The Mystery of the Missing Workflow Sitemap Area Revisited (Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement)

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I’ve gone on record previously saying how highly I rate the Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM/D365CE) community. Out of all the groups I have been a part of in the past, you couldn’t ask for a more diverse, highly passionate and – most importantly of all – helpful community. There are a lot of talented individuals out there which put a metric tonne of effort into providing the necessary tools, know-how and support to make our daily journey with CRM/D365CE that much easier to traverse.

An excellent case in point comes from the CRM DevOps extraordinaire himself, Ben Walker, who reached out me regarding my recent post on default SiteMap areas vanishing mysteriously. Now, when you are working with tools like XrmToolbox, day in, day out, the propensity towards generating facepalm moments for not noticing apparent things can increase exponentially over time. With this in mind, Ben has very kindly demonstrated a much more simplistic way of restoring missing SiteMap areas and, as he very rightly points out, the amount of hassle and time-saving the XrmToolbox can provide when you fully understand its capabilities. With this in mind, let’s revisit the scenario discussed in the previous post and go through the insanely better approach to solving this issue:

  1. Download and run XrmToolbox and select the SiteMap Editor app, logging into your CRM/D365CE instance when prompted:

After logging in, you should see a screen similar to the below:

  1. Click on the Load SiteMap button to load the SiteMap definition for the instance you are connected to. It should bear some resemblance to the below when loaded:

  1. Expand the Area (Settings) node. It should resemble the below (i.e. no Group for Process Center):

  1. Right click on the Area (Settings) node and select Add Default SiteMap Area button. Clicking this will launch the SiteMap Component Picker window, which lists all of the sitemap components included by default in the application. Scroll down, select the ProcessCenter option. Then, after ticking the Add child components too checkbox, press OK. The SiteMap Editor will then add on the entire group node for the ProcessCenter, including all child nodes:

  1. When you are ready, click on the Update SiteMap button and wait until the changes upload/publish into the application. You can then log onto CRM/D365CE to verify that the new area has appeared successfully.

I love this alternative solution for a number of reasons. There are fewer steps involved, there is no requirement to resort to messing around with the SiteMap XML files (which has its own set of potential pitfalls, if done incorrectly) and the solution very much looks and feels like a “factory reset”, without any risk of removing other custom SiteMap areas that you may have added for alternate requirements. A huge thanks to Ben for reaching out and sharing this nifty solution and for rightly demonstrating how fantastic the CRM/D365CE community is 🙂

The Mystery of the Missing Workflow Sitemap Area (Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement)

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UPDATE 02/09/2018: It turns out that there is a far better way of fixing this problem. Please click here to find out more.

I thought I was losing my mind the other day. This feeling can be a general occurrence in the world of IT, when something completely random and unexplainable happens – emphasised even more so when you have a vivid recollection of something behaving in a particular way. In this specific case, a colleague was asking why they could no longer access the list of Workflows setup within a version 8.2 Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) Online instance via the Settings area of the system. Longstanding CRM or D365CE professionals will recall that this has been a mainstay of the application since Dynamics CRM 2015, accessible via the Settings -> Processes group Sitemap area:

Suffice to say, when I logged on to the affected instance, I was thoroughly stumped, as this area had indeed vanished entirely:

I asked around the relatively small pool of colleagues who a) had access to this instance and b) had knowledge of modifying the sitemap area (more on this shortly). The short answer, I discovered, was that no one had any clue as to why this area had suddenly vanished. It was then that I came upon the following Dynamics 365 Community forum post, which seemed to confirm my initial suspicions; namely, that something must have happened behind the scenes with Microsoft or as part of an update that removed the Processes area from the SiteMap. Based on the timings of the posts, this would appear to be a relatively recent phenomenon and one that can be straightforwardly fixed…if you know how to. 😉

For those who are unfamiliar with how SiteMaps work within the application, these are effectively XML files that sit behind the scenes, defining how the navigation components in CRM/ D365CE operate. They tell the application which of the various Entities, Settings, Dashboards and other custom solution elements that need to be displayed to end users. The great thing is that this XML can be readily exported from the application and modified to suit a wide range of business scenarios, such as:

  • Only make a specific SiteMap area available to users who are part of the Sales Manager Security Role.
  • Override the default label for the Leads SiteMap area to read Sales Prospect instead.
  • Link to external applications, websites or custom developed Web Resources.

