Nishant Rana's Weblog

The Nigel Frank International Salary Survey 2020/21 for Microsoft Dynamics 365

The latest edition of Nigel Frank International’s Microsoft Dynamics salary survey is now live!

This will be their 12^th annual report published, and has proven to be an invaluable resource to myself and my peers over the years.

I had the pleasure of contributing a foreword to the report, which set the scene in terms of where the Dynamics 365 ecosystem is now, what the future holds, and my own career journey. I can say with certainty that the ecosystem has been, and will continue to be, altered dramatically due to the Covid-19 crisis, as is the same with the technology sector as a whole.

The report uncovers a wealth of changing sentiments, along with work benefits, diversity statistics, the importance of certifications, and of course average salaries to name just a few topics covered. After reading through the results, here are my 5 main takeaways:

Certifications are growing in importance

The crisis has resulted in a huge increase of professionals upskilling; this is due to a combination of increased free time and job losses. Certifications are the best way to beat the competition in this increasingly difficult environment according to 61% of professionals surveyed, who believe certifications give you the edge in the job market. This along with the fact that getting certified can increase your salary by up to a reported 22% makes the decision whether to get certified or not an easy one. This was echoed by 80% of respondents who agreed Dynamics certifications were important towards increasing earning potential. Now is the time to upskill and safeguard your career!

The rise of working from home

The most obvious impact of Covid-19 on our working lives has been the shift from office to remote. The increase in related benefits offered such as a company laptop (73%) has followed, with 60% of respondents being offered homeworking. It will be interesting to see if this continues as restrictions across the world are beginning to ease, but it certainly seems the pandemic has changed our way of working forever. A company laptop and flexible/ remote working options have continuously been the most desired benefits when looking at past editions of the survey, so if this continues, job satisfaction will surely be boosted within the Dynamics workforce.

Equal rights are being championed

69% of respondents see their employers as being equal rights champions, which is hugely positive. Obviously, there is some way to go to reach the remaining 31%, however this signals change for the better across the industry. This along with 61% of employers promoting racial and ethnic diversity, and 56% hiring and retaining mature employees, is a resounding success. I hope this will continue and grow across the tech sector as a whole.

Increasing workload for partners

51% of employees working for Dynamics partners have seen their workload increase over the last year, and this was prior to the effects of the Coronavirus. This is a keen reflection of the digital skills gap, which will only be widening with the increased demand on cloud and digital in terms of keeping businesses and economies functioning. It is crucial that more people are encouraged into the tech sector in order to relieve the burden from these existing Dynamics professionals. This will be sure to further boost diversity within the ecosystem also.

Increased adoption of Dynamics 365

Since its release in November 2019, there has been an increase in take up from both new customers and existing users. 41% of end users, an 5% increase on last year’s result, are using Dynamics 365, with a further 19% expecting to use it in the future. The move to the cloud has been instrumental to this increase, and Dynamics 365 only looks to keep building momentum and customer base.

If you’d like to read the full report, and find out the average salary for your role and location, please do take a look here: https://www.nigelfrank.com/microsoft-dynamics-salary-survey/

Hope it helps..

Fixed – ID3242: The security token could not be authenticated or authorized in Dynamics 365

We recently got this error in our web application while trying to fetch some records from one for CRM On-premise organization.

This error was because we had recently configured IFD for that CRM Server.

We had around 6 organizations in that particular deployment and because of security reasons, we didn’t use the wildcard SSL certificate and had a single certificate with multiple subject alternative names (SAN Certificate), and this organization was not part in it.

Fortunately, it wasn’t the case in our production environment and we had this organization part of the SAN Certificate used for IFD configuration there.

So as a quick and temporary fix, as we just wanted to test a couple of methods, we disabled the Claims Based Authentication / IFD from the deployment manager for that short period.

Hope it helps..

Notes on Adobe Campaign v6 – Running a campaign

Continuing our previous posts, where we looked at Campaign planning, segmentation, deliveries.

In this post, we’d look at Flow Control tab and various steps in it, for running the campaign.

We can use the Start step inside the Flow Control tab, to specify the starting point within the workflow.

We can use the End step which cleans up the temporary data and free up resources.

We can use the Fork step to have the same result of the query flowing to a different path

We can use the scheduler step for specifying the schedule on which the campaign should run. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Once or several times a day.

We can also define a recurring schedule along with any specific future date for the campaign to run on.

We can use the Test step to evaluate a condition and define the flow accordingly based on the result either true or false.

