Overview: The new July 2017 update of the D365 is the latest update to Dynamics 365 and is called v9. This is a major change from not only functionality perspective but also from a visual perspective as well. And one such part of the visual upgrade is the refreshed web client UI. This is a major change since it’s 2013 Online version! What has changed: The traditional UI has been redesigned to appear more intuitive and eliminate issues with the previous UI. Some of the changes are: Removal of White Spaces: They’ve removed all the extra white spaces from the current version making the UI look more occupied and tightly bound. As you can see in the screenshot above. Boxes have been added to house the sections on the form. This makes the white spaces disappear making the UI look more occupied. In the previous UI, the short length of fields and unexpanded subgrids used to leave a lot of white space causing a disjoint in the UI. That has been taken care of here. Word Wrap Fields: With the new refreshed UI, the lengthy field names are taken care of. In the previous version, the lengthy field labels used to disappear behind the field making it a hassle to hover over the label and read the name of the field. With the new UI, the field labels are not wrapped and if you have lengthy field labels, the entire text is seen as below: Color Coded Subgrid on Form: Further, they’ve enhanced on how sub-grids should appear on the form. Example, if you have a  lot of sub-grids on the form and you need to read to know which sub-grid is where. Now, you can have colored Sub-grid headers that give you a visual feedback of what entity sub-grid it is. See sample screenshot below: As seen above, I can have a uniform color for Contact across all forms where I have Contact subg-grid. This is available only on the form level. The color can be modified from the Sub-grid properties on the Form as shown below: Other Improvements: Along with these, there are other significant improvements that can be seen across the new UI: Improved Form tab formatting. Standardise fonts. The new UI looks promising and will provide an easier visual feel.

Overview: Another new feature announced in the Dynamics 365 July 2017 Update is that the Business Process Flows are now available as entities in D365! That means, you can access them like entities from SiteMap and see the records of their respective entities in an Entity View like you would do with other entities. Turning BPF Entity customization support: Since this is in preview for Dynamics 365 July 2017 Update, you’ll need to turn it on from the Previews section under Settings > Administration. BPF as Entity in Solution: Just like any other entity, the Process appears like an entity. Accessing BPF as entity records: Once this is enabled from the Previews section, you’ll see the entities in the default Sales area as shown below: Business Process Flow as records: Now, so far you’ve seen records having the same business process flows and once you open them, you’d see which records were in which stage. This view gives you which records use a particular Business Process Flow and where has the record reached in the flow. In the above view, each record will open the record of their respective entities. Ex. Jake Cormick is in Process stage and Process stage belongs to Opportunity entity. So opening this record will open the Opportunity record as shown below: Quite Simple! Hope this was helpful.

Since this is in Preview, it won’t be available for users until next update. However, this is how it works and seems so easy to implement it. Enable Step Action from System Settings: Since this is a Preview feature in Dynamics 365 July 2017 update, it appears in the Previews section where you can go and enable the same. Once you’ve enabled the Preview feature, you should be able to see Action Step visible in the Business Process Flow editor as shown below: Add Action Step in BPF: You can trigger an Action or a Workflow in the Step Action feature. I have a Workflow to create a New Invitation entity record in D365. I’ll be adding the same in the BPF. In the Business Process Flow editor, I’ll add an Add Action Step in one of the stages as shown below: I’ll add the already created a Workflow to the Business Process Flow in the Step Action. Once done, I’ll simply activate the BPF and we can see it in action. Working with Step Action: Let’s see how easy it is to execute this workflow using the Step Action. On the Business Process Flow, I can see that the step appears from what the Display Name in Business Process Flow is set. And clicking on it, the workflow will run the background performing it’s operation. (You’ll see a quick ‘Processing’) message while it triggers the workflow. As seen below, the record for New Invitation was created as directed in the Workflow I created. Conclusion: Putting it simply, it works very quickly and is as simple as clicking a button.

Introduction: Finally, one of the most sought after feature is here in the D365 July 2017 Update. The Multi-Select Option Set! A new attribute type added to D365, you can now create Multi-Level OptionSets in D365. Creating a Multi Select OptionSet: A new attribute type is now available that lets you create Multi-Select Option Set. 1. When you create a new field, you’ll see an option to create a Multi-Select Option Set. 2. Here, I’m creating an Option Set for choice of Subjects for Newsletter Company. I’ve named the field as Subjects and I’ll let users select which all subjects is a particular customer interested in in the Enrollment entity. 3. The Multi-Select Option Set looks like a usual option set and my options look like this 4. And I’ll add the same in my form as well and Publish all my changes. Using Multi-Select Option Set: Below is how you can select multiple values in the Multi-Select Option Set. Once on the form, here’s how you can use the Multi Select Option Sets 1. They come with auto-complete feature, so you can start typing the options and they will show up 2. Now, I have selected 3 options namely Technical, History and Science and my subject of interests. 3. Once selected, they appear separated by semicolon (;) And I’ll save the record. Multi Select Option Set on Views: You can see selected values in the Multi-Select Option Sets on the entity views as well. Some Features: Below are the features of the Multi-Select Option Sets Auto-complete the results. Can hold up to 150 values Can be used in Advanced Find as well as FetchXML queries. Hope this was helpful!  

