10 tips for keeping data in check
Storing data in dataverse is very expensive. Especially the data that is stored in the actual database (db data). Hence, for many customer with larger datasets, typically with some B2C type of business, it is a good practice to overviewing the data you have in the system and figure out different ways of keeping it from costing too much money. Below are 10 tips you should consider to keep… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Advanced find URL
With Release Wave 2 2022, the old advanced find will be removed and the new advanced find experience will be its replacement. However, there are many old goats, like me out there that still want to use the old advanced find. I think one of the main advantages of the old advanced find is that it is not bound to the tables/entities of the specific app which makes it easy to have a look at things… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Bulk Delete Manager in XTB
Have you ever tried creating bulk deletes in dataverse/Dynamics 365? It is still a very old interface and it is hard to control the exact definition of what is to be deleted as you cannot see the actual FetchXML that is being used. It is also hard to see existing recurring bulk delete jobs and what FetchXML they are using. Based on these facts, my colleague Ebba Linnea Nilsson and I decided to… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Our first connector released!
Previously integrations between systems have been rather specific. For instance, someone has build an integration between Dynamics 365 and Mail Chimp or something similar. The introduction of Logic Apps and Power Automate has, however, at least from a Microsoft ecosystem perspective, changed this quite a lot. Now, when someone asks for an integration it is usually preferable to build and use… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
New Entitlement limits announced!
Yesterday at Ignite, new Entitlement limits were announced and the corresponding Microsoft Docs page was updated: Requests limits and allocations – Power Platform | Microsoft Docs In general I am very positive to these changes as they more closely correspond to the overall goal of what was said to be point of Entitlements. First of all, the most important fact is that non-licensed users… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Large migration – lessons learned
I was recently in charge of a large migration. It all went fine but not without hickups that typically are connected to moving large amounts of data to dataverse. We were using SSIS with Kingswaysoft and ended up using a local SQL database as staging database too. This article will discuss the different lessons learned and give some concrete tips when doing similar migrations. One of my… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Impersonation – the Entitled future
As I mentioned in my previous articles, I am trying to investigate the details of how the entitlements and API Service Protections are working and are planning to be rolled out (in the case of entitlements). I had a very interesting call with some of the nice people in the product team last which shed some more light on the entitlement issue and the best practice of how they suggest the API is… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Delete records like a Ferrari
“Do you really need to delete records like a Ferrari?” – that question was posed to me when I, a few years ago complained about the bad performance of the Bulk Deletion functionality in Power Platform (at that time Dynamics 365 Online) to a friend at Microsoft who I will not name. And my simple answer is yes, we do need to delete records like a Ferrari, for many reasons. I will discuss why in… Continue Reading...
Entitlements are not throttling
Should a five user organization be entitled to the same amount of compute as a 5 000 user organization?Entitlements are the limitations that Microsoft have set on the platform that are based on which type of license each user has. This is not the same as the API Service limits which are much more liberal. The entitlements have not yet been fully enforced as the reporting capabilities of the… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Thoughts on throttling updates
Microsoft recently (in February) published some updates to their documentation regarding Service protection API limits or as they are sometimes referred to, throttling. Some of these, like the new recommendations on how to handle batching are rather interesting and I thought I’d give my 2 cents about this. They are also eluding a bit regarding how the network infrastructure is set up for the… Continue Reading...
Custom columns on systemuser – good or bad?
Some people might have heard about an industry best practice that you should never have custom columns (fields) on the systemuser table (entity) in dataverse. Is this true and why so? This article is based on my understanding of how the inner workings of dataverse works and hence what you need to think about when designing your application to not unintentionally create an application that… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Jonas, FetchXml Builder and Kingswayssoft
As you probably will have heard by now, my colleague and friend, Jonas Rapp suffered a stroke about two weeks ago. Daryl LaBar, Carina Claesson, Benedikt Bergmann and I talked about this on the XrmToolCast which you can listen to here: https://xrmtoolcast.libsyn.com/coming-together-to-support-jonas I would, with this post, like to give my personal perspective on how I use FetchXml Builder… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Can we expect a new API?
