Dynamics 365 Support - your best friends when you have Dynamics 365 Online

If you are using Dynamics 365 Online, Dynamics 365 Support is your IT-department for your Dynamics system and you need to know or start learning how to working with them in a good way. There are several things you should consider.

Registering a support ticket

First of all, registering a support ticket is of course important. This might not be as trivial as it seems, as it depends on which type of license you have. If you have bought your licenses using CSP (Cloud Service Provider) or Select/Volume Licensing then you will most probably be directed to your CSP/Select partner for any support issues. You can of course buy premier support from Microsoft but that might not always be an option for smaller companies. There are some tricks as well if you are stuck with CSP/Select or similar, and will be happy to tell you about these in person if I meet you, but I won't write about them, as I am afraid it will be "fixed" which would be sad.

If you have bought your licenses directly through the O365 portal, you can also create a ticket using the portal. You need to be a Global Admin or a Dynamics 365 Service Admin to place a ticket. Currently you cannot indicate that the ticket is for Dynamics so you simply write so in the text and the O365 support team will create a new Dynamics 365 ticket for you. I was amazed at how fast the Office 365 support called me after registering a ticket, I think it took less than 1 minute. So I would suggest you choose the option "call me".

If you have a partner, I strongly suggest that you register them in the Office 365 portal for the Dynamics 365 subscription as Partner of Record (PoR). This will make your company show up in their Microsoft partner portal where they can register a support ticket for you.

Checklist
When registering the ticket with Microsoft, there are some things you have to note:

1. Be polite. Even if your system is slower than sirup in January (a Swedish saying) or nobody can log in, you will not be getting any help faster by screaming or being rude. I like to quote my grandfather who had a good saying: "Better to be strong in argument and withheld in words, than the other way round." I have actually gotten written compliments for being nice by the support people, do you think they will go the extra mile for me?
2. Be very exact with what is you think is wrong. The best way is to formulate it like this: "I did X and expected Y but I got Z". Also be clear on when you define the case as closed. This is particularly important, and hard when you have performance issues or intermittent errors. But try to be as exact as you can. For example: "When users run Chrome open a Contact (after the contact form already has been loaded for another record) it takes 10 seconds. We expect it to take no more than 2 seconds."
3. Only have one issue per ticket. Better to have many tickets open. I have had 4 tickets open for one single customer at the same point in time.
4. If you think the issue is important, describe it in business impact terms. For example "The bug X affects all sales people in the organization effectivly stopping them from using Dynamics 365. It severly risks our entire Dynamics 365 investment as users look at other solutions and the user adoption drops dramatically and the trust in the system is drastically lowered for every hour this bug is not fixed. We have 4354 sales people in our global sales organization spread out over 34 countries. It also affects managements abilities to manage the company as no pipleline and forecast numbers are produced which could potentially cause sever business damages that cannot easily be fixed within the coming 4-5 years." - This was just made up :) but it is important to not hold back when doing this, especially if you are Swedish or from other cultures which value humbleness.
5. Be clear on limits of the error. 
1. Which Operating system?
2. Which browsers?
3. What times? Can you see any clear patterns on when it happens?
4. Geos?
5. Security roles?
6. Types of users affected, AD users federated to O365 or Cloud users?
7. How long?
8. Which versions of Dynamics 365 are you running?
9. Which instances have the issue (the url:s)?

Types of tickets

What types of tickets can be registered? Should you only register a ticket when you want help with something?

Well, no, you can and should register a ticket for many different reasons. As I mentioned at the top of the article it is important to think about Microsoft Support as your Dynamics 365 IT-department. They will help you with a lot of things that your IT-department would have helped you with had they hosted your Dynamics system. The main difference is probably that they do nothing else than host Dynamics 365, every day, year after year... not many IT-departments that can compare with that.

Typical issues they can help out with are:

• Something seems to have stopped working that used to work, and you didn't change anything. Like you cannot create an Application User anymore.
• Something clearly is a bug in Dynamics 365 and you want Microsoft to know about it (they might not know) and you want to let them know how important it is for you (they will surely not know this).
• You need some information from the Server, like the "Top 10 table Usage"  report from the SQL database.
• You have performance issues.
• You need to change the planned upgrades because your team won't make the set time.
• You want to set some non-clustered indexes on the database.
• You are doing a migration of large amounts of data and you will be a bad neighbour for a few days and if possible you would like a little more than the 2 allocated threads in the API.
• You want a database copy prepared for installation into an on-prem equivalent.
• You need some detailed information on how the service is managed, like
• How backups are stored
• How to restore backups from the 90 day tape backup
• Where an instance is hosted
• You would like to move an instance to another datacenter
• You need to remove a managed solution but it has dependencies that shouldn't be there...
• You need to do some task with an instance that you cannot do yourself with the instance manager.

