Introduction: CRM SDK provides a data migration tool/application called “DataMigrationUtility” which allows simple data migration from one CRM environment to another CRM environment. Prerequisite: Microsoft Dynamics CRM. CRM SDK Purpose of the set up Our goal is to migrate accounts from one Online CRM environment to another CRM environment. Steps: Open CRM SDK folder and run ‘DataMigrationUtility’ application. Path: SDK\Tools\ConfigurationMigration Click on Create Schema. You’ll be asked to log in to your source CRM system. Select the solution, entity and fields. Then click ‘save and export’, this will save a XML schema file. To export data: select XML file created in the above steps and create a file to save the data (zip file); then click Exportdata. Click exit after successful export of data. To import data: Click on Import data and then continue. Login to your target system. Select Zip file which was created in the above steps. Click on Import data Error logs can be viewed from Logs stored.  

Introduction: Microsoft introduced a cloud-based platform that works with Mobile Devices known as Microsoft Staff Hub. This platform enables workers and their Managers to manage, communicate and share content. Workers can ask for time off or swap and offer their shifts with their co- workers whereas Managers can send messages to one person or the entire team. Managers can also upload files and then workers can access that file within their Mobile Apps. Microsoft Staff hub is available for Office 365 Business Subscribers as a Web App for Managers and as a Mobile App for Employees/Workers supported on iOS and Android. Settings To start with Microsoft Staff Hub, the very first step is to activate the Staff Hub which can be done by Global Admin. Enabling Microsoft Staff Hub After Login, Admin can go to the mentioned URL https://staffhub.ms/admin and enable StaffHub. Self-Provision Accounts This setting enables the ability to create the new Office 365 accounts for desk-less workers. It adds the Security Group “DesklessWorkers” and creates an account in Azure Active Directory and provisions an Office 365 Group for every team that is created. Microsoft StaffHub Team members are added as members of Office 365 Group and the files and documents that are uploaded in Microsoft StaffHub Team are stored in Group SharePoint of that Team.     Employee Resources Admins can provide their desk-less workers with links to important internal resources or PowerApps i.e. the ones that are most often used by employees. You can enter max up to three links and can give corresponding Titles. Working: Create Schedule Managers can use Microsoft StaffHub to create Schedule, Manage Requests for Shift swaps or Time off and they can also share information with files across the team. With StaffHub, Managers can update shifts from week to week, by “Copy Last Schedule” button with different color labels and can update the notes in the shift that can be highlighted to the workers. Schedules can be viewed in Day, Week, Month, Today or we can just go to a specific day. Managers can add an employee in the schedule for a shift. They can set the start and end time. Managers can also assign a color or add notes to the shift. Custom Label can be used to display in the schedule. Raise Requests Employees can request to schedule changes in the shift using Microsoft StaffHub mobile app. The request is sent to Manager for approval and once approved it is automatically updated on the schedule. Employees can also offer to swap the shift i.e. to get the shift exchanged by some other co-worker. Workers can decline the request and approve the request. View Shifts Workers can view their shifts in a single view on their Mobile App. Conclusion Thus, Microsoft Staff Hub helps managers and workers understand and manage shifts and also allows the flexibility to swap their shifts with Manager’s Approval.

