This year we experienced a surge in new ways to work day to day all thanks to new Advancements in AI. With various brands and tech giants put up their version of AI for public use cases, back in June Microsoft unveiled their take on AI enabled system, the infamous – Copilot, a collaborative tool designed to reduce digital debt and enhance productivity, freeing up people to focus on tasks that require a uniquely human touch.

With the new announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2023, the flagship event for IT Devs and Business Folks, everyone got to know about the new products, features and updates and way forward with Copilot and other AI enabled in Microsoft Ecosystem (Power Platform, Dynamic 365, Microsoft Suite, Azure, Dataverse, etc.)

Attendees also learned about the latest advancements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, productivity, and collaboration. Moreover, they had the chance to network with other Microsoft professionals and get hands-on experience with the latest Microsoft products and services.

If you want to keep up with the latest news and updates from the event, check out the Microsoft Ignite 2023 Book of News

With all the new buzz that accompanies Copilot, comes a lot of questions like

Copilot’s impressive capabilities continue to grow with each update, and this speaks volumes about its potential. But enough with the fanboying – let’s dive into the exciting new Power Platform and other major announcements from Microsoft Ignite.

Microsoft Ignite 2023 has brought some exciting updates to the Power Platform. One of the most significant updates are for Power Apps.

Exciting Power Apps Updates Revealed at Microsoft Ignite 2023

The Power Apps has seen significant updates and improvements, particularly. One of the most noteworthy changes is the rendering of mobile apps natively on devices. This update enhances the user experience with smoother animations, better performance, and increased reliability. This truly native mobile UI/UX feature also offers the latest mobile interaction patterns to users. Additionally, users can now use apps offline, along with the recently introduced modern controls.

Another exciting feature focuses on Copilot, which is available to every user of Microsoft Dataverse-backed canvas apps. Now, Copilot allows users to ask questions about their data with a single click, without any action needed from makers. This Copilot feature is entering a limited preview in December 2023 and ends by March 2024. All Dataverse-backed canvas apps will now include this feature by default, but you’re still in charge. As a maker, you can turn off this functionality for your apps whenever you want.

Microsoft has announced a new feature for Dataverse-backed canvas apps with Copilot. With this feature, users can easily ask data-related questions to Copilot with a single click, without needing any assistance from app makers. This feature will be in limited preview mode starting in December 2023 and will end by March 2024. However, it will be automatically available to all Dataverse-backed canvas apps. Makers can rest assured, as they will maintain full control over the feature and can disable it at any time.

Microsoft Unveils Copilot Studio: An Innovative Low-Code Tool for Developers

Microsoft recently unveiled Copilot Studio at the Ignite event. This innovative low-code tool provides developers with the ability to customize Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, as well as develop standalone copilots. Copilot Studio offers a range of powerful conversational capabilities, including GPT customization, generative AI plugins, and manual topics. This allows users to seamlessly personalize Copilot for Microsoft 365 with their own enterprise scenarios. With Copilot Studio, users can quickly build, test, and publish standalone copilots and custom GPTs.

Additionally, the tool provides essential features such as access management, data security, user controls, and analytics. The limited preview of the feature is expected to begin in December 2023, with the full preview available to all by the end of March 2024.

Microsoft Fabric: A Revolutionary End-to-End Analytics Product

Microsoft Fabric is an innovative analytics product that consolidates an organization’s data and analytics into a single platform. This inclusive software allows users to create generative AI experiences via services like Azure AI Studio and Copilot. Currently, the product is widely used, with 25,000 businesses worldwide implementing it.

Power BI and Microsoft Fabric Integration

Integrate Power BI with Microsoft Fabric to generate reports and summaries from the data within the Fabric platform. With Copilot, users can quickly generate insights and narratives in seconds. Additionally, data from Dynamics 365 or Power Platform can be linked to Fabric without the need to export data or build pipelines.

Copilot: The Revolutionary Feature of Microsoft Fabric

Copilot is a new feature in Microsoft Fabric that provides users with access to large language models such as GPT. With natural language or prompts, users can instruct Copilot to perform specific tasks. This feature is now in public preview and is available for Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, and Data Science experiences.

Discover New Capabilities with Power Automate: Enhanced Process Mining, RPA, and Orchestration Features

Power Automate has recently introduced new features to its existing Copilot capabilities, offering users a range of new experiences. Copilot is now equipped to aid users with desktop flows (RPA) by answering their questions and providing step-by-step instructions and relevant information from documentation. Additionally, users can generate scripts by simply describing the task they wish to perform, and the Copilot feature will automatically generate the corresponding code.

Introducing Copilot: The Ultimate Solution for Analyzing Automation Activity

Orchestration is essential for building and operating automation at scale. Copilot’s new experience enables CoE teams to unlock new use cases for their monitoring and governance strategies. It democratizes access to insights, helping automation stakeholders to easily analyze the health and performance of their automation by using natural language queries.

