Virtual Assistant replacing CafeX

During the recent User Group in Amsterdam Microsoft was showing off the Virtual Assistant that uses flow type logic to build a great Chat experience for your web pages. One thing that caught my eye was a little button on the top right corner of the Dynamics screen.

This is all taken from a demo Microsoft showed at the User Group, so I don’t have the live environment personally yet. If pictures or the story don’t match when you get it live, there might be some magic behind the scenes they didn’t talk about.

So the end user would start a chat in any CMS provider of your choice.

Behind the scenes we now get to create a pretty awesome BOT with smartness. Creating a new BOT flow uses the same look and feel as the Microsoft Flow UX. It even allows us access to flows to complete certain responses. This tool is capable of running all the connectors within the Power Plattform, and return results directly to the end customer!

In the picture below you see the virtual agent in the side bar. This side bar hasn’t been opened up to partners yet for altering the content in a smart way, but the Virtual Agent works the same way that Cafe X worked. Almost exactly like CafeX worked.

When opening the sidebar, you are presented with the view from the Omni-channel engagement hub.

At this point a call from the chatt was waiting, and the agent had to accept it.

Immediately you are shown the complete chat dialog leading to the bot escalating the chat to the agent.

As you can see in the bottom right, the options for saving the chat, creating new actions, routing, transfer etc are all here. You can even add internal notes before sending the customer to another agent.

My key takeaway here is that the chat bot can connect to the flow channel leaving us with a lot of cool features for instant feedback to the customer. No more creating bots that use custom development that only a few understand. Focus your efforts on creating custom connectors in powerplattform if you want to make something custom:)

Power BI RLS report for Dynamics 365

RLS stands for Row Level Security and is a function within Power BI used to securely manage what the users see. I am reusing the steps from the Power BI embedding blog, and continuing with the same dataset to define RLS. Another big thanks to Jeroen Vos for teaching me PowerBI.

We start the process in Power BI for Desktop. Open the same report, and then navigate to Modeling and Manage Roles.

This brings up a DAX console, and I will chose the “Address 1: Country/Region”

Now we can test the DAX by simulating how it is with another user login. This function is something I wish we had in Dynamics!!!

Notice that the data has changed!:)
NB! Remember to publish changes to PowerBI.com

Log into https://www.powerbi.com to complete the rest of the process

Next step is to add a user to the newly created security role. Navigate to datasets and open the security.

Last step is to Share the Dashboard with the user

Open Dynamics 365 and add a new Power BI Dashboard.

The Administrator (All data)

The Sales user (Only USA)


RLS reporting in Dynamics 365, secure and supported 🙂

Dynamics 365 autonumber now available in PowerApp config

The API approach has been available for a long time, but now the autonumber is available through the config. Jonas Rapp’s autonumber solution in XrmToolbox has been absolutely one of the best tools for this purpose so far, and not we might not need it any more. I belive the first release is missing some of advanced options that Jonas has, but it might work for most of us.

This is the release information regarding the PowerPlatform autonumber: Autonumber from MS PowerApps blog

BUT why is this cool? Well, because it mentions that we can convert existing text field to Autonumber. This means that we can get rid of the stupid workflows/javascripts etc that we have made over the years to give some entities names for the name purpose:)

NB! you can only change the field to autonumber via powerapps.com. The Dynamics classic doesn’t support this. Below is the name field from a new entity. For the first time in EVER I could change the field type!!:)

Dynamics 365 force classic mode from admin panel

I know we are supposed to use the UI, but it’s not ready for all purposes yet. Therefore it is nice to know that you can force the classic view for a little while longer. If for some reason you can’t use this approach, you can also change the URL like Jamie Bowman mentions here

https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com

Open Environment and then behavior and change the variable

The result is that you now can open the Customize to classic. This doesn’t force the other UI apps to classic, so you are still all good:)

Power BI embed to Dynamics 365 form with filtering

There have been several post about this topic before, but this one is the only way I got it to work. Rasmus wrote about this a few weeks ago, and I am using most of his code. Ida was also early out mentioning this possibility, but I just couldn’t get it all to work before now. Big thank you to Jeroen Vos for BI assistance:)

Bear in mind that I had to start from scratch here to make sense of it all. You can fast forward quite a bit if you already have a data model. I believe Microsoft will release a OOTB function sometime this year, but until then we can demo embedded BI in CRM forms like this.

Create a report

Start by opening Power BI dashboard, and creating a new project with “Get Data”

If you don’t know where to find the developer settings, you can copy the url from above, and just replace it with your org and crm* that you have in your country.

For this demo I am only choosing Account and Opportunity.

After loading, add the funnel graph.

Add the field salesstage and estimtedvalue. Both are from Oppty table.

Your report should resemble something like this. Now we have to format quite a bit for this to actually look presentable in Dynamics. Because this solution is highly custom at the moment, we need to make it fit the Dynamics IFrame for it to look decent.

The most important format of them all is the page format to the right. You need to make this one small for the Dynamics Tab to be able to open it in full screen. I made it half of the standard. Eventually you should end up like something below:

Numbers on the right are a picklist, but for the demo I didn’t care to rename them.

Publish to powerbi.com

Remember to copy the URL here

Dynamics 365 form configuration

This process requires a webresource with javascript and a tab with IFrame in Dynamics. Because of the new UI this layout is actually quite nice!