Now often, you want to have a common mail address for everyone within a team to monitor and interact through like info@domain.com or support@domain.com Office 365 provides this capability with something called as Shared Mailbox. Features of Shared Mailbox Shared Mailbox doesn’t need an Exchange license. Shared Mailbox doesn’t have its own credentials. Users add this mailbox to theirs and use their own credentials to access it. Shared Calendar is available in a Shared Mailbox where everyone can see who is available when Setting up Shared Mailbox You’ll need to be an administrator in Office 365 to be able to create a Shared Mailbox. Navigate to Office 365 Admin Center and find Shared Mailboxes options under Groups. Click on Add a mailbox I’ll call it Sales@domain.com, for example. And click Add. I selected both the users seen in above step to add to the Shared Mailbox. Those members are seen on the detail pane of the selected Shared Mailbox as shown below Shared mailbox gets created within moments! Adding Users to the Shared Mailbox Only users who have an Exchange Online license can be added to Shared Mailboxes. Click on the mailbox and then on Edit in Members area to add O365 users to the mailbox as shown below Click on +Add Members to add users to the mailbox. You’ll find all the members who already have an Exchange Online license are eligible for adding to the shared mailbox. I selected both the users seen in above step to add to the Shared Mailbox. Those members are seen on the detail pane of the selected Shared Mailbox as shown below Adding Shared Mailbox to Outlook I will show the OWA example in this blog to show how to add the shared mailbox to the user’s Outlook Let’s assume we have the mailbox pwagh@cft79.onmicrosoft.com and we want to add the shared mailbox sales@cft79.onmicrosoft.com to pwagh’s mailbox. In OWA, right click on the root folder of the mailbox and click on Add shared folder Start typing the name of the Shared Mailbox and it should auto-populate the same for you. Select the Shared Mailbox and click Add. The mailbox should then appear in your OWA. Note: It takes a few minutes until the Shared Mailbox is accessible from your mailbox after adding it Hope this was helpful.

Overview: Connection entities provision an easy way to connect and describe relationships between two records in D365 CRM. This is supported across most Entity types in Dynamics 365. Some of the features of Connection entities are as follows: All Business and Custom entities can be enabled for Connections. Provision to add descriptive information between the relationship between the 2 records. Enabling Connections for an Entity: In my example below, I’ll enable Connections for 2 custom entities – I have a custom entity called Family Members and have these records details of Family Members like their blood groups and medical history. This entity is a child entity of another customer entity called Patient. Connections must be enabled for this custom entity at the entity level as shown below: Connections need to be enabled on both entities between which connection is to be made. Once Connections have been enabled, navigate to the record and navigate to the related records, you’ll see Connections is now available. Connection Roles: Connection Roles are the description that defines in what way is record A related to record B. Connection Roles can be added to a Solution or even created as below: In a solution, look for Connection Roles on the left hand menu Then, create a Connection (Existing ones in an Unmanaged Solution can be added as well) I am creating a new Connection Role by the name Father and I’ve enabled the same only for Patient entity. and Family Member After saving the record, I’ll create a Matching Connection Role to the role Father I just created. Now, I’ll create a matching Role called as Son Now, the two roles have been created which match each other Associating Records: Once my Connections have been enabled on source (connection from entity) and target (connection to entity), I’ll associate the two records as follows: I will navigate to the Family Member entity I created above and will associate a record with a record to Patient entity. This way, I can derive what is the relation between the family member and the patient. In the Connection Associated View above, I’ll associate the Family Member Gary to the Patient. So I’ll select To Another in the connection menu as shown in #1 above. Then, find the Patient Alexander James which I created in the Connect To tab as shown below. And then I relate the current record to the target record as the Father. Note: As soon as Father was selected in the Connected To tab, the Details tab auto-filled Son as it was the only role associated with the Father when we created Connection Roles in above section in this blog. In case there are multiple Connection Roles associated with one Role, the Details section’s As This Role field will be empty for you to select the related role from. And the record is saved as below. Likewise, a record can be connected to multiple other records as well. Retrieving Connections: Connections are useful if you want to draw reports, graphs or charts.

