If your Dynamics 365 instance is 9.0, it is time to ditch deprecated Dynamics 365 for Outlook (add-in) and switch to Dynamics 365 App for Outlook because version 9 is now out of preview.
Short summary of the new features and things you can do without leaving Outlook:
Read more the full announcement on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Team Blog post.
For today’s tip, Sarah “Dynamics 365 Diva” Jelinek answers the question “I have one person who handles customer issues for my company–should I still use cases?”
I would tend to answer with “It depends.” But in all honesty, I would say yes. Even if one person handles the customer issues, I think there is a need to record that history with the customers. Even if the same person is handling the issues, there may be others that need to see the interactions, frequency, and results of the support process.
I have clients that email me directly needing assistance. There is a good reason for me to record that interaction within cases. If I am unavailable and the customer contacts another person in my company, they can look at the past cases in the system and find answers. Account managers can seek opportunities from cases recorded. Management can gather KPIs and other metrics to plan for growth.
I know it can seem overkill for the end user, but the pros outweigh the cons. Starting to use cases makes it easier for growth and seeing the 360-degree view of your customers.
This one was discovered by my KPMG partners in crime Fiona Whiteing and Jijeesh Kunhiraman on a recent project. As you may know, for a record such as a Contact, if I own the record, I can see the child Activities whether my security role gives me permission or not. I do not know if this obscure exception to record level security has a name. I call it ‘inherited security’. In fact it also works for Team ownership; if I am a member of a Team which owns a Contact, I can see the Activities of that Contact whether my security role (or the Team’s security role) allows me to or not.
If you did not know the above, end here and walk away intellectually nourished by an informative tip. If you did know the above, here is the twist. Let us say you are a member of a Team which owns a Contact and you can see the associated Activities thanks to inherited security. Let is assume none of the Activities are yours. If I now give your User record’s Security Role User-level delete privileges to Activities, you can now delete all those child Activities. Even though they are owned by other people and you can only see them because the Activities are on a Contact, owned by a Team which you are a member, you still get to blow them away.
Somehow inherited security amplifies the User-level delete privilege to work on any child record it renders visible, regardless of the actual owner. Is this a bug? Maybe. My guess is, as inherited security pre-dates the introduction of Team ownership in Dynamics, the subtle nuances of the two combining were not fully tested and give rise to unusual results. The moral of this tip? If you are securing records and inherited security is involved, make sure you test everything within an inch of its life.
If you make changes to the marketing list entity in Dynamics 365 v9 and try to move your customization, you may receive an error importing the customization.
Solution:
<IsReadOnlyInMobileClient>1</IsReadOnlyInMobileClient>
4. Zip the solution and import it again
So you want to use hierarchical security to give your sales managers access to their team’s account records. One thing that you should be aware of is how hierarchical security works when users are disabled.
If a user becomes disabled, records that he or she owns are not available for hierarchical security. This is a performance related limitation but is not currently documented in the official documentation.
Recommendation
Dynamics 365 Portals have a very convenient way to control access to knowledgebase articles – content access levels. Link contact, account, or web role to a content access level (e.g. Gold Partners), then simply associate that access level with a knowledgebase article and boom – that article is only available to the users associated with that access level (directly or indirectly).
However, when you deploy Dynamics 365 v9.0, you may find that following the instructions to Assign content access levels to knowledge articles is not possible because, well there is no “symbol that looks like a lock.”
That is because knowledgebase articles are now part of the Customer Service Hub app and that app is configured to use one form only: Knowledge Article for Interactive Experience.
Several people have recently asked me if they could use VOC to send surveys to application users. The answer to that question is “yes, sort of.”
When you send a non-anonymous survey invitation, you copy an HTML snippet to a Dynamics 365 email template, and when the system generates the email, it replaces the snippet with a client-specific URL that includes the ID of the customer. That’s how Voice of the Customer knows which customer record to link the response.
These invitation templates only work with contact and account records, not users or other records. If you try to put an invitation snippet in an email template sent to users, you will fail (trust me, I’ve tried).
Workaround 1
One workaround is the possible solution I suggested at the end of tip 951. Create contacts for system users, then create a lookup field for contact on the user record, linking the user to his or her contact record.
