Overview: You’ve been using Dynamics CRM 365 for your organization. And there is a need to make the information stored in your D365 accessible to your customers in a user-friendly interface. That’s where Microsoft CRM Portals come into play! Previously owned by ADX Portal, D365 Portals are now available Online. With each D365 Plan 1 Business Application subscription, 1 Portal Add-On is provided for free. Users can access portals by signing into the Portal. Users are stored in Dynamics 365 in the form of Contacts. Customers are invited to the Portals by Invitation method. Upon creating and account / redeeming an invitation, they can manage their own profile. Setting Up Portals You can setup Portals from the Office 365 Admin centre. Here is how you can do that: Navigate to the Admin area in Office 365 and on the left-hand pane, scroll down and expand Admin section. In the D365 Admin area, select the instance you want to enable the Portal on and click Solutions. (The same can also be installed from the Applications tab in the Dynamics 365 Administration Center.) Once inside solutions, select the Portal you want to deploy for your organization. It takes about a few minutes to install. Once this is installed, you can check the Applications tab and the Portal installed will appear there for you to manage. All the Portal actions can be administered from here (Manage option). Sample Customer Self Service Portal: Types of Dynamics 365 portal There are 4 types of Portals that could be setup using the free add-on with each D365 Plan 1 subscription: Custom Portal Custom Portals come with minimal set of pre-defined page templates where you can start creating a Portal of your own per your tailored needs. Customer Self-Service Portal Customer Self Service Portal is used by the customers of the organization. This portal is their own space of use where they can login and view as well as register their own support cases and manage the same. Along with that, Knowledge Base can be accessed and Forums topics can be started on this portal. Partner Portal Partner Portal enable business partner to build business by working on Opportunities of your organization. Community Portal Community Portal serves to grow a community of people by sharing ideas, voting them and starting forum discussions about a certain topic.

Dynamics 365 for finance and operations which is earlier known as Dynamics AX is nothing but Microsoft’s flagship ERP solution. Small, medium and large companies can use this ERP suite to become efficient and to streamline their processes. It is an application that helps companies stay flexible. There are so many excellent features in this particular software that will help users become a lot more efficient than they were before.  Since it is a cloud-based, and all the changes that occur in it are real-time. Teams can work with team members that are working across the world with ease. New users might struggle with a few aspects such as creating service orders from the sales order when they are using X++. In this blog article, we will see how we can create Service Order from Sales Order using X++ in Dynamics 365 Operations. I have created a button in Sales Order form which will run a class (MenuItem – Action) to create Service Order Header. Create a new Class: class CFSServiceOrderCreateFromSalesOrder { SMAServiceOrderTable serviceOrderTable; SMAServiceOrderLine serviceOrderLine; SMAserviceTaskRelation serviceTaskRelation; SalesTable salesTable; } Create a main method: public static void main(Args _args) { Args serviceOrderTableArgs = new Args(); CFSServiceOrderCreateFromSalesOrder serviceOrderCreateFromSalesOrder = CFSServiceOrderCreateFromSalesOrder::construct(); ttsbegin; //Call to method createSMAServiceOrder() for Service Order Header creation serviceOrderTable = serviceOrderCreateFromSalesOrder.createSMAServiceOrder(_args.record()); ttscommit; //Infolog to display service order id if service order created else failure message if(serviceOrderTable) info(strFmt(“ServiceOrderHeader created with ID: %1”, serviceOrderTable.ServiceOrderId)); else info(“ServiceOrderHeader creation failed”); } Create SMAServiceOrder() method: This method is used to create a Service Order header record. public SMAServiceOrderTable createSMAServiceOrder(SalesLine _salesLine) { //initialize SMAServiceOrderTable serviceOrderTable.initvalue(); //Initialize Service Order ID NumberSeq NumberSeq; NumberSeq = NumberSeq::newGetNum(SMAParameters::numRefServiceOrderId(),true); serviceOrderTable.ServiceOrderId = NumberSeq.num(); serviceOrderTable.CustAccount = _salesLine.custAccount; serviceOrderTable.ProjId = _salesLine.ProjID; //display Customer Name as Service Order Description serviceOrderTable.Description = CustTable::find(_salesLine.CustAccount).name(); //insert Service Address serviceOrderTable.updateCustAddress(); serviceOrderTable.insert(); return serviceOrderTable; } So, this will create a Service Order Header from Sales Order. Let me know your reviews. I will soon come up with more articles, as I further explore D365 Operations.  

