Dataverse search: the good, the bad and the ugly

The enhanced search experience for model driven apps (initially called relevance search) on Dataverse and Dynamics 365 CE was initially announced in November 2020 and you could start using it a couple of months later. Recently Microsoft announced some changes (and improvements) for relevance search in Goodbye Relevance search, hello Dataverse search! 

When you plan to use Dataverse search, there are a number of things that you need to keep in mind which are not so obvious from the Microsoft documentation so let's dive right in and look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly about Dataverse search.

Dataverse search - The Good

The search box has moved in the UI and is now very easy for end users to find back. When you start typing text in the Dataverse search box, you will see a list of suggested results as well as previous queries.  The way that the suggested results are shown can even by slightly changed as outlined in this blog post - Quick tip - Data in the inline suggestion view of relevance search in Dynamics 365 CRM. Dataverse search is powered by Azure Cognitive Search so you get support for fuzzy search and advanced capabilities like word stemming and work breaking. For more documentation on the end-user experience see Search for tables and rows by using Dataverse search

With the new solution explorer update it also is a lot easier to configure which entities/tables you want to be indexed for search. The settings are solution aware so if you have multiple solutions installed in your Dataverse environment be aware of solution layering. To get an overview of all indexed tables - select the Default solution in the maker portal and click Manage Search Index - for more details see Configure Dataverse search for your environment

Relevance search is also available through a REST API meaning that you can also use it in Canvas Apps & Power Automate (See Use Relevance Search API in Power Automate & Canvas App - Part 1). To begin using Dataverse search, your application simply needs to use POST requests  to the /api/search/v1.0/query endpoint - for the complete documentation see  Search across table data using Dataverse search in Microsoft docs.

Dataverse search - The Bad

Although there is no specific license required for Dataverse search - and it works both for environments without Dynamics 365 apps enabled and with Dynamics 365 apps - there might be a cost associated to it. 

When you enable Dataverse search, additional storage is required for creating the indexes in the Dataverse database storage. You will probably not notice this in your development environments since they might not contain sufficient data. But in production environments the increase can be quite significant - I have seen Dynamics 365 Customer Service environments where as much as 16% of the database usage is taken by the RelevanceSearch table.

In my opinion it would be better to add a more prominent warning of possible storage increase to the main documentation pages about Dataverse search - there is however a mention on the Free up storage space documentation - remove unrequired tables and columns from Dataverse search. 

With the Wave 2 2021 release (after October 2021) Microsoft enabled Dataverse search by default for all production environments so probably want to find out what the impact is on your storage  consumption.

I also did not expect the storage to be added in the database which at roughly 40€ GB/month for additional database storage does not come cheap.

Dataverse search - The Ugly

Now suppose that you are suddenly faced with an increase in storage in one of your production environments after you activated Dataverse search. Unfortunately just disabling the Dataverse search again is probably not an option because your end users probably liked the functionality. So your only options are to start reviewing which tables and which fields to add to the index. The entities which are enabled for search are clearly visible from the administration screen but unfortunately finding out the fields which are added to the relevance search index is a little more involved.

So if we take the example of the "accounts" table and look at the "Quick find" - out of the box there will be 8 fields marked as added to the index - account name, account number, primary contact (lookup), address1 city, main phone and e-mail. If you want to modify this e.g. remove account number - you will create a new solution and add the "accounts" table and "quick find" to the solution (via add existing components) and remove the column/field from the Quick find view and from the "Find by" settings. After you made these changes - you will notice that the number of indexed fields decreased.

Unfortunately in bigger organizations, you are not allowed to make changes in production environments without following a strict process. 

So an iterative process of  removing tables from Dataverse search results and modifying the fields selected for each table in an iterative manner to assess the impact is not always easy to find the balance between storage increase and providing functionality is not always easy. It would be a lot easier to see how much each table and preferably also each field contributes to the RelevanceSearch table storage size so that you now which changes are required.

