Nishant Rana

Single Instance / Organization Considerations in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement / Dynamics CRM

Let us start from the scenario that the enterprise has decided to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM /365 CE as a preferred customer relationship solution for their organization.

For a large enterprise and/or having multiple different departments, the first question that comes up is, do they need to have a single instance or organization or multiple instance or organization. Well, that decision is not that easy but one thing is for sure the decision should be made as early as possible in the project.

Well you could refer to these posts that could help us to make the decision

https://medium.com/capgemini-dynamics-365-team/does-enterprise-scale-dynamics-require-multiple-instances-f1931a443930

https://nishantrana.me/2019/07/23/single-organization-vs-multiple-organization-single-instance-vs-multiple-instance-key-points-to-consider-in-dynamics-365-ce-on-premise/

Now suppose we have made the decision to go with the single instance \ organization, so what are some of the key points we need to consider.

There could be multiple ways of implementing and defining the segregation layer as well as what needs to be shared from data and customization perspective among the different business units, the most important being the security model and the business unit structure being one of the key components of it.

Check out the below Webinar –

http://www.xrmcoaches.com/2017/07/free-webinar-friday-creating-your-dynamics-365-security-model/

also listen to the below podcast to get some guidance around the setting up the security model

http://crmmvppodcast.com/episode-19-setting-up-your-security-architecture-like-a-crm-mvp

In one of our projects, the way we segregated different departments, after defining the appropriate business unit structure, was by having the Business Unit lookup (custom field) in all the common entities that were being shared by the departments and populating that field accordingly, every time record is created either through User Interface or through code and to refer the same field in the customizations (plugin, workflow etc.) as and when applicable.

In the other project, we were referring to the Business Unit lookup field in the System User / Team Entity.

Well there could be multiple ways of doing the same with its own pros and cons.

But what if you have already implemented for one of the units and didn’t consider that the same instance would need to be extended to accommodate the different business unit(s).

Well, then it is time to modify a couple of things to make the Business Unit structure scalable (if it is not).

Let us go through the each of the main components one by one and how they can be segregated among different business units.

Wrong root business unit name?

Set Parent Business Unit lookup field as optional, open the Business Unit record and rename it.

Need to rename the organization?

For Online à

Navigate to Admin Portal, select the instance and click on edit and update the organization name and if required the URL as well as shown below.

For On-Premise à

Follow the below steps to update the Display Name

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/darrenliu/2013/09/21/change-crm-organization-display-name/

Updating Organization Database Name

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/crmbipl/2008/01/14/how-to-change-crm-4-0-organizations-database-name/

Forms

Create separate new Main forms for different business units.

Enable appropriate security roles for the Form.

Views

We can make use of the 3^rd Party Solution à
http://www.xrmforyou.com/role-based-views.html
Name the view appropriately to reflect which Business Unit it belongs to.
Train the users to use the appropriate View and Pin It.

Fields

Reuse the fields that are common instead of ending up creating a large number of fields.

Field security profiles can also be used if required when certain entity’s records are shared across the business unit and we want to hide the sensitive information.

Business Rules

Business rule can be configured to run on the scope of Form instead of the Entity.

Dashboards

For Dashboards, we can enable the security roles.

Workflows

Use scope fields to make sure the workflows fire appropriately.
Or put the first step to check for which business unit it is firing (depends on the segregation logic implemented)

Plugins

Have a field in the records to identify to which Business Unit it belongs to and check for this field as the first thing in the plugin or check for the Business Unit of the user under whose context the plugin is getting fired or use the secure \ unsecure configuration etc. it purely depends upon the way the segregation logic has been implemented.

SLAs

Use SLA lookup field to apply the SLA dynamically through plugin or workflow.

https://nishantrana.me/2019/07/24/apply-sla-choosing-the-sla-in-the-sla-lookup-field-for-the-sla-enabled-entities-in-dynamics-365-ce/

Business Process Flow

If there are multiple business process flow, make sure appropriate one is applied

Apply business process flow while creating an entity record.

https://www.powerobjects.com/blog/2019/04/24/business-process-flows-switch-bpf-dynamics-365-javascript/

There would be multiple other key points to be considered apart from the one listed above specific to each implementation; the above points are some of the things that can be taken as guidelines.

Lastly we must consider creating different apps for different department \ teams\ users and add required solution components to it.

Design custom business apps by using the app designer

Please feel free to add comments and share your thoughts.

