Dynamics 365 monthly reading list December 2017

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Searching for business process flow stages in Dynamics 365 CRM by @MeganVWalker
• Import data with multi-select option set values in Dynamics 365 
• Is Dynamics 365 server-side sync filling up your database? by @PFEDynamics
• How to trigger Plugins on custom messages using Actions in Dynamics 365 by @Magnetism Solutions
• How to work with Record Create and Update rules null(Channel properties) in Dynamics CRM
• 10 techy tips your team will want to know about Dynamics 365 mobile applications for phones & tablets
• Microsoft Flow and change tracking - Microsoft Flow requires that Change Tracking is enabled to work with Dynamics 365 when looking for updates or deletes to records in CRM.
• Dynamics 365 Online Navigation fix – remove the “Switch to another app” menu – highly unsupported but you might have customers requesting for it
• Workflow scope and security in Dynamics 365
• What’s new in extensibility and app platform in the Enterprise Edition for Dynamics 365 (Online)
• Option sets and statuscode – doing some testing – see how they behave when setting them using Javascript
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 v9.0: Usage of the new OOB WebApi functions – Part 3 by @a33ik
• What is unsecure/secure configuration on a Dynamics 365 plugin
• Best practices for automating business process stage progression in Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Data Integration feature (for Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations)
• Not all business process flow entities are created equal
• Solution export error  - known issue in Dynamics 365 with “orphaned” roll-up fields
• Global option sets in Dynamics 365 by @PowerObjects
• Searching customer web resource content – how to write code to retrieve javascript/html code to check for unsupported code
• Customer Driven Update for Dynamics 365 version 9.0 is coming – scheduled updates begin in February 2018 and end in August 2018
• How do you get started with the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook Preview

Topics for Dynamics 365 business analysts, project managers, power users and end users

• Automatically collect and track emails with Dynamics 365 Auto Capture
• Getting around in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service App (Youtube 00:02:45)
• Which emails should I track in CRM?
• Visualizing data in Dynamics 365
• Beginner’s guide: how to perform simple data validation on records in Dynamics 365
• Use story time workshops and not backlog refinement
• Scrum certification for Dynamics 365 practitioners

Speaking at Dynamics 365 Saturday Amsterdam

I will be delivering a session about chat bots and Dynamics 365 at Dynamics 365 Saturday Amsterdam on the 3d of February. Registration is free.
Dynamics 365 Saturday is a Technical & Strategy event organized by the community with the following credo: “Learn & share new skills while promoting best practices, helping organizations overcome the challenges of implementing a successful digital transformation strategy with Microsoft Dynamics 365”.

Searching in knowledge base articles in Dynamics 365

Knowledge base articles are a base component of the Service Management module in Dynamics 365. The knowledge base is a repository of informational articles that can be used to help customer service representatives resolve cases. Knowledge base articles can be emailed to a customer, which can be sent either through the Dynamics 365 interface or through the Microsoft Dynamics apps for Outlook.
With the introduction of the new knowledge articles entity data model (KnowledgeArticle) in Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1   and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 SP1 (for on premise) (Release documentation 8.1 – January 2017) , the existing entities for knowledge management: KbArticle, KbArticleComment and KbArticleTemplate were deprecated.

You should now use the newer KnowledgeArticle in your code  (See Important changes coming in future releases of Microsoft Dynamics 365), which also support versioning and translation support.
In version 8.1, these knowledge articles became visible in the interactive service hub which was revamped into the Customer Service Hub in version 9.0 (Dynamics 365 July 2017 update). The Customer Service  Hub also contains a number Knowledge Base dashboard - one with "your knowledge base articles" and one specifically for a knowledge manager (see screenshot below).

If you want to learn more about how to work with knowledge base articles, you should really take a look at Reduce call handling times with knowledge articles in the Customer Service Hub . Knowledge base articles are also directly shown in a tab on a case form (see screenshot below).

It is also possible to execute full-text searches against the new knowledge articles using the FullTextSearchKnowledgeArticleRequest which uses the following parameters:

• QueryExpression: used to set additional query criteria and for which you also need to set the PagingInfo otherwise no results are returned
• RemoveDuplicates: remove duplicate versions of the same Knowledge Article
• SearchText: the text to search for in Knowledge Articles
• StateCode: required parameter which accepts an integer for the different statuses of a knowledge article such as Published, Draft, Approved, etc…
• UseInflection: searches for all different tenses of a verb or both the singular and plural forms of a noun. Underlying SQL full-text search is used (For more details see Searching for the inflectional form of a specific word

Code sample: searching within knowledge base articles using FullTextSearchKnowledgArticleRequest

References:

• Knowledge management entities (MSDN)
• MB2-718 Certification: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service – Knowledge base
• Work with knowledge articles in Dynamics 365 (MSDN)
• KnowledgeArticle entity messages and methods

Quick tip: finding all users with Dynamics 365 Service Administrator role in Office 365 tenant with PowerShell

Unfortunately the Office 365 Admin Portal, does not contain a predefined view to show all users who have the Dynamics 365 Service Administrator role – this role allows you to manage Dynamics 365 at tenant level (See Use the service admin role to manage your tenant for more details). But luckily you can also retrieve this information using PowerShell.

First make sure that you install the different prerequisites as outlined in Connect to Office 365 PowerShell – next open Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell. To connect to Office 365, simply type connect-msolservice . Get-MsolRole will give you a list of all administrator roles. You will see that the internal role name which is listed is still "CRM Service Administrator". The last line will export all users with this role to a CSV file

 connect-msolservice  
 get-msolrole | select name, description  
 $role = get-msolrole -rolename "CRM Service Administrator"  
 get-msolrolemember -roleobjectid $role.objectid | export-csv d:\temp\serviceadmins.csv  

Fix for unable to login to Dynamics CRM 9.0 with CrmServiceClient and .NET 4.7

When you try to connect to Dynamics 365 9.0 from within a console app using the CrmServiceClient, you might still encounter an error “Unable to login to Dynamics CRM” even though you have updated to the latest version of the different assemblies (9.0.0.7 at the moment of writing).

This might be caused by the fact that you compiling against .NET 4.7 where the default value of the ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol is SecurityProtocolType.SystemDefault (See What’s new in .NET 4.7 for more details).

If this is the fact, you might need to explicitly change the protocol to TL1.2 - which is a requirement for Dynamics 365 9.0 as announced in September 2017 in Updates coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement connection security  - by adding a line ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12