The amount of storage required depends on the number of rows in the table, the number of indexed columns/fields and the amount of data stored in a specific column - a text field/column with many characters will consume more space then a text field with only a few characters. So if you are indexing e-mail activities - adding the description field might cause a significant increase. The indexed fields include Find columns (isSearchable), View Columns (isRetrievable) and Filter criteria (isFilterable).

References:

• Simplified Dataverse Search Configuration by @D365Goddess
• Quick tip - Data in the inline suggestion view of relevance search in Dynamics 365 CRM by @Inogic
• Goodbye Relevance search, hello Dataverse search!
• Enhancements in Relevance Search in Dynamis 365 CRM by @Inogic
• Configure Dataverse search for your environment

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list October 2021

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 release 2021 wave 2

• Improved User Experience in Dynamics 365 2021 wave 2  by @inogic
• Announcing public preview for in-app notifications in model-driven apps
• Dynamics 365 Waves Guide - General thoughts applied to Wave 2 2021 by @popujol
• What's new and planned for Microsoft Dataverse
• Exclusive sneak peek at the new multi-tab Panel (Side Panes)
• App side panels available for public preview with model driven apps

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Saving Dataverse capacity by deleting useless emails by @mattybeard
• PowerApps Component Framework and Microsoft Graph Toolkit better together using MSAL
• Understanding the Dynamics 365 Teams Member License Restrictions by @benhosk
• Upgrading a solution vs updating a solution - what is the difference?
• Enable Model-Driven In-App Notifications with Power Automate
• Power Apps Canvas Apps - application monitoring with Azure Application Insight (Youtube)
• Azure Logging and Monitoring for ISVs
• New Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 training: August 2021 roundup
• 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report
• YouTube Channel for PFE Dynamics - you can find the recordings of the monthly Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technical Update Briefing here  by @pfedynamics

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform consultants, project managers and power users

• Announcing public preview of Custom Pages for converging model-driven apps and canvas apps
• Is the importance of Customer Experience overinflated?
• Confront the misconceptions slowing your move to Dynamics 365
• Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list August 2021

 Power Platform and Dynamics 365 release wave 

• Power Fx coming to model-driven Power Apps, Dataverse and more
• Microsoft Teams calling from Dynamics 365 Sales with productivity intelligence (Youtube) - powered by Sales Insights Add-in for Dynamics 365 Sales
• Important new feature: relationship validation for solutions
• Introducing the Modern App Designer (Preview)
• Our top picks from the New Microsoft Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Plans
• Deal Manager Workspace (Preview) by @d365goddess
• Early access - advanced lookups

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Best practices for building and designing Azure functions by @zimmergren
• Experiences from 7 years of Azure Cosmos DB (Youtube recording)
• Improved SLA timer control helps agents track KPIs
• How to customize quick actions in Dynamics 365 CE/ Model-driven Power Apps
• Microsoft Power Platform icons download
• Posts on Omnichannel for Customer Service by @nishantranaCRM
• How to fix Office 365 WS-Trust Authentication deprecation and Regional Discovery deprecation for Dataverse and Dynamics 365 client applications
• Power Fx coming to model-driven Power Apps, Dataverse and more
• Write batch size, data integration unit and degree of copy parallelism in Azure Data Factory for Dynamics CRM/365 dataset
• Improving bulk Dataverse performance with enableaffinitycookie
• Extend access token lifetime to connect to Dataverse API by @ramontebar
• Data migration - optimum batch size and threads for maximum throughput to Microsoft Dataverse - explains which settings to manipulate when requiring big volume data loads using Kingswaysoft
• Bringing your Dataverse data to Azure Synapse 
• Easyrepro tips
• Performance insights for model-driven apps -  feedback from Alex Shlega on cold page load warnings in the new Performance Insights dashboard
• Log plug-in telemetry to your Application Insights resource
• What is DevOps? Excellent starting point from the people at Github

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform/Power Platform consultants, project managers and power users

