Introduction In the blog we are going to see how to add Insights based News related to Companies/People on the Dashboards in Dynamics CRM Pre Requisites Insight, powered by InsideView Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Implementation Step 1: First we go the dashboard we want to customize and we add a web resource with the following details Web Resource: iv_/webpages/insights_dashboard.htm Name: WebResource_WebResource_insightdashboard Label: Insights Dashboard Also don’t forget to keep “Visible by default” as “Checked” Step 2: Now when we see the dashboards we will be able to see Insights news related to Companies/People Step 3: Additionally we could also add Companies/People to the watch list and we will be able to see news related to them on the dashboard by switching to the specific Watchlist Hope this helped!

Introduction: In my personal experience over the years, whenever I dealt with business owners, directors, and CTOs in the technology conferences and events, I come across many of them who always hold some misbeliefs about the Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system. This persuaded me to pick and share some experiences and demystify topmost 3 myths regarding ERPs in this blog. Myth #1: Ah! ERP is expensive! The primary concern for any company prior to implementing ERP is its cost. But contrary to the belief, there are tons of other ERP solutions available in the market which are affordable. This sounds like a paradox, however; low-cost ERP system brings along the same impact to the firm as compared to high-cost ERPs. Many enterprises here fail to realize that choosing a right ERP partner is as much as important as selecting an ERP. Firstly, there are thousands of ERP software providers who may offer variable packages depending on the usage. Different ERP modules are used as per the different needs and requirements.  For example, few ERP software as a SAAS solution or Cloud solution reduces the entire cost of acquiring a whole new ERP for your business. Several factors like below contribute to the cost of an ERP. 1. ERP Development cost 2. ERP Implementation or customization cost 3. Cost of Licensing and finally, 4. Annual Maintenance cost The above costs can be drastically reduced by essentially considering planning and methodology which will result in optimizing the resources working with the ERP implementation. Here a choosing a right consulting partner would guide you perfectly into selecting a right ERP as per your business needs. Myth #2: ERP is not my cup of tea! It’s for Big Businesses! Although ERP systems are typically well known in the big enterprise domain, there are plethora of small and medium enterprises across the globe who are actually leveraging ERP system.  This is solely dependent on the variations of the ERP system that you choose to deploy. While it was a case a few years ago, that the ERP systems are more applicable to larger firms, it’s not applicable today given the similarity in the nature and scalability of operations. Today the world and market place is growing at a pace and to gain competitive edge, several small and medium organizations are making use of the latest technologies. To deal with those large organization, small and medium enterprises need to have a digital technology that can help them overcome problems faced during daily operations. For example, in a country like India, there is a diverse base of SMEs which need to benefit from the technology. The best example here can be of a company called ‘FarmLink’, which is backed by Swiss company called Pioneering Ventures. It is impressive to see how this agro startup focused on modernizing and transforming the supply chains across the Indian geographical region. Their key challenges were related to the handling of Supply chain operations, Inventory and vendor management, Provide them reports and easy to use dashboard. Post deploying a suitable ERP system, their entire operations was automated from inventory management to vendor management, generation of deep and critical insights due to reports and dashboards enabled them to execute faster and accurate decision making. The software was also implemented with an easy-to-use smartphone interface for the sales team. Hence it is just a myth that ERP software is only for big businesses and not for small and medium enterprises. Myth #3: ERP? Oh no! It’s too complicated! Many business owners, managers, and high-level executives have this fear in the mind that the ERP deployment might change the course of their regular tasks and disrupt the whole rhythm of the everyday operations. However, this is just not the case! An ERP is an enterprise, resource, and planning technology. It is developed with the fact in mind that numerous companies should be able to implement them easily and commence its operations flawlessly. The complexity of the ERP depends on range of factors such as the number of users, the degree of customization, size of business etc. Although its successful implementation requires a commitment from the system users, right training from an ERP provider is essential to ensure its smooth running. Hope the above myths are now eliminated and I would be happy to respond to any of your queries.

Introduction: Companies want to record some of contacts as customers, vendors, or bank accounts. Creating a customer, vendor, or bank account from a contact enables you use existing data. When you create a customer, vendor, or bank account this way, it is synchronized with the contact. Prerequisite: Setup Business relations Select Business relation codes in Marketing setup in Interaction section. Specify number series for Vendor Customer and bank account Steps: In search option type Contact and choose related link. Create new contact and specify Name, Address and other data which are required. Choose the Create As action, and then choose either Customer, Vendor, or Bank. You will get below pop up once Customer, Vendor and Bank account has been created. The contact information is transferred from the Contact card to the Bank Account card, the Customer card, or the Vendor card. You may want to add specific information to each of the cards, such as invoicing and payment details.

