Category Archives: CRM
Dynamics 365 Monthly Update-January 2021
Featured News
Dynamics 365 and Common Data Service Terminology Updates
Common Data Service has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse
- Effective November 2020, Microsoft has recently announced changes to the terminology used with Common Data Service in Dataverse to be more intuitive and make its usage more productive.
- As a reminder, Dynamics 365 applications also use Common Data Service to store and secure the data they use.
This means that these changes are relevant to all Dynamics 365 applications as well.
- Some terminology in Microsoft Dataverse has been updated. For example, entity is now table and field is now column.
Check out the Terminology Updates here.
D365 Online | Deprecations | Awareness
See below the list of the most recent deprecations with deadlines in 2021
App Source: Deprecation of Attachment Management Add-on for Dynamics 365 using Azure Blob storage
- Attachment Management solution is a popular add-on feature to Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Services to manage notes and email attachments using Azure blob storage.
- Enables business users to optimize use of Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Services storage and retrieve files on-demand through Dynamics 365.
- This solution is built on Dynamics 365 and seamlessly works on Dynamics CRM 2016 and above.
By June 2021, this solution will deprecate from App Source.
- Recommended to move Default Dataverse File storage by providing Consent in Blob storage settings page for the existing Users of this solution.
- Once the Consent accepted by the Customer then all the solution related Create/Update Plug ins will be disabled and start move all the new notes/activity mime attachments to default file storage.
- Product team will start migrating the old attachments to Default File storage in back end.
- Additional details are available here.
Refer to the document for next steps.
Legacy web client is deprecated for D365 Online
On December 4, 2020, the legacy web client is no longer available.
- All Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Services Customers should have made the transition to Unified Interface by now to take advantage of Microsoft’s ongoing investments in reliability, performance, and functionality.
- Reach out to your Microsoft resources for questions.
Additional Helpful resources are available here.
Organization data download filters for mobile offline are deprecated
- Effective February 2021, Organization data download filter option that filters the data when you set up mobile offline are deprecated.
- We recommend that you start preparing your organization and move relevant data filters from Organization data download filter to the offline profile option, which lets you determine what data will be available when users work in offline mode.
For more information, see Create a mobile offline profile.
Once the old filter criteria has been moved to offline profile, you can clear or delete the filters set in Organization data download filter.
TLS RSA cipher suites are deprecated
- Beginning March 1, 2021, customers can only use our standard cipher suites. This change impacts your clients and servers that communicate with our servers, for example, syncing emails from your Microsoft Exchange server, running outbound plug-ins, using native (local) clients to access our servers.
Dynamics 365 Home is deprecated
- Dynamics 365 Home users will see notification about the new location and recommendation to change browser bookmarks starting October 1, 2020.
Deprecation of Office365 authentication type and OrganizationServiceProxy class for connecting to Dataverse
- Effective April 2021, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new environments within a tenant.
- Effective April 2022, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new and existing environments within a tenant.
- Effective February 4, 2020, the WS-Trust authentication type that is used by custom clients to connect to Dataverse is deprecated.
- This change affects applications that utilize Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.OrganizationServiceProxy and Microsoft.Xrm.Tooling.Connector.CrmServiceClient classes for the authentication type of “Office365″.
Regional Discovery Service is deprecated
- Until March 1, 2021, Microsoft will continue to provide support, security, and other critical updates for the regional Discovery Service, but won’t release any additional functionality beyond what has already been announced.
- After March 1, 2021, the regional Discovery Service won’t be available.
Some client APIs are deprecated
- Deprecated Client API: ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx
- Replacement Client API: None
- Comments:
- The ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx page is deprecated and scheduled to be unavailable after October 1, 2021.
- Alternative methods to access global context information will be available before April 1, 2021.
Reminder | For the full list on deprecation check out the Important changes (deprecations) coming in Power Apps, Power Automate, and model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 page on Microsoft docs.
Updates & Releases |
Manage Updates | General availability deployment
General Availability deployment & Dynamics 365 release schedule
- Check out Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Plans to learn more about new features to be released in the release waves.
- After a release wave is generally available, all environments will be automatically turned on to receive mandatory updates which will enable the early access features and the general available features of a release.
