Introduction: Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based chat and collaboration platform, designed to simplify group work. It is customizable in many ways your teams work today. Whereas Site 24×7 is an integrated solution for cloud monitoring. It is a platform designed with full-stack monitoring and analysis tools to enhance user experience. Site24x7 users can integrate with Microsoft Teams to receive critical status alerts and RCA from their Site24x7 account as chat messages in selected Microsoft Teams Channel. In this article, I am going to show you how we at CloudFronts benefitting with this awesome integration. We are using Site24x7 for monitoring our client’s server and our own ISP services.  With the help of this integration, I don’t have to go to Site24x7 each time for checking the status and everything is being done from Teams only. One important benefits of this integration are that we don’t have to add other responsible members in Site24x7 account instead we can add them directly to a team which I have created in Microsoft Teams for Site24x7. You can receive chat messages for the following Site 24×7 events: Monitor status alerts Incident Root Cause Analysis (RCA) To Start this Feature Integration, login to Site24x7 portal account before accessing your Microsoft Teams account via the login link provided in your Site24x7 integration form. Login to Site24x7 Portal Dashboard > Admin > Third Party Integration.                                           Click on Add Third Party Integration and fill up the required details (see below image). Integration Name, Message Title, Integration level     After you are done with the process, Microsoft Teams integration will be listed in the Third-Party Integration dashboard. You can set up multiple integrations.                 Adding Site 24×7 connector in Microsoft Teams: Navigate to the Teams tab and select the team and channel which you’re looking to integrate with Site24x7. click on the three dots and select Connectors from the dropdown as shown in below image.                         A new window will pop up. Search for Site24x7 and click the Configure button after it shows up.   You’ll be navigated to a new window, click on Visit site to install (see below image).   After that, you will be automatically redirected to the Microsoft Teams Integration form in Site24x7’s web client. Adding a Site 24×7 dashboard in Microsoft Teams: Log in to your Microsoft Teams. Open Teams channel and click the ‘+’ icon on the top layer of your channel window to add a tab.                   In the add a tab windows, search for Site 24×7 and click the icon.                   You will get a pop-up to connect to Site 24×7. Log in using your Site24x7 credentials or use your Office365 credential.                                     After login, you can see your Site24x7 custom dashboard.                                       Now you will receive and monitor all alerts on your Site24x7 MS Teams channel. If you want, see full report about monitor status you can click on “View Online Reports”                                   You can also see Real-time alert, Memory/CPU utilization, Availability Chart, Monitor Status, Troubleshooting Status etc. (see below image)                 This is how you can integrate Site 24×7 into Microsoft Teams. Now we will see how to monitor the alerts through MS Teams chatbot. Setup Site24x7 bot for Microsoft Teams: Site24x7 Bot is an automated program based on an advanced AI-engine that gives a quick reply and share updates and notifications about your monitor’s status, availability, performance, outages, SLAs, RCAs, and alarms within your Microsoft Teams channels or private chat. You can interact with bots in private chats and channels within a team. Go to the Microsoft Teams app store and search for the Site24x7 app.                                           In the pop-up window, pick the Team where you wish to install the Site24x7 Bot and click install.                                       After the installation is done you will be able to Open the chatbot (see below image).               From your personal chat window, you will be able to communicate with the Bot.                           After the successful authentication, you can initiate conversation with the Bot.                   For example, if you want to know the status of all your monitors, send a message What is the status of all monitors and you will be getting a revert (see below image).       One more example, type – Availability Summary for Monitor Name.   Bot commands in Microsoft Teams (see below image).             Conclusion: Hope this article will help you for integrating Site24x7 into Microsoft Teams. Similarly, there are many more applications which can integrate with Microsoft Teams to make your life much easier. Microsoft Teams is consistently growing since its release and giving us with some awesome features.      

Introduction: This blog explain the steps to lock the columns of Editable Grid in D365 CE UCI. Scenario: Lock the View columns of Editable Grid in D365 CE. Steps: Below are steps to be performed for locking fields of Editable Grid in View Create Business Rule to lock the field. 2. Mark the Scope of Business rule at Entity level 3. Editable Grid with locked columns in View   Note: Fields are locked for all Views and subgrid.  Conclusion: This blogs helps developers to lock columns of View and Subgrid in Editable Grid of D365 CE.