Introduction: This blog explains how to Create an Email activity in MS CRM through WebApi Request: Post URL:  <your instance url>/api/data/v9.1/emails Header: Content-Type: application/json Prefer: return=representation Body: 1. Creating Email with resolved emails (To field of email is record in MS CRM). { “description” : “Email Created”, ///Email Body “regardingobjectid_account@odata.bind” : “/accounts(69C38067-EDB7-E811-A961-000D3A363C81)”, “subject” : “Test Email Creation”, “email_activity_parties” : [ { “partyid_systemuser@odata.bind” : “/systemusers(CED2E02D-188E-4AA8-B6E2-D746E9B370C1)”, “participationtypemask” : 1 ///From Email }, { “partyid_account@odata.bind” : “/accounts(69C38067-EDB7-E811-A961-000D3A363C81)”, “participationtypemask” : 2 ///To Email }] } 2. Creating Email with unresolved emails (To field of email is not record in MS CRM). { “description” : “Email Created”, “regardingobjectid_account@odata.bind” : “/accounts(69C38067-EDB7-E811-A961-000D3A363C81)”, “subject” : “Test Email Creation”, “email_activity_parties” : [ { “partyid_systemuser@odata.bind” : “/systemusers(CED2E02D-188E-4AA8-B6E2-D746E9B370C1)”, “participationtypemask” : 1 }, { “addressused”:”vvyas@cloudfronts.com”, “participationtypemask” : 2 } ] } 3. Creating Email with multiple unresolved emails (To field of email is not record in MS CRM). { “description”: “Test Email”, “regardingobjectid_account@odata.bind”: “/accounts(69C38067-EDB7-E811-A961-000D3A363C81)”, “subject”: “Update Your Phone Number”, “email_activity_parties”: [ { “partyid_systemuser@odata.bind”: “/systemusers(CED2E02D-188E-4AA8-B6E2-D746E9B370C1)”, “participationtypemask”: 1 }, { “addressused”:” vvyas@cloudfronts.com”, “participationtypemask”: 2 }, { “addressused”:” smahato @cloudfronts.com”, “participationtypemask”: 2 } ] }

Introduction: Managers and employees need a good time entry application to record worked hours for billing, payroll, or operations. That information is used to automate payroll, invoice clients, and keep a business operating efficiently. While there are many good off the shelf time entry applications, the pre-built time entry capabilities of the model-driven approach in PowerApps provides a no-code or low-code component-based approach to facilitate the development of such an application development atop the Common Data. Model-driven apps run with the new Unified Interface client, which provides a responsive and accessible design running in browsers and on popular mobile devices.  This app type composes multiple component types including dashboards, forms, views, charts, and business processes which together form a great UI. In this article we will explore the steps to set up your own time entry application in PowerApps using the existing Time Entry entity. Steps  Select the environment you want or go to the PowerApps admin center to create a new one. Go to solutions, click on the “+ New Solution” button and enter the required details for creating a new solution and then click on “Create” option. In the solution, click on “New” and go to “App” and select “Model Driven Apps“. Enter the app name, description, image and the link to access the app designer. Add components to the app: Select the “Open the Site Map Designer”arrow to open the sitemap designer. On the sitemap designer select the new subarea and in the right pane select the properties tab. Then select the following properties: Type: Entity Entity: Time Entry On the app designer canvas select “Forms”, and then on the right pane under the Main Forms group select the “Time Entry Form”. On the app designer canvas select “Views”, and then select “My Time Entries By Date”. On the app designer toolbar, select “Save“. The App can now be validated to check for any error. The time entry entity is dependent on many other entities which will be shown as dependencies to be added during the validation process. All these entities need to be added so as to indicate all the resources, projects, tasks for each project and ensure they are shown properly. Now save and publish the application and you can directly execute the app from the app designer itself, by clicking on the “Play” button. Working with the new app: To work with your new time entry app, download the on your mobile device and login with the credentials into the time entry application as shown below. You can enter a new time entry by clicking on the “New” button, which can be accessed within the menu area. A message box is displayed and the status of the time entry changes to submitted. An existing time entry can be recalled for modification using the “Recall” button icon and a message box is displayed and the status of time entry changes to draft. For time entries such as absence or vacation, manager approval is required. Thus, when you type in absence or vacation it is mandatory to enter the manager name and an approval request is sent to the manager. When the manager name is included, the time entry is submitted and the approval request goes to the manager, who can either approve or reject the request. The status of the time entry changes to approved, when the manager completes the approval process. All the respective time entries managed via your Time Entry app are reflected in the Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation first-party app if it is in use. To share the model-driven application among multiple users, go to the solution and on the app select the share option. Conclusion Pros for model-driven PowerApps: The model-driven application approach for building PowerApps is much simpler as compared to the canvas apps. Model-driven apps can be from the Dynamics 365 first-party applications, which also makes it easy to use. It is helpful in creating your own data source from scratch, using the Common Data Service as the foundation. The Unified Client Interface means your app will look the same whether it is being viewed on a phone, tablet or desktop. Cons of model-driven PowerApps: The model-driven approach does not have a flexible interface, thus in such cases where we need to customize, the canvas PowerApps approach is recommended. It does not provide flexibility with development of functions and controls. There are still problems to solve with the time entry app described in this article. In particular, the time entry has a field date of the data type Date-Time which is set to the UTC time zone, thereby resulting in time entries based on UTC time zone. The solution to the above problem is as follows: Set the field as time zone independent. The change is permanent. Enter the time along with the date so as to get the entries on their proper day.