What this all means is that there is a way to fix the issue described earlier in the post and, even better, the steps involved are very straightforward. This is all helped by quite possibly the best application that all D365CE professionals should have within their arsenal – the XrmToolBox. With the help of a specific component that this solution provides, alongside a reliable text editor program, the potentially laborious process of fiddling around with XML files and the whole export/import process can become streamlined so that anybody can achieve wizard-like ability in tailoring the applications SiteMap. With all this in mind, let’s take a look on how to fix the above issue, step by step:

  1. Download and run XrmToolbox and select the SiteMap Editor app, logging into your CRM/D365CE instance when prompted:

After logging in, you should be greeted with a screen similar to the below:

  1. Click on the Load SiteMap button to load the SiteMap definition for the instance you are connected to. Once loaded, click on the Save SiteMap button, saving the file with an appropriate name on an accessible location on your local computer.
  2. Open the file using your chosen text editor, applying any relevant formatting settings to assist you in the steps that follow. Use the Find function (CTRL + F) to find the Group with the node value of Customizations. It should look similar to the image below, with the Group System_Setting specified as the next one after it:

  1. Copy and paste the following text just after the </Group> node (i.e. Line 415):
<Group Id="ProcessCenter" IsProfile="false">
    <Titles>
        <Title LCID="1033" Title="Processes" />
    </Titles>
    <SubArea Entity="workflow" GetStartedPanePath="Workflows_Web_User_Visor.html" GetStartedPanePathAdmin="Workflows_Web_Admin_Visor.html" GetStartedPanePathAdminOutlook="Workflows_Outlook_Admin_Visor.html" GetStartedPanePathOutlook="Workflows_Outlook_User_Visor.html" Id="nav_workflow" AvailableOffline="false" PassParams="false">
        <Titles>
          <Title LCID="1033" Title="Workflows" />
        </Titles>
    </SubArea>
</Group>

It should resemble the below if done correctly:

  1. Save a copy of your updated Sitemap XML file and go back to the XrmToolbox, selecting the Open SiteMap button. This will let you import the modified, copied XML file back into the Toolbox, ready for uploading back onto CRM/D365CE. At this stage, you can verify the SiteMap structure of the node by expanding the appropriate area within the main SiteMap window:

When you are ready, click on the Update SiteMap button and wait until the changes are uploaded/published into the application. You can then log onto CRM/D365CE to verify that the new area has appeared successfully. Remember when I said to save a copy of the SiteMap XML? At this stage, if the application throws an error, then you can follow the steps above to reimport the original SiteMap to how it was before the change, thereby allowing you to diagnose any issues with the XML safely.

It is still a bit of mystery precisely what caused the original SiteMap area for Processes to go walkies. The evidence would suggest that some change by Microsoft forced its removal and that this occurred not necessarily as part of a major version update (the instance in our scenario has not been updated to a major release for 18 months at least, and this area was definitely there at some stage last year). One of the accepted truths with any cloud CRM system is that you at the mercy of the solution vendor, ultimately, if they decide to modify things in the background with little or no notice. The great benefit in respect to this situation is that, when you consider the vast array of customisation and development options afforded to us, CRM/D365CE can be very quickly tweaked to resolve cases like this, and you do not find yourself at the mercy of operating a business system where your bespoke development options are severely curtailed.

