User Group Focus 2019 Recap

A few weeks ago I was at the User Group Focus event in Houston, TX. I attended Monday and Tuesday for the D365/CRM portion of the event. I presented several sessions, attended others and also went to the Rodeo! It was a great trip!

I participated in three sessions. Michael Ochs, Phyllis Eriksen and I presented an introduction to XrmToolBox which taught participants how to use it and we shared our favorite tools (be on the lookout for an encore webinar coming in June). I also presented on "Wrangling your Processes" (an introduction to Workflows in D365) and you can catch the encore webinar on May 22. Finally I participated in a panel about Upgrades. This was a good discussion on many tips for planning, upgrade methods, and preparing your users.

I also got to attend a few sessions and wanted to share some takeaways from those as well. For attendees, you can download all session materials from the User Group Focus Community.

Planning, Developing, and Surfacing Metrics for Sales and Service

Tad Thompson

The goal of this session was to discuss ways to maximize time for sales people by reducing clicks and effectively using screen real estate. Lots of great recommendations were discussed:

• Don't forget about Goals
• Utilize the Apps feature to minimize the number of unnecessary items users see
• Remove unused fields
• Use customization to drive user adoption by providing more information
• Calculated fields to give important stats, ex. time to qualification
• SLAs, shorten the SLA based on the customer's interest
• Business Process Flows to drive behavior (be careful not to overwhelm). Now you can have multiple BPFs per record so multiple users can be following separate flows at the same time.
• Editable grids can be helpful but ensure these are not used for continuous, mass data clean up (fix the actual problem!)
• Check out email feature to follow email and get insights and reminders related to it
• Reporting can be used to drive excitement and show the users what their data is powering.
• OOB charts still have value. These are real-time when PowerBI is not.
• Start with the PowerBI Templates and see what you can get value from quickly
• Embed your PowerBI dashboards in Dynamics
• For service, Flow allows you to listen to Twitter and create cases as needed

The Power Platform in 90 Mins

Michael Ochs

This session walked through an example of building a vacation request/approval tool using CDS, Flow, PowerApps, and PowerBI. D365 is an application that is only part of the Power Platform so we have so many other tools to explore! CDS (Common Data Service) was formerly thought of as the XRM Platform. Now everything is stripped away into apps and core entities such as Contacts, Accounts, Activities, etc. form the backbone of CDS.

PowerApps are broken down into Canvas and Model Driven. Canvas Apps are the type of app we are used to using on mobile devices. Model Driven Apps are part of Dynamics to only show what users need.

The objection of this session was to use all of these components to build line of business applications. This was a shortened version of the App in a Day session.

Better Activity Management
Geoff Ables

One of the most important features of a CRM system is activity tracking but you need to get the users to actually follow through. Start by working with the business to determine why they even want to track activities. We need to find the end motivation and then find ways to make it easy, fast and fun. The goal is to find ways to move from just reactive work to proactive work. This may also include watching users work through the current process to look for where efficiencies can be gained.

All of this boils down to the LUCK Principle. Listen Understand Connect Know. 

So, what are some practical ideas to explore?

• Compare the Outlook App with the Legacy Outlook Client to determine what is best. The app is recommended if there is nothing in the client that is needed. App is being recommended for new users. The App allows you to view dynamics data in Outlook without tracking the message.
• Relationship assistant provides reminders on the home screen to direct users. Activities are not automatically created but users are encouraged to take specific follow up actions. There are settings to control these reminders that are set by administrators. These are configured for the full organization.
• Neglected records monitoring. OOB neglected records reports may be beneficial. Additionally, calculated fields can be used to build fields to track Date of Last Contact so custom neglected rules can be developed.
• Workflows can also be used to automatically create follow up tasks. Create fields on Activities to indicate if a follow up is needed. Then automatically create when that activity is closed.

D365UG/CRMUG Houston 2019

It's less than a month until D365UG/CRMUG Focus conference in Houston. This event features 90-minute deep dive sessions in a smaller environment. This will be a great way to learn more about the product and discuss your questions with speakers.

I will be participating in 3 sessions. Make sure you add them to your schedule!

• Monday March 11th 1pm: XrmToolBox and Other Helpful Tools for Administrators. This panel will feature Michael Ochs and Phyllis Eriksen sharing their favorite tools in XrmToolBox as well as other tools that make your D365 life easier.
• Tuesday March 12th 8am: Wrangling Your Business Processes Using Workflows. Learn the how to get started writing workflows. We will explain the basics of scope, start when and steps to build.
• Tuesday March 12th 1:15pm: It’s Time to Automate That! Dive deeper into workflows Phyllis Eriksen and look at solving real world problems.

What are you hoping to learn in Houston?

