Some topics that are published on TechNet and MSDN are versioned. This means that with a couple of clicks you can easily switch between similar topics that apply to a different version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Here’s how it works using the “Other Versions” picker.

Go to a versioned topic, such as Deploying and administering Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Click Other Versions located just under the topic title to present the drop down list of available topics by version.

Here are a few more notable features to be aware of when you view our TechNet and MSDN content.

Also located just under the topic title is the product family and versions that the topic applies to.

Versioned topics have (v=crm.x) appended to the URL, where x is the major version number, such as 5, 6, or 7. You can also access a topic without (v=crm.x) in the URL and the default topic is displayed. By design, the default topic is the most recent version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Search engines typically only index the default version. This means, if you search on content specific to an earlier version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the default topic page will appear in the search results instead of the earlier version topic. To view the earlier version, you click the corresponding link in the search results and then use the version picker described earlier to load the topic.

Don’t forget that you can always submit feedback directly to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM content publishing team by either clicking the Send comments about this article to Microsoft link located at the bottom of every online topic or use the Was this page helpful widget integrated with all TechNet and MSDN pages.

Thanks!

Matt Peart, Senior Technical Writer

We’re pleased to announce the publication of an updated version of the Scalable Security Modelling white paper incorporating updates related to Dynamics CRM 2015.

In particular this version includes updates to reflect:

• The new Hierarchy security modelling options introduced in Dynamics CRM 2015
• An expanded section on the way that privileges work and can be used in an implementation
• A case study on optimising a design for scalability

The paper can be accessed from the download centre in the section for Performance and Scalability Documentation here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45905

Cheers,

The Dynamics CRM Solution Architect Team 

We are pleased to announce the release of a new white paper “UX Design Guidelines for Microsoft Dynamics CRM”! 

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48268

Microsoft Dynamics CRM underwent a major user experience (UX) refresh with the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and enhanced further in subsequent releases. This white paper will give insight to the key design principles behind this refresh but as importantly how to take best take advantage of them in implementation projects.

The key objectives of this document are therefore to:

• Illustrate how to use the new features introduced in or after Dynamics CRM 2013 to create a delightful experience to end users.
• Explain how designing solutions for versions in or after Dynamics CRM 2013 should differ from designing solutions for CRM 2011.

This document isn’t intended to explain the technical details of the UX components. Instead, it’s a collection of best practices based on real life customer scenarios.

We hope you find the whitepaper helpful. We plan to continue to enhance this whitepaper with new ideas. Please post your comments here and stay tuned!

Cheers,

Hayley Bass

Roger Gilchrist

Prashanth GanapathyRaj

Did you ever wish to perform all these operations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM using PowerShell:

• Create, retrieve, update, and delete records in CRM
• Manage CRM security by adding/managing users, teams, and their roles
• Import and export CRM solutions
• Manage user and system settings

While some of it was possible earlier using the official CRM PowerShell cmdlets, it required using multiple PowerShell snap-ins.

Introducing Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell module for CRM, created by  Kenichiro Nakamura and Sean McNellis, which provides you a single PowerShell module with over 60 PowerShell functions to perform data operations in CRM and manipulate user and system settings. The module is built using the Microsoft.Xrm.Tooling.CrmConnector.PowerShell snap-in, and the two XRM Tooling PowerShell cmdlets (Get-CrmOrganizations and Get-CrmConnection) are also part of this module.

The Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell module for CRM works with CRM online and CRM 2013 and later (on-premises). To use this module, you require PowerShell 4.0 or later.

After you have downloaded and imported the Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell module on your computer:

• Use the following command to display a list of functions available in the module:

Get-Help *crm*

• The PowerShell functions in the module come with in-built help to enable you to use these functions effectively. Use the following command to get detailed help on a function (say Import-CrmSolution):

Get-Help Import-CrmSolution -Detailed

For detailed information about the module, and how to import and use it, see Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell module for CRM.

We look forward to your feedback, and will be adding more PowerShell functions in the coming days.

Kenichiro Nakamura, Sr. Premier Mission Critical Specialist, is based out of Japan and works supporting PMC customers.

Sean McNellis, Sr. Premier Field Engineer, is based out of North America and works supporting Dynamics CRM customers.

Blog (English): http://blogs.msdn.com/CrmInTheField
Blog (Japanese): http://blogs.msdn.com/CrmJapan
Twitter: @pfedynamics 

We are pleased to announce the release of Microsoft Social Engagement Update 1.2 for October 2015 which will be ready soon.  You will receive an email notification on when the service will be updated.

Here is a walk-through of the exciting new features you will get:

Create records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online directly from within Social Engagement

You can transform social interactions into an end-to-end experience between Dynamics CRM and Social Engagement with the ability to create CRM records directly from any relevant social post in Social Engagement. For example, salespeople can now quickly create new leads or opportunities from a social post that mentions their product or brand positively. People working in customer service can proactively create new cases that originate from a customer complaint on social media.

Additionally, you can benefit from the extensive workflow capabilities of Dynamics CRM to handle the created records efficiently and increase your business productivity.

Improved sentiment calculation with Azure Machine Learning

Through sentiment analysis, we are able to determine how a product, a campaign, or a brand is perceived by people on social media. Previously, we used to calculate sentiment from a static algorithm in a post’s original language.  In this release, we are introducing adaptive learning, powered by Azure Machine Learning, which enables you to customize sentiment scoring models according to your business or industry needs. With a few dozen manually edited sentiment values on social posts, the customizations of the algorithms already show results. Since all learnings are organization-based, you can freely choose to reset the values at any time or turn adaptive learning off if the sentiment values meet your organization goals.

Additionally, we increased the number of languages that the sentiment algorithm supports. This is the full list of supported languages:

• English
• Danish
• Dutch
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish

More languages supported by the application

We continue to add new languages to Social Engagement. For this update, we’ve added Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, and Swedish. This applies to the user interface as well as to the sentiment calculations mentioned earlier.

Increased cross-device compatibility

Mobile devices matter a lot in a fast-paced world. Nowadays, your workplace is where you are. With that in mind, the settings area and alerts are now supported on modern mobile devices. Go ahead, create your alerts while
you’re traveling so you don’t miss any important posts.