- Tips: Stay Informed with Message Center notifications for Dynamics and PowerApps HERE
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Release
For the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 release notes, visit Released Versions of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement
Note:
- Service Update naming convention has been revised to clarify the link between the version number and Service Update number.
- For example, Service Update 150 will now correspond to version number 150xx.
- Occasionally a Service Update will be canceled and all associated fixes will be rolled into a subsequent Service Update.
- For this reason, Service Update numbers may not always increase incrementally.
- The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 online version 9.1 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others.
- To determine which version your organization has applied, check your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online version number.
- Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, then click About.
Important Note:
Following Service Update 270, we are updating the version numbering format from 9.1.0.xxxxx to 9.2.xxxxx.xxx.
We are making this change to better differentiate the version numbering for each deployed version.
Service Update numbering will now reflect the third numerical group within the version number.
For example, version 9.2.20122.xxx will correspond to “Service Update 20122″
Service Update 20122 (9.2.20122.00101 or higher) resolved issues including in this list below and much more:
- Platform Services
- When creating an entity using the reserve entity feature, the Tabular Data Stream (TDS) views were not updated.
- Unified Interface
- Activities entities displayed the ActivityPointer icon instead of their own icon.
- On mobile, the service tab was not loading within a Booking Entity while online.*
- A bottom scroll bar remained for collapsed panels in multisession mode.
Service Update 270 (9.1.0.27001 or higher) resolved issues including this list below and much more:
- Platform Services
- When creating an email with an attachment, the attachment was not synchronized with Exchange.*
- When an email recipient was not listed in Outlook, the sender was listed in the “To” field.*.
- Unified Interface
- After clearing a filter on a form, the filter remained.
- When using the app in offline mode, newly added entities did not sync.
- When two Quick Forms were within a single form, both Quick Forms shared identical labels which prevented automated expansion of multi-line text fields.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-premises Updates
For the latest Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise version 8.2 and 9.0, visit Service Updates
The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise version 8.2 and 9.0 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others.
These cumulative update rollups include all the hotfixes that were released for limited distribution.
Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 9.0
Service Update 0.23 (9.0.23.7 – December 2020) resolved issues including:
- Repaired Functionality
- Emails from unresolved senders could not be manually resolved
- Email signature within Dynamics CRM were not working as expected
- Forms were not properly rendered when assigned to a business unit
- Scheduled Report Filter Snapshot Settings were not being Saved
- Unable to save a Task record with Custom field lookup field against QueueItem entity
- Critical security updates.
Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 8.2
Service Update 2.25 (8.2.25.16 – December 2020) resolved issues including:
- Repaired Functionality
- Email body is truncated due to a regular expression
- Critical Security Updates
Portal Capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Releases
For the latest Portal capabilities, visit Latest Portal capabilities – Read the Potential Breaking Change section for awareness.
Version Check and Upgrade Information
- To determine the version of a particular portal deployment, please reference to this KB #3166126.
- For instructions on how to upgrade the solutions within Dynamics 365 when a newer version is available,
please reference to this KB #3192042.
Latest Portal Capabilities Update-
To know the release schedule please check Office 365 message center for release schedule in your geographical region.
This article describes the features and enhancements that were included in this update, as well as the scope of the release.
For a full list of all portal updates released to date and their corresponding KB articles,
please reference this KB article.
The latest Portal host Version 9.2.10.x resolves the following issues and more:
- Related Record Filtering defined on lookups is not working correctly when a 1:n relationship is used to filter records.
- Unable to search datetime field in dd/MM/yyyy format when using search functionality in entity list.
- Month chart does not honor the sorted order defined in the chart for link entities.
Important Note: Potential Breaking Change
As part of this release we are updating various client libraries used in portals.
If you have taken dependency on functionality of these libraries for custom code, please validate this release.
Jquery is updated to 3.0.0.0 –
We are using jquery-migrate-3.1.0.js to handle API’s which may have been deprecated or have a change in behavior in Jquery 3.0 version as compared to Jquery 1.12 version. Custom JavaScript code may show some warnings in the browser console which should be fixed by updating the custom code.
However, if you have custom javascript code on portal using deprecated Jquery Api’s from older Jquery versions (<1.10), then they might not behave properly after the upgrade.
More details can be read here.