My Highlights from the October 2018 Business Application Release Notes

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With two major Microsoft events recently taking place back to back over the last fortnight – Microsoft Inspire & the Business Applications Summit – there is, understandably, a plethora of major new announcements that concern those of us who are working in the Business Applications space today. The critical announcement from my perspective is the October 2018 Business Application Release Notes, which gives us all a nice and early look at what is going to be released soon for Dynamics 365, Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Power BI and other related services. Unlike previous Spring or Fall releases, the sheer breadth of different features that now sit within the Business Applications space makes it all the more important to consider any new announcement carefully and to ensure that they are adequately factored into any architectural decisions in months ahead. If you are having trouble wading through all 239 pages of the document, then I have been through the notes and picked out what I feel are most relevant highlights from a Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) perspective and their potential impact or applicability to business scenarios.

SharePoint Integration with Portals

This is a biggie and a feature that no doubt many portal administrators have been clamouring for, with the only other option being a complicated SDK solution or a third-party vendor approach. Document management directly within CRM/D365CE has always been a sketchy idea at best when you consider the database size limitations of the application and the cost for additional database storage. That’s why SharePoint has always represented the optimal choice for storing any documents related to a record, facilitating a much more inexpensive route and affording opportunities to take advantage of the vast array of SharePoint features. When you start adding portals into the mix – for example, to enable customers to upload documents relating to a loan application – the whole thing currently falls flat on its face, as documents (to the best of my knowledge) can only be uploaded and stored directly within CRM/D365CE. With the removal of this feature, a significant adoption barrier for CRM Portals will be eliminated, and I am pleased to also see an obligatory Power BI reference included as part of this announcement 🙂

In addition, we are providing the ability to embed Power BI charts within a portal, allowing users to benefit from the interactive visualizations of Power BI.

Portal Configuration Migration

Another process that can regularly feel disjointed and laborious are the steps involved in deploying Portal changes from Dev -> UAT/Test -> Production environments, with no straightforward means of packaging up changes via a Solution or similar for easy transportation. This torment promises to change as part of the release in October, thanks to the following:

To reduce the time and effort required to manage portal configuration across environments, we are publishing schema for configuration migration that works with the Configuration Migration SDK tool.

If you are not aware of the Configuration Migration tool, then you owe it to yourself to find out more about what it can accomplish, as I am sure it will take a lot of headache out of everyday business settings, product catalogue or other non-solution customisation activity that you may be carrying out in multiple environments. The neat thing about this particular announcement is that an existing, well-established tool can be used to achieve these new requirements, as opposed to an entirely new, unfamiliar mechanism. Integration with the current Configuration Migration tool will surely help in adopting this solution more quickly and enable deployment profiles to be put together that contain nearly all required configuration data for migration.

Portal Access Restrictions

In Portal terms, this is a relatively minor one, but a welcome addition nonetheless. When testing and developing any software application, it is always prudent to restrict access to only the users or organisations who require access to it. This option has not been available to Portals to date, but no longer thanks to the following announcement:

This feature would allow administrators to define a list of IP addresses that are allowed to access your portal. The allow list can include individual IP addresses or a range of IP addresses defined by a subnet mask. When a request to the portal is generated from any user, their IP address is evaluated against the allow list. If the IP address is not in the list, the portal replies with an HTTP 403 status code

The capabilities exposed here demonstrate a lot of parity with Azure Web Apps, which is, I understand, what is used to host portals. I would hope that we can see the exposure of more Azure Web App configuration features for portal administrators in the years ahead.

Multi-resource Scheduling

There has been a real drive in getting the Resource Scheduling experience within D365CE looking as visually optimal and feature-rich as possible in recent years. There is a specific reason to explain this – the introduction of Project Service Automation and Field Service capability requires this as an almost mandatory pre-requisite. There is a wide array of new features relating to resource scheduling as part of this update, but the announcement that caught my eye, in particular, was the ability to group related resources on the Resource Scheduler, as predefined “crews”. This new feature is hugely welcome for many reasons:

  • Different types of jobs/work may require resources with a specific set of skills in combination to complete.
  • It may be prudent to group specific resources if, for example, previous experience tells you that they work well together.
  • Location may be a factor as part of all this, meaning that by scheduling a “crew” of resources together within the same locale, you can reduce the unnecessary effort involved in travelling and ensure your resources are utilising their time more effectively.

