Introduction: In this blog we will be discussing about System user in D365. Description: System Users are built in users in D365. Some important points that need to be kept in mind are as follows: The Mailboxes of the System user cannot be setup hence emails can’t be sent and received. If a plugin is run with the System user context then it bypasses all the security rules. No one can log in to the system as the System User. The System user is in the base business unit. There might be situations when we not only want the plugin to update records that can be viewed by us but there is a need to update the other records to which we don’t have access to, in this situation we can run the plugin with the System User context. A plugin can call other plugin/workflows hence if a plugin is run in the context of System User then all the other plugins that are run because of the parent plugin will also be run in the same context. Implementation: Step 1: By default, in D365 the System User can’t be seen in the users’  section, as shown in the below two views. On Searching in the Disabled Users also it doesn’t show the System User. The owner of the record can’t be changed to System Owner from the lookup field as System User does not show up. Step 2: There might be situations when we might need to perform checks on the record to know if the owner is System User or not to carry out some operations. If there are no records in D365 with the owner as System User then it’s a problem. One way of creating a record with System owner is by using plugins to create a record and run the Plugin in the System users context as shown below. Step 3: After that is done as shown in the below image the owner is set as System. Now we can perform our business logic as we have a record with the SYSTEM as the owner. Step 4: Now if we click on the Owner we go to the record which is read only and see the following details as shown below. Step 5: We can’t modify any details of this user. If we try to add a security role to this user we get the following error message as shown below.    

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is a server-based solution  that provides online analytical processing (OLAP) functionality. Analytical reports help users examine business data and identify trends that they might not otherwise discover when viewing data on traditional reports. To integrate Microsoft Dynamics AX and Analysis Services, you must perform the following steps: Step 1: Complete the prerequisite tasks: Verify that you have the permissions that are required to configure Analysis Services. Create a domain account to run the Analysis Services service. Assign the .NET Business Connector proxy account to the server administrator role in Analysis Services. Install prerequisites. Step 2: Configure Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services: Start Microsoft Dynamics AX Setup. Under Install, select Microsoft Dynamics AX components. On the Select components page: Select the Analysis Services configuration check box. Click Next. On the Prerequisite Validation page, resolve any errors. When no errors remain, click Next. On the Select a file location page, select the location, and then click Next. On the Specify a location for configuration settings page, specify whether you want the cubes to access configuration information from the registry on the local computer or from a shared configuration file. If you select to use a shared configuration file, you must enter the network location of the file. Click Next. On the Connect to an AOS instance page, enter the name of the computer that is running the Application Object Server (AOS) instance On the Specify Business Connector proxy account information page, enter the password for the proxy account that is used by Business Connector. Click Next. On the Specify an Analysis Services instance page, select an instance of Analysis Services. Click Next. On the Connect to a SQL Server Database page, follow these steps: Select the computer that hosts your Microsoft Dynamics AX online transaction processing (OLTP) database. Select the Microsoft Dynamics AX OLTP database. Click Next. On the Ready to install page, click Install. Click Finish to close the Setup wizard. Step 3: Complete the Analysis Services integration: Install SQL Server Shared Management Objects on Microsoft Dynamics AX client computers. Verify that information about exchange rates has been entered. Click System administration> Setup > Business intelligence > Analysis Services > System currency and exchange rate type. Set up OLAP Administration Form Click System administration> Setup > Business intelligence > Analysis Services >Analysis Server Deploy the default cubes that are included with Microsoft Dynamics AX. PS: Ensure that the Microsoft Analysis Server should be connected to the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio for the respective Server along with correct logon Credentials. Open the Microsoft Dynamics AX client. Click File > Tools > Business Intelligence (BI) tools > SQL Server Analysis Services project wizard. On the Analysis Services project wizard page, click Next. On the Select an option page, click Deploy, and then click Next. On the Select an existing Analysis Services project page, click Select a project from the AOT. Select the project you want to deploy from the list, and then click Next On the Deploying page, click Next when the deployment is completed. Click Finish to close the wizard. Configure the cubes, based on the changes that you have made to the Microsoft Dynamics AX configuration or license keys. Click Tools> Business Intelligence (BI) tools > SQL Server Analysis Services project wizard. Click Next. On the Select an option page, select Configure. Click Next. On the Select an existing Analysis Services project page, select the project to update. You can select a project from the AOT or from disk. Click Next After the project builds, click Next Select the Apply the Microsoft Dynamics AX configuration to the Analysis Services project check box. Click Next. Select additional languages for which to provide label translations and then click Next. To Run the Report: Click on Accounts Payable>Reports>Statistics>Vendor>Top Vendors by YTD Purchase  