Admins and business users with access to flow histories can query past runs across their environments, which helps in monitoring tasks and detecting potential issues in flows. Copilot is a game-changer for makers, small teams, or part of a Center of Excellence (CoE), as it provides the necessary insights for greater success. If you haven’t established a CoE yet, our automation kit can help you get started.

New Possibilities with Copilot’s Integration into Power Pages

Copilot has already been integrated into Power Pages, enabling creators to develop websites, web pages and forms with natural language. Now, creators can take it a step further and design websites that allow payments, opening up new opportunities for applications.

Microsoft Introduces Copilot as Bing Chat’s Rebranded and Expanded AI Chat Interface

Microsoft’s Bing Chat is now Copilot, universalizing the AI chat interface for Windows 11, Bing, and Edge. Moreover, Microsoft has added new AI features to Copilot, including Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service, Copilot Studio, and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides.

Microsoft Unveils Two New Custom Chips for Cloud Infrastructure

Microsoft is continuing to push the boundaries of AI with the introduction of two new, custom-designed chips for its cloud infrastructure. The Azure Maia 100 is solely optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) tasks and generative AI, while the Azure Cobalt 100 is a CPU chip that uses the Arm Neoverse CSS design to enhance both performance and energy efficiency in general cloud services on Azure. These chips will be implemented in Azure data centers early in 2024, demonstrating Microsoft’s commitment to providing innovative AI solutions that cater to customer needs and enhance its supply chain.

Microsoft Introduces Loop, Its Rival to Notion

Microsoft has unveiled its latest collaboration hub, Microsoft Loop, which aims to rival Notion and other similar platforms. Loop is specifically engineered to sync across all Microsoft 365 apps and services, providing users with workspaces and pages to organize their tasks, projects, and documents. What sets Loop apart from its competitors is the seamless integration with the Microsoft 365 suite. Loop is now accessible to users in public preview mode.

Microsoft’s Copilot: Now Revolutionizing Security Management

Microsoft is leading the way in creating a unified security operations platform by combining its Sentinel and Defender XDR platforms. The addition of Security Copilot chatbot to this framework brings cutting-edge conversational AI capabilities to IT and security teams, resulting in simplified and streamlined security management. These advancements are a crucial step forward in improving security measures.

Conclusion

Microsoft’s Power Platform can be significantly enhanced with the use of Copilot – natural language and generative AI capabilities, Copilot can help you automate, analyze data, develop apps, and even create content. Copilot can increase your productivity, efficiency, and creativity, making it easier for you to reach your objectives.

If you haven’t tried Copilot yet, you’re missing out on an amazing opportunity to take your business to the next level. Inogic is here to help you develop Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, or Power Pages using Copilot. As your trusted advisor, we understand your unique business needs and can help you achieve your goals.

Visit Inogic’s website or contact us at crm@inogic.com to learn more about our Power Platform Professional Services and how you can leverage the power of Copilot.

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As a Developer working on a project, I always create an unmanaged solution and then create a unique Publisher so that a unique prefix can be used for the tables. But sometimes, by chance when I create a table outside the context of the solution it resides inside the default solution with the prefix new which is quite a frustrating and hectic task.

Also, when I work with my team and everyone works on different projects that need different solutions with different prefixes like, my solution should contain the prefix ‘jack’ and for the other user, the prefix should be like ‘temp’. But sometimes those solutions end up with having the default prefix i.e., ‘’new’.

As a solution to it, Microsoft has introduced a game-changing feature recently – ‘Set the Preferred Solution.’ With this feature, you can designate your unmanaged solution as the preferred one, ensuring that any new elements you create or modifications you make will reside in your chosen solution.

Here’s how to enable this feature:

Access the Power Platform Admin Center:

Start by navigating to admin.powerplatform.com. Select your environment and go to the ‘Features’ tab in the settings.

Enable the Preferred Solution Feature:

Once in the ‘Features’ tab, enable the ‘Preferred Solution‘ feature. This is the foundation of the entire setup.

With the ‘Preferred Solution’ feature enabled, you’re now ready to set your chosen solution as the preferred one in Power Apps. Here’s how to do it:

Access Power Apps Studio:

Head to make.powerapps.com and go to the ‘Solutions’ tab.

Select Your Preferred Solution:

By default, the ‘Default Solution’ is set as the preferred one. Click on the ‘Manage’ button, and you’ll be able to choose your unmanaged solution as the preferred option. For example, you can create an unmanaged solution named ‘Customizations’ and select it as your preferred solution.

With these settings in place, you’re ready to benefit from the preferred solution feature. Now, when you create a table or work on other components, they will automatically be housed in your chosen solution, complete with your unique prefix.