The release notes give us a teaser of how this will look in practice, and I am eager to see how this works in practice:

Leave and absence management in Dynamics 365 Talent

I have been watching with casual, distant interest how the Dynamics 365 Talent product has been developing since its release, billed as one of the first applications built on top of the new Unified Interface/Common Data Service experience. I have noted its primary utility to date has been more towards the Human Resources hiring and onboarding process, with a significant feature gap that other HR systems on the market today would more than happily fill, by providing central hubs for policy documents, managing personal information and leave requests. I think there may be a recognition of this fact within Microsoft, which explains the range of new features contained within Dynamics 365 Talent as part of the October 2018 release. The new feature that best epitomises the applications maturity is the ability to manage leaves and absences, noted as follows:

Organizations can configure rules and policies related to their leave and absence plans. They can choose how employees accrue their time off, whether it’s by years of service or by hours worked. They also can configure when this time off can be taken and if certain types of time off must be taken before others. If they allow employees to get a pay-out of their time off, this can be configured as well.

Managers can see an all-up calendar view of their team members’ time off as well as company holidays and closures. This view shows them where they may have overlap as well as time-off trends for their team and enables them to drill down to gain a better understanding of an individual’s time off.

This immediately places the system as a possible challenger to other HR systems and represents a natural, and much needed, coming-of-age development for the system. I would undoubtedly say that Dynamics 365 Talent is starting to become something that warrants much closer attention in future.

Develop Microsoft Flows Using Visio

Microsoft Flow is great. This fact should be self-evident to regular followers of the blog. As a regularly developing, relatively young product, though, it is understandable that some aspects of it require further work. An excellent example of this is the ability to manage the deployment of Flows between different environments or stages. While Flows big brother, Microsoft Logic Apps, has this pretty well covered, the ability to deploy development or concepts Flows repeatedly often ends up being a case of manually creating each Flow again from scratch, which isn’t exactly fun.

The October release promises to change this with the introduction of a specific piece of integration with Microsoft Visio:

Microsoft Visio enables enterprises to capture their business processes using its rich modeling capabilities. Anyone who creates flowcharts or SharePoint workflows can now use Visio to design Microsoft Flow workflows. You can use Visio’s sharing and commenting capabilities to collaborate with multiple stakeholders and arrive at a complete workflow in little time. As requested here, you can publish the workflow to Microsoft Flow, then supply parameters to activate it.

This feature will be available to Visio Online Plan 2 subscription users. Office Insiders can expect early access in July 2018. In the future, you’ll also be able to export existing Flows and modify them in Visio.

Now, it’s worth noting, in particular, the requirement for Visio Online Plan 2 to accommodate this neat piece of functionality. But, assuming this is not an issue for your organisation, the potential here to define Flows locally, share them quickly for approval, and deploy them en masse is enormous, bringing a much-needed degree of automation to a product that currently does not support this. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this in due course.

Custom Fonts in Power BI

Continuing the theme of obligatory Power BI references, my final pick has to be the introduction of Custom Fonts into Power BI, which will be in Public Preview as part of October’s release:

Corporate themes often include specific fonts that are distributed and used throughout the company. You can use those fonts in your Power BI reports.

For any font property, Power BI Desktop will show a complete list of all the fonts installed on your computer. You can choose from these to use in your report. When distributing the report, anyone with the font installed will see it reflected in the report. If the end user doesn’t have it installed, it falls back to the default font.

