Formating Web API query for getting VoC Survey questions

Working with a Flow to do some text analysis and sentiment analysis on Voice of the customer responses.

The trick, as the payment model is per run, is to trigger it per Survey Response, and not Question Response. Hence the logic has to loop through all the question responses.

The way you create a filter in Flow for the query is to use Odata filters. However, I found that these were a casing nightmare, which those of you who have worked with more, probably also have noticed.

After troubleshooting a lot with different queries in the browser I finally found that the following actually worked. Note that you will have t change the guid to your own.

https://dev-dtn.api.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/msdyn_questionresponses?$select=msdyn_name,msdyn_SurveyResponseId&$filter=msdyn_SurveyResponseId/msdyn_surveyresponseid%20eq%20460279E7-2AF2-E811-A97F-000D3AB0C08C

The tricky part, as you can see, is that the first part of the lookup attribute, is defined in camel-case and the one in the related entity (Survey Response) in lower case.

The part you need in the Flow is the last part, but it is useful to test it directly in the browser to make sure you get the syntax correct.

Its the filter part of the query that you are to enter into the "Filter query" field, and make sure to make it dynamic. :)

And this is how it looks in Dynamics 365 CE if you check out the fields. I like to look at them in the list view as I can see the schema name there, which isn't visible in the Form.

msdyn_SurveyResponseId Lookup from the Question Response Entity. As you can see it seems to be using the Schema name above.

This is the primary field Survey Response. Do note the subtle difference between the fields, that Id is spellt with a capital "I" in the Schema name. Based on the information above, it hence seems to be using "Name" to indicate the field.

Hence based on the above, the supposition would be that the syntax is <Schemaname of the lookup>/<name of field in target entity>


I then did a query to business Unit and I was very surprised to find that it was rather inconsistent and looked like this:

https://dev-dtn.api.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/businessunits?$select=cntso_organizationbaseurl&$filter=parentbusinessunitid/businessunitid%20eq%20null

with just the query that would be

parentbusinessunitid/businessunitid eq null 

Let's have a look at the fields in Dynamics:

The Parent Business Unit Lookup in Business Unit (Self Referential). Note that the Schema name is Pascal Case.

key field, businessunitid in Business Unit

And as you can see, if we were to follow the syntax set by the example above, this should be:

ParentBusinessUnitId/businessunitid 

However, that didn't seem to work, and as a pragmatist, I have to conclude, somewhat sad, that this doesn't seem to be very consistent.

My recommendation is hence when working with this:

• Do not take any casing for granted
• <Schemaname of the lookup>/<name of field in target entity> is probably correct for most custom fields/entities.
• Many older entities and fields, like the businessunit shown above, has been there since CRM 1.0 or at least 3.0, if I remember correctly and hence the syntax might be different.
• Test your queries directly in the browser like I have shown above.

Good luck with your Flows.

And if you know Swedish, make sure you check out my colleague Martin Burmans article on Flow as well. Not sure how well it turns out in translation. https://www.crmkonsulterna.se/flow-i-medvind/

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

Dynamics 365 Saturday in Stockholm - will be a blast!

For the first time ever 9 Business Solutions MVP:s will converge on Stockholm to share their knowledge! In the amazing Dynamics 365 Saturday event which will be held on the 10:th of November 2018 at the Microsoft Office in Kista, just outside Stockholm. As usual, the Dynamics 365 Saturdays are free.

As the main organizer, me, my company CRM-Konsulterna and the MVP Jonas Rapp, will also help out it is of course very satisfying to have so many talented people sign up to speak. A lot is happening, and version 9.1 was just rolled out today in EMEA if you didn't notice. Hence there is a lot to talk about.

There will be three tracks:

• Application - sessions on configuration and usage of Dynamics 365
• Development - sessions on development and configuration that could be viewed as programming like Flow, LogicApps, PowerApps/CanvasApps etc.
• Business/Project Management - sessions on how to best run projects, businesses, your career and other softer issues but all related to Dynamics 365.

As the host, I really hope you are able to secure a seat, we are limiting the amount to 150 and we are getting signups by the hour, so be sure to book your seat now.

Read more and sign up here: http://365saturday.com/dynamics/stockholm-2018/ 

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

Embedded PowerApp in Dynamics 365 CE

PowerApps or as the new name for it is, Canvas driven Apps, is a very fast low/no-code way of creating applications that can fill in the blanks where Dynamics 365 CE sometimes fit. Can for instance be when there is a mapping entity, a complex calendar functionality or even integrations with a camera or other applications directly. These things can be done, some are even supported within the new UI/UCI if you are running it through the tablet/mobile client. However, there is currently no easy way that I have found to just add a PowerApp/Canvas Drive App (I will just call it PowerApp below to make things easier) to Dynamics. But after a chat with my friend, ex MVP and now Microsoft Global Black Belt Carsten Groth (isn't that a cool name for a team by the way?) he told me that it is possible to embed PowerApps. So I googled a bit a found that no one seemed to have blogged about this (if you have, please tell me in the comments) except for other it concerning other applications like SharePoint. I tried it out and found that it wasn't that hard at all to embedd a PowerApp into Dynamics 365.