Now, after setting the Preferred Solution as Customizations which contains the prefix ‘jack’, I created one table with some columns, and automatically instead of using the Default one’s prefix i.e., new it took ‘jack’ as the prefix and that’s how my issue was solved. The same was reflected for the other developers in my team as well and they were able to seamlessly manage their own preferred solution with their Publisher and prefix for different projects which made our task very easy and efficient.

Similarly, when you create different assets such as forms, views, components, etc., the unique prefix from the Preferred Solution will be applied automatically.

That’s how the feature works for the assets mentioned above. Also, if you want to add the Power Automate flows and the Canvas Apps in the preferred solution, you can enable the options provided in the below screenshot.

Conclusion

This game-changing feature not only streamlines your development process but also ensures that your work reflects your unique branding and organization’s needs. Say goodbye to the ‘new’ prefix and make Power Apps your own with the preferred solution feature.

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For 15+ years, Inogic has been assisting clients with its Dynamics 365 professional services to get the most from their CRM investments to develop stronger customer relationships, enhance productivity, optimize the sales process, and reduce operational expenses. We combine our deep expertise in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform with experience in procedures, project methodology, and IT architecture. If a requirement cannot be met with the out-of-the-box features, our Dynamics CRM Techno-functional consultants create simple, customer-specific apps to address the gaps. In this Part 1 of a two-part series on Inogic Professional Services, we discuss how Inogic Techno Consulting Services aims to provide expert solutions in the nine areas listed below.

Dynamic 365 Sales

Gain the first-mover edge over your competitors with a well-crafted digital transformation strategy that includes Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. Inogic’s Dynamics 365 Professional Services aid businesses in getting a single 360-degree view of their prospects. Accelerate sales by automating the whole process from inquiry to client onboarding, going beyond pre-built functionality based on your own tailored functions and features.

Dynamic 365 Customer Service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service supports enterprises by streamlining service operations, increasing service agent efficiency, and building customer loyalty. Inogic’s extended CRM capabilities, such as plug-ins, bespoke business apps, scripts, and more aid in customizing Dynamic 365 Customer Service for enterprises to improve their customer service and retain more customers.

Dynamic 365 Field Service

Field Service 365 in Dynamic CRM enables uninterrupted field services and customer relationship management by analysing obtained data insights. Businesses can utilize Inogic for Dynamics 365 field service outsourcing to optimize and automate daily manual activities such as tracking, managing, and maintaining work orders, allotted resources, schedules, and ad hoc requirements in order to optimize resources, boost productivity, and successfully engage customers.

Power Apps

Power Apps is an excellent platform for automating internal processes. The Inogic team understands the app’s needs to design, construct, and execute the app while also allowing for seamless integration with existing platforms, processes, and apps.

Power Pages

Power Pages is a low-code/no-code portal solution that allows organizations to share information with their customers/partners without giving them actual access to CRM. Inogic Power Platform Techno-functional consultants build portals from the ground up, modify existing ones, migrate web-based portals to Power Apps Portals, and more to automate processes for people outside of an organization in order to simplify and shorten the time required to complete routine tasks.

Power Automate

Power Automate enables the creation of automated workflows between applications and services to synchronize or manipulate data, send notifications, and do other operations. Inogic power platform professional services assist in the identification of processes to be automated, flows to be followed, and background processes to save time and money while lowering the risk of human error, through automation.

Power BI

Businesses can make intelligent decisions to increase sales and profitability based on data-driven insights from the combined capabilities of Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. Inogic Services aid organizations by developing complex Power BI reports and dashboards that allow for data analysis and presentation.

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents let users create intensely powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service. Inogic helps in creating powerful AI-powered chatbots for a range of requests—from providing simple answers to common questions to resolving issues requiring detailed and quick communication, thus capturing missed opportunities and improving customer satisfaction.

AI Builder

AI Builder enables you to use artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize your business processes. With Inogic’s bespoke AI models within Power Automate, Inogic can create custom models matched to your needs or choose a prebuilt model that is ready to use for many typical business scenarios.

Inogic Professional Services division is intended to enable everyone in your business to deliver to their full capacity. By choosing Inogic, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner based out of India, you can accomplish automation with Dynamics 365 deployment through proper planning and competent execution. We are widely recognized for providing best-in-class Microsoft CRM solutions when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Power Platform customization and configuration. Inogic’s industry expertise can assist you in accelerating process flow, and improving efficiency, and seamlessness across your industrial environment. Our extensive CRM expertise of more than 15 years has enabled us to give exceptional Microsoft Dynamics 365 services with genuine customer satisfaction and superior quality, allowing you to elevate your professional service practices and begin optimizing potential growth and scalability.

We’ll see you in our next blog, Part 2 of a two-part series, where we’ll talk about how Inogic provides Dynamics CRM Outsourcing Services on Dynamics 365 CRM and Power Platforms. Email us at crm@inogic.com or visit our website for FREE Quote.