This then creates a trail you can follow with workflow or other system processes to send a survey invitation email to the contact related to a system user. For example, say you want to automatically survey the requesting user when an internal case is closed, you could have a workflow fire on the resolution of the case and trigger an email send to the originating user’s related contact record.
Workaround 2
Another school of thought is don’t use Voice of the Customer to survey users. It’s called Voice of the Customer for a reason–it’s designed to get customer satisfaction feedback from external customers. VOC fills an important gap by providing an interface that external parties can use to provide feedback into Dynamics 365. Users, by definition, have access to Dynamics 365, and any of the D365 user interfaces can be used for capturing input from users. Instead of using VOC for user surveys, you can use the feedback entity, create a custom user feedback entity, or use a dialog (yeah, they are going away at some point in the future, but still very viable for the foreseeable future). With any of these approaches, you can still send an invitation link to the feedback form via a workflow and you can also create additional relationships to other entities (which is not currently available via Voice of the Customer).
Our resident video tipster, Derik, has been a bit quiet lately and, as it turned out, for a good reason. If you are not a partner, and do not have access to Dynamics Learning Portal, then you’re in luck.
Managing Customer Engagement with Microsoft Dynamics 365 course is now offered free of charge through Microsoft Learning. The course contains tons of videos, step-by-step exercises, and targets first-time Microsoft Dynamics 365 users, young professionals and students.
The course is set to be archived in June 2018 so hurry up and learn!
(Facebook/Twitter cover photo by Clever Visuals on Unsplash)
Jonas “The Shuffler” Rapp fed us a perfect question for a security slam dunk.
Really?
(Jonas’s words, not mine)
Yes, really. We’ve already mentioned the brilliant password guidance in our tip 1031. Since some folks seem to have missed the memo, here’s the quote from the guidance (highlights are mine – g.d.).
Most administrators will force users to change their password at regular intervals, typically every 30, 60 or 90 days. This imposes burdens on the user (who is likely to choose new passwords that are only minor variations of the old) and carries no real benefits as stolen passwords are generally exploited immediately. Long-term illicit use of compromised passwords is better combated by:
- monitoring logins to detect unusual use
- notifying users with details of attempted logins, successful or unsuccessful; they should report any for which they were not responsible
Regular password changing harms rather than improves security, so avoid placing this burden on users. However, users must change their passwords on indication or suspicion of compromise.
It’s good to see Microsoft reviewing and adjusting their security recommendations on a regular basis. Stay safe, folks!
If we use ClickDimensions and Dynamics Portals, we have a wealth of options when it comes to creating a form for an external party to fill out. We have:
The question we may need to ask ourselves is which one to use for a given situation. At this stage I could use an illustrated guide to pave the way. After all, TOTD does occasionally feature flow diagrams. However, I am feeling nostalgic so my tip today will be in the form of a Commodore 64 BASIC program.
EDIT: Not everyone turned out to be a BASIC fan. Heck, some probably were not even born when BASIC was the language du jour. Scroll down to see a handcrafted diagram, if reading code is not your thing.
1 REM *****DYNAMICS FORMS DECISION TREE***** 10 AUTH = AD_AUTHENTICATION_REQUIRED 11 CONTACTS_ONLY = ONLY_CAPTURING_INFO_ON_CONTACTS 12 SURVEYS = CAPTURING_SURVEYS_ON_EXISTING_CONTACTS 13 HTML_FORM = IT_IS_AN_EXISTING_HTML_FORM 14 SKIP_QUESTIONS = THE_FORM_SKIP_QUESTIONS_SOMETIMES 15 REM *****I DONT DO COLONS***** 20 IF AUTH = YES THEN GOTO 100 ELSE GOTO 30 30 IF CONTACTS_ONLY = YES THEN GOTO 40 ELSE GOTO 50 40 IF COMPLEX_FORM = YES THEN GOTO 60 ELSE GOTO 200 50 IF SURVEYS = YES THEN GOTO 70 ELSE GOTO 100 60 IF HTML_FORM = YES THEN GOTO 200 ELSE GOTO 100 70 IF SKIP_QUESTIONS = YES THEN GOTO 300 ELSE GOTO 100 100 LOAD "DYNAMICS PORTAL FORMS", 8 200 LOAD "CLICKDIMENSIONS WEB FORMS", 8 300 LOAD "CLICKDIMENSIONS SURVEYS", 8
of the