The first thing we have to start with is to create our PowerApp. You can get to this place by browsing to https://web.powerapps.com or clicking the waffle in Office365 and then selecting PowerApps. In my case, I used the Dynamics 365 template and pointed to the Case Entity and did more or less pressed Next-next-finnish. I did replace the field that was shown in the first screen from the Guid of the case to the field "title" as that makes a little bit more sense looking at.

So what I was looking for when creating the PowerApp was the AppId, in this case:
"904e3ac1-1e26-4b4b-a384-971485f6709c"

What we then need is the embedding syntax for PowerApps which is:
<iframe src="https://web.powerapps.com/webplayer/iframeapp?source=iframe&screenColor=rgba(104,101,171,1)&appId=/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/[AppId]" />

You need to replace the [AppId] with your AppId. Also, if you do not specify it, the iframe it will typically render rather small so I would recommend either setting the size of it directly with width and height attributes or using css, the latter being more kosher.

I tried setting an Iframe directly with this in Dynamics 365, but that didn't seem to work. All I got was a spinner like this:

Spinner which never stops when tried to add PowerApp directly

Not sure why this is.

So, I circumvented it and created a very small html-page like this:

<html>

<body>

<iframe width="1024px" height="768px" src="https://web.powerapps.com/webplayer/iframeapp?source=iframe&screenColor=rgba(104,101,171,1)&appId=/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/904e3ac1-1e26-4b4b-a384-971485f6709c" />

</body>

</html>

This time, when trying the TestPowerApp.html-page from my local drive, the spinner was quickly replaced by this and then by the App

Then I uploaded this file as a webresource to Dynamics.

Create a webresource with the simple html-page pointing to the PowerApp

After uploading it, in the WebResource screen, you can test the page by clicking on the URL. It should show a webpage with the PowerApp.

The PowerApp running as a webresource in Dynamicws 365

Now you can use this web resource wherever you want. Like directly in a sitemap:

Added PowerApp webresource to the Marketing Area as a Subarea called "Power App Cases"

It should be possible to send parameters to the PowerApp as well making them context aware so that we can create PowerApps that for instance show up within a case and show specific data on that case after you have selected it in Dynamics 365. However, if you look at the iframe syntax you will see that the AppId and stuff is already a parameter and I need to research this a bit more to be able to figure it out. I think that the html web resource probably has to shuffle the query string parameters from Dynamics to PowerApps. I will leave this hanging and hope that someone else in the community catches this ball! Otherwise I will try to figure it out later.

As CDS (common data service) and Modular Driven Apps are the same thing as Dynamics 365, just with less sugar on top, this technique can be used there as well. 

If you find anything unclear or have any questions, please leave a comment (moderated).

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

Setting up Data Export Service without PowerShell Script

Setting up Dynamics 365 Data Export Service requires a Azure KeyVault to be set up which is typically done using a PowerShell script which can be found in the Data Export Service setup wizard. However, if you run into issues setting this up, it might be easier to do this directly in Azure by minimizing the steps of the scripts. This was a tip that my friend and Business Solution MVP Scott Durow recommended. He mentions this in his very instructive video, but doesn't actually show how, so I thought I'd just detail how I made it work.

First some background. The reason why I even started investigating how to do this manually was that when I tried running the PowerShell script supplied by Microsoft in the wizard.

Press the "i" icon to get a window containing the PowerShell Script that Microsoft recommends for setting up the Key Vault.

When running the PowerShell script both as myself (not a global admin) and asking a global admin to do it, it failed in the latter parts. The key vault was created by some of the access policies seemed to be missing and it just didn't work. My users rights in Azure was Contributor in the Resource Group, and it was a bit interesting cause the global admin and I got different error messages, but when I finally managed to create the key vault manually, I could do it all with my user, so it didn't seem I was missing any rights to do it.

First step is to make sure you have all your data straight. The power shell script is good for this. Check out Scott clip if you want to know how to find the different strings. He shows it very clearly.

 Just copied from the PS-Script:

$subscriptionId = '<subscription ID>'
$keyvaultName = 'MyVault'
$secretName = 'MySecretName'
$location = 'North Europe'
$connectionString = 'Server=tcp:<db-name>,1433;

Initial Catalog=<catalog>;

Persist Security Info=False;

User ID={your_username};

Password={your_password};

MultipleActiveResultSets=False;

Encrypt=True;TrustServerCertificate=False;Connection Timeout=30;'

$organizationIdList = '<DYN365GUID>' 

$tenantId = '<AZURE TENANT ID>' 

The highlighted parts have to be replaced by your settings. I will use these variables to have something to reference to further in this article.