Overview: O365 Message Encryption is a service based on Microsoft Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS). Once an RMS is setup, Email messages can be encrypted under certain rules set and provide the recipients with 2 options to read the encrypted email – By an OPT By signing into organization account. Pre-Requisites: Activate Azure RMS in Office 365. Setup Azure Rights Management for Exchange Online Setup transport rule to enforce message encryption in Exchange Online. Activate Azure Rights Management in Office 365: Following are the steps to enable Email Encryption. I’m going to enable encryption on one of my trial environments- Log in to Office 365 Admin Center as a Global Administrator Navigate to Settings section and then select Services and add-ins Then, look for Microsoft Azure Information Protection Open the same by clicking on the highlighted link as shown below On the rights management page, you’ll see the rights management is not activated and you’ll get an option to activate the same. Once you activate the same, it will be activated and you’ll see a page like this Here, Rights Management has been activated! Setup Azure Rights Management for Office 365 Email Encryption: Following steps are carried to setup Azure RMS for Email Message Encryption. Enter the following steps to authenticate and connect to the session. As shown above, enter the commandsSet-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSignedEnter Y/y when asked about changing the Execution Policy.Then, enter $cred = Get-CredentialThen, enter the admin credentials to your O365. 2. You’ll be authenticated, then enter the following commands$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection 3. Then, Import-PSSession $Session as shown below 4. Next step is to verify that IRM is not configured yet.   Get-IRMConfiguration 5. Now, configure with key-sharing location. For my North America environment, I’ll use the following –Set-IRMConfiguration -RMSOnlineKeySharingLocation https://sp-rms.na.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc Here’s the list of key sharing locations depending where your tenant resides Location RMS key sharing location North America https://sp-rms.na.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc European Union https://sp-rms.eu.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc Asia https://sp-rms.ap.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc South America https://sp-rms.sa.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc Office 365 for Government https://sp-rms.govus.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc1 6.  Import TPD i.e. Trusted Publishing Domain from RMS Online Import-RMSTrustedPublishingDomain -RMSOnline -name “RMS Online” 7. Now, test the successful setup of IRM in Exchange Online Test-IRMConfiguration -sender crmadmin@cft77.onmicrosoft.com (Enter your Admin username) 8. Enable InternalLicensing and test again Set-IRMConfiguration -InternalLicensingEnabled: $true And you’ll get the passed result. 9. Few more steps – Disable IRM templates in OWA and Outlook Set-IRMConfiguration -ClientAccessServerEnabled $false and Enable IRM for O365 Message Encryption Set-IRMConfiguration -InternalLicensingEnabled $true 10. Now, check the IRM Configuration Get-IRMConfiguration IRM is now setup! Configure Rules in Exchange Admin Center: Now, we will setup a very simple rule which where the Exchange will send out an encrypted email Navigate to Exchange Admin Center in O365 Under Mail Flow section, create the below rule And set the conditions as – If the sender is CRM Admin, encrypt the email. And then save. And try sending a sample email – The email will be received like this Download the HTML file and open the same. The HTML file will have the following options – Let’s say, I select OPT, I’ll get another email as this And I enter that OTP, I can then see the message And you have the encrypted message feature as shown above! Hope this was helpful!  

