About Me


Tom Smelser 

I am a Dynamics 365 Architect with 8 years of experience using Dynamics 365 and model-driven applications. 



My additional experience includes:
  • Dynamics 365 
  • Model-driven apps
  • Canvas apps
  • Power BI
  • Power Automate
  • Power Portal

You can reach me at tsmelserxrm@gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

Lookup and Quick Find create a better user experience

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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
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Making toast in the Dataverse with model-driven in-app notifications

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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
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Creating a Trial Instance of Dynamics 365

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
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