Dev Environments Dataverse
Did you recently see the update from Power CAT announcing the 3 dev environments pr user?!?! The topic of more than one dev environment has been discussed in several forums over the last years, but finally, it is here. Go check out the video on YouTube about the details: In short a few key takeaways: 3 Dev environments PR user 2 GB of data pr environment (does not count against… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on...
ACDC 2023 – The ultimate learning Hackathon
In just a few days Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge is going to kick off at Soria Moria hotel in Norway. This is a hackathon that gathers the best of the best within Dynamics / Power Platform / Azure / .NET / M365 etc. The main reason why I haven’t been so active blogging lately about CRM is that this has been my main focus! I am really excited and proud to be a part of the ACDC team We… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 AI code with ChatGPT
By now I am sure most of you have heard about ChatGPT. The AI product is pouring out surprisingly intelligent responses to all sorts of questions that people all around the world have given it lately. There have been examples of the tool writing papers for school, creating blog posts for people, and helping formulate fairly complex text for webpages and marketers. One thing that someone… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Custom Page – Opportunity Close Solution Download
Initially, I was just going to explore some possibilities with Custom Pages, but decided to make a solution out of it instead. This way you can just download the solution and do the required modifications for your project (GIPHY API key), and you are good to go I am really excited to hear your feedback after seeing/trying this out, and hopefully, I will be able to make it a lot better in… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Custom Page – Teams Integration
Did you think my last post was the final stage of the “Custom Page – Win Notification“? Of course not!! We have one more important step to complete the whole solution. I am all about salespeople being able to boast about their sales. If you meet a salesperson who doesn’t love to brag about closing, are they even in sales? Communication is key when you work in organizations of any size… Continue Reading...
Custom Page – GIF for the win🏆
Most of you might know by now that I am a huge fan of GIF’s. I have written about GIF’s earlier when trying to motivate sales people, and I thought I would turn it up one notch! Last post I wrote was about the opportunity close dialog. It was functional, but not exciting. It is still 100% more feedback friendly than the Microsoft OOTB functionality, but it’s a little boring now that… Continue Reading Thomas...
Custom Page – Close Dialog Logic
In the last post, we created a new close dialog, but we didn’t add any logic to the buttons. Logic – Fields and Buttons The most important parameter we send in via JavaScript last time was the GUID of the record that we are going to work with. The first thing we do is add an onload to the app and perform a lookup as the very first step. This will give us all of the data for that… Continue Reading Thomas...
Custom Page – Open Page with Ribbon Button
I am using Dynamics 365 as an example, but the process will be the same for Power Apps. Only difference is that Dynamics 365 has the Opportunity table that we are wanting to use. If you want to learn more about Custom pages I suggest you look at the following posts:Scott DurrowLisa CrosbyMCJMicrosoft Custom Pages I have also added the simple button setup to Github, if you just want to… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Ribbon Button – Custom Page / Dialog
The deprecation of Dialogs has been discussed WAAAY too many times, and I still feel there is a gap for simple dialogs that would do lots of magic. A while back Microsoft introduced Custom Pages as one option to solve this missing piece, but simplicity is just not there yet. I have been reviewing lots of great material from fellow MVP’s to study up a bit on the topicMCJ – Custom Page… Continue Reading Thomas...
Custom Page Multiple Screens
Custom pages can only have one screen… Right? No, actually they can have multiple screens like a normal Canvas App I was a bit surprised when learning this, because I have been told that there only was one screen pr Custom Page. Turns out that Microsoft only reccomends one screen pr Custom Page, because they want to isolate the pages better, and rather navigate betweeen custom pages. In… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 – Conversation Intelligence 📞
I could write a long post with lots of screenshots from the Conversation Intelligence, but I will be linking to the Microsoft DOC’s article in this post. It is really well written and summarized pretty much everything that I would want to say. Docs Conversation Intelligence Instead I will show the product in action via YouTube A huge thank you to Kai Stenberg for making this… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article...
CRM 19 – Welcome to Norway😍
By accident I was clicking around in the Power Platform Admin Center new environments. This is when I Noticed that Norway is now on the list!! The environment URL was CRM19.dynamics.com , and that is really cool for all the nerds out there eagerly awaiting the entry of Norwegian Dynamics / Power Apps possibilities. I was really excited at first to have a look at it, but I do… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on...