URL can be any website since we are overwriting it anyway. The name of the iframe is used in the javascript. Don’t restrict any cross-frame scripting.
function SetBIFrame(executionContext){
    var formContext = executionContext.getFormContext();
    var pbiFrame = formContext.getControl("IFRAME_BI");
    var GUID = formContext.data.entity.getId().replace(/[{}]/g, "");
    //replace the Power BI url with the url from the Embed step
    var PBIurl = "https://app.powerbi.com/reportEmbed?reportId=d86fdc2b-316a-420e-b177-9e477c879031&autoAuth=true&ctid=83121429-cfda-4a1b-89c9-969eb42dc605";
    //accounts = account table in BI, and accountid=guid for account
    pbiFrame.setSrc(PBIurl + "&filter=accounts/accountid eq '" +GUID+ "'");
}

Only thing you need to change is the URL from the powerbi.com secure embed. Since I am using account and opportunity out of the box, the table names for both of them are “accounts” and “opportunities”.

In the filter above I am filtering the results in the Account table with the account ID that i will find within CRM. The result is to show a graph for only that single account.

Remember to Pass Execution Context here. I don’t really now why, but it wont work without. Normally when I script I don’t have to use this, but if someone would tell me what it does I am happy to learn:)

Publish all settings and open Dyanmics 365 to the account (that you know has some opportunities).

As you can see Alpine Ski House is showing a sales funnel of the opportunities related and nothing more. This is a filtered report in Dynamics based on the account in a BI tab on top. Navigation here in dynamics is pretty smooth.

Power BI embedded dashboard Dynamics 365

Download Power BI Desktop https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
and login to the Power BI with your credentials.

Then download the content pack file for Power BI
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/analytics/customize-power-bi-content-packs

Open the .pbix file in Power BI desktop, and it should look something like this

If for some reason the dashboard isn’t showing any data, you might need to run through the Power BI Sales Analytics fix for Dynamics 365

Next step is to publish this to Power BI

Open https://www.powerbi.com and locate the report you uploaded. A report itself can’t integrate with Dynamics, so we have to create a Dashboard for CRM to be able to pick this up. Open up the report

Find a chart you like and pin it

Continue the process for the charts you like, but add them to the existing dashboard “CRM Sales”. Eventually you might have a dashboard looking something like this:

NB!!! I had to make the size of these charts fairly large. Otherwise Dynamics 365 was doing strange things with scaling. Just try different approaches.

Now we have to configure Dynamics 365 to allow Power BI embedded reports. Open https://www.admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com for Environment settings.

Open CRM in your app and you can now add a BI Dashboard.

The result will be nice if you remembered to scale the Dashboard in PowerBI.com large enough.

One little side note. At the moment I can only see the option to add Personal Dashboard with Power BI embedded.

Power BI starting a trial

If you don’t have a demo account in O365, start here. The description is for Dyamics 365, but you end up with a Office 365 and Dynamics 365 demo data.

Navigate to Office.com and open the admin center.

Open Subscription

Find the Power BI PRO and start a trial

Remember to add the license to the user before you continue.

Remember to add the Power BI license to the user

Fix – Power BI Sales Analytics data for Dynamics 365

Problem

There is something wrong with the BI content pack for Dynamics 365. It might be my setup, but this is what I have to do before demos to fix the connection problem. The issue is related to the content pack filters locked. So after completing the setup you will se an almost blank BI dataset. I haven’t figured out why, but figured out a way around.

Solution

I will go through the steps to fix the report and make it ready for demo.

Download Power BI Desktop https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
and login to the Power BI with your credentials. Then download the content pack file for Power BI
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/analytics/customize-power-bi-content-packs

In the filter view for every page you will notice that there is an active filter. This is the problem when looking into the data!”

I personally would remove all the filters pr page for the purpose of the demo. More data looks better:)

Next step is to fix the Dynamics source, so the system is getting data from the correct CRM system.

Find the query, advanced editor and change to the CRM org. Based on MS doc when writing this article, only the 8.2 was supported. When you are done, “close & apply”.

That’s it for the fix. This should now be ready to publish to Power BI online. Next step is embed Power BI report to Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 VOC end of life

Dear VOC,
Thank you for services provided, but you have been replaced with a younger and more exciting model.

During a call today Microsoft made it quite clear that you should start the transition to FormsPro. On the questions regarding what we do with existing customers, the answer was pretty clear “you should transition”. The one thing that I did think was a little strange was the fact that Microsoft said they would provide assistance migrating (a tool of course). Usually Microsoft doesn’t provide any form for tool for transitioning, and make the partners do this manually.

The magic

I might sound negative, but honestly I think it is quite amazing. VOC turning into a separate app on top of the CDS only commits that MS is really serious about the PowerPlatform story and APPS. Microsoft chose to store data in the CDS, so the options for this tool are almost endless. And even more, you don’t need Dynamics to deliver the product.

Licensing

So what will happen to the product now that it is no longer a Dynamics product? Good question. It was mentioned that licensing is in the works, so let’s hope that this won’t become another Marketing “scandal”. The only thing I would prepare for is a license that now cost more than what you pay today. You can hope for the P2 license to cover this, but probably no.

No one used VOC besides Dynamics customers with the license included. Being able to configure this product separately, you can use any system with a CDS connector. This will open a marked for the FormsPro that the VOC never had. The demonstration was used with Salesforce and Dynamics.

Track categories soon available to activate in admin panel!

We all miss the awesome CRM tracking image. Why they removed it I will never know.

from powerobjects

Then they replaced it with the odd type of tracing based on category.

Anyway, you need to use the OrgDB settings tool to activate this, but soon this will be arriving to www.admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com

Not clear to say when though. Info on webpage is only “soon” 🙂