Applies to Dynamics 365 Online

With the current release of Dynamics 365, we are introducing the concept of tailored, purpose-built apps for business functions. Our view is that these apps will simplify the consumption experience by showing functionality and components that are relevant to the users.

When we had set out to bring about the business apps functionality, we decided to have the following key goals:

• To simplify the current experience and UI
• To provide a way to create purpose-built apps that address a specific task, are built for a persona,  or just to modularize the monolithic interface.
• And finally, to make it easy to build such business apps.

And we now have the first release of the business apps framework that you can get started on. This blog will deep dive into the realization of the concept and how it manifests in the application.

Following are the key tenets of the business apps framework:

Business Apps are available via a new Solution aware component called Apps.

All Microsoft and custom built apps will be visible in this area. An App can be packaged inside a solution, exported and imported just like any other solution component.

An App stores references to UX artifacts only, namely the following: 

• Sitemap
• Forms
• Dashboards
• Views
• Charts
• BPFs

This implies that a custom App can be created just by composing one or more of the above mentioned UX components.

E.g. In a simple Ticket management app, you can bundle in just the required set of Customer Service dashboards, some views of the Case entity and a relevant Case form. While users will have access to other entities, forms, views etc. based on their overall security privileges, when in the context of that app, they will see the chosen components only.

Did we say App can reference a Sitemap?

Yes, each app will have its own Sitemap. The App’s Sitemap defines the navigation of the app. So in the case of a simple Ticket management app, you may choose to have just two sub areas pointing to Dashboard and Case view.

Below is a sample Sitemap of the Service app.

All Sitemaps are visible in the Client Extension node in the Solutions area. The full application continues to have the same default Sitemap.

What references does an App need to work?

Just the Sitemap. In line with the simplification goal, an App is ready to run once the navigation has been defined i.e. the Sitemap has been referenced. At runtime, the app will show components that the user has got access to. And as the admin refines the App to reference explicit UX components in the App, only the referenced components will start to show in runtime for users.

And, how are Business Apps created? 

Apps can be created and composed using the new App designer. Using the App Designer will be covered in the next post.

And, since an App requires a site map, we now also have a fully integrated Site map designer! More on that in the next post.

Accessing the App

Apps are role based and as an administrator, you can give access to desired roles to the app.

Once users are given access, they can access the apps from any of the following areas:

• The new My Apps page

This page can be accessed via Settings > Applications > My Apps. Or directly by typing <URL>/apps

• The new App Switcher

Drop down the Dynamics 365 menu to access the App Switcher. With this, users can switch between apps even when they are working on another one. Infact the App switcher lists apps across Dynamics 365 including Power Apps. An introduction here to the new App Switcher and Dynamics 365 home. App switcher is only available for Dynamics 365 online.

• Directly through the App URL

Each App can have its own URL. As an administrator, you can choose a friendly URL for an app e.g. ticketlite for the simple Ticket Management app. Once set, any user can directly access the app via:

<URL>/apps/ticketlite i.e. https://<org>.crm.dynamics.com/apps/ticketlite

Current Support for Apps

As of current release, Business App supports web client only. We will update this blog as new client support is announced.

Additional Resources

Business apps in Dynamics 365

Where to find your business apps

Design custom business apps by using the app designer

Manage access to apps with security roles

– Prateek Sethi

Businesses today demand apps which are streamlined and focused on making their employees agile and productive.

There is a huge uptake in the demand for such apps but at the same time the app creation experience is challenged with the need for faster development and a high degree of technical skill. IT departments are overwhelmed and struggle to support these requests from business units.

Aimed at simplifying and democratizing the app development process, with the current release of Dynamics 365, we are introducing the Application Designer

App designer provides a visually rich and intuitive canvas for creating apps without writing a single line of code. The designer cuts across all persona boundaries and enables everyone to design and publish an app in minutes.

Integrated within the app designer is the brand-new WYSIWYG Site Map designer.

Putting things into action, business apps in Dynamics 365, namely Customer Service, Sales, Field Service and Project Service automation have been designed using the constructs and capabilities of App and Site Map designer.

So, welcome to App designer! Let’s acquaint ourselves with the key capabilities.

Creating business apps

It all starts from the My Apps page.

Use the Create App action to start providing meaningful information (properties) about your app, that users can easily associate with. To make this easy, all you need is the app name and the auto-defaults will take over. These defaults are shown upfront and you can choose to make edits/add details as necessary.

Promote your brand by adding icon for the app tile.

While you are at it, here are a couple of key properties to get you familiar with:

• Name –  This is the name of your app
• Unique Name –  The unique name defaults to app name and prefixed with the publisher prefix.
• App URL Suffix – The suffix value defaults to the app name. You’ll see a preview of how the complete URL looks.

Once you have all the details, click Done to get started with the app designing experience.

Designing apps using a visually rich and context driven canvas

The main stay of the app designing experience is the canvas. Onto the canvas as components are added, you will visually see the app composition taking shape.

With a few clicks and NO CODE, modify the composition, to meet the evolving needs of your business.

Let’s look at some of the key principles of the app designing experience.

1. Universe of app components

The designing experience is supported using UX constructs, namely the following:

• Sitemap
• Dashboards
• BPFs
• Entities
  • Forms
  • Views
  • Charts

1. Site Map configuration:

We have simplified the app designing experience such that all you need is to configure a Site Map for your app, using the WYSIWYG Site Map designer. This is a mandatory component, for the app to be successfully published for runtime access.

There are indications on the canvas and notification bar, in case the Site Map configuration is incomplete.

We will talk more about the Site Map designing experience and its capabilities in a forthcoming post.

1. Adding components to your app:

The UX constructs are visually represented as Artifacts and Entity Assets tiles as part of the Components tab. Click on any of them to reveal a full list of their type.

For example, on accessing the Entities tile the UI flips to show existing entities listed by their Display and Unique name. To get to the entity of choice use the type ahead search and/or simply scroll and select the one you are looking for.

The Add command option is another great way to get to the list of existing components and add to your app.

The designer retrieves all entities which are supported in solutions and are available as part of the Default solution of the backing Dynamics 365 CRM Org.

Should you need to create new components, for example a new dashboard, then simply select the Dashboard tile and click on Create New option to launch the dashboard designer.

Tip: Using the ‘Add all Assets’ option, you can at one-go add all forms, views and charts for that entity as well.

1. Working with app components added to the canvas.

Let’s continue with the example of entities… Once an entity is selected it is added as a row under the Entity View swim lane of the canvas. Asset tiles for that entity, i.e. form, view and charts are also now available.

Observe by default the tiles call out ‘All‘. This means that all forms, views and charts for that entity will be available to users in runtime (provided they have the required permissions). This is another example of simplifying and enabling rapid app designing.

Should you have a need to select a specific set of entity assets then click on the relevant tile and pick the required assets from the components tab. On selecting 1 or more assets the tile shows the count of referenced assets (instead of All) and the flyout reveals the list of references.

Dashboard and BPFs also follow the same pattern.