In other words, they will be your superfriend when working with Dynamics 365 and you want to be really nice to your super friend!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Working with CrmSettings via PS - setting things you didn't know you could, or should

Recently I have been trying to fix some Server Side Sync issues with an on-prem Dyn CRM 2016 and this got me to dig into the nitty gritty of settings for the system.

Before going berserk and chaning a lot of these settings, be aware that you can cause severe problems with your system if you are not careful so I would strongly recommend that you test any settings and also export any settings so that you know what they are.

Finetuning your onprem installation is something that you can do with an onprem that is a lot harder with online.

By logging in on your CRM-server, and opening Powershell and entering the following command, you can start working with some settings that are otherwise hard or impossible to reach:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell

For instance, if you want to check out some of the ServerSideSync Settings, enter:

Get-CrmSetting -SettingType ServerSideSyncQueueSettings

If you are using the Windows Power Shell ISE, after loading the Microsoft.Crm.PowerShell, you will get intellisense that will help you see which different settings are available. So if you write:

Get-CrmSetting -SettingType

And then enter a space after this, you will see the different options:

For some more details into Server side sync and how to configure this in detail, look here:
https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/1/D/71D44C6E-CB78-4573-BDFF-77A6E137BA5C/serversidesyncwithDynamicsCRM.pdf

And here is an example of how to set data.

$set = Get-CrmSetting -SettingType ServerSideSyncQueueSettings 

$set.MailboxQueueItemsInMemoryHigh = "500" 
$set.MailboxQueueItemsInMemoryLow = "200" 

Set-CrmSetting -Setting $set

Just add more $set - statements to set more values.

If you want to write some settings to a file, just pipe the output to a file, for example:

Get-CrmSetting -SettingType ServerSideSyncQueueSettings > ServerSideSyncSettingsOrg.txt

But as I mentioned above, be careful with these settings.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

First full day at CRM UG Summit 2017!

GDPR and October Update of Dynamics 365, that is what has been the main take away from today for me at CRM UG Summit, (UG is User Group for those who do not know.)

I have discussed GDPR a lot with a lot of different people here, some more in tune with what it is about than others and some not even realizing that it will affect all companies in the US having EU Citizens in their systems.

And of course the new release of Dynamice 365, called October Update or version 9.0 for those of us who like to be clear about what we are talking about.

I will come back to some of the details, for now I will leave you with some recordings I made.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

v9 GA and some problems with Solution deployment

As many of you probably have noticed version 9.0 has just been released. If you havn't, spin up a trial by clicking here: New Trial

It has a very nice and shiny UI which I really think you should try and some very other very nice new features. However, you should be a bit wary of using it in production environments just yet as there seems to be a bit too many serious bugs as described in this document:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/readme-9

I am working with a customer and we have a specific non-production instance we call "sandbox" which we use to test apps and features outside of the ALM (application lifecycle management) process, so we installed v9 or July Update as it is called and tried it out.

What I found when trying to deploy our unmanaged customization with all the entities which we have changed in the project, was that I got the weirdest error, it complained that it was missing an internal Microsoft Web Resource with the name of:
  "CampaignActivity_main_system_library.js"

So, I opened up the customization.xml (yes, all you oldtimers from CRM 3.0 time remember it as the true export file) and searched for the guid and the web resource name in the file. I found that it was actually used on the main form of Compaign Activitiy, and if you look at the read-me document I have linked above, it mentions that the Campaign Activity is one of the entities which does not work. Hence, there is probably some old code in there that Microsoft have decided to remove, and havn't had time to replace.

So, the temporary fix to get our solution to work in Dynamics 365 v9.0 (July Release), go into the customization.xml and then manually remove all <Event> tags which include that webresource, and if the <Events> tag was empty, remove that too. Then put the customization.xml file back into the solution file and reimport it.

The campaign activity still won't work but at least our solution imported. Perhaps there are similar issues with other entities.

I will expect this issue to go away very soon.

And on the issue of if it is ok and supported to manually edit (hack) the customization.xml file I am under the impression that it is as long as it actually import into a system without any forceful shoehorning as it is up to Dyn365 to validate it.

On monday, I will be heading to CRM UG Summit in Nashville which is sure to be a great trip. I am planning to try to make some video there which I will post here and on my Youtube, and don't miss my session on if it is really is a fair fight to compare Online with Onprem? Guess what I will say?

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

AuthenticationResult.AcquireToken deprecated in ADAL 3.x and how to fix.