Usability Improvements

We’re constantly striving for the best user experience and we optimize when we see an opportunity to do so. In the past three months, we’ve extended the dark UI theme to also support the new Bing Maps that are shown on the user interface. Streams in Social Center now show its owner and allows users to easily get in touch with him or her. To improve the structure of the Settings area, we moved the configuration of Social Profiles to Personal Settings.

Additionally, you can now create alerts from the configuration of a stream, or see the data in Analytics. On the other hand, navigating the application with the Navigation-Bar now resets your filter selection.

Besides the new features of Update 1.2, we also want to highlight two important capabilities that we introduced earlier this year:

See what’s happening and where it’s happening in real-time with Activity Maps

Customer engagement on social media happens 24/7 all around the world. Create real-time maps that visualize the sentiments and newly found posts on an interactive map. Show this map on a large screen (for example at a conference or in your office’s entry hall) to get the most details out of it and impress your audience by showing where the action happens. You can engage with your audience directly from the activity map.

Provide delegated administration privileges to Microsoft cloud service providers

It’s now possible to delegate the administration of a Social Engagement solution to a cloud service provider without adding the service provider as a licensed user. In other words, you can work closely with a person of trust to share the work to administer the application.

We are continuing to make improvements to Social Engagement to deliver great functionality to you. Stay tuned for more exciting features in the coming months.

Customers are facing challenges with data migration scenario, where each customer/partner has to write custom code or use 3rd party tools to import large volume of data. To help alleviate this pain point, Microsoft Dynamics team has developed a cloud Data Loader service for Dynamics CRM Online. The key benefit of this service is the ability to move your data between flat files and CRM Online, and cut down on implementation costs. We’re pleased to announce preview of this service that will empower organizations to better manage their data import/export processes. The preview supports only import operation, and the export will come in the next update of the feature.

This new Data Loader is available as a preview to North American based Dynamics CRM Online organizations. It supports CRM 2015 Online Update1 and the upcoming release. 

Important

Microsoft doesn't provide support for this preview feature. A preview feature is a feature that is not complete, but is made available before it’s officially in a release so customers can get early access and provide feedback. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Technical support won’t be able to help you with issues or questions. Preview features aren't meant for production use and are subject to a separate supplemental terms of use for preview features. 

In this post, I will be sharing the following high level topics for the Data Loader.

Key Benefits

Getting Started

Preview features

Known Limitations

Send us feedback

Key Benefits

• Quick and easy to configure import of data
• Eliminate writing custom code against CRM SDK for importing data and thus cutting down on the implementation time and cost
• Supports bulk loading of data
• It’s available at no cost 

Getting started 

The Data Loader preview is enabled by default for all CRM administrators. Use the following steps to access the service:

1. Navigate to link https://lcs.dynamics.com/DataLoader/Index.
2. Click on Sign in and enter your CRM administrator credentials.

NOTE: This CRM admin also needs to be a Service or Global admin in AAD (Azure active directory).

This will log you in the service, and you are ready to use.

For detailed walk through of how to use this service – refer to the blog post Data Loader Service: How to Use (Part 2 of 2) (coming soon!).

Preview features

• All data uploaded is encrypted
• Support for update and creates
• Support for flat files with any delimiter
• Edit and re-use data mappings
• Excel app for fixing invalid data in the staging db and iterate over the data
• Parallel processing to support bulk loads
• Import of multiple entities in one data project
• Handles auto detection of insert order and relationships
• Imports historical data like closed activities, older Created date
• Achieve high throughput 

Preview limitations

• Only supported for North America geography
• No support for email attachments
• No Web API support for accessing the tool
• Limited to flats files as source data format
• Scheduling Jobs not supported
• Dynamics CRM On-Premises is not supported

Send us your feedback

We are making this preview available so that you can try it and let us know what you think. Your feedback will help us prioritize work to include the capabilities you need most. We ask that you give us your suggestions, questions on how to and report problems from right inside of the Data Loader user experience, it’s the Smiley feature as shown below. 

Cheers,

CRM Product Team

This blog post is the second in a two-part post about the Data Loader Service.  The first post can be found here.  

This post details a quick walk-through of how to use the service and various features.

Configuring Data Loader Service

There are 2 steps that need to be completed before this service can be used.

Step 1: Deploy the Data Loader runtime for a specific CRM organization

Data Loader for every CRM organization needs to deploy a new runtime module to ensure data isolation across organizations and to stay closer to the data center of the specified CRM organization.

1. Click on “Deploy runtimes” tile

2.  Click on the “+” button and fill in the data in the pop up screen. Select the CRM organization that you would like to import data to and click “Deploy“ button on the page.

3.  Deploy will take approximately between 15-30 minutes.

4.  Your deploy is ready when the grid reflects “Running” status as below

Step 2. Configure the flat file format.

1.  On the main dashboard click on “Configure file format” tile.

2.  In the “Configure file format” page, click on “+” and enter the necessary information pertaining the flat file format. Here is the example of the standard CSV format.

3.  Click save.

Now you are ready to start importing data into CRM organization.

Importing data

1.  Click on the “Import” tile on the dashboard

2.  This will start a wizard, follow the steps. Here you can upload data for more multiple entities as needed.

3.  On the “3. Map fields” step, the service will do the best effort matching, of the source file columns to the target entity. For the unmapped fields you could choose to complete that mapping or ignore.

Another key point to note is, the drop down for target fields also displays any alternate keys that were defined on the lookup entities. So you can map the alternate keys for your lookup columns.

4.  At the end of the wizard, give a name to the project and click on “Start data job”. This will start processing the uploaded files and import them to the cloud staging environment.

This is not starting the “Import to CRM” yet.

Viewing the Job execution details

1.  Click on the specific job’s card view on the dashboard.

2.  This will open the Job Details page, which is divided into 3 tabs:

• Source tab.  This will display the success or error encountered while processing the files into staging table. If there are any records which the service was not able to import into staging, it will display it as an error with details.