• Agile isn't dead and it can't be killed - the rumors of the death of Agile have been greatly exaggerated
• Feature parity - replicate existing functionality of a legacy system using a new technology stack
• Connect Dynamics 365 Customer to Livechat
• Custom Analytics solution for Power Virtual Agents
• Empower every dev to go faster with Microsoft Power Apps (MBAS 2021 recording with @clamanna)
• Empower seller excellence with customer feedback solutions
• Driving empathetic, connected service experience with Dynamics 365
• Power Apps and Power Automate Licensing Overview (Youtube  - 31/7/2021) - still on my todo list to view

Leverage environment variables in Power Platform and Dynamics 365 projects

Environment variables allow you to easily add configuration data with Power Platform solutions  and use them in different solution components such as canvas apps, Power Automate cloud flows and model driven apps. Environment variables are a fairly new component type and were introduced in public preview in November 2019 and released in GA around summer 2020.  They are a good alternative for the typical custom "configuration entity/table" that you use in a project -  check out Why you should use environment variables for some practical experience around it.

The new solution import experience supports setting environment variables during the import of the solution but it will only do it when you did not set the default value or a current value so don't forget to remove the current value (click on the "..." next to the current value to remove before exporting your managed solution) as documented on Enter new values while importing solutions. On the target environment where you import your managed solution, you will see a red bar appearing if there are environment variables missing values.

You will be able to use the created environment variables within all different types of Power Platform components but so far I have used it mainly in Power Automate cloud flows where you can use environment variables in expressions  (see screenshot below) - see references section for other example use cases.

References:

• Simplifying importing & exporting Power Apps with datasource environment variables - good example of using environment variables with canvas apps.
• Retrieving environment variable values via Javascript (Dataverse/PowerApps) -  by @joegriffin

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list July 2021

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 release wave 2

• Dynamics 365 and industry clouds: 2021 release wave 2 plan
• Top 11 things from Power Platform 2021 release wave 2 by @dancingwithcrm
• New integration scenarios between Power Platform and Dynamics 365 FinOps with new Power Platform convergence - quite interested in this one since it makes dual write setup a lot easier - see Introduction to the Dual Write framework for Dynamics 365 for more details
• Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Wave 2 2021 Reelase: Top 10 in (under) 10 minutes by @LisaMCrosbie
• First look at the multi-tab panel (sidePanes)
• Important changes (deprecations) coming in Power Apps, Power Automate and customer engagement apps - additional info added in June 2021 - be aware that you will need to migrate automatic record creation rules and service-level agreements as the legacy versions will be deprecated
• 2021 Release Wave 2 Plan: My Top 6 Power Apps Features by @DianaBirkelbach

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Power Platform Extension for VS Code 
• Retrieve and delete the history of audited data changes
• Announcing public preview of App Governance - app governance is designed for oAuth enabled apps that access Microsoft 365 data
• How to get started with Azure Communication Services part 1 - 2 - create a chat app
• Connecting customers and businesses with Azure Communication Services and Microsoft Teams
• Dynamics 365 - the cost of manual deployment activities
• Important changes coming in Power Apps Portals
• How a Microsoft team transitioned from unmanaged to managed Power Platform solutions
• Performance insights in model driven apps
• Application Insights integration with model-driven power apps explored
• Dependent assemblies for plugins  - allows us to get rid of the unsupported ILMerge approach for adding references to third party assemblies for plugins
• On-premises to Online Migration Factory Overview (March 2021)
• Unmanaged to managed solution strategies - interesting thread on this topic with @ddlabar and @scottdurrow

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform/Power Platform consultants, project managers and power users

• Even in low-code software development, IT departments still need to hold users' hands
• On demand webinar - Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Sales and Service what is coming on Wave 1 release
• Improve seller productivity with the deal manager experience
• Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams: extend collaboration across teams
• Is Dynamics 365 data now "free" in Microsoft Teams?
• Understand why Microsoft drops Power Apps licenses by 50% and Power Apps pricing drops by 50% and the official announcement Pricing and licensing updates coming to Power Apps
• Measure three types of customer experience
• Critical questions for Customer Success Executives
• The difficulties of scaled agile projects

Quick tip: don't forget to unblock downloaded source code files when using Visual Studio

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly received below exceptions when trying to build a VS2019 solution that I downloaded from Github. 