When authenticating to Dyn 365 with S2S the following is a simple program using the S2S authentication which core I think I got originally got from my pal George Doubinski. I like to use it to test S2S. Very clean and easy to build on.

string organizationUrl = "<org url>";string clientId = "<client id in Azure>";string appKey = "<secret for the clientid>";string aadInstance = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/";string tenantID = "<contoso or whateveryouhave>.onmicrosoft.com";

ClientCredential clientcred = new ClientCredential(clientId, appKey);AuthenticationContext authenticationContext = new AuthenticationContext(aadInstance + tenantID);AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireToken(organizationUrl, clientcred);var requestedToken = authenticationResult.AccessToken;

using (OrganizationWebProxyClient sdkService = new OrganizationWebProxyClient(GetServiceUrl(organizationUrl), false)){sdkService.HeaderToken = requestedToken;OrganizationRequest request = new OrganizationRequest();
WhoAmIResponse response = sdkService.Execute(new WhoAmIRequest()) as WhoAmIResponse;

Console.WriteLine($"UserID:{response.UserId}");Console.WriteLine("Press any key to continue...");Console.ReadKey();

}

However, the line:
AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireToken(organizationUrl, clientcred);

Cloud computing - isn't it great?

Requires ADAL version 2.x and the method AquireToken has been removed in the later version of that library.

If you look around the net, many advocate staying on 2.x version of the library but I didn't have that option as I was integrating with Dyn 365 Operations and that was using the ver 3.x.

So, to make this work in version 3.x you just have to make a simple fix:

AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireTokenAsync(ClientConfig.CRMOrgUrl, clientcred).Result;



Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

What do you need to have a Voice?

Have been trying to install Voice of the customer for one of my customers. As with larger customers,
and of course, many of the smaller ones too, I am not allowed to (and I don't really want to) be the global admin in their Office 365. I am however a Dynamics 365 Service Admin, which I think is fair.

So I was trying to provision Voice of the Customer (VoC) but it failed and after many weird loops and dances with support, of which I will not mention here, I finally got hold of Microsoft support and they were able to tell me that not only did I need to get hold of one of the global admins (you know, one of the scary pale guys who they lock in a safe somewhere cause god knows what would happen if they stepped in front of a car...) but the user also needs to have a full plan 1 Dynamics 365 license.

Said and done, we allocated it, and restarted the installation - do remember that you have to install VoC from the "Applications" tab, and not only as a Solution.

So, quick recap:
To install VoC, you need:
- Dynamics 365 online instance
- User with Dynamics 365 Plan 1 license
- Same user with Global Admin rights



Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Unable to open Case entity forms - any of them...

I just ran into one of the weirdest errors I have seen in my Dynamics CRM/365 carreer, and I have seen a few.

The problem we had was that the case entity had stopped working more or less totally. When trying to open any type of case form either as a normal user or in the form editor, I got a more or less anonymous error message. After a lot of banging my head against the wall and loosing some of my few strands of hair, I finally with the help of Deepesh excellent blog article:
https://dynamicsofdynamicscrm.com/2015/09/22/error-resolutionthe-case-of-the-form-which-stopped-loading-in-dynamics-crm/
it got me on the right track. I did some URL-hacking to try to access the form editor directly and accidentaly got to a mixed form editor. Very weird, but it showed that the form itself wasn't broken, hence there was something wrong further down... probably the fields, just as Deepesh's error. And after removing all custom fields, I got it working. Then tediously going back and removing them one by one, I found the culprit, a custom Lookup to the Product.

To give you some more background:

When trying to edit any case form, I got the following error:

When trying to create a new case, I got the following error:

And if I downloaded the file, the contents was: (I have hightlighted the part which has some, but only slight relevance)

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]: System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has experienced an error. Reference number for administrators or support: #D856E3CEDetail: 
<OrganizationServiceFault xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">
  <ActivityId>a3831d4c-6557-4f8a-b558-ba8c01b97e21</ActivityId>
  <ErrorCode>-2147220970</ErrorCode>
  <ErrorDetails xmlns:d2p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
  <Message>System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has experienced an error. Reference number for administrators or support: #D856E3CE</Message>
  <Timestamp>2017-06-29T13:12:03.5384906Z</Timestamp>
  <ExceptionRetriable>false</ExceptionRetriable>
  <ExceptionSource i:nil="true" />
  <InnerFault>
    <ActivityId>a3831d4c-6557-4f8a-b558-ba8c01b97e21</ActivityId>
    <ErrorCode>-2147220970</ErrorCode>
    <ErrorDetails xmlns:d3p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
    <Message>System.NullReferenceException: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has experienced an error. Reference number for administrators or support: #5CCC57F6</Message>
    <Timestamp>2017-06-29T13:12:03.5384906Z</Timestamp>
    <ExceptionRetriable>false</ExceptionRetriable>
    <ExceptionSource i:nil="true" />
    <InnerFault i:nil="true" />
    <OriginalException i:nil="true" />
    <TraceText i:nil="true" />
  </InnerFault>
  <OriginalException i:nil="true" />
  <TraceText i:nil="true" />
</OrganizationServiceFault>