Tips:

• We made sure that should you need more canvas space as you design large-complex apps, it is available as each swim lane can be collapsed and expanded, keeping you focused.
• Form or view defaults are based on the defaults defined in the default solution of the organization. Should you need to have an app specific default, then only reference that form or view in the app.

• Site Map designer provides an option to configure an app specific default dashboard.

• Removing of referenced components is as straight forward as adding them. Select the relevant tile on the canvas and uncheck a referenced component.

• To remove an entity and all its forms, view and charts in a single action, select the entity name tile on the canvas and click on the remove command action.

1. Launching individual component designers

We spoke of how the Create New option is available for all app components and is a contextual way to create net new components as you design the app.

At the same time, you can also modify the definition of referenced components thru their designers. For example, to modify the definition of a referenced business process flow, click on the Open the Process Flow designer option to launch the new and reimagined process flow designer.

Our roadmap for future releases, looks to reimagine some of the legacy designers and have an inline experience to the app designer.

Validating your app to highlight errors and warnings

We wanted to make sure you have no surprises when you are ready to publish the app to your users and this where the Validate command action is useful.

Results of the validation are branched into two categories:

1. Type error – Needs to be addressed before the app changes can be published.
2. Type warning – Optional. Will not block app publish and impact runtime for app users.

Error and warning icons are contextually displayed against the app components tile present on the canvas. So, that you also have details on what to do next, the notification bar supports errors and warnings with a descriptive message as well.

Let’s now look at the most common types of errors and warnings one may experience, during app validation.

We also see the need for you to be aware of dependencies created when components are added to the app.  The validate action provides a warning category of highlight next to the canvas component tile creating these dependencies. At the same time the required tab provides a detailed listing, which is easy to correlate back to the canvas highlights.

Reviewing the dependencies and addressing them has been made easy, let’s understand how it works.

In this example, Customer Service Manager dashboard and the Case entity form are calling out several dependent components they need. These dependencies are neatly stacked and in a hierarchical and easy to understand format in the Required tab.

Canvas highlights	Required tab

If you choose to not add 1 or more dependencies, you can simply hide them by clicking on Hide Dependencies. This doesn’t permanently ignore the dependencies from your app composition, but only hides them in the app designer until you click Validate or Get latest dependencies again.

Anytime a dependency is added to the app, it will be listed on the canvas under the appropriate component tile and the count of dependencies will change.

It’s fair to ask, what is the purpose of adding dependencies (which are warnings), when app runtime is not going to be impacted? The dependency addition experience ensures that should you choose to transport your app as a solution, for the app UX constructs your app universe is complete and ready to be imported in the target org.

We spoke about the solution support for apps on another post – Designing business apps – I.

Tip: Be sure to Save the app, before you run the validation.

Publishing your app and launching it for prime time

Now all that remains is to click the Publish command and have your app ready for your app users.

Once you’ve published the app, go to the Published Apps tab on the My apps page. This will list the published app with the App tile, Name and description you’ve provided during the Create App step.

Publish action is only enabled when there are unpublished changes relevant to the app designer.

To view the runtime of the app, click anywhere on the tile.

Apps are role based and as an administrator, you can give access to desired roles for your app.

Tip: App properties were defined during the create app step. However, if you wish to change the app properties later, you can do this in the app designer from within the properties tab. Except Unique Name and App URL suffix, all other properties can be updated. Once done, save and then publish your app.

In conclusion

App Designer and Site Map designer will dramatically accelerate how business apps are built, reducing time to stand up apps from days to minutes and empowering a new category of app creators.

Additional Resources

Business apps in Dynamics 365

Where to find your business apps

Design custom business apps by using the app designer

Manage access to apps with security roles

Designing Business Apps – I

When it comes to transitioning to the next generation of marketing and customer engagement automation tools from Microsoft, there are a few topics of interest:

• The life cycle of Dynamics Marketing
• Migration and My Data questions
• Licensing questions in relation to the next generation of tools

How customer of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing best migrate to the next generation of marketing tools from Microsoft – “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”

As an existing customer of Dynamic Marketing feel free to continue using the product throughout the ongoing subscription period. You may extend your subscription once from now to October 2017. For Direct purchase customer, the subscription period renews for one year, for Enterprise customers for 3 years. Microsoft is committed to provide full support for the product throughout your subscription.

We will continue to provide service allow adding more users and purchase of add-ons like email volumes throughout the subscription period. Microsoft will continue to support the product in that period fully, including the case of a hotfixes for observed issues. Yet we will eventually ramp down on the flow of monthly enhancements. We will instead fully focus our development on the new marketing app from Microsoft – “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”. This new app will be available for Dynamics 365 customers in Spring release 2017. This will be an online release only in Spring 2017. Starting November 1, 2016, we have stopped selling Dynamics Marketing to new customers.

The spring release will focus on the topics of Customer engagement automation (campaigns), email and Web channels including content designer and templates, event management and event marketing, Integration and customer Intelligence including segmentation and analytics.

How will I in the future can move to the new generation of marketing tools from Microsoft: “Dynamics 365 for Marketing”?

If you are using the Dynamics CRM Connector for Dynamics Marketing today to connect Dynamics Marketing with your CRMOL instance today, you will find that the master data are already synchronized between the two systems. While you will find that you will need to reimplement campaigns and email messages with the new more powerful functionality in the new marketing app, you will also find that your audience and the lists you are syncing already today will continue to be in Dynamics 365 as well. We are looking at more tooling that help you with the transition.

Another option will be to continue using Dynamics Marketing running your existing customer engagement automation – some of which might have planned to run continuously for several months. By using the new app Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition gradually more and more you will find the transition a smooth process.

What if I don’t want to transition to “Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Business edition”?

You may continue use the Dynamics Marketing until the end of your subscription (including the renewal you may be able to acquire, if you wish to do so.)

What happens to my data in Dynamics Marketing?

Upon the end of your subscription all customer data will be kept for maximum of 90 days. Before the subscription ends you may use the various functions for exporting data in Dynamics marketing to take a copy of records you like to take a hold of – if you need to do so.

Most objects provide an export to Excel function on the list representation. The OData endpoint together with Power Query and Excel is another good excellent tool to take a snapshot of relevant data in your Dynamics Marketing.

What about my product licenses, can I continue using them and when can I transition?

License plans will be available toward the Spring 2017 release.

Applies to: December 2016 Update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) and December 2016 Service Pack for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises)

This year brought major changes to the Microsoft CRM platform—even its name changed from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365. Dynamics 365 still provides all the familiar capabilities of Dynamics CRM, but now also aims to break down the invisible barriers that have traditionally existed between CRM, ERP, productivity software, and other systems that business professionals use every day. Going forward, the platform will also take increasing advantage of the scalability, data integration, and advanced processing power of the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing infrastructure. And already now, you can get your first glimpse of some of benefits this change has made possible by previewing the new Relationship Insights suite of features.

Relationship Insights leverages the data-integration and artificial-intelligence capabilities built into Azure to combine and analyze your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Outlook data. It uses the insights derived from this analysis to surface features that help guide your daily work, find critical opportunities, manage email communications, identify actionable email messages, and propose the best path forward. Relationship Insights features are context sensitive, so the information they present and the suggestions they make are always most relevant to whatever you are doing (or should be doing) right now.