Scenario: CRM space is expensive, and often clients want alternatives to CRM storage for storing documents, images as these take up most of the space. Available solutions: SharePoint Online with Dynamics CRM OneDrive for Business with Dynamics CRM Currently, SharePoint document management is the preferred choice for most of the customers as alternative to storing email attachments and documents. Advantages of SharePoint: SharePoint storage cost is very small about $0.20 per GB/Month compared to CRM’s $9.99/GB/Month. So, CRM space is around 50 times costlier than SharePoint space. You can leverage SharePoint Document management features like: Full text Search Metadata sorting Revisions Enterprise grade security There are 2 ways to use SharePoint for document management with Dynamics: Use SharePoint Online Integration with Dynamics CRM. This is the ideal and efficient way to use SharePoint. You can see the steps for SharePoint online integration in one of our previous blogs: https://www.cloudfronts.in/enable-sharepoint-integration-and-onedrive-for-business-in-crm/ Use 3rd Party tools like Power Attachment, which will migrate your File attachments (notes) and Email attachments from CRM storage to Dynamics. More detail and pricing about Power attachments can found here: http://www.powerobjects.com/powerpacks/powerattachment/ 1st approach should be the preferred way for using SharePoint as it is free, and works well. But users complain about an extra step to navigate to attachments, in which case you can go for Approach 2. Alternative Solution: The drawback with using SharePoint is if you have requirement of migrating your documents from CRM storage (Notes Attachments and Email attachments), you need to use 3rd party paid tools like Power Attachment. Developing custom plugins to migrate documents to SharePoint is difficult in CRM online, since we cannot use External libraries in Sandbox plugin. Due to above 2 reason, we can use Azure Blob storage as a possible alternative for migrating CRM documents. What is Azure Blob storage: Massively-scalable object storage for unstructured data With exabytes of capacity and massive scalability, Azure Blob storage easily and cost-effectively stores from hundreds to billions of objects, in hot or cool tiers depending on how frequently data access is needed. Store any type of unstructured data—images, videos, audio, documents and more. Azure Blob Features: Easy to Use – Geo Redundancy Robust API access Very Cheap storage space: It costs about $0.03/ GB/ month- which is 6.5x less than SharePoint storage cost and 300x less than CRM storage cost. Learn more about pricing here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs-general/ API Coding for CRUD Operations in Azure Blob: I have written a sample plugin which will migrate the CRM attachment to Azure blob, and save the Azure blob file link back in CRM. The plugin is registered on Annotation entity For this, I have used a RestHelper and BlobHelper utility code files, which have all the operations of (a) making a web request and (b) performing blob operations. The Helper files and the CRM plugin sample can be found in the below GitHub link:  https://github.com/somesh2207/CRMOnlineWithAzureBlob The plugin file is UploadDocumentToBlob.cs The below code from the plugin file takes the document from CRM and creates a blob using REST API: Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters[“Target”]; string documentBlobURL = string.Empty; //// Optional condition to migrate attachments related to particular entity. //// If you want to migrate attachments for all entities, remove this CONDITION if (entity.Contains(“isdocument”) && entity.GetAttributeValue<bool>(“isdocument”) == true && entity.GetAttributeValue<string>(“objecttypecode”) == “account”) { string storageAccount = “<storageaccountname>”; string filename = entity.GetAttributeValue<string>(“filename”); string containerName = “<blobcontainername>”; string storageKey = “<blobstorage_accesskey>”; //// Read File string text = entity.GetAttributeValue<string>(“documentbody”); BlobHelper blobHelper = new BlobHelper(storageAccount, storageKey); bool isUploadSuccess = blobHelper.PutBlob(containerName, filename, text); //// Once blob upload is Success, get the Azure blob download-able URL of the uploaded File if (isUploadSuccess) documentBlobURL = string.Format(“https://{0}.blob.core.windows.net/{1}/{2}”, storageAccount, containerName, filename); }

Introduction: Editable Grid is a new feature introduced Out-Of-The-Box with D365 to ease of most common necessity of editing records from the grid itself. Up until now, you had to explicitly open a record and then update the changes. With Editable Grids, You can enable Editable Grid at the entity level so that all Entity Views are converted to Editable Grids or also on a specific form where subgrid is used. Enable Editable Grid on the Entity Currently, this is how your default read-only grid looks: Navigate to your entity in the Default Solution (Settings > Customization > Customize The System > Default Solution > Entity) on which you want to enable Editable Grid. Then select the Controls tab on the entity as shown below: The click on Add Control… hyperlink as mentioned below: Once you see the window as below, select Editable Grid and click on Add. Once this has been enabled for the entity, you can make the change in the Control section as shown below: I’ve chosen to have Editable Grid for Web, Phone and Tablet as well. Save and Publish the entity changes. At this point, the Grid has been enabled on the Entity level. Enable Editable Grid on the Form Now, Editable Grid has been enabled for that entity. You can go to your form where you already are using this entity’s subgrid on its form. Open the Form Editor of that form. Double click on the Grid to show it’s properties. Navigate to Controls tab: Now, click on the Add Control similar to the step shown to enable Editable Grid on the Entity level. Make sure the options are selected to use Editable Grid and click OK. Save and Publish changes made to the form and refresh the form to see the change. You can now see the subgrid used has changed: Use Editable Grid You can quickly hover over the column and record value and change it easily. Also, fields that are read only, like System Fields will be shown representing a lock indicating that they can’t be edited. These are some of the basic uses of Editable Grid. More information is provided by Microsoft on their official documentation here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt788312.aspx.

