Service XRM

Occasionally during construction or enhancement of a model-driven app there is a requirement to notify users of actions they need to take. You know, something like a message that says "Here are things that need your attention today".  This can be handled with custom code, creating tasks that appear on their dashboard, creating queue items that show up in their todo queue, assigning ownership of records, sending an email etc. There are many options. Now, with the addition of in-app notifications there is another way.   Image creator  Charlotte Kingston Larson Along comes a toast message In Fall of 2021 a new modern in-app notification feature debuted. This feature allows for generation of notification messages and display at the user level. These messages display  in the modern toast format that many responsive and mobile apps have adopted. This new feature can be enabled in your D365 instance now. I recommend testing it out in a trial instance of D365 or another sandbox inst

Dynamics 365  - Lookup and Quick Find  Improving User Adoption Searching for information in Dynamics 365 provides a means to quickly locate data. This could be contacts, account, or custom entity data.   If you want to improve user adoption you will want to educate your application users on efficient searching techniques.  Here is a simple, but somewhat hidden concept on leveraging quick find for lookup fields. The Scenario Your users often need to quickly locate account information when creating contacts. This could apply to any custom entity as well. But for this simple scenario let's use account.  An account has fields for name, account number, phone, etc.  But let's say the users need to locate accounts in a given city.  Out of the box searching is only done on select fields and does not include city.   The Solution All entities have 2 out of the box views.  The Lookup view, and the Quick Find view.  These 2 views work together to deliver the results you need. First you can

A common scenario ... You have a new customer and you want to start with clean trial instance of Dynamics 365 to work on a demo or you just want a trial to study and experiment with application features. You can Google for options. But this brief post will take you where you need to go. Request: Obtain a trial instance of Dynamics 365 outside of your organization domain. This should be a standalone cloud instance. Solution: Watch my YouTube video for details: How to create a trial instance of Dynamics 365

In Dynamics you have the ability to assign owners to records for entities that have ownership setting of  User or Team Owned . Owners may be a user or team who has assigned responsibility to work on the record.  An example is a new account, opportunity, or case having an assigned owner. It is common to have multiple tasks  related to the record. These task may be assigned the owner also.  For example when creating a new case the system auto creates tasks assigned to the service representative who is the case owner. The tasks may include: 1. Send an acknowledgement email with case number  2. Send an acknowledgement email when work has begun on the case 3. Perform follow up phone call after 2 days When each of these tasks are completed they are flagged complete in the system. All is good. However, when the owner of the case changes the ownership of the tasks will also change. This is standard out-of-the-box functionality. Request: Your business owner has requested that you alter the syst