The Relationship Insights suite currently includes the following features: the relationship assistant, email engagement, and auto capture.

Relationship Insights is currently in preview, which means that it is considered stable but is still under development. Microsoft makes preview features available to give customers early access and a chance to provide feedback. Preview features aren’t meant for production use and may have limited or restricted functionality. The Relationship Insights preview is currently available only for North American sites that use US English (en-us).

The Dynamics 365 online help provides everything you need to know to enable, set up, and use the Relationship Insights preview. Here are a few handy links:

• For a detailed overview of the various Relationship Insights features and their capabilities, see the Relationship Insights overview.
• For prerequisites and instruction on how to enable and configure the preview, see Configure Relationship Insights features.
• For details about the relationship assistant, which helps salespeople and support staff organize their daily work and nurture vital business relationships, see the Relationship assistant topic. The relationship assistant uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to generate a collection of interactive action cards, which are presented throughout the application to deliver important information, advice, and action buttons related to your current ongoing activities, scheduled activities, and whatever you are doing right now. It also monitors your incoming email message and applies natural-language analysis to identify travel plans, customer requests, competitor mentions, and other relevant communications. This feature is available both in the web interface and in the mobile interface, where its space-efficient design and context awareness deliver extra value.
• See the Action cards reference for details about the various types of action cards that can be generated by the relationship assistant.
• For details about email engagement, which helps salespeople and support staff get more out of their email communications, see the Email engagement topic. Features include delivery scheduling, follow-up alerts, and the ability to see when contacts open your messages and attachments. Email engagement features are available in both in the Dynamics 365 web interface and in the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.
• For details about auto capture, which finds email messages from your Outlook mailbox that could be relevant to the record you are currently viewing in Dynamics 365, see the Auto capture topic. Messages found by auto capture remain private to you, but you can choose to track any found message with a single click without having to open Outlook. Tracked messages are imported into Dynamics 365 and added as an activity for the relevant record, where the rest of your team can also see them. Auto capture is only available in the web interface for Dynamics 365, though you can also track messages manually using existing controls in Outlook.

Most Relationship Insights features require Dynamics 365 Online, and the Outlook integration features require Microsoft Outlook Online. The only Relationship Insights feature available to on-premises installations is the relationship assistant, which provides just a subset of action cards. For full requirements, see Configure Relationship Insights features.

Applies to: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1

I am pleased to announce the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 Performance Benchmark which is currently available for download, from Microsoft Download Center. This is the second whitepaper being published, as promised in the CRM blog a few weeks ago. The initial whitepaper was related to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 Performance Benchmark on Azure (IaaS).

This latest whitepaper provides a benchmark for performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and explains the configuration, topology, data profile, and test workload used.

The results in this white paper demonstrate the capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 in handling enterprise-scale data and transactions with incredible performance.

We’d like to recognize the efforts of Matt Brown, Grant Geiszler, Matt Peart and the broader Microsoft Dynamics 365 product group for contributing and reviewing this paper to help ensure its completeness and accuracy.

We would love to hear your feedback.

Thanks,

Srikumar Nair

The Fall 2016 release of Dynamics 365 App for Outlook includes many significant changes. This blog post describes supported clients for different app features in the context of Office Add-ins.

The first major improvement is hybrid support. Starting with the December 2016 update of Dynamics 365, you will be able to use the app if you connect Dynamics 365 (on premises) with Exchange Online, or Dynamics 365 (online) with Exchange server (on-premises). Please note that if you use Dynamics 365 (on-premises), you need to authenticate with IFD authentication.

We can’t talk about Dynamics 365 App for Outlook without mentioning Office Add-ins. Office provides the ability to extend Office clients such as Word, Excel, and Outlook using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Outlook Add-ins can display contextual information next to the Outlook item you’re viewing or composing. The server requirements for using Office Add-ins are Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, or Exchange Online.

To take advantage of Office Add-ins on Windows desktops, you must have Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016, and Internet Explorer 11 or later must be installed (but doesn’t have to be the default browser). One of the following must be set as the default browser: Internet Explorer 11 or later, the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. If you use a Mac, you need to have Outlook for Mac and the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 11, or Microsoft Edge.

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

You can also use Dynamics 365 App for Outlook by browsing to the mobile version of Outlook on the web. This means you can browse by using the native browser on your mobile device. The supported operating systems are iOS 8 or later, Android 4.4 KitKat or later, and Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Note that the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook support matrix is a subset of Office support. Also, due to authentication limitations on mobile devices, we only support Dynamics 365 (online) when connected to Exchange Online.

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook running on Outlook on the web (Android device native browser)

What about composing email and creating meetings? The Office Add-in support matrix is different, based on your client, and whether you use the add-in for received email, composing email, or creating meetings. For composing email, if you want to track email before sending it, you need to have at least Exchange Server 2013 CU14. This is also true If you want to track appointments or meetings.

Mobile Outlook on the web supports composing email, but you can only track email (you can’t add templates, for example) since the mobile editor does not support HTML.

Finally, Dynamics 365 App for Outlook supports contact tracking and syncing by using the Outlook module add-in, which is supported by Exchange Server 2016 CU3 or Exchange Online and Outlook 2016 CR2.

The table below summarizes the support described in this blog. In my next blog, I’ll discuss contact tracking in Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. Stay tuned!

Ben Elad

Senior Program Manager

Microsoft Dynamics 365 team

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook support matrix

1. Outlook on the web supports IE 10, IE 11, Edge, Safari 9, Safari 10, Firefox, and Chrome.
2. Mobile Outlook on the web supports Windows 8.1, Windows 10, iOS 8, iOS 9, iOS 10, Android KitKat (4.4), Android Lollipop, Android Marshmallow, and Android Nougat.
3. Tracking email in compose mode and tracking appointments requires Exchange Server 2013 CU14 or Exchange 2016.
4. Tracking contacts is supported only on Exchange Server 2016 CU3 and Outlook 2016 16.0.6741.1000 and up
5. Adding email templates, Knowledge Management articles, and sales literature is not supported in Mobile Outlook on the web.
6. Supported only on Outlook 2016 16.0.7426.1049 and up
7. Supported only on 16.0.6741.1000 and up
8. More information:
9. Tablets are not supported at this time (coming CY2017).

• Deploy Dynamics 365 App for Outlook
• Train your users with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook User’s Guide

Applies to: December 2016 Update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online)

Dynamics 365 (online) users have a great new way to find what they are looking for. Relevance Search brings a more Bing-like, global search experience to your mission critical business applications powered by Azure Search! You’ll get comprehensive search results quickly in a single list, sorted by relevance. System Customizers and Administrators have full control over the data that is searchable and syncing to the search index. For more information, see Configure Relevance Search for the organization.

How does it work?

When a System Administrator enables Relevance Search, data in enabled entities is fully synced to the search index and data changes begin to sync continuously. When you search for something, such as “nancy is opening a new Contoso retail store”, the search is executed against the Azure Search index. Results are returned with a match to any word in the search term, including inflectional forms of words, like “stream,” “streaming,” or “streamed”, in the base language of your Dynamics 365 application. No wildcards are required to search anywhere in the text.