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The post Techno-Functional Consulting for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Power Platform by Inogic appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In this blog, we will see how to enable Administration Mode from Power Platform Admin Center. Enabling the Administration Mode comes in handy while performing operational changes to the environment like copying a sandbox instance to the production. Previously, this setting was available from the Office 365 portal for sandbox instances. For more details, you can refer to this blog.

Administration Mode can be enabled for Sandbox, Production, and Trial (Subscription-based) instances. So once enabled, only the users with the security role of System Administrator and System Customizer can access the environment. Enabling the Administration Mode ensures that neither non-administrators nor administrators affect each other’s work.

Let’s see how to configure ‘Administration Mode’:

1. Navigate to Power Platform Admin Center Login with Environment Admin or System Administrator -> Navigate to Environment from the left-side menu.

2. Select the Environment and Click on Open.

3. In Details, select Edit.

4. Enable the Administration Mode.

5. Post enabling the Administration mode, you will get the option to disable or enable the Background Operation. By default, this option is enabled.

If you disable the Background Operation, it will disable all asynchronous operations like workflow, and synchronization with Exchange.

6. Now the Custom Message field is no more editable as it is being removed -> Click on Save.
7. After saving, the environment gets updated.

Once it is completed, you can see a notification on the Environment page stating that ‘This environment is currently in administration mode, so only admins can sign in to it. You can turn off administration mode in settings’.

Now, only users with System Administrator or System Customizer security role can successfully access the environment.

Whereas, other end users i.e. non-admin users will not be able to access the environment.

Conclusion:

In this way, administrators can manage and maintain the environment by setting it in the ‘Administration Mode’ from Power Platform Admin Center.

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The ability to search a record by scanning its barcode is an intuitive and useful feature making the searching process quite easier. In our previous blog you saw adding of the Barcode field in the Case form. By adding this you can scan any Barcode and unique value of that Barcode will get updated in the barcode field on Case form.

We can add Barcode field in any of the forms in CRM. Also, we can search the barcode globally.

Global search will help the users to search the records quickly in the CRM.

Through Global search we can simply scan the Barcode using the Scanner and after scanning the barcode, the user will able to see the records for which the barcode is scanned. After scanning the barcode in the search, we will be able to see the associated records because in the barcode field the unique code will get auto-populated when the user scans the barcode.

In this blog we will see how we can use Barcode Scanning to search for Products in Field Service Mobile App.

Below is the example of Global Search for Barcodes in the Field Service Mobile App.

• Add the Barcode field in the form as explained in the previous blog.
• Navigate to powerapps.com
• Navigate to tables.

• Select Products in the Table.

• Go to views under the Product table.

• Select the Quick Find All Products view.

• Click on ‘Edit find table columns’.

• Select the Barcode and click on Apply.

• The Barcode will get added in the ‘Find By’ section as shown below:

• Click on Save and Publish.

• Open the Field Service Mobile App in mobile.

• Click on Search icon.

• Click on Barcode icon to search the associated records with respective to the barcode.

• Scan the Barcode.

• Records associated with the scanned barcode will be searched and displayed.

Conclusion

As illustrated above, you can see how easy it is to use Barcode Scanning to search for Products in Field Service Mobile App.

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The post Global search and Barcode scanning in Field Service Mobile App appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Most of you would be well acquainted with our popular assignment automation app for Dynamics 365 CRM – Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation. Already a Preferred app on Microsoft AppSource, Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation is a productivity app that automates the allocation or distribution of Leads (or any other entity records) recorded in Dynamics 365 CRM. In this way, it ensures that Leads are not mismanaged or overlooked and are assigned to users automatically thereby improving the chances of creating new customers and increasing sales.

Now, let’s reiterate why Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation is the apt app for assigning Leads, Cases or any other entity records in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Say Goodbye to Manual Assignment of Leads

With this assignment automation app, you can assign Leads (or other entity records) to your team members using Round Robin or Capacity Algorithm. With Round Robin algorithm, the incoming Leads will be evenly distributed among your team members. If there are three members in your team and there are six incoming Leads then each member will be allotted two Leads.

But with Capacity Algorithm, the individual capacity of each team member will be taken into consideration. Here, you will be given the provision to determine the capacity of each team member depending upon their experience. And based on this capacity Leads will be allocated to your team members. Here, the most experienced team member will be assigned more Leads as compared to the least experienced team member.

Assign Leads in Sequence

With this feature of Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation, you can set a sequence or order to distribute the Leads to your team members. This will work for both Round Robin and Capacity algorithm and the Leads will be assigned from lowest to the highest sequence. So based on performance, experience or any other factors you can decide to set a sequence and determine who will be the first to get the share of incoming Leads.