The solution is indicated in the exception - you need to right click the file and uncheck the "Unblock tickbox" at the bottom of the dialog. But when you have a lot of files, this is quite tedious. Luckily there is a PowerShell cmdlet Unblock-File to help you solve this. Navigate to the folder where you sourcecode is located and just run "dir -recurse | Unblock-File".

Quick tip: submitting web forms to Dataverse using Power Automate Cloud Flows

You can quite easily integrate data coming from forms on your web site with Dataverse using some simple  Javascript and Power Automate Cloud Flows. 

First step is to create a Power Automate Flow with a "When a HTTP request is received" trigger and add the form fields that you want to capture as JSON payload.  Remember to start creating your flow from within a solution so that you can leverage the ALM capabilities of Dataverse and use the new Dataverse connector (current environment)

The request body JSON schema should contain all the web form fields that you want to sent to Dataverse/Dynamics 365 - below is the JSON schema that I generated from a sample payload. 

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "firstname": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "lastname": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "phone": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "email": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "message": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    }
}

After you save the flow - the "HTTP Post URL" will be automatically generated - this is the URL that you will be using in the Javascript code that you embed on your website to sent the web form  to Dataverse. You might want to consider using Azure API management to protect and expose the API indirectly. 

 

The last step is to  add the Javascript code snippet to your website to submit the changes to the Power Automate cloud flow endpoint or the Azure API management hyperlink.

function submitform()
	  {
		var emailvalue = document.getElementById('emailvalue').value;
		var firstnamevalue = document.getElementById('firstnamevalue').value;
		var lastnamevalue = document.getElementById('lastnamevalue').value;
		var phonevalue = document.getElementById('phonevalue').value;
		var messagevalue = document.getElementById('messagevalue').value;
		var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
		xmlhttp.open("POST","yourcloudflowurl");
		xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/json;charset=UTF-8");
		xmlhttp.send(JSON.stringify(
			{
				firstname: firstnamevalue,
				lastname: lastnamevalue,
				phone: phonevalue,
				email: emailvalue,
				message: messagevalue
			}
		));
		alert("Thank you");
	  }

References:

• Use Microsoft Flow to integrate your website's webforms with Dynamics 365
• Using Microsoft Flow to capture web form submissions in Dynamics
• How to expose Microsoft Flow through Azure API Management
• Protect your nested/service flows with the  Azure API Management Service

Introduction to the Dual Write framework for Dynamics 365

Summary: The Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform consists out of a number of different first party apps with CRM (Dynamics 365 Sales & Customer Service) and ERP (Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management) being core components which typically are used cross industries and sectors in a large number of sectors. The Dual write framework allows for deep integration of Dynamics CRM and F&O.

In most application architectures at companies we have this classical divide between CRM software on the one hand and ERP software on the other hand. Different vendors, technology stacks make it difficult to bridge the divide between the processes and the data models in these core applications.

But from a customer perspective, they don't care about how your application architecture looks like and whether your processes need to cross application boundaries (see simplified schema below)

The Dual Write framework in Dynamics 365 is just one of the different integration mechanisms available in the platform but it probably is the one which provides the deepest level of integration. Dual-write is an out-of-the-box infrastructure that provides near real-time and bi-directional integration between model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 CE (and Dataverse) and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Dual-write provides tightly coupled, bi-directional integration which offers a number of interesting functionalities (but is not necessarily a fit for your scenarios so it is important to do an assessment first of the impact both on sales and customer service processes and financial processes). Changes in CE  causes writes to FinOps and changes FinOps causes writes to CE, this automated data flow provides an integrated user experience across the apps. (See Dual write overview in Microsoft docs for more detailed information)

Dual-write was made general available (GA) in March 2020 and has been evolving at a rapid pace with monthly updates - see What's new or changed in dual-write.  It consists out of a number of entity maps which are provided out of the box by Microsoft but you can adapt or even extend these entity maps in Dynamics 365 FinOps.  In my opinion, the configuration and setup should typically be done by FinOps consultants/architects since the process and data model from ERP is the most complex one but a basic understanding of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is quite useful.