For those who have particular branding requirements that require accommodation within their Power BI Reports, this new feature completes the puzzle and takes you an additional step further in transforming your reports so that they are almost unrecognisable from a default Power BI Report. Hopefully, the preview period for this new feature will be relatively short and then rolled out as part of general availability.

Conclusions or Wot I Think

The list above is just a flavour of my “choice cuts” of the most exciting features that will be in our hands within the next few months, and I really would urge you to read through the entire document if you have even just a little passing interest in any of the technologies included in these release notes. As you can tell, my list is ever so skewered towards Portals out of everything else. This is for a good reason – ever since Microsoft’s acquisition of ADXStudio a few years back, we have seen some progress in the development of CRM Portals from Microsoft, mainly in the context of integrating the product more tightly for Online users. In my view, this has been the only significant effort we have seen in taking the product forward, with a relatively extensive list of backlog feature requests that looked to have been consigned to the recycling bin. The October Release very much seems to flip this on its head and I am pleased to discover a whole range of new, most clamoured for, features being made available on Portals, which take the product forward in strides and enables organisations to more easily contemplate their introduction.

As you will probably expect based on where things are going in the D365CE space at the moment, the announcements for Flow, PowerApps and the Common Data Service are all very much framed towards the end goal of integrating these and the “old” CRM/D365CE experience together as tightly as possible, a change that should be welcomed. The release notes are also crucial in highlighting the importance of anyone working in this space to be as multi-skilled as possible from a technology standpoint. Microsoft is (quite rightly) encouraging all technology professionals to be fast and reactive to change, and anticipating us to have a diverse range of skills to help the organisations/businesses we work with every day. There is no point in fighting this and, the best way for you to succeed in this climate is to identify the relevant opportunities that you can drive forward from these product announcements and proactively implement as part of the work you are doing each day. In a nutshell, you should know how to deploy a Power BI Dashboard, have familiarity with the type of services that Flow connects to, see the difference between a Canvas and Model-driven PowerApps and – amongst all of this – understand how D365CE solutions operate. Be a Swiss Army Knife as much as possible and deliver as much value and benefit in your role as you possibly can.

Modernizing Dynamics 365 Updates: What This Means For Your Organisation

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Earlier this year, the Business Applications team at Microsoft published a blog post titled Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365, a significant article that anyone involved with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) should take time to read through carefully. Indeed, as a direct consequence of the announcements contained in this post, you may now be receiving emails similar to the below if you are an administrator of a D365CE instance:

Changes to well-established processes always can produce a mixture of questions, confusion and, in some cases, frustration for IT teams. Once you have fully understood the broader context of where D365CE is going and also the general sea change that has been occurring since Satya Nadella came to the helm of Microsoft, the modifications to the Update Policy are welcome and, arguably, necessary to ensure that D365CE users and administrators can take advantage of the different features available within a D365CE subscription today. For those who are still scratching their head at all of this, what follows is a summary of the most significant changes announced, along with some additional observations from me on why it is important to embrace all these changes wholeheartedly.

Version 9 or Bust

Longstanding D365CE online customers will be used to the regular update cycles and the ability to defer significant application updates for a period. While this can be prudent for more complex deployments, it does potentially lead to additional overhead in the long term, mainly if Microsoft were ever to force this decision upon you. The well-established advice has always been to proactively manage your updates at your own pace, ideally targeting at least one major update a year. If you haven’t been doing this, then you may now be in for a particularly nasty shock. As mentioned in the article:

Since every customer will be updated on the continuous delivery schedule, your organization needs to update to the latest version if you are running an older version of Dynamics 365…For customers who are currently running older versions of Dynamics 365, we will continue to provide you with the ability to schedule an update to the latest version and want to make sure this effort is as seamless as possible through continuous improvements in our update engine…For Dynamics 365 (online) customer engagement applications, we sent update communications in May to all customers running v8.1 and have scheduled updates. Customers running v8.2 should plan to update to the latest version by January 31, 2019.