Partnership in Leads

With Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation app, you can automate the process of transferring Leads from one team member to another by using workflows (Classic & Power Automate Flows) in Dynamics 365 CRM. There may be cases, where it may seem prudent to first assign Leads to one team member for initial footwork and then assign it to another team member for sales conversion. This will build partnership between team members and enhance productivity.

Now, all of these processes which used to be done manually can be automated with this amazing app. You have to just do three things – Get it, set it and forget it. In other words – get Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation app set it as per your requirements and then forget about it.

Sounds tempting, isn’t it?

Then go to our website or Microsoft AppSource to download this amazing assignment app for a free trial of 15 days and experience how automation of Lead assignment can boost your overall productivity.

And feel free to share your experience and expectations at crm@inogic.com

While we have been talking about Leads how can email marketing be left behind – it’s time to also look at our latest integration app – Marketing4Dynamics which integrates Mailchimp (one of the most famous and used email marketing software across the globe) with Dynamics 365 CRM.

Until then – Stay Healthy, Stay Wealthy!

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The post 3 Best Practices for Increasing your Lead Conversion Rates – Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation in Dynamics 365 CRM is what you need! appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Model-driven apps – Data first approach – more for backend end user with full form experience.

Canvas Apps – Design first approach – more for the field users with a mobile experience with simple to use and easily accessible apps being designed to serve specific purpose.

Traditionally these have been aligned as Model-driven apps for web experience with full support for pro-dev extensions and Canvas Apps for citizen developers to design using low-code expression language now branded as Power Fx.

Custom pages is the next big step in the journey to unify the app experience and enable the developers and designer to combine the best of both worlds to give a seamless user experience to the end users without they having to worry about the technology being used and wait a second… they do not have to worry about the licensing as well.

Read here, canvas apps designed as pages do not count towards app limits.

With one of the earlier updates, we are allowed to embed Canvas apps within a model-driven form. But with Custom pages we will now be able to take advantage of Canvas app designers to build quick ui solutions that we can surface within model driven apps as;

1.  Standalone pages in sitemap – app navigation in the new app designer now supports adding Custom Page to navigation.
2. Call them from the context of a form through client api like a popup dialog from a ribbon button on a form or home grid as an example.

Let us have a quick look at each of these options.

Standalone page in App navigation:

To add a custom page, we need to go through the new app designer experience that is currently in preview and choose the Custom option.

Next either choose an existing page if you have already designed one or create a new one.

Note: Since it talks Canvas apps I thought “use an existing custom page” would show me a list of all my existing canvas apps from my previous work and allow me to quickly add one of those and get going… BUT canvas apps are not custom pages – custom page is a new component type though it uses Canvas designer for designing it is not a canvas app and it won’t even be listed as an APP in your app listing.

Currently there seems no way to use existing canvas apps as is in this screen here. Check out the recommended way shared by the product team to get them migrated.

If you would like to include this as a standalone page in sitemap then check Show in navigation. Once you click Add, the very familiar Canvas App Designer shows up for you to go ahead and build your app.

For this exercise I added a gallery component with Contacts listed in there.

With very minimal effort, we are now able to add visually appealing listing with images. Before Custom pages, this would perhaps have to be a Power Apps Component Framework Control requiring substantial efforts to develop.

Save and publish this app from the canvas designer and click back to navigate back to the app designer to see this added to the navigation.

Make sure to publish the App to see the preview for the page.

And that is all it takes to converge a canvas app with a model driven app!

Have a look at your solution and you will see this listed as a Page and not a Canvas App.

Calling a custom page from a ribbon button

Note, you need to first have a page component created. You now have the option of adding a new page in the Add new option within a solution.

For this example, we will create an unbound screen to accept notification types from the user as shown below:

These controls have simply been arranged on the canvas. No further code is added to any control here.

Now let us modify the text for the record label to instead show the name of the record that this button was invoked for.

In the App -> OnStart event type the following code:

Set(RecordId, Param(“recordId”));
Set (selectedRecord, LookUp(Accounts, Account = GUID(RecordId)));
Notify(RecordId);

Param(“recordId”) is a parameter that we will pass to this page when invoking it from the ribbon button from model driven app. This will be the recordId of the selected record from the home grid.

LookUp(Accounts, Account = GUID(RecordId))
Here we search for an account in the database with same recordid as the parameter received.

Now modify the text property of the record label added to the canvas to show the name of the account retrieved using the recordId passed as parameter.

With this, page design is complete, let us save and publish this page and return to the solution explorer.

Note: Make sure to also publish the app each time you edit the page, I noticed the page throws an error until the app is published and then you re-open the app editor.

Go back to App designer and show the Edit in preview option to use the new designer interface.

Choose edit command bar for the account entity.

Here, choose main grid that’s where we will add the button.

Add + New Command.