Enabling Dual-Write for existing Finance and Operations Apps is quite thoroughly documented but in my personal experience there were still some quirks during the setup that I did not expect (experience from last year):

• Dual write is not supported on trial instances of Finance and Operations Apps (See Microsoft Power Platform Integration > Dual-write setup>System requirements for dual-write)
• Make sure that you meet all the system requirements and complete the prerequisites. 
• One of the prerequisites, is installing the Dual Write Core app in Dataverse. This is a quite complex app which will add a whole set of  (hidden) solutions to your Dataverse instance
• 
  
  
  
  
• There are quite a few steps required to complete the setup - luckily the setup wizard in Dynamics 365 FinOps will do a validation whether all steps have been completed successfully.
• 
  
  
  
  
• After importing the standard entity maps, you will still need to do some additional configuration to make the bi-directional sync work correctly. 
• Be also mindful that the person who initially setup the dual-write connection is the only one who can add new table maps. See Troubleshoot dual-write issues in Finance and Operations apps:  Error when you link the environment for dual-write or add a new table mapping.

After installing the Dual Write solution on Dataverse (or Dynamics 365 CE) you will see quite a lot of changes that you need to be aware of as a CE consultant or CE solution architect like:

• Enhanced currency functions (FinOps and CE need to have the same currency precision - see Currency data-type migration for dual-write)
• Changes in CRM will be propagated to Dynamics 365 FinOps using a large number of plugins, if a transaction fails in FinOps because of some missing data (or wrong configuration) your changes will not be saved in CRM.
• Introduction of new concepts like company (legal entity in FinOps) & party
• As part of the Integrated customer master, account numbers are now required and need to be filled in. There is no global number sequence across CE and FinOps. You need to handle the autonumbering in both apps and use a common pattern. Accountnumber in CR is mapped to Customer Account number in FinOps, it needs to be unique per legal entity and is the primary key of the customer table in FinOps.
• Exposure to financial and tax data  in Dynamics 365 CE e.g. customer groups which are used in FinOps to share characteristics for companies such as payment terms, number of days until invoices are due etc... This is sometimes also used for intercompany invoicing for internal/external customers.
• Advanced pricing and on hand inventory functions

References:

• What gets changed (Technical) in Dynamics365 FinOps with dual-write 
• Want to see the inbound and outbound payload for dual-write integration (FinOps perspective)
• Managing dual write - Application Lifecycle management
• Prospect-to-cash in Dual Write (August 2020) webinar recording
• Finance and Supply Chain Management: Dual Write Framework | May 2020 webinar recording
• Dynamics 365 Wave 2 - Field Service & ERP Let's talk integrations by Lucas Diaz recording

Quick tip: ConfigurationManager and .NET Core

If you want to use the System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager class in your .NET Core app you will first need  to reference the System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager Nuget package since it is not part of .NET Core due to the smaller framework footprint.

Getting started with Azure Data Factory for Dynamics365 CRM consultants

The majority of Dynamics 365 CRM projects typically include some initial data load/migration activities as customers don't start from a blank sheet. Besides initial load of data there might also be a need for data integrations - there are a  number of solutions for data migration or data integration with Dynamics 365 CRM - this post will explain why you should strongly consider Azure Data Factory as a possible option.. 

Besides the obvious writing code as an integration option, you can also consider a third party solution and there are many good solutions on the market to meet integration needs e.g.  Tibco Scribe or the KingswaySoft SSIS Integration toolkit for Dynamics 365 .  But if you are looking for something with minimal initial cost investment (no separate licensing fee), quick start-up time and fully cloud based (no virtual machine/server environments needed) Azure Data Factory is a great fit. 