Introduction: When you check your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entity records, you might think where your documents related to specific entities will get stored. Here, SharePoint comes into the picture. The built-in integration between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint is mainly focused on managing & storing documents in SharePoint and ultimately then surfacing these in the context of a CRM record. Apart from storing the documents in SharePoint, you might also wonder that is your stuff secure on SharePoint Online. In this article, we are going to see how you can store the documents on SharePoint Online and how we can secure those documents through SharePoint Online security features. For using the document management functionality, you need to enable the server-based SharePoint integration on a Site Collection in SharePoint Online. Note – Installing Microsoft Dynamics 365 List Component was used for SharePoint On-Premise earlier versions and is not required for SharePoint Online and later versions of SharePoint on-premises. IT Considerations: No additional software is required to install on SharePoint You need to have System Administrator Security role in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Make sure that the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and SharePoint Online in under the same Office 365 tenant. Steps for enabling server-based SharePoint Integration: Login to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement services > Settings > Document Management. Under Document Management, go to Enable Server-Based SharePoint Integration. Check out the changes (in the below image) which you will notice if you have used the previous SharePoint integration and click on Select between Online & On-Premises depending upon the SharePoint infrastructure you have and click NEXT (check below image). Now you must enter the URL of your SharePoint site where you want your Dynamics 365 entity records documents to be stored. Here, I have entered the URL of my root site collection ‘https://o365talks.sharepoint.com’, you may want to have a different Site Collection for your D365 documents as per Organisation requirements. For that, you can create a new Site Collection, such as https://o365talks.sharepoint.com/sites/Dynamics365You can create Site Collection from the SharePoint Online admin center. Here it will show the site URL validation status. Click on NEXT after the validation succeeds. So we are done with the SharePoint integration. Now we need to enable document management for specific Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entities. Enable SharePoint document management for specific Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps entity records.   Go to Settings > Document Management Settings. Select the entities (for eg, Accounts, Lead, Opportunities, Projects) for which you wanted to store the documents in SharePoint Online and click on NEXT. Check Based on Entity and select Account or Contact to create a folder structure based on a specific entity (Account or Contact), or else you click on NEXT without checking if you don’t want your folders to be automatically created based on the Account or Contact entity. Now you can see the SharePoint Online Document Library has been created as the status is Succeeded. Click FINISH. You can see in the below image Document Libraries has been created for the entities under the SharePoint site (https://o365talks.sharepoint.com). You can access the same by going to Site Contents. Keep your D365 Customer Engagement documents safe While having the integration done for document management in SharePoint Online, it is also important to secure these documents. For that, there are several features which you can use to keep your SharePoint Online documents secure. Using Permission Level: – Microsoft already provides a set of default permission levels which is very useful, but you can also create new permission levels in SharePoint Online. You can then create Groups for that Site Collection for e.g. https://o365talks.sharepoint.com, associated with the permission level. For e.g., you can create a permission level called Contribute (Not delete) which means the users associated with this permission level will not be able to delete anything. Note – Never modify or delete a default permission level. Retention policy from Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – Create a Retention Policy for all or chosen SharePoint Online sites, so that if accidentally or by purpose if the documents are deleted from SharePoint Online it can be recovered. Restricting access for certain records: – You might not want that all the users should have access to all D365 for Customer Engagement records. You can basically customize permission for that SharePoint Document library to achieve the same. By default, all sites, list, libraries within a site collection inherit permissions from the parent site break the inheritance from library settings and then add only those users whom you want to provide access. Alerts: – Alerts can be set in two ways for SharePoint Online. a. Setting up alerts from SharePoint Online – You can set alerts for a specific document library within SharePoint Online, so if there is any modification or deletion you can get email or SMS alert.b.  Alerts from the Security & Compliance center in Office 365: – Here we can set alerts whenever there is any activity in SharePoint Online defined by you. We can only get Email notifications in this case and not an SMS, unlike SharePoint Alerts. Audit in Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – With the help of Audit you can search for Users and Admin activities. Before you can start searching for the audit logs it needs to be turned ON. To turn it ON, just click Start recording user and admin activity on the Audit log search page in the Security & Compliance center. Here, we can get the audit logs for the activities defined by you. Access Control in SharePoint Online admin center: – With the help of access control, you can restrict or allow all the users to access SharePoint Online contents on basis of network location, which can do in just a few clicks. This helps to prevent access from untrusted locations. Conditional Access using Azure Active Directory: – You can either restrict access or enforce Multi-Factor Authentication for specific users or group of users whenever SharePoint Online is accessed from an … Continue reading Manage and secure Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement documents in SharePoint Online →