Introduction: In this blog, we are going to discuss how to find the users having the System Administrator role. This can be done using the basic feature of CRM. Instead of checking all the Users separately and identifying the System Administrator(s) we can utilize the CRM feature of Advance Find. Steps: Step 1: Login to your CRM organization and click on Advanced Find located on the top toolbar as shown below. Step 2: On the Advanced Find page, click the Look for: drop down as shown below, scroll down and select Users. Step 3: Select Security Roles from the list. Step 4: After selecting Security Roles, under Fields select Name from the drop down Step 5: Enter the search string in the enter text location “System Administrator” and click Result. Step 6: Users with System Administrator role will be visible. We hope this has given you a useful information.  

Overview: You’ve been using Dynamics CRM 365 for your organization. And there is a need to make the information stored in your D365 accessible to your customers in a user-friendly interface. That’s where Microsoft CRM Portals come into play! Previously owned by ADX Portal, D365 Portals are now available Online. With each D365 Plan 1 Business Application subscription, 1 Portal Add-On is provided for free. Users can access portals by signing into the Portal. Users are stored in Dynamics 365 in the form of Contacts. Customers are invited to the Portals by Invitation method. Upon creating and account / redeeming an invitation, they can manage their own profile. Setting Up Portals You can setup Portals from the Office 365 Admin centre. Here is how you can do that: Navigate to the Admin area in Office 365 and on the left-hand pane, scroll down and expand Admin section. In the D365 Admin area, select the instance you want to enable the Portal on and click Solutions. (The same can also be installed from the Applications tab in the Dynamics 365 Administration Center.) Once inside solutions, select the Portal you want to deploy for your organization. It takes about a few minutes to install. Once this is installed, you can check the Applications tab and the Portal installed will appear there for you to manage. All the Portal actions can be administered from here (Manage option). Sample Customer Self Service Portal: Types of Dynamics 365 portal There are 4 types of Portals that could be setup using the free add-on with each D365 Plan 1 subscription: Custom Portal Custom Portals come with minimal set of pre-defined page templates where you can start creating a Portal of your own per your tailored needs. Customer Self-Service Portal Customer Self Service Portal is used by the customers of the organization. This portal is their own space of use where they can login and view as well as register their own support cases and manage the same. Along with that, Knowledge Base can be accessed and Forums topics can be started on this portal. Partner Portal Partner Portal enable business partner to build business by working on Opportunities of your organization. Community Portal Community Portal serves to grow a community of people by sharing ideas, voting them and starting forum discussions about a certain topic.