Bootstrap js is updated to 3.4.1
JQueryUI is updated to 1.11.4
CKEditor is updated to 4.11.4
Additional News |
Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query reaches general availability
We are very happy to announce that Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query has reached general availability status.
- We are very happy to announce that Microsoft Dataverse support for Power BI Direct Query has reached general availability status.
- With the combination of the new Dataverse connector for Power BI and tabular data stream (TDS) endpoint, Power BI users have more options when connecting to Dataverse environments, including Dataverse for Teams.
- The endpoint enables better relationship discovery in the Power BI dataset model.
- The new connector supports Direct Query providing real-time data and support for the Dataverse security model.
- In addition, complex data types, such as lookups, choices, and currency are flattened for easy consumption in the model.
To find out more, check out the documentation: View entity data in Power BI.
PowerApps | Considerations for optimized performance in Power Apps
Performance considerations as you build your Power Apps Canvas App.
- When you build a Power Apps canvas app there are many different data sources you can choose to use such as SharePoint, Microsoft Dataverse, SQL (on-premises), Azure SQL (online), Excel, and others like Oracle.
- Depending on the data source and connectors you choose in your canvas app, there are different performance optimizations you can apply.
Click HERE to learn more about:
- How data calls travel in Power Apps.
- Common performance issues.
- Issue types per data source.
Power Apps | General Availability of Power BI reports as system dashboards in model-driven apps
Power BI dashboard in a model-driven app is GA!
- We are excited to announce the generally availability of Power BI dashboard in a model-driven app that was introduced in an early release as a preview feature.
Learn more about creating and embedding Power BI reports.
Power Apps | Power Apps portals capacity consumption Reporting is now available
Power Apps Portals Reports in Power Platform admin center
- Administrators can now get visibility of their Power Apps portals logins and page views consumption by downloading these reports from the Power Platform admin center.
- These Excel-based reports allow you to look at the capacity consumed in a 30-day period preceding the selected date.
- Where to see the reports?
- Available via the Power Platform admin center, these reports can be accessed from the Capacity menu by going to Download reports action.
Read more details on this page on Power Automate blog
Power Apps | New AI Builder capabilities are now generally available
We are happy to announce that two AI builder preview capabilities are now generally available.
- Two AI Builder capabilities are GA. Both new capabilities can be found under the Prediction model card in AI Builder.
- One of them is prediction of multiple outcomes, and the other is prediction of a numerical field.
- These new features make the prediction model richer, and be able to solve more business problems for you.
- Previously, AI Builder prediction model could predict binary outcomes, such as whether a shipment would arrive on time or not.
- Now you can use it to predict more than 3 outcomes, like will a shipment arrive early, on-time or late. You can also predict a number, like how many days it would take to close a customer ticket.
- With the release of these capabilities, they’re now considered premium features. You will need an AI Builder add-on license or an active trial to use them.
More information: Overview of the prediction model – AI Builder | Microsoft Docs
Training Corner |
Pro Dev | GitHub | Learning Corner | GitHub connector features for Power Platform
See How the GitHub Connector makes it possible to build self service CI/CD apps using Power Apps and Power Automate
- With GitHub Connector, you can create a GitHub repo, create a pull request, merge a pull request, compare commits, trigger a GitHub actions workflow and much more from Power Apps and Power Automate.
- The GitHub connector works perfectly with the GitHub Actions for Power Platform released in preview recently.
- The create a repository dispatch event can be used in Power Automate or Power Apps to trigger a GitHub actions workflow in your repo.
For full details, See how to set it up on this page on Power Apps Pro Dev blog.
Power Automate | Learning Corner | Process invoices with AI Builder (Preview)
We are happy to announce the introduction of a new prebuilt AI model in AI Builder in Preview
- Traditional invoice processing can be a very cumbersome and time-consuming.
- Between all the manual data entry, approval workflows, and auditing, there are many pain points across the end-to-end process.
We are happy to announce the introduction of a new prebuilt AI model in AI Builder: Invoice processing.
Now available in preview, you can test the feature right away, no trial or subscription required.
- To learn more about the prebuilt invoice processing AI model, you can refer to this documentation page.
- The Get started with invoice processing in AI Builder module in Microsoft Learn is also a great way to learn how you can easily use Artificial Intelligence to speed up your invoice processes at your company.
