Introduction  Dynamics 365 Project Operations (PO) is a project management application within the Dynamics 365 suite. It is designed to manage project-related tasks, schedules, resources, and budgets. While they may include some financial functionalities, they often lack the comprehensive financial management capabilities that dedicated financial platforms offer.  In this article, we will explore several functions that Project Operations (PO) cannot perform as effectively as financial platforms like QuickBooks (QB) or Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC).  We will also discuss how to bridge this gap and create a seamless integration between Project Operations and these financial platforms.  Let’s first look at what Project Operations falls short of and what financial platforms like QuickBooks or Dynamics 365 Business Central can offer.  Accounting Functionalities  General Ledger Management: Financial platforms provide robust general ledger management, allowing for detailed tracking and reporting of all financial transactions across the entire organization.  Accounts Payable and Receivable: They manage accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) efficiently, including invoicing, bill payments, and collections.  Tax Compliance: Financial platforms are equipped with tools to manage tax calculations, filings, and compliance with local and international tax regulations.  Financial Reporting: Financial platforms offer extensive reporting capabilities, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and customizable financial reports.  Audit Trails: Financial platforms maintain detailed audit trails of all financial transactions, which are crucial for internal audits and external regulatory audits. To leverage the Project Management features of Project Operations and the above-discussed features of financial platforms, businesses often choose to integrate both systems.  Integration Approach  Custom integration offers the utmost flexibility when connecting Project Operations with QuickBooks or Business Central. Several key considerations and entities are important to ensure a seamless integration: Data Mapping:  Tables: Identifying the key entities (Tables) such as projects, expenses, invoices, customers, vendors, contacts, and accounts that need to be synchronized between project operations and financial platforms.  Mapping: Map the fields and attributes of these entities between the two systems to ensure accurate data transfer and synchronization.  Tip: The best practice is to create mapping Excel for maintaining the table and column mappings between the systems.   Chart of Accounts (COA):  Chart of Accounts: Proper alignment between the chart of accounts in Project Operations and the financial platforms is necessary to facilitate accurate financial reporting and reconciliation.  Tip: Creating custom tables for your Chart of Accounts (COAs) and designating the financial systems as the source of truth for COAs is recommended. This approach offers flexibility to associate COAs with expenses, materials, roles, etc.  API Integration:  API Access: Check if the financial platforms offer APIs for integration.  Integration Points: Determine the integration points where data will be exchanged between the two systems, such as project creation, expense tracking, invoice generation, and payment reconciliation.  Data Flow:  Data Direction: Define the direction of data flow between Project Operations and financial platforms, ensuring consistency and integrity of data. The source and the target systems should be defined.  Real-Time Sync: Decide whether data synchronization will occur in real-time or through scheduled batch processes to meet business requirements. Currency:  Currency Conversion: Consider currency conversion requirements when dealing with contracts or transactions in multiple currencies.  Error Handling and Logging:  Error Handling: Implement mechanisms to handle data validation errors, inconsistencies, and exceptions during data transfer between systems.  Logging: Maintain logs of integration activities and errors for troubleshooting, audit trails, and compliance purposes.  Security:  Authentication: Implement secure authentication mechanisms to ensure data privacy and integrity during data exchange between systems.  Access Control: Define roles and permissions to restrict access to sensitive data and functionalities based on user roles and responsibilities.  Testing:  Testing: Set up a dedicated testing session to validate the integration setup, data mappings, and synchronization processes before deploying to production.  Integration process flow diagrams:  Create a process flow diagram for all the entities, for example below, is an integration process flow diagram for integrating Accounts, Contacts, Vendors from Project Operations to Quick Books.  In conclusion, while Project Operations is essential for managing the operational aspects of projects, it lacks the depth and breadth of functionalities offered by dedicated financial platforms.   Financial platforms provide accounting, regulatory compliance, advanced financial reporting, cash flow management, and more, which are crucial for the overall financial health and strategic planning of an organization.   Integrating these platforms with Project Operations tools leverages the strengths of both, ensuring efficient project management and robust financial oversight.  Here is our featured Customer Success Story:  Armexa, a leading US-based Industrial Cybersecurity Company, partnered with CloudFronts for Services Automation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Business Central.   We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

