Convert Quote to PDF using Inbuilt Functions
If you read my blog or if we have met, I’ve probably told you about my love of Word Templates. I think they are brilliant and I’ve deployed them numerous times for customers. One of the requests I get a lot is to convert quotes, invoices or any other Word Templates to PDF. I’ve written about how to do this using Flow and OneDrive’s Convert to PDF action.Quietly, a few months ago, an… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Enhanced Email Functionality
Emails! People write emails every day. In 2019, it’s estimated 293 Billion emails will be sent and only 45% of that will be spam. Email functionality is something that has been unloved in D365 Customer Engagement for several years/versions but in the last year or so, we have had a couple of updates. These include a rich text editor, email preview and email engagement (tracking delivery,… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Business Card Scanner in D365CE
The Business Card Scanner is a new, highly requested feature, coming to Dynamics 365 Customer engagement from October 2019. The Business Card Scanner will allow you to quickly and easily, scan Business Cards into Dynamics 365 and create contacts where the Business Card info is automatically populated into the fields. This could save a lot of time, especially if you have Sales people on the… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Customise Close Opportunity Dialog
One of the most requested features for D365CE has been to be able to customise dialogs to close Opportunities and Cases. It was announced for the 2019 Wave 1 that customisation of dialogs for Cases would be coming to the application. Yay, everyone rejoiced…but the functionality slipped. Then for the 2019 Wave 2 release notes, customisation of dialogs for Opportunities was announced… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
New Old Qualify Lead Experience
Back in the olden days (pre 2015 I think), you used to have the ability to qualify a lead and choose the record that would be created. Microsoft removed the choice and the last few years you either had to live with the default behaviour or replace the functionality with workflows or plugins. I even wrote an unpublished article about how to do this but when it was announced that this… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article...
Quick Tips- Workflow Action SetWordTemplate not there?
Quick Tips – a succinct post which handles a specific tip or topic; not requiring too much explanation or guidance.One of my favourite actions in a Workflow is the SetWordTemplate action which I have used across numerous deployments, shown off in presentations and may have blogged about it. It allows you to call a specific Word Template, run it against a record in D365CE and then it will attach… Continue Reading Matt...
Track duration of Business Process Flow stages – No Code
Business Process Flows are a great tool for businesses to help users. They can guide users through a process, collecting information and ensuring all information is captured at the right point. There is no built in mechanism which tracks the duration the a record has been in a specific stage of the Business Process Flow. Luckily, you can build one.To start with, we need to create a new entity,… Continue Reading Matt...
Blog Year 1 Retrospective
It’s been 1 year since I started this blog (technically it was the 1st June so i’m a little early) so I thought i’d crack out some statistics and some thoughts about the first year.Top 3 PostMicrosoft Flow Vs Dynamics 365 Workflows – Part 1 – In this post we explored some differences between Microsoft Flow and Workflows in Dynamics 365. The example I described was creating an approval… Continue Reading Matt...
Quick Tips – Change name of default App
Quick Tips – a succinct post which handles a specific tip or topic; not requiring too much explanation or guidance.Not since the birth of the iPhone has technology been so App dependant. Dynamics 365 and the new PowerPlatform is no different, but this is all Canvas and Model Driven Apps. Apps, Apps, Apps, it’s all App Crazy!With Apps driving the user experience and the fact that you can… Continue Reading Matt...
Word Templates – Downloading
There are a lot of people with nicknames in the D365 community, The CRM Chart Guy, The API Guy, EmojiMegs; these are people synonymous with either a feature or areas of the product(s). With how much I write and present on Word templates, not even the amount that I do at work, I think i’m going to get the nickname Matt “Word Templates” Collins…in fact, I need to find a better name than… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Flic and Flow – Trigger a Flow with a physical button
I was chatting to a good friend of mine, Iain Connolly about…something and we ended up talking about SmartHome devices. He sent me a picture of his Flic button which got me super jealous. If you haven’t seen them, Flic buttons are an IoT physical button which can trigger actions for SmartHome automation like Philips Hue lights or taking a picture with your phone. I mentioned that i’d… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Flow – Item not in Dynamic content but returned in JSON?