For full details on How it works, check out this page on Power Automate blog.
Power Automate | Learn how to automate your business process
We launched a new set of documents to help learn and guide on how to automate business processes
- Do you want to use Power Automate to automate your business processes but don’t know where to start?
- Are you a pro developer looking for the best practices for planning and delivering a business process automation or RPA project.
- Or are you a Power Platform expert on your team who wants to help other people in your organization thoughtfully plan and execute a project with Power Platform?
You can jump to one of the five main sections as described below for guidance:
For full details on How it works, check out this page on Power Automate blog.
Podcast
Coming Soon
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We were upgraded to the Unified Interface for Dynamics 365. Now What?
In December, Microsoft began all model-driven apps, except on-premises customers, to the new . Model-driven apps are custom applications on Microsoft’s Power Platform. These are low-code solutions, meaning that they are created using more of a component assembly style of interface, rather than writing code. They can range in size and functionality and can easily be implemented into environments. With their wide range of potential abilities, model-driven apps can be created and customized for any department or function desired.
What does this mean for your system?
These improvements are great, but what does it mean for current apps and customizations? , customizations shouldn’t need to be recreated if they’ve been consistently kept up to date with changes in the past. With the new interface however, there may be new opportunities to optimize the customizations. ISVs from third parties on AppSource were notified of these changes prior to the transition. They will likely have taken action to ensure the continuity of service. Luckily, functionality of apps should not have been changed much, if at all. Business won’t need to focus on how the apps function, but rather spend a little time familiarizing themselves with the new interface and navigation.
Getting Comfortable with the UI App
Similar to other updates that have an effect on functionality and navigation, it may require a bit of time for end users to reacclimate to the new Unified Interface. Many people will also have concerns about how this may impact current processes. The Unified Interface aims to provide better productivity through a more modern interface with improved features and accessibility.
Microsoft designed the Unified Interface in order to provide developers with better development tools to ensure that all end-users are able to have the same experience when using model-driven apps. Prior to this hard transition, Microsoft had been slowly moving users towards this new experience.
The Unified Interface provides consistency in app functionality regardless of screen size. It uses a feature referred to as Reflow to move and rescale page elements to best fit into the screen size. When an app uses multiple columns, but the screen isn’t large enough to fit all columns, Reflow will combine them in to one column. Columns will be vertically ordered based on their left-to-right order, assuming a left-to-right language. In instances where a control takes up multiple columns, Reflow arranges vertical list that maintains the same navigation order.
In addition to this more consistent functionality, Unified Interface makes navigating around model-driven apps much easier. Clicking the app name at the tops allows for quick switching between apps.
The navigation pane in apps has a dropdown for viewing recent rows and favorites. There is also a page navigation to quickly jump between entity and dashboard pages within the app. All system and user dashboards can be viewed with Unified Interface with interactive dashboards available for all row types and improved interactive elements. The timeline helps to facilitate team collaboration by keeping track of all customer communications from posts to notes to voice attachments. Unified Interface also provides better compatibility with screen readers and braille printers.
Why should I create custom apps?
The customizability of model-driven apps makes them great addition to business processes. With Unified Interface’s optimizations for variable screen sizes, this versatility is further increased. Take, for example sales team members that travel frequently. They might not always have the ability to open the app on their computers to record data and advance workflows. Custom apps can more easily and reliably be created to function properly on mobile devices to help these team members focus on their sales, rather than technical issues.
Get started
At , we’re highly experienced in customizing Dynamics 365 UI Apps to fit our clients’ needs. If you are interested in getting assistance with customizing model-driven apps, or the Power Platform in general, schedule a consultation with us !
Upcoming Webinar: Using Dynamics 365 to Empower your Marketing and Sales Teams with Digital Automation
See first-hand how your sales and marketing teams can automate their manual processes, which take up valuable time and energy, using tools in Dynamics 365 like lead scoring and automated email campaigns.
When: Tuesday, February 16th at 11 AM CST
In this webinar you’ll learn:
- Target your leads most likely to close with behavior-based and targeted email marketing
- Use automatic lead scoring models that grade leads based on their interaction with your marketing content
- Discuss questions with Dynamics 365 Marketing Consultants with a Live Q&A
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation tools take marketing processes that are traditionally done manually and makes them easier and more targeted. For example, instead of guessing how interested your leads are, create complex scoring models that rate them based on their previous interactions with your website and marketing content.