We can use the Wait step for specifying wait duration (seconds, minutes, hours, days)

We can use the Time constraint step, through which we can specify start and end time.

We can use the Sub-workflow step to start a child workflow.

We can use Jump (start point) and Jump (end point) step, to make it easy to view and design the workflow that could have many steps and complex flows in it.

We can use the External signal step, as a trigger for an event outside Adobe Campaign.

We can use the Approval
step for defining the approval step, before moving to the next action.

We can use the Alert step for sending the message to adobe campaign users.

We can use the Task status step, for assigning the task to the users, as part of the workflow.

We can use the start button to run the campaign, similarly, we can use pause, stop, restart options in the menu bar for controlling the execution of the workflow

We can pause a workflow, disable a particular step in the workflow, and can also check the interim result

We can use the Journal tab to get all the details of the workflow execution.

We can also check logs of any individual step. Right click and select Display Logs in the menu.

The Dashboard for the campaign will show the status and the delivery information for the Campaign once we run the campaign.

Do check out the Pluralsight course for understanding in depth.

Getting started with Adobe Campaign V6

Hope it helps..

Column Comparison using FetchXML Builder and SQL 4 CDS

Check it out, the column comparison feature is now added in our favorite XrmToolBox plugins (make sure to update to the latest version)

FetchXML Builder

https://jonasr.app/2020/07/fxb-july-2020/#more-4374

SQL 4 CDS

https://markcarrington.dev/2020/07/15/column-comparisons-in-fetchxml/

Thanks, @Jonas, and @Mark for incorporating it.

Also, refer –

https://www.itaintboring.com/dynamics-crm/we-can-now-do-column-comparison-with-fetchweb-api/

https://prashantmayur.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/use-column-comparison-in-d365-ce-power-apps-cds-queries/

https://debajmecrm.com/2020/07/16/compare-two-columns-in-queryexpression-in-dynamics-365-cds-sdk/

https://nishantrana.me/2020/07/16/the-new-column-comparison-in-queries-in-dynamics-365-powerapps/

Hope it helps..

New Admin Trial (subscription-based) experience – Dynamics 365

Recently a new Trial (subscription-based) environment option added to the tenants in the Power Platform Admin Center

Earlier we were limited to below options –

These new trial types are created and controlled by tenant administrators, as a result of signing up for a trial subscription and can be added to the existing tenant.

This new environment follows the trial subscription lifecycle (which is typically 30 days) and can be extended from the admin center.

https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/subscriptions

A total of 3 trial environments can be created.
Trying to create 4^th will give us the below error

Get more details here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/trial-environments

Hope it helps..

Notes on Adobe Campaign Classic V6 – Delivery

Continuing the previous post on Planning and Segmentation, here we have some of the important points with regards to delivery in Adobe Campaign Classic.

Kindly refer to the PluralSight course –Getting started with Adobe Campaign V6 to learn in-depth.

Different delivery channels supported are Email, SMS, Mobile App Pushes, Social Media, etc.
All the interaction with recipients is tracked as activities.
To create the delivery, navigate to Deliveries inside the Campaigns tab, and click on create.

For delivery, we can select an existing delivery template for the Delivery template field. Below we have Birthday Template selected.

Clicking on continue will open the edit screen.
Below is how the default content editor looks like.

Content editing mode can be changed to another mode inside the Advanced tab. Here DCE stands for Digital Content Editor.

Switching to Digital Content Editor adds a new pane on the right side, which makes it easy to specify the properties of the elements selected in the template and a few more controls/options added on the top of the selected control.

Once done with the editing we can save the template. The next step will be to use the step in the Campaign’s Workflow.
Navigate to the Deliveries tab, and drag the Email delivery step in the workflow after the deduplication step.

Next double click the Email delivery step to edit it, which allows us to select and add the template we created earlier to it.

We can edit the email content. In the below screen we have selected the personalization field, the value for which will be picked from the recipient record targeted in the delivery.

It allows us to select the fields in Recipient (personalization)

Along with HTML Content, Text content can be defined for the scenario where HTML is restricted.

We can also add personalization for email parameters – Sender Address, From, Reply Address and Reply Address Text as shown below.

Personalization can also be added to the Subject line

The To field of the email i.e. Target comes from the result of the targeting steps specified in the workflow

It can also be further modified in the Select Target window when needed.

We can use the Preview tab to test the email message by using the Test personalization option.
Preview option also provide additional details like anti-spam details