Business Applications MVP 2018-2019
Last week I received at home a small ring that came all the way from US. It was a small gift from Microsoft to celebrate another year as part of the MVP community 🙂
Since 2012, I have really enjoyed being part of this technical community where I have met very good professionals from all around the world.
Microsoft created this program more than 20 years ago to recognise individuals who help others to learn and understand Microsoft’s techonologies. Today we are more than 4,000 MVPs globally.
This award is split in different categories and areas depending on the technologies that we contribute to. Microsoft’s priorities and focus have evolved consideriable during the last years, which has also been reflected in the MVP award structure. My first year I got nominated as “CRM MVP“, then “Business Solutions MVP” and this year it was “Business Applications MVP“. Below you can see the current MVP award structure:
If you would like to learn more about the Microsoft MVP Program, have a look at this site:
Great demos at Microsoft Business Applications Summit Seattle 2018
If you haven’t watched the Microsoft Business Applications Summit sessions, I would really recommended. In this article I have captured some of the great demos delivered during the main keynote led by @JamesMPhillips.Â
In the first part, @JamesMPhillips emphasizes the importance of The Digital Feedback Loop, where everything is connected through data:
To be able to implement The Digital Feedback Loop, we need a good platform, the Power Platform:
The Power Platform will then provide all the support and core functionality to our business solutions built on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
190+ new capabilities are in scope for the next October 20108 release:
Portal Live chat integration
In this Polaris demo, we could see a live chat integrated in the Dynamics portal. Behind the scene, the chat was answered by a bot.
LinkedIn Integration
The integration with LinkedIn carries on improving and it will be part of the new Unified Interface.
Predictive Lead Scoring
Relationships analytics
Case Intelligence
In the new Customer Service Hub, also part of the Unified Interface, related information will be suggested based on our knowledge base and its relevance.
Sales AI App
This new Sales AI App will help sales leads and managers to understand their team performance and drive their next steps.
Talent
A better integration between Talent and LinkedIn will help our colleagues in Human Resources to find the right candidates.
Field Service
This was probably the most impressive demo. A field service engineer was assigned a work order generated by Azure IoT based on some smart patters. Once the engineer was in the field, she was helped by a remote colleague using HoloLens. Thanks to HoloLens, the engineer could fix the issue by sharing images and documents of the actual scene in real-time.
Azure IoT
Work Orders in Field Service Hub
Schedule Board in Field Service Hub
Engineer using HoloLens to get help
In this second picture, we can see how the engineer can draw and point in the actual device the area to be considered as part of the fix they need to apply:
Power BI within Finance and Operations
Using Power BI integrated in Finance and Operations, the Field Service managers could monitor the actual state of the system and predict new potential issues.
PowerApps
Right by Power BI and Flow, the other key element of the Power Platform are the PowerApps. In this AutoGlass demo, Ryan Cunningham shares his passion for the PowerApps potential and how easy they can be developed by any technology fan:
Dynamics 365 October 2018 Release
In October 2018 there will be another big release for Dynamics 365, including Marketing, Sales, Service, Social Engagement, Finance and Operations, Talent, Retail, Business Central (Nav), PowerApps, Microsoft Flows and Power BI (Business Intelligence), Data Integration and Mixed Reality business apps.
These were the news published just yesterday at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2018Â celebrated in Seattle.
The release notes (Download the October ’18 Release Notes PDF) include more than 100 changes across all those technologies, so get a coffee and start reading 🙂
If there was a particular area that I had to highlight, that would probably be PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. See below my favorite features.
PowerApps
Dynamics 365 entity forms with embedded canvas apps
PowerApps within PowerApps! That’s basically it. So we will have the ability to put the powerful and flexible Canvas apps within our Model-Driven apps, like custom controls.
Canvas apps with Solutions
To improve our ALM process, we will be able to pack our Canvas apps within Solutions, allowing us to deploy them easily between environments (e.g. dev=>test=>…=>prod).
Solution Checker
This utility within the platform will help us to identify potential design and performance issues in our apps.
Microsoft Flow
Custom controls in Business Process Flows
Previously, business process flows only permitted the available XRM attribute types (such as text, optionset, lookup, number, and so on) to be surfaced as control steps inside business process flow stages. Now, custom controls, which offer rich interaction mechanisms both in Unified Interface and the Web Client, are supported. They power
controls such as sliders, radial knobs, timelines, and even the LinkedIn controls.
Flow management connector, SDK, and APIs
Microsoft Flow is becoming the core processing solution in the Dynamics ecosystem. More documentation will be provided around its SDK and APIs to improve deployments, automation and governance.
Location as a connector
The feature allows users to create a location range that will trigger a flow when a mobile device enters or leaves it. Cool, isn’t it?!
Flows in Visio
We will be able to design our flows in Microsoft Visio, so you won’t have a excuse for “no documentation” now 🙂
Dynamics 365 Saturday Madrid memories
As I expected in my previous post, it was definitely a great event!
We really enjoyed our weekend in Madrid for the Dynamics 365 Saturday where 290 attendees came to the Microsoft’s offices.
There were plenty of interesting presentations and a fantastic atmosphere. We received very good feedback from our sessions and we felt everyone took something away.
I leave below some pictures with all speakers and another with  @marcoamoedo and @mtcantero during the Dynamics Quiz session , it was really good fun! 🙂
Dynamics Saturday Quiz is coming!
This Saturday there is a fantastic event happening: Dynamics Saturday 365 Madrid.