There are some indirect benefits of Relevance Search as well. You’ll notice improved responsiveness over traditional Quick Find, particularly to when a wildcard was previously used. Since Azure Search is providing the results, Relevance Search can significantly reduce the overall load on your Dynamics 365 application, potentially improving the experience of your users.

What’s new?

You may be familiar with Relevance Search from the public preview in a previous update. In addition to going from preview to generally available, we are also introducing some significant new capabilities in this latest release.

• Relevance Search is available in mobile clients: During the preview, Relevance Search was only available in the web browser client. You can now use Relevance Search in the Dynamics 365 (online) client of your choice, including:
• Explore your results using Facets and Filters: It’s easier to find what you are looking for when you can narrow your search results, particularly when a simple search term may result in millions of matches depending on the size of your organization.
  • Global Facets: When you first execute a search, you can refine your results be Record type, ie entity, Owner, Created On, or Modified On:
    
  • Entity Specific Facets: When you click on a particular Record type, such as Account, you’ll see four additional facets specific to fields of that entity. In this case, Primary Contact and Industry:
    
  • End user configuration: Entity level facets are highly customizable. System Customizers can configure which fields are available for faceting using the entity’s Quick Find view. End users can also configure the facet fields that they’d like to see for every searchable entity in their Personal Options:
    

• Search within Documents in Dynamics 365: One of the best new capabilities of Relevance Search is that you can now search for text in a document stored in Dynamics 365! These include documents in a Note and Attachments on an Email or Appointment. We support several document formats, including Microsoft Office (Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc), PDFs, EML, HTML/XML, ZIP, and rich text format (RTF). Results of a search for “Contoso” in documents stored in Dynamics 365:
  

• Search records that have been shared to you
• Sharing records is a core concept of the Dynamics 365 security model. One key improvement from the public preview is the ability to search for records that were shared to you. We previously only supported search for records you owned directly or through your business unit or team.

• Search in Option Sets and Lookups: You can now search for text in an Option Set or Lookup field on an entity!

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What about the public preview?

A: The public preview for customers on the spring 2016 online update is still ongoing. You can continue to use Relevance Search preview, but you will not see any of the new capabilities introduced in the December 2016 update until you upgrade.

Q: How do I turn this thing on?

A: Relevance Search is disabled by default.  You can enable it on in the General tab of the System Settings page:

Q: How does it work?

A: Once enabled, we perform a full sync of enabled data. System Customizer control what entities and specific fields are enabled for search. When you perform a search, we make a call to Azure Search to provide the actual results.  No costly SQL queries required!

Q: Where is it available?

A: Relevance Search is generally available worldwide to customers on the Dynamics 365 (online) release. Feel free to try it out in an online Trial Instance today! Relevance Search is NOT available to customers in our sovereign or government clouds in North America or Germany.

Please Note: Relevance Search is not available for on premise customers.  It is online only.

Q: How much is this going to cost me?

A: Relevance Search is included in all current Dynamics 365 licenses!

Q: Really? What about storage for the index? Will it impact my Dynamics 365 database?

A: Enabling Relevance Search has no impact the storage consumption, and corresponding cost, of your Dynamics 365 database.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 for Field Service

Connected Field Service, introduced in the Fall 2016 release of Dynamics 365, combines monitoring with the Internet of Things to replace your costly break-fix service model with a more proactive “never fail” model.

With monitoring in Connected Field Service, you always know your customers’ equipment is running smoothly—and when it isn’t. If equipment fails, you’re notified right away, so you can troubleshoot the problem remotely, or send a technician to fix it, often before the customer even knows there is a problem.

Connected Field Service is designed with time-saving features that boost productivity. You can register customer assets with the Azure IoT hub, right from the Field Service app or from the mobile app. You can also manage devices by categorizing them—for example by device type, supported commands, or breakdown frequency. You can also view the live heartbeat of registered devices using Power BI.

There is also a IoT dashboard that shows alerts by customer, device, asset, and what action what taken in response to an alert.

To learn how to install and get started with Connected Field Service, see: Use Connected Field Service to remotely monitor and service customer equipment (field service).

Visit the Dynamics 365 for Field Service – User’s Guide page for more information on Field Service.

Get the latest info and links for eBooks, videos, onboarding information, how to contact support, and much more on the Help and Training site.

Developers can find information in the MSDN: Connected Field Service Developer Guide.

Manjinder Kaur
Technical Writer
Dynamics 365 team

With the deprecation of Azure Access Control Service (ACS), we have to modify our SDK authentication code by removing all references to ACS. Effective from versions Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 (v8.1.1) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (v8.2), we removed Live ID support and ACS dependencies on the server-side.

We also removed Microsoft.Xrm.Client from the CRM 2016 (8.x) SDK client because it was not compliant with the OAuth changes, and replaced it with Microsoft.Xrm.Tooling.Connector. You can use the current Microsoft Dynamics 365 Software Development Kit (SDK) to access Microsoft Dynamics CRM back to version 6.x for both auth and messaging.

When upgrading to Dynamics 365, make sure you use the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Software Development Kit (SDK). The following outlines the current supported matrix for other SDK clients:

See Also:

Software Development Kit for Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) and Dynamics 365 (on-premises)

Updates to the CRM SDK assemblies

Connect to Microsoft Dynamics 365 web services using OAuth

Visual Studio and the .NET Framework

– Paul Liew

Applies To: Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365

With Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, you get the ability to support multiple languages in your single portal. This new feature allows content creation of a website to reach a wider global audience in different languages. For an introduction on this topic, see Multi language capabilities in Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the process of enabling Multilanguage for a Portal website, creating content specific to a language, and browsing a multi-language portal.

Adding a Supported Language to a Website

Portals comes with a new entity called Portal Languages. When installing Portal, 43 Portal Language records are created out of the box. Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports all the Dynamics 365 languages except Arabic and Hebrew. If you have a current Portal that is upgrading, then these Portal Language sample data will be created. Considering the Dynamics 365 portals uses the Dynamics 365 Solution metadata translations, the Portal Language models the language that is enabled on the Dynamics 365 portals and the underlying Dynamics 365 language information.  A language must be enabled/activated in your organization first. Once your languages are enabled, you can go to your website record by navigating to Portals -> Website.

In the dialog that opens, you will see a list of Portal Languages that you have enabled in the organization. Select one of these to add. By default, the publishing status for a new supported language is set to Draft. When a supported language is in the Published state, it will be visible for browsing on the portal. Leaving it as Draft allows the content to be edited and hidden from those without privilege until content is created and ready to publish.

Once you save this new supported language, it is added to your website as a language option. Now you can create/edit content in that specific language. Adding content for supported language is done automatically as a part of adding the supported language to the website.

