Using the Plugin Registration tool with MFA-enabled accounts in Dynamics 365

Hi Everyone,

Today, I was working on some plugins and there is multi factor authentication enabled on the user account which I was using and I was not sure about the process that has to be followed to login. However, after search I did find the solution for the same. 

When you hit the Login button in Plugin Registration Tool with Username, Password and multi factor authentication enabled, the login fails shows the below message.

"You don't have permission to access any of the organizations in the Microsoft Common Data Service region that you specified. If you're not sure which region your organization resides in, choose "Don't know" for the CDS region and try again. Otherwise check with your CDS administrator."

To resolve the issue, you must not enter your username and password in the login window and when you click Login, you will taken to Microsoft Log-in screen as normal and asks you to enter username and password followed by MFA.

Hope this helps.

--

Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Email as a popup on Sales Hub - Dynamics 365 - 2020 Release Wave 1

Hi Everyone,

Today I was doing some testing Sales Hub and observed that there is a popup opening when we click on Email button from Activities View.

Not sure why it is applied only on Sales Hub and not on Customer Service Hub.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Dynamics 365 - Get the details of Parent record to child using Calculated Field - No Code

Hi,

Today I was working on some requirement to show data from Parent record. Normally, we go with Quick view form but here we need the data to be stored on the child entity so that Advanced find, Reports and integrations shows the same info.

There are two ways to achieve it. We might go with Plugins (Pre-Operation), Flows or Workflows. There is one way to do the same and that is using Calculated Fields.

Create a calculated field and use the formula as below.

Condition - If Account Contains Data

Action - Just type the schema name of the lookup on the current entity, in my scenario Parent Account and then put .(dot), you will see the fields from the Parent entity and select the field as per requirement.

The only caveat is, it doesn't work on change of Account value on the Form as the calculated formula works on the retrieval of the data.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Kanban View for Opportunity in Dynamics 365 for Sales - 2020 Release Wave 1

Hi Everyone,

Kanban view is one of the coolest feature that has been released in Dynamics 365 for Sales (Sales Hub) in 2020 Release Wave 1 Plan.

Let's see how can we configure and understand more about it.

Navigate to Customizations windows and Select on Opportunity entity. 

Select on Controls tab and Add Kanban Control.

After adding just Save and publish for Changes to show.
Open Sales Hub and navigate to Opportunities.
You will see the button with Name "Show as" and after clicking on it, you should see Kanban. 

Click on that to open the Opportunities view as below.

By default, there are 2 views available. 
1) Business Process Flow

2) Status

The cool feature of this view is Users can drag and drop to move the opportunity from one stage to stage and to change the status as well.

When we move the stage, it open the opportunity and data view of the dropped stage for the users to fill the stage information.

When we move the Opportunity from one Stage stream to other, it automatically opens Close Opportunity popup.

Searching also works like a charm.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Advanced Settings is Opening Power Platform Admin Center instead of Settings - Legacy Settings - Dynamics 365 CE

Hi Everyone,

Today, I was working on importing some solutions and when I clicked on Advanced Settings it opened the Power Platform Admin Center instead of Settings.

I wondered as I cannot find a way to navigate to Solutions for sometime and after checking the things slowly, found a link to "Legacy Settings" under Resources. That link opens the legacy Settings and you can navigate to Solutions window.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Generate PDF/Send PDF as an Email Attachment - Dynamics 365 CE OOB - No Code - 2020 Release Wave 1 Feature

Hi,

We were building many solutions to generate PDF and send it as an attachment via email. Generating /Creating PDF is one of the most awaiting feature.

Here are the steps for the same.

1) Open Sales Hub APP
2) Navigate to APP Settings - at the bottom of the site map, select Change area , and select App Settings.
3) Under General Settings --> Overview --> Productivity Tools --> Convert to PDF --> Manage
4) Enable the settings on the entities.
4) Select Save.

Now go to Account form/Quote form/anything where the setting is enabled, you will see two buttons 

 
1) Create PDF and then select the Quote Template

It shows two Options 
         a) Save to Share point - It will automatically the PDF to Share Point and you can see it under Document grid of the record.
         b) Download a copy.

2) Email as PDF and then select the Quote Template. Once you select the Template, email record with is populated with the below values.

To - Potential customer of the quote
From - Current user
Attachments - The generated PDF, added as an attachment
Regarding - Quote record from which the email was triggered
Subject - Quote title

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

2020 Release Wave 1 Features

Hi Everyone,

It seems we have good features released for preview with 2020 release wave 1 plan.

Personally, I was waiting for the below. For more information, check this.

1) Configurable Case resolution page.
2) Improved email content designer
3) Rich text notes

Will explore more soon and keep posted. 

For now, comment below what are your favorite things from this release.

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Happy CRM'ing

Gopinath

How do I enable 2020 release Wave 1 updates

Hi Everyone,

As we all know that Wave 2 is release for preview and here are the steps to be followed to update your instances.

1) Visit Power Platform Admin Center
2) Select the environment which you would like to enable for the 2020 wave 1 updates

3) You will see a button as Manage on the left hand side.

4) Click on that button and window would open on the left side, click on Update Now.

It takes sometime to activate. The 2020 release wave 1 update is activated for the Dynamics 365 platform, Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Sales Hub, Customer Service Hub, and Marketing.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing
Gopinath

Cannot update Closed or Cancelled Activity - Not for Admin

Hi Team,

Today have observed a strange behavior when updating the completed activity. We have written the code to update the Completed Activity in the plugin and as we always do use Admin account for our development. Everything was working at the time of development and Testing team complained that it was not working. When we have checked in detail, we found that only Admins are able to update completed activity records. We have changed our code to use Admin User Account for updating the Activity inside the plugin and it started working like a champ.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Company News Timeline in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Hi Everyone,

Today I was working on some POC and I had a requirement where I have to take some information from Opportunity and open the search on the form. Somehow, I thought I heard about this requirement sometime ago and searched it. 

