PowerApps and CDS 2.0 (Dynamics 365)
The Spring 2018 version of PowerApps saw the introduction of Dynamics 365 as the new CDS platform on which to build Model-Driven apps. As it is early days in the CDS journey the integration between PowerApps and CDS (aka Dynamics) may not be as smooth as you might hope. Here are a few observations that may be of interest in relation to PowerApps Environments and CDS solutions…. Continue Reading Joe Gill’s Article on their...
Validate Web API calls using Custom Actions
I previously blogged here about how you can configure S2S, Server-to-Server, authentication to allow third party applications to query and update data in Dynamics 365 using the Web API. As the Dynamics 365 Web API is built on open http standards with libraries for a variety of languages the integration possibilities are endless. You can use Web API calls to integrate Dynamics 365 with… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s Article...
Data Import Update
The out of the box data import In Dynamics 365 does not support updating records unless you do an export to Excel and and then re import it. This does not work where you are given a CSV file and need to use that to update records in Dynamics. Here is a quick NoCode way to do a data import and update records in Dynamics. What you need to do is to create an import entity that contains… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s Article...
Dynamics Web Chat with PowerChat
If you are interested in adding Web Chat to your web site that integrates with Dynamics it is worth considering PowerObject’s PowerChat. This probably takes in the region of 30 minutes to get up and running. Install the PowerChat solution in your Dynamics instance and once installed you have a number of options to configure your chat. WebChat by PowerChat The most inportant option is the… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s...
How to Configure Dynamics 365 S2S Authentication
The combination of the Dynamics 365 Web API and Azure Active Directory allows a variety of applications to integrate easily with Dynamics 365 to retrieve and update data. This can be any type of application such as a web site or a data integration process and is commonly referred to as S2S, server-to-server, authentication. Calling the Web API using S2S is a two step process. The first step… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s...
Search Attachment Content with Relevance Search
Relevance Search was added to Dynamics 365 in the December 2016 release and it utilizes Azure search to index the data in Dynamics and to sort it based on relevance. What you may not be aware of is that it will also search the content of attachments. It will search all your common document types including Word, Excel and PDFs. The nice thing about it is that it shows a snippet of the content… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s...
PSA Contractor Time Entry
A shortcoming in the current release of Dynamics PSA, Project Service Automation, is that it only allows you to book time against a project for resources that are users. Resources in PSA can also be created for contacts and this is a typically how you handle sub contractors. You create them as a contact and then create a bookable resource records linked to this contact. You can then assign… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s...
Dynamics and Service Bus Queues
Usually message queuing requires software development however in this blog post I am going to show you how events, such has creating an account, in Dynamics 365 can put messages on a queue without the need for any code. On top of that you can provide a third party with access to read messages from the queue from anywhere without configuring any firewalls or ports. This can be accomplished by… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s...
Project Service Automation – Validate Hours for Time Entry
This blog post covers how you can validate time entry in PSA, Project Service Automation, using a custom real time workflow to limit the amount of time a user can enter for any day. The functionality of PSA is is pretty comprehensive however many users find it frustrating you cannot limit the total duration a user can book for a single day. To accomplish this I wrote a custom workflow… Continue Reading Joe Gill’s Article...