This point is reinforced in a much more explicit manner in the email above:

ACTION NEEDED: Schedule an update for your organization by August 16, 2018. The date for the update should be on or before January 31, 2019. You can find instructions on how to schedule and approve updates here.

If you do not schedule an update in the timeframe mentioned above, Microsoft will schedule an automatic update for your organization on August 17, 2018 and communicate the dates. The automatic update would take place during your normal maintenance window.

The implications should be clear, and it certainly seems that, in this scenario, Microsoft has decided to eliminate any degree of upgrade flexibility for its customers.

No Changes to Minor/Major Updates?

Again, if you are familiar with how D365CE Online operates, there are two flavours of updates:

  • Minor updates, to address bugs, performance and stability issues, are continually pushed out “behind the scenes”. You have no control over when and how these are applied, but they will always be carried out outside your regions regular business hours. The Office 365 Administrator Portal is your go-to place to view any past or upcoming minor updates.
  • Major updates generally referred to as Spring Wave or Fall Update releases. There has always been two of these each year, and administrators can choose when to apply these to a D365CE instance. These updates can generally take much longer to complete but will introduce significant new features.

Microsoft’s new Update Policy seems to leave this convention intact, with a noteworthy change highlighted below in bold:

We are transforming how we do service updates for Dynamics 365 (online). We will deliver two major releases per year – April and October – offering new capabilities and functionality. These updates will be backward compatible so your apps and customizations will continue to work post update. New features with major, disruptive changes to the user experience are off by default. This means administrators will be able to first test before enabling these features for their organization.

In addition to the two major updates, we will continue to deploy regular performance and reliability improvement updates throughout the year. We are phasing deployments over several weeks following safe deployment practices and monitoring updates closely for any issues.

Some additional detail around this will be welcome to determine its effectiveness, but I can imagine some parity with the Experimental Features area in PowerApps, which – contrary to the above – will often introduce new features that are left on by default. A derived version of this feature would, I think, work in practice and hopefully streamline the process of testing new functionality without necessarily introducing it unintended into Production environments.

On-Premise Implications

One question that all of this may raise is around the on-premise version of the application, in particular for those who consume online subscriptions, but use their dual-usage rights to create an on-premise instance instead. This situation becomes more pressing when you consider the following excerpt from the refreshed Update Policy:

Dynamics 365 (Online) version 8.2 will be fully supported until January 31, 2019. Customers running version 8.2 should plan to update to the latest version prior to this date.

Now, the important thing to stress is the fact that the above quotation makes explicit reference to Online as opposed to on-premise. Also, when we check Microsoft’s product lifecycle page, you can see that Mainstream support for this product ends in January 2021. On-premise administrators can, I would suggest, breath a sigh of relief for now, but I would urge you to contact Microsoft to clarify your support arrangements. I think as an organisation as well, you should also start seriously asking yourself the following questions:

  • Is an online, Software as a Service (SaaS) version of the application going to be easier to maintain compared with dedicated server environment(s)?
  • Is it possible to achieve all of your required functionality and business requirements using the Online version of the application?
  • Do you want to ensure you have the latest features exposed to you and can take advantage of Online-only functionality, such as Export to Excel Online?

If the answer to all of the above questions is “Yes”, then a migration to the Online version of the application would be my recommended course of action, as it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft were to stop releasing new versions/service packs for the on-premise version of the product or eliminate it by providing inexpensive sandbox instance options.