• Staging tab.  This is one of the important part of this service. This reflects all the records that were successfully imported in the cloud staging, in CRM, in errored etc. In this view user can run data quality validations and fix errors.

• “Import to CRM” tab.  This tab displays the progress status after import to CRM has started.

Run data quality services

1.  On the Jobs details page, click on “Staging” tab

2.  To run DQS, click on “Validate” as shown below. This will validate two things, metadata validation and look up validation. Depending upon the number of records this might take a few minutes, and you could start validate on all the entities parallel if needed.

3.  At the end of validate, it will change certain records into “Not Valid” status – see the pic below.

Fix errors in Excel

1.  User can fix the errors in Excel, by clicking on “Download to excel” button. This button is in the staging tab as shown below.

2.  This will open excel. Click “Sign in” and enter the CRM credentials. Once authenticated, this will load all the errored records.

3.  Review the error message and fix the records. After the records are fixed, click on “Publish”. This will publish the fixed records back to staging. You would need to refresh the data in the staging grid to see the changes.

Start Import to CRM

After the data has been validated and fixed in staging, you are ready to start the import to CRM action. This will basically start import for all the entities in the current data job.

1.  Click on “Import to CRM” – as seen below.

2.  Once the import to CRM has started, the progress of the import can be viewed in “Import to CRM” tab

Any records that did not make it in CRM will remain in the staging grid in “Errored” status with detail error message that was received from CRM web service. The user can review the error messages and fix the records again in Excel and retry import. This service enables iterative import of data until all the records that are required are imported.

Refresh CRM Metadata in Data Loader

Once the Data Loader runtime is deployed, and thereafter if there are metadata changes or customization added on CRM side, then you would need to follow the steps below to refresh the metadata in Data Loader.

1.  Click on “Deployed runtimes” on the main dashboard

2.  Select the CRM organization in the grid and click on the refresh icon over the grid.

This will start refreshing the metadata. It might take several minutes before the refreshed metadata is reflected.

Cheers,

CRM Product Team

In Today’s world, the success of an organization is directly linked to the quality of customer service it provides. The only way to do customer-centricity right is to offer customers the right information. Knowledge management is considered as one of the most important pillar of customer service that helps organization give their customers the right data at the right time to solve their problems.

As Bob Stutz mentioned in his blog post, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with a new knowledge management solution. With this new solution, you can quickly turn customer feedback and issues into knowledge articles. Content authoring and update of knowledge articles is enabled in the interactive service hub. Here are the main features that come with the Knowledge Management offering in CRM 2016 release: 

• Rich Content authoring– Knowledge management comes with a rich text editor that makes content authoring simple. It also allows advanced features like paste from word, and supports editing the source\HTML code.
• Embedded images and Videos–You can now embed videos and images to the knowledge articles. Videos and images help in describing things better.

• Versioning– You can now create versions of a knowledge article. It is possible to create major and minor version. This allows Knowledge manager to publish earlier versions and simultaneously have the authors work on the new (current) versions.
• Translation– Knowledge articles supports translating a knowledge article in ~164 languages. It also maintains a link among all translations of an article. Please note that there is no out of box actual content translation that happens with Knowledge article. CRM just marks the article for translation so the knowledge manager can pick all the articles that need to be translated and pass it on to the translation vendors.
• Knowledge Management dashboards– There are out of box interactive dashboards for Knowledge Manager (new roles introduced) and Knowledge Author. They provide quick glimpse of knowledge authoring stages.

Figure 1 My Knowledge Dashboard

Figure 2 Knowledge Manager Dashboard

• Life cycle and article review business process flows– A typical knowledge management process like authoring, review, approval, expiry is enabled out-of-the-box through business process flows. These can be extended through customization and solution based on your business scenario.

• Schedule Publish \ Expiry– Knowledge management supports scheduling knowledge articles for publishing and expiry.
• Knowledge management context search– Knowledge management supports embedding the knowledge article search in any entity form in CRM. The search is set up to automatically search knowledge articles based on the configured field of a record. 

This is a list of few main features of the new Knowledge management solution. More blogs will follow to cover these features in detail.

Regards,

Niraj Yadav

As Bob Stutz mentioned in his blog post, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 introduces a new knowledge management solution. With this solution, you can embed the Knowledge Article Search on any entity in the Dynamics CRM. For more information about new knowledge management solution, read New Knowledge Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 release.

How to Configure Knowledge Article Search with Dynamics CRM

You can activate Knowledge Search on different entities, which means that users can search and view knowledge articles from any entity. Out of the box, the Knowledge Search is already activated on the Case entity. To activate it on any other entities, follow the steps below.

1.  Navigate to Settings> Business> Service Management

2.  Under Knowledge Base Management, click Embedded KnowledgeSearch. This will open the knowledge Base Management Settings wizard.

3.  In Knowledge Base Management Settings wizard, select the record types (ex: Account) that you want to place Knowledge Article Search on. By default, Case is selected.

4.  Dynamics CRM supports the use of the CRM knowledge articles as well as the Parature Knowledge articles. To configure it with CRM Knowledge articles, select Dynamics CRM from the Knowledge Solution dropdown.

5.  If user has support for portal then turn on the portal and provide the external URL format. Otherwise, you can skip this step.

6.  Click Next to go to the Knowledge Base Management Settings summary page.

7.  Click Finish to complete the setup wizard.

How to add Embedded Knowledge Search control to the Form

Once you’ve activated the knowledge search on different entities, you can add the KM Control on those entity forms.

1.  Open the form editor and click on the form's section (example, Social Pane) where you want to add this control. Now click the Insert tab, and then click Knowledge Base Search. The Set Properties dialog box opens where you can set the properties of the Knowledge Base Search control.

2.  Set the display and formatting settings by entering the name, label, filter criteria and additional options and then click Set.

 

 

3.  Now go to Home and click on Save and then click on publish. This will complete the setup.

Now open the entity record and check the section where you have added this control. The Knowledge Base Search pane (control) should show up there.