In Dynamics 365, you can utilize marketing automation to automate processes like sending an email to a contact that clicked a link in a previous email or upgrade a lead score when they visit your website.
Improving Dynamics 365 Data Integrations with Alternate Keys
Dynamics 365 Data integrations is something that we’re quite familiar with – whether it’s a custom integration tailored for one of our customers or it’s utilizing our popular pre-built solution . Microsoft added alternate key support to Dynamics 365, which allows us to greatly improve integration speed.
The challenge
One challenge that we’ve had in the past was speed. In other words, how much time it takes to actually get your data from another system into Dynamics 365. If all that’s needed is to Create records, then speed usually isn’t an issue. The challenge comes into play when data already exists in Dynamics 365 or you need to backfill data. This could sometimes take several days to several weeks! One of the main reasons for this was that this required 2 steps:
- First, query Dynamics 365 to determine if the record you want to update already exists
- If it doesn’t exist, then Create it. If it does exist, then Update it.
That might not seem like much, but if you can imagine trying to backfill thousands or millions of rows of data, this can take a huge toll on performance.
The solution
A few years ago, Microsoft began allowing Dynamics 365 developers to use Upsert statements. Upserts can dramatically improve the speed of your data processing. Instead of making 2 separate calls to Dynamics 365, an Upsert allows for one call that can determine if a record needs to be Updated or Created based on a unique key. The key defines the unique identifier for the record (using one field or a combo of fields).
With the introduction of in Dynamics 365 not too long ago, this made using Upsert statements incredibly easy. Alternate keys provide developers a way to specify their own unique identifier for an entity based on the source data. Alternate keys also provide a safe-net to prevent duplicate records when used, because it is enforced at the database level.
Developers can create an alternate key programmatically or via the power platform admin center. You can specify up to 5 alternate keys per entity which is sufficient. There are a few other constraints as well, but these likely won’t hold you back from using them:
- Only field types of decimal, whole number, single line of text, datetime, lookup and picklist can be included in the key
- All fields included in the key must be allowed to be populated via either a create or update of the entity records
- Field-level security needs to be turned off for the included fields (which is the default)
- Fields can’t be logical or inherited. For example, address fields on Account and Contact entities
- The key size can be a maximum of 900 bytes and 16 columns
- Certain special characters (/,<,>,*,%,&,:,\) in key field values will cause errors when performing a Get or Patch
The challenge with Alternate Keys
You may run into a challenge when creating Alternate Keys in an existing Dynamics 365 organization if it already contains duplicate records as defined by the Key. In that case, you will notice that the Key status is set to Inactive. In order to Activate it, you must eliminate the duplicate records, either by deleting the duplicates or removing the values on one of the corresponding fields for each duplicate record.
You can find duplicates in Dynamics 365 a couple different ways:
Create and publish a duplicate detection rule. Then, run a duplicate detection job on all records for that entity. This process works well for the most part, but can be slow if you have a ton of data.
or
Use the Dynamics 365 SDK or 3rd party tools which can help you identify duplicates within minutes.
Note: While Dynamics 365 allows you to merge records, this does not remove the duplicate record from the database, so the alternate key will remain Inactive. You can give your end users control over which duplicate records are removed by instructing them to merge the records or utilize a custom merge process. Then, use an automated process to delete the Inactive merged records.
We’ve been implementing alternate keys with Upserts in our data integration solutions for our customers and we have seen an incredible improvement in speed! It allows us to push more data in a timely manner and the keys help enforce record uniqueness at the database level which in turn makes our customers happy.
If you want to learn more about how you can improving Dynamics 365 data integrations with alternate keys,
Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in and . We also provide expert , , and
Conversational Platform Trends for 2021
Live chat and conversational platform technologies have made significant advancements in the past few years. Thanks to AI and machine learning, these implementations have gone beyond just being a customer support tool, to a crucial component of an e-commerce website’s revenue engine.
With the pandemic ongoing, e-commerce is booming right now at the expense of brick-and-mortar. But with Amazon still accounting for 44 percent of all online transactions, e-commerce business owners must constantly search for ways to keep customers on their site and returning for future business.