Recommended Next Steps

The fundamental aim of this move is a housekeeping exercise for Microsoft. The announcement earlier this year of version 2 of the Common Data Service – which is utilising the existing D365CE SQL database for all customisations – is the key driver behind a lot of the changes that are happing in the CRM/D365CE space today. The focus for the product team at Microsoft currently appears to be towards knitting together both experiences into the PowerApps interface. What this means in practice is that the traditional customisation experience is going to slowly fade away, to be replaced by Model-Driven App development instead. This refresh is excellent for several reasons – it provides a much-needed interface update, while also exposing additional functionality to us when creating business applications – but it is evident that such a massive change will require a consistent playing field for all of Microsoft’s existing version 8.2 and below D365CE customers. Getting everyone onto version 9 of the application is the apparent result towards rolling out version 2 of the Common Data Service for all existing customers while ensuring that D365CE can fit into the mould of other application release cycles across Microsoft today. Embracing the change should not be a difficult thing to do and, when you understand the broader context, there is no other option available on the table.

So what are the key takeaways from this that you should be thinking about in the weeks and months ahead? My suggested list would include the following:

  • Schedule your update to version 9 of the application manually well in advance of August 16th 2018. DO NOT put yourself in a position where you are having an update forced upon you and give yourself the amount of time needed to successfully plan and test your upgrade in good time before January 31st 2019. I would also anticipate upgrade slots may start to fill up fast if you want to wait until as late as possible too 🙂
  • Start considering your future strategy in regards to the on-premise version of the application, if you are still supporting these environments. I speak with literally zero authority here, but I would not be surprised if the on-premise version of the application receives no further update at all in future or that dual-usage rights get revoked entirely.
  • Get familiar with the Common Data Service and Power Apps, as this is increasingly going to be the go-to area D365CE development and administration in the future. If you get the opportunity to attend one of Microsoft’s PowerApp in Day course, then be sure to go along without any hesitation. I would also be happy to speak to and help anyone with training in this area.
  • As with anything in life, embrace change, be proactive and identify areas of opportunity from this. A good one from my perspective is the potential to more easily introduce the staggering array of differing Business Application functionality, with the outcome being the ability to quickly deploy bespoke business applications that achieve any possible requirement and integrate with a wide variety of different services or datasets.

Voice of the Customer Survey Response File Uploads: A Few Thoughts

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The Voice of the Customer (VoC) add-on solution for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) presents a really nice way of incorporating survey capabilities within your existing Dynamics application estate, without any additional cost or significant administrative overhead. I’ve talked about the tool previously, within the context of specific application errors, and I can attest to its capabilities – both as a standalone solution and as one that can be leveraged alongside other D365CE functionality to generate additional value.

One feature that is particularly useful is the ability to include diverse Survey Response controls. This can cover the range of anticipated user inputs that most web developers would be used to – text inputs, ratings, date pickers etc. – along with more marketing specific choices such as Net Promoter Score and even a Smilies rating control. The final one of these really does have to be seen to wholly appreciate:

I hope you agree that this is definitely one of those features that becomes so fun that it soaks up WAY more time than necessary 🙂

One of the final options that VoC provides you is the ability to upload files to a Survey Response, which is stored within the application and made retrievable at any time by locating the appropriate Survey Response record. You can customise the guidance text presented to the user for this control, such as in the example below:

Uploaded files are then saved onto an Azure Blob Storage location (which you don’t have direct access to), with the access URL stored within D365CE. The inclusion of this feature does provide the capability to accommodate several potential business scenarios, such as:

  • Allowing a service desk to create an automated survey that allows error logs or screenshots to be uploaded for further diagnosis.
  • The gathering of useful photographic information as part of a pre-qualification process for a product installation.
  • Enabling customers to upload a photo that provides additional context relating to their experience – either positive or negative.

Putting all of this aside, however, and there are a few things that you should bear in mind when first evaluating this feature for your particular requirements. What follows is my list of major things to be aware of, along with some tips to sidestep any issues.

Privacy concerns…

To better understand why this is relevant, it helps to be aware of exactly how files can be stored on Azure. Azure file storage works on the principle of “blobs” (i.e. files), which can only be created within a corresponding Storage Container. These can be configured using a couple of different options, depending on how you would like to access your data, which is elaborated upon in this really helpful article:

You can configure a container with the following permissions:

  • No public read access: The container and its blobs can be accessed only by the storage account owner. This is the default for all new containers.