Search for Key Vault and add the "Key vault", the top one in this picture

Then we have to set it up. Not so tricky if you have worked with Azure before. Consider if you want to work in an existing Resourcegroup or if you want to create a new one. Typically you need to have Azure SQL services running as well so it might be good to keep them all together to be able to see the costs and control who has access why a resource group might be a good idea. But that should hence already exist. If not, you can create it. I would recommend keeping Azure SQL and Key vault in the same, not sure if it actually works in different resource groups, probably does, but I haven't tested.

Creating the key vault - in this case I am creating a new resource group, normally it would already exist

Azure will add you as the default principal with access to the key vault. We will add Data Export Service to this later. For now, just create it.

Now we need to open the Key vault and select the "Secrets" section in the menu on the left hand side and press the button:

"+ Generate/Import" 

Then you have to enter you Secret name ($secretName) and the connection string ($connectionString) into the value.

Creating a secret - $secretname in Name and $connectionstring in Value

Press "Create".

You should now return to the previous screen and see a row for your secret.
Select it.

It should open the settings panel for the Secret, press the "Tags" part which is located in the middle and add a tag which has $OrgIdList ($organizationIdList) as the key and Tennant ($tenantId) as value. I have blurred them out below as they are rather private.

Adding a tag with OrgIdList and tenantId to a Secret

You then need to go back to the Key Vault and click on the "Access Policies" menu item, you should then see yourself as the principal as this was set when we created the key vault. We now need to add Data Export Service as a valid Principal with read access rights.

So click "Add", click "Select Principal" and search for "b861dbcc-a7ef-4219-a005-0e4de4ea7dcf" which is the ID for Data Export Service. It should show up like this:

It needs to have "Secret Management Operations - GET" permissions and nothing else.

Now, go back to the Secret and copy the URI to the Secret.

Getting the URI for the Key Vault Secret

Paste it into the Data Export Service Wizard field for Key Vault.

Fill in the other information and press validate. Hopefully it will work out well!

Some issues

Being too cheap with the Azure SQL level
If you don't go for a Azure SQL P1 and choose a lower tier, you might get this warning:

We tried an S0 for our Dev environment and tried to sync a couple of million records and that just didn't work, we got tons of errors. We upgraded the ASQL to S2 and then at least we didn't get any errors. We are planning for P1s in UAT and production.

Might have to set activation date on secret
Seems that you might have to set an activation date on the secret. Not sure why this is, the PS-script doesn't seem to do this. But not very hard.

Added activation date on the Secret from June 4.th

Using Database schema that is not created
The default database schema is "dbo" in the Data Export Service Wizard. If you change this to something else like "crm" and you haven't created this in the database, you will get an error. It is simple to fix, you just have to go into the database and create the schema. To create the schema "crm" open a query and run:
CREATE SCHEMA crm

For more information on how to create schemas, check this site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/create-schema-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

Once the schema has been created, there should be no problem using it, as long as the user has permissions using it.


I hope this works for you. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

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

Admin portal for managing your tickets

In case you haven't seen it, the Dynamics 365 Admin Portal it is a great place to create and manage you Dynamics 365 tickets.

You get to it using this URL: https://admin.dynamics.com/

I haven't found a link to the admin portal from the instance manger or any other place in O365 or Dyn365 yet so I have just created a bookmark for it, so I suggest you do the same.

Also, as I am a frequent Microsoft Support user, and often have customers with many instances, I have tried to consolidate many instances into one ticket. They don't want that. Better to create one ticket for each instance. (probably gets someone a higher salary too :)) However, I did notice that there seems to be some duplicate detection going on, so try to avoid using the same "Issue Summary" for several tickets - as that will just make the later ones disappear without any error message (hint Microsoft, please fix this! - at least give a decent error message).

In order to create tickets, you need to be either O365 Global Admin or Dynamics 365 Service Administrator. There might be some other admin as well that has the right to create tickets, but I don't think so.

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

Deleting a lot of records fast

A quick one today...

Needed to delete a couple of million records for a customer and the natural thing was to use the Bulk Deletion service, well, I turned it on and it was extremely slow. Only got about 10 records/s which would cause the entire delete to take over a week. I have checked with Microsoft and this is not a bug, but it is working as designed and is not designed to be super fast. According to Microsoft bulk deletion jobs are put on the async queue on low priority to allow other more important jobs higher prio.

And a favorite quote of mine from Purvin Patel of Microsoft "Does a dump truck need to outrace a Ferrari?" - and I think that the answer to that question is: it depends. Sometimes it does.  

