Continue Reading StefanS365’s Article on their blog

Customize and extend self-service sign-up for guest users with Power Automate flow – There’s Something About Dynamics 365

Posted by External Identities are a new feature in Azure AD. We had already B2B, B2C and now we have B2X (see blog post, blog post). The default identity providor is Azure AD but this can be extended with other identity providers like Google, Facebook, etc.

Blog Syndicated with StefanS365’s Permission

The post Customize and extend self-service sign-up for guest users with Power Automate flow appeared first on 365 Community.

Continue Reading Nishant Rana’s Article on their blog

Scripting AzCopy for automated upload

Tech Wizard Today we will discuss how we can use powershell & script the azcopy to upload the files to azure. This can be used for office 365 pst imports or other work that you do. Here is the Code Snippet from one of my office 365 scripts to upload archives & also do error checking.

Blog Syndicated with Nishant Rana’s Permission

The post Scripting AzCopy for automated upload appeared first on 365 Community.

Continue Reading Pieter Veenstra’s Article on their blog

Call Microsoft Graph from an HTTP Action vs Custom Connector in Power Automate

Is there a difference between calling Microsoft Graph Endpoints using an HTTP action or creating a custom connector? In this post I will compare these two options. In the past I’ve used quite a few times Microsoft graph to do things in Office 365 from my flows in Power Automate.

Blog Syndicated with Pieter Veenstra’s Permission

The post Call Microsoft Graph from an HTTP Action vs Custom Connector in Power Automate appeared first on 365 Community.

Also, as you see, some users are still getting notifications from (Preview) even though they are using the latest non-preview add-on.

The post L’expérience collaborateur : c’est quoi ? appeared first on Change the work.

In case you miss any Scottish Summit 2021 session, here is the channel where you can find the recordings: Scottish Summit - YouTube. Make sure you take advantage of all the shared knowledge from people all over the world. There are great presentations, and more will be uploaded soon in multiple languages.

Below you'll find my session. In this presentation, I cover the three elements needed to start with Dynamics 365 Human Resources: mindset + technology + community. This is my go-to session because I literally changed my career. Mainly because community support helped me to become who I am today.

Feel free to reach out if you have any doubt :)

What is FetchXML Builder? It is a tool that is part of the XrmToolBox that allows you to quickly point and click choose tables from Dataverse (aka entities from Common Data Service/Dynamics CRM), choose the columns, filtering, sorting, etc and it will generate equivalent FetchXML, OData, JSON formats, etc.

The tool has saved me personally 100s of hours… and world wide I am sure it has saved customers, partners, consultants, developers *millions* of hours… considering standard billable rates, the cost savings are enough to fund research into life saving treatments many times over or to feed thousands of children in developing nations.

Why do I mention that?

The creator of the FetchXML Builder, plus a number of other very useful tools, presenter, MVP and my friend Jonas Rapp, suffered a stroke on February 17th. Jonas is a fighter and on the road to recovery. A summary of what happened can be heard on the latest episode of the XrmToolCast.

Now its our turn to help Jonas.

Jonas is always giving and always helping people, and beyond spending countless hours creating time-saving tools is that he gives to various charitable foundations, such as UNICEF https://unicef.se/ and the Swedish Brain Institute.

Normally I would suggest giving a donation to buy a beer or pizza in appreciation of his work, but I know Jonas will likely redirect that donation to someone else who needs it.

Please help support him and his causes with a donation at https://fetchxmlbuilder.com/donate

I wish my friend Jonas a speedy recovery. He is communicating via emojis and I look forward to when I can once again go to a football game, watch one of Jonas’ presentations or just sit down and have a beer with my friend.

First step, have your Administrator go to the Settings area of the Marketing App, then in to Feature Switches. Be sure to turn on the Customer Voice Marketing integration so that the Customer Voice entities are available to add to your Segments.

You can watch a video on this here.

Next, navigate to the Segments area from under the Customers category on the menu in the Marketing App. For a bit of clarity, these are the two types of segments.

• Dynamic segments are set up by using logical expressions, meaning Contacts can fall in and out of these segments based on changes on their record, or based on interactions they have with other data in the marketing app.
• Static segments contain Contacts who are manually selected by a user. This might be your ‘top ten’ clients considered based on logic and criteria that can’t be determined by any fields you have. So you can hand pick these and have a list of people you target. Contacts will not ‘fall out’ of these segments and would need to be manually removed.

We are going to create a Dynamic Segment.

The list of Segment Templates will open. Unless you have a template you’ve already created as a good starting point, click Skip to start with something blank.

The first thing we will add is a query block.

We can use this to add conditions to the Contact record. I typically like to set it to include people where the Email field contains data, the status of the record equals Active, Do not allow Bulk Emails is set to Allow, and then set the Consent given to be either 3, 4 or 5. While it’s true that there are blocks in place that mean a Contact wouldn’t be sent an email if their Do not allow Bulk Emails is set to Do Not Allow, or the Email was missing, or the Consent given levels didn’t match to that on the Customer Journey, I would rather see an accurate number for the Members on a Segment and see how many are included that COULD actually be a part of a journey.