CloudFronts recently implemented and went live with Microsoft Social Engagement to analyze the reviews of their services using twitter handler @cloudfronts and #askCloudFrontsPM and use it to track Leads in Dynamics 365. So, Microsoft Social Engagement helps to analyze people’s views about the company, product and services on Social Network like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It collects the information from Social Media and helps examine the positive, negative or neutral sentiments of the posts. There are three main key aspects of Social Engagement: Listen Everywhere: The information from where you hear it, what is it about, how people feel about the business i.e. your products and services. Analyze the Language/ Location/ Sentiments: The language in which the post is made or the location from where the post is done and Influence of products in Market is it Good or Bad? Drive Engagement: To Capture Feedbacks, Provide Service based on the Cases or Create a Lead. Let’s see an example how Microsoft Social Engagement is used to drive information out from Twitter Profile for certain keywords like in our case say #askCloudFrontsPM that is posted by people anywhere around the world and based on the posts a lead is created in Dynamics365. Note: So being a Global Admin, I have configured the settings in Microsoft Social Engagement. Microsoft Social Engagement can be accessed from https://portal.office.com Overview on Navigation Areas Search Setup: This application area is where the Manager defines the search topics for the posts. Analytics: This area is where the Manager or Analyst can see their data in Visual Metrics i.e. with various factors like Sentiments, Phrases, Location, Source and Language they can also filter out relevant data as per their business needs. Social Center: This is a Subset of Analytics. Here the user can see posts from last 14 days. Streams capture the posts that are more relevant and can be configured using the filters. Activity Maps: Activity Maps are real time visualization of post with Location. This Map shows the area that where in the world the topics are discussed. Message Center: Message Center is used to manage alerts based on the trends or posts and get notified by email to specified recipients. Settings: This area is where the Admin can configure Social Profiles, Dynamics 365 Connection, Automation Rules and additional settings. Setup Below are the steps which needs to be configured to get the desired results. Configuration: a. Personal Settings Here Admin can set the default setting of Language, default filter for Analytics, Theme, Date Format and Number Format. b. Social Profiles Three type of Social Profiles can be created i.e. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. So once the admin creates the Social Profile, the profile needs to be authenticated with username and password. Here in this case I have configured a Twitter Profile. This Profile has two key main sections: User (Ownership): This is where the Admin can decide about the ownership of Profile and can also add users in that profile who can access and share that Social Profile. Search Topics: This is the area where the Admin can decide on the Search Topic Keywords and can assign a Search Topic in a particular Channel to this specific Social Profile. c. Default/ Global Settings As the name suggests, this setting applies to the entire organization i.e. to setup Default Preferences. Different Parameters are configured like Default Screen Language, Time Frame, Date Time Format, Number Format, Search Topics, Location Groups and Additional Settings. Default Preference: This section will cover the Solution Name, Screen Language, Date Format and Number Format. Search Language: Here the Admin can manage the languages that should be enabled for Search Setup. Search Setup Defaults: This Section defines the area about where the search should work and in which Language that is Search can happen from Blogs, News, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Forums etc. for English Language. Sentiments: This is Adaptive Learning i.e. it allows the system to learn the sentiments from the user’s posts. People using MSE can also change the sentiment value of the posts and can help the system train well. So this section allows the Admin to enable and reset these settings. Labels: User can define certain labels to categorize the posts in the Analytics and Social Center. Location Groups: Location Groups can be used as filters in Analytics. In this section the user can add the Location Groups and can add the Number of Locations based on their Preferences. User Management: This is only visible to Admins. Here the user can be assigned roles and permissions for Microsoft Social Engagement. Dynamics 365 Connection: This section is to establish the connection between the Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics 365 (in this case) and will create a Lead Record in Dynamics 365. Automation Rules: Automation Rules can be defined to filter down the posts and then automatically create new cases, leads or events or assign it to user or set a label. Only Manager or System Admin can manage Automation Rules. Admin can create new automation rules, provide filters and based on those filter conditions, the admin can decide to perform actions of linking the post in Dynamics 365 or assigning the post to some user or to set the label of the post. The graph on the extreme right shows the analysis of the posts that fall in that particular filter criteria specified earlier. Search Setup Search Setup is required to make sure that the Analyst is capturing the right conversations of Customers from Social Media. Analyst can also fine tune the searches and drill down the data based on their Business Requirements. While defining the Social Profile in Settings, the search topic needs to be configured and should be applied to that particular Social Profile. One Option is to create the Search Topic while configuring the Social Profile and Second Option is from the Navigation Area. Note: At least on Active Search is required to acquire the social data. Also it takes some time to fetch in the data … Continue reading Microsoft Social Engagement →