Dynamics 365 for finance and operations is a product from Microsoft. It is an ERP or enterprise resource planning software. Both medium and large companies can benefit from using this ERP solution. Companies can streamline the processes in the finance and operations functions. You will get a detailed view of what’s happening in departments such as warehousing, manufacturing, finance, budget planning, IT, demand forecasting and transportation to name a few.  It is very easy to install and use this ERP solution. But, if you are a new user, you might struggle initially as you do not know how to operate the system and to get what you want on it. For example, you might not know how to import the budget using excel in this application. Dynamics 365 for Financials has a feature of defining Budgets for chart of accounts. The budgets can be defined in a multiple combination using dimensions and periods. Generally, companies have a huge list of Chart of Accounts and it becomes difficult to create budget for each chart of accounts in the system. Thus, Microsoft has provided a tool to import budgets in Dynamics 365 for Financials using Excel. Following are the steps to import budgets: In the global search, search for G/L budgets and click on it. Click on new to create a new budget. Provide a name & description to the budget and then click on Edit budget. Once the budget is created, go to Action tab and click on Export to Excel. On clicking of Export to excel, system will ask for Start date, No. of periods in budget and Period length. This data will be useful to design the budgets. (For e.g. Starting from 1st February 2017 I need to create a two-monthly budget for petty cash, then I will select start date as 01/02/2017, no. of period would be 2 and period length would be 2M). Once OK is clicked, an excel file will be downloaded in the system. Open the excel file and put the amount against the respective ledger and save the file. Once the file is saved, click on Import from Excel in the Action tab. The system will ask the Budget name which will be the newly created budget. There are two options available either to replace entries if there are any entries created previously or to add new entries if the user needs to append already created budget. On clicking of OK, the system will ask the path where the excel file is stored. After providing the path system will automatically either replace or add entries to the budget (depending on the option selected). Conclusion D365 for financials is a very good product for Small and medium size enterprises. The import budget features can become a very effective tool to design complicated budgets in the system within very less time.  

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail Management Solution is one of the best and popular ERP cloud solutions. It is a lot efficient and effective than a lot of other similar products that you can now find in the market. Even in the peak hours of the day, you can give the best customer experience to your clients. And the best part is that you can achieve this without gaps or duplication. It is one of the main reasons why a lot of business people rely on this ERP solution. It is easy to install and use this app.  However, if you are a new user, you might find it a little difficult to manage this application. Here’s how you should handle AX retail POS error. Introduction: In AX Retail POS, the Implementation Administrator created a new Windows user ID. But new user trying to open the Retail POS, he is getting error “Retail POS Cannot connect to a database. Try again Later or see your system administrator. “.  As we all know for the online store required the Store channel database and store Massage database. The system administrator created this database from the Administrator user ID or Administrator Permission. But still this Error occurred? Error: Why this error occurred? Answer:  Store channel is the database where all retail POS transaction data stored Like ( sales Transaction, shift details, POS profile, store and terminal details…etc.).  User ID can to connected to this Database or user ID does available for store channel database in SQL. Because of this reason when new user tries to run the Retail POS application, he gets this error message. How to solve this issue? Follow the below steps: Login Point of Sales system from administrator. Then Open the store SQL server. After opening SQL, In Object Explorer go to Security -> logins Right Click on Logins and select New Login option In the General tab, select the Windows authentication option and after that click on the Search button. Add the new user ID. <Domain Name>\<New User ID> (Note:- Make sure that your system should be in the domain while adding new user). For demo use, I am using my domain CloudFronts\Amol Select User Mapping Page, In User Mapping Page Map Store Channel Database and Store message database. Select Database Role membership for Store channel database and store message Database. Role should be db_accessadmin, db_datareader, db_datawriter, db_excutore and click on OK button. Restart the Async client Service and run the Retail POS. Conclusion: Adding User with permission in SQL for Store channel database and Store Message Database, allow windows users to interact with the database from Retail POS application.  