Here are some facts:

• We had installed a solution that is an upgraded solution, originally from CRM 4 via CRM 2011 and 2013. Not sure if the field definition from the earlier versions are causing this. Probably not.
• I tried switching off all plugin steps. But it didn't help at all. This is usually what Microsoft support will ask you to do when you have issues why I tried it myself. Always good to try and send this to Microsoft support when registering a support ticket.
• I have tried spinning up a clean 8.2 Dyn 365 with no customizations, creating a solution with just the case entity and importing that. It did not work. Not very strange, as the problem was a field that is causing the problem. Adding solutions does not remove anything unless you are using managed solutions with patches etc.
• I tried exporting a small solution with just the case forms and removed all custom fields from the customization file manually and reimported it. It did not work, which is not strange either, as the error was not on the form.
• I tried creating cases via the API. That did work. I did not use the lookup field that I later found out was the culprit. Perhaps writing something to all fields in the case entity would have generated an error. The reason for doing this was that I wanted to see if I could get an exception in my code that contained more information than what I was getting in the UI. Hence I wasn't at all happy that it did work.
• I tried retrieving cases via the API. That did work. Again, not happy at all.
• I tried to manufacture the URL to the form ( https://contoso.crm4.dynamics.com/main.aspx?appSolutionId=%7b<solutionguid>%7d&etc=<entityobjectid, 112 for case>&extraqs=formtype%3dmain%26formId%3d<Guid for the ofrm>%26action%3d-1&pagetype=formeditor) That did not work. No form URL with etc=112 works.
• I tried to retrieve the form via the API, that works. Again, not happy, but at least it showed that there probably wasn't any problem with the form.
• I tried to manufacture a weird URL, with the correct form id with the incorrect EntityObjectID. That showed the form, but with the information that the form is for the “other” entity. Weird, but showed that there is actually nothing wrong with the form itself. I could even edit the caseform this way, move fields, remove fields, but not add new stuff. Totally unsupported way of editing a form, but when in love, war and when Dyn365 buggs out, anything is allowed.See below. This proved to be a very useful, as the form seemed for some very strange reason to be involved in this. The way I proved this was that I had an "original", instance where the error showed and one where I had got it to work, after removing some fields, and removing all unnecessary fields from the main form. After this I created a solution which only imported the form from the non-functioning instance for the case entity and imported it into the working instance. I had not expected the result, but it actually stopped working. With the error described above. So for some reason the form was part of the problem.

  

  A weird Form Editor - the Case form loaded with the Account Entity (EntityTypeCode=1). Be careful when using this, and use at your own risk!

• I got the same error as above when I try to open the case form in the normal UI.
• When I try to create a new case, I get the error shown in the file "AnErrorHasOccuredWithTimeStampAndLog.png"
• As for what happened with the system just before/during/when this error occurred, we were doing customizations on the case form from a spotty internet Connection, and the case for did work before.
• In the field-section of the Case entity, I selected "Custom" fields, and I have a notion that most of these errors are probably caused by code which mix up custom lookup fields with built in ones. So I would start by looking at lookup fields based on system entities with custom relationships to case like:
• case 1:N case
• product 1:N case
• account 1:N case
• contact 1:N case
• pricelevel 1:N case
• However you might have several fields that are causing errors (I did), and that might make it very tricky to find what is wrong. Cause once you managed to remove the last field causing the error, and then restore the solution and then remove it again, you will find that you are back to a non-functioning entity, and you will have to work your way through each of the fields, with all their dependencies again, until you find the next one. Hence the methodology becomes

1. Export solution
2. Remove fields until you get the entity to work. Document exactly which fields you try and in which order. Always work in the same order. Remove a field, try to open the case, remove the next field, try to open case form, and so on. All the time documenting, which fields and in which order.
3. When you get the case form to work, import the solution again.
4. Remove the the field(s) that you know are causing the problems.
5. If, after this, it still does not work, go to 2.

• After I removed the fields, and cleaned the form, I recreated the fields with the exact same schema-names and that worked perfectly. Not sure though how it will work when I export it, I am still not sure what is causing this. Probably some erroneous code in the case logic.
• I was able to replicate this error on other instances. So the problem is certainly connected to the solution itself. 

So to sum it up. This is most obviously a bug in the Dynamics 365 platform as it should never be able to go into this state. In my case entity the problem was two lookups AND the main "Case" form. After removing the fields and removing all non-necessary stuff from the form by using a URL hack described above, I managed to get it working.