Introduction: In this blog, we will be demonstrating how to use JavaScript to check user security roles. This is applicable in organization where, there are users with multiple security roles. And only users with a specific role assigned to them should be allowed to carry on certain tasks. Scenario: There is an organization with two users,”User A” is assigned a custom role and “User B” is not assigned a custom role. Only “User A” should be able to Save the form as he/she has the custom role. Implementation: Step 1: Create two users “User A” and “User B”. Step 2:   Create a custom security role “CustomRoleA”. “User A” has the following security roles: Salesperson Sales App Access CustomRoleA “User B” has the following security roles: Salesperson Sales App Access Step 3: Now we write a JavaScript code to check the logged in users security roles and accordingly allow only that user to save the record who has the “CustomRoleA” security role. If a user without that security role tries to save the a newly created record, an error notification is shown and record is not saved. Step 4: Save this as a new JavaScript web resource in Dynamics 365 and we will make this code run on the “Contact” form which will be triggered on the form onSave event. Step 5: Now when “User B” makes a new record and tries to save it the following error message is shown. The record can’t be saved. The search results as shown in the below image states that there is no such record. Step 6:  When “User A” tries to make a new contact and save, the permission is granted to save the record and in the search the record is shown as shown in the below two images. Conclusion: By checking the security roles different functionalities can be restricted for any user like show/hide fields or buttons.

Introduction: In this blog article, we will discuss working of Media controls in Power Apps Media Controls: There are 7 Media controls in Power Apps Image Camera Barcode Audio Video Microphone Add Picture Image Control: Shows an image from, for example, a local file or a data source. Description: If you add one or more Image controls to your app, you can show individual images that aren’t part of a data set, or you can incorporate images from records in data sources. Example: Show an image from a local file Steps: 1. On the Content tab, click or tap Media, and then click or tap Browse. 2. Click or tap the image file that you want to add, click or tap Open, and then press Esc to return to the default workspace. 3.  Add an Image control, and set its Items property to the name of the file that you added. Output: Camera Control: A control with which the user can take photos by using the camera on the device. Description: If you add this control, the user can update a data source with one or more photos from wherever the app is running. Example: Add photos to an Image gallery control Steps: 1.Add camera control set it’s OnSelect Property to Collect(MyPix,Camera1.photo). (here Camera1 is the name of camera control.) 2. Add gallery control set its item property to MyPix.Url 3. Set the Image property of the Image control in the gallery to ThisItem.Url. Output: Barcode Control: A control with which the user can take photos by using the barcode scanner on the device. Description: If you add this control, the user can update a data source with one or more photos from wherever the app is running. Steps: 1. Add a barcode control. 2. Add a label control and set its Text property to (here Barcode1 is the name of barcode control) Output: Microphone control: A control with which the user can record sounds. Description: If you add this control, the user can update a data source with one or more sounds from wherever the app is running. Steps: 1. Add Microphone control and set its onStop Property to Collect(MySounds,MyMic.Audio). (here MyMic is the name of microphone) 2. Add a blank gallery control and set its items property to MySounds and add audio control inside it. And set its Media Property to ThisItem.Url 3. Add A button if you want to remove any audio. Set its OnSelect property to : Remove(MySounds,ThisItem) Output: Add picture control: Takes a photo or loads images from the local device. Description: With this control users can take photos or upload image files from their device and update the data source with this content. Example: Add images to an image gallery control Steps: 1.Add an Add Picture control 2. Add Button control inside Add picture control. 3. Set OnSelect Property of button to: Collect(Pics, AddMediaButton2.Media) 4. Add gallery control and set its items property to pics. (gallery control will display all the images which are added) Output: Audio Control: A control that plays an audio file. Description: An Audio control plays a sound clip from a file, a recording from a Microphone control, or the audio track from a video file. Steps: 1. Add Audio control. 2. On the Content tab, click or tap Media, and then click or tap Browse And select the audio from local device. 3. Set Media property of audio to the name of audio file. Output: Video Control: A control that plays a video file, or a video on YouTube. Description: A Video control plays a video clip from a file or from YouTube if you specify a URL. Example: For adding a YouTube video Steps: Add video controller and set its Media property to the URL link of that YouTube video. (add URL in quotes) Output:

