL would be passed through as the visited URL filter. By default, you would be looking at the Last 3 days of data. Simple right? What if you are interested in something a bit more specific? Clicking on the blue Filters button from the top will bring down a plethora of options for you (yes, I said plethora ).

Timeframe Filters

The time frame filter has several options for set periods of time. You can see for today, last 3 days (default), last 7 days and last 30 days. Then you have a custom time frame where you can set the start and end date for the data to review.

Insight Filters

Next, you have filters for 4 different insights (explained in this post on the dashboard). Selecting any on of these for boxes will make sure you only view recordings or dashboard data where any of these kinds of interactions occurred.

Device Filters – (not Heatmaps)

We can filter by the type of device someone was using when they visited the website. PC, Tablet and Mobile are pretty obvious, but Other will include visits made if someone was viewing from a TV or other smart device (Occulus Quest anyone?)

User Action Filters – (not Heatmaps)

These filters are really interesting, as they show data where more than just clicks occurred. So did the user move their mouse around or swipe on their device while viewing a page? Did they type or paste text somewhere? This is great to know if you have search box on your site. Did they select any text on the page? Perhaps they wanted to share some of the text with someone else? Finally, did they resize the page, meaning they changed the size of their browser, or if on a mobile device they rotated it and it changed from landscape to portrait or back again. Selecting any on of these will filter and show data that includes these actions.

Session & Page Filters (limited with Heatmaps)

Sessions cover the full amount of time a visitor was on your site, while pages cover the individual page views that occurred within a session. The Session filters are not available for Heatmaps.

• Session click count – the number of clicks (greater than) within an entire session
• Page click count – the number of clicks (greater than) on an individual page
• Session duration – the amount of time (greater than) spent within an entire session
• Page duration – the amount of time (greater than) spent on an individual page
• Session page count – the number of pages (greater than) viewed within an entire session
• Page scroll depth – the percentage of a page (greater than) that was scrolled down

All of these are helpful to see how engaged a visitor was by how many pages they viewed, and how long they stayed on pages or within the entire session. The page scroll depth and number of clicks also help to show how valuable your content is to your visitors.

Operating System Filter

This is helpful if you want to view recordings or widgets on the dashboard showing data based on a specific operating system. Perhaps you’ve noticed issues on mobile devices, then want to narrow that down further to just look at Android or iOS. You can do that using the operating system filter.

Browser Filter

Using the browser filter can be useful if you’ve noticed a difference in the number of pages or length of sessions, and want to drill down further to see if it could be related to how your website renders in specific browsers. It gives you a good way to understand how it’s performing for your visitors in each one.

Country Filter

This one is fairly simple… filter based on the country your website visitors are based. Visitors might be more interested in a specific topic depending on where they live, so this filter can be used to spot trends or issues.

Path Filters (limited with Heatmaps)

The last set of filters are for setting a path to a specific page or set of pages. For any of these, you can type in either the full URL, partial URL or a keyword. For example, if I wanted to see any traffic had come through to my site from anywhere with podcast in the URL (such as theUPpodcast.com ) I could just use the word podcast in the referring site filter. Same with the entry (the first page someone landed on) or exit (the last page before a visitors session ended) URL, or visited URL (one that was visited anywhere within a session). Only the Referring site filter is available for Heatmaps.

That’s a pretty comprehensive list of filters right there! And that’s just part of it! In an upcoming post, we will look at the filters for heatmaps, and then on to advanced filters. Really enjoying digging in to Microsoft Clarity. What do you think? Have you added it to your website?

You can watch a video on this here.

Check out the announcement here:

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/reshape-the-future-of-work-with-microsoft-dataverse-for-teams-now-generally-available/

Goodbye Common Data Service, Hello Dataverse.

What is Microsoft Dataverse? Simply put, it’s the new name for the Common Data Service.

The term “Dataverse” is part of a series of nomenclature changes as Microsoft pushes the Power Platform in the Microsoft Teams (aka Project Oakdale). In a previous blog, I outlined how entities, fields, and option sets have been renamed to tables, columns, and choices. These changes were further extended by called records “rows” and boolean fields “Yes/No” fields.