The Knowledge Base Search pane on a case record form in the web application looks like below:

The Knowledge Base Search pane on a case record form in the interactive service hub (in Main Interaction Centric form) looks like below:

Regards,

Vijaya Mudundi

We are pleased to announce the release of a new setup guide: Server side synchronization for CRM Online with Exchange Server.

This setup guide will take you step by step and guide you how to prepare Exchange Server, and how to configure CRM Online with Exchange Server.

Have questions? Feedback? Drop us a line to crmssspm@microsoft.com

Brace yourself – Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1 is just around the corner. We’re excited to share the news on the features and improvements we’re about to launch.

Publish tweets and posts to Facebook pages from Social Center

In addition to the reactive interactions, Social Engagement now enables you to compose new tweets or Facebook posts directly from Social Center. All you need is an authenticated Social Profile in Social Engagement to start reaching out to your audience immediately! 

New sentiment and app languages introduced

Get in touch with your audience using Turkish language. The acquisition of social posts, the application interface and sentiment calculation are now available for Turkish besides the already available languages for the application interface and sentiment calculation. With this release, we’re now covering 20 search languages for data acquisition as well as 15 languages for application translations for sentiment processing. For more information about the languages that Social Engagement is translated into, see the Microsoft Social Engagement Translation Guide.

Improved language detection with Microsoft Translator

Social Engagement now makes use of the Microsoft Translator (API) to provide improved language detection for all available languages in collaboration with Bing. Posts that were found so far without a pre-defined language from data acquisition are analyzed and if possible get categorized in one of our 20 available languages.

Filtering for posts linked to Dynamics CRM 

Social Engagement now allows filtering for posts that are either linked or not linked to CRM. Apply a filter for your data set and find linked posts quickly. Build streams and workflows to track the posts that require your attention.

Service and performance improvements

Availability and performance are key aspects of an online service. With growing usage, the architecture needs the flexibility to scale quickly when required. In collaboration with the Microsoft Azure team, we’re constantly investing in our infrastructure. We’ve migrated critical parts of the service to new generation high-performance hardware and upgraded the ElasticSearch index to the latest version. This results in faster loading times for widgets and pages in the application. Additionally, we have tweaked the queries done by the application to make bulk actions on larger number of posts complete faster than ever before. We’re committed to continue our investments in this area and strive for pushing performance to the next level. 

Enjoy!

Microsoft Social Engagement Team

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016's new knowledge management offering allows you to easily create, publish and manage knowledge articles for your organization. Often you might want to publish the same article to multiple different languages. To solve this issue, CRM 2016 allows you to create and publish translated versions of your article.

Let’s walk through a simple example - say you’ve created an article titled “Upgrade Instructions” in English, and would like to also provide Spanish translation of your article. Start by opening up the latest English version of your article, and selecting the “Translate” ribbon button on the top ribbon bar.

Doing this opens a dialog where you can set the language of the new translation – in this case, to Spanish.

Note, the available languages are independent of which language packs you have installed. There are 164 possible languages out of box, and you can disable languages you don’t want so show up as options for your organization.

After hitting Create, you’ll be forwarded to the edit form for the new article translation. This will copy over the certain fields, like title and content, from the English version to the new Spanish version. Note that the actual translation of the text is manual, not automatic, so you’ll have to still translate the text yourself.

Once you finish translating the article text from English to Spanish, it’s time to move the article through the rest of its lifecycle. This occurs like any other article - see the Lifecycle blog for more details. Translations do have one difference in the lifecycle: you can publish or schedule a translation in multiple ways. The first way is the same as any other article – just click the “Publish” ribbon button on the top. You’ll notice there’s one extra option in the dialog for publishing – a yes/no option for “When publishing this translation, inherit product associations from the related primary article.” Selecting yes for this option will copy any product associations on the English article to the Spanish article. If you’ve already set the product associations for the English article, this will save you some time.

The other option is to publish our Spanish translation right with the English version. If you click the “Publish” ribbon on the English article, there will be a yes/no option on the resulting dialog for “Publish approved related translations with article.” Selecting yes for this option will cause your Spanish article to be published at the same time as your English article. The other options you select in the publish dialog will also be inherited by the Spanish article, such as expiration date or publish status.

The translation is directly tied to the major and minor version of the primary article you created it from. You can update or create new major or minor versions for the translation, and it will still be tied to the original primary article you created it from. You can see all the translations of a primary article by going to the Related Translations grid in the Summary tab. See #Versions# for more information of article versioning.

Regards,

Justin Terry

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 brings a new Knowledge Management solution to help organizations in offering great customer service. It comes with rich content authoring and workflow capabilities to manage knowledge articles in the interactive service hub. Please refer to blog New Knowledge Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 release to know more about Knowledge management in 2016 release.

Adding to the Knowledge Management out-of-the-box capabilities, CRM users can further accelerate knowledge articles authoring even better by using CRM Queues. This blog will walk you through the steps on using queues in the context of knowledge articles.

• Organization Contoso is launching new products, and is creating knowledge articles to help their customer service representatives in providing information to customers.
• Contoso wants the articles written by content authors. Once the authors are done writing the articles, they should be reviewed by knowledge managers before they are published.
• As the volume of articles is going to be high, Contoso is looking for a simpler way of getting this accomplished.
• Contoso leverages CRM queues to achieve this.

Following are the details of the approach.

• Contoso has identified the following two roles to manage knowledge articles for its products
  • Content author- responsible for authoring the knowledge articles and publishing them.
  • Knowledge managers- responsible for reviewing the knowledge articles content before the articles are published by author.

Note: Knowledge manager is a new role introduced in this release. A knowledge manager is the person who is responsible for managing the knowledge articles.

• As Contoso is planning to release multiple new products, and is expecting high volume of knowledge articles to be reviewed, they decide to use CRM queues to better manage the review process of the articles.

Note: Use queues to organize, prioritize, and monitor the progress of your work. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, queues are containers to store anything that needs to be completed or requires an action.

Contoso creates a new queue “Knowledge Article Approval Queue” and the purpose of this queue is to contain all the articles that are ready for review.

“Knowledge Article Approval Queue” queue is accessible only to Knowledge Managers. After completing the article, content Authors can add their articles to this queue.