So next, we will add a behaviour block, and make sure the connection is set to and also between that and the query block.

There are several options available with the behaviour block, but we will select, Forms Pro Survey Submitted. Yes, it’s now Customer Voice, it just hasn’t been renamed yet.

We can then select the Survey from the list of attributes.

Then we can use the equals indicator, and then select the survey from the list of Customer Voice surveys found. That will then give us all Contacts that meet the conditions set in the query block AND that also have submitted the survey we pick. That segment might work well for you.

However, what if you want to dig in further and add some conditions about the survey itself? Instead of using the behaviour block, we have a couple of other options. We can add a second query block, and select the Customer Voice survey response entity.

Then we can pick the Date Created field, and choose the Within option, and look for responses within the past X number of days.

We can then add another condition and specify which Survey from here. At the bottom, you will notice a red exclamation mark. This means that we need to indicate a link back to the Contact via the correct relationship.

When a survey response is created in Customer Voice, it’s the From field that is populated with the related Contact, so that’s the relationship we will select. Once you’ve done that, the red exclamation mark will go, and you can save your segment and make it live. Now you will get any Contacts who have filled out a survey within the past 7 days. This might even be a segment you want to use as a suppression list so that you don’t ask Contacts to fill out too many surveys via a Marketing email in a Customer Journey.

So having said all that about how to access the Customer Voice Survey Response, you can also do it another way. From the Contact query block, click and add in a related entity.

You can then select the Contact (From) relationship.

Then we can just add in the same fields and conditions as above, but it’s all part of the same query block. The end result will be the same, just a bit neater and easier to create.

One last segment we might want to create is based on the response to a specific question from one of the Customer Voice surveys. This can be achieved by adding a related entity to the Contact query and picking the Customer Voice survey response entity, linked via the Contact (From) relationship. We can add a condition using the Survey field, and select the correct survey. This isn’t required but would be useful if you possibly have the same question on multiple surveys and want to make sure it’s the correct one.

From there, we add another related entity, and this time select the Customer Voice survey question response entity. Then we can pick a specific Question, and then add in the Response and the response we want. So in the example below, I want any Contact with an Email, Do not allow Bulk Emails set to Allow, who are active and have given 3, 4 or 5 for Consent. They must have answered the Event Feedback survey, and given a response of Yes to the question asking if they would like more information shared with them. We can now use this segment in a Customer Journey and send Event information when it’s ready to go!

You can watch a video on this here.

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

First, navigate to the Redirect URLs under the Internet marketing section in the Marketing app. From there, click New to create a record. We’ll give it a name, something descriptive for internal users to know what it’s for, and then we add the Original URL link. This is the link that you ultimately want to take people to.

Once you’ve saved the record, you get a Redirecting URL generated.

It’s the Redirecting URL that we can then use in a variety of places. Do you want to share it in a Social Post from the marketing app? Great, you can do that. You might also want to generate links to use in paid advertising on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, or even in Google Adwords. The Original URL would be the same, but you could set up different Redirect URL’s to then be able to review specific links that were clicked on.

The Redirect URL record has an Insights tab, so once people start clicking on it, you can see where those visitors are located.

Clicking on the timeline will then show if any of the people clicking on the link are already Contacts in your system. We can see the original URL they were taken do, and the Referrer URL of where they started from.

We can then dig in to the Insights on a Contact record which will show us all of the Redirect URL clicked interactions they have had. This makes it a lot clearer than just seeing Website visited interactions. We can clearly see if someone visited via an ad, or a specific campaign you were running.

Oh, and you can also use these Redirect URLs to take people to websites that are not yours. It’s the redirect URL generated for you that is being tracked. So here I have a link to https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/rumney-ramblers which is for a charity walk I am doing for the Alzheimer’s Society. It’s not a site I own, but I can still use it to review the clicks people have taken to get there.

Another cool thing about using the Redirect URLs is to add people to Segments based on their interaction. Create a new blank segment and then click on Add behaviour block. Then select the behaviour of ‘Redirect link clicked’.

We can then add a query block with the connection between the two blocks being set to ‘and also’. Put in all of the criteria you want about the Contact, and you are done. If we leave it like this, without any filtering on the behaviour block, this will return all of the Contacts that have clicked ona Redirect link.

So, we can add in additional criteria such as the Original URL, or the Redirect URL to determine WHICH of the Redirect links you care about.

Consider the ability to use this to put Contacts in to a Segment who have clicked on a specific link that you might consider expresses interest in a specific product or service you have. You could use this interaction to add them to a Customer Journey to start sharing more information with them.

You can watch a video on how to do 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)