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What is Dynamics 365?

What is Dynamics 365? It is a set of connected modular SaSS applications and services designed to transform and enable core customer, employee and business activities.

Overview:

  • Combination of CRM and ERP solutions in a cloud service, which allows a more modular approach to purchasing and using business applications.
  • Each area of Dynamics 365 is a module, i.e. Sales or Operations and can be mixed and matched
  • Allows a more unified and integrated experience with fluid UX at its core
  • Bringing your business together as a cohesive unit by connecting people, processes, and data across many applications, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365, LinkedIn, and Azure.
  • Adapting the application to your needs rather than changing your business methodology. You can integrate most applications with existing systems or even customise them with Microsoft Power Platform.
  • Modernise your approach by incorporating AI, mixed reality, social, and mobile capabilities for progressive business innovation.

Modules (Organisations can choose from the following Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and features):

  1. Sales: Provides insight into prospective customer sources, personalisation of service and customer engagement data, sales productivity and performance metrics on many platforms.
  2. Marketing: Links up Dynamics CRM with Adobe Marketing Cloud to provide campaign management and targeted, personalised marketing tools that cater to the businesses unique needs.
  3. Customer Service: Offers multi-channel tools for engaging customers, tools for self-service / self-care portals as well as tools for community engagement and support agents.
  4. Field Service: Primarily used for planning and scheduling resources, managing contracts, inventory, insights into the internet of things-connected products and customer communications tools.
  5. Finance and Operations: Financial management with all the reporting and analytics tools. It also includes manufacturing tools for project management, production planning, scheduling, cost management; and warehouse and inventory control tools for supply chain management.
  6. Project Service Automation: Automate project planning, resources scheduling, time and cost management, and service analytics in an all-in-one package. Gets you what you need while making management seamless.
  7. Retail: Combined business tools, store and employee management, merchandise management and operational insights.
  8. Talent: Human resource cloud services connected with LinkedIn to manage all aspects of HR. This includes attracting, hiring, and onboarding new employees in managing HR programs.

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My Top VS Code Extensions for Web Development

Visual Studio Code is the most popular text editor out there and for good reason to. I enjoy editing on VS Code because of how customizable it is, when first installed it is a very barebones environment but with some modifications to the theme, settings.json and the addition of extensions users can turn a simple text editor into their perfect IDE for their needs. So here are my top extensions:

  1. GitLens – This extension supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code. It helps you to visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more.

2. Bracket Pair Colorizer – This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. The user can define which tokens to match, and which colours to use. Users are also able to modify the settings.json with “bracket-pair-colorizer-2.colors” to change the bracket colours to their own custom ones rather than the default.

3. emojisense: – This extension lets users insert emoji’s into their code with a simple short cut of CTRL-i. No need to google for emoji’s or find hex codes online to put into your strings you have all the emoj’s at your finger tips.

4. ErrorLens – This highlights any errors or warnings users have with a short detailed message. It even combines with other extensions to provide a consistent look to your editor, for example combined with CodeSpellChecker it highlights any spelling errors in your code so they’re easily noticeable rather than a dull little warning in your status bar.

5. PowerLevel10k (Terminal Theme): A Zsh theme (github.com) – This is not so much of an extension but it is a terminal theme that uses ZSH. However this theme is not just aesthetically pleasing to look at, it is very practical too. Again it is a theme that is fully customizable by users with segments. For example, within the segments, you can add the status of your battery, your OS, time, public IP, azure account name and even the status of your VPN.

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Unified Interface in Dynamics 365 – great job

Unified Interface in Dynamics 365 looks great, not so much white space like in current UI. The thing is, I just hope it won’t break anything in existing UI.

The challenging plan behind Unified Client Interface/Infrastructure “UCI” is to bring a single client technology to cover all the different UI’ s across many devices, Outlook, Web Mobile, …. – fingers crossed!

  1. Post about it on Linkedin with interesting opinions from CRM community:  https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:629750374259389235
  2. Brilliant Brian’ article describes all features:  https://community.dynamics.com/enterprise/b/dynamics365fordevelopers/archive/2017/06/20/dynamics-365-v9-0-summary-july-2017-update
  3. Great article posted byJukka: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/survivingcrm/archive/2017/07/03/the-long-road-to-unified-interface-in-dynamics-365

Please click on following screenshots to enlarge them.

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Set up Personal Settings

Because I receive many queries on Linkedin how to set up personal settings at D365 using User Settings Utility please find my answer in following post. I usually set up Personal Settings that way for CRM systems based UK. I hope it helps you – as a good example.  I published one post about it on Linkedin as well. Here is url: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6277245355968995328

I would like to introduce/recommend User Settings Utility for all readers . It is a part of XrmToolBox. That way you can easily set up the personal settings for ALL CRM users in ONE GO e.g. time zone (UK), default currency(Pound),… Recently this tool saved me a lot of time. It is a little thing, but it really makes a difference, doesn’t it ? – a CRM’ game changer.

Usually I set up these 7 Personal Settings for All users (UK based CRM systems) like on following screenshot:

1,2,3. General Settings at CRM

4,5,6. Email Settings at CRM


Particularly setting number 5 on my screenshots is very interesting. It is important in tracking emails. Shortly I will write a post about tracking emails related to Case at D365 – a good example to understand tracking emails at CRM.

5. Select the e-mail messages to track in Microsoft Dynamics CRM – the following summarizes the various options. I usually choose All e-mail messages rather than E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail.

  1. All e-mail messages – This will track all e-mail messages regardless no matter if it is a Dynamics CRM record or not
  2. E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail  – This will track e-mails in response to current e-mails based on either the Tracking Token or Smart Matching configuration in System Settings. It looks to see if this e-mail has already been tracked in Dynamics CRM as well as the tracking token if one is being used.
  3. E-mail messages from CRM Leads, Contacts and Accounts – This will only track e-mails only if the sender is a lead, contact, or account.
  4. E-mail messages from CRM records that are e-mail enabled – This will track e-mails from all record types (all entities), including custom record types (custom entities) that contain an e-mail address field.

6. Automatically create record in D365

I usually select NO, because we don’t know for 100% sure it should be created automatically Contact or Lead, but I image it can depend of very specific requirements and you want to create Contact/Lead every time.

7. Error notification

I usually disable the errors notification to not frustrate the users. By the way I opened a very interesting discussion about it on Linked. Please look at this post.

 

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Microsoft Tech Summit – Build your cloud and infrastructure skills

I was invited for Microsoft Tech Summit at Birmingham. It is very important for companies like TopOneCRM to constantly interact with Microsoft community. It will be a great pleasure for me to represent TopOneCRM on this event  and connect with Microsoft engineering experts, technology partners and Microsoft’ community.

It is a two-day free technical training event where you can improve your cloud and infrastructure skills. More details you can find using following link – Microsoft Tech Summit 2016-17

Hopefully see you there!