I’ve been doing some work with Flow recently, specifically around approvals which I’ve written about here. I’m creating an approval system for quotes and wanted to send some information to users via Flow so that they could make an informed decision inside their emails. However when I tried to send certain fields, they were returning blank.I was a little confused and started… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article on their...
User Group Summit Europe 2019 – I'm presenting!!
I’ve written a post previously about the CRMUG/D365UG and about the first CRMUGNW meeting that I helped organise as part of the committee.User Group Summit Europe or Summit EMEA is the big event in Europe for everyone in the D365CE, F&O or PowerPlatform community. This year is is located in Amsterdam in the RAI Amsterdam building between the 27th-29th March.This year, I am lucky enough to… Continue Reading Matt...
Word Templates – Advanced Features
In the first two parts to this blog series, we learned how to create a simple letter/mailmerge as well as Quotes using repeating lines in a table. These are some of the basics which you can build upon to create more complex Word Templates.One thing we haven’t touched on yet is automation, how can we automate any of these processes and bring some value added to your D365CE enviroment.An… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Word Templates – Intermediate features
We learned in my previous post, Word Template – Introductions, how to create a simple Word template but now we want to do a bit more. I showed how to create a simple letter but one of the best uses I’ve found for Word templates is to create quotes. But it’s not as straightforward as you may think. To create a professional quote you may want the following:We want a repeating list of quote… Continue Reading Matt...
Word Templates – Introduction
Word Templates are one of my favourite unsung heroes of Dynamics 365. They are great, they allow you to create quick and easy templates which can be used by individuals or by all users in the system. They are essentially the successor to mail merges and work in a similar way. Anyone familiar with these or creating them in CRM 4 or 2011, the process will be similar but luckily…a lot… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
D365 Community Appreciation
I’ve seen a few tweets of admiration, appreciation and inspiration for the Dynamics/PowerPlatform community the last couple of days so I wanted to write a blog post talking about some of the people I’ve met over the last few years, some people I look up to and some people who I think are generally awesome! I always say how amazing the D365 community is and now that the technology is… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article...
Microsoft Flow vs Dynamics 365 Workflows Part 3
This is a summary of part 1 and part 2 of my series on Flow Vs Workflows. One of the reasons to begin this series was to learn more about Flow so that I can advise about it in my day to day life and understand when I should use both. The other main reason was this so called “Divide” between the Pro Flow vs Pro Workflow where people are only using one or the other and to better understand… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Microsoft Flow Vs Dynamics 365 Workflows – Part 2
Following on from my previous post about Microsoft Flow vs Dynamics 365 Workflows, this time we are looking at the built in workflow engine in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.Workflows are the bread and butter of most consultants/Power Users/System admins who want to make the system do something it doesn’t by default. The workflow engine is a fantastic tool in Dynamics 365, it can be used… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Microsoft Flow Vs Dynamics 365 Workflows – Part 1
I’ve seen some chatter recently about people’s use of Microsoft Flow over Dynamics 365 Workflows. Some people are choosing to solely write flows, others are choosing a mixture of the two and others not embracing this new technology.The newer Microsoft Flow has a lot of advantages, it can connect to multiple sources like SharePoint, Twitter, Dynamics 365, Twillio, Exchange and can get data or… Continue Reading Matt...
CRMUG/D365 UG – UK North West October 18
Not my typical technical post but something I wanted to write about. I’ve been going to the CRMUG’s for a couple of years now and on October 11th I had the opportunity to attend an event I helped organise. I thought a post explain what the CRMUG/D365UG is, why you should join the CRMUG/D365UG and details of our event; would be extremely useful.What is the CRMUG/D365UG?The CRM User Group is… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Quick Tips – Can’t Open forms after an instance copy
Quick Tips – a succinct post which handles a specific tip or topic; not requiring too much explanation or guidance.Continuing my trend of copying Dynamics 365 instances, I had another usual occurrence but this time a lot more serious. I copied a D365 8.2 instance from Live to Sandbox as a Full Copy and I couldn’t open any of the following records:AccountsContactsLeadsOpportunitiesQuotesI… Continue Reading Matt...