Creating or Editing Language Aware Content

Web Pages

Web pages have the concept of localized Content pages. When creating a new web page record, the configurations of the web page are chosen on the form and then saved. By default, new web pages created will have a localized Content page created in the default language of the website. The main Webpage record is used to give default values to new localized Content pages on creation, and the localized Content page is where the actual content of the web page is created/modified. Any configuration changes intended for web pages should be made on the Content pages, as this is the data that is used when rendering pages on the portal. This means that if you want to update any fields, such as an Entity List or the Publishing State of a web page, you must do so on the Content pages. In addition to this concept, every lookup to a web page points to the main web page record, but in Portal rendering, if the page does not exist in that specific language, then the page will not be found in the context of that language.

Once Multilanguage is enabled, however, there is still a single page hierarchy structure for webpages. In each language of the Portal, parent and child pages will have the same relationship. They will also all inherit the same Access Control Rules and Web Files as they would in a single language portal.

Web Link Sets

Each supported language of a website should have corresponding Web Link Sets in the language. The Web Link Sets are specific to the language chosen. This means that the navigation can vary for different languages of the portal. If a Web Link Set does not exist for the portal, the navigation links do not appear in that language.

Content Snippets

Content Snippets can be language specific or language agnostic. When a content snippet exists with no supported language value, then it will be viewed in the context of all languages where the content snippet would render. On the other hand, if a content snippet has a language value, then it will only show the value of the content snippet when the portal context is in that specific language. There can also be a mix, where there is a generic language agnostic content snippet that exists for some languages, but selected languages have the same content snippet with a language value, so that the specified languages can have their own values when that content snippet is rendered.

Blogs/Ideas/Forums

Like Content Snippets, Blogs, Forums, and Idea Forums can be either language specific or language agnostic. When given a language, the blog, forum, or idea forum, along with the related posts/content will show on the language specific web page (or partial url, which is used by Idea Forums). When they exist with no language value, then they will show across all languages of the Portal.

Browsing the Multilanguage Portal

Once your Multilanguage portal has been set up and configured, you can change the Publishing status of the supported languages of the website to Published to bring the Multilanguage portal browsing experience to life. Enabling more than one supported language as Published brings the experience through a language dropdown on Portal, where all of the Published supported languages can be selected for browsing. This dropdown is the result of a new Web Template included in the header of the portal called Languages Dropdown. Also coming to life through the Multilanguage experience is the language code visibility in the URL. The site setting “MultiLanguage/DisplayLanguageCodeInURL”  should be set to true in Dynamics 365, when more than one supported language is added to a website. This will allow the URL to show what language the portal is currently being browsed in addition to the language dropdown. Any shared links or saved bookmarks will still navigate to the appropriate web page through a redirect, whether or not the language code is included in the URL input.

Creating Variants of Supported Languages

Portal Language helps you support different language variants on the Portal. To do so, you can create a new Portal Language record, or modify an existing one. The value given in the Dynamics 365 Language field should match a language LCID that is enabled in the organization (the same LCID as one of the original 43 values). The LCID field should be the LCID value of the language desired, and the code should be the Language Code value of the language desired. Refer to .net support languages for the LCID and ll-CC. This will enable you to light up your portal in different flavors of a language.

If you are interested to create Canadian flavor of English on your Dynamics 365 portals, you can do that as in the screenshot below. You will be limited by the translations coming from Dynamics 365 but you can create custom web page content to give a personalized experience for your Canadian English customers.

Controlling the replication of your site content

When a supported language is added to your website, the plugin uses a Site Setting with the name “MultiLanguage/MaximumDepthToClone” which gives you further control on what content should be replicated when the new language is added. The plugin creates Web Page content and Content Snippets in the newly added language using the default language content. The depth of Web Pages the plugin replicates is dependent on the site setting value:

• -1 – no content will be created in the new language
• 0 – creates only the Home and Page Not Found web pages. All the Content Snippets and Web Link Sets will be cloned as well.
• > 0 – Any number greater than Zero, based on your website. Typical support websites have a depth of 20. All the Content Snippets and Web Link Sets will be cloned as well.

Here is how you can calculate the depth of your website. With Home Page being level 0. A value of “1” will create Home web page, and all of Home web page’s child pages, etc.).

Thanks,

Jennifer Gregory

Applies To: Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365

In today’s world, your customers are not confined to a single region or a language. A customer service portal that helps you connect with your customers speaking different languages is key to your success. In Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are increasing the language support to 43 languages. In addition, we are giving the ability for a single portal to surface content in multiple languages. You can translate the content of your portal while maintaining a single content hierarchy. Existing portals can leverage this functionality by upgrading their Portal Solutions.

Localizing your portal content

To make Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 available in an additional language you need to activate that language in your Dynamics 365 organization first. Once the language is activated on the Dynamics 365 org, you can navigate to your Website record and add that language as a supported language using the “+” button.

Once you have successfully enabled a language support for your website, you can translate your portal content in the new language using Dynamics 365. Out-of-the-box, we clone your default language web pages, web link sets and content snippets content into the newly added support language. A web page defines this language agnostic container that models the configuration about the page along with the language-specific content. Once a web page is made available in a language through Dynamics 365, you can use the Portal Content Management System (CMS) to edit the page content and its configuration. It is recommended that you have the landing/home page and “Page Not Found” page translated in all the languages enabled for your website.

Web Link Sets are specific to a language. This gives you the ability to configure Primary Navigation, Profile Navigation, Secondary Navigation and Footer web link sets specific to each supported language. You can edit the web links part of these web link sets through CMS.

Liquid Extensions

We have exposed new Liquid APIs as part of enabling multi language support to help you customize your portals. “website.languages” will list all the languages enabled for your portal. We have introduced “languages” in the “page” liquid drop as well. “website.selected_language” will help you identify the language in which the website has been rendered. “page.languages” signifies the languages in which the page can be made available. Languages is an array of language which has Name, Code and URL properties. Once you are in a page you can use the URL property of language to fetch the page URL in that language ex: page.languages[0].url

This is just a brief introduction to get you started with the Multi lingual capabilities of our Dynamics 365 portals. More blogs to follow to cover these in detail.

Thanks

Shiva Kavindpadi

Applies To: Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365

Everyone knows the benefit of having a customer self-service portal and how critical it is to your organizations success. As your business expands into multiple domains and products, the amount of information accessible on your self-service portal drastically increases. Today a typical Portal user has access to all the knowledge articles that are made available on your portal. It’s not the amount of knowledge that brings customer satisfaction but it’s our ability to show the relevant information based on your user. This creates a happy problem to solve. With Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are enhancing the way you could create customized view of your portal using product filtering and content access level filtering.

Product Filtering

Product filtering allows the portal users in accessing knowledge articles based on their mutual product ownership. Let’s illustrate the benefit of product filtering with an example. Say, Mia purchased a tablet from Contoso.com. Contoso.com offers a wide variety of products ranging from tablets, PCs to smart watches. After a week of using the tablet, Mia has some issues with it. One of her friend asks her to update her tablet OS to fix the issues. Mia is not sure how to update the tablet, so she logs on to support.contoso.com and searches for “how to update”. Support.contoso.com is a one stop solution to find information about all the Contoso’s products and self-help articles. The search results for Mia are across the board. Mia is unable to find what she wants and she is lost with this information overload.