Knowledge Managers monitor the queue, and review the completed articles and approve so that authors can publish them.

Prerequisites

• Contoso has identified users who are “Content Authors” and “Knowledge Managers”.
• Contoso has created a queue with the name “Knowledge Article Approval Queue” keeping it private and only accessible to “Knowledge Managers”.
• Content authors have created few new articles that are ready to add to queue for review.

Steps

Author adds completed article to the Knowledge Article Approval queue

1.  In the interactive service hub, log on as a content author.
2.  Navigate to Service > Knowledge Articles, and open the article that’s complete and ready for review.

3.  Click the Author stage and set the Mark for Review field to “Completed”.

4.  Click “Add to Queue” action from the command bar.

5.  Select the queue, and click Add.

Please note that this is the queue that you must have created as part of the prerequisites.

Knowledge manager picks the article for review from the queue and approves it 

1.  Log on as a knowledge manager in the interactive service hub.

2.  Navigate to Service > Queue Items.

3.  Select the query "All Items".

4.  Choose the queue “Knowledge Article Approval Queue” from the drop-down. 

This shows the list of items available in the queue.

5.  Pick the knowledge article that’s added to the queue by the author. To do this, click the “Pick” button on the command bar.

6.  In the Pick dialog box, click the “Pick” button to assign the article to yourself.

7.  Now you can see the “Worked By” column populated with your name. Open the article by clicking the article title from the list of records.

8.  Review the article, and approve it by clicking the “Approve” button on the command bar.

Author publishes the approved article

1.  Log on as a content author in the interactive service hub.
2.  Navigate to Service > Knowledge Articles, and open the article that is approved by the Knowledge Manager.
3.  In the article, click “Publish” on the command bar.

This opens the Publish dialog box. Provide the required details, and confirm the action to publish.

Regards,

Srinivas Rao Pittla Venkata

Microsoft Dynamics CRM currently has two phone apps available in the market:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for phones
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for phones express

Going forward, newer versions of CRM won’t support CRM for phones express, but will only provide support for the newer version of the app, currently named “Microsoft Dynamics CRM for phones,” in the app markets.

The newer app, which has a similar look and feel to our CRM for tablets app, gives you:

• Offline capabilities
• Business rules and business logic
• Full forms instead of mobile forms
• Quick create experiences
• And more!

Learn more about the newer mobile app

Availability

In the app marketplace, you’ll still see CRM for phones express, which continues to work with previous versions of CRM. However, we will no longer provide support for CRM for phones express for newer phone OS versions or functionality enhancements. The express version isn’t available for CRM Online 2016 Update (version 8.0) or later releases.

The newer CRM for phones app will be available for CRM Online 2015 Update 1 (version 7.1) and CRM Online 2016 Update.

Get the newer phone apps here:

• Windows
• iPhone
• Android (Google Play)

We’re pleased to announce a three-part video series for building xRM solutions.  In this series, you’ll get an end-to-end walk through of the key extensibility capabilities (xRM) of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allow you to build line of business (LOB) applications.

Building xRM Solutions I: Introduction

Dynamics CRM's capabilities can be leveraged to build line of business applications, managing any relationship and interaction versus customer relationships and interactions.  In this video, we'll walk through the the xRM framework within CRM, including:

• Rapid application development
• Business process management
• Business intelligence
• User experience

Building xRM Solutions II: Configuration

In this video, the terms configuration and customization are used interchangeably, and refer to an iterative process of defining the data model, security model, navigation, forms and views, business process flows, business rules, business process automation, and solution packaging.

Building xRM Solutions III: Code

In this video, we'll cover four main concepts to consider when extending CRM to build a xRM solution:

• Client extensions
• Server extensions
• Integration
• Custom user experiences

Enjoy!

David Yack @davidyack

Marc Schweigert @devkeydet

You can use JavaScript in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to perform actions in form scripts, command bar (ribbon) commands, and web resources. More information: Use JavaScript with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Each browser provides you with a debugging tool to help you debug your custom JavaScript code natively in the browser. Typically, you activate debugging in your browser by pressing the F12 key to display the native developer tool used for debugging.

In This Post

Debugging your JavaScript code for CRM web client

Debugging your JavaScript code for Interactive Service Hub client

Debugging your JavaScript code for CRM mobile clients

Browser Developer Tools Reference

Debugging your JavaScript code for CRM web client

When you use a custom JavaScript library with the CRM web client, the library is loaded with the page, and you can view it in the browser developer tools to set break points, and examine the variables as the code executes to debug your JavaScript code.

For example, on Microsoft Edge, the custom JavaScript library becomes available in the Debugger tab.

On Google Chrome, the custom JavaScript library is available in the Sources tab.

For more information, see Debugging JavaScript in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Debugging your code for Interactive Service Hub client

When you use a custom JavaScript file or library with the new Interactive Service Hub client (introduced in CRM 2016), instead of loading your custom JavaScript library with the web page, CRM dynamically injects the contents of the custom JavaScript library in a dynamic library in the app. Developers cannot set break points on their custom code because every time the page is reloaded, the custom JavaScript code is injected into one of the dynamic libraries which will prevent the specified break point to be hit.

In this case, you could use any of the following techniques to debug your dynamic JavaScript code. Please be aware that this is not a comprehensive list, but provides some of the ways that can be helpful in debugging your dynamic JavaScript code. All the methods listed below might not work the same across all the browsers supported by CRM, and you must research around to see what suits best as per your requirement.

• Test your JavaScript code using the CRM web client. As the code is not dynamically injected on the CRM web client, it is convenient to locate the script and set break points for easy debugging as explained earlier.
• Set your debugger in the browser developer tool to break/pause even on handled or caught exceptions because CRM catches exception in the custom JavaScript library. For example:
  • On Microsoft Edge, select Break on All Exceptions in the Debugger tab:
    
  • On Google Chrome, select the Pause on Caught Exceptions check box in the Sources tab.
    