Introduction: Whenever the a single field in NAV contains Name, Address and other values seperated by delimiter such as ‘,’. But this field cannot formated in SSRS to look appropriate as follows. For Example in NAV: John Peter, Long Island, New York,US. Formatting in SSRS: John Peter, Long Island, New York, US. Pre-requisites: Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Solution: Getting a combined value field in this we are concating mutliple values seperated by ‘|’. In this case I’m using the comments on Sales Invoice Lines. This can be a single field or combination of mulitple fields Code to combine all comments in single variable Writing a Query in SSRS report query to seperate the values by delimiter Field and its expression: Output: In this output screen the comments are seperated properly in SSRS report. Conclusion: This is one of the easiest way of combining and seperating and formatting the report by the use of  delimeter.

Most new users get stuck with issues saying ‘Email address of the recipient was not resolved’. Like in case you want to send out an email from D365 but you don’t have the same saved in the system as a Contact/Lead or any other record. And it resulted in this the big red cross like the one below – There’s a simple setting for this in Settings > Administration > System Settings, under Email tab. You can simply flip the switch on ‘Allow messages with unresolved email recipients to be sent’ to Yes. And, now simply enter the Email address in the Recipient (To) field and let the email go! Hope this quick tip was helpful!

Introduction: One of the most common blunders often made in Data Import are importing whole lot of records without finalizing. And when you import, you realize you needed to add something more to the Import or some things were pending in the Excel file and you ended up uploading them all! Delete Imported Records: Assuming your Import was successful and you want to now just revert what all was imported, navigate to Settings > Data Management > Imports. Open the Import job and look for the option under Delete which says ‘All Records Imported to This Entity During This Import’ And the button label is self-explanatory. Once you click on it, a Delete Job is triggered once you fill in the below information And once you click OK, a Delete Job will run in the background to delete the data that was imported. Navigate to Settings > Data Management > Bulk Record Deletion and open the Delete Job that you started in Step #3 above – Also, if you selected ‘In addition to deleting imported records, delete import job history’, the Import Job record will also be deleted. So, it will be No. of records imported + 1.

Introduction: While migrating Cases, the migration of activities of type ‘Case Resolution’ is necessary. However, the complexity in migrating this increases due to the fact that when the status of a case is updated, a blank case resolution activity is created automatically by the system. This system-generated case resolution needs to be deleted as this would result in each case having two case resolution activities after migration – one system-generated and one with the correct migrated data from the source. Solution: To tackle this issue, one must follow the following steps during migration: 1. Send all Cases (no matter what the status in the source environment) to the target with their status as ‘Open’. 2. Send all related activities to the target environment. 3. Update the case status in the target environment to its status as in the source environment. 4. For cases with status ‘Resolved’, a system-generated case resolution activity will be created. 5. In your case resolution migration map, first add a step to delete the existing case resolution in the target and then insert the case resolution from the source environment. 6. Now your case with status ‘Resolved’ will have only one case resolution and that will be the one migrated from the source environment with the correct data. Conclusion: Above steps shed some light on how to preserve the integrity of case resolution activity data in your target environment during data migration.

Item Attributes are user-defined classifications that can be assigned to your items for ease of searching, filtering, and reporting. For example, a Marketing team could use attributes to help with classifying their items to aid in the grouping, sorting, and filtering for a catalog or website. The Sales team could use these same Attributes to search for Items while helping customers. To view Items and item attributes, navigate to Items in Business Central. Attributes assigned to a selected item display in a fact box on the right side of the screen. To modify or update attributes assigned to an item, a user simply selects the carrot in the Item Attribute fact box or selects Attributes in the ribbon from the Item Card. Setting up available Attributes Available Attributes and their allowed values are configurable. To add an available Attribute, a system admin or power user navigates to Item Attributes in Busines Central. From this window, a user can view, edit or add a new Attribute. The available Types of Attributes that can be used are as follows. Option– allows a list of options to be predefined for the user to select Text – allows free text entry of an attribute value Decimal – allows a numeric value (options not predefined) Integer – allows a numeric value – whole numbers only (options not predefined) Filtering by Item Attributes Back in the Item list view in Business Central, a user can filter their view by one or more attributes. To do this, select Filter by Attributes on the Home ribbon.   In the popup screen, the user can enter search criteria for one or more Attributes.   Search operators commonly used in Business Central such as @(ignore upper or lower case),*(wild card),<,>, etc. can be used. After clicking OK, the items displayed in the Item List will only be those items that meet the search criteria. To remove the Attributes filter and return to the full list of Items, simply click Clear Attributes Filter.