We can prevent these information overload issues using our product filtering capabilities. With Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can filter the Knowledge articles exposed on your portal based on your Portal users’ product ownership. Products can be associated directly to the Portal contact or to its account. Filtering the knowledge articles based on mutual product association helps you give a customized view of your portal based on the logged in user.

Out of the box product filtering is turned off. You can turn it on using the site setting ” ProductFiltering/Enabled”.

Before you turn on product filtering on your portal, as a knowledge author you need to relate your knowledge articles to the right set of products you own by using the Interactive Service Hub. Once you have got all your articles related to the appropriate products, you need to associate your Portal users to the right products they own.

There are two ways to model your portal user’s product ownership. If you are a small or medium sized business, you could use the out-of-the-box relationships we ship for contact and account to relate them with products. If you are an enterprise with a custom entity that models the assets owned by your users, you can use that to drive the product filtering on your Portal. Please refer to the site setting ” ProductFiltering/AccountToProductRelationshipNames” and “ProductFiltering/ContactToProductRelationshipNames” for information on how to use a custom intersect entity to drive product filtering.

There are situations where you want your users to access the knowledge articles that do not have any products associated with them. You can use the site setting “ProductFiltering/DisplayArticlesWithoutAssociatedProducts” to control this behavior when product filtering is turned on on your portal.

Content Access Level filtering

Another neat feature we have added in this release of Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the Content Access Level – CAL filtering. You can associate a CAL to your Portal contact or its account to drive your desired business scenarios where access to knowledge articles is controlled based on the Portal users’ content access level ownership. Out-of-the-box, we ship three sample content access levels namely Default, Registered and Premium. Default content access level is associated with the Anonymous and Authenticated web role.

We have customized the Portal Contact forms to include content access levels.

To turn on content access level based filtering of knowledge articles on your portal, use the “KnowledgeManagement/ContentAccessLevel/Enabled” site setting.

When you create a new knowledge article, we associate the content access levels marked default. When you translate or version your knowledge articles, we copy the associated products and content access level to the new version or translation, simplifying the authoring experience. You can validate the access levels and products associated with an article before publishing it.

The Search and Browse features in Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 will respect the product filtering and content access level filtering configured on your portal. Article Unavailable page is displayed when a Portal user tries to access a knowledge article that he does not have access to. You can customize the “Article Unavailable” page to include your customized message.

Cheers

Shiva Kavindpadi

Applies To: Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365

At Microsoft, we are always thinking about features that will benefit our customers. Search is one of the most used features in any self-service portal. With Portal capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are enhancing your customers search experience with the global search filters and faceted search experience. Your customers will be able to drill down into the results seamlessly and find what they are looking for in an intuitive way.

Out-of-the-box faceted search is enabled in your portals. Site Setting “Search/FacetedView” controls whether faceted navigation is enabled on your Portal.

We have enabled entity filters in the global search. The default selector is “All”, which lets the Portal user search across all the entities enabled for search.  As a Portal user, if you are interested to find something specific to blogs, you can use “Blogs” as your search filter.

You can customize the entity filters enabled for your Portal using the site setting “search/filters”.

Your Portal users will be delighted to see the faceted navigation we have added to enhance their Portal search experience. We have enabled four faceted views namely Record Types, Modified Date, Ratings and Products. Ratings and Products facet views are specific to knowledge articles and they are shown when the search results contain knowledge articles.

In this scenario if I am really interested to narrow the search results specific to knowledge articles which have at least 3-star rating, I will be able to use the Record Type and Rating facet views to drill down into the results.

The search results are sorted based on their relevance by default. When knowledge articles are part of the results, the Portal users will be able to sort the results based on Ratings and View Count to find the article that has helped other customers.

Thanks

Shiva Kavindpadi

Applies to: Dynamics 365 (online)

In Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1, we introduced Learning Path, which delivers contextually-rich training, walkthroughs, videos, and articles right in the app at just the right time. Watch a short video (1:50) about Learning Path.

We’re excited to announce that you can now use Learning Path to create your own custom Help experience for your Dynamics 365 (online) users. Learning Path allows you to deliver custom content specific to the role assigned to a user, and publish different content to different organizations within your deployment. This means, for example, that on a given page, screen, form, or view, you can display different Help content for sales people vs. customer service reps. You can also display different content for the same role in different organizations. You can even localize your content in different languages for different users and organizations.

Content you create can be published across organizations, as well as exported from one organization and imported into another.

Learning Path provides a great way to help people discover new features and become familiar with new forms or business processes at their own pace right from the app. This can help you reduce training time and costs and enable your users to quickly become productive using Dynamics 365 (online).

To learn more about creating Learning Path guided help, see Create your own guided help (Learning Path) for your customers.

For more great content, including videos and eBooks, see the Dynamics 365 Help & Training site or the Dynamics 365 Setup & Administration site.

Randall DuBois

Content Developer

Dynamics 365 team

Applies To:  Dynamics 365 (online)

To better track and manage your Dynamics 365 (online) updates, we’re adding more granular update status to the Updates page.

At the date and time of your update, the status for your instance will show Updating instance.

The four stages of an update are:

With this information, you can keep track of how your update is progressing and when it has completed.

See Also:

Technet: Deciphering the update information

– Paul Liew

Applies to: Dynamics 365

The fall 2016 release of Dynamics 365 introduced a powerful new feature called business recommendations, that enables a Business Analyst or System Customizer to guide users to optimal data based on intelligence they have about their business.

Business recommendations work like the Show Error action by adding an indicator next to a form field. When the user clicks the indicator, they see a bubble with a recommendation that tells them how to fill out the field based on other data on the form. You can associate a Portable Business Logic (PBL) action with the business recommendation. That PBL action can automate setting the value to that or other fields, making the experience much more streamlined for the user.

In Dynamics 365, you can use a new drag-and drop designer to create business rules and recommendations.

Example: Product Selection

A great example is product selection. Suppose the user is running an Insurance Sales business process and is at the stage where they are discussing with their customer what insurance products they want to buy. Business analysts and customizers can check the performance and profile of past deals and establish, for example, that:

• Married customers who buy auto insurance also usually buy home or renter’s insurance.
• Married customers with children who buy auto insurance are usually willing to buy extra personal injury protection for their children.
• Single, young customers who buy auto insurance are usually willing to buy extra liability insurance due to their inexperience with driving.

To set up the last example:

1. Open the form editor for the Opportunity form.
2. Add a new business rule.
3. Set the branch condition for the business rule to:

IF Marital Status = single
AND Age<= 25
AND Insurance Type = Auto

1. In the designer window, drag a Recommendation component “Young, single drivers are still learning to drive and afraid accidents. They are usually willing to pay more for extra liability insurance, so make sure to offer it.”
2. For the associated action, drag two Set Value components with the following values:

Set Add Liability Insurance? to value Yes

Set Liability Insurance Amount to value $2,500

1. Save and activate the rule.Whenever the condition is met, the business recommendation will show prompt the sales rep to take advantage of this type of opportunity. Even better—the fields will automatically be filled out for them in the form.