Dataverse, and new terms for picklists, fields and more. This has been described in detail by many others in the community like Jukka Niiranen. However Microsoft are saying that there will be no new API, that all API:s will stay the same so this article is just going to discuss this subject briefly. First of all, they will, of course do exactly what they are saying. The current WebAPI will… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Why I love Kingswaysoft
The reason I often recommend Kingswaysoft over other methods of data migration or even sometime data integration is rather simple, it can do what others can’t. Not even Microsoft. And it can do it fast. So have I been payed by Kingswaysoft to write this? No, not a penny, I havn’t even been given a free license even though they… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog Why I love Kingswaysoft The reason I...
Team member licensing – hammer coming down!
The team member licensing option is something that has been a subject of debate for quite some time. What can it actually be used for and what not? I have heard “experts” suggesting that it be used for integrations but if your read the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, appendix A, you can read all about what Team member licensing… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog Team member licensing – hammer...
D365UG Summit – will be awesome!
The yearly CRMUG or D365UG Summit is here! Nowdays it is colocated with eXtreme365 which is a partner event. I was planned to present 4 sessions (panels and presentations) for D365UG but as I am writing this on the second day of eXtreme365 I happend to cover for a speaker yesterday that… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog D365UG Summit – will be awesome! The yearly CRMUG or D365UG Summit is here! Nowdays...
Top Table Usage in PPAC
Top Ten Table usage is back from being lost when Organizational Insights was discontinued. A bit tricky to find so check out the video. Awesome tool when trying to reduce the size of large instances, especially important now that the prices per GB are going up to $40/GB… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog Top Table Usage in PPAC Top Ten Table usage is back from being lost when Organizational Insights was...
API per user limits – The good, the bad and the ugly
Microsoft recently release some throttling that have been causing some stir in the community, especially since the latest throttle, the concurrency throttling, was not very openly announced, some partners and customers were hit rather hard by it as it affected their abilities to manage large dataloads in the system. Now… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog API per user limits – The good, the bad and the...
Fast data management in a limited CDS world
In May 2019 Dynamics 365 CE/CDS enacted some new throttling mechanisms that have caused some headaches for anyone wanting to manage a lot of data in CDS (I will refer to Dynamics 365/CDS as just CDS below). There are several different throttles but the one that has cause me most trouble is the concurrency throttle. Kingswaysoft… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog Fast data management in a limited CDS world In...
How to reduce SubscriptionTrackingDeletedObject table in CDS/Dynamics 365
Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings. We often monitor… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog How to reduce SubscriptionTrackingDeletedObject table in CDS/Dynamics 365 First thing, as usual is of course to google...
Forms Pro Flow activity set regarding
Forms Pro is an awesome new tool that combines the datamodel support that we previously got from Voice of the Customer (VoC) with the look and feel from Office Forms. It also has nice native support for Flow and many other parts of the Power Platform. It is still in Preview, make sure you check it out. A great resource for this… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog
TCP Chimney
Today I was working with a customer and we have had some weird SSIS intermittent errors where the Native OLE DB / SQL Client was giving me some trouble with really weird errors. Errors like these: CRM service call returned an error: CRM service call returned an error: The request channel timed out while waiting for a reply… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog
Azure guest accounts in CDS/Dyn365
Azure Active Directory (AAD) has a feature where it allows users of foreign tennants to be granted access to the current tennant. In other word, if you are running contoso.com and a user of northwind.com would like to have access, you can add this user as a guest account in Azure. However, I have found that giving this user… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog
Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step
A customer of involontarily gotten a Dynamics 365 Employee portal installed. I had to remove it. It has 21 (!?) solutions which are interdependent. This is how I fixed it. As always, I start off by trying to find if anyone else has run into the same issue, almost. This guy had with another portal type:
Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step
A customer of involontarily gotten a Dynamics 365 Employee portal installed. I had to remove it. It has 21 (!?) solutions which are interdependent. This is how I fixed it. As always, I start off by trying to find if anyone else has run into the same issue, almost. This guy had with another portal type:
Server Side Sync with Forward mailbox and SMTP
Most often when setting up server side sync, especially in Online environments, Dynamics 365 CE/CDS is connected to Exchange Online. This is rather straight forward. Even in less straight forward cases like On-prem to On-prem or the so called hybrid cases of on-line to on-prem where the involved parties are Microsoft Dynamics… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog Server Side Sync with Forward mailbox and SMTP...