CloudFronts recently implemented and went live with Microsoft Social Engagement to analyze the reviews of their services using twitter handler @cloudfronts and #askCloudFrontsPM and use it to track Leads in Dynamics 365. So, Microsoft Social Engagement helps to analyze people’s views about the company, product and services on Social Network like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It collects the information from Social Media and helps examine the positive, negative or neutral sentiments of the posts. There are three main key aspects of Social Engagement: Listen Everywhere: The information from where you hear it, what is it about, how people feel about the business i.e. your products and services. Analyze the Language/ Location/ Sentiments: The language in which the post is made or the location from where the post is done and Influence of products in Market is it Good or Bad? Drive Engagement: To Capture Feedbacks, Provide Service based on the Cases or Create a Lead. Let’s see an example how Microsoft Social Engagement is used to drive information out from Twitter Profile for certain keywords like in our case say #askCloudFrontsPM that is posted by people anywhere around the world and based on the posts a lead is created in Dynamics365. Note: So being a Global Admin, I have configured the settings in Microsoft Social Engagement. Microsoft Social Engagement can be accessed from https://portal.office.com Overview on Navigation Areas Search Setup: This application area is where the Manager defines the search topics for the posts. Analytics: This area is where the Manager or Analyst can see their data in Visual Metrics i.e. with various factors like Sentiments, Phrases, Location, Source and Language they can also filter out relevant data as per their business needs. Social Center: This is a Subset of Analytics. Here the user can see posts from last 14 days. Streams capture the posts that are more relevant and can be configured using the filters. Activity Maps: Activity Maps are real time visualization of post with Location. This Map shows the area that where in the world the topics are discussed. Message Center: Message Center is used to manage alerts based on the trends or posts and get notified by email to specified recipients. Settings: This area is where the Admin can configure Social Profiles, Dynamics 365 Connection, Automation Rules and additional settings. Setup Below are the steps which needs to be configured to get the desired results. Configuration: a. Personal Settings Here Admin can set the default setting of Language, default filter for Analytics, Theme, Date Format and Number Format. b. Social Profiles Three type of Social Profiles can be created i.e. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. So once the admin creates the Social Profile, the profile needs to be authenticated with username and password. Here in this case I have configured a Twitter Profile. This Profile has two key main sections: User (Ownership): This is where the Admin can decide about the ownership of Profile and can also add users in that profile who can access and share that Social Profile. Search Topics: This is the area where the Admin can decide on the Search Topic Keywords and can assign a Search Topic in a particular Channel to this specific Social Profile. c. Default/ Global Settings As the name suggests, this setting applies to the entire organization i.e. to setup Default Preferences. Different Parameters are configured like Default Screen Language, Time Frame, Date Time Format, Number Format, Search Topics, Location Groups and Additional Settings. Default Preference: This section will cover the Solution Name, Screen Language, Date Format and Number Format. Search Language: Here the Admin can manage the languages that should be enabled for Search Setup. Search Setup Defaults: This Section defines the area about where the search should work and in which Language that is Search can happen from Blogs, News, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Forums etc. for English Language. Sentiments: This is Adaptive Learning i.e. it allows the system to learn the sentiments from the user’s posts. People using MSE can also change the sentiment value of the posts and can help the system train well. So this section allows the Admin to enable and reset these settings. Labels: User can define certain labels to categorize the posts in the Analytics and Social Center. Location Groups: Location Groups can be used as filters in Analytics. In this section the user can add the Location Groups and can add the Number of Locations based on their Preferences. User Management: This is only visible to Admins. Here the user can be assigned roles and permissions for Microsoft Social Engagement. Dynamics 365 Connection: This section is to establish the connection between the Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics 365 (in this case) and will create a Lead Record in Dynamics 365. Automation Rules: Automation Rules can be defined to filter down the posts and then automatically create new cases, leads or events or assign it to user or set a label. Only Manager or System Admin can manage Automation Rules. Admin can create new automation rules, provide filters and based on those filter conditions, the admin can decide to perform actions of linking the post in Dynamics 365 or assigning the post to some user or to set the label of the post. The graph on the extreme right shows the analysis of the posts that fall in that particular filter criteria specified earlier. Search Setup Search Setup is required to make sure that the Analyst is capturing the right conversations of Customers from Social Media. Analyst can also fine tune the searches and drill down the data based on their Business Requirements. While defining the Social Profile in Settings, the search topic needs to be configured and should be applied to that particular Social Profile. One Option is to create the Search Topic while configuring the Social Profile and Second Option is from the Navigation Area. Note: At least on Active Search is required to acquire the social data. Also it takes some time to fetch in the data … Continue reading Microsoft Social Engagement →

Introduction With new release of Microsoft Teams, CloudFronts decided to analyse and check if Teams could be used for communication within the organization and we figured out few points between Yammer and Teams as which tool can be used as the best to enhance the communication within and outside the organization. Following are some points on Yammer and Microsoft Teams based on different key points. # Yammer Microsoft Teams Basic Idea – Yammer is like Forum Discussions – Especially used for Asynchronous Communication – User Interface is like Company Facebook – Chat Group- Real Time Conversations – No external/guest access – Integration with third party services Support – Discontinued the Desktop Client but Mobile App Available – Available on both Desktop Client and Mobile Client. Mobility – Supported on Android, iOS, Windows phone – Supported on iOS, Android phones Multimedia Support – No Audio, Video Conferencing – Supports both Audio and Video Conferencing External access – External groups feature in Yammer enables us to extend and makes it easier for External teams to work together. – Integrates with Office 365 Groups. CRM Integration – Yammer can replace the Activity Feeds solution in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online organization, though your Activity Feeds components will remain in the same state they were before installing Yammer. Yammer simply replaces Activity Feeds in the users’ workspace. – No integration with CRM. Praise /Polls – With Yammer Users can do announcements, praise and have poll. – Microsoft Teams does not provide functionality to have praise and polls. Alerts /Notification – Posts in Yammer can be notified via Emails (Personal Settings) – Notification appears only when we chat (Desktop App). Whereas there is no intimation when users post in Channels though the channel name is highlighted in bold. Meeting Invites/ Calendar – – With Teams users can schedule, view and update their Meetings and can view Calendar from Teams. They also highlight the number of attendees who have accepted the Meeting. Connectors – – Teams can be connected to Third Party Installers. For Developers Team can connect to Yammer, TFS etc. – TFS can help the Development Team to organize the task and see the status and manage them easily within the Team Window. Additional Points – Files uploaded on Yammer stays in Yammer and are not uploaded in SharePoint or OneDrive. But Files from OneDrive can be added in the post on Yammer. – Yammer, you can search for public groups and ask to join them. In Yammer, you have private groups which cannot be seen at all. – Microsoft Teams is Business Casual – No outside people can be added to the conversation. – Teams is built on top of all of the existing Microsoft technologies. Under the hood, every Team is actually an Office 365 Group – When the user is creating or uploading the files in the team it is actually uploading and creating files in SharePoint – T-Bot is a training bot at this time. It’s designed to allow you to ask questions and get a quick reply on how to complete a particular task. – In Teams, you only see the Teams in which you have been invited to. Conclusion – Yammer is the social network – Yammer is a bulletin board for the entire organization – Teams is the social interaction with fresh UI. – Teams works well asynchronously, for more informal, Business Casual conversation. Conclusion Thus, we at CloudFronts use Yammer to connect to External Groups but Microsoft Teams for our internal communications and awaiting more enhancements in Team in near future.