Forms and Flow – Get data quick and easy, no code
Flow is brilliant! Forms are a great tool! Both combined allow for some quick and easy data gathering. Let’s start by talking about Forms.Microsoft released Forms a year or two ago with a basic premise, allowing end users to quickly and easily setup a web page to gather data and collate responses. You don’t need to be a developer or have access to a web server to host a Form, it’s all done… Continue Reading Matt...
Quick Tips – Copying Organisations and fixing views
Quick Tips – a succinct post which handles a specific tip or topic; not requiring too much explanation or guidance.I’ve come across quite a number of issues recently which have been slightly puzzling but relatively easy to fix once you know how; I thought i’d create a sub category of blog posts called Quick Tips to bolster some of the longer posts I like to write.I’ve been doing quite a… Continue Reading Matt...
500 Error in home.dynamics.com
Matt’s notes: Since starting this blog, I’ve had numerous comments and messages from people in the D365 community wanting to collaborate or discuss with a fellow D365 Geek. The below article is written by Andrew Wolfe, Office 365 Productivity Operations Manager at TSG who has over 25 years of delivering software and hardware solutions. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.The Issue We are… Continue Reading...
Model Driven Apps – Streamline while increasing productivity
Don’t worry, be Appy!Microsoft have gone a bit App happy the last couple of years, PowerApps, App for Outlook and you can build Model Driven Apps inside D365.Apps, in terms of D365, allows you to declutter the site map while giving administrators granular control over what is shown to users. You can specify Entities, Dashboards, Views, Business process flows and Charts to either show or not… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s...
Stop – Prevent deletes while still allowing deletes
Deleting records. There are times where you need to delete records and there are times when you don’t want to delete records. I’m an advocate of only giving responsible users the deletion if I have to give it to users at all. Sometimes, against my better advice, people want to give all users on a certain team the ability to delete records but prevent the from deleting certain… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article on...
Major Changes to D365
Big changes are afoot in the Dynamics 365 world. Announced today by Mo Osborne, there are changes to the way Dynamics 365 will handle upgrades and bring it in line with other Microsoft products like Office 365. Mo Osborne is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Business Applications Engineering….wow that’s a long job title.What’s changing and why should I… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article on...
Powerful – Embed PowerApps into D365 Dashboards
Ever wanted to embed your PowerApp into a Dynamics 365 Dashboard? No? What’s been stopping you?To be honest, I didn’t know I wanted to do this until the recent CRMUG North West meeting where I saw Chris Huntington face off against Microsoft’s own Craig Bird in the battle of the PowerApps.During the presentation it was shown that you can actually embed a PowerApp into a D365 Dashboard and… Continue Reading Matt...
The Missing Link – Get data without mappings but with calculated fields
Ever wanted to get data from a related entity? Of course you have, everyone has and it’s easy isn’t it, just update the mapping between the two entities. That’s simple, I’ll just do that.End of Blog post….Or is it?Maybe it’s not as simple as your first thought, maybe you need to get data from a related entity where you can’t update the mapping because there is simply no option… Continue Reading Matt Collins’s Article on...
Who am I? An Introduction
No I’m not Jackie Chan, but I am an action hero…OK, maybe not a hero but a stunt man who has bumped, fallen and been thrown down numerous steps on my journey through Dynamics CRM, now known as Dynamics 365 Customer engagement.I’m Matt Collins, I’m 30 years old, a self professed D365 Geek; I’ve been working with Dynamics for about 8 years, through every version since v4 or as I like to call… Continue...