 Since we would like this button to show up only when one record from the grid is selected we write Power Fx expression in the Visible property as shown above.

Next to show the page on the click of the button, we need to call a javascript function. Choose Run JavaScript for the Action property and select the javascript library with the code.

Type in the function name to execute from the library and in our case, we also pass the parameter which is id of selected records from the grid.

Here is what the showCanvas function looks like;

function showCanvas(id)
{
alert(“in here”);
alert(“text ” + id);

//set the pageType as custom, to call a custom page that we just created
// name is the logical name of the page you can pick this up from solution explorer

var pageInput = {
pageType: “custom”,
name: “rooh_querydialog_bd7bb”,
entityName: “account”,
recordId: id
};

//target = 2 is for dialog
//position = 1 is for center dialog
var navigationOptions = {
target: 2,
position: 1,
title: “Notification”
};

Xrm.Navigation.navigateTo(pageInput, navigationOptions).then(
function success() {
// Run code on success
alert(“loaded”);
},
function error() {
// Handle errors
alert(“error”);
})

}

Here is where you can pick up the logical name of the page you just created.

It doesn’t allow you to copy the name so be careful when typing out the name.

Save and publish the command bar and click Play to preview.

Note that while we can pass context information as parameters from the model driven app to the custom page, we are not able to pass any information back to the model driven app from the custom page. In the above example, there isn’t a way to return information of the selection made by the user on the custom page.

Alternate method could certainly be to update a field of the record using the Patch() from within the custom page on the OK or Cancel button click.

Being a canvas app, you can now also invoke a flow from the buttons on the custom page to process the selection further.

Conclusion: Custom pages would certainly help with many of the UI scenarios that have traditionally required developing custom web resources or pcf controls and with license considerations out of the picture, it would make adoption of this one a lot easier.

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The post Custom Pages: A step towards disappearing lines between Canvas Apps and Model Driven Apps in Power Platform / Dynamics 365 CRM appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft recently introduced Microsoft Power Platform Command Line Interface to perform various operations on Microsoft Dataverse environments, Power Apps Portal, PCF, Plugin, Solution, Admin, and Canvas by using Visual Studio Code.

In this blog, we will be focusing on Power Apps Portal and will see how we can connect Portal using Microsoft Power Platform CLI and perform various operation on the same.

To be precise, we will create a new web page using CLI and check it on the portal.

However, there are some prerequisites that we need to configure before start working on Power Apps Portal.

First, we need to configure the Power Apps Portal for our CRM.

Login to https://make.powerapps.com/ and click Portal from Blank.

After clicking the button, a popup will appear where we need to provide a suitable name for the portal and address.

Then click on the Create button and wait for the portal to become ready to use.

While the portal is being configured, we need to install the Power Platform VS Code Extension in our Visual Studio Code.

Open the Visual Studio, click the extension button and search for the Power Platform VS Code Extension. Once it is visible, click the install button.

Here we are done with prerequisites and ready to connect the Power Apps Portal.

Now create new folder and open that into Visual Studio Code. The Power Apps Portal data will be downloaded in this newly created folder.

Open the Terminal in VS Code.

Now we need to authenticate it in order to connect Power Apps Portal. To authenticate we will use below command:

Command: pac auth create –url <Dynamics CRM Url> –un <User ID> -p <Password>

For example: pac auth create –url https://orgname.crm.dynamics.com –un admin@orgname.onmicrosoft.com -p pass@123

You can check if you have successfully connected to your environment by running the command.

Command: pac org who

This will show you the organization details.

Once successfully authenticated now we need to download the portal data into our system so that we can work offline into our portal and then upload it back to cloud.

To download the Power Apps portal data we need to run the below commands.

Command: pac paportal list

This will show you the listing of portal websites and website ids into your connected environment. The WebsiteId will be used in the command to download the Portal data.

Command: pac paportal download –path “<Directory Path>” –webSiteId <Portal WebsiteId>

For Example:

pac paportal download –path “E:\Sam\PowerAppsCLI” –webSiteId d78574f9-20c3-4dcc-8d8d-85cf5b7ac141

Once it is downloaded, all portal data can be seen in the folder and since we have already opened the folder in our VS Code we just need to refresh it.

Now to create new custom webpage we need to know things we required to update.

• YML extension files: – yml is serialized human readable text document file, which is actually not a Markup Language. Using this we will be setting our web page properties.
  • How we can set property? It will be like key value pair and the key will be logical name of the property and the value for the key needs to specify after the colon (:).

Our custom page should be having the below properties and its values.

• Parent Page(adx_parentpageid) : Home Page
• Page Template(adx_pagetemplateid): Full Page without Child Links
• Publishing State(adx_publishingstateid) : Published

As can be seen above, we will be using the “Home Page” as the value of the adx_parentpageid, “Full Page without Child Links” as the adx_pagetemplateid and “Published” as the adx_publishingstateid.