If you run into this, I hope you manage to fix it. It isn't easy and it will take some time. Hopefully I have given you some pointers.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Dynamics 365 Version 9.0 Business Edition and more

Version 9.0 is soon here and it is set to be the largest release ever from Microsoft. The biggest news on my horizon is the relase of the all new Business Edition of Dynamics 365 (BE). This will be an interesting new product and I'd thought I'd write a few lines about it just to clear some things up based on my understanding of the product.

Note that these are my thoughts, they are based on what I have heard and what information I believe is in the public domain (non-NDA). If you know that anything is wrong or have something to add, please leave a comment and I will try to fix it as soon as possible. Due to the high level of spamming I have to use moderation on all comments.

Is it xRM?
Yes, it is going to be based on the xRM platform but it will be using the all new and shiny "Unified Experience" UI which is probably going to be great in many aspects, looks great and everything but also will probably have a glitch or two as it is just coming out the factory doors.

Ok, so can I customize it?
Yes, to some extent you will be able to. It will have specific limits that set it distinctly appart from Enterprise Edition (EE). As of now Microsoft have not been very specific on the details but they have said that the limits will be on:

• The amount of users in the system
• Number of custom entities
• Max amount of GB of usage on disk

I am an ISV developer. Will my ISV 3:rd party addon work with BE?

As far as I understood Microsoft, they will limit ISV addons to only be able to work with the OOB entities in BE. As creating entities in the "normal" CRM/EE has almost no cost, almost all ISV solutions I have seen have at least one custom entity, if not to contain customizations. So, my answer would not be a blanket "no" but a probable, "no". If your addon isn't too advanced, you could probably rewrite it to make it work, but with larger addons like for instance ClickDimensions or Resco, I don't see how that would be possible.

Can I use a sandbox with BE?

No. No non-production instance will be included in the price and as far as I understood, you won't even be able to buy a non-production or even production instance of BE.

Can I upgrade from BE to EE?

Yes. As it is based on the same xRM framework this will totally be doable on a theoretical plane. However, I don't know how this will work on a short term basis if, for instance, you start with a BE in Nov 2017 and in Dec 2017 decide that it was too limiting too you and you want to upgrade to EE. The reason for my hesitation in this is that BE will be based on Unified Experience and EE will not at the time of release of 9.0. I would, however, expect 9.0 to catch up further on the line and after it has been upgraded to Unified Experience, then an upgrade of an instance from BE to EE should be no problem.

I bought the interim EE offer for BE pricing level, will I be able to downgrade to BE?

This is a tricky one. First of all Microsoft has not made any public statement on this that I am aware of in either one or the other direction. However, I do think that the key here lies in the level of customizations that you have done to you system. If your EE system falls with the limits of # of users, # of entities and # of GB that is set by MSFT, and also not having any ISV addons not allowed according to BE and any other limitations that Microsoft might come to set before the General Availability (GA) of BE then I think you have a very good chance of being able to downgrade. However, just as I mentioned above in the ISV section, the limitations might be too limiting and creating a lot of entities and adding ISV addons both free and purchased might make it hard to move to BE.

Can I use the Marketing App of BE in EE?

This is a really interesting case, as this is an area where the BE will have a featureset that exceeds EE, at least at the time when it is delivered. In the big overview of all Dynamics 365 Apps (for example the one above) - the Marketing Automation slot is filled by Adobe Marketing. However, for the BE there is a Marketing App which has been created from the bottom up by Microsoft on the xRM platform. Do note that for those of you who were unfortunate to have chosen Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, that product has been discontinued, so that is as of the General Availability of Dynamics 365 (dec 2016) you should really start thinking of moving away from it.

However, the new and shiny Marketing App for BE is strickly speaking only for BE for the time being. I think that the feature set it has is perceived to be too small for the Enterprise segment, although I can perceive many customers using the Enterprise edition that would probably be more than happy with it.

As for the future for the Marketing App in EE only Microsoft knows what they have planned and if I knew I couldn't have written anything here either. What we know is that they have invested quite a lot of money in building some Marketing Automation features for the BE which is only aimed at the lower end of the customer segment. I would find it noteworthy if they did not leverage that investment in some way in the Enterprise segment as well. However, building a Marketing Automation solution that can match other Enterprise Marketing Automation systems is not something that even Microsoft can do at the flick of the hand, so I would not expect this to show up for at least a year or two. And it might of course be that they will slowly evolve the BE Marketing App until it is fit to grow into the larger Enterprise segment by just turning some switches, but I guess only the future will show.

