Introduction: In the blog we will be discussing about the error while connecting to Dynamics 365 version 9 using console app. Implementation: In our example we will show how to connect to Dynamics 365 using a Console app in v 8.2 and when the same code is used to connect to version 9 we get an error. We will also discuss about how to resolve the issue Step 1:  The code show below is used to connect to Dynamics 365 version 8.2 using Console App. Step 2: When we run the above code, we get the following output. Step 3: Now we change the credentials and try connecting to Dynamics 365 v 9 with the same code, we get the following error. Step 4: To solve this issue there are two ways, in the first method, set the Target framework to “.NET Framework 4.6.2 or above”. Step 5: After changing the target version build the solution again and run the app.The connection to Dynamics 365 version 9 environment will be successful. Step 6: The second method is by using the below code before making a connection. TLS stands for “Transport Layer Security,” and is a protocol that is an industry standard designed to protect the privacy of information communicated over the Internet.

Introduction: This blog explains how to open  report from custom ribbon button on entity form. Steps to be followed: 1. Add custom button on entity form using Ribbon Workbench. (If you don’t have ribbon workbench solution installed, you can install it from here. ) 2. Once button is added on form, navigate to the Quote entity and run the report. Take note of the URL, it should look something like this. (I am doing it for quote entity) URL: https://portals1.crm.dynamics.com/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?action=run&context=records&helpID=Quote.rdl&id=%7b18c85c59-7d04-e711-80e6-00155db8652a%7d&records=%7bBD891D3F-C92C-E811-A831-000D3A37CC26%7d&recordstype=1084 Specifically note the items I’ve bolded, these are the report name, report unique identifier, and the entity type code of the main entity. 3. code to our new JavaScript web resource. function OpenQuoteReport() { debugger; var rdlName = “Quote.rdl”; //Replace with your report name var entityType = “1084”; //Replace var entityGuid = Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId(); var reportGuid = “18C85C59-7D04-E711-80E6-00155DB8652A”; //Replace with your report guid var url = Xrm.Page.context.getClientUrl() + “/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?action=run&context=records&helpID=” + rdlName + “&id={” + reportGuid + “}&records=” + entityGuid + “&recordstype=” + entityType; window.open(url, null, 800, 600, true, false, null); } 4. Create Command i.e. add JavaScript web resource to the button using Ribbon Workbench. 5. Add command on button. 6. Publish. 7. Now go to Quote entity and click on the custom button which you have created, your report will get open.

Introduction: In this blog we will see how to create a marketing email in Dynamics 365 for marketing preview. Dynamics 365 for marketing provides an easy drag and drop tool to design marketing emails with dynamic personalized content. Implementation: Step 1: We navigate to Marketing Emails and Click on New. We can see there are a number of pre defined email templates The templates are also categorized by purpose Step 2:  At the top of the page we see three required fields Name, Subject and Form. The Name is the internal name for the designed email, Subject is the message that will be displayed in the emails subject and the From is the Dynamics 365 user who email recipients will see as the sender Step 3: In the toolbox we can see content blocks which can be used to design the email. We can add text, images , buttons etc as shown below. We can also add Surveys and Marketing Pages to the email which creates a button and on click the user is navigated to the Survey form and marketing page respectively. Step 4:  The assist-edit button </> can be used to add dynamic content to the email. Step 5: Once the email is designed as per the requirement in the HTML tab we can see the code is auto-generated. In the preview tab we can see how the email would look in different clients like Desktops, Tablets and mobiles Step 6: It is important point to note is that every email message must include both a subscription centre link and your organizations physical address. These are required by the law in many jurisdiction and Dynamics 365 wont let you publish any marketing email that doesn’t have them. Email templates include them already but when we are working with a blank template you must add them yourself. Step 7: Once the email designing is done we can check for error by clicking on the button in the navigation bar. We can also Test send the email.