The reason for these name changes was to make the platform more understandable and reach a broader audience. Whether you like it or not, these changes are here to stay, and we’ll all eventually get used to it.

(And maybe there is hope that Microsoft will update licensing to be more understandable and reach a broader audience, but I digress)

It was only a matter of time (and a few legal skirmishes) that the Common Data Service would be renamed (again). Microsoft Dataverse might not describe the Common Data Service any better, but the name is a bit catchy and aligns with naming conventions like Cosmos DB.

If you are a newcomer to the Power Platform or wonder what Microsoft Dataverse or the Common Data Service is, read on.  If you have been working with Dynamics CRM or the Common Data Service for a while, then a lot of this might be a review, but there may be some nugget of trivia valuable for a pub quiz.

More than just another Database

Microsoft Dataverse from a quick glance could appear to be just another database technology, like SQL or Access. Like a database, it has tables, columns, rows and relationships, but it’s much, much more than that.

Microsoft Dataverse as technology is close to 18 years old. It began as the core engine for Microsoft CRM in 2003 and evolved to be one of the central pillars of the modern Power Platform.

The Big Bang (how it all started)

Microsoft Business Solutions Customer Relationship Management v1.0 was released in 2003. While it lacked many features of a CRM system, it was one of the first applications where the end-user would access the system via browser instead of installed desktop software.

One of the powerful aspects was the business application layer on top of SQL server that provided many additional features that could be easily modified by non-developers. There was already a series of provided entities (Tables) that represented business objects like Accounts, Contacts and Activities, etc. This “template” of business entities would eventually become the Common Data Model.

Over time, more features were added and eventually, this “CRM” engine became an integral part of the Power Platform.

See What is the Power Platform for my interpretation of the story.

Microsoft Dataverse – What’s in the box

Dataverse API

Dataverse, at its core, is simply an API (Application Programming Interface).  Many of the Power Platform features such as Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder can interact with Dataverse directly or through built-in connectors.

Going beyond the Power Platform, applications written in other languages and tools can interact with Dataverse via the WebAPI.

Model-Driven Power Apps

Model-Driven Power Apps are applications that present the end-user with a standard set of forms, views, dashboards and processes.  Model-driven apps are directly built-in to Dataverse to provide a friendly, easy to use, business application interface for Dataverse. This technology provides the foundation for both custom applications and many of the Dynamics 365 first-party applications available from Microsoft.

Dataverse Connector

Connectors are a vital part of the Power Platform.  When creating Canvas Power Apps, Power Automate flows or other applications using connectors, there are currently (and likely to change) three connectors that can access Dataverse.  The Dynamics 365 Connector (deprecated), the Common Data Service connector and the Common Data Service (current environment) connector.  I suspect we will soon see a Dataverse connector.  Please refer to my friend Sara Lagerquist’s blog post: CDS vs CDS: What Connector should I use in Power Automate? to understand the differences.

Dataverse Security

Dataverse has security built-in at the platform level (as opposed to the application level), meaning that once you define security roles and field-level security profiles for a particular user or team, these will apply to that authenticated user no matter what application or service they are accessing Dataverse from. 

The security is used in the context of business usage versus discrete data access, making it more straightforward to configure a robust security profile for applications.

Dataverse Logic

Within Dataverse, there are a series of configurable logic engines that can are used to build applications.  There are calculated and rollup columns that can display calculations or aggregates of related data.  There is a fully configurable workflow engine (aka “Classic workflows”) that can perform a series of steps both asynchronously and synchronously.  (It is recommended that asynchronous workflows be done using Power Automate).  Other features can enhance the user experience, such as business rules and business process flows.  Finally, advanced logic can be implemented with a full-featured SDK and custom plug-ins written in .NET.

Dataverse Data

While Dataverse has several features, it also can be used to store data!  The structure of Dataverse is based on related tables, a table representing a real-world object (a company, a person, a transaction, etc.) and made up of attributes called columns (first name, last name, date of birth, etc.).  These items have been recently renamed from entities and fields to accommodate a broader audience and make Dataverse objects more relatable to something like an Excel spreadsheet.

A maker can create their own custom tables, but the Common Data Model provides ready to use tables that have been designed and developed following industry standards.  A maker can extend these tables with their own custom columns.