Programmability

Business recommendations are exposed through the Client API just like error messages. To add a business recommendation to a field, add the following JavaScript snippet to the running web resources, as follows:

First, create a Notification object:

var myNotification = {

messages: ['Recommendation Text'],

notificationLevel: "RECOMMENDATION",

uniqueId: "unique_id", // Pick a unique id; you will need it to clear the notification later, if necessary

actions: [{

message: "Recommendation Action Text",

actions: [function () {

// This action will execute as the button on the bubble is pressed

}]

}]

}

Next, get a control and add the notification, as such:

Xrm.Page.ui.controls.getByName(“control_name”).addNotification(myNotification);

The addNotification function returns True or False depending on whether the notification was successfully applied. To clear the bubble, call the following:

Xrm.Page.ui.controls.getByName(“control_name”).clearNotification(“unique_id”);

For more information, see:

• Help & Training: Create a business rule or recommendation to apply logic in a form
• MSDN reference

Carlos Mendonça | LinkedIn

Program Manager

Microsoft Dynamics 365 team

Applies To:  Dynamics 365 (on-premises)

You can now run Dynamics 365 (on-premises) with SQL Server 2016 CU2 using database compatibility level 110 (SQL Server 2012 compatibility level). The application’s performance is improved when you set the organization database with trace flag 1224. This setting reduces the CPU usage by disabling lock escalation based on the number of locks. For details, please see Improve performance when you use Microsoft Dynamics 365 with SQL Server 2016.

The performance of SQL Server 2016 is also improved with the High Availability Enhancements. The obsolete Database Mirroring technology has been replaced with a more efficient Always On Basic Availability Groups for high availability.

SQL Server 2016 comes with a set of rich capabilities that can help you solve and meet your business needs. The Dynamics 365 engineering team continues to evaluate these capabilities to enhance the application’s performance in upcoming releases. An example of these capabilities that we are evaluating is the ability to perform Native compilation of Tables and Stored Procedures. This capability allows faster data access and more efficient query execution for better performance. Another capability that you should consider is the In-memory Columnstore. In-memory Columnstore uses column compression to reduce the storage footprint and improve query performance for data warehousing scenarios.

Please see What’s New in SQL 2016 (Database Engine) to help you maintain and fine-tune your applications.

See Also:

• Improve performance of highly concurrent workloads – SQL Server Customer Advisory Team
• SQL Server 2016 with Cumulative Update 2 (CU2) – Server & Tools Blog: Cumulative Update #2 for SQL Server 2016 RTM
• SQL Server 2016 In-memory OLTP and ColumnStore
• December 2016 update for Dynamics 365 (online and on-premises)
• Software requirements for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Server

– Paul Liew

This article describes the features, fixes, and other changes that are included in Microsoft Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.1.

New features introduced in Microsoft Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.1

Sell more with Social Selling Assistant

Microsoft Social Engagement introduces Social Selling Assistant, to empower your salespeople to sell more by leveraging social media. With this application, your salespeople get personalized and smart recommendations to share on their social networks to enable them increase their social presence, gain trust from their followers, and generate more leads.

You can access Social Selling Assistant from within Microsoft Social Engagement and install it from the Microsoft AppSource into your Dynamics 365 for Sales application. The AppSource app adds a new dashboard that contains Social Selling Assistant. Salespeople can access this dashboard from the Dynamics 365 web client, as well as from Dynamics 365 for tablets. Dynamics  365 for phones is currently not supported.

Share a post to LinkedIn

With this release you can add your personal LinkedIn account as a social profile. With it you can share any public post in Microsoft Social Engagement to your professional network on LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn social profile will be available for the post action “Post Link“. When you share to LinkedIn, you can choose between two visibility options: show the post to everyone on LinkedIn or to your network only. This post action is available across all Microsoft Social Engagement services, including the newly released Social Selling Assistant. For you to start sharing, go to Settings> Social Profiles, and then click the Add Profile button, select LinkedIn Profile, and follow the steps..

Japanese & Chinese (traditional) User interface

Microsoft Social Engagement introduces the user interface in Japanese and Chinese (traditional) languages. Users can change the language of the user interface under Settings > Personal Settings > Your Preferences. The localization of the user interface also includes the respective calendars for Japanese and Chinese (traditional) languages.

Issues that are resolved in Microsoft Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.1

In addition to the new features, Update 1.1 addresses the following issues and improvements:

• Fixed an issue where RSS feeds based on a keyword search topic were only acquiring data when at least one full feed custom source search topic was set up.
• Fixed an issue where we were unable to process a high number of RSS feeds added to Microsoft Social Engagement.
• Fixed an issue with the description of the Facebook User account type.
• Fixed an issue to improve readability of posts with multiple sentences and paragraphs.
• Fixed an issue where content from Blogs was displayed in JSON format.
• Fixed an issue with truncated tool tips for domains and custom tag names in the Allowed Domains and Custom Tags settings pages. The full label is now shown in the corresponding tool tips.
• Fixed several issues to reduce execution errors and the resulting number of e-mail notifications for Automation Rules.
• Data exported to Excel from our app will now use Excel’s date format. This means you will see dates according to the localization settings of your operating system and can change them easily.
• Data exported from the widget “Sources history” now labels all sources as expected.

Invest 5 minutes a day to become a successful social seller. The Social Selling Assistant recommends personalized actions for you, like which posts to share, based on machine learning. No need to spend hours to spot relevant content or crawl through hundreds of updates anymore.

Social Selling became a big trend in recent years. It allows sellers to use social networks to achieve more. Studies* show that top sellers use social channels to build a highly efficient network, create new opportunities, and stay in touch with existing contacts. Digitalization accelerates the trend to turn products into services. Increasingly, sellers need to stay in touch with a customer throughout the entire product lifecycle. With social networks, the Internet of Things, customer 360 and increasingly artificial intelligence based recommendations, sellers have the tools at hand to master the change.

*7 Key Insights from LinkedIn’s Study ‘The State of Sales in 2016’

*How B2B Sales Can Benefit from Social Selling

What is Social Selling?

There are many definitions and ideas around how to define social selling. We adopted a simple and broad definition: “Leveraging social networks to sell more”. This doesn’t imply that a salesperson uses social networks to sell products directly. In fact, most successful social sellers use social networks to build their networks, increase their reputation and become an influential thought leader. Which, in turn, increases their reach to share their product’s USPs and value proposition with potential customers and other influencers. Additionally, it provides insights to sellers about the right timing to engage with a customer to discuss challenges and their solution.

What do we offer?

The Social Selling assistant is a digital assistant that helps you to leverage social networks to sell more. It takes less than 5 minutes a day to grow your network, connect with the right people, and become a thought leader in your domain. The assistant proposes 10 recommended actions per day. It’s easy and efficient. Let me give you an example:

Meet Nancy, she’s a legal advisor. She is busy with all his clients and rarely finds time to share articles about important topics in her industry. She’d like to be more active on social media but it’s just too time-consuming to research good content and keep up with a growing network.