With Power Automate it has become easier to post automated messages, and alert approvals in Microsoft Teams, in the following blog we will explore some Power Automate actions which will help us to send these alerts messages and approvals to Microsoft Teams Channel Owners only.  So let’s begin…!  Let’s say we have a Teams Channel with members, as shown in the snapshot below. We need to send approvals to the Owner of the channel only.  Here is how it is done,   Step 1: In power automate flow, search for Office 365 Group Action, and now select List all members action. Select the Teams name from the dropdown.  (Comments: When a Team is created it forms an Office 365 group)  Step 2: Here we will be using the Microsoft Graph API to get the owners of the group more about it in the doc – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/group-list-owners?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http  API : GET /groups/{id}/owners  To get the ID go to https://admin.microsoft.com/ and follow the snapshot below. (Comments: to get the id of the group you need to have admin privileges)  Step 3: After we run the flow, we get the output for step 2 as shown in the snapshot below.  So now we need to get the “mail” from the “value” from step 2, hence here we use a Select action in Power Automate to get the emails from the values from step 2.  Step 4: At last, we use a join expression to club the mails separated by (;)so that we can use them in the outlook action.  Power Automate Flow Screenshots:  Output: Hope this helps 😉

I created a SharePoint site and was working on user permissions for a document library, I wanted to assign the Restricted View permission to a group but the permission was not visible. Below is the screenshot of the document library I created in my SharePoint and as you can see the Restricted View Permission is not available in the permission list. So how to make the permission available, the catch here is that it is only visible if there is a document uploaded in the document library (So you can upload a dummy document to your library and later delete it).  Hope this helps!

I had a requirement from a client to remove the hover from the header navigation on the customer portal. Here is how we do it, if we inspect, we can see that this is handled by a style element “.navbar-inverse .navbar-nav > li > a:hover“ Now if we removed the background colour here is how it looks. Now let’s make these changes in the code, edit your portal and open the portal in the Power Apps gallery and go to themes. Search for the style element and comment or remove the background colour. Hope this helps!

Recently I faced issues with some of our custom and Out of the Box ribbon buttons disappearing for example look at the snapshot below. For any selected service order I was not able to see the Run Flow button which runs on-demand workflows and Power Automate Flow (and a few custom ribbon buttons as well). I investigated and found out that this happens because of a field service setting called “Show Simplified Work Order Command”. As per the document – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/field-service/configure-default-settings This setting influences the command bar on work order records and lists. By default, this field is set to Yes, which shows only the most relevant commands for work orders. The following commands will be hidden from the form: deactivate, check access, process, add to queue, queue item details, assign, share, email a link, flow, Word templates. The following commands will be hidden from the list view when no records are selected: email a link, flow, import from Excel. The following commands will be hidden from the list view when a record is selected: activate, deactivate, email a link, add to queue, flow, Word templates, Excel templates. When set to No, all commands are shown. To turn it off in your field service app go to settings from the change area and select Field Service Settings, under field service setting turn off Show Simplified Work Order Commands to No. Now we can see our run flow button along with a couple of other buttons. I hope this helps!

Dynamics 365 provides functionality to create a text field of type website field where the user can type in the website name. But out of the box, it has no validation to validate if the user is actually putting a web URL or just a text value, this can be achieved using simple JavaScript.  In this blog, let’s see how to put a validation on a website field in CRM so that users enter the correct data.  I have created a website field in CRM and here is how it looks.  Using the below javascript code you can put a validation on this website field. Code:       validateWebsiteURL: function (formContext, fieldName) {          if (formContext.getAttribute(fieldName)) {              var websiteurl = formContext.getAttribute(fieldName).getValue();              if (websiteurl != “”) {                  var pattern = new RegExp(‘^(https?:\\/\\/)?’ + // protocol                      ‘((([a-z\\d]([a-z\\d-]*[a-z\\d])*)\\.)+[a-z]{2,}|’ + // domain name                      ‘((\\d{1,3}\\.){3}\\d{1,3}))’ + // OR ip (v4) address                      ‘(\\:\\d+)?(\\/[-a-z\\d%_.~+]*)*’ + // port and path                      ‘(\\?[;&a-z\\d%_.~+=-]*)?’ + // query string                      ‘(\\#[-a-z\\d_]*)?$’, ‘i’); // fragment locator                  if (!pattern.test(websiteurl)) {                      formContext.getControl(fieldName).setNotification(‘Website: Enter a valid Website URL.’);                  } else {                      formContext.getControl(fieldName).clearNotification();                  }              }          }      }  I hope this helps 😉! 