As of now, Adobe is the preferred partner for Marketing, something I personally would like to see more detail to. What does it acutally mean? Seems there is some integration engine but no availble whitepapers to dowload that describes what it does. http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/microsoft-partnership/digital-foundation-azure.html 

If Microsoft are investing in building their own EE Marketing Automation App, which does not seem very far fetched althought it might take some time, you might need to take this into consideration if you are considering investing in a new Marketing Automation system for your organization and you are already running Dynamics 365.

If you have any other questions on Dynamice 365 Business Edition, please ask them in the comment. Not sure I can answer, but I can try!

By the way, my blog was awarded the 78:th best CRM blog of all in the world in all CRM categories. Hence the new shiny logo to the right. That was worth some celebration!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Don't miss our new sales oriented blogging

When blogging on this blog I try to keep content king why I would rather not blog than blog about
something that I don't think brings value to you as readers. I have the greatest respect for you as readers of this blog and I hence try to keep the content focused on what typically developers, architects and application experts might be interested in.

Content is King

However, there are a lot of other topics that are relevant as well and we have started blogging about those as well at CRM-Konsulterna. You can find it at http://crmpaketet.se/blogg/ where we discuss matters which are of more interest to salespeople. It is in Swedish as this is our primary market and it is also part of our new digitalization strategy which we are implementing with inbound content marketing (the blogging and articles) and technically driven by ClickDimensions as the Marketing Automation tool. This is a great new way of doing business but requires all the techy parts to really work so there is a lot of room for us tech-weenies to get our hands dirty. But the tricky part is getting the business end people on track, they are usually a bit slow (not dumb) when it comes to changes and hence it takes some time for them to accept these new ideas of digitalization.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Some dashboards are more equal than other

Typically you are not allowed to remove components from the system layer in Dynamics 365/CRM

Is this dashboard more pig than horse?

but for some reason this does not apply to dashboards in some earlier versions of Dynamics CRM. It seems this bug has recently been fixed but if you have a version of CRM where this was possible or have been upgraded from this version, you might be missing it. I just tried this in the Online version
8.2.0.798 and in this version it is not possible to delete dashboards but I have managed to in earlier versions.

My friend Jerry Weinstock has blogged about this as well.

One particular dashboard that the system is in dire need of for its mobile features is the "Sales Dashboard" as this is the default dashboard for the mobile and tablet clients. This cannot be changed although the default dashboard can be changed within the mobile client by the user after it has been started. See MSDN for more info in this.

In case you do manage to delete it or it has been deleted, Power Objects blog have described how to restore dashboards from instance with this dashboard in it. In short, create an unmanaged solution in that other instance containing the "Sales Dashboard" and then export and import the solution into the instance missing it.

Before closing the window showing the results, open the log of the import and get the guid of the dashboard and then use the url of another dashboard to insert the GUID into the url to get to the "Sales Dashboard" and change it's name and/or the label of the the tab to what it typically is in case it doesn't show up directly.

In case you do not have one, here is a link to an unmanaged solution file (version 8.0) containing just the sales dashboard. SalesDashboard_1_0_0_0_target_CRM_8.0.zip


Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Update on BPF gotcha

Wrote an article a few days ago on the BPF new architecture and effects that it might have.

I spoke with Roger Gilchrist, a Principal Program Manager with the Product team during the eXtreme365 conference and he mentioned that using the "Process Stage" fields are actually not supported if you read the SDK very closely. This document is a very long document and it is not very clear in the UI and there is no other very obvious way of solving triggering on stage changes than the triggering on Process Stage changes, with which he did agree.

The important lesson from that, I think is that not everything you see in the UI is actually supported for use.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Strange error when deleting managed Solution

Seems like that Dynamics 365/CRM doesn't catch all dependencies for managed solutions. This is how you can find and remove one of the tricky ones I got when uninstalling a managed solution which was:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]: During Solution Uninstall of Solution Id [solution-guid], cannot find any instances of the component with Component Id c97cd9d7-a0fa-4ed5-b360-3c2ad998a620 and Component Type 2.Detail: 
<OrganizationServiceFault xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">
  <ErrorCode>-2147220970</ErrorCode>
  <ErrorDetails xmlns:d2p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
  <Message>During Solution Uninstall of Solution Id [solution-guid], cannot find any instances of the component with Component Id c97cd9d7-a0fa-4ed5-b360-3c2ad998a620 and Component Type 2.</Message>
  <Timestamp>2017-03-06T13:06:54.6280227Z</Timestamp>
  <ExceptionSource i:nil="true" />
  <InnerFault i:nil="true" />
  <OriginalException i:nil="true" />
  <TraceText i:nil="true" />
</OrganizationServiceFault>

After some thinking I figured that this was probably a reference to an attribute (Component type = 2) with the Guid = c97cd9d7-a0fa-4ed5-b360-3c2ad998a620 so I opened another attribute and then cut-n-pasted the url. And it seemed that you didn't have to worry about the entity guid:


https://<onlineorgname>.<globalcrmcenter>.dynamics.com/tools/systemcustomization/attributes/manageAttribute.aspx?appSolutionId=%7bFD140AAF-4DF4-11DD-BD17-0019B9312238%7d&attributeId=%7bc97cd9d7-a0fa-4ed5-b360-3c2ad998a620%7d&entityId=%7b70816501-edb9-4740-a16c-6a5efbc05d84%7d

Change <onlineorgname> to your org, and <globalcrmcenter> to the crm-subdomain you are using, which for EMEA is crm4.

