Blog Archives
Dynamics attributes utilisation by FetchXML
XrmToolbox is an amazing free utility formed by many tools that have been developed by the community. During the last weeks, I have been particularly using and enhancing the Attribute Usage Inspector. This tool tells you the fields utilisation in your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) environment.
In this article, I’ll show how I have extended this utility to allow FetchXML queries which defines the scope of the attributes to be analysed.
Visualising what attributes are used and what aren’t can be extremely helpful in your project analysis to understand adoption and drive new features.
In the above Figure – 1, you can see the attributes utilisation for the opportunity entity. In this case, the tool is using all the records and attributes in the system. You could also filter these attributes or even use a SQL query:
Additionally, I have recently added a new option to allow a FetchXML query (see “Use FetchXML query” in above Figure 2), which will define what attributes and records will be analysed based on the results of the same query.
Once you have selected the new setting “Use FetchXML query“, you will find a new dialog after you click on an entity:
The new FetchXML Query dialog allows basically 3 things:
- Generate the FetchXML query using a System View.
- Generate the FetchXML query using a User View.
- Use your own FetXML query just editing or pasting the text in the editor.
The FetchXML Query dialog also validates the query in run time to avoid potential mistakes.
For instance, let’s say we want to understand certain opportunity attributes utilisation for those records created in the last months. Using the XrmToolbox FetchXmlBuilder, I have generated my own FetchXML:
Figure 4 – FetchXML Builder tool to generate custom FetchXML
I will then paste the same query in the FetchXML Query dialog shown in Figure 3:
After clicking OK, the tool will use the same custom query to provide the corresponding results:
Figure 6 – Attribute Usage Inspector results with a custom FetchXML query
Notice how only a subset of the attributes are presented in the results and the number of records and % utilisation are determined by the FetchXML query.
How do I get this tool?
After you have downloaded the main XrmToolbox utility from https://www.xrmtoolbox.com, go to its Plugins Store and search for “Attribute Usage”, then install the Attribute Usage Inspector plugin:
Figure 7 – Install Attribute Usage Inspector from XrmToolBox Plugins Store
In case you were already using it, notice there is a new version 1.2018.9.11, which contains the new FetchXML query feature.
Where is the code?
The whole tool is open source and you can find the code here:
https://github.com/MscrmTools/MscrmTools.AttributeUsageInspector
https://github.com/rtebar/MscrmTools.AttributeUsageInspector
The Dynamics Community
You can reach and participate in the Dynamics 365 Community using the following channels:
Sites:
Dynamics in general
https://community.dynamics.com/
https://experience.dynamics.com/
PowerApps
https://community.powerapps.com
Flow
https://community.flow.microsoft.com
Power BI
https://community.powerbi.com/
Twitter:
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.
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 2018 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 🙂
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: 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 🙂
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
Dynamics Outlook App button doesn’t appear
This article describes how to fix an issue with the new Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. In this scenario, the Dynamics App button was available in the Outlook web client (OWA – https://outlook.office365.com), but it didn’t appear in the Outlook 2013 installed in the desktop.
As the app was working fine in the OWA client, we understood the administration configuration was done properly from the Dynamics side (e.g. security role, user mailbox). So we had to run some test in the corresponding machine to learn more about the problem.
In order to carry out those tests, we used the utility Microsoft Office Configuration Analyzer Tool 2.2 (known was OffCat). It provides a quick and easy way to analyze Microsoft Office programs for known configurations that cause problems, including in Outlook. You can download this utility from the following link:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36852
Once you install it, you will get the following menu to choose the program to be scanned, Outlook in our case:
After running the scan, OffCat will highlight potential issues and it will also suggest options to fix it straight away, very useful.
Finally we were able to resolve the issue just installing the latest update for Outlook 2013:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4011282/december-5-2017-update-for-outlook-2013-kb4011282
Hope it helps!
Using “EWS Editor” to fix “Dynamics 365 App for Outlook” issues
This article describes how to use the EWS Editor for Dynamics 365 utility to resolve Dynamics 365 App for Outlook issues. This post is a continuation of my previous article where I listed several checks to fix deployment issues with the Dynamics Outlook App.
EWS Editor was originally created to demonstrate the capabilities of the Exchange Web Services API. EWS Editor for Dynamics 365 is based on that one to provide additional utilities and troubleshoot issues related to Server-Side Synchronization and the E-mail Router.
Because the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook relies on the Server-Side Synchronization, this utility becomes also useful to resolve issues with the Dynamics Outlook App. In our case, we were getting the following error:
ExchangeError:UnknownIncomingEmailIntegrationError
This happened to us when we enabled the Dynamics Outlook App in a different organisation. So the app for this user was first enabled in organisation A, then we needed to deactivate it in this org and add it in organisation B, but we started to get that error and we couldn’t deploy it in org B and it also stopped working in org A 😦 .
The following steps describe how we use this tool to finally fix the problem:
Step 1 – Download EWS Editor for Dynamics 365
Step 2 – Launch “EWSEditorForDynamics365.exe”
Step 3 – Connect to Exchange Service
Step 4 – Add Mailbox Root
Step 5 – Connect to Dynamics 365 Service
Step 6 – Open All Items
Expand MsgFolderRoot and select Allitems by double clicking it.
Step 7 – Show To-Be Tracked Items
Navigate to View => Filter View Items => Show To-Be Tracked Items
Step 8 – Check that crmLinkState is set to 1
Exchange Items (email, tasks, contacts, appointments) that have been tracked in Dynamics will have some additional properties to define the link between the systems. One of those properties is crmLinkState, which should have one of these values:
0 – Item is not tracked
1 – Item To-Be tracked
2 – Item has been tracked
Step 9 – Hard Delete* all items to be tracked (pending tracking) where crmLinkState is 1
Right click on each item and navigate to Delete Item => Hard Delete
*Please notice you may lose important information, so make sure you are ok deleting those emails or other items.
Step 10 (END!) – Enable the Mailbox again
- Now navigate to your Dynamics instance.
- Open the User mailbox and click on “Test and Enable Mailbox”.
- Check the Box “Sync items with exchange”
- Wait till you receive the “Success” message for both emails and appointments.
- Once you receive the Success message, deploy/add the app again.
- This should resolve the issue.
If you want to learn more about the EWS Editor, check the following URL:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mstehle/tag/EWSEditor/
**Credits: Thanks to my colleague Narendra for helping me to put this content together.
