I was trying to explore the Extend Booking functionality in Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA) and saw that the users were getting allocated for the entire 24 hours in a day. Immediately, I realized that the issue was coming up because the work hour template was not set properly. When the new work hour template was created, the work hour parameters for the resources were not set back to eight hours. To check the work hours of a resource, navigate to Project Service–>Resources–>Select a Resource. Click on the button “show work hours” as highlighted in the screenshot below. A popup opens. The screenshot shows that the work hours are not defined for the resource as of now. As a result, the resource will be allocated for 24 hours if they are selected for a project unless there working hours are defined.    I selected the resource in the Default Work Hour Template and then created the work hours for that resource (eight hours a day and Monday-Friday working). I assigned these work hours to all the resources in the navigation shown below. Select all resources and click on the ‘Set calendar’ button from the Ribbon Control. I assumed that the new work hours will be set for all the resources selected. I then tried to allocate via extend booking and saw that the resource was still not reflecting the new work hours set. Upon further research I worked out a solution that follows the proper way to define the work hour template of the resources. I created a new work hours template by navigating to Project Service Work Hour Templates. This new work hour template was created to define the following: Working hours per day of the resource. Working days in a week. Holidays in a year. The resource selected should have the proper work hours defined. Select all the resources and assign the newly created work hour template. Because Kuldeep Gupta is a template resource in this example, all the resources will get assigned from Kuldeep Gupta. As a result, it’s not possible to select more than one resource. Now while creating the project select this newly created Work Hour Template  and the project will respect the new work hours. A word of caution: You will not be able to change the work hour template for the old projects as the field is locked and you are not allowed to change it in the midst of the project. I hope that these steps help you to create and assign the work hour template effectively.

Introduction: Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) application, part of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, empowers users to create surveys without the need of a third-party product. Some elements of the experience can be configured in VoC like logos and custom images. The theming layer allow users to edit a survey’s look and feel with custom colors and other details using CSS to align with the organization’s brand. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to customize a response page and setup a redirection link to the thank you page. The problem: Customizing a thank you GIF image: One of our retail industry clients had a requirement of adding a “thank you” GIF image and another linked image to their survey thank you page. When clicked, the linked image would take the survey respondent back to the first page of survey. But VoC has no such default customization functionality on its thank you page. Solution: Since it is not possible to meet this requirement using VoC alone, we tricked the program with CSS. Here’s what we did: 1. Go to active surveys and click the survey that you want to modify. 2. Go to survey designer and select “Complete Page,” which is the page seen upon completion of the survey. The survey designer section shows your complete survey, with all elements. You can design your survey here with desired questions, their types, and can even add pages to your survey. The thank you page, or complete page, is the last page of the survey and the one in need of customization, per the customer’s requirements.  I added some “descriptive text” here. Text in the footer is the redirection link, and I marked it as a footer to separate it from the main section here. I used CSS to hide the text “footer” and add an image which will be clickable to the first page in the next steps. 3. Here is the survey’s first page: 4. Now, here you can add text. I added text but in italics to differentiate it. Giving CSS properties to the<i> tag (italic content) means it will be applied only here and nowhere else. You can use any other tag, too. If you want multiple images, you can add multiple tags and then style them accordingly in custom CSS. 5. Upload the images that you want to use here (under the custom icon). 6. Click on themes. You can do all customization under this page. 7. Under theme, you can get options to provide color to different elements of your survey form. 8. Below this color section, you will find the CSS section, where you can add your custom CSS. 9. In this step, I played with the HTML tags that I used on the thank you page. I gave them predefined height and width and set the required image as the background. Since it is just a tag and might contain text, I hid the text using CSS properties. 10. In the same way, I added a background image to the survey complete link URL using the CSS property on the tag (classes are pre-defined by CRM), so that the user can click and go back to the required page.  11. The survey link now shows both images properly, with the lower image clickable to bring the user back to the first page of the survey. Conclusion Although this is not a part of default customization of VoC, it is a very useful trick which I followed to improve customization of the VoC thank you to meet our client’s requirements

Introduction: This blog explains how to Send Emails using WebApi in MS CRM. Request: Post URL:  <your instance url>/api/data/v9.1/ emails (<guid of the email record>)/Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.SendEmail Header: Content-Type: application/json Parameter To be send in body: Parameter Value Comment IssueSend False If value is set as false, then email is market as sent only in MS CRM. IssueSend True If value is set as true, then email is sent and as well as marked as sent in MS CRM. Body: {        “IssueSend”: “true”  } Response:

Introduction: XrmToolBox can be used to simplify many tasks. With so many tools now listed, a newcomer may wonder what others are using it for to maximum benefit. XrmToolBox is a Windows application that connects to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Dynamics CRM, providing tools to ease customization and configuration tasks. It is shipped with more than 30 plugins to make administration, customization, and configuration tasks easier and less time consuming. In this article we will explore ten of our favorite XRMToolBox tools, exploring what they do and why they are so useful. How is it used? Documentation is available through the wiki of XrmToolBox Github’s repository. All the information regarding the prerequisites, connection, tools description, how to use is mentioned in the documentation. Ten useful tools of XrmToolBox: 1) Web Resource Manager Web Resource Manager helps to manage your web resources easily. This tool has saved hours of time for creating, updating and managing the web resources of Dynamics 365/CRM. This is a must have for all developers. 2) Ribbon Workbench The Ribbon Workbench tool helps to edit the Dynamics CRM ribbon or command bar from inside the XrmToolbox. By installing the Ribbon Workbench you’ll quickly be performing customizations that were previously only possible by time consuming and error-prone manual editing of RibbonDiff Xml. 3) Fetch XML Builder The tool is helpful for three major areas: Constructing FetchXML in ways that advanced find cannot Querying CRM for information not (easily) found in the CRM UI lie system and internal entities, hidden attributes or join on other fields Developer assistance like generating C# query expression code, OData query strings or composing queries for reports 4) Plugin Registration The Plugin Registration tool is an important tool used for registering plugins and custom workflows. 5) Auto Number Manager The Auto Number Manager tool’s primary goal is to give D365 customizers a way of managing auto number attributes. This feature was introduced with the 9.0 release. However, this release only supports creating and managing these attributes through the SDK. A user interface for the features is expected to be available from the 9.1 release of the platform. With the Auto Number Manager for XrmToolBox you can create, alter and delete these attributes through an easy to use UI. 6) Site Map Editor The Site Map Editor tool helps to manage the sitemap with no XML needed. Editing sitemap XML is scary for any developer, as any mistake in XML can make the entire CRM unusable. This tool helps to edit your sitemap components. You can easily create areas and subareas, update the order and copy or paste components from one area to another. You can also update all the sub area details like icons or titles for multiple languages. 7) Solution Component Mover The Solution Component Mover tool helps to transfer components from one or multiple source solutions to one target solution. It avoids components getting missed when creating a new solution or adding components from other solutions. Using this tool ensures you add all components from the selected solutions. 8) Metadata Document Generator Metadata Document Generator makes it easier for Dynamics CRM 2011 integrators to generate documentation about entities and attributes metadata. You’ll no longer have to write “by hand” these awful tables full of metadata information. This tool can connect to all type of Dynamics CRM 2011 deployments, including OSDP! 9) Bulk Delete tool The Bulk Delete tool has the ability to delete records from CRM based on system views, personal views, or custom FetchXML Queries. It also has the ability to edit a FetchXML query in the FetchXML Builder tool within XrmToolBox and to select the batch size and interval (in seconds) between batches. It takes less time to delete records as compared to traditional bulk delete from CRM. 10) Metadata Browser The Metadata Browser tool has ability to browse metadata from D365 CRM environment. This tool can be used to view all the metadata.  

One of the most common asks as an administration is to know when the user started accessing the system and from where. In your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps, you can enable Auditing for User Access.   Enable Auditing of User Access You need to enable this feature once you enable Auditing on Organization level. Then, you can enable User Access Auditing as well Navigate to Settings > Administration > System Settings and under Auditing tab OR Settings > Auditing > Global Audit Settings Once the Auditing for User Access has started, the Audit Summary will record this – And whenever a User logs into Dynamics 365 via the Web Application, Phone app or WebServices that provide authentication, the Auditing will be logged as shown below – The Operation will be Access and the Event will be User Access via Web or User Access via Web Services. If you want to enhance user login, you can quickly enable Multi-Factor Authentication for the users, read my blog on MFA here. Hope this quick tip helps.

Introduction: Are you one of those traditional company who has been reeling under the burden of undergoing digital transformation just because there is enough buzz around and every other organization including your competitors are taking on their operational, human and several other business challenges head-ons with this digital transformation thing? You have no idea of where to begin with? Then this article is just for you. I am going ahead and listing down THREE factors you MUST consider even before riding your company through the much-hyped Digital Transformation process. Data Magic!! Leverage Your Data First! Nothing beats customer data when it comes to gaining critical insight into how to execute a digital transformation program. This depends on factors like the volume of data, the volume of business transactions and the daily operations, and how they have been able to dive deeper into a prospective customers’ specific demographic’s needs and wants, understand everything about their expectations, and then being able to target them effectively is the best way to begin a digital transformation initiative. Recent McKinsey research concluded that the executive teams that make extensive use of customer data analytics across all business decisions see a 126% profit improvement over companies that don’t. What types of data metrics come into play? Data metrics vary from one company to other. For example, in the case of retail industry, factors such as demographics, products purchased by category and type, the frequency of purchase and purchase value can really prove to be a great head-start. In this case, your technology consulting partner should provide a right consultation. In modern technological jargon, a business intelligence tool such as Microsoft Power BI would act as a catalyst in terms of accumulating data, grinding it and giving a critical insight into it which can fuel your business decision making. Its Desktop, but then Its Mobile too!! Today, customers and employees across the globe expect the flexibility of mobile (or portable device) platforms whenever they are engaging with brands. They expect the ability to access the responsive microsites, apps, or SMS, and to be constantly engaged and kept in the loop. Hence, to verify that a digital strategy is mobile-first, to avoid alienating modern platform users. Today, the digital platforms from Microsoft like Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement have availed separate apps for Field Service, customer service, sales and several other tasks which can be easily done when you are on the go. With just one download from the app stores, you’ll automatically gain access to all apps. Consult, Revamp Your Existing Platforms NOW! Digital Transformation programs thrive on the understanding of the company, industry, right audience and the need to increase their profitability. Then it may be by slicing human intervention costs or by increasing operational efficiencies.  In some cases, it is both.  Here, I am stressing a fact that a right customized solution is essential to drive the business decision making. For small and medium enterprise, it takes a great deal to undergo a digital transformation especially when there might be a profound investment involved. A minor rejig may also make a huge difference. For instance, in my experience, there is a company called as Eternity Lifestyles, which is a pioneer in the Indian sports eyewear industry. This company consulted its new solution partner to overview the existing systems and restructure it with an objective to reduce the overall operations cost. The result was such that they registered an 80% of the reduction in the existing systems’ licensing costs. Read the whole success story here. Another example, I would suggest is of a South Asian sporting goods retail company ‘House of Sonee Sports’, who underwent a huge digital transformation and registered a 22% ROI within just few months of the deployment of the new business platforms. You can check out more about how it went through this process in a simple way and ensured a successful future journey here.

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: 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.