Dynamics Customer Service Solution 2.0
A while back I released a Customer Service solution to get a DEMO or Simple production system up and running withing an hour. Due to recent updates to email to case and templates, the solution I had created failed every time on installation. After a few weeks with Microsoft Support we sorted it out, and the solution is back working again! Remember to get the latest version (18 or… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article...
AI Builder + Lobe
During the recent Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge Hackathon I was playing around with AI Builder for the first time. The scenario we were going to build on there was the detection of Good buy / Bad guy. The idea was that the citizens would able to take pictures of suspicious behavior. Once the picture was taken, the classification of the picture would let them know if it was safe or not…. Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
ACDC 2022 – Summary
I just participated in a 3 day hackathon ACDC 2022 (arcticclouddeveloperchallenge.net) and it was one of the biggest emotional rollercoasters I have had in MANY years. Let me just paint the picture first.. ACDC is a yearly hackathon where the best of the best in Norway gather to explore the Dynamics/Power Platform/M365/Azure platforms, creating stellar products. What makes it different… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Azure Authenticator APP Backup
I know I know.. This post is nothing near Power Platform or Dynamics, but it’s just a friendly reminder that you need to check you backup of the Azure Authenticator App on your phone. I don’t really feel the need to explain what the app is, because I expect everyone reading my blog to be aware of the application on some shape or form (private and business). As a consultant your application… Continue Reading Thomas...
Business Unit Name Change
Something small, but yet useful. Thank you Tanguy for the tip As you probably figured out the Default Business unit name is something you can’t change OOTB after you have created a CRM/Dataverse environment. If you are not careful when creating a new environment the org name will be set for you, and that is also when the Business Unit Name is set. This can result in the following… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Power Apps Pay As you GO!!💸
When Microsoft introduced Azure for the Microsoft public, it was a new way of thinking. We were suddenly paying for what we needed and when we needed it. Amazon had been there for a long while, but for Microsoft customers this was a new way of thinking. After a skeptical start, this model has really become somewhat of a system standard. As of today Power Platform will be available on Azure… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 Sales Adaptive Card🚀
Doesn’t matter how many times you tell a salesperson that input of data is important. They will always ask you what’s the output that I can look forward to. A few years back I remember gamification being important, but you normally need high volume of sales + many sales reps for it to be any fun. So in the constant pursuit of having some fun with sales I managed to find a new way of spreading… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 App for Outlook button
Tiny blog for a tiny button This is only relevant if you have users that work in Outlook Web. Every now and then I do encounter a few Apple users that prefer the Outlook Web, even though it works well with Outlook for Mac. Outlook client If you use the Outlook client you know the button from the ribbon. Click the button do load the client. Outlook Web. OOTB the Dynamics… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their...
🚨Update🚨 Automatic record creation rules NOW!
If you are using email to case, SLA or any Automatic Record Creation in classic you really need to update your rules ASAP to the new UI. I can’t seem to fin the message in the make.powerapps.com, but it’s one of the first messages that appear when opening the classic editor in solutions. This post is not going to comment the pros/cons of the old vs the new. I will have to come back… Continue Reading Thomas...
SSIS – Dataverse for Teams DV4T
Earlier I wrote about connecting SSIS to Dataverse for Teams. At the time of writing the article it was not possible to connect to DV4T via KingsWaySoft and SSIS. Dataverse for teams DV4T – Exploring Data Migration – CRM Keeper I wrote about the theme because I still think it is highly important to merge some data to DV4T in some business scenarios from a Dataverse table. DV4T is… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article...
The rise of the Galleries🌌
By now I hope most people know the https://pcf.gallery (run by Guido Preite). A great page for sharing community components (PCF) and exposing awesome contributions to the rest of the world. What I like about the PCF Gallery is the simplicity of the site only being about PCF components. This is why I asked Guido if we could create a similar site for other components regarding the Power… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics 365 Case add new contact missing
Recently I had this happen twice without really knowing why. The add new contact button was missing on the case form. In the old UI it was present, but in the new UI it was gone. Problem Luckily support found out that this is caused by the contact field containing some old “metadata”. All you have to do is remove it and add it back. FIX As you see here we have added the… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics / Dataverse Environment Variables in Power Automate
There have been several posts on the environment variables, but I think Microsoft just released a pretty GREAT update recently. I honestly don’t have a clue when this function was released, but it made my day a LOT easier:) Basics When moving solutions from system A to system B we often have hardcoded values in workflows/flows/javascripts etc. These cause problems because the fields… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Power Automate – finding Dataverse environment URL
There are many ways of getting the current environment URL, but this is the quick and dirty version of doing just this Next week I will post about Environment variables as I know this is a possible approach that is better. The intention about this blog is to show how to use Json to parse just a small part of an action body to get what you want exposed. Power Automate So this… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Teams Document Locations – Where art thou?🤷♂️
Even though we all wish it wasn’t so, Document Locations still rule the integrations between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. I’m not saying that I have a better idea what would be a smarter way of solving it, but it all seems a bit “2011” ish. Last week I encountered a problem with the Document Locations for Temas, and I was surprised when I couldn’t find them in the Document Locations at… Continue...