Introduction: This blog consists of information on adding notes section in to your form and the difficulties faced while adding the notes section. When to use notes on entity forms: Notes are quick, easy and create a time-stamp. You can use when temporary and not critical information need to be shared with others. Prerequisites: 1. Notes should be enabled on the entity. Open the entity in the solution and check the notes box. 2. If notes are not present on the form, add on the form. If the notes section is already present on the form, the notes button will be disable on the form. Note the below points before adding the notes section: Dynamics CRM allows only one Notes/Activities/Posts per entity and which is enabled by default. If you try to add one more notes, you will get the error message. It will be visible only for the Main forms, so if you are deleting the Notes/Activities/Posts from Main form, it will be visible on another main form. If you want to make use of Notes/Activities/Posts to be added on some other form. You can’t use a notes control for an entity that is not enabled for Notes, so unfortunately you cannot have just activities, or activity feed posts. Disadvantages: Notes are not searchable. Notes cannot be included in Reports or advanced finds. Notes do not roll-up. Users must re-create the same note several times for different records. Information may be lost.

Overview: With the new v9 release of Dynamics 365, a lot of user-friendly features have made life easier. Talking about the slick new Unified Interface! And if you want to make an App based on the same with components you need, it’s a hell lot easier too. New App with Unified Interface: You can either design an App in the Web Interface or in the new Unified Interface in v9 of Dynamics 365. Here’s how you can do it – Navigate to Settings > Apps. Then, click on create new App button as shown below. Now, you only get to choose either from the Web Interface or the new Unified Interface. So, it takes just a moment to get the interface ready for you to design.  Once prepared, you can start making your app, designing your site-map, dashboards, entities etc. For the sake of this blog, I’ve added a basic SiteMap, some Dashboards and a few Entities So typically, this is how I want my App to have! Once I have made all the changes, I’ll save and Publish the same. Accessing Unified Interface App: Once the App is published, it will appear in My Apps section as shown below: And I can then open and get the new Unified Interface. Now, you can work in the new Unified Interface with your custom app.

Overview: The new July 2017 update of the D365 is the latest update to Dynamics 365 and is called v9. This is a major change from not only functionality perspective but also from a visual perspective as well. And one such part of the visual upgrade is the refreshed web client UI. This is a major change since it’s 2013 Online version! What has changed: The traditional UI has been redesigned to appear more intuitive and eliminate issues with the previous UI. Some of the changes are: Removal of White Spaces: They’ve removed all the extra white spaces from the current version making the UI look more occupied and tightly bound. As you can see in the screenshot above. Boxes have been added to house the sections on the form. This makes the white spaces disappear making the UI look more occupied. In the previous UI, the short length of fields and unexpanded subgrids used to leave a lot of white space causing a disjoint in the UI. That has been taken care of here. Word Wrap Fields: With the new refreshed UI, the lengthy field names are taken care of. In the previous version, the lengthy field labels used to disappear behind the field making it a hassle to hover over the label and read the name of the field. With the new UI, the field labels are not wrapped and if you have lengthy field labels, the entire text is seen as below: Color Coded Subgrid on Form: Further, they’ve enhanced on how sub-grids should appear on the form. Example, if you have a  lot of sub-grids on the form and you need to read to know which sub-grid is where. Now, you can have colored Sub-grid headers that give you a visual feedback of what entity sub-grid it is. See sample screenshot below: As seen above, I can have a uniform color for Contact across all forms where I have Contact subg-grid. This is available only on the form level. The color can be modified from the Sub-grid properties on the Form as shown below: Other Improvements: Along with these, there are other significant improvements that can be seen across the new UI: Improved Form tab formatting. Standardise fonts. The new UI looks promising and will provide an easier visual feel.

Background: In Dynamics CRM, one of the common requirement customer have is to Run a report and save the copy of the report (PDF/ Word/ Excel) as notes/ attachment on the record or send the created document as email attachment to customer. Sounds an innocent requirement, right? With CRM online, it is NOT. What we do to achieve this till now We do one of the following when the customer asks this request: Ask user to manually run report, download PDF and create email record or attach to record notes. Use some paid 3rd party tool. Tell the customer it is not possible For CRM Online. 😀 For On-prem CRM, developers would tweak the Report Viewer and somehow manage to achieve this with lot of effort and custom plugins. Alternative: With Dynamics 365, you have one alternative which does not exactly give you the above solution but is very close or may be acceptable adjustment to client. We all know CRM 2016 also introduced word templates. But with D365, CRM has inbuilt Action to Run a word template and attach that to document without user action. Since it is an action, it can be used in Workflows, Plugins, other actions and even in JavaScript using Web API. Example: I have created a workflow on Account Credit limit update, such that when credit limit is more than 10,000 an Account summary will be created using the Account Summary template and attached to the record. See screenshots below of the workflow and generated document. All this without user intervention. Limitations: We cannot create PDF documents using this approach This is limited to Word templates and they are not yet as powerful as SSRS reports Next Steps: We can extend this functionality by may be having plugin on notes creation to send an email to customer or any other thing? Please post your comments/ suggestions below. Happy CRM’ing