Hope it helps..

New features of Visual Studio 2019 – Code Clean up, Faster Debugging, Refactoring, Live Share

Earlier we covered below features

Let us have a look at the other new features, that are now part of Visual Studio 2019 (couple of features were available with VS 2017 as marketplace extension earlier)

Health Indicators
à With Health Indicators, which can be found at the bottom of files in Visual Studio 2019, we can quickly get a glance at how many errors and warnings are there in the file.

Code Clean up
à Along with health indicators, we can also see the icon of Code Cleanup, which allows us to apply fixes to the code.

Configure Code Cleanup settings let us define the fixes to be part of the profiles as shown below.

Code cleanup can also be run for the entire solution from Analyze à Code Cleanup

Debugger stepping is not 50 % faster in Visual Studio 2019 compared to Visual Studio 2017.
The Watch, Autos and Locals Windows are 70 % faster.

Font and Colors of Visual Studio 2019 can be customized through Tools à Options à Environment à Fonts and Colors

Indent for the parameters of the method can be specified easily

Result à

Signature for the parameters can be easily changed using the Change Signature dialog box

Result à

Now let us have a quick look at the most interesting feature i.e. Live Share

With Live Share, enables real-time Code Collaboration, using
we can easily share the source code/ terminal from our machine for code review or for technical help with the team members. Earlier the options were to check in the code in the repository and then asking others to get the latest or share the screen / have a meeting set up.

To get started,

Click on Live Share icon,

Select Copy Link

Here we are sharing it with one of the team members having Visual Studio Code. Live Share works with Visual Studio 2017 (with extension)/ 2019 and Visual Studio Code (with Extension) and any OS.

Click on Join Collaboration session and paste the link.

Both the users have the ability to move across the code, make changes together within their environment.

Debugging session can also be initiated/shared from both environments, without having the other user to install any specific packages/tools/plugins, etc.

Also with Live Share Extension Pack, we can add Chat and Audio Capabilities to Visual Studio Code

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare-pack

That is not all, we have Live Share Whiteboard and Pomodoro extensions as well.

Check the below article that explains all the functionality of Live Share in detail

https://dev.to/lostintangent/visual-studio-live-share-in-pursuit-of-enjoyable-developer-collaboration-2nko

Hope it helps..

Business Unit Hierarchy – My First XrmToolBox Plugin

Check out – XrmToolBox Plugin to generate Business Unit Hierarchy by Phani

Phani Rajasekhar

I am very happy to announce that my first plugin “Business Unit Hierarchy” is listed in XrmToolBox now.

Thanks to Nishant Rana for giving me an idea to develop this.

This plugin is simple but very useful. Most of the times we navigate to so many windows to understand the BU hierarchy in our organization (I faced this situation many times) but with this plugin it is very easy to get the complete overview of BU Hierarchy. I plotted the BU Hierarchy in tree view presentation which is easy to understand for any user.

Here are list of steps to use this plugin

Install “Business Unit Hierarchy” plugin from XrmToolBox Plugins Store.
Connect to your organization.
Open the plugin and click on “Generate Business Unit Hierarchy” button.

That’s it, Business Units of your organization will be loaded in a hierarchical structure like in the above screenshot. The BU’s that are…

View original post 46 more words

New features of Visual Studio 2019 – IntelliCode

IntelliCode to be very precise provides Artificial Intelligence to the code.

Basically, it will provide suggestions (AI) by displaying at the top the frequently used properties, functions, etc. as shown below.

For DateTime, IntelliCode is suggesting Now, UtcNow, MinValue and Today, as these are the ones that are used frequently.

Similar for our IOrganizationService class of Dynamics 365 CE, it suggests RetrieveMultiple, Execute, Retrieve
Update, Associate as the most frequently used methods.

To enable it.

Navigate to Tools à Options à IntelliCode

Enable the required features à

The IntelliCode gets its intelligence to give recommendations based on the huge number of open-source projects on GitHub with more than 100 stars on which it has performed machine learning and have the models defined.

The interesting part is that we can have intelliCode work for our code as well.

From within the Project, Navigate to View à Other Windows à IntelliCode Model Management.

Select Create a new model à

It will start the training and will store the generated model locally along cloud to be referred in case if working offline.

The model can be shared, deleted and retrained.

For e.g. we have the following class

And within our code, we are making use of FullName property frequently.

