Occasional rantings about Enterprise Architecture and Solution Architecture. Taking the first small steps in machine learning, Python and algorithmic trading
I recently stumbled upon this interesting training material https://azure.github.io/LearnAI-KnowledgeMiningBootcamp/ . It explains how to built an enterprise search solution by applying knowledge mining to business documents like contracts, memos, presentations and images and expose these using a bot. You will use Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Bot Framework, Azure Functions, etc..
I’m a big fan Dynamics 365 Organization Insights and I have been using for more than a year now since it was released in February 2017. Organization Insights provides a number of key statistics about the usage, activity and quality of service (failing API calls, plugin execution failures, etc…) for your Dynamics 365 (online) instance. A couple of weeks ago Microsoft moved the Organization Insights functionality to the new Power Platform Admin Center . You will find the Organization Insights dashboards by selecting Analytics in the left navigation bar and selecting Common Data Service for Apps. The analytics for Common Data Service for Apps provides more detailed information and also allows you to filter and download the information in CSV format. The filter functionality allows you to select the specific instance for which you want to see information as well as see define a time frame for which you want to see information.
If you want to download all the videos and powerpoint decks of Microsoft Ignite 2018 – you can still use the PowerShell script written by @mderooij. It allows you to download individual sessions by using the schedule code or by solution area. To download all 134 sessions about Dynamics 365 and related applications use this syntax
I will be delivering a session about chat bots and Dynamics 365 at Dynamics 365 Saturday Brussels on November 17th. 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”.
The Dynamics 365 Health Accelerator is directly available from the Microsoft AppSource and allows you to rapidly develop healthcare solutions by providing a data model which supports entities based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (https://www.hl7.org/fhir/index.html) framework created by HL7. Besides the data model, it also contains pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data, as well as other tools to help partners build and deploy new healthcare solutions. The Dynamics 365 Health Accelerator is part of Microsoft’s Industry Accelator initiative which supports industry partners by extending the Common Data Model.
Figure 1. Patient timeline: presentation of clinical information about a patient in chronological order enabling providers to visualize all patient interactions and make informed care decisions
Figure 2. Care Team Visualization: A connected view of the care team associated with a patient and their roles that can be configured to include family and other related relationships
Microsoft recently decided to change its update policy for Dynamics 365/CRM online – see Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (administrator guide) – manage updates for more details. One of the important changes is that all customers will need to be on the latest version from February 1, 2019 onwards. Therefore it is highly recommended to keep up to date with upcoming changes. Microsoft therefore committed to delivering the release notes of upcoming versions a couple of months in advance.
Keeping up to date with all of the information on Dynamics 365 is quite a challenge – luckily a number of people - did a great job by creating these podcast shows which help me during the daily commute
Microsoft recently announced that Azure Data Factory (v2 functionality in preview) now enables you to copy data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Oracle Responsys by using Copy Activity. These two connectors are currently available in ADF copy activity authoring user interface.
In this post I will focus on the new activity log management functionality, which extends the existing auditing functionality in Dynamics 365 with support for auditing on all data and all operations (including admin operations), with near real-time support, out of the box SIEM integration (Security Information and Event Management systems which provide real-time monitoring, correlation of events, alerting, etc ...) and seamless integration with Office 365 and Azure. Since auditing occurs at the SDK layer of Dynamics 365, much more data is available than just activities.
It is important to notice that the documentation states that this feature might change as well as limited availability so it might be that on your Office 365 tenant the functionality is not available (yet).
I however briefly looked into the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center in one of the tenants that I administer, and listed below are a number of my findings:
Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center (accessible from https://protection.office.com) now indeed seems to surface some audit log events from Dynamics 365. It is however unclear whether you still need to activate audit logging first on your Dynamics 365 instances
SIEM vendor integration is available using SIEM agents which will probably leverage the Office 365 Management Activity API – I will probably test the API integration out later on when the functionality is fully available
The documentation gives already a good indication on the way that Microsoft will proceed with this new functionality so I’m really eager to get my hands on this and see how this functionality can be used. In the meanwhile you might also take a look at the Actionable Audit App (Appsource) to access audit logs functionality as an alternative to see if it covers your specific needs and requirements. References:
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.
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”.
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).
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
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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
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