This is why - in my opinion -  technical Dynamics 365 CRM consultants should be at least aware of the  capabilities of Azure Data Factory and setup simple data pipelines.

Azure Data Factory is a managed cloud service meant for building complex, hybrid ETL/ELT pipelines that integrate data silos and can include big data and machine learning transformations.

Azure Data Factory provides an easy to use drag and drop interface where you use activities/tasks to transformation, move and copy your data from over 100+ supported data sources within the Microsoft stack or non-Microsoft (Salesforce, SAP, etc…). Azure Data Factory also has full support for running existing SSIS packages on its cloud infrastructure and last but not least it has a flexible pricing model with low initial costs. As expected from an enterprise platform it also provides great DevOps integration - something which I will cover in a next blog post (always setup Git integration for Azure Data Factory - it will make the editing experience a lot easier - see below in the Tips & tricks section for more details).

Below is a visualization of the different building blocks in  Azure Data Factory:

• A data factory can have one or more pipelines which group together activities which define the actions to perform on your data. (See  Pipelines and activities in Azure Data Factory for more details)
• These activities use datasets as inputs and outputs. A dataset identifies the data in a specific data store. (See Datasets in Azure Data Factory for more details)
• Before you can create a dataset you need to specify the linked service to link your data store to the data factory. The dataset represents the structure of the data within the linked data store and the linked services defines the connection to the data source. (See Linked services in Azure Data Factory for more details)
• The pipelines need to run in a compute infrastructure used by Azure Data Factory to allow for the different types of data integration capabilities. There are three types of integration runtime types (Azure, Self-hosted and Azure SSIS) and depending on the required capabilities and network support you will need to use on or the other. (See Integration runtime in Azure Data Factory)

Tips & tricks:

ADF has a connector which supports both Dynamics 365 (cloud version) as well the legacy on-premise versions of Dynamics CRM (version 2015 and higher) -   See Copy data from and to Dynamics 365 (CDS/Dataverse) or Dynamics CRM by using Azure Data Factory for more details). To be able to use on-premise versions of Dynamics CRM, the environment needs to be setup with  Internet-facing deployment (IFD) - info on the ADF connector information to on premise CRM see Dynamics 365 and Dynamics CRM on-premises with IFD is found on the same documentation page

• Setup Git integration for Azure Data Factory - by default, the Azure Data Factory user interface experience (UX) authors directly against the data factory service (live mode). Even when you are not deploying Azure Data Factory artifacts from source control you will benefit from the better developer experience when git integration is enabled.
• For the copy activity, you are required to set the Write Behavior to Upsert when  you use Dynamics 365 CRM as a destination (sink). You will need to provide an alternate key or you  can  leave the alternate key blank when you use the internal ID of CRM within your mapping (See Azure Data Factory: Update an existing record using Dynamics 365 Internal Guid for more details)

References:

• Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises) version 9 - configure an internet-facing deployment
• Ask the Expert: Azure Data Factory Channel 9 recording (March 2021)
• Azure Data Factory Ignite 2021 announcements

Learning material:

• Microsoft Learn - Data integration at scale with Azure Data Factory or Azure Synapse Pipeline
• Pluralsight - Building your first data pipeline in Azure Data Factory
• Azure Data Factory and Dynamics 365 & Power Platform  blog posts from Priscilla Tse

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform quarterly reading List Q1 2021