• Use try and catch statements in your code to test and execute a block of code and handle the error, if any. In the catch statement, you can output the exception details using the console.log() statement. For example, in the following sample code, ‘adddlert’ is undefined, and the resulting error details (message, description, stack trace) will be displayed in the console:

  try {
   adddlert("Hello world!");
  }
  catch(err) {
   console.log(err);
  }

• You can use the Breakpoints in Dynamic JavaScript capability in Google Chrome for debugging dynamic script by providing a name for your dynamic script, so that the script becomes available in the Sources tab allowing you to set break points to easily debug the code.

  For this to work, you need to provide the following comment at the end of your script:

  //# sourceURL=dynamicScript.js

  For example, here is a sample JavaScript code:

  function test() {
   console.log("test");
  }
  
  //# sourceURL=dynamicScript.js

  This will result in the dynamic file showing up in the Sources tab with the following name: dynamicScript.js.

  You’ll need to navigate once to the page to set the break point. The break point is hit even when you hit the refresh command or when you navigate in or out of the page.

  NOTE: This method only works with Google Chrome.

• Copy and run your code directly in the Console tab of the browser developer tool to test and make changes to your code as required. You might have to switch to the multi-line mode in the Console tab of your browser dev tools to run your code if it does not support multiple lines of code by default.
  For more information about the multi-line mode in Microsoft Edge, see the The multiline command line section in Console Tool.

• Add a debugger statement at the beginning of your script and dynamically add break points once the debugger statement is hit. You’ll however need to add the break points every time you load the page (via navigation or refresh command). This works best if you are trying to debug onChange handlers since the debug points persist so long as you are on the page. For more information, see JavaScript debugger Statement.

  NOTE: Remember to remove the debugger statement after you have tested and fixed all the issues in your JavaScript code, and are ready to publish your library in CRM.

Debugging your JavaScript code for CRM mobile clients

As with the Interactive Service Hub client, CRM injects your custom JavaScript code into one of the dynamic libraries, so you face the same challenge in debugging your code. However, the instructions to debug code for CRM mobile clients are different than the Interactive Service Hub client. For more information, see Debugging scripts for CRM for tablets.

Browser Developer Tools Reference

Developer Tools in Microsoft Edge

Developer Tools in Microsoft Internet Explorer

Developer Tools in Google Chrome

Developer Tool in Mozilla Firefox

Developer Tools in Apple Safari (Web Inspector)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK Documentation Team

SMS marketing is here!

The big news for this release is the introduction of mobile (SMS) marketing, which enables you to deliver instant text messages directly to marketing contacts on the move, regardless of whether they carry a smart phone or a traditional mobile phone. SMS marketing is new to Dynamics Marketing and might also be new to you, so it is important that you understand how it works and how to use it to deliver the greatest benefits for your organization. Our online documentation will help you get started:

• Start by reading our SMS marketing overview, which will help you understand the terminology, technologies, and regulations that apply when doing SMS marketing.

• Learn how to set up SMS keywords , which create an interactive SMS opt-in system that enables contacts to sign up for your newsletters and campaigns while ensuring compliance with local regulations.

• When your contacts start signing up, you are ready to create and compose your SMS messages .

• Integrate SMS messaging with your cross-media automated campaigns or send them directly to any marketing list that includes opted-in contacts.

• Finally, inspect and analyze your SMS marketing results.

Design custom analytics and reports with expanded OData feeds and documentation

Though Dynamics Marketing provides a collection of pre-built reports and analytics features, many organizations choose to expand on these by creating customized, detailed, graphical reports based on OData feeds delivered live from Dynamics Marketing. Microsoft Power BI and Excel with Power Query are the tools that make this possible. With each release of Dynamics Marketing, we have expanded the collection of OData feeds available and now, to help you work more effectively with the available data, we have likewise expanded our OData feed documentation to include more technical details and all of the latest feeds.

Need help connecting to CRM? Check out our new connector troubleshooting and FAQ topic

In cooperation with Microsoft Support, we have collected solutions to the most commonly experienced problems and frequently asked questions related to integrating Dynamics Marketing with Dynamics CRM. They are now published in the new connector troubleshooting guide and FAQ .

Another good resource for information is the Dynamics Marketing Support Blog , which includes a five-part series on setting up the connector .

Note also that our standard connection installation and configuration documentation has moved from TechNet to the Dynamics Marketing customer center, where it is better integrated with our other user and administrator documentation. Be sure to update your bookmarks.

Inspect and copy HTML generated with the graphical email editor

When you create a marketing email using the drag-and-drop email editor, the system generates standard HTML to implement your design. The email maintenance page now provides a tab that lets you inspect the generated HTML and, if needed, copy it to be pasted and further developed using your favorite HTML editor. See the updated Create or view email marketing messages topic for details.

What else is new?

See the What’s new topic for a comprehensive overview of the major new features introduced in the Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update. The topic includes a brief summary of each feature together with links to documentation resources that provide full details about how to use it.

New to Dynamics Marketing? Get started quickly with these tutorials

Last summer we began issuing a series of step-by-step tutorials/walkthroughs designed to get new users started quickly with the most important features of Dynamics Marketing. Our fourth, and most recent, tutorial explores the many aspects of the Dynamics Marketing lead-scoring system. If you are new to Dynamics Marketing, then we recommend working through the entire series; each walkthrough builds on previous exercises and leverages the sample data that you create as you work. Here is the complete series:

• Walkthrough 1: Create marketing contacts and lists

• Walkthrough 2: Create, send and monitor a marketing email

• Walkthrough 3: Behavior analysis and campaign automation

• Walkthrough 4: Lead scoring

Another good resource for new users is the Learn how to work and get around help topic, which introduces many of the common user-interface elements and working methods that you'll employ while working in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.

If you are primarily a Dynamics CRM user who uses Dynamics Marketing mostly to collaborate with your marketing professionals, then check out the Dynamics Marketing for Dynamics CRM users topic, which highlight collaboration features.

Video learning

For those who prefer videos to text-based resources, we provide a growing collection of videos on a wide range of Dynamics Marketing topics. Some videos are designed to give a broad overview of a particular feature area to sketch out possibilities, while others provide deep, step-by-step tutorials for accomplishing specific tasks. For a categorized list of videos, see our Videos & eBooks help topic.