Unstructured data such as file attachments can also be stored within Dataverse.  These attachments are generally related to a table or identified in file-type columns.

The data itself is stored in a combination of Azure SQL and Azure Blob storage.  Generally, a maker or end-user doesn’t need to worry about where and how the data is stored.  Access to the data for creation, updates and deletes must happen via the API.  However, the data can be read directly using a SQL endpoint.

Dataverse Integration

Data can be viewed or integrated with Dataverse using concepts such as virtual entities or integrated using connectors.

One feature from the Dynamics CRM legacy is that Dataverse has out of the box features to populate Microsoft Word templates, integrate with Microsoft Excel, and send and receive communication with Microsoft Exchange.  Users can also associated emails, contacts, appointments and tasks from Outlook with rows in Dataverse.

Dataverse for Teams

As part of a Microsoft Teams’ license, makers can now build Power Apps; Power Automate flows, Power Virtual Agent chatbots directly within the context of Microsoft Teams. 

These Power Platform features can access a scaled-down version of Dataverse to store data for these solutions.  I recently collaborated with fellow MVP and 365.Training team member David Yack in creating an free introductory online course for building apps on Dataverse for Teams.  Check it out here: Introducing Microsoft Dataverse for Teams

Summary

I hope you can see the value of using Dataverse to build your solutions in the Power Platform and understand that Dataverse is more than just a simple cloud-based database.  This platform has many years of development and evolution and is not a new idea that will disappear in a week (although it might be renamed).

Galaxy Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

Gear shift Photo by Alok Sharma on Unsplash

Nick Doelman is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) as well as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). Follow Nick on Twitter @ReadyXRM for various updates on the Power Platform and the weekly “Community Confessions” poll. Looking to ramp up on various Power Platform topics? Check out a growing catalogue of courses on https://365.Training

When I had my first meet up session with Alex Rostán - AWESOME MVP - back in middle September, I shared content about D365 HR and Alex about Power Virtual Agents. We talked about the amazing stuff we can build together, so after a few days, I decided to create my own chatbot. At the beginning it was a nightmare: I'll be honest with you. But I failed fast, and this means that I learned even faster.

Back in October, I decided to create a simple chatbot gathering information about D365 HR, community content, worldwide user group, docs, and so on. I posted on Twitter asking for people interested in testing it, and the amazing Malin Martnes and Jon Levesque were there to try it. Both of them gave me pretty good feedback, BUT the best part came when Mark Christie review the chatbot and gave me some of homework.

Where am I now?

- Created version 2.0 of D365HR Chatbot

- Waiting for the amazing Alex to build something together

- Thinking how to innovate with the combination of this solution with D365 HR always keeping in mind that human relationships are important in HR processes

After studying, changing and creating a new - and enhanced - experience for the user I can say I'm more than proud of what I achieved so far. So, let's gather a few lessons learn and piece of homework for future Ana.

Lessons learn:

- User experience must be #1 priority: remember that the user is talking to a bot, if the experience is bad, you may lose a prospect, customer or a potential candidate.

- Draw your process before starting: may sound obvious, but for people with a similar amount of anxiety as me LISTEN: design the process (including questions, answers, and everything you think you'll need). Once you have it all written you can start with PVA. From the first design, till the final version changes may occur, that's expected.

- Ask for help: I thought my first chatbot was AWESOME until I had some feedback that made me think about all this. Things I wasn't planning or even thinking about. Community is what makes us stronger, we rise by lifting others.

✍️ Homework for future Ana (and open to anyone who wants to come onboard):

- Create a PVA solution connected with D365 HR extracting specific data.

Isn't awesome how much we can create by only learning? I can't believe I'm able to create this kind of solutions with no tech-background.

To be honest knowing HR processes from the inside gave me the structure to build this amazing career, added to the solutions available (mostly my beloved D365 HR) + support of community and colleagues. So... at the end of the day is all about my three favorite topics:

⚡️ Mindset + Technology + Community ⚡️

The post Dior lance des talks pour nourrir l’ambition des jeunes femmes appeared first on Change the work.

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.