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query reaches general availability
• Use of Dynamics 365 CRM Field Service features – Functional Locations and Asset Hierarchy by @inogic
• A smarter way to work with cases using Kanban view within Dynamics 365 CRM 
• Customer Service workspace review by @D365Goddess
• Connecting to Dynamics 365 using WS-Trust authentication not possible anymore use oAuth 2.0
• Finding all audit enabled tables and columns for your Dataverse environment 
• Export and import bots using solutions (Preview)
• Considerations for optimized performance in Power Apps
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Setting up search providers (Preview)
• Power Platform Base request capacity by @joegilldotcom
• Setup a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing
• Rapid Assist Teams app template - Power Platform based app that allows customer facing employees to rapidly connect to experts, get quick answers, search for info, etc...
• How Microsoft built and adopted a customized Release Planner app
• What does a Power App look like exactly? by @jukkan
• Efficient bulk Dataverse updates with SQL
• Release 2020 Wave 2 - Agent scripts and macros as part for Customer Service Workspace explored
• Configuring Wave 1 2021 Relevance Search Quick Actions
• Announcing Visual Data Prep general availability (Diagram View in Power Query Online)
• A painful bulk email sending lesson
• Power Apps Code Review Tool
• Future of developers in Power Platform
• Key ALM updates in Power Platform
• How to use environment variables by @DDChristian19
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service - activity monitoring for automatically created records
• Why does low code need a programming language like Power Fx? by @jukkan
• Using environment variables in Dynamics 365 CRM - part 2 by @inogic

Topics for Dynamics 365  Business Application Platform consultants, project managers and power users

• IKEA Sweden – Reimagining the customer experience with Microsoft Power Platform
• New Microsoft Dynamics 365 learning paths: November 2020 roundup
• 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low Code Application Platforms
• How omnichannel enhances the customer experience
• Transforming SOX compliance evaluation process with Microsoft Power Platform
• Automate taks with Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10 - no additional cost and Power Automate Desktop Introduction -tutorial (YouTube 00:20:23) 
• The difficulties of scaled agile projects
• Creating a resilient organization for now and the future
• 3 reasons to accelerate you migration journey to Dynamics 365
• Why a knowledge base is important in delivering exceptional customer service 
• The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service

How to disable multi factor authentication (MFA) for a Dynamics 365 trial environment

 You might have noticed that if you now setup a new Dynamics 365 trial environment, users who login are greeted with "Help us protect your account" which requires to setup multi factor authentication (MFA) even for accounts in trial/demo tenants. This is part of the Azure Active Directory security defaults. 

To get rid of this setting you need to login to https://portal.azure.com and change this setting for the Azure Active Directory used by your demo/trial tenant. Navigate to Azure Active Directory in your subscription and select Properties in the left navigation pane. At the bottom of this screen, you will find the Access Management for Azure resources section.

Click the link Manage Security Default in this section and change the setting to Enable security defaults No.

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 API request entitlements

Based on the number and the different types of licenses that you have within your Office 365 tenant you are granted a specific number of API request entitlements in a 24 hour window. For more details take a look at Request limits and allocations (Microsoft documentation)

It is important to keep in mind that these entitlement limits are different from the service protection limits  which are already enforced today.

It is time to start reviewing your architecture and consumption of API requests on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 as Microsoft announced that they will start enforcing these limits once the transition period ends (no date available yet in the official documentation - last updated February 2d 2021) - see Power Platform > Licensing > Request limits and allocations for more details.

Quick tip: changing the access for a Teams recording in Microsoft Stream

 Up until now a Microsoft Teams recording is published in Microsoft Stream (this will change in early 2021) and  the Microsoft Teams recording is only accessible to a limited set of people. 

If you are the meeting owner, you can change permissions and allow people without access to view a meeting recording. Open the meeting in Stream and select   More options button > Update Video Details. 

This will open a new screen, in which you can tick either "allow everyone in your company to view this video" or you can share the recording with specific persons.