Introduction: This blog demonstrates how the information that is visible to a user on the window can be controlled and managed. The ‘Importance’ property of a field helps us to control whether a field is seen or hidden on a window. Pre-requisites : Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Steps: The Importance property helps to control the visibility of a field on the window. A field can be shown when clicked on the ‘Show More’ option and can be hidden on the ‘Show Less’ Action, we can even show the field value on the FastTab Header  when the whole FastTab  is collapsed. The values of the Importance property are as follows: Standard : It displays the field on the page by default. Promoted : It displays the field on the page and shows it on the FastTab Header when the FastTab is collapsed. Additional : It hides the field on the page, inorder to view the field user can click on the Show More action on the FastTab. 3. The Example below demonstrates this property : The Buy-From County Field (State) its Importance property is initially set to Additional. Therefore, it can only be seen when Show More action is clicked. After setting its Importance property value as ‘Standard’ the field is visible on the page by default. After setting its Importance property value to ‘Promoted’ its value is seen on  the page and even on the FastTab Header when the FastTab is collapsed. Conclusion: Thus, by using the Importance property of the field the user can control the Amount of information regarding a particular entity that needs to be shown/hidden.

Problem definition Often clients using PSA V2 used to complain of the feature missing was copying the project as the template. A few of the Construction Company clients of mine have huge projects and have almost similar structure for many of their projects. Undoubtedly templates use to serve the purpose, but, only to a certain extent. When you have an option to copy a project exactly, I would always prefer that. Below is how you do. Mitigation: Navigate to Project Services and try creating new project by Clicking on New Project button: Type the project name which you want to copy in the Project Template field. This will start copying the tasks from the project onto Schedule of the new project. You are done. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using Dynamic 365 Project Services Automation for last 3 years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation. According to my opinion, implementation of Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation is one of the best things that we did in CloudFronts Technologies. We have gained a lot with this implementation because we save time and money due to easy access resources and ability to manage them.

Dynamics 365 Project Services Automation demands a perfect configuration and that is the proof of being a sophisticated application. You won’t see any result unless the configurations are all set right. Use Case: I am observing from quite sometime that my Accounting Team complaints that when the Actuals are created on the project they are with 0 value. This was an issue as I went out to check a couple of things: Is the project having a currency tagged to it. Is the project price list existing for the project. Is the resource having a Resourcing Unit tagged to himself. In the approval tab is the time entry submitted by the resource having a Role and is it Chargeable. To my surprise all of the above were looking correct. Out of curiosity I digged in one more step and that’s where I found out the issue: Issue Resolution: Step 1: I navigated to D365 Project ServiceàResources. Search for the resource who is working on that project. Step 2: Open the Resource by clicking on it and then navigate to the Scheduling Tab.   Step 3: Make a note of the Organizational Unit mentioned for him. In this case it is CloudFronts Mumbai (USD). Step 4: Navigate to Projects and Sales Tab and Open the Project Contract Header by clicking the link in the Project Contract grid. Step 5: Navigate to Project Price Lists and Open the Price List in the project price lists. Navigate to Role prices. Check the Role and the Resource Unit mentioned for that Role should be exactly the same as the Resourcing Unit mentioned for the Resource mentioned in Step 3.   Now when you try approving the time entries the Actuals will have correct price. You are done. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using PSA for last 3 years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation. According to my opinion, implementation of Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation is one of the best things that we did in CloudFronts Technologies. We have gained a lot with this implementation because we save time and money due to easy access resources and ability to manage them.