Live chat is one of the most important tools that retailers can have on their website so that when a customer has any questions or concerns about a product or service, they can get instant customer support. This is particularly important to service consumers with a high-level of intent to purchase, so they don’t bounce to a competitor to get their questions answers and make the buy.
However, a live chat tool is only as good as the team and technology behind it — and live chat experiences can vary dramatically from retailer to retailer. There are essential factors that every online seller who is serious about conversions needs to consider.
Here’s what retailers need to know to get maximum conversions and satisfied customers from live chat tools in 2021 and beyond.
So Many Channels, So Little Time
When today’s consumers have a question for a retailer, there are a growing number of communications channels they might try to send a message through: the website, email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. The longer a customer is left waiting for a response, the more likely a serious shopper will have searched elsewhere for what they were looking for.
But now, live chat technology can integrate into all the various communication channels. Customer messages that arrive via channel can be sent to an app on the smartphones of the retailer’s support staff, so they can instantly respond to any customer messages that come through any channel, at any time of day.
AI, Machine Learning
Very few technologies haven’t benefited from AI and machine learning — and live chat is no exception. There is a fine balance between technology and human experience when it comes to customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, the advantage of automation is that it saves businesses time and money. The downside is that sometimes your customers just want to speak with a human and get frustrated dealing with bots.
Hiring humans to answer the same questions over and over makes little sense. This is why many retailers offer a chatbot to respond to common questions, but these can often be a lackluster or frustrating experience from the customer’s perspective.
A live chat system with good AI will monitor hundreds of thousands or millions of live chat conversations between customers and sales associates to identify common customer problems and determine which questions can be automated verses requiring human interaction.
AI can now analyze all your customers’ live chat sessions to understand the most common questions, integrate these answers into a bot, and redirect customers who want to speak to a human instantly with the right person.
AI and Customer Intent
One of the hottest topics recently for retailers has been customer intent. Only 17 percent of customers who visit a website have a serious intention to buy. In turn, this means that 83 percent of people visiting a website have no intent of actually buying anything.
Thanks to AI, state-of-the-art live chat systems can help identify which shoppers on a website have a serious intent to purchase. This gives the retailer a chance to open up a live chat portal and offer these customers the chance to speak to a sales associate. Very much like the in-store experience, these sales associates can help answer any questions, maximize the chance of converting these customers, upsell more products, and offer the best customer experience.
Integrating Freelance Product Experts
One of the primary reasons that retailers don’t have a 24/7 team of people on standby to live chat with their online customers is expense.
However, another key trend that has unfolded recently is integrating independent product experts and sales associates who work on a freelance model (similar to Uber), in the e-commerce live chat system.
Instead of paying full-time staff to respond to customer queries, retailers can now tap into a pool of freelance product experts who work from home and will help customers on behalf of the retailer.
For example, Lowes uses a team of freelance home improvement experts to respond to its customers. These gig-economy experts are pre-vetted on their expertise — in this case, home improvement. Many other retailers utilize freelance experts for chat to help with beauty products, photography, consumer electronics, etc.
These expert advisors work from home, choose their own hours, and jump onto the conversational platform whenever they want to live chat with customers of a particular retailer, or even multiple retailers’ customers, to answer product questions or upsell. The freelance advisor gets paid per chat session they participate in and earns a commission of sales they help to make.
From a retailer’s perspective, they have best-of-breed product experts helping convert and upsell customers who are identified as having serious intent on their website, without the expense of paying full-time staff.
Conclusion
E-commerce continues to grow exponentially, but with Amazon always just one click away, retailers can outdo the competition by providing a better customer experience and adding the human element to their website. Live chat is the main portal for connecting online customers to people from your company, or someone who works on your behalf.
A live chat or conversational platform is only as good as the technology and the team behind it. Retailers who see it as a crucial part of their e-commerce experience and use the technology to the best of its ability will experience greater conversions and customer satisfaction scores compared to those who do not.
Terrence Fox is head of innovation and strategy at iAdvize.