Join the online community

To participate in an online community of Dynamics Managers users that also includes participation by consultants, expert users, Dynamics Marketing developers, program managers, and Microsoft Support, join the Dynamics Marketing Forum.

More documentation highlights and learning resources

Browse through the collection of technical articles and comprehensive online help. Each of our various customer center pages focuses on a particular audience and provides feature highlights and links to related documentation.

• Marketing professionals and other end-users should start with Marketing Help & Training.

• Site and user admins should start with Marketing Setup & Administration.

• Developers, system integrators and others interested in the software development kit should go to the Marketing Developer Center.

• Go to TechNet for links to technical articles related to Dynamics Marketing.

• To browse the complete online help, start at the table of contents.

The introduction of the Knowledge Article entity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with many new and exciting features designed to bring strong knowledge management capabilities into Dynamics CRM. I am excited to explain a little bit more about the lifecycle, which is a key concept in the new Knowledge Article entity. I will cover the newly introduced states, roles, and privileges in the new knowledge management feature. Let’s get started!

Knowledge Article is a new entity introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 to bring knowledge management capabilities into services organizations. There is support for rich content authoring, versioning, translations, and other features designed to empower organizations to better capture, maintain, and incorporate knowledge into every aspect of their organization. For a full outline of all capabilities introduced with Knowledge Article, see:

Knowledge Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Release

A knowledge lifecycle walkthrough

In a typical organization, a knowledge lifecycle could be covered by several different teams (customer service representative, content authors, and content reviewers) and might look something like this:

• A customer service representative resolves a case and proposes a Draft version of a knowledge article.
• The customer Service representative submits the knowledge article for review by an approver.
• The approver approves the article, which sets the article into the Approve State. 

Figure 1. The confirmation dialog for Approve command

• The publisher reviews the approved knowledge article and sets the publish date and expiration date for the article, and also specifies whether publishing should cascade to all approved translations. Figure 2. Publish dialog options

• The publisher moves the article into scheduled state for publication.
• A system job moves the scheduled article to the Published state on the specified publishing date.
• The knowledge article is now consumable based on the permissions set.

Figure 3. Homepage grid displaying Published Articles view

• A system job moves the published article to the Expired state on the specified expiration date.
• A content reviewer moves the article to the Draft state and provides feedback on revisions needed.

A knowledge article may go through many revisions, approvals, and reviews in the lifecycle. In many cases, after a knowledge article is expired, it goes back through the process of additional approvals to be republished. This flow is depicted in the below cycle: 

Figure 4. Simple lifecycle flow for a knowledge article

While this illustration is a very high-level view of the actions that take place throughout the lifecycle of an article, it does capture the essence of each stage in the process. The knowledge article may eventually reach a point where it no longer needs to be published. The knowledge article can then be archived or discarded according to business preferences.

There are two notable additions to the process of knowledge management: versioning and translations of Knowledge Articles. These are explained in more detail here:

Dynamics CRM 2016 Knowledge Article Translations

State-based modeling

Knowledge articles will be leveraging the underlying State Code concept in CRM to provide a modeling of the many states a knowledge article could be in within the Lifecycle. Below are the new state codes that are introduced as part of the knowledge article entity:

 Table 1. Out-of-the-box state codes and information

The above table defines the out-of-the-box status codes that are associated with each state code and denotes the special permissions required to enter a state code (if applicable). In this section, I’ll touch on the new business process flows, how to transition through the various states, and each of the state code’s intended usage scenarios.

Business process flows

The knowledge article provides two out-of-the-box business process flows that will walk users through the basic lifecycle of a knowledge article. There is one for knowledge articles, which starts at the Draft State and walks the user through the necessary stages to have a knowledge article published. You’ll notice that the Active stage of the process (depicted below) has several steps that require completion before moving to the next stage in the process. The processes are designed to help a user go through the correct steps for publishing. You can change the states by using the command bar buttons, which are explained further below. 

Figure 5. New knowledge article business process flow

The second process is for knowledge articles that have expired and need to be reviewed and sent back through the lifecycle for publishing. The new knowledge article process is automatically transitioned to the expired process once the knowledge article has expired. The Process will revert to the new knowledge article process once the knowledge article has been reverted to the Draft state.

Changing states

Transitioning states from the interactive service hub is performed through the command bar buttons, which are present above the editing area. Only state transitions that are valid for the current context are presented on the command bar. 

Figure 6. Where to change the state of a knowledge article

It’s always easy to know which state a knowledge article is in at a glance in the interactive service hub. Take a look at the notification bar at the bottom to see this. 

Figure 7. Footer depicting current status of a knowledge article

You can also set the status reason within each state to provide more detailed insight into the current state of the knowledge article. You can do this in the header of the knowledge article form. 

Figure 8. Changing the status reason for a state

Quick overview of the states

• The Draft state is where new knowledge articles are born! Proposed articles, drafts, and articles needing review are Draft knowledge articles. All newly created knowledge articles are in Draft state and require Create permissions to create a new article.
• Approved state is for knowledge articles that have been reviewed and marked as Approved. Note that one requires a special “Approve Knowledge Articles” permission to approve an article.
• Scheduled state is for knowledge articles that have been scheduled for publishing and that are picked up automatically by the auto-publish job when the publish Date/Time has reached.
• Published state is for knowledge articles that are marked for consumption either internally or externally based upon the permissions set for the knowledge article.
• Expired state is reached when knowledge articles reach their set expiration date and the desired expiration state is marked as Expired. These knowledge articles should be reviewed to determine if they need to be updated, republished, or archived based on business needs.
• Archived state is for knowledge articles that don’t currently serve a business case but have some value that should be preserved.
• Discarded state should be used for knowledge articles that are okay to delete. This serves as a symbolic recycle bin for knowledge articles to be deleted.

Roles and permissions

There is a quick callout regarding permissions that I would like to highlight. There is an entirely new Security Role added called Knowledge Manager. There are also two new permissions introduced specifically for knowledge article. Let’s look at both of these in more detail.