Introduction With new release of Microsoft Teams, CloudFronts decided to analyse and check if Teams could be used for communication within the organization and we figured out few points between Yammer and Teams as which tool can be used as the best to enhance the communication within and outside the organization. Following are some points on Yammer and Microsoft Teams based on different key points. # Yammer Microsoft Teams Basic Idea – Yammer is like Forum Discussions – Especially used for Asynchronous Communication – User Interface is like Company Facebook – Chat Group- Real Time Conversations – No external/guest access – Integration with third party services Support – Discontinued the Desktop Client but Mobile App Available – Available on both Desktop Client and Mobile Client. Mobility – Supported on Android, iOS, Windows phone – Supported on iOS, Android phones Multimedia Support – No Audio, Video Conferencing – Supports both Audio and Video Conferencing External access – External groups feature in Yammer enables us to extend and makes it easier for External teams to work together. – Integrates with Office 365 Groups. CRM Integration – Yammer can replace the Activity Feeds solution in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online organization, though your Activity Feeds components will remain in the same state they were before installing Yammer. Yammer simply replaces Activity Feeds in the users’ workspace. – No integration with CRM. Praise /Polls – With Yammer Users can do announcements, praise and have poll. – Microsoft Teams does not provide functionality to have praise and polls. Alerts /Notification – Posts in Yammer can be notified via Emails (Personal Settings) – Notification appears only when we chat (Desktop App). Whereas there is no intimation when users post in Channels though the channel name is highlighted in bold. Meeting Invites/ Calendar – – With Teams users can schedule, view and update their Meetings and can view Calendar from Teams. They also highlight the number of attendees who have accepted the Meeting. Connectors – – Teams can be connected to Third Party Installers. For Developers Team can connect to Yammer, TFS etc. – TFS can help the Development Team to organize the task and see the status and manage them easily within the Team Window. Additional Points – Files uploaded on Yammer stays in Yammer and are not uploaded in SharePoint or OneDrive. But Files from OneDrive can be added in the post on Yammer. – Yammer, you can search for public groups and ask to join them. In Yammer, you have private groups which cannot be seen at all. – Microsoft Teams is Business Casual – No outside people can be added to the conversation. – Teams is built on top of all of the existing Microsoft technologies. Under the hood, every Team is actually an Office 365 Group – When the user is creating or uploading the files in the team it is actually uploading and creating files in SharePoint – T-Bot is a training bot at this time. It’s designed to allow you to ask questions and get a quick reply on how to complete a particular task. – In Teams, you only see the Teams in which you have been invited to. Conclusion – Yammer is the social network – Yammer is a bulletin board for the entire organization – Teams is the social interaction with fresh UI. – Teams works well asynchronously, for more informal, Business Casual conversation. Conclusion Thus, we at CloudFronts use Yammer to connect to External Groups but Microsoft Teams for our internal communications and awaiting more enhancements in Team in near future.

Overview: At CloudFronts, we use our Dynamics 365 PM App to track and manage Projects with Task and Resource Scheduling, Project Billing and Invoicing, Timesheets, Gantt Chart, Time and Expense Entries, User Skillsets and many additional features. We recently implemented an intelligent time entry reminder notification workflow to intimate users about pending time entries with the goal of establishing a culture of doing time entries on a daily basis. Why do we need this? A Professional Services company relies on team members who contribute to billable entries which in turn helps the company estimate Project Costs, Forecast Revenue and most importantly ensure billing is done on time and accurately. High Level Flow Diagram The below image shows the diagrammatic representation of high level flow of what we implemented. Custom Logic The Custom Workflow logic has series of steps that checks and based on the conditions it sends out email to that particular User. Check if it’s a Weekend As the step name suggests, this will check if today is a Saturday or Sunday and if the condition is true the workflow will stop. Check if it’s a Public Holiday If current day is not a weekend, there is a possibility that it might be a public holiday. So in this step it checks if today is a Public holiday. If true, then the workflow stops. Get Previous Working Day This step fetches the Previous Working Day as in if today is Monday then the previous working day in our case is Friday. Else if Tuesday then, previous working day is Monday. Check if the Previous Working day is Public Holiday Now there might be the case, that the previous working day was a Public holiday then in that case the time entries will not be there for the users. So if the Previous Working day is a Public Holiday then the workflow stops. Fetch Users This step will get the users who enter time entries in the system, be it a billable resource or a non-billable resource. Fetch Time Entries Here in this step, fetch the time entries less than 8 hours. If we have complete 8 hours’ time entry, then no alert is sent to that particular user. Else if we have incomplete time entries then the next step is to check if the user was on Leave. Is User on Leave? If we have less than 8 hours’ time entry, then there is a possibility where that person was on leave on the previous working day. In that case no reminder will be sent to that particular user. Send Email With the above criteria’s and conditions, if we get that user was working and has not completed his/her daily time entry, then an alert will be sent to that user. So with this simple logic and series of steps, CloudFronts was able to achieve this and intimate their users to complete their time entries.