Apparently it will be one of the biggest Dynamics 365 Saturdays events celebrated so far. Apart from Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM), this time there will also be presentations for Finance and Operations, and Business Central over 3 rooms. My session will be in Calcium room at 16:50, see below the schedule:
You may have noticed a small little pumpkin in the first picture, that is Ruperta. She is our special guest who will help us with the Quiz on Saturday 🙂 For those who don’t know her, Ruperta was part of one of the most famous TV game shows in Spain years ago (Un, dos, tres… responda otra vez), where the participants were also challenged with a quiz.
After the great feedback we received from our Summit EMEA Quiz in Dublin, we want to continue the show in Madrid, but this time in Spanish and with new questions 🙂
The whole Quiz will be an interactive session where you will be able to provide your answers from your mobile device and see the results in real time. We will take one question at the time, share the results in the main screen and discuss the different answers. Our purpose is to create an entertaining contest where everyone can learn something.
And, very important…!
Thanks to the Dynamics 365 Saturday organisation, the first 3 winners will have a amazing award, so get ready and don’t miss it!
See you on Saturday!
Summit EMEA 2018 Dublin memories
Time flies and it is already weeks since the Summit EMEA conference in Dublin last month. It was definitely a great event and I really enjoyed meeting the community and exchanging experiences.
Apart from the Quiz session I already mentioned in my previous post:
I also had the opportunity to collaborate in other 2 presentations, which were fun. One of them was with Microsoft, where we talk about Dynamics and Digital Transformation happening at Investec. They found interesting some of the changes we are currently carrying out. Although it was challenging to be in such a big stage, I feel like it went well and I received some positive feedback.
The other one was with my MVP colleagues and some great member of the Dynamics community to talk about integrations. This topic is always an endless one and it was funny to hear the stories from the panel as well as the audience.
Are you ready for the Dynamics 365 / CRM Quiz at Summit EMEA 2018?
The Summit EMEA 2018 conference in Dublin is almost there and we have been preparing some tough, fun and educational questions for those who like a challenge.
The Quiz will be focus, mainly from a technical perspective, on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, CRM and other related technologies like Azure.
The whole Quiz will be an interactive session where you will be able to provide your answers from your mobile device and see the results in real time. We will take one question at the time, share the results in the main screen and discuss the different answers.
Our purpose is to create an entertaining contest where everyone can learn something.
But that is not all! For those who win the Quiz, there will some great awards, don’t miss it 🙂
You can join the event and add this session to your list following this link:
https://www.summitemea.com/conference-schedule/crmugsessions
See you in Dublin!
Session Title:Â DEV02 – Dynamics 365 CE Quiz! Who Will Be the Winner?
When: Thursday, April 26. 10:30 – 12:00
Where: Wicklow Meeting Room 3
Slides Dynamics 365 Saturday London
What a great event we enjoyed last Saturday! 🙂
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Dynamics 365 Saturday event took part in London in the Microsoft Paddington offices. It was a great experience to see so many participants (150+) in such a collaborative environment.
You can now find below the slides for the presentation that my MVP colleague Baris and I used during our session, which covered the new features and deprecations coming with the version 9 for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
Finally, I would like to share this great picture that was taken on Saturday morning just to kick off the event with James Phillips, great memory 🙂
Dynamics 365 Saturday – London 2018
This weekend there is a great community event in London for the Dynamics professionals and fans: DYNAMICS 365 Saturday
The event is actually running for 2 days, starting on Friday (today!) with the Hackathon and multiple activities around it:
Then on Saturday we will have more presentations, including mine: Dynamics 365 Version 9 New Features &Â Deprecations
During this presentation, that I’ll be sharing with my MVP colleague Baris Kanlica, we will cover the main features coming with the new version of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (our old CRM) and highlight those that have been deprecated.
Microsoft is really supporting the event this year and James Phillips, Dynamics Corporate Vice President, will kick off the event.
We hope you will enjoy it and learn something useful 🙂
Capture contact images with Xrm.Device.captureImage
This article shows how to capture contact images using a Dynamics 365 mobile App based on the new client API in version 9. The same could be extended to capture images in any entity for other business scenarios.
The new Dynamics 365 API introduces several new namespaces, one of them is Xrm.Device. This namespace offers the method Xrm.Device.captureImage that we will use here to take the photo of our contact.
Firstly, we will create a Dynamics 365 App:
You can also get into the “My Apps” section using the following URL:
Please notice we will use the new Unified Interface in the Client option:
This app will be available for the Dynamics 365 for phones. In my case, I’m testing it with an iPhone.
In the new app, we will edit the site map to include the contact entity:
Now we will add a new button to the contact form ribbon. There are different ways to do this, in my case I have used the Ribbon Workbench editor within XrmToolbox:
We will pass the record GUID and the entity type (e.g. contact) as the command parameters:
The button will trigger the corresponding command (e.g. GetPhotoCommand) and this will execute the JavaScript function to capture the image (e.g. GetPhoto). This code should be placed in a WebResource.
You can download this code from GitHub:
Once we have captured the image, we will update the current contact record. There is where we are using the method Xrm.Web.updateRecord. To display some alerts or potential error messages, we will use the method Xrm.Navigation.openAlertDialog and Xrm.Navigation.openErrorDialog. Finally, to refresh the form and show the new picture, we are refreshing the form with the method Xrm.Navigation.openForm. These methods are also part of the new client API with Dynamics 365 version 9.
In the actual mobile app, you should see something like these screens:
The new button should appear when you click on “…”:
Once you click the button, it should trigger the device camera:
If everything is ok, it will show us the alert dialog we were expecting:
Finally, the picture should appear in our contact form:
Notes: This article has been written using the platform version 9.0.0.3267