Dynamics 365 + Teams integration error
Recently ran into a problem with the Teams integration OOTB, where the integration continuously threw an error after connecting the Dynamics record to the Teams. This is a pretty Vanilla environment, so I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong. I obviously could see that the URL was wrong, but I didn’t understand WHY it was wrong.
Dynamics / Power Apps + Office App Launcher
Launching a new app or launching a new CRM system always leaves the users with the same question. Where do I find the application? At first I didn’t really understand the question, because I thought it was natural to bookmark the URL to your application ie https://www.company.crm4.dynamics.com/***** etc. Eventually I realized that most users are actually using the waffle menu in office 365… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 form or advanced find images error
This post is almost not relevant any more due to the fact that we all will be pushed into the make.powerapps experience in “the fullness of time”, but I will still be using the classic viewer for the foreseeable future From time to the images can get distorted due to unknown reasons. This is not a big deal as the buttons still work, but can be annoying for the users. You might have seen… Continue Reading Thomas...
ACDC 2021 – Final delivery
My last post described the ACDC hackathon and what it’s all about, but this post is what our company ended up delivering for the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge after 2 1/2 days of pure geeking Meet the Team Area: Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Developer, Power Apps Areas: Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Developer, Areas: Microsoft 365, Azure, Developer Areas:… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their blog ACDC 2021...
ACDC 2021 – Hackathon summary
WOW… Simply WOW. It’s the best way to summarize this years hackathon. Normally this 3 day hackathon is situated in the beautiful hill of Holmenkollen, but this year we were forced to go online for obvious reasons. One little difference we did do was to open up for teams to gather locally at their companies offices. This way we could add a social factor within safety regulations without… Continue Reading Thomas...
DataFlows – Customer lookup fix🔨
I have allready posted about the Customer Lookup, but there is a bug ATM that will prevent you from setting the customer lookup correctly. Luckily Microsoft has provided us with a workaround while they figure out how they wan to support polymorphic lookups like Customer in dataflows The Problem When trying to map customer lookup you won’t be able to see the correct lookup in the… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
DataFlow – Merge Queries (aka Join Tables)
A long while Back Carina Claesson wrote about joining data with DataFlows. I had created a dataflow with 2 tables and used a specialized “behind the scenes” connecting several “CRM Keys” together. It was a little buggy, so I thought I would give it a try to follow her blog: Combining information from multiple data sources with Power Platform Dataflows – Carina M. Claesson… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 Storage Changes coming your way
A while back I posted my worries about storage and the DB being eaten up by system tables that we as consultants can’t do anything about. Have you checked you storage lately? I created an Idea in the hope that we could come together as a community and make a change, and they have listened!:) <a… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their blog Dynamics 365 Storage Changes coming your way A while back I...
Dynamics Relevance Search just got relevant 🙌
MAAAAAASIVE update in the search experience for Dynamics, and I am extremely excited about it. The global search has received a major face-lift and is now looking really good. I personally never used the old relevance search, because I thought it looked bad and was confusing for the end customer. OLD Search My customers personally fond this search confusing when the database… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on...
Dynamics HR + CDS
This is not the average Dynamics CRM post, but I was challenged by Malin Martnes to see if we could integrate the competency part of of Dynamics HR with Customer Engagement. The reason we wanted to look into the matter was because we thought it would be really easy!!! Turns out we were wrong.. hehe The first thing we did was figuring out what tables were accessible in the CDS integration…. Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics 365 – Rich text editor
Thanks to my good friend Rasmus he pointed out that wave 2 is announcing a PCF component for rich text editing. I had to try it out see what it actually was. After adding the multiple lines field to the form, I added a few examples. Regular Text, Color Text, link to a site, and image via Copy/Paste Definitely cool to see that we now can store Ritch Text with images in CRM…. Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on...
