Every now and then someone from Microsoft may ask you for your tenant ID. In my case it was in relationship to one of the preview programs at experience.dynamics.com insider program. But what is the tenant ID? First, what it is not: It’s not your D365 environment URL It’s not your D365 evironment ID found […]
Tip #1263: Microsoft Flow and Azure outages
Most of you were probably impacted by a most recent Azure outage on May 2 (see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/status/history/). Between 19:29 and 22:35 UTC on 02 May 2019, customers may have experienced connectivity issues with Microsoft cloud services including Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure DevOps. Most services were recovered by 21:40 UTC with the remaining […]
Tip #1153: When Upgrading, Consider the Whole Ecosystem
It is that time of year when people turn their thoughts to upgrading; the October 18 release has been announced and for those on Dynamics 365 Online v8, the clock has started. I was recently with a client who had a pretty typical setup. They had Dynamics 365 Online, NAV 2016, and an online shopping […]
Tip #985: Use Azure for permanent instance backups
In the tip 759 we suggested keeping a sandbox instance as your persistent backup because Dynamics 365 Management Center provides no control over the backup lifetime. Later, we were excited about introduction of the Online Management API and, as it turned out, all for the right reasons. Using the API, administrators can now backup a […]
Tip #808: Tracing with Xrm Tooling in Azure Functions
By now you should be able to get your Azure Function triggered from Dynamics 365 and connect back to Dynamics 365 to do some evil awesome things. Debugging Azure Functions however, is not a walk in a park – not like you can set breakpoints and step through the code. Well, you should, of course, […]
Tip #794: Connect to Dynamics 365 in Azure Functions
Delegating some work from plugins to Azure Functions turned out to be not as complex as we expected. Making function to do something useful (like updating Dynamics 365 records) was entirely different story. After running some NEL (naked eye learning) algorithms against our sales pipeline we calculated that an average opportunity value is inflated by […]
Tip #792: Invoke Azure Functions from Dynamics 365
You probably heard of the new kid on the Azure block: Azure Functions, that allow serverless execution of code. Wouldn’t that be nice to be able to trigger this serverless execution from Dynamics 365? I’m glad you asked! Since functions are very new, some plumbing is required but not as much as one would think. […]
Tip #631: Azure ML is coming to Dynamics CRM
One of the most exciting upcoming features in CRM Online is Azure Machine Learning integration (under In Preview): This release will introduce scenario-based Machine Learning (ML) integration with Azure ML for product cross-sell recommendations, and auto-suggest of relevant knowledge articles and case topic analysis. These scenarios are based on integration with Azure ML APIs for […]
Tip #522: Escape CRM Online sandbox
I said it before and I said it again that presenting at the conferences like eXtremeCRM can be a real eye-opener. You quickly learn, for example, that Bob could not make it and you also learn how much people know about CRM. With all the accumulated knowledge it comes as a surprise that some of […]
Tip #207: Remove password expiration for O365/CRM Online
Password expiration in CRM Online is indeed a nuisance and can be changed but the maximum password expiration period configurable using Office 365 administration portal is 2 years. If you intend to use O365/CRM Online for longer than 2 years, you may want to consider using Powershell tools to do it like a boss. The […]