Another Success Story: McWane
McWane is a global leader in water distribution solutions and infrastructure that are integral to the function and development of plumbing and clean water works systems throughout the world. They conduct business throughout North America and the rest of world. They continue to grow their product lines to meet the needs for safe, long-lasting, environmentally friendly infrastructure…
The Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile App Helps Salespeople Stay Productive From Anywhere
The new Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app, now available for preview, is optimized to help your Sales team stay productive from wherever they’re working. The key capabilities of the mobile app enable sellers to prepare more thoroughly for customer engagements, log and share information quickly, and easily find information they need. You will not only be able to view data from Dynamics 365, but you’ll also be able to view data from Exchange in the app.
Benefits of using the Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile App
- Utilize time more effectively – Field sellers spend a lot of time on the road, traveling to meet clients. With the mobile app, “on-the-go” time becomes productive time.
- Easy – The Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app is easy to use. You can simply sign into the mobile app by using the same work email address used for Dynamics 365. Salespeople can easily find the information they are looking for. Salespeople can easily find contacts and recent records. The app is exceedingly simple to navigate and is available on both iOS and Android.
- Stay more organized -Salespeople are able to take post-meeting actions such as adding notes, creating contacts, or updating important data in relevant records. It becomes a cinch to stay up-to-date with important information.
- Plan – The mobile app can be used to plan and map out your day by seeing what your day has in store – in terms of upcoming meetings, appointments, etc. Upon opening the app, salespeople immediately see reminders about customer meetings or insights for the day.
- Build customer relationships and loyalty – Salespeople have quick access to customer information on-the-go, making it easy to keep information up to date and to respond to customers quicker. This not only simplifies the customer relationship, but also helps sellers to focus on selling. Salespeople go into meetings better prepared – as they can review important customer information prior to customer engagements.
Home page
Upon opening the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app on your mobile device, you’ll see the home page. This home page provides high level information on the meetings and insight cards – specific to you.
The home page displays five different types of information: meetings, recent contacts, recent records, reminders, and insights.
Meetings
The meetings section shows important information to salespeople about the last meeting they were in, as well as the next meeting coming up. They will also have the ability to see information on all meetings in this section.
to learn more, visit our
Important Changes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile App
Today’s blogpost is for all our Dynamics 365 Field Service enthusiasts. Well, it’s actually good information for everybody in the Dynamics community because it is reflective of a continuing trend of deprecating aging apps, versions, and platforms. But if your organization uses the Field Service workload of Dynamics 365, please pay extra special attention because this change will likely have a…
Syncing Dynamics 365 User Permissions with SharePoint
Today, it seems that most companies are using more than one business application. Each application has its own unique features and provides value to different departments. To improve user adoption, some of the applications are likely integrated with one another. This could be either natively or with a custom integration built at the hands of your development team.
While each application has its own unique role, they likely share the same security model per your organizations business requirements. However, integrating security requirements between applications is often overlooked or is a manual process and prone to error.
In this post, we will take a quick dive into how you can achieve this with 2 integration applications – specifically syncing Dynamics 365 user permissions with .
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that your Dynamics 365 org currently has a custom security structure. Additionally, you already have an integration to SharePoint (or you want to). Specifically, it integrates your Dynamics 365 Accounts to an Account folder structure in SharePoint.
Dynamics 365 vs SharePoint security structure challenge
Here’s an example of what your security structure might look like in Dynamics 365. This is an Account (client) record with a unique Account team that is comprised of dynamic users. Only these users have access to this Account record (aside from Admins):
As this team changes, the permissions to this Account record will change. In SharePoint, your admins currently have to manually maintain the security for this clients folders. This is an inefficient use of their time, not to mention it is also prone to error.
The solution
In order to accurately keep up with these changes, a custom process can automatically synchronize the Dynamics 365 user permissions to your SharePoint. As users change on the teams in Dynamics, the process will automatically kick off and refresh the permissions on the clients folders in SharePoint.
This may sound easier said than done, which is why you’ll want to utilize a .
Developers can use both the Dynamics 365 API and the to retrieve the team members from Dynamics and then grant write and read permissions at the SharePoint folder level. If your SharePoint folder structure is currently not organized based on the data you have in Dynamics 365, the MS Graph API can also be used to produce a relevant and consistent folder structure automatically in SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about how you can sync Dynamics 365 user permissions with SharePoint, today.
Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in and . We also provide expert , , and .