New times, new blog – less nagging!
Time for a new blog engine, time for a new blog title and time for my own domain to blog from and above all, time for Jonas Rapp to stop nagging about me blogging on blogspot. Old blog is still up and running and I will keep it there for some time as long as people find interesting stuff there. As you might be aware of, I have… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article on their blog New times, new blog – less nagging! Time...
Formating Web API query for getting VoC Survey questions
Working with a Flow to do some text analysis and sentiment analysis on Voice of the customer responses. The trick, as the payment model is per run, is to trigger it per Survey Response, and not Question Response. Hence the logic has to loop through all the question responses. The way you create a filter in Flow for the query is to use Odata filters. However, I found that these were a casing… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Quickfind bug in 9.1.0.643
Tonight Microsoft rolled out an update to Dynamics 365 that seemed to have had a few issues. Most noteably if you have any Lookup-fields in a quickfind views “Find”-columns, it will break. Most of the time, not always. Microsoft knows about this, there are angry threads talking about this, like this one: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/301925?pi61802=3#responses and you can of… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Saturday in Stockholm – will be a blast!
For the first time ever 9 Business Solutions MVP:s will converge on Stockholm to share their knowledge! In the amazing Dynamics 365 Saturday event which will be held on the 10:th of November 2018 at the Microsoft Office in Kista, just outside Stockholm. As usual, the Dynamics 365 Saturdays are free. As the main organizer, me, my company CRM-Konsulterna and the MVP Jonas Rapp, will also help… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Hybrid NTLM Server Side Sync and Exchange 2013 Cert secrets
The server side sync is a technology for connecting Dynamics 365 CE to an Exchange server. When connecting an Online Dynamics 365 to an onprem Exchange there are some requirement that need to be met. These can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/sv-se/library/mt622059.aspx Piping data to and from Exchange and DynamicsBy Quartl [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons However,… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Embedded PowerApp in Dynamics 365 CE
PowerApps or as the new name for it is, Canvas driven Apps, is a very fast low/no-code way of creating applications that can fill in the blanks where Dynamics 365 CE sometimes fit. Can for instance be when there is a mapping entity, a complex calendar functionality or even integrations with a camera or other applications directly. These things can be done, some are even supported within the… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Setting up Data Export Service without PowerShell Script
Setting up Dynamics 365 Data Export Service requires a Azure KeyVault to be set up which is typically done using a PowerShell script which can be found in the Data Export Service setup wizard. However, if you run into issues setting this up, it might be easier to do this directly in Azure by minimizing the steps of the scripts. This was a tip that my friend and Business Solution MVP Scott… Continue Reading gustaf’s Article...
Anonymizing data in UAT/Dev – GDPR
On the eve of GDPR what could be more fitting than a post on GDPR. I think everyone is probably deadly tired of all the consent emails and I think that they will probably even have reached our friends in the US and Asia by now. This article relates to legal matters on GDPR and are based on my personal interpretations and are not to be viewed as legal advice. One interesting thing that has to… Continue Reading gustaf’s...
Admin portal for managing your tickets
In case you haven’t seen it, the Dynamics 365 Admin Portal it is a great place to create and manage you Dynamics 365 tickets. You get to it using this URL: https://admin.dynamics.com/ I haven’t found a link to the admin portal from the instance manger or any other place in O365 or Dyn365 yet so I have just created a bookmark for it, so I suggest you do the same. Also, as I am a frequent… Continue Reading...