The Power Apps Portals Primary Navigation Header always has a section to the profile page as shown in the snapshot below.   It is possible to disable this by adding a Web Page Access Control Rule, this will restrict read access to the profile page, but what if you don’t want to remove the read access and you only want to remove the Profile Section from the header, here is how to do it.  The Primary Navigation or Navigation on the portal is a part of the portal’s Header Component, this header component comes from the Header Web Template, It is not possible to edit this template from the Power Apps Portal Studio. To be able to edit this template we will have to use the portal management app  Step 1: Go to Portal Management App, under templates search for Header Template.  Step 2: at line number 104 or after line number 95 search for Class “dropdown-menu” in an unordered list (ul) and comment the below code.  Ding!! We have done it.  Hope this helps 😉!

Power Apps Portal allows us multiple ways to authenticate users, users can login either by using a User ID and Password for local login or using SSO logins like Azure AD, etc.  Users can also register themself through the portal, when a user registers from the portal this creates a new contact with the user’s details and email ID in CRM.  But what if the contact already exists in your system? To map the registered portal user with this existing contact instead of creating a new contact we need to enable/add a site setting.  Site Setting –  Authentication/[Protocol]/[Provider]/AllowContactMappingWithEmail  More on Protocol & Provider – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/portals/configure/configure-portal-authentication  For Azure AD login which is provided by default, you can use the Site Setting – Authentication/OpenIdConnect/AzureAD/AllowContactMappingWithEmail  Reference Microsoft Document – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/portals/configure/configure-site-settings#portal-site-settings  I hope this helps 😉 ! 

I have a contact record with a role option set field with options Billing, Decision Maker, Client, Influencer.  The Requirement is to only show billing contacts i.e. contacts with role billing related to the account selected on the Opportunity in the lookup of the contacts on the Opportunities.  Let’s see how I to filtered the contacts lookup to just show billing contacts :   Step 1:  Create a contacts view such that the role is billing(or any field on which you want to filter is set to the value by which you want to filter that record ).  Step 2:  Set the filter criteria of the contacts lookup field on the opportunity as shown below.  In the Additional properties  turn of the view selector and set the default view to the view you created in #1Step 1  In the Field Behavior Tick the “disable most recently used items for this field”.  Now you will only see contacts with role billing in the lookup of the contacts on the opportunity form.  Hope this helps!   Thank you. 

MS Forms offers a functionality to create a dropdown field which is similar to an option set fields in D365 CRM, But when it comes to mapping or storing values between these two field things become a bit tricky. However there are a few workaround using power automate capabilities. In this blog let’s see how we can store a MS Forms Dropdowns options into an Option Set field in CRM.  What is an Option Set? Option sets are a field type that can be created within Dynamics CRM and are Often referred to as “dropdown” or a “pick-list”.   An option set has two identities for each of its option. The Options Label Name and the Label Value as shown in the below snapshot.  What is a Dropdown in MS Form ? A dropdown is a list of defined options(Choice) that can be selected by a user, unlike a text field where the data can be “organic” or manually entered.  Now Let’s Consider an use case :  Consider we have a MS Form Name “Company Registrations” when a user submits this form a Power Automate flow is triggered which creates a new Account record in CRM with the field mapping shown in similar colors in the below snapshot.   Now we need to get the form responses first to create a new Account record.  2. All the Text field values can be directly mapped into the dataverse connector as shown in the below snapshot.  3. For mapping the MS forms Dropdown to the Option set we need to maintain the CRMs Option Label values into our flow as to set (define the value of the option set) Option Sets in CRM we need to pass the Label Values to the flow (if you just pass the label text it won’t work hence we need to maintain these option set values in the flow)as shown below.  4. Now we need to select the option set field in our flow connector and select enter custom value.  5. Once you are able to add a customer value use the following expression which will dynamically bring option set label value for the dropdown choice selected by the user on the form.Expression – outputs(‘Option_Set_Values’)?[outputs(‘Get_Form_Response’)?[‘body/rf98dd4fb83624fc7b7314de77542a3ef’]]Red : Text in the above expression corresponds to “Outputs “in the below snapshot which is the output of the compose in which we stored our option set label values. Blue : Text corresponds to the “Ownership Type” from the form response.   Output : MS Form Submission –   Created Account Output –   Hope this helps !