Main cause of Performance Issues: Bandwidth and latency are the primary characteristics which affects the performance of Dynamics 365 client application on the web browser and other apps like D365 for Outlook It is also important to note that even if there is high bandwidth, the performance may be still slow because of latency issues. Let us define these two terms: Bandwidth is the width or capacity of a specific communications channel. Latency is the time required for a signal to travel from one point on a network to another, and is a fixed cost between two points. An application designed to send a request, wait for a reply, send another request, wait for another reply, and so on, will wait at least five seconds for each packet exchange, regardless of the speed of the server. How to Check Latency in D365 Online Applications: Dynamics 365 includes a basic diagnostic tool that analyzes the client-to-organization connectivity and produces a report. To run the Dynamics 365 Diagnostics tool, follow these steps. On the user’s computer or device, start a web browser, and sign in to a Dynamics 365 organization. Enter the following URL, https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx, where myorg.crm.dynamics.com is the URL of your Dynamics 365 (online) organization. Click Run You can see the results like below: What to make of this? The report displays a table with test and benchmark information. Of particular importance is the Latency Test row value. This value is an average of twenty individual test runs. Generally, the lower the number, the better the performance of the client. Although users may receive a satisfactory experience by using connections with more latency, for best application performance we recommend that the value be 150 ms (milliseconds) or less Other Notes: One of the reasons of high latency is that sometimes D365 tenant is setup in a region far from the home region. For e.g. Customers in USA using D365 which is setup in Australia. This will result in high latency for the end users. In these scenarios where most of the customers are in USA, you can contact Microsoft Support to help move your tenant to USA or nearby region. Best practices for improving application performance Maximize how quickly your forms load. More information: Optimize form performance Make sure you aren’t using legacy form rendering, which can make forms take significantly longer to load. More information: System Settings dialog box – General tab

Issue: Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service running on Server might be unable to receive messages. Therefore, messages stay in “Waiting to connect” state in the outgoing queue of the sending computers. Cause: Issue occurs on 2 scenarios- During computer start, MSMQ service tries to bind to machine IP for listening which is still not acquired by DHCP. This might happen when DHCP takes some time acquiring IP due to any network latency or service start timing between DHCP and MSMQ. In this case MSMQ starts listening to the loopback address i.e. 127.0.0.1. DHCP acquired IP correctly and MSMQ listening on that IP as well. However, at some later point, DHCP IP renewal happens and now machine IP is different from the last one. In this case MSMQ is still listening on the older IP. So, when a new message comes for any old IP, it is never seen by MSMQ service. Verify Scenario: In Command Prompt, type following command and check the result netstat –abno | findstr 1801 If the system is facing this problem, output resembles the following in first scenario: TCP 127.0.0.1:1801 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING xxxx TCP [::1]:1801 [::]:0 LISTENING xxxx Output resembles the following in second scenario: TCP y.y.y.y:1801 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING xxxx where, y.y.y.y is the IP address which MSMQ port is listening to but this is different from the IP it should listen to. Resolution: Restart Message Queuing Service If Point 1 don’t resolve the issue, Install this Metadata hotfix.  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hotfix/kbhotfix?kbnum=2554746&kbln=en-US

Overview: Often, we wonder what could be wrong where we see a generic error on Documents in Dynamics 365. Something like this – That’s when you wonder if all the privileges in D365 Security Roles for SharePoint Site or Document entity are correct or not? In fact, it’s the SharePoint privileges that you must look into. Privileges On SharePoint: Even if the error indicates that you don’t have access in D365, it is actually the SharePoint site that’s missing permissions. Here’ where you need to check for the O365 User’s SharePoint privileges: Navigate to SharePoint Admin Center in the Office 365 Admin center Next, in any of the intended SharePoint sites, navigate to the Gear Icon and then Site Settings. In Site Settings, navigate to People and groups under Users and Permissions area. Check that you might not have the intended user in that list. You can then click on Add and add the user in the list. You can either add an individual user or ‘Everyone Except external users’. and confirm that you see them in the list now. Confirm Permissions: Now, you can ask the users to check and they should be good to go. Hope this helps!