Overview Spring 2017 update to Dynamics 365 is coming up in July 2017. And there are exciting new additions and improvements coming to Dynamics 365 For Sales. Here are the highlights on what’s up next – LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Improve performance of their sales processes from LinkedIn Company and Sales profiles Display Navigator person and company information on Lead, Account, Contact and Opportunity pages. Automatic daily updates between the two systems. Write select Sales Navigator activities (InMails, messages, notes and call logs) to D365 For Sales. D365 Connector for LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms (only if you use Lead Gen Forms for LinkedIn): Bring LinkedIn Leads to D365 Online using this connector. Automatically captures and syncs leads to further nurture them. Support for multiple LinkedIn member accounts. Configure how Leads will be captured. Analyze Lead performance. Prospect to Cash Integration: Connect D365 For Sales and D365 For Operations using Common Data Service. Maintain Accounts in Sales and sync to Operations as Customers. Sync Contacts Sync Products from D365 for Operations and sync them to Sales. Create Quotes in D365 for Sales and sync them to Operations. Generate Sales Orders in Sales for existing Productions and sync them to Operations. Generate Invoice in Operations and sync them to Sales. Relationship Analytics: Relationship health Most Contacted Relationship KPIs Dynamics 365 Administrator Role in Office 365: Assign D365 Admin role at a tenant level. Can manage instances and admin functions, access D365 application if they are licensed. Bulk Data Loader:  New cloud based service for bulk import/export to cloud staging tables and perform light data-quality functions. Then push back to Dynamics 365. Will be accessed from a link in Admin Center and will redirect of LCS. Cortana Integration: Surface relevant Activities, Accounts and Opportunities to Salespeople. Customer backup and restore (online only): Customer backup and restore on Azure servers securely. Database Level Encryption with Customer Managed Keys: Ability for customers to generate their own keys and upload it to Azure Key Vault. Also revoke access on demand in a self-service manner. Portal Features Ability to Include attachments on knowledge articles so that they can be displayed on the Portal. Improved Admin Wizard on Portal to add an entity to the Portal. When data is updated in the entity, it will be automatically available to Portal users who have access to these data. Source Code for Portals will be available on the Microsoft Download Center under MIT license for developers to download. This will let Portals be deployed for D365 Online as well as on-premise environments. Support Azure Ad-B2C for Portal authentication using a single sign-on configuration Configure portal authentication for SSO. Manage Portal security in Azure. Support Timezone independent date formats in Portal forms. This means that  

Introduction: Want to make a dedicated OneNote notebook per Dynamics 365 record? Dynamics 365 Integration is what you need. This integration provides you the ability to take notes in the notebook in context of Dynamics 365 record for selected entities. OneNote records can be directly accessed on the Activity wall of the record whether on web application or on the mobile apps. Pre-Requisites: Server based SharePoint integration needs to be enabled between D365 and SharePoint Online. OneNote integration is only supported for SharePoint Online. Document Management is enabled for the Entity and the same is setup in Document Management under Settings in Dynamics 365. Setting Up: Before we begin, look that OneNote Integration won’t appear yet in Document Management under Settings since we don’t have Server-based SharePoint Integration enabled yet. Once you’ve enabled Server-based SharePoint Integration, you’ll see OneNote Integration Note: By default, OneNote integration will be enabled for Account, Contact, Lead and Product. So, I’ll enable OneNote integration for one of my custom entities. Following are the steps to enable the same: I have an entity called Order Fulfilment. On this entity, I have the usual Activity Feed as below   First, the entity needs to be Document Management enabled to be able to be listed for OneNote Integration as shown in the image below on entity level. I’ll navigate to Settings > Document Management > OneNote Integration. Because Document Management has been enabled on Order Fulfilment entity, I can see Order Fulfilment (I’ve ticked the same and clicked on Finish)3. And DONE! Accessing OneNote for a record Once I’ve configured this, I’ll open the Order Fulfilment record I was looking at. Once I click on it, I’ll see a Notebook has been created. And clicking on the Untitled Notebook will take me to OneNote Online for that record Hope this was quick and easy!

Now, it’s possible to make your CRM views visually more informative. This is a cool new feature which is in preview for Dynamics 365 for December 2016 release. You can now add custom icon with tooltip text to display a column based on the column value. First thing need to be done to achieve this is – upload the custom icons as web resources in your Dynamics 365. Then, use these icons using JavaScript web resources. Adding JavaScript code The following 2 new attributes have been added to layoutxml of savedquery – imageproviderwebresource imageproviderfuntionname The JavaScript code gets executed when the page loads. Following is how you can add Icons to the columns: In this example, I will add 3 types of images to the Open Opportunity View and based on whether the Opportunity is Hot, Warm or Cold, I’ll display a different emoji representing each. 1. Take 16×16 images and upload them as Web Resource in Dynamics 365. In my example, I’m using a “happy” and “sad” emoji to represent if the Opportunity is Hot or Cold. 2. Create a new Web Resource of type JavaScript to handle these icons when the Opportunity is either Cold, Warm or Hot. In the above code, row object and the User’s LCID is passed as parameters. I’m selecting the image to be displayed (Web Resource names of the images in D365) based on the value in str.opportunityratingcode_Value.  3. Once I have this code ready, I’ll import this JS as a Web Resource in D365. 4. I’ll navigate to the view I want to add this functionality to and double click the column to edit the property of the column as shown below: 5. In the above example, I’m selecting my JS Web Resource new_IconInCols and the function as displayIconTooltip. 6. Once everything is set, I’ll publish all the changes and refresh my view with relevant data. 7. Finally, my data looks like this on the View: Hot = Happy Warm = Neutral Cold = Sad 8. Also, if you hover over the icon itself, you’ll see what tooltip it has – Hope this was helpful!