Moreover, to set the above properties we first need to get unique ids for each of these properties. As each of them are attributes of type lookup in Dynamics 365 CRM and to map respective records in the lookup fields we require their respective Ids.

To get the unique id of the Home Page, expand the Web Pages folder and find home. Then expand it and open the Home.webpage.yml. After that copy the value of adx_webpageid. This is the value we shall use for the adx_parentpageid attribute of our custom page.

To get the unique id of Page Template, expand the page-templates folder from main folder, look for the Full-Page-without-Child-Links.pagetemplate.yml page template file and copy the value of adx_webtemplateid. This is the value we shall use for the adx_pagetemplateid attribute of our custom page.

Similarly, we need to find the id of Publishing State. In the main folder search publishingstate.yml file and copy the value of adx_publishingstateid. This is the value we shall use for the adx_publishingstateid attribute of our custom page.

Now we have all values for our required properties.

To create new custom web page, we will expand the Web Pages folder and within it copy & paste any Web Page. For instance, we copied category page as shown below:

After pasting all required things now we will update folder and files as per our requirement.

We changed the web page name to custom-page and also renamed all files inside the folder. After updating the name, we need to set/update the properties inside the “Custom-Page.webpage.yml” file.

You can check the changes we did in below screenshot:

Now in the “Custom-Page.en-US.webpage.yml” we will be adding the same values as we have set in the above step except for the adx_rootwebpageid. In the adx_rootwebpageid we will set the value of adx_webpageid from the “Custom-Page.webpage.yml” file.

After updating the yml files, we can now update the html files and that will be shown in our portal.

Once changes are done, save the changes. And now we are ready to upload our portal data into cloud.

For uploading the changes, we will use below command:

Command: pac paportal upload –path “<Directory Path>“

For Example: pac paportal upload –path “ E:\Sam\PowerAppsCLI“

Result:

We completed our changes and uploaded those changes on cloud. Now we will check if the changes are reflected in our Portal or not.

Open the portal home page and since parent page of our custom page is home then after the portal url we will add “/<partial name of the page>/” to access our page.

For example: <portal url>/custom-page/

Conclusion:

Using Microsoft Power Platform CLI, we are able to work on the portal in offline mode and after doing the changes, we are able to upload them in one go. In addition, it will help developers to migrate portal data from one environment to other environment with very less effort.

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The post Perform changes in Power Apps Portal with newly introduced Microsoft Power Platform CLI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the recent release, Microsoft added one powerful feature called ‘Global Intelligent Search’. In this blog, we will see how the admin can enable this for the organization and how it helps the user, and some tricks to get quick results.

Enable Relevance Search:

1. In the Power Platform admin center, select an environment.
2. Select Settings> Product > Features.
3. Under Search, set Relevance Search to On.
4. Select Save.

Note: Once you enable this option it will take 5-10 min.

Click Here to Know more about relevant search configuration.

Once Admin is done with enabling and configuring the option then within CRM a search option will be available on the top.

Now we will show you some tricks so that you can easily find records quickly using binary operations.

1. Here, first I entered ‘Contoso’ and saw that it is showing all the records with the word Contoso.

2. Next, I entered the Account name + primary contact name as ‘Contoso + Calvin’ and it displayed only those records whose account name starts with Contoso and primary contact is Calvin. So, by using ‘+’ button you will get an exact match.

3. But now, I’m looking for a record where the account name contains Contoso or contact person is Calvin. In this situation, I’ll use ‘Account name | primary contact name’ format i.e., ‘Contoso | Calvin’. Now it displayed all the records whose account name starts with Contoso and primary contact is Calvin. Here by using ‘|’ button, I will get all the records whose account name is Contoso or primary contact is Calvin.

4. Similarly, now I want all accounts to start with Contoso but primary contact should not start with Calvin. For this, I will search by using Account name + (-Primary contact name). So I will enter ‘Contoso –Calvin’ in the search option and it will get all account records except the primary name starting with Calvin.

5. Sometimes it happens that you don’t know exact spelling or you just know the start or end word of any field. In this case, you can use ‘*’ before or after any word so it will give all the records as per the asterisk mark. In the below case, I entered ‘Con*’ so it will get all records starting with Con.

6. If you are looking for an exact match then just enter the word in the double quotation so it gets only those records which are exactly matched.

Also, when we search for any records then we mostly perform some common actions. These are now by default available within the search result called as ‘Quick Actions’. So, now you don’t need to open the records to perform an action. You can simply search for the records and perform actions as the actions are available there itself as shown below.

In the next blog, we will see how Quick Actions can be configured.