Introduction: In this blog we will be discussing about marketing segments in Dynamics 365 for Marketing Preview.Marketing is basically promoting some products or services which an individual or organization has to offer. While marketing the main aim to decide a target audience. Once the audience is know,  the marketing content can be tailored to target that specific group of people. A market segment is the collection of contacts that you target in a marketing campaign. There are three types of segments a follows: Static Dynamic Compound Implementation: Static Segments: Members in the static segments are added explicitly. These members can be added by the marketer based on the personal interaction that he/she had with the customer. Step 1: Here we created a new static segment in the definitions tab we select the members using the check box as shown below. Initially the segment is in the Draft state. A point to be noted is that segment names can’t have blank spaces.   Step 2: Then we save and click the Check for Error on the top ribbon which validates the changes done as shown Step 3: After the validation is passed successfully we can click the Go Live button on the top of the ribbon. Dynamic Segments: The members in dynamic segment keep on changing based on the criteria that is setup. Every time a new contact is added to the system and it fulfills the condition specified in the query, it gets added to the dynamic segment. Step 1: In the designer at the bottom of the page we can see the total segment size which is the total number of members who will be added in the segment. In dynamic segments we design rules using the Designer or Flow or Query. Once we design the view using the designer we can see in the Query tab the query is populated. There are three operators that can be used is, is not and contains. Compound Segments: The third and final type of segment is the compound segment.Compound segments make use of static and dynamic segments which are live. As seen in the image below first we have to select the segment from the drop down and only the segments that are live will appear in the drop down list. Once the segment is selected we click on the arrow and then select one of Union/Exclude/Intersect. Finally, we see at the top of each segment how many members are included or excluded. Conclusion: These segments are used in customer journeys when we want to send marketing emails to a particular group of people.

Introduction: This blog explains how to Pause SLA in Dynamics 365. Steps to be followed: Only Enhanced SLA can be Paused. Go to Settings –> Administration  –> System Settings –> Service Select the Entity for which SLA is Created. (I have Created SLA for Word Order so I will select Word Order from that list). Now from Available Values select that Status that will Pause SLA. For Work Order entity we will create new Status as “On Hold”. (because it does not have any status which we can use to Pause SLA) Save and Publish. Now Select “On Hold”. Go to Work Order entity and select the Status = ‘On hold’ and Save. SLA is Paused now.

Background: When an enterprise transitions to Cloud, it may still need to leave some assets on-premises for technical or security reasons. Typically SQL DBs will be On-premises for most enterprises. But this should not stop the enterprise from having their Web apps, APIs, services and mobile apps on cloud. The major hindrance in this scenario will be the feasibility for connecting the Cloud based services to On-Prem SQL for seamless transition. Azure allows you to create layer on top of this On-prem assets while safely connecting to them back on your premises using Hybrid Connections. Supported assets include MS SQL Server, MySQL or any resource that runs on static TCP Port. Prerequisites: Visual Studio 2013 or later SQL Server 2008/ 2012 with SQL server authentication Azure SDK Microsoft Azure Subscription Steps: Create SQL Server DB and table. Cerate an SQL User to connect which will be used in the .NET application. Also create some sample data in the table. Create a .NET web application which will read data from table create in Step 1. The connection string will look something like below. Host the application on Local IIS and ensure it works and can connect to SQL. Now host the application on Azure as web-app. You can refer the below link for steps to create Azure Web app. https://github.com/Microsoft/HealthClinic.biz/wiki/Create-and-deploy-an-ASP.NET-web-app-in-Azure-App-Service You will notice that the application will throw error because it will not be able to connect to the On-prem SQL. We will now create a Hybrid connection to the SQL DB. Navigate to App Service which we created in Step 4 in Azure, and navigate to Networking. Click on Hybrid Connections > Configure your Hybrid Endpoints Create New Hybrid Connection. Enter the details for Hybrid connection like below: Note: usually the TCP Port no for SQL is 1433. Please check for the SQL you are configuring. Download the Hybrid connection manager and install on the SQL server or any server on the same network. Open the installed Hybrid Connection Manager UI, and enter the connection string of the Hybrid connection we created in Azure. You can get the connection string of the Hybrid connection by clicking on it like below. Enter the Connection String in Hybrid Connection Manager UI. If everything is proper, you should see the status as Connected Like below in the tool as well as in Azure. In Azure: Other Notes: If you are facing issues with connection, you can restart the Hybrid Connection service from Local services. Please comment below in case of queries.

Overview: Here’s a quick helpful control to enter barcodes in D365 fields. Here is how it goes – Adding Barcode Control: Here’s how you can add the Barcode Control. Select Add Control in the Field Property section. Select Barcode Scanner and click on Add. Select the appropriate configuration of devices for the control and click OK Finally, save and publish your customization. Seeing it Work: Now, since I have published a field called Brochure Barcode. I can use the same on the mobile device to capture barcodes without having to type them manually I can see the icon on the right end of the text box of type Barcode. On clicking the barcode icon, my phone’s camera opens. Show it in front of the barcode. And it automatically detects and enters the same in the textbox. That’s it. Hope this helps!