Overview: At CloudFronts, we use our Dynamics 365 PM App to track and manage Projects with Task and Resource Scheduling, Project Billing and Invoicing, Timesheets, Gantt Chart, Time and Expense Entries, User Skillsets and many additional features. We recently implemented an intelligent time entry reminder notification workflow to intimate users about pending time entries with the goal of establishing a culture of doing time entries on a daily basis. Why do we need this? A Professional Services company relies on team members who contribute to billable entries which in turn helps the company estimate Project Costs, Forecast Revenue and most importantly ensure billing is done on time and accurately. High Level Flow Diagram The below image shows the diagrammatic representation of high level flow of what we implemented. Custom Logic The Custom Workflow logic has series of steps that checks and based on the conditions it sends out email to that particular User. Check if it’s a Weekend As the step name suggests, this will check if today is a Saturday or Sunday and if the condition is true the workflow will stop. Check if it’s a Public Holiday If current day is not a weekend, there is a possibility that it might be a public holiday. So in this step it checks if today is a Public holiday. If true, then the workflow stops. Get Previous Working Day This step fetches the Previous Working Day as in if today is Monday then the previous working day in our case is Friday. Else if Tuesday then, previous working day is Monday. Check if the Previous Working day is Public Holiday Now there might be the case, that the previous working day was a Public holiday then in that case the time entries will not be there for the users. So if the Previous Working day is a Public Holiday then the workflow stops. Fetch Users This step will get the users who enter time entries in the system, be it a billable resource or a non-billable resource. Fetch Time Entries Here in this step, fetch the time entries less than 8 hours. If we have complete 8 hours’ time entry, then no alert is sent to that particular user. Else if we have incomplete time entries then the next step is to check if the user was on Leave. Is User on Leave? If we have less than 8 hours’ time entry, then there is a possibility where that person was on leave on the previous working day. In that case no reminder will be sent to that particular user. Send Email With the above criteria’s and conditions, if we get that user was working and has not completed his/her daily time entry, then an alert will be sent to that user. So with this simple logic and series of steps, CloudFronts was able to achieve this and intimate their users to complete their time entries.

Introduction: Document Recommendations are one of the preview feature that is added in Dynamics 365. In this blog let’s see how we can enhance the use of this feature in our Business Requirement. Note: Since it’s a preview feature, it is advised not to use and it is subject to change. So not recommended on Production Environment. Pre- Requisites Document Recommendations are supported on Dynamics 365 Online. Since it’s a preview feature the System Administrator needs to enable this from Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Previews Tab. User should have access to SharePoint Online 2013 or SharePoint Online 2016 for Document Repository. Document Management must be done before hand i.e. enabling SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. Relevance Search should be enabled. Azure Text Analytics can be used optionally to determine the Document Suggestions. System Administrator must define the similarity rules. Working Suppose we have a Sales Representative and Sales Manager that is working with Opportunity in D365 and all documents related to this are associated with this particular Opportunity. Now another Sales Representative starts working on this Opportunity and she is unaware with all the previous details and deals. So with Document Recommendations, CRM provides her with all the documents to understand about previous conversations, assets and makes it easier for the new Sales Representative to work with this particular Opportunity. Now the question is how this works? So there are certain prerequisites that are required to establish this feature. Configuration Enable Document Recommendations Enable SharePoint Settings -> Document Management -> Enable SharePoint Online. Enable Relevance Search Configure Similarity Rules Create Similarity Rules Similarity Rules can be created from Settings -> Data Management -> Similar Records Suggestions Settings ->New Rule as shown in the first image. While the second image shows how to configure rule.  So when we create a new rule below are some details that System Administrator needs to fill. Source Entity – For which entity the rule is enabled. Document Recommendations is supported only for COLAC Entities (Case, Opportunity, Lead, Account and Contact) + Custom Entity. Filter results by Status – Whether it is Open, Won or Lost in case of Opportunity and different in the case of other entities. Use Text Analytics – Yes or No. By Default, the value is No but then if using Cognitive Service Text Analytics then set the value to Yes. Maximum Number of Key Phrases – this is used to determine the keywords or key phrases to determine with text search which helps to achieve key word based similarity between source and target records. The acceptable value is from 0-1000. Create Match Fields Once the Similarity Rules are created the next step is to create the Match Fields, so on Similarity Rules a sub-grid is present to display all the Match Fields. Match Fields involves the following details. Criteria – Whether it should be Exact Match or Text Match. In Exact Match, fields from the source entity is matched. In Text Match, text in these fields are used to find the key phrases. Entity – Choose an entity to use in creating a text search rule to find the matching records. Fields – Select a field to find the matching target records. To enable field for Exact Match, the field should be added in Quick Find View of that particular Entity. Once the Match Fields are created, simply activate the Similarity Rule. Manage Document Suggestions Document Suggestions can be managed under Settings -> Document Management -> Manage Document Suggestions. Once we open this setting we can only see the list of entities for which the similarity rules are listed. We can also provide the External Base URL for querying the results as shown in the images below. Example So based on above steps, I tried Document Suggestions on my trial environment and below screenshots will demonstrate the same. Here I have created Similarity Rule for Opportunity Entity and document recommendations will be displayed for the records. So I have created two different Opportunities, to buy IPhone 7 and IPhone7s and I have added the documents regarding the deal cracked for buying IPhone 7 so when I view suggestions for IPhone 7s it will show the related documents associated with IPhone 7 on Document Associated Grid of Opportunity to Buy IPhone 7s. The above screen shot shows that since the topic name had similar key words that’s the reason I could see the recommendations. This happened due to Similarity Rule created where in Match Fields I had declared the Text Match of the Field “Topic” on Opportunity. Also Document Recommendations will read documents stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business or Office 365 Groups. Document Recommendations is not supported in Offline Mode. Whereas on Mobile/ Tablet Clients the recommendations will be shown as shown below.  