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The post How to get quick results by using ‘Global Intelligent Search’ appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We recently had a business requirement to load data in Dynamics 365 CRM. We had a case where the user will create Account records in a CRM and at the end of the day, it should load records in the other Dynamics 365 CRM. To achieve this we have used the Azure Copy Data Activity tool, also we have configured scheduling on the “Copy Data” tool so it will Upsert records in the target system once a day.

In this blog, we have explained how we have configured the ‘Azure Copy Data Activity’ tool to Load records. So, let’s have a look at the steps we followed to achieve the same.

Step 1: Connect to the Azure https://portal.azure.com and navigate to the Data factory. If you don’t have a Data factory then create it first to use the ‘Copy Data Activity tool’.  Please refer to the below link to know how to create a Data factory:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/quickstart-create-data-factory-portal#create-a-data-factory

Step 2:  We already have a Data factory i.e. “DataLoadActivity”, so we are using that but to add the Copy Data Activity tool, you need to add a pipeline.

DataloadActivity (Data factory) -> Author & Monitor -> Author -> Create new/Existing Pipeline -> Drag and Drop Copy Data.

Please refer to the below screenshots:

Navigate to Author & Monitor

Navigate to Author

Add Pipeline

Drag and Drop ‘Copy Data’ tool.

We can change its name from the ‘General tab’, we have renamed it as ‘Load Accounts’.

Step 3: In the next step, we need to add a new dataset and configure a connection with Dynamics 365 CRM. To configure the dataset, we need to click on the Dataset menu and add New Dataset as shown below:

It will open the Data Stores window. Here we need to select Dataverse (Common data service for app) and click on continue.

Once the dataset is added, we need to add link services. To add link services, click on the +New button and it will open another window where we need to set CRM connection details.

Here, we need to pass details i.e., Name, Service Url, Authentication type(AAD Service Principal), Service Principal Id(Azure Active directory App Id) and service principal key(secret key) details. And after the ‘Test connection’, click on Create.

• Name: Connection name
• Connect via integration runtime: AutoResolveintegrationruntime
• Deployment Type: It has two options i.e. Online and OnpremisewithIfd. As we are connecting to Dynamics 365 CRM online, so need to select online.
• Service uri: Dynamics 365 CRM url
• Authentication Type: It has 2 options i.e. AAD service Principal and office365. Need to select ‘AAD service Principal’ option. FYI, office365 is deprecated now.
• Service Principal credential type: Select ‘service principal key’ and then it will ask to enter Azure Active directory App Id and secret key.
• Service Principal ID: Need to pass Azure Active Directory Application(client) Id.
• Service Principal Key: Need to pass Azure Active Directory Secret key.

To establish a connection, you must have Azure Active Directory and use the App Id and secret key from the Azure Active Directory app. You can refer to the below article to know about how to configure/create Azure Active Directory app:

https://www.inogic.com/blog/create-azure-active-directory-app

Once Azure Active Directory app is configured, you need to create an Application user in CRM. To configure the Application user, we need to pass Azure Active Directory Application ID (App Id) as shown below:

After this, we need to select the table name under connection. As we want to load data for the Account table so here we select the Account table. Using the same way, we have set up a dataset/connection for both Source and Target CRMs.

Step 4: Now, we can set up the “Copy Data” tool. In the first step, we need to set up a Source detail, as shown below. Here, we have selected a table but as per the requirement, we can also select Query and pass the fetchxml query.

Step 5: Next, we need to set up Sink details. Here we have selected Target CRM and selected behavior as Upsert. Also, it has other properties i.e. to ignore null values, perform upsert based on Alternate key, etc.

Note: If you don’t want to upsert the record based on the Primary key field (i.e., accountid) then you can use the Alternate key property. You need to set an alternate key in your target CRM table field and then the alternate key will display here under the Alternate key name list.

Please refer to the below article to know how we can configure alternate key in CRM:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/customize/define-alternate-keys-reference-records?view=op-9-1#define-alternate-keys

Step 6: Once Sink details are configured, we need to set field mapping as shown below:

Note: If you don’t see mapping fields, please click on Import Schemas.

Step 7: We can also add a trigger and configure scheduling to trigger the ‘Copy Data’ tool.

It has multiple options to set trigger i.e., minutes/hourly/day/week. As per our requirement, we have set it to Day(s), as shown in the below screenshot

Step 8: Publish all.

We can also monitor the run history. To check the run history please navigate to Monitor -> Pipeline run.

Also, we can run the pipeline by clicking on Debug without setting any Trigger, please refer to the below screenshot:

Note: I couldn’t get the option/behaviour to perform only Update operation instead of using Upsert.

Conclusion:

As illustrated above, with the help of Azure Copy Data Activity tool, we can load data in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Reference link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/quickstart-create-data-factory-copy-data-tool#start-the-copy-data-tool

Source

The post Load Data in Dynamics 365 CRM using Azure Copy Data Activity tool appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.