You will then see the field editor, and can then show the dependencies of the field and remove all of them manually to make sure they are not bothering the Solution uninstall. After that "publish all" and retry removing the solution.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Dynamics 365 new BPF architecture gotcha

The new Dynamics 365 release of CRM or as I like to call it 8.2, as that makes it a bit simpler. Dynamics 365 is a bit ambigious, it can mean AX and NAV as well and at the same time I want to discuss the platform and not just an app... so it becomes trick. I hope Microsoft figures some decent naming for the xRM part of the platform so we all have something to call it. (hint... xRM is a decent word)

Well, one of the cool new features of the 8.2 release is the revamp of the Business Process Flows (BPF) which now have gotten a couple of different facelifts, of which some are:

• A new editor which looks identical to the Business rules editor. However, the Workflow editor is still very old-style... I wonder if this might be next. :)
• BPF:s final stage can now be closed/or you actually close the entire BPF. This was not the case previously where the last stage simply sat there.
• If you have multiple BPF:s and you switch between them, D365 will remember where you are in each of the BPF:s. This was not the case in earlier versions when it always restarted when you changed.

In order to handle the last point, the underlying architecture of the BPFs have been changed. Previously when you had an entity that was BPF enabled by a lookup called "Process stage" and when this changed you knew that the record had changed stage in the workflow.

Alas, in comes 8.2 on its white horse, and "Process stage" lookup falls dead to the ground like knight before a modern day tank. In other words, it simply isn't triggered.

The new BPF architecture is based on the principle that a new shadow entity is created for each BPF that you create. And yes, they are removed when you remove your BPF.

So, when is this typically a problem? The most common uses for triggering on stage changes in BPF is using a Workflow to trigger on changes in an Opportunity to set the probability. This is then later used in calculated fields like Weighted Estimated Revenue (not a standard field) and similar fields.

The effect upgrading to 8.2, which is just a minor upgrade from an upgrade perspective, is hence that these customizations that you might have done to set the probability, stop working and the opportunities get the wrong, 0 or no probability making any calculation based on this number incorrect.

So, how are you supposed to fix this? There is a new WF triggering mechanism built in to the BPF designer. You simply create a workflow that can be manually triggered, and drag a workflow compontent into the appropriate step in the BPF designer.

Do note that you can choose if you want it to trigger when the stage is started or completed.

BPF Editor with a workflow added with the Stage Entry trigger selected as highlighted

And this is how the workflows needs to look

This is the workflow that was selected in the BPF Editor above. Note the highlighted checkbox. This needs to be checked in order for the workflow to show up in the BPF editor lookup

A final comment. Even though the BPFs can now be completed, that does not mean that the final stage's Stage Exit is triggered. As far as I have understood it, it is still in this phase even though the BPF in it self is considered closed. I would call semantics on that. I hope Microsoft fixes that bug or enhances that lack of feature if they rather call it that.

Was this original workflow supported? Was it ignorant of your partner, you might ask, to create a workflow that triggered as described in the old manner and this has now stopped working and you
are faced with additional costs for fixing this? Shouln't they have known? Well, frankly no, your partner, if they followed what I described above, did make what are called "supported customizations" which according to the documentation from Microsoft is supposed to be upgradable. At least one major version, often 2 or 3 major versions This time it was not even a minor, from 8.1 to 8.2. Hence it is a regrettable situation but if you want to complain somewhere, I do suggest you complain to Microsoft.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Finding URL to dependencies on installed managed solutions

Uninstalling a managed solution? (ie Deleting it) Getting a bad error message saying you can´t? (Cannot Delete Component) And you don't know how to find what the dependencies are for the solution? So did I. And perhaps you, as I, did not notice the small link in the dialog which says "Details" that takes you directly to the "Dependencies" page.

Click this to go see the dependencies for the solution,
or follow the instructions below to manually generate an URL 

So, if you did miss that, or for some other reason want to know how to get to the dependency page of a solution, read on.