Quick tip : how to do a poll during a Microsoft Teams meeting

 A colleague showed me last week how to do a poll during Microsoft Teams meeting - check out the video below on how to set this up yourself and add some interactivity to meetings

 

Getting started with Azure Synapse Analytics on demand webinars

 Mid December 2020, Microsoft organized some webinars to get Microsoft partners up to speed with Azure Synapse Analytics. All these webinars are now available on demand on the Microsoft events page - just search for synapse and add the filters "category: on demand" and "events for: Partners"

On demand webinars for Microsoft Partners - Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics

• Session1: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics: Studio and orchestration
• Session 2: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics: Azure Synapse Analytics - Synapse and SQL Serverless
• Session 3: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics: Apache Spark and Synapse Workspace security
• Session4: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics: Azure Synapse Analytics Security, Metastore and Synapse link for Cosmos DB
• Session 5: Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics: Azure Synapse Analytics -  Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics Integration

MB-600 Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solution architect exam prep and beyond

The last couple of weeks of 2020 I have been prepping for Exam  MB-600: Microsoft Dynamics 365 + Power Platform Solution Architect which I passed end of December 2020. In this blog post I will share some resources I used to study for the exam. I will also share some thoughts on what you can expect on the exam (without breaching the confidentiality - so I can't give specific questions). 

It was the first time I took a Microsoft exam online  due to the exam centers being closed in Belgium due to Covid.  The online proctored exam went quite smoothly but it did make me a little more nervous  especially given some of the horror stories I had heart about these type of exams.

For any Microsoft exam you start by looking at the detailed skills outline document. The MB-600 exam skills outline document  contains an overview of the different topics, you can find this document on the exam details page. Make sure to always look for the latest version since the exam requirements might get updated a couple of times every year - which is logical given the rapid evolution of the platform.

As part of the preparation I started with the MB-600: Microsoft Power Apps + Dynamics 365 Solution Architect Virtual Training Series (May 2020) for Microsoft partners - a 3 part on-demand webinar series  of about 2 hours per topic:

• Becoming a solution architect for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform (116 minutes)
• Discover customer needs and propose a solution (114 minutes)
• Work with requirements and perform fit-gap (115 minutes)

There is an overlap of this training with the Microsoft Learn learning paths which are also outlined on the MB-600 exam details page - Architect solutions for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

I also started following a number of sessions from the MB-600 virtual study group initiative where a number of consultants share their thoughts on the exam - they will cover all content in 10 different sessions/webinar sessions. The content of the study group is largely based MB 600: Microsoft Dynamics 365 + Power Platform Solution Architect - Revision Guide (Recording are only accessible for CRMUG members)

• Session 1 recording  MB-600 virtual study group Solution architect's role (November 6th 2020)
• Session 2 recording  MB-600 virtual study group Initiate solution planning (November 13th 2020)
• Session 3 recording MB-600 virtual study group (November 20th 2020)
• Session 4 recording  MB-600 virtual study group Capture requirements (December 4th 2020) 
• Session 5 recording MB-600 virtual study group Perform Fit gap analysis (December 11th 2020)
• Session 6 recording MB-600 virtual study group Design process and topology  (December 18th 2020)
• Session 7 recording MB-600 virtual  Lead the design process part 2 (January 10th 2021)

In hindsight (after passing the exam) all of these resources provide a lot of information about the role of solution architect, the type of activities he/she engages in during the different phases of a customer engagement (Initiate & design, Implement, Support and evolve) but they are not enough for passing the exam. The exam contains quite a few technical questions that you should be prepared for on some of the topics on integration patterns using Azure, Dynamics 365 security model, ALM for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, basic understanding of the capabilities of all of the different products in both Power Platform (Canvas and model driven apps, Power BI, Power Automate Flow, Power Virtual Agents, PowerApps Portals) and Dynamics 365 (Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, etc...), ALM for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, ... 

There are the standard multiple choice questions which you also encounter but what was new for me in this exam was the use of fictional customers case studies which will serve as input for a set of questions afterwards. Normally the MB-600 exam is the culmination in a series of exams for attaining the title of but I only took this last exam up until now. So probably there is an overlap in the technical content covered as part of the other exams.

Alternatives to Azure Notebooks preview

Azure Notebooks Preview will be retired on January 15th, 2021 and all user data will be destroyed - don't forget to download your user data before then.  Microsoft alternatives to use are listed on Quickstart: Export a Jupyter Notebook project in Azure Notebooks Preview