Microsoft MVP ❤
After 13 years of Dynamics 365 (CRM) I can finally say that I am a Microsoft MVP I had no idea this would mean so much to me, but it really really does!! The amount of work behind this title is just overwhelming, making me respect the existing MVP’s even more. I am so proud to be a part of a unique community where sharing the knowledge is the most important thing you do. A community… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Project Oakdale (CDS Lite) – Exploring Data Migration
I will keep calling it CDS Lite in the smallest hope that this one day might get the name CDS Lite. It just makes perfect sense to give it a name like this. Allright, enough about the hope for a better naming future… I know the system is only in preview and many things will change in the next months, but I thought I would give it a go at importing data from CDS to CDS Lite. I had no idea… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 1 hour or less ⏰
Did you know that it is possible to setup a fully functional Customer Service installation in less than one hour? I am proud to present all 3 parts1. The community solution – Download2. The Video for installation3. The Video for demonstrating the product I have put a lot of hours into this configuration, because I wanted other consultants to see how nice and easy Customer Service could… Continue Reading Thomas...
New Email Signature in preview. Is it really an upgrade? 🤷♂️
In the preview for release wave 2020 2 Microsoft is moving the signature to UI. While doing this, they have the possibility to brush up on some old tech. Almost every piece of the old Dynamics moved over has had been given at least a small upgrade, of not a total overhaul. If you want to read about my take on signature in Dynamics, head on over here. Limitations of the old signature:1…. Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics 365 Field Service – Simple example
This weekend I was so fortunate to talk at the Field Service BootCamp. I have tried to design the Field Service solution to be as simple as possible. I remove most of the logic from view, but keep the essence of the process. What do you think? Check out the recording from my session here: Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their blog Dynamics 365 Field Service – Simple example This weekend I was so fortunate to...
Dear MS Could you please just fix the following? Pretty Please🙏🥰
I love the new UI and the new timeline, but there were some choices made that never made sense. Specifically the navigation elements on the timeline. This is a OOTB case with a timeline. I want to open one of the emails to view content or reply. Either way I want to OPEN the activity. Let’s click on the Email and see what happens… NOPE… Only the preview of the email. Great… Continue Reading Thomas...
Dynamics 365 – Customer Service Demo Video
This video is how I demonstrate the Customer Service solution based on my blog series. I like to keep things simple, but at the same time functional. Please let me know what you think. Stay tuned Next video will be “how to install the solution” from scratch, so you can try it out yourself Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s Article on their blog Dynamics 365 – Customer Service Demo Video This video is how I...
Dynamics 365 Customer Service – The Solution
This is the last post in a long series about Customer Service and Dynamics 365. After several implementations over the years, the following configuration should be a great place to start. Before we get started Fire up a new trial of Dynamics with Customer Service, and add an office 365 trial to the same instance. I will not be going in depth on how to create a trial. Navigate here if… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
What the Flex !?💪
So as of yesterday Common Data Service platform was rebranded to Dataflex Pro. Introducing Microsoft Dataflex, a new low-code data platform for Microsoft Teams The COVID-19 crisis has rapidly changed the way we live and work, and many organizations have shifted to remote work or are implementing a hybrid remote work approach as they reopen physical locations. This post confused me way to much. Nothing seemed to make sense, and the...
RegardingObjectID Type fix – Flow
How to fix the RegardingObjectID Type field in FLOW When working with the Current Environment Connector (CDS), you have 2 options for a lookup (Value and Type). For some strange reason only one of them seems to work for me. The Value is obviously the GUID, and the Type is “incidents, accounts, contacts, opportunities etc”. Let’s look at the data: As you see I have values… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics 365 Email to case – The New Way
Microsoft released a new way to do automatic record creation a few months ago, but I never got around to ckeck it out before now. The most obvious reason for the new release is creating something that is possible use within new UI. Therefore you can only find this in the customer service app at the moment. Heads up At the current moment the new approach doesn’t work, for a contact… Continue Reading Thomas Sandsør’s...
Dynamics Customer Service form – Simple yet functional
This post is a part of a series of posts for Customer Service. The complete GUIDE can be found here Before we complete it all I will clean the form a bit. The demo I will be focusing on is the B2B space. If you use the B2C part of support, you might not need any of this. Just continue to the next post:) Before It looks good out of the box, but it doesn’t provide a great amount of… Continue Reading Thomas...