I found this blog article: https://www.interactivewebs.com/blog/index.php/crm-2015/crm-2015-2013-find-dependencies-for-managed-solution/

which described how to find the dependencies in a nice way in a CRM 2013/2015 on-prem environment where you have access to the database. But I was using Dynamics 365 (8.2) so that was no option.

The one part you cannot do in an online instance, in that article is to open the SQL database, in case you tried. So the trick was to find some other way to find the guid of the managed solution and it is of course quite simple, just right click it and select "Email a link" and your favorite email editor will open with the guid shown and you just have to know which part to cut, see the picture below:

Cut the guid between the %7b abd %7d which are the { and the }

Then just follow the instructions from the blog above and insert the guid into the url provided:

https://YOUR CRM URL/tools/dependency/dependencyviewdialog.aspx?objectid=GUID&objecttype=7100&operationtype=dependenciesforuninstall

Replacing "YOUR CRM URL" with the url to your D365 and GUID with the guid above.

That got me to this page, which after some de-privatization looks like a document from the Swedish tax authorities:

Thanks again to InteractiveWebs for the original article.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Emailing Queues internally - OrgDBOrg to the rescue

Using queues is in D365/CRM for managing functional email addresses is the the only way to go as
far as I know, unless you want to set it up as a full user, which I don't really see the point of.

I recently ran into an interesting issue with a customer pertaining to queues and that is when you want to be able to forward mails internally to users that are registered in D365/CRM. What happens is that with the standard setting you will get two emails. Hence, you might think that going into System settings and the email tab and unchecking the "Track emails sent between CRM users as two activities". However, this will have the unpleasant effect of disabling internal emails to queues, or in other words, if an internal user sends an email to a queue, to a system with this setting unchecked, D365/CRM will simply ignore the mail and not pull it into the D365/CRM.

By RRZE - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

So, do we have to choose between duplicate emails for internal users and being able to send emails from internal users or not getting duplicates and no emails from internal users? Well, no, there is a very special set of settings to the rescue, OrgDBOrg, which are described here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2691237/orgdborgsettings-tool-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm

There is a setting here called: DoNotIgnoreInternalEmailToQueues which by default is set to False. So, if you uncheck the "Track email sent between to activities" and then set this to True, the system will not ignore your internal emails.

A small word of caution, OrgDBOrg settings are fringe (but still supported) settings which hence are probable not as tested as normal settings in D365. I would hence recommend that you only use OrgDBOrg setting in the case you need very specifically them.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Dev L300 Training in Stockholm!

George Doubinski is coming to Stockholm and he is going to be holding a very rare level 300 (= advanced) Dynamics 365 developer training.

George is an MVP and a good friend of mine and one of the bright beacons in the D365 community, co-founder of both http://crmtipoftheday.com/ and http://crm.audio/ . He is an excellent developer who told me that he is always striving to learning something new. Last he said his goal was to learn a new programming language every year. And to top that off, he is a great presentor and teacher as he is a lot of fun to listen to and almost none can match his skills when it comes to coding in Dynamics 365.

We at CRM-Konsulterna were very happy when we were able to convince him to come to Sweden and Stockholm and teach us some of what he knows! He lives in Australia so this doesn't happen often.

Read more about it here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/dynamics-365crm-developer-master-class-in-stockholm-with-george-doubinski-tickets-31443903562

Hope to see you there!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Warnings mean something - don't just click them away

Warnings like the one you see above, I often see in my customers systems when rudely looking over their shoulders. And what do they do? Call support and tell them that there is some weird error about email coming up and that there must be some error in the CRM-Exchange inter-server email synchronization mechanism? No. They don't. They ignore it. Totally. Every time. They typically get a bit annoyed every time and think the system is a bit crappy but they ignore it. And we as their CRM-partner might never know that there is anything wrong unless we have very deep monitoring of their system (has anyone built this? Would be a great tool! Tanguy to the rescue perhaps?)

Well, as you guessed I don't agree that you should just click away these error messages or actually any error messages. They usually mean something. In the case above, there is something wrong with the synchronization of emails, why emails that have be written and sent in CRM have not been delivered. Once fixed, these WILL be sent, which might be a bit problematic. Once, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, we had a customer who had had problems with synchronization of emails and hadn't told us. We got to know during our summer vacation (don't you always), and when we fixed it, the CRM system sent out loads of old emails to their customers. Which was not really appreciated. Well, we all do misstakes, but not all learn from them. So, do check which emails have Status Reason"Pending Send" as you can see in the picture below.

Having emails with this status for more than 24 hours is also what causes the alert at the top of this post. So, before fixing Server Side Sync, the Email Router or installing Outlook clients, do check this list to make sure that there are not a lot of old emails that will be sent to your customers and contacts. Advanced Find is very useful if you want to find them all, and not use the built in view that I am showing above.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se