Activities

Dynamics 365 InApp Notification

Maxime Bonnot — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:45:14 +0000

Dynamics 365 InApp Notification Maxime Bonnot Tue, 07/05/2022 - 14:45

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Dynamics 365 InApp Notification

An interesting feature has been released in 2022 Wave 1 : In App Notification

According to Microsoft documentation, this feature would ease the communication and the collaboration within Dynamics 365.

I think that we are all familiar with the concept of Notification as we all have a Smartphone and this concept isn't really different when it comes to Dynamics CRM.

Therefore, let's not loose time and let's try this new feature.

First let's see how to enable this feature. I will also add some technical information that might useful if you want to try it right away. Finally, we will see how to use it and to which point this might be interesting for business purposes.

I - In App Notification

In order to enable In App Notification : Go to make.powerapps.com > Apps > Click on the 3 dots in your app row > Edit > In the App Editor, click on Settings > Feature tab > Enable In-app notifications as below :

Then Save and Publish : you will be able after refreshing, to see a new notification icon in the upper bar :

If you click on it, a side pane will be displayed on the right sight with the possibility to access notification settings allowing the user to decide whether or not Toasts are enabled and for which duration.

Also notice that a new Notification table is appearing in the Dataverse. This Notification table has the following fields :
Title : Title of the notification
Owner : The user who receives the notification
Body : Details about the notification
IconType : Predefined Icon depending if it is a success, error or information message
Toast type : The list of notification behaviors
Expiry : The number of seconds from when the notification should be deleted if not already dismissed
Data : JSON that's used for extensibility and parsing richer data into the notification. The maximum length is 5,000 characters.

Apparently this feature will allow us to create any kind of notification for any kind of action within the Dynamics 365. No doubt that In App Notification might be really useful for business. Though let's make sure of it !

II - In practice

As it makes me think on one of my client, I will make this demonstration according to its need.

We talk here about a watch manufacturer having Boutique all over the world. In those boutique, beside selling watch, we also submit customer service request. Those customer service request have to be treated in a limited time. So the Boutique creates and assigned a customer service request to the concerned person. Although this person suppose to take care of the request doesn't always notice it unless he checks his Request view constantly in order to don't miss anything. In reality, as you can imagine, it make them loose a precious time and in the worse case scenario, a request can be missed which is terrible for the image of the company.

According to this, I will create a flow triggering on Opportunity whenever the owner is modified and so create a notification to the owner it is assigned to.

Here it is :

After turning on this flow, I will merely assigned an opportunity to myself as below :

As soon as the page is refreshed, a notification is displayed on the right sight informing the owner that he got a new Opportunity assigned to him :

You can then check the side pane by clicking on the notification icon itself :

As you can see, we created on a really easy and quick way a logic that might fit with Business requirements.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in part II, In App Notification is a feature that will surely fit business expectations. For those who need to push employees to pay attention to a task.

We now don't have to over load employees mailbox in order to make sure that they notice a new task for instance.

With In App Notification, notification can be created really quickly and for any kind of changes !

It was definitely something missing in my opinion so I will not hide that I am glad to be able to propose this to our clients from now on.

Dynamics 365 InApp Notification

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D365 Convert a Note to a Post and vice-versa without coding!

Danny Rodrigues Alves — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:27:57 +0000

D365 Convert a Note to a Post and vice-versa without coding! Danny Rodrigue… Mon, 02/01/2021 - 17:27

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D365 Convert a Note to a Post:

Here at Dynamics Chronicles, we are all nice guys!

During an episode of XrmToolCast, our editor Lloyd Sebag agreed to make an article detailing how to convert a Note to a Post, or a Post to a Note. So here we go :)

Of course, the first option that comes to mind is the "bazooka option": go full custom! Create an application console, connect to your CRM, retrieve the records, convert them and push them back.

Another option would be to go custom, but without any code using Power Automate. But it still requires Azure and it's not that trivial.

Therefore, we will go another way, the "community option" using the XrmToolBox!

We could create an OnDemand workflow and, if the workflow will need to be ran for more records than one would want to do manually, use the XrmToolBox's Bulk Workflow Execution to run the workflow for all records.

But because the community is so amazing, we can use two other tools without a need for an On Demand workflow, Export To Excel and Data Impot++

Let's start at the end: creating the new records. We don't need all fields to create a post or a note. Below are two screenshots of the Data Import++ tool for importing those two records.

Notes with the annotation entity
Post

Obviously, the fields objectid and regardingobjectid must be adapted for Contact and Accounts, meaning one Excel file for each.

Before importing and creating the new records, we need to export the source records. For that, a simple export to excel does the trick. Below are the two FetchXML used in the Export to Excel tool

For the Post records
For the Notes records

Then the mapping is important.

Post based on Notes: four columns for the import

text
- A note that a Title and a Content, but a post only has an unique text field. So there a concatenation of the two fields is easily done.
- Note that the annotation field Content - technical name notetext - is sometimes an HTML field. It's easy to remove the HTML tags on Excel, for example with a Find & Replace for "<*>"".
source
- Set to 2 here
_regardingobjectid_value
- Set to annotation's field _objectid_value
type
- Set to 1 here

Notes based on Posts: three columns for the import

subject
- Title of the note
notetext
- Set to post's field text
_objectid_value
- Set to post's field _regardingobjectid_value

D365 Convert a Note to a Post

Activities in Dynamics 365

Amaury Veron — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:57:19 +0000

Activities in Dynamics 365 Amaury Veron Mon, 06/29/2020 - 17:57

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Activities are entities in Dynamics 365 made to help an organisation understand the interactions it has with its customers and prospective customers. This article will present the main points related to Activities.

Activities are used to record a specific type of communication such as Phone calls, Emails and Faxes.

Here are a few details about other existing Activities:

Tasks: used to track “To-Do” items
Appointments: used to track in-person meetings or conference calls
Letters: used to track hand-written letters
Campaign Responses: used to track interest from marketing campaigns. They can be converted to a Lead if they require more attention
Campaign Activities: used to track campaigns that have been made
Service Activities: used to schedule an appointment that provides a service

Creating Activities

The Activities related to a record are displayed in the Timeline in the Form of the record. They are presented in Chronological order. New Activities can be created from this Timeline.
Activities can also be created from the Activities section in the CRM or by clicking the plus icon in the top right corner of the navigation bar.

Converting Activities

An Activity can be converted to an Opportunity, Case, Lead, or Campaign Response. When the user chooses to convert an Activity to a certain Entity, a Form opens with pre-filled fields of the target Entity. These fields are filled using information from the Activity.

Activities Status

An Activity has a status of open or complete. If the status is open, that means the activity hasn’t taken place yet. If it is complete, the activity has occurred. When an Activity is created, it is always initially open. Closing activities in Dynamics 365 must be done manually. For instance, sending an email changes the status to complete.

Synchronisation of Activities with Mailboxes

When emails are synchronised between Dynamics 365 and Outlook or Exchange, activities such as emails, appointments, and tasks can be synchronised between the CRM and the Mailbox that is used.

Custom Activities

When creating an Entity, it is possible to choose to make it be an Activity. It therefore becomes a custom Activity.