And yes, my memory is not bad. There is a feature called Company News Timeline release with Dynamics 2016 Update 1. Let's try to understand more on this.

Company New Times shows the latest new about the customer on CE forms. This uses Bing Search for getting all the information. Here are the steps to install the same.

• Sign in to https://admin.microsoft.com with your Global Administrator or Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement System Administrator credentials.
• Click Admin > Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
• On the Manage all Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (online) instances page, select the instance to add the solution to.
• Click Solutions.

Select the Company News Timeline solution, and then click Install.

• Accept Terms and Conditions.

• The status shows as Installation pending and give sometime for it to install.

After installing you can go to the Opportunity and you will see the new timeline on the left side of the form.

Please read Privacy notice before using it. Thanks.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Shared Projects Reference not showing in Visual Studio - Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit Template

Hi Everyone,

Today I was working on new project setup on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. We are using Developer Tool Kit, we all know that for some reason we have to stop using ILMerge and start using Shared Project if you want to divide the code like Business Processes and EntityWrapper.

I have created the Project using Dynamics 365 Template (Which comes with Developer Toolkit) and I have created SharedProject in the same solution. When I tried to give the reference, I was not able to see any option to reference of the Shared Project. It was like below.

How it should like is below. I am sure there is something going with the Template whatever we used from Developer Toolkit. 

Here is the way to solve, you just have open the Project file (.csproj) file in notepad add the below line at the end before Project End tag

<Import Project="..\SharedProject1\SharedProject1.projitems" Label="Shared" />

SharedProject1 - Folder of the SharedProject
SharedProject1.projitems - You will see this file in the location where you have created Shared Project.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Application User creation - Dynamics 365

Hi Everyone,

To create an unlicensed "application user" in your Dynamics 365 organization, follow these steps. This application user will be given access to your organization's data on behalf of the end user who is using your application.

1) Navigate to https://admin.microsoft.com and sign in, or from your D365 organization web page select the application launcher in the top left corner.

2) Choose Admin > Admin centers > Azure Active Directory

3) In the left navigation panel, choose Users and Select + New user

4) In the User form, enter a name and username for the new user and select Create. Make sure the username contains the organization domain URL of your D365 tenant (i.e., someuser@myorg.onmicrosoft.com). You can exit Azure AD now.

Navigate to your D365 organization

5) Navigate to your D365 organization

Navigate to Settings > Security > Users

Choose Application Users in the view filter

Select + New

In the New User form (Application User Form), enter the required information. These values must be identical to those values for the new user you created in the Azure tenant.

User Name - The Username that was created on Azure Active Directory

Application ID - You can get this from the App (Overview section) that is created under App Registrations

Full Name and Primary Email - As your wish.

6) If all goes well, after selecting SAVE, the Application ID URI and Azure AD Object Id fields will auto-populate with their correct values.

7) Before exiting the user form, choose MANAGE ROLES and assign a security role to this application user so that the application user can access the desired organization data. I gave Administrator as a role but you can give the role as per your requirement.

Hope this helps.

--

Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Phone Call Regarding Object Type in Microsoft Flow - Power Automate

Hi Everyone,

Today I got a requirement to update the Case record when a phone call record is created or update under Case. Yes, it is very simple requirement and we can use OOB Workflow and finish it in 10 minutes. As we all know that workflows are getting deprecated, I started using Flow.

It was fine, I have added all the required steps and below is the condition I have taken for checking the regarding object type but when I was testing it was never satisfying. 

Created two steps as Initialize and Set Variable to understand what exactly the value that is coming to the field.

To my surprise, the result is null and my doors are closed to check the condition.

If I leave it like this, the flow will trigger and every phone call create/update and tries to update the Case and fails if the phone call is not associated with the Case record.

After some search came to know that we have to below expression to check the Regarding Type and it worked for me.

triggerOutputs()?['body/_regardingobjectid_type']

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

Under Operator in Dynamics 365

Hi Everyone,

Today I was working on some reporting requirement and it was like I have Account Info and we have to get all Opportunities related to the child accounts of the given account.

Confused, let me put in more simple here. Here is my account hierarchy.

Child 1 has two Opportunities and Child of Child 2 has two Opportunities. In one go, we have to retrieve all these and show them on UI. I was not aware of how to do this for the first time and after some search found Under Operator that came to rescue me.

Just used Account Under Parent, here is the query and output.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath

What's new - Personal Wall not showing on UCI Dashboard - Dynamics 365 CE

Hi Everyone,

Today, I got a requirement to show Personal Wall on a custom Dashboard on UCI. We all know that we just have to add PersonalWall.htm web resource on the Dashboard, after adding I have published and refreshed the page to check how it renders on UCI.

To my surprise, it didn't show and I opened Customer Service Representative Social Dashboard to check how it is working as the Personal Wall is pre-configured by Product on that dashboard. Somehow it didn't show there as well and on Classic it was perfectly fine.

Classic - Customer Service Representative Social Dashboard.

UI - Classic - Customer Service Representative Social Dashboard - The section itself is not shown.

After some search, I came to know that Personal Wall is no more working on UCI and we have to add Timeline Control on the Dashboard to show Posts on UI.

Hope this helps.

--
Happy 365'ing

Gopinath