The End Is Near for Dynamics 365 (Customer Driven) Updates

Have you been administering organizations running on the online version of Dynamics CRM / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for a while now? If so, you will be familiar with this screen: That is essentially CDU in flesh. CDU of course stands for Customer Driven Update, the process through which Microsoft has allowed online customers to decide when their instances are updated to the latest… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Winter in July: Release Notes for Next Dynamics 365 Version

While I’m over in Finland enjoying the biggest and longest heatwave ever, some of my fellow MVPs and Dynamics 365 community members were attending the first ever Microsoft Business Applications Summit this week on the other side of the globe in Seattle. As much as I would have enjoyed sitting in cold & dark conference rooms instead of trying to hide from the burning sunlight, this time I had… Continue Reading Jukka...

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Unified Interface Form Design Notes

It’s been around a year since Microsoft announced that Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement would be moving from the world of separate web, mobile and Outlook clients into a single Unified Interface (or UCI, as in “Unified Client Infrastructure”). At that time I made a prediction that this level of shift in the client technology would be a long road, and to date that still pretty much holds… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Card Forms and List Views in Unified Interface

Since the beginning of time, meaning early days of MS CRM, we’ve grown accustomed to the fact that record fields in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement can be presented either via entity forms or entity views. The entity form shows the editable fields of a single record, whereas the entity view gives us a list of many records from the same entity. Views used to be read only, but as Microsoft… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Business Application Platform at Microsoft Build 2018

Build is the lead event for all things developer related in the Microsoft ecosystem. This year was the first time that the Business Applications side of MS’s stack also had dedicated tracks in the event agenda. While I didn’t attend the event myself (the Elisa Microsoft developer community was of course represented in Seattle), I was quite curious to see what kind of story is being told to… Continue Reading Jukka...

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Exploring CDS for Apps Platform Licensing (PowerApps)

When Microsoft originally made the Spring 2018 release announcement for Business Applications products and essentially promoted XRM to be the Common Data Service for Apps, they didn’t yet disclose the finer details about how the CDS for Apps license model would work outside the Dynamics 365 Apps and Plans that we’re familiar with. On May 1st the details were revealed alongside the blog… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Discussing Spring 2018 Highlights at CRM Rocks

When Microsoft originally made the Spring 2018 release announcement for Business Applications products and essentially promoted XRM to be the Common Data Service for Apps, they didn’t yet disclose the finer details about how the CDS for Apps license model would work outside the Dynamics 365 Apps and Plans that we’re familiar with. On May […] Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s Article on their blog

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Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service

In November 2016 I wrote an article on LinkedIn with the title “No, Common Data Service is not the new XRM”. This was my response to the speculation that had emerged from Microsoft’s announcement of a new cloud-native platform to store, model and integrate business data with other (cloud) applications. This platform called CDS was seen as a potential replacement to XRM that had been born… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Microsoft Business Forward 2018 Event and Spring Wave for Dynamics 365

The public launch of the Dynamics 365 Spring Wave was at the Microsoft Business Forward event in Amsterdam on March 21st, 2018. Here are some highlights from the event, shared over on Twitter with the #MSBusinessFwd and #MSDyn365 hashtags. (If you’re viewing this post on Dynamics Community page then you might want to visit the original post on Surviving CRM site to see the embedded… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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Trial & Error: Understanding Dynamics 365 CE Trials

With SaaS products like Dynamics 365, getting the process of running a free trial right is crucial for the commercial success of products. This is why you may have seen Microsoft also perform a lot of changes into the process how you’ve been able to spin up trials of CRM Online instances, nowadays known as Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Or “Dynamics 365 for X”, with the “X” being… Continue Reading Jukka Niiranen’s...

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In Praise Of Code and No-Code

Two weeks ago Neil Benson wrote an excellent article on LinkedIn, as a response to a claim that everyone working as a functional consultant in a Dynamics 365 project team should also know how to write code. This really resonated with me and I shared the article, along with a bit of commentary of my own. My post, in turn, started to gain quite a lot of traction on the LinkedIn feed. It looks… Continue Reading Jukka...

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