D365 field service or Dynamics 365 for field service is one complete field service management software. It is a product from Microsoft. It helps large and medium businesses to become quite efficient. This software can hold stuff such as service agreements, service locations, customer assets, preventive maintenance, resource management, work order management and so forth. You will have total control over your field service management teams. The scheduling options available on this software is quite flexible. You can significantly boost customer service when you use this particular ERP solution.  So many excellent features are available in this particular ERP solution. Integrating the Outlook calendar with the field service is entirely possible when you are using this ERP suite.  Introduction: This blog explains how to configure work order bookings for Field technicians who need them to show in the Outlook calendar. Prerequisites: 1. Dynamics 365 Field Service licenses 2. Office 365 Enterprise E3 licenses Configuration: Enable and Test email mailbox for relevant Users is successful. Working: Below are steps for setting up Outlook Integration with Field Service to set this up in the system Login to Dynamics 365 Field Service environment as an “Administrator”. Next, go to Settings > Administration > System Settings > Synchronization and check Synchronize resource bookings with Outlook. Login to Dynamics 365 Field Service environment as a “Technician”. Navigate to Options > Synchronization. And check Synchronize resource bookings with Outlook. Login to Dynamics 365 Field Service environment as an “Administrator” and schedule a Work Order to Technician. Login into Outlook with the User related to that “Field technician”. Open Calendar and booking is shown as below. Note: The Booking may take 10+ minutes to show in Outlook. This is because it is an asynchronous service.  

Customer service is the backbone of any organization. Any company that desires to progress or scale-up high should focus on providing the best customer service to their clients. But, with so many things happening at the same time, it is pretty tough to provide it. Hence, it is wise to use  Dynamics 365 customer service, an ERP solution. It will not only help you to become effective but, it will help you and your team to be more efficient. Since it is cloud-based software, you get information from your team in real-time.  The best part about this particular enterprise resource planning software is that it offers a host of different features. For example, ‘Voice of Customer Survey,’ is one of those salient features that you will love using.  Voice of Customer is a feature of Dynamics CRM where you can create and send out surveys to gain valuable feedback from your customers about your products or services. Respondents can take your surveys on a phone, tablet, or computer. Anonymous surveys can be triggered in different ways: Email Social sites like Twitter, Facebook or other web pages SMS In this blog, we will discuss how we can achieve sending surveys using SMS. We had a requirement for the client that whenever work order status is changed to completed, send a survey SMS to the contact to fill out the feedback for the service provided. Pre Requisites: Voice of Customer Solution installed Power SMS solution. Download Power SMS from here- http://www.powerobjects.com/powerpacks/powersms/ Choose a Service Provider CallFire(for US numbers) Twilio Configuring Power SMS. The configurations steps can be found in Power SMS User guide here- http://www.powerobjects.com/guides/powersms/. Steps to be followed to send survey using SMS are listed below: Create survey in Voice of the Customer as per your requirement and publish the survey. Create a workflow on work order status field that creates Survey Activity. On creation of survey activity, survey link will be created. Populate and store the survey link in work order contact some custom field on work. Step: Create survey activity Step: Update contact Create a workflow that creates a SMS message on update of survey link field. After creation of SMS, set the status of the survey as “Pending Sent”. Step: Create SMS When a work order status will be changed to completed, SMS will be send using workflow. You can see the status reason whether the SMS send successfully or not. Thus, surveys can be distributed using SMS and feedback can be stored for analysis and improvement of the organization. For more information on Voice of Customer you can refer our blog “Voice of the Customer for Dynamics CRM 2016”.