Personally I would sometimes like it to be as fast as possible when removing a lot of records.

I also checked to see how fast the deletion would be with SSIS and Kingswaysoft. Used the following settings:

• VM about 5 ms from the Dynamics 365 instance (important that it not be too far, use an Azure VM for this)
• Used 64 threads
• Used Execute Multiple batching with 10 (cannot use more that 10 if you are using a lot of threads, ie more than 2)
• VM has 8 virtual cores and 32 GB memory
• Loading in batches of 2000. Only loading the id-column, as that is all that is needed.

With this setup, I got somewhere around 345 records deleted per second. Which is a tad more than 34x faster than the bulk delete.

So, want to delete a lot of stuff, maybe Bulk Delete is not the way to go. Not yet anyway, let's hope Microsoft makes it faster!

(this post was updated on Feb the 9:th 2018)

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

Supported browsers - update

One of my most popular posts is a collation on which browsers are actually supported for Dynamics 365 CE. This is not strange since it is a common issue, we often have customers call our support complaining that Dynamics doesn't work well, and as described in the original article, the cause is usually that they are using an unsupported browser.

Also the Micrsoft Technet article for this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/supported-web-browsers-and-mobile-devices
and the detailed version: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699710.aspx mainly focuses on Edge and Internet Explorer compatibility for the different windows versions. And despite Microsoft's hopes, the rest of the world have not totally turned to all of their programs, yet.

There are currently some issues with version 9.0 as well, why I thought it might be a good idea to write a new article on which browsers are the supported one in a easily overviewable grid.

A brief explanation to the different abbreviations used in the picture:

• SW - Supported and Working.
• SW* - Supported and Working on OS X as designed but with somewhat limited functionality. If you compare Dynamics on OS X running Safari with it running Edge on a Win 10 you will notice that there are more options.
• SW** - The app is not the same thing as the browser at the moment. The Unified Interface will make them almost the same. There will still be differences, in that the app will have better integrations to the device's hardware, like camera, etc. Especially for the earlier versions, the app was very limited. It is more powerful know. For field service there is also a special Field Service App which is not as HTML/JS based (it is based on Resco).
• SW*** - I have not had the chance to test if version 9.0 works on a Nexus 10 running Chrome but the official documentation says it should work. However, as v.9.0 does not work with Chrome at the moment, (this will probably be fixed very soon) I would actually be surprised if it worked for Chrome on Nexus 10.
• NS - Not supported. This does not mean, however, that you cannot get it to work. I have heard of people that mange to get Chrome on OS X to go into some "PC" mode which tricks Dynamics. This still doesn't make it supported, but it might work for you. The problem might be if you have any issues, that Microsoft Support could leave you hanging.
• SNW - Supported but Not Working - As for Chrome on Windows, the general story is that Microsoft only support the latest version of it. However, despite version 9.0 official supporting Chrome on Windows, it doesn't seem to actually work. I would presume that they will fix this soon. The problem is that Dynamics 365 won't actually load.

The support matrix for the browsers is generally a tricky question. The matrix above is also simplified a bit as I have not included the parameter of the different versions of Operating systems. It can probably be presumed that Microsoft will make greater efforts into making sure that the latest and possibly even some versions before that, that they know customers are using for Edge and Internet Explorer, work well with Dynamics 365. I know some of you will probably think I am crazy for even mentioning Internet Explorer, but I have several customers who still have IE as the company standard browser, and it is not due to Dynamics 365.

As for Firefox, Chrome and Safari, these browsers might be very popular, but from a Microsoft perspective I can see a very tricky situation, and that is that they roll out changes without notifying anyone. This was, for instance, done by Google a couple of years ago when they changed their handling of modal dialogs. This caused many dialog handling features of Dynamics CRM (at that time) to break. It took some time for Microsoft to identify the change, fix it, make sure there were no regression errors, roll it through all testing scenarios and deployment stages and controlls they do until they were able to get a fix out. It did come out quite fast, but there were some people nagging at Microsoft for having a bad product, which I personally find a bit unfair.

The essence of the two paragraphs above is; feel free to use Chrome, Safari or Firefox but I would suggest always having Edge and/or IE as a backup option in the case that an update comes to the main browser that severely affects the usage of Dynamics 365.

And I hope that Microsoft soon fixes the error that stops us from using Chrome with ver. 9.0. Any day now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video - How to enable editable grids

So, time to try something new. I recorded a small screencast with SnagIt to show how easy it is to enable the awsome new feature Editable grids in Dynamics 365. So, please have a look and let me know what you think!

And yes, I know I keep saying CRM, and Dynamics CRM. I have been working with this product for more than 11 years now. It's going to take some time for this old dog to sit.

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