Knowledge Manager role

The Knowledge Manager is the security role defined for a user who is designated as the curator of knowledge management. This security role has the Create, Approve, and Publish permissions on knowledge articles for consumption. If this level of permission is not suitable for your organization’s needs, they can be tailored. Find more details on editing security roles here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn531130.aspx

Knowledge article privileges

We have also introduced two new privileges for the Knowledge Article entity, which allow for fine-tuning control over who is allowed to both approve and publish knowledge articles. By default, the Knowledge Manager role has both these privileges. In the following figure, you can see the newly introduced privileges. 

Figure 9. Knowledge article privileges for the Knowledge Manager role

This role should only be assigned to users that require both the ability to approve and publish knowledge articles. Another use case for many businesses would be to define two separate security roles to effectively define a separation of privileges: one role having permissions to approve and other for having permission to publish knowledge articles. 

Until next time,

James Calhoun

We’re excited to share the news for the features included in the upcoming release. Microsoft Social Engagement now includes a detailed view of an author’s Twitter profile. Posts you publish from within Social Engagement now support photos. You can extend your sources coverage by adding public RSS or Atom feeds and analyze them like any other post. Additionally, Social Engagement now supports the capabilities of Office Groups to collaborate with other users. Stay tuned for more news!

See details about authors on Twitter

Let’s check out author details. In Social Center, click the author details icon in any tweet. Right away you’ll see a detailed view of the author’s profile. You can get an idea of how influential and active the author is based on their reach score, their followers, and how many tweets they’ve posted. Review the hash tags they use most, and their recent tweets to understand the topics that interest them. If you decide this is someone you want to follow, just link the social profile you want to follow the author with. 

Include photos in your posts

Direct publishing is another cool feature in Social Center. It lets you tweet or post to Facebook right from within Social Engagement. Let’s say your sales person wants to share a white paper or your marketing team wants to announce the agenda for an upcoming conference. Click the Publish tab in Social Center and pick the social media source you want to publish to. Then pick the social profile to post on behalf of. Type the announcement text and add media if you want—let’s include the conference flyer and publish. On the confirmation page, click the link to see the post on the source you published to. You can also post the same message on other sources or social profiles from here.

Extend your data coverage with custom sources

Social Engagement supports popular social media sources right out of the box. However, some customers prefer sources that are specific to a brand, company, or industry. Use custom sources and add public RSS or Atom feeds to listen and analyze those conversations so you can hear what they are saying about your company, and engage more effectively.

Collaborate in Social Engagement using Office Groups

Finally, with the addition of Office Groups in Social Engagement, you can create and manage Office Groups in Exchange, or in your Office Admin Portal. Once you do that, those groups are available in Social Engagement for assigning posts or sharing streams and social profiles.

Here’s an example. A customer posts about an installation issue, and the Field Installation group is great with issues like this. Click “Assign To” and use keyword search or filtering to quickly find the Field Installation group. Now, everyone in the Field Installation group can see the post in their Inbox and act on it.

Get help, videos, and eBooks

For more information about Microsoft Social Engagement, including help articles, eBooks, and videos, see the Microsoft Social Engagement Help Center.

We’re convinced you’re going to love the new features. 

Enjoy!

Microsoft Social Engagement Team 

We’re really excited about the new Knowledge Management capabilities  we shipped as part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. One of the common scenarios for Knowledge Managers is to schedule knowledge articles to be published and removed from public access at a specific time. Let’s say you're the Knowledge Manager for our infamous Contoso wearables company. Your company decides to launch the new Fitness band on December 25, 9:00 AM EST. What it means to you as a Knowledge Manager is that you must manually publish all the self-service articles on a holiday when the product is launched globally.

Scheduling articles to be published

Guess what, we’ve got you covered. You need not be available in the office during holidays for this. You can use our Auto Publish feature to schedule your articles for publishing at any specific data and time. The knowledge articles will automatically be published using the system job “Update Knowledge Articles State job” created for the purpose of publishing and expiring articles. 

What this means is you can author, review, approve, and get the knowledge articles staged for publishing way ahead of time at your convenience. A knowledge article can have related translations in different languages to support a wider customer base. When you publish the knowledge article, also called the primary knowledge article, you have the flexibility to publish the related translations. You can also choose a few other details like the status your scheduled article will be in and the publish status to enter when the actual publish happens.

Enough talking, let’s show you how the publish dialog is going to look for our above scenario of scheduling knowledge articles for December 25, 9:00 AM.

Expiring articles to make them unavailable

Let’s say there’s a promotional offer on the Contoso wristband that is available only for the first five days after the product is launched. You have a few knowledge articles catering to this promotional offer to help your Customer Service Representatives. When the promotional cycle ends, you need not manually search for the related contents to remove them or modify their access. During publish time, if you are aware of the promotional content, you can choose the future date and time when the article should expire. For a Knowledge Manager, this simplifies things. You can expire the knowledge article into Archived or Expired status, or choose to keep it in the Published state. You will be able to choose the respective status combination as well.

The following screenshot shows the example where we want to publish the knowledge article on December 25 but expire it on December 31, 12:00 AM when the promotional offer ends.

How to trigger periodic review on your self-service articles

Let’s say your company requires a few critical technical articles to be updated periodically to maintain the quality of your self-service content. This is easy to implement using the Publish command. When you publish an article, you can choose a future date when the article should expire. In our scenario, we will configure the article to remain in the Publish state but change its status to “Needs review”. You can create a custom view or workflow to configure the articles that are in the “Needs review” status to act on them.

Scheduled articles

In the interactive service hub, you can use our Scheduled Articles view to identify all the articles that are scheduled to be published. If you are interested in finding whether a specific knowledge article is scheduled for publish, you can search for it or drill down using the different filtering options available on the grid. From this view, you can also revert the knowledge articles to draft or publish them immediately using the bulk actions available to you.

With every organization trying to embrace the power of self-service technologies, we hope these new Knowledge Management capabilities help you create and maintain your knowledge base much more efficiently. 

Regards, 

Shivasubramaniam Kavindpadi