Now after training (retraining), it would suggest FullName as the property for our SampleClass that is being used frequently.

Get all the details here

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/

Hope it helps..

Generate Dynamics 365 CE (CRM) Business Unit Org Chart through SmartDraw

Recently we were looking at the options of generating a Business Unit Org Chart for quick review.

Using SmartDraw we were able to do achieve it very quickly.

Steps

Export the Business Unit records to excel.

Keep only the Name and Parent Business column and delete all the other columns including the hidden ones.

Excel with required columns.

Create the trial account of SmartDraw cloud

Click on Org Charts from the New Document menu.

Select Build Org Chart from Data option

Browse and select the xls file.

Click on Process.

Select Show in Shape for the columns and click on the Build diagram.

The result

The other option is to select any of the Organizational Charts

Select Import from file

Select the excel file

The result

The chart can be exported, shared and print.

Thus SmartDraw makes it very easy to generate the Org Chart for the Business Unit.

To achieve the same through Visio

http://www.planetxrm.com/12-steps-to-creating-crm-business-unit-org-charts/

Hope it helps..

New features of Visual Studio 2019 – New Search Experience and UI changes

Visual Studio 2019 comes with a completely revamped, context-sensitive Search experience.

To change the Theme, search for keyword “Theme” and select the appropriate result.

It would open the respective screen, which allows us to quickly make the changes.

Similarly, to change the Font.

Also, observe the option to “Search online for ‘Font'”, which opens the search result in the browser. It appends the “Visual Studio 2019” keyword to the search term.

The search result is also context-sensitive,

For e.g. search results when a search is performed when the context is the file within a project.

The search results when Solution is selected inside Solution Explorer.

New features of Visual Studio 2019 – Export / Import Visual Studio Configuration Settings

Within Visual Studio Installer, we now have the option to export and import the configuration settings. These configuration settings can then be shared with the team to import, which makes sure that all of them have the same set of workloads installed in their Visual Studio environment.

Select the version of Visual Studio and click on Export Configuration.

Click on Review Details to check the workloads part of the configuration

Here we can see .NET desktop and ASP.NET workload to be part of it.

The content of .vsconfig file

To import it, click on Import Configuration.

Select vsconfig file and click on Review Details

Click on Modify to install the workload/components.

The installation begins and installs the required components.

Hope it helps..

Contextual Email communication in D365 CE Wave 2

D365 Demystified

2019’s Wave 2 release have really put things where they should be. Once I enabled Early Opt-in while writing this post, this is a great feature for Sales people I came across and couldn’t resist sharing with you all – Contextual Email Communication! So kindly wait until updates are automatically applied to your org or try the same in your Sandbox first.

Isn’t going exclusively to Activity/Email entity extremely off-putting? I mean, you navigate away from your record you were working on and that isn’t productive, is it?

That’s when Contextual Email window comes in really handy. Here’s how you enable it in your 2019 Updates.

App Settings in Sales Hub

In your Sales Hub, navigate to App Settings.
Among other settings, look for Enhanced email and flick the switch from off to On.
Then click Apply at the bottom right and you’re set!

Contextual/Enhanced Email

Now, when you’re…

View original post 69 more words

Live Chat using ProProfs Chat in Dynamics 365 CE (CRM)

ProProfs chat is another live chat solution that integrates with both Dynamis 365 CE as well as CRM On Premise. Recently I wrote about PowerChat which is another live chat solution that works on both online and on premise version of Dynamics CRM.

In this post we’d see how quickly we can setup the integration and be up and running and also compare it with PowerChat.

Navigate to https://www.proprofs.com/chat/integrations/microsoft-dynamics/ to get the details and click on Try Chat Free to get started.

After creating the account, go to Integration option and select Microsoft Dynamics and set the toggle switch on.

Specify the Dynamics CRM URL, Dynamics CRM Account, on-premise or online and should lead, contact and case should be auto created or not.

Once enabled, go to Installation option and copy the code and paste it on the website or page.

As soon as the visitor starts the chat, the agent will receive the Invite.

The agent can see the details of the visitor like location, device etc.

The customer can end the chat and give rating as shown below.

The agent gets the notification that user has ended the chat.

As configured, we can see the case, lead and contact record created in Dynamics 365 CE, with description having the chat transcript.

To add agents, we can choose the Add Operator option

Routing order gives the option of specifying the sequence of operator accepting chats if chat routing is enabled. Similarly, visitor can select the operation they want to interact with as specified by Allow Operator Selection option.

