So why am I fussing about it now? Well, after all these years Microsoft is still using the Potential Customer field for Field Service.
The error (Accound with id Does not Exist)
Did you ever see this message in Field Service?
“Account With ID = Does Not Exist” – Field Service
As you can see from the image above, the Potential Customer has been set to a Contact.
Standard behaviour is that Account should overwrite the contact, and therefore always show account if account is present. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, and then you will receive the following error when trying to convert to Work Order.
The fix is extremely simple. Dear Microsoft, please just read from the Account field😊
Ideas
If you for some reason feel the same about this, I created a suggestion for improvement..
In Norway we have a saying “everything was better before”. It’s commonly used to describe what old people feel when things are just moving to fast, and they don’t see the purpose of the change.
The new timeline for Unified Interface has been like this for me, BUT recently things are starting to get better:)
The Old
2 tasks and 2 phone calls created. Et was easy to see what type of records these were on the left side with the icon. It was also easy to see that they were not yet completed on the right side, AND that they were white.
When completing one of each I saw clearly that it was completed both with color, and the fact that the complete button was gone.
Another great feature about this was the possability to navigate (hyperlink) to the item by clicking on the phone call or task icon. Worked like a charm.
At last you had a nice feature for quick create that was really nice. The only problem though is that this was never a form we could edit, so in the big picture of things I understand why this was not continued.
The new
So the new timeline has been through a few changes, and this is the lates on wave 2 at the time of writing. They have allready made some small improvements that make it better, but lets break it down.
I have the same 2 tasks and phone call. On the left side I now see orange with my name. I don’t know why my name is there. Would make more sense to have the ICON of the activity type. My name should be sown in FULL as is. In a large company you have no idea who TS is.
On the right side it looks like the task is done.. Well, it isn’t.
When you hover over a task you see the color difference, and this is the first time you actually see the button for complete and open. The “check” mark is complete task, but the odd one here is the open record next to the trash can. Why is it so hard to open a record suddenly? This is absolutely not intuitive, but I guess they just need feeback on this.
WTF!
The picture below look like the one above, right? Well, in this picture I have actually completed the to phone calls. Can you tell? Nope.. A little odd to leave out the color coding for the visuals. This should be something they could fix in a small release soon i guess.
So for the new UI we have to rely on the Quick Create form instead of the nice little form on the old one. This is actually not that bad once you get used to it. On this form we have access to the fields via javascript etc, so this is not a bad thing.
Conclusion
I love the new UI because of more activities shown in less space, but they still need to understand how people use the timeline. If you really want to make sense of the timeline you need to clearly see what is todo, overdue and complete. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense really.
PS!
Will they ever give us the option to stop the email warnings? (i mean completely gone)
At the time of writing this post Microsoft Flow will throw an error when you create this flow with the trigger Create, Update or Delete, and the flow is standalone.
Error
This is the following error you will see when you try to create the flow (Create, Update, Delete) without any connection to a solution.
Sollution
All you have to do, is open this in a solution (for the time being).
Power Platform is maturing rapidly, and users are really loving the new platform for citizen development. The only natural thing to do for Microsoft was to alter the licensing model now that they see how users are working with the platform.
Normally I am the first one to hate on all changes, but this time I am not sure I hate it. I am actually seeing some opportunities here that I didn’t see before.
I am seeing this from a Dynamics perspective, and not Office. There are 2 different ways of viewing this change.
From what I read, we can now setup a 10$ pr user pr month and create a sales app with both Model Driven and Canvas AND Portal. Within the app we are also capable to run as many flows as we want without the need for a FLOW plan.
You might still need one Enterprise or Proessional license in the bottom for the entities to be installed on the CDS, but after that you can create your own simple apps.
NB! I am sure that Microsoft will introduce some other restrictions later on to separate the apps (Sales, Customer Service etc), but currently this is not the case.