Introduction: In this blog, we will have a look on new updates on Business Process flow. Previous Release Updates: Business Process Type Run process as a task flow (Mobile) Run process as a business flow (Other clients) New Designer New Toolbar introduced with edit buttons, connector, new snapshot button to take screenshots of your business process flow design which can be used in technical documentations Security Note:  Your process will not show up in this tab until you Activate the process.  If you Deactivate it after updating security roles, the process will remain in the available in this tab so you will NOT need to go back and update your security roles again.  It’ll only be removed from the security role tab once you delete the process. Action Workflows Stages can execute workflows with a trigger of Stage Entry, or Stage Exit. Example: You can have the completion of a specific Business Process on an opportunity kick off a workflow that creates a Case, and activates a Business Process on that newly created Case. Stage Active Duration Out of Box feature, to see duration details in BPF- Total time for the BPF being in active state Additional Status Reasons available – Abandon, Finish Maximum number of processes, stages, and steps To ensure acceptable performance and the usability of the user interface, there are some limitations you need to be aware of when you plan to use business process flows: There can be no more than 10 activated business process flow processes per entity. Each process can contain no more than 30 stages. Multi-entity processes can contain no more than five entities. New Release Dynamics 365 July 2017 Update: Business Process Flow entities are now available on Site Maps, Views, Charts: Now the BPF are available in the form of entities and personalized views can be created and we do not need to write any code for getting the BPF in particular stage. Sales BPF will be visible in Sales area and Service BPF will be available in Service area. Site Maps Views Charts Action Steps: Calling an on-demand workflow or a process action from within the Business Process. Action will appear on the UI in the form of a button Business Process Flow in Unified Interface: Different stages of Business Process Flow When you click on pin the stage, the stage is pinned on the right side of the screen and we can see for how much duration the stage was in active stage as shown below The activity duration of the stages is visible even on the Business Process Flow Hope you like the new feature of Business Process flows with some new required functionalities.

Introduction: This blog explains how to add learning path to your solution. Prerequisites: Dynamics 365 (online – latest version, or Dec 2016 update installed). Steps to be followed: Steps for enabling learning path Steps for adding users to Learning Path Authors Creating Learning Path content Stpes to create Guided Task Steps to create Sidebar 1. Steps for enabling learning path: Opt-in to Learning path by going to Settings->Administration->System settings (under General tab). Select Yes for Enable Learning Path and Enable Learning Path Authoring. Confirm that Use Custom Help for customizable entities and Append parameters to URL are set to No. OK. 2. Steps for adding users to Learning Path Authors: Go to Admin Portal. In Admin center Groups->Learning Path Authors security group. Click Edit in the Owner row to add owner of the group. Click + Add Owner, and then select the user from list or search for the user(s). Click Edit in the Members row to add users to the group. Click + Add members, and then select the user from list or search for the user(s) you want to add to the group. Save and close. 3. Steps for Creating Learning Path content: Go to help. Click on content library button Content Library will open. There are two types of learning path content: Guided Task: Interactive “bubbles” which form a sequence to provide help or guide users on specific tasks. Sidebar: Vertically formatted help content, which is initially shown as a “table of content” with items that the user can expand, revealing relevant webpages, videos, or links to existing guided paths content in Dynamics 365. 4. Steps to create Guided Task: Click on + Guided Task to create a new Guided Task. Fill Details. Save. Click on + Add New Steps to add steps to your Guided Task. Step with Next Button: This step has a Next button that can be used to navigate to the next step in the flow. Step with User action: This step does not have a Next button. The user is prompted to click the UI element on which the step is pinned. User action with Next Button: This step does have a Next button. Clicking the Next button has the same effect as clicking the UI element on which the step is pinned. Learning Step: This step can only be at the end of a guided task flow. Drag and drop the step where you want. Give step title. Click on content type to add content it can be text or video. Save. Repeat step number 5 until all steps are added. Click on Preview to see how it will work before publishing. Click on publish select your publishing environment. Output of Guided Task:   5. Steps to create Sidebar Click on + Sidebar to create a new Sidebar. Fill Details. Save. Select the section and add what type of content you want to add in that. Repeat step number 4 to add more sections to sidebar. Click on Preview to see how it will look. Click on publish select your publishing environment. Output of Sidebar: Conclusion: Using learning path newly created  users can easily navigate through the system with ease. It provides basic guidance to the users.