For different business units having different websites/ pages, we would want them to be served by different operators, herein we can use Departments.

Department will have a code which we need to place under the ProfProfs Chat code to send chat to that specific department.

Also, for Admin, there are Reports available Summary, Rating, Operator, Timesheet, Visitor.

Theme settings à

Chat Window Settings à

Real Time Monitoringà

Comparing the ProProfs Chat with PowerChat with regards to Dynamics CRM integration à

PowerChat provides a managed solution that we import inside our Dynamics CRM, then we register through the configuration page of that solution to get started. In case of ProProfs there is no solution file. We register at their site.
PowerChat Users are Dynamics CRM Users and can chat with visitors from within Dynamics # CRM. In ProProfs Chat, the operators are not the crm users and their account needs to be created / added separately.
PowerChat allows different Chat Widgets to be created, to be used in different web pages or web sites. Agents can be associated to the Chat Widgets. In ProProfs Chat, there is concept of Departments to achieve the same.
PowerChat allows agents the option to create lead/ contact/case records manually during the chat. In ProProfs Chat, the lead /contact/ case records are auto created based on the configuration, we can select which records to be created.
PowerChat auto creates PowerChat Activity record for each chat which has all the details of the chat. ProProfs Chat doesn’t create any other records expect lead/contact/case inside Dynamics CRM.
They both have the option of configuring the chat windows, fields to be added, snippets to be reused during chat, multi agent support.
PowerChats is natively integrated with Dynamics CRM, so the CRM Users do not have to be working on 2 different applications. However, ProProfs brings in with it lot more features like routing chat to another operator, co-browsing, APIs support, Reports, Real Time Visitor monitoring etc.

Check the guide here to see all the features

https://chathelp.proprofs.com/home

Hope it helps..

Enable Live Chat in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE (CRM) using PowerChat

PowerChat is the live chat solution / addon developed by PowerObjects that supports both Dynamics CRM On-Premise and Online.

Below we will look at how to set it up and what are the features it provides.

To get started

Download the appropriate solution

https://www.powerobjects.com/powerpacks/powerchat/

After successful import of the solution, next step is to register the solution. For this, open the solution and click on the configuration page, provide the required details in the Profile and Setup tab.

In Setup tab, provide the Cloud Location nearest to your deployment.

The PowerChat solution adds the following entities in the sitemap.

and the following security roles

In Agents i.e. agent record we can specify the System User who would be working as agent and topics they are working on.

Topic, Agent and Widgets work hand in hand. We can have multiple topics defined in the system and for each topic we can define the agents who’d be handling that topic along with the widget that will be used for that topic.

Widgets specifies the Chat Interface that would be deployed in the website. Clicking on Design opens the design interface for the widget.

Below are some of the different options that can be configured for the chat widget.

Once we are done with the configuration of the chat widget, we need to click on GENERATE SCRIPT ribbon button to get the script for the widget which we will be embedding to our websites.

Below is the script generated à

Below is the sample website where we have embedded the above script

Back in CRM, users need to click on Power Chat and start the PowerChat for communication to begin.

Power Chat interface à

Once the user clicks on Chat Now button on the Chat window, the agent gets the notification to Accept the chat.

Below is how the communication looks like for the agent as well as the customer. The green bubble below is the timer that captures the duration of the chat.

The agent also has the option of creating the lead, contact and case record associated with the chat. Create Lead and Create Contact option creates the lead and contact record in the background using the information auto populated at the Visitor Input section on the right panel.

Create Case option allows agent to specify the Case Title and Description along with the Contact Name.

Agents and Customers both have the option to end the chat, the customer also have the option to rate the agent when they close the chat.

Every interaction creates PowerChat activity record in Dynamics CRM as shown below, which records the chat history, rating, duration etc. information about the chat.

Agent can also set their status, if the agent is in Away or Busy status it will not receive the notification to accept the new chat.

As we discussed earlier if we have multiple agents configures for same topic, they both will get the notification to accept the chat as shown below.

Also, Agent has the option of adding another agent to the chat.

The invited chat agent can either accept or decline the request.

Below is how the communication looks like when we have multiple agents working with the same customer. Both the users are communicating with the Customer at the same time as shown below.

One more feature that agent has while interacting with the customer is to use the snippet, which basically defined predefined content which agents can use.