Microsoft has used words like “seamlessly” integrated when speaking about Dynamics 365 and SharePoint, and I have hated it since day one. CRM and SharePoint never seemed to get it right, and after a while I feel they just gave up. The current state of the integration is in most cases utterly useless.
Larger companies
The larger companies will require scalability and security. The integration has none of these in combination. The standard integration has absolutely no idea what security is, and therefore opens all documents for everyone with site access. In larger organizations they might want to separate the BU’s or even more granular access like team access in CRM. This is where you have to use 3rd party tools like Connecting Software. The second you start adding security to folders, you will hit the cap of 50k something unique permissions in a DocLib.
Result: Fail
Smaller companies
The smaller companies have the highest requirements in regards to simplicity. They expect it to be easy to drag/drop files, navigate a simple folder structure, merge documents from CRM that end up in the SP folder etc. In general the smaller companies are always benchmarking the CRM system against smaller collaboration solutions, and therefore expect simple usage. Again the standard isn’t enough.
Result: Fail
Microsoft Teams, the new hope
So with the introduction of Teams + Dynamics integration, we might be somewhat closer to a solution for collaboration that could work. For the first time it makes sense to include others outside of Dynamics 365 to collaborate on the documents. A salesperson could now easily work together with others in the organization that don’t have the Dynamics license. I will show you how in a later blogpost.
Does this mean that we can use the word “seamless” in regards to integration? NOPE, but we are one step closer. My biggest concern is still that the product teams working on this seem to be forgetting to solve the simple features. When you merge a document out of Dynamics, it should be easy to put it back in to Dynamics (SP folder) where it belongs! We should need to have solutions like Documents Core Pack or Xperido for the simple templates.
Anyway. Stay tuned for the next blog when I show how cool the new integration with Teams is:)
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.
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.
If you can’t find the Dynamics tracking app in OWA you are not alone. It is simply not supported (yet). Not quite sure why. As you can see in the pictures below, I have one with the new OWA and the other with the old OWA
Don’t think this is normal, because I have not been able to reproduce the error since. I created a very simple flow on top of a few custom entities. I used both the Dynamics connector and the CDS connector while testing. When I was going to clean up my mess, I got an error when deleting.
That being said, when I tried to reproduce the flow SDK step, I was not able to. This meant that I was able to delete an entity with an active flow, and I would say that isn’t optimal either?
I tried removing the flow, but that didn’t help.
Had to add the SDK step, and then delete the step before it was ok.
I have tried reproducing the error, but not able to. Still don’t know how flow registered a plugin step in Dynamics, or why it didn’t remove it when trying to delete.
I installed Microsoft Marketing for the purpose of testing in our dev environment. My first irritation was the need of a separate portal just for marketing. I had to reset my customer self service portal just for marketing (fairly annoying). I have heard that this will change later this April, so hoping for the good news:)
PS! I also had to install VOC and I can’t really understand why I have to install this!
ANYWAY. If you wonder what the uninstall button does, here you go!
Email from Dynamics 365 marketing team
I started off opening the email I got when I installed the Dynamics 365 for Marketing and clicked the bottom link, and then “uninstall marketing from this org”.
Uninstall marketing from this orgYes I’m sureWork it!Are you sure it is?
Well that is nice. It all took about 2 minutes. Could it be true that it was that easy?
NO (lol)
30 ish solutions and 1 portal reset later I was almost there!
Still there!Reset portalOMG!!What could possibly go wrong?
Thank you VOC for creating dependencies that I simply can’t find.. Supportcase created.
Conclusion
This was far from smooth. Uninstalling the solutions way to long because Dynamics kept freezing (probably because of database locks).
Worst of all was probably that Voice Of Customer was installed and I can’t remove it without a support case.
Update:
Support called, and they found a dependency in the App for VOC that did not uninstall correctly. If you go into the default solution, and then remove the app step by step you can finally delete the VOC solution! For me that meant doing the ribbon first. Then the entities in the app, and finally the app. All the while publishing changes.
CRM Keeper 