Segmenting your Contact records with Dynamics 365 Apps

I’ve been using apps with Dynamics 365 for some time now and they are a great way of simplifying the user interface in a way that doesn’t require you to cross reference low level security permissions with Site Map XML.

One problem that has come up time and time again is the fact that different organisations often have different types of contact because of the nature of their business. There are a lot of benefits you get from using the system contact entity, which means that creating a new custom entity for a new contact type does not always make sense.

For example, consider an organisation with multiple types of service and therefore multiple different types of customers. They have contacts which may encompass the following types, and contacts may often be one or more types of these.

Staff Member
Applicant
Student
Citizen
Farmers

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Summit EMEA Review – Day 1

Today I attended the first day of the Summit EMEA Conference in Amsterdam with my Codec-Dss colleagues where over 2000 Microsoft Dynamics 365 professionals and users come together to digest all things across Dynamics 365. With the converging product set, this included separate streams on CRM, NAV and AX. Being a community-driven conference it features special access to Microsoft leadership and a diverse array of interactive training workshops led by experts and users.

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On-Premise Dynamics 365 – How does Deployment Manager find all available databases?

Today I was working with a Dynamics 365 instance where I did not have full SA access to the SQL Server instance. My deployment administrator account was able to connect to Deployment Manager ok, disable organizations ok and delete Organizations, however, when I tried to re-import an organization I had already deleted, I got the below error.

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Install Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit with Visual Studio 2017

Visual Studio was officially released today, and with it’s release comes the dilemma for Dynamics 365 developers. Do you keep going with VS 2015 (or maybe VS2013, VS 2012 or 2010!), or do you bite the bullet and install Visual Studio 2017?

In the past, I would normally hold off on a new Visual Studio installation until there is a service pack available, but after reading that Visual Studio 2017 is focused on performance improvements and speed, I decided to install it on an Azure Developer VM to see if I could get the Dynamics 365 Developer toolkit working on it.

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Dynamics 365 On-Premise supports App Designer and Site Map Editor

I attended the excellent CRM Saturday in Dublin on Saturday past, with some very informative talks on a wide variety of CRM related topics, both technical and non-technical.

appdesigner

One of the most interesting talks was by Mohamed Mostafa, which involved a discussion around things to consider when considering whether to recommend an on-premise CRM or a cloud based deployment.

As well as discussing technical considerations, supportability, data jurisdiction issues and data protection issues such as GDPR, the diverging feature set between online and on-premise came up. Since Microsoft’s move to the cloud, more and more features are going online only, leaving on-premise customers slightly envious of some of the cloud only features.

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Dynamics 365 Upgrade – Unable to add Notes to entity

I recently had an Organisation updated from Dynamics CRM 2016 Online Update 1 to Dynamics 365. After the upgrade, users experienced the following symptoms :

Unable to add new notes to custom entities and core entities via the notes control on the form.
Existing Notes created prior to the upgrade do show up ok however and can be edited.
This occurs on multiple entities, but not all. I didn’t see a pattern, but certainly on some contact records I could add new notes ok.

I raised this with Microsoft and it didn’t appear to be a known issue, so I decided to do some investigation myself.

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Dynamics 365 Upgrade – Entity doesn’t contain attribute with Name = ‘fullname’.

Update – This appears to be fixed in Service Update 5 for 8.2.0

Today I upgraded a Dynamics CRM 2016 Online Update 1 instance to Dynamics 365. Everything seemed to be going well. However when using Global Search I was getting the error below.

Query Builder Error – The specified field does not exist in Dynamics 365. If you contact support, please provide the technical details.

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10 Types of Dynamics 365 Project for IT Decision Makers

dyn3652

Are you scoping a new applications project and think Dynamics 365 could be all or part of the solution?

Starting a Dynamics CRM or Dynamics 365 Project can be a daunting task even for the most experienced decision maker. All your research might indicate that Dynamics 365 is a good fit for your business, but if you don’t know enough about the benefits, pitfalls and how it fits with your business, how can you be sure it’s the route you really want to go down?

You might be considering some of the following points?

Maybe you’ll need to use a few in-house business analysts to do some configuration.
Some bits may look complex so maybe some you need some .NET developers involved too?
Should you start with Waterfall methodology or Agile or SureStep or a Human Centred Design approach?
What training do you need?
Fixed Price or Time and Materials?
What licences should you buy?
On-Premise or Cloud?
Maybe you should go out to tender, but what if you don’t frame the requirements correctly? Should we get some training first?
Is offshoring Dynamics 365 consultancy a good idea – can it be achieved remotely?

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Under the Hood – There’s a Dynamics 365 App for that

Microsoft has surely been looking at Salesforce for the past few years, feeling somewhat envious of their ‘apps’ market. If you take Salesforce at their word, they have over 1.4 million registered developers, so the apps market for Salesforce is clearly not a flash in the plan.

With the recent launch of Dynamics 365, there appears to be a concerted effort at Redmond to build an ecosystem around Dynamics 365, but how has this been implemented and what do application developers need to know?

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CRM Dependency Hell – The dependent component WebResource does not exist.

“Dependency hell is a colloquial term for the frustration of some software users who have installed software packages which have dependencies on specific versions of other software packages.”
Source : Wikipedia

It’s often tempting to spin up a new trial online instance to do some custom development. The intention is normally to use it temporarily, then export your masterpiece as an unmanaged solution so you can import it into a target vanilla non-trial, more permanent instance.

With Dynamics 365, if you check all the boxes when setting up, CRM will be provisioned with a lot of supplementary solutions as well on top of what you know as a vanilla CRM instance – think Project Service, Field Service and maybe a few extra dependent solutions thrown in there for luck too.

managedsolutions

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