How can we help Nancy to achieve more? To grow and nurture her digital network, Nancy needs persistence, consistence, and good content. That’s the exactly where the recently released Social Selling Assistant helps. The first version helps sellers to spot relevant content. Based on machine learning, the assistant makes recommendations about what content to share by analyzing millions of social posts in a specific domain like legal services. It will take only 5 minutes a day to create a steady flow of relevant information for an audience. In a monthly cadence, we will improve the assistant by adding more types recommendations.

The assistant provides 4 types of sharing recommendations:

• Promoted content: Manually selected editor’s picks, for example from the marketing team.
• Owned content: Published by your own company on social media.
• Trendy content: Posts that are currently trendy in your industry.
• Recommended content: Recommendations based on the sharing behavior of the entire sales team to leverage the collective intelligence. The assistant learns from all your actions to get better.

You can share all the content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

How do I get the Social Selling Assistant?

The capabilities are based on Microsoft Social Engagement which is part of the Dynamics 365 (online) Plan 1 and the Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation apps. For additional information, see Dynamics 365 pricing.

Follow the quick steps below to get started with the assistant.

Step 1: Bookmark the Social Selling URL on your mobile phone or in your browser

If you have a Microsoft Dynamics 365 user license, you already have access to Microsoft Social Engagement where the Social Selling assistant is based on. Just go to the app switcher and select Microsoft Social Engagement. In Microsoft Social Engagement, you select in the navigation bar the item Social Selling. Bookmark this link on your mobile phone or in your browser.

Additionally, you can integrate the experience into Dynamics 365 by connecting Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics 365 and installing the “Social Selling Assistant” app from app source.

For information about installing the Social Selling Assistant in Dynamics 365, see TechNet: Install the Social Selling Assistant.

Step 2: Customize the service to your needs

The Social Selling assistant needs input to come up with the best possible recommendations. Best practices include:

• Add your social accounts as social profiles in Microsoft Social Engagement to be able to share content.
• Tell the system what your own content channels are, like your company’s Twitter account(s).
• Include keyword searches about your domain like “legal tech” in the advisory example – this needs special permission in Microsoft Social Engagement. Please work with your administrator to get this done.
• Include relevant 3^rd party social accounts (customers, competitors) as another source of potentially relevant information.

More information: Configure Social Engagement for the Social Selling Assistant

Step 3: Get recommendations and share the first piece of content into your network

Now you are ready to go. Open your bookmark in your browser and the assistant will recommend you first posts to share. For each recommendation, you have the choice to share it or dismiss it. A best practice follows a zero-inbox strategy. Go through all recommendations until there are none left so the system can learn from your actions and get smarter.

More information. Work with the Social Selling Assistant

How does Social Selling Assistant relate to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

The Social Selling Assistant is not a replacement for the Sales Navigator – but they fit well. So, we recommend using them in combination.

What’s Next

In the next blog post about the Social Selling Assistant we will share an example how a typical customer implemented social selling with the assistant and how and the setup looks like in detail.

Now, it is up to you to start social selling – never been easier!

François Rüf

Principal Group Program Manager, Dynamics 365

Applies to: Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online)

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Asynchronous Processing Service (called the async service) executes long-running operations independent of the main Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online & on-premises) core operation.  This results in improved overall system performance and improved scalability.
 

How does it work?

The asynchronous service features a managed queue for the execution of asynchronous plug-ins, workflows, and long-running operations such as bulk mail, bulk import, and campaign activity propagation.  These operations are registered with the asynchronous service and are executed periodically when the service processes its queue. Since these operations are queued up and must be executed in time globally, there are some well-defined resource quotas that enable resources to be distributed amongst all online customers equally.

In Microsoft Dynamics 365 online environment, there are certain quota settings applied for every organization, which are mentioned in the list below.
 

Settings

1. AsyncMaxExceptionCountInTimeUnit
2. OrgMaxAsyncThroughput
3. OrgMaxThreadCount
4. AsyncMaxExceptionCounterTimeUnitInMinutes
5. AsyncThroughputCapResetTimeIntervalInMinutes

 
Some important points to note here:

• These quotas are applied to a priority queue (plug-ins, SLA operations) and a regular queue (workflow, rollup, bulk delete, import, etc.) only and don’t apply to email jobs.
• Since plug-ins and workflows are executed in different queues, each has an independent quota within each organization.
• The values for these quota settings will differ between customer organizations. These settings are to be adjusted by Microsoft as per the performance needs of the platform, and are not configurable by customers.
• These settings are for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Asynchronous Processing Service and not Microsoft Dynamics 365 Asynchronous Processing Service (maintenance), which is for system maintenance like executing the deletion and re-indexing services.

Setting details

AsyncMaxExceptionCountInTimeUnit

This setting helps Microsoft throttle failing async operations and prevent them from consuming valuable resources. If a workflow job execution fails A times in D minutes, it gets postponed. If an operation is postponed for the first time, it would be postponed for D minutes. If it’s postponed for the nth time, it would be postponed for D times n (D x n) minutes. There is a max limit for the number of times it can be postponed, after which it would be postponed forever. A, D, and n being values that are set at the organization level to ensure optimum throughput and performance.
 

OrgMaxAsyncThroughput

OrgMaxAsyncThroughput is the number of jobs that the async service will process in E minutes.

OrgMaxAsyncThroughput is the actual throughput which is the net sum of various other operations like perceived throughput, system internal operations, and operations with async auto-delete. It should not be confused with the number of operations marked completed in the UI (perceived throughput). The values for these throughputs (i.e. perceived throughput and actual throughput) will be different depending on the load on the system, at any given time.
 

OrgMaxThreadCount

OrgMaxThreadCount helps to control the total number of parallel executions, for any given organization, at a given time.
 

Key takeaway

Since async operations have to operate within the quota limits mentioned above, all operations which directly or indirectly impact async operations should be created judiciously. Here are some tips to consider, while working with asynchronous operations.

1. Since there is no limit on the total number of async operations that can be created, the total number of operations can grow fast. With the limits mentioned above, it will further delay the async operations from getting picked up for execution. Some of the scenarios where this could happen are bulk import or migration from an on-premises to an online environment. If there are asynchronous workflows created to do backend updates to system or other entities for import of every single record, then these workflows or plugins should be disabled before staring the bulk import or migration.
2. Review scenarios where async plugin or workflows throw exceptions. Exceptions should not be thrown indefinitely without any handler to stop after a certain number of retries or timeouts. Such indefinite execution could lead to exception limits, mentioned in the settings above- = (AsyncMaxExceptionCountInTimeUnit, being hit often and async operations becoming throttled).

Review health of asynchronous operations

These quotas hold good for a regular workload, however customers can view the health of asynchronous operations and know when they are being throttled, due to quota limits, by visiting the Organization Insights dashboard.

The chart above depicts a scenario when the organization’s async queue is getting impacted by significant load, which is beyond quota limits. As a result, some operations (15 – 25 jobs) are backlogged. During times of usual load, when quota limits are not exceeded, there should be no jobs showing up as backlogged on this chart.

If you’d like to provide feedback, or offer suggestions, please go to Microsoft Dynamics Ideas. This website provides a collaboration platform for gathering actionable feedback to build and improve products and services.

 
 
Thanks,

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Product Engineering Team