Auto Sending Emails as Another User in Dynamics 365

Workflows in Dynamics 365 can be used to send emails and even send on behalf of another user. This is used in our organization to notify teams about actions needed on their records via automatic or on-demand workflows. When you are adding this functionality, there are a few settings to keep in mind.

Setting up Workflow to Send Email

Create your workflow based on your business logic. Inside this process you can include a "Send Email" step with the details you want to be communicated. By default this would send from the workflow owner (or trigger user if run on-demand) but sometimes you want this to be from a specific user. So populate the from information with a user or dynamic reference to the user you want it sent from.

Workflow Owner Permissions

If sending from another user, the workflow owner needs to have access to Send on Behalf of another user. 

On a Security Role this is on the Business Management Tab under Miscellaneous Privileges as "Send Email as Another User". This is included in the System Administrator and System Customizer Roles by default.

Miscellaneous Privileges on Business Management Tab

Outgoing Mail Options

Now you have to make sure that these emails actually go out! If you are using CRM for Outlook, these emails will only send when Outlook is open and running. So this is a good opportunity to use Server Side Sync. You can turn this on just for Outgoing email if you are not ready to use for everything.

Personal User Settings

Last step is to ensure you have permissions to send as that user. So the user's personal settings need to be updated to allow others to send email on their behalf. This can be done with XrmToolBox using the User Settings Utility. 

1. Launch XrmToolBox and connect to your organization
2. Open the User Settings Utility
3. Click "Load Users and Settings" to pull in users from your organization
1. You can also select a view for the users to limit the list you are looking at. This can be helpful if all users for a team need to start having emails sent.
4. Select the users you want to edit
5. Under "Email Settings" change "Allow emails on my behalf" to "Yes"
6. Click "Update User(s) Settings" in the tool bar

XrmToolBox User Settings Utility Settings

I hope this helps automate automate your processes!

Getting Started with XrmToolBox

XrmToolBox is a great tool for administrators. It has lots of great features to make your life easier. For me, it was a bit intimidating getting started so let's talk about how to do it. Then I will talk about a few of my favorite tools.

Step 1: Download the tool

Download the latest version from: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/
This will download a .zip file. Extract to anywhere convenient on your machine.

Step 2: Launch the App

Open the extracted files. It will looks something like this. Double click on the Application to launch. This does not need to be on the CRM Server or installed. Just launch.

Loading. Wait patiently.

Step 3: Install Additional Plugins

Don't be crazy we are just getting started! You can close this page.
Later you can use this step to add additional tools that are not downloaded by default. You can also launch this once in the app through Tools -> Plugin store.
But for now, just stay calm and close this window.

Step 4: Set up your Connection

Now you will link to your CRM implementation. You can store multiple connections (such as a development environment and production). Remember to test everything in a development environment. If possible, use the tool to make changes there then use a solution to move to other environments. But that's a topic for another time.

1. Click the "Connect" Button in the top left
2. Select "New Connection" in the new window
3. Enter the URL for your CRM instance. If you are on-premise, then you can check off "Use your current credentials" to login with your domain login. Click "Go" to proceed.
4. If online, then enter your username and password to login. You can also select "Save password to encrypt string in connection file" so you do not need to enter your credentials again in the future.
   
5. Wait patiently.
   
6. Enter a name for this connection. This should be something that will help you know which environment it connects to.
   
7. You will notice the bottom of the screen updates to show the connection.
   

Step 5: Start working!

Now, just go to the Plugins tab and start seeing what magic you can do!

Metadata Document Generator

This is one of my favorite tools as it saves me from typing and copying things unnecessarily! It allows you to grab all of the attributes and their details from all entities in your CRM system.

To use start by selecting "Retrieve Entities and Languages" to pull in the data from your CRM system. Then select an Excel file to populate with this data (blank, everything will be overwritten). Select the entities you want to extract the data from or all entities. Finally, click "Generate Document".

The Metadata Document Generator is the tool I have used the most frequently. There are lots of other great tools to check out such as:

• Audit Center - Allows you to modify the audit settings of fields in bulk. Good idea when you enable auditing for an entity and all fields have been automatically enabled.
• Easy Translator - designed to help you set the field labels in other languages. Also can be used for updating the description fields (aka tool tips) in bulk. (We used this when upgrading from 2011 to 2016 because many fields had descriptions saying "Created by KK on ...")
• User Settings Utility - update default user settings such as number of records in a view and default start page.
• View Layout Replicator - Allows you to copy the columns plus widths from one view to another. It even allows you to copy from a personal view to a system view. This is great when creating a new entity where you want all views to be consistent but you don't want to do all the clicking multiple times. 

That's all! Try it out and see what you can do!

What are your favorite uses for XrmToolBox?