Introduction: Document Recommendations are one of the preview feature that is added in Dynamics 365. In this blog let’s see how we can enhance the use of this feature in our Business Requirement. Note: Since it’s a preview feature, it is advised not to use and it is subject to change. So not recommended on Production Environment. Pre- Requisites Document Recommendations are supported on Dynamics 365 Online. Since it’s a preview feature the System Administrator needs to enable this from Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Previews Tab. User should have access to SharePoint Online 2013 or SharePoint Online 2016 for Document Repository. Document Management must be done before hand i.e. enabling SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. Relevance Search should be enabled. Azure Text Analytics can be used optionally to determine the Document Suggestions. System Administrator must define the similarity rules. Working Suppose we have a Sales Representative and Sales Manager that is working with Opportunity in D365 and all documents related to this are associated with this particular Opportunity. Now another Sales Representative starts working on this Opportunity and she is unaware with all the previous details and deals. So with Document Recommendations, CRM provides her with all the documents to understand about previous conversations, assets and makes it easier for the new Sales Representative to work with this particular Opportunity. Now the question is how this works? So there are certain prerequisites that are required to establish this feature. Configuration Enable Document Recommendations Enable SharePoint Settings -> Document Management -> Enable SharePoint Online. Enable Relevance Search Configure Similarity Rules Create Similarity Rules Similarity Rules can be created from Settings -> Data Management -> Similar Records Suggestions Settings ->New Rule as shown in the first image. While the second image shows how to configure rule.  So when we create a new rule below are some details that System Administrator needs to fill. Source Entity – For which entity the rule is enabled. Document Recommendations is supported only for COLAC Entities (Case, Opportunity, Lead, Account and Contact) + Custom Entity. Filter results by Status – Whether it is Open, Won or Lost in case of Opportunity and different in the case of other entities. Use Text Analytics – Yes or No. By Default, the value is No but then if using Cognitive Service Text Analytics then set the value to Yes. Maximum Number of Key Phrases – this is used to determine the keywords or key phrases to determine with text search which helps to achieve key word based similarity between source and target records. The acceptable value is from 0-1000. Create Match Fields Once the Similarity Rules are created the next step is to create the Match Fields, so on Similarity Rules a sub-grid is present to display all the Match Fields. Match Fields involves the following details. Criteria – Whether it should be Exact Match or Text Match. In Exact Match, fields from the source entity is matched. In Text Match, text in these fields are used to find the key phrases. Entity – Choose an entity to use in creating a text search rule to find the matching records. Fields – Select a field to find the matching target records. To enable field for Exact Match, the field should be added in Quick Find View of that particular Entity. Once the Match Fields are created, simply activate the Similarity Rule. Manage Document Suggestions Document Suggestions can be managed under Settings -> Document Management -> Manage Document Suggestions. Once we open this setting we can only see the list of entities for which the similarity rules are listed. We can also provide the External Base URL for querying the results as shown in the images below. Example So based on above steps, I tried Document Suggestions on my trial environment and below screenshots will demonstrate the same. Here I have created Similarity Rule for Opportunity Entity and document recommendations will be displayed for the records. So I have created two different Opportunities, to buy IPhone 7 and IPhone7s and I have added the documents regarding the deal cracked for buying IPhone 7 so when I view suggestions for IPhone 7s it will show the related documents associated with IPhone 7 on Document Associated Grid of Opportunity to Buy IPhone 7s. The above screen shot shows that since the topic name had similar key words that’s the reason I could see the recommendations. This happened due to Similarity Rule created where in Match Fields I had declared the Text Match of the Field “Topic” on Opportunity. Also Document Recommendations will read documents stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business or Office 365 Groups. Document Recommendations is not supported in Offline Mode. Whereas on Mobile/ Tablet Clients the recommendations will be shown as shown below.