At times, end users are used to working with Advanced Find a lot without having much control over what they can customize. Because for obvious reasons, they are users. And not someone who customize the system. In this case, they might also not know what they can’t search for in the Advanced Find and are led into believing that all the fields are being shown. And they could even wonder why it doesn’t appear in Advanced Find when they can see it on the Form/View. However, there’s a configuration which can either hide/show the fields in the Advanced Find. Making Fields Searchable So this is the answer. If fields are not Searchable, they don’t appear in Advanced Find Advanced Find field list with the missing field   And, when the Searchable is set to Yes, they appear in the Advanced Find. Advanced Find showing the Searchable enabled field   So that’s why. Hope this helps!

Business Use Case: Often there are team members who share the need of getting allocated on schedule board in Dynamics 365 Project Services Automation directly as soon as they book an appointment or have a meeting invite. One of the reasons for the same is for the team or anyone concerned about allocation to understand that the said team member is either having a meeting with someone or has an appointment. Hence, they do consume some time of the day. This is one of the reasons that I get when I think aloud. Since, there is lot of argument and justification the team needs to provide for these additional non-billable time that they spend. There can be many other reasons as to why this is needed by other organisations. Mitigation: Though there is an (Out of the Box) OOB solution for marking an appointment in Outlook calendar from Schedule Board, but, vice-versa is not provided OOB. MS Flows helped me here. I created a flow between Bookable Resource Booking entity and Outlook entity in Flows. I have explained the steps as to how to do the same. Steps: Step 1: Login to https://portal.office.com with your credentials. Step 2: Click on Flows as shown in below image. Step 3: This will take you to the portal where you can mange and create all your Flows: Step 4: Click on +New. Step 5: Click on Create from Blank. Step 6: Click again on Create from Blank. Step 7: Select the Outlook connector by searching the Outlook 365 Connector from the search box as show in the image below. Also, select the Triggering event on when the flow should be triggered. So we selected, When a new event is created (v2). Step 8: Select Calendar id as Calendar. Step 9: click on next step. Step 10: Select the target connector i.e. Dynamics 365 by searching in the connectors. Step 11: Click on create a new records. Step 12: Select the Organisation and the Entity where you want to create a record. Since the booking that shows up on the schedule board comes from Bookable Resource Booking, we shall select Bookable Resource Booking. Step 13: Add the mappings to the fields as shown below, by searching them from the right pane. Step 14: Once done, click on save and your flow is ready. Step 15: Once created do not forget to Turn it On. Test it by creating an event in calendar and see in the event history of the flow whether it is successful or not. Conclusion: This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using PSA for last 3 years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation. According to my opinion, implementation of Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation is one of the best things that we did in CloudFronts Technologies. We have gained a lot with this implementation because we save time and money due to easy access resources and ability to manage them.

Introduction: With update of Microsoft dynamics many new exiting features has been introduced in Dynamics 365 sales one them is Unified Interface with Navigation. By default, form December organization will start receiving the new UI. But if you are still interested you can enable it by yourself. Description: To enable the UI navigation you need to have organization Id, You will find the organization id can be found at Developer resource. To get the organization id you need to follow the below path 1. Go to setting -> customizations -> select “Developer Resource”. Highlighted in red is the organization Id. Once you have organization id you need to execute a small script in developer script console. To do so you need to press key F12. Also you need to make sure that you are logged in to the same system where you want to change the UI. You can see that navigation has change from old to new UI. Conclusion: Hope this blog help you to use make UI look and feel more better and comfortable

Introduction: With update of Microsoft dynamics new exiting features has been introduced in Dynamics 365 sales one them is Reference Panel. Description: While putting the Quick create or any subgrid in a section extra space gets added which looks weird. Most of us has feel the same situation. But with the introduction of “Reference Panel” we can now overcome this issue. Solution Let’s start with adding a reference section and view 1. Go to setting -> customizations -> select “Customize the System”. 2. Open the account entity Form. Now you can add the Reference panel by adding the section. If you try to add more than 1 Reference Panel you will receive below error. After adding the reference panel, you will not be able to identify the which one is the general section or reference. There is only way to know if it is reference panel, as name of reference Panel is generated by default as you can see in the below screen shot. I have added below two grids on account record. After adding you need to save and publish. Now go to account record and refresh the page you will able to see the sections with no extra space as you can see in the below screen shot. Conclusion: Hope this blog help you to use reference panel wisely.