  • Public read access for blobs only: Blobs within the container can be read by anonymous request, but container data is not available. Anonymous clients cannot enumerate the blobs within the container.

  • Full public read access: All container and blob data can be read by anonymous request. Clients can enumerate blobs within the container by anonymous request, but cannot enumerate containers within the storage account.

To presumably mitigate the need for complex deployments of the VoC solution, all uploaded Survey Response files are saved in Full public read access storage containers, meaning that anyone with the URL can access these files. And, as mentioned already, administrators have no direct access to the Azure Storage Account to modify these permissions, potentially compounding this access problem. Now, before you panic too much, the VoC solution deliberately structures the uploaded file in the following format:

https://<VoC Region Identifier>.blob.core.windows.net/<Survey Response GUID>-files/<File GUID>-<Example File>

This degree of complexity added during this goes a long way towards satisfying any privacy concerns – it would be literally impossible for a human being or computer to guess what a particular uploaded file path is, even if they did have the Survey Response record GUID – but this still does not address the fact that the URL can be freely accessed and shared by anyone with sufficient permissions over the Survey Response entity in D365CE. You should, therefore, take appropriate care when scoping your security privileges within D365CE and look towards carrying out a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) over the type of data you are collecting via the upload file control.

…even after you delete a Survey Response.

As mentioned above, the Blob Storage URL is tagged to the Survey Response record within D365CE. So what happens when you delete this record? The answer, courtesy of Microsoft via a support request:

Deleting Survey Response should delete the file uploaded as part of the Survey Response

Based on my testing, however, this does not look to be the case. My understanding of the VoC solution is that it needs to regularly synchronise with components located on Azure, which can lead to a delay in certain actions completing (publish a Survey, create Survey Response record etc.). However, a file from a Survey Response test record that I deleted still remains accessible via its URL up to 8 hours after completing this action. This, evidently, raises a concern over what level of control you have over potentially critical and sensitive data types that may be included in uploaded files. I would urge you to carry out your own analysis as part of a PIA to sufficiently gauge what impact, if any, this may have on your data collection (and, more critically, storage) activities.

Restrictions

For the most part, file upload controls are not a heavily constrained feature, but it is worthwhile to keep the following restrictions in mind:

  • Executable file types are not permitted for upload (.exe, .ps1, .bat etc.)
  • Larger file types may not upload successfully, generating 404 server errors within the control. There is not a documented size limitation, but my testing would indicate that files as big as 60MB will not upload correctly.
  • Only one file upload control is allowed per survey.

The last of these limitations is perhaps the most significant constraint. If you do have a requirement for separate files to be uploaded, then the best option is to provide instructions on the survey, advising users to compress their files into a single .zip archive before upload.

Conclusions or Wot I Think

Despite what this post may be leaning towards, I very much believe the VoC solution and, in particular, the ability to upload Survey Response files, is all in a perfect, working condition. Going a step further on this, when viewed from a technical standpoint, I would even say that its method of execution is wholly justified. With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) earlier this year, current attention is all around ensuring that appropriate access controls over data have been properly implemented, that ensures the privacy of individuals is fully upheld. Here is where the solution begins to fall over to a degree and evidence of the journey that VoC has made in becoming part of the Dynamics 365 “family” becomes most apparent. As can be expected, any product which is derived from an external acquisition will always present challenges when being “smushed” with a new application system. I have been informed that there is an update coming to the VoC solution in August this year, with a range of new features that may address some of the data privacy concerns highlighted earlier. For example, the option will be provided for administrators to delete any uploaded file within a Survey Response on-demand. Changes like this will surely go a long way towards providing the appropriate opportunities for VoC to be fully utilised by businesses looking to integrate an effective, GDPR-proof, customer survey tool.