This release the Dynamics 365 Human Resources team are focusing on these five areas:

• Transform the employee experience
• Build an HCM ecosystem
• Optimize HR programs
• Unlock your HR data
• Enrich your existing Microsoft solutions with HR data

Let’s dig in to all the features and when they are in Public Preview (PP) and when they are General available (GA)

New entities in CDS

They continue to work on getting entities into CDS from HR, here are the new entities and when you’ll find them in CDS. This means that there are even more entities that you can use together with the Power Platform.

• Benefits management – GA October ’20
  This will help you with integration to your payroll and benefit providers.
  • Setup entities
  • Benefit plan entity
  • Worker enrolled benefit entities
• Skills and certificates – GA October ’20
  Finally, we can use this information in other Dynamics 365 applications that use skills and certificates, like Field Service and PSA/Project
• Scenario-specific APIs – PP September ’20, GA October ’20
  I look forward to seeing how this will work and how we can integrate closer with recruiting solutions.
• Performance entities – GA November ’20
  With the performance entities in CDS you can now do integration, reporting and extend it with for example a Power App.

New stuff

Custom links in Manager self-service – GA December ’20

You can add links to the manager self-service page the same way as you can do in the “My information” tab in Employee self-service page.

Manager access to employee attachments – GA February ’20

This is a feature I really thought was already there. But now managers can get access to documents that employees and HR have uploaded.

Employee Leave and absence experience in Microsoft Teams – GA October ’20

This is a cool feature that I’ve tested and blogged about, getting ready for GA in October.

Automated address validation – GA October ’20

HR will now verify alternate addresses and give alternate suggestions if available.

Integration with LinkedIn Talent Hub – PP July ’20, GA October ’20

This is the integration we have all been waiting for since they deprecated Attract is now finally here! You can test it in July and it will be in GA from October. This is going to help everyone that used Attract and is now looking for a new ATS.

Enhanced candidate profile in Personnel Management – PP September ’20. GA October ’20

Have you ever set up a trial in HR, and you’ve seen the section “candidates to hire” and wonder where they came from? It seems to have been something left from AX, but wasn’t really needed in Core HR because you had Attract. Now that is changing! You can now create candidates in personnel management and include a lot of details about them. All the information about the candidate can then be transferred to the new employee record. Easy and really helpfull.

Manager can submit a recruiting request for open positions – PP September ’20. GA October ’20

A manager that want’s to hire a new employee, can now create a request to recruit which will initiate a workflow. In this workflow you will be able to populate the request form with default job and position information that can also be changed if needed. The managers can also track the status of the hiring process with the recruiter.

Organization and Personnel management workflow experience enhancements – PP September ’20. GA October ’20

The workflow for new hire requests and changes to existing employees or positions will be improved.

Azure AD integration – PP October ’20. GA December ’20

It seems like AAD will be even more tightly connected with HR, which is needed, why would you want to administer users and access any other places than AAD?

Enable simplified integration with payroll providers (Phase 1) – PP October ’20. GA December ’20

This feature will enable partners to use an API for pay roll systems. This will also enable employees and HR professionals to view and update payroll related information through deep linking with SSO!

Leave and absence

• Leave and absence workflow experience enhancements – PP September ’20. GA October ’20
  Employees and managers can update or cancel leave requests.
• Provide additional insight into leave balances – PP October ’20. GA November ’20
  The leave balance insights will simplify viewing of employee leave balances to a single place. It will also give the employee and manager insight into accrual amount, time off taken and remaining time off.
• Cross company view of employee leave for managers – PP November ’20. GA December ’20

The last one for leave and absence is so big and is so important that I want to highlight it;

Approved leave integrated with Microsoft Outlook Calendar – PP February ’21. GA March ’21

When time off is approved for an employee, their Outlook calendar will automatically update – how cool is that!

Create customized reports – PP November ’20. GA December ’20

Oh how I’ve waited for this! This I can’t wait to play with in November. You can create custom reports for human resources, time, finance and other data. AND you can embed custom reports in workspaces.

This is such an amazing list of new and enhanced features and the kind of development speed I was dreaming of seeing once they deprecated Attract and Onboard.

I’m very happy!

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)