D365UG/CRMUG Manchester (NW UK) Chapter Meeting – 20th June 2018

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I was very honoured and excited to be involved with the very first D365UG/CRMUG North West Chapter Meeting earlier this week, hosted at the Grindsmith just off Deansgate in Manchester. This is the first time that a D365UG/CRMUG event has taken place in the North West, and we were absolutely stunned by the level of interest this event generated – all in all, 37 people attended, representing a broad spectrum of Microsoft partners and organisations of varying sizes.

I very much got the impression that the amount of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE) users in the North West far exceed any number you could assume, and I am really looking forward to seeing how future events develop as we (hopefully!) get more people involved. Despite a few technical glitches with the AV facilities, the feedback we have received to both presentations has been overwhelmingly positive, so a huge thanks to everyone who turned up and to our presenters for the evening

In this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on both sets of presentations, provide an answer to some of the questions that we didn’t get around to due to time constraints and, finally, provide a link to the slide deck from the evening.

Transform Group – The Patient Journey

The first talk of the evening was provided courtesy of Bill Egan at Edgewater Fullscope, who took us through Transform Group’s adoption of D365CE. Bill provided some really useful insights – from both an organisation and a Microsoft partner’s perspective – of the challenges that any business can face when moving across to a system like D365CE. As with any IT project, there were some major hurdles along the way, but Bill very much demonstrated how the business was able to roll with the punches and the very optimistic 16 weeks planned deployment presents an, arguably, essential blueprint in how IT projects need to be executed; namely, targeted towards delivering as much business benefit in a near immediate timeframe.

The key takeaways from me out of all this was in emphasising the importance of adapting projects quickly to changing business priorities and to recognise the continued effort required to ensure that business systems are regularly reviewed and updated to suit the requirements of not just the users, but the wider business.

Power Up Your Power Apps

The second presentation was literally a “head to head” challenge with Craig Bird from Microsoft and Chris “The Tattooed CRM Guy” Huntingford from Hitachi Solutions, seeing who could build the best PowerApps. In the end, the voting was pretty unanimous and Craig was the proud recipient of a prize worthy of a champion. I hope Craig will be wearing his belt proudly at future events 🙂

I found the presentation particularly useful in clearing up a number of worries I had around the Common Data Service and the future of D365CE. The changes that I saw are very much emphasised towards providing a needed facelift to the current customisation and configuration experience within D365CE, with little requirement to factor in migration and extensive learning of new tools to ensure that your D365CE entities are available within the Common Data Service. Everything “just works” and syncs across flawlessly.

https://twitter.com/joejgriffin/status/1009531079492079622

In terms of who had the best app, I think Craig literally knocked the socks off everyone with his translator application. Although I include myself in this category, I was still surprised to see that PowerApps supports Power BI embedded content, courtesy of Chris – a really nice thing to take away for any aspirational PowerApp developer.

Questions & Answers

We managed to get around to most questions for the first presentation but not for the second one. Here’s a list of all the questions that I am able to provide an answer to. I’m still in the process of collating together responses to the other questions received, so please keep checking back if you’re burning question is not answered below:

Presentation

For those who missed the event or are wanting to view the slides without a purple tinge, they will be downloadable for the next 30 days from the following location:

https://jamesgriffin-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/joe_griffin_gb_net/EbRAws0urypMkrGyqCzoTdMB4ggjUQI4_npQlEZAYhea4w?e=U3lvf5

Looking Ahead

The next chapter meeting is scheduled to take place on the 2nd of October (venue TBC). If you are interested in getting involved, either through giving a presentation or in helping to organise the event, then please let us know by dropping us a message:

  • Email: crmuguknw@gmail.com
  • Twitter: @CRMUG_UK_NW

Display Data Input Error Messages within PowerApps

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PowerApps is very much the in vogue topic at the moment, particularly if you are a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement professional reconciling yourself with the new state of affairs. The previous sentence may sound negative but is very much contrary to my opinion on PowerApps, which I am finding increased use cases for each day when working to address certain business requirements. Whether you are looking to implement a barcode scanning application or something much more expansive, the set of tools that PowerApps provides from the outset means that traditional developers can very easily achieve solutions that would previously take Visual Studio and a whole breadth of programming knowledge to realise.

On the topic of developers, one thing that they may have to assuage themselves with when working with PowerApps is the inability to display dialog messages within the app when some kind of alert needs to be provided to the user. A typical scenario for this could be to request that the user completes all fields on a form before moving to the next screen, ensuring that an appropriate message is displayed reflecting this fact. Whilst there is no current way of achieving this via a dedicated pop-up control or similar, there are ways that this behaviour can be imitated using existing Label controls and a bit of function wizardry.

The best way to illustrating how to accomplish this is to view an example PowerApps app. Below are screenshots of a very simple two-screen app, with several Text Inputs, a Button and Label control:

The required functionality of the app is to allow navigation to the ‘Thanks for your submission!’ screen only if the user has entered data into all of the Text Input controls on the first screen; if this condition is not met, then the user should be prevented from moving to the next screen and an error message should be displayed to advise the user accordingly.

The first step is to create the error message and required text on the first screen. This can be straightforwardly achieved via an additional Label control, with some text formatting and colour changes to make it noticeable to the user.

As with many other controls within PowerApps, you have the ability to toggle the visibility of Labels either on a consistent or variable basis. The Visible property is your go-to destination for this and, as the next step, the value of this field should be updated to read ErrorVisible – the name of a variable storing the state of the controls visibility (either true or false). If done correctly, as indicated in the screenshot below, you will notice that the Label control will immediately disappear from the screen on the right. This is because the default value of the newly specified variable is false.

The next step involves the invocation of a somewhat complex PowerApps function to implement the required logic on the Button control. The entire function to use is reproduced below in its entirety:

If(Or(IsBlank(TextInput1.Text),IsBlank(TextInput2.Text),IsBlank(TextInput3.Text),IsBlank(TextInput4.Text)), Set(ErrorVisible, true), Navigate(Screen2,ScreenTransition.Fade))

To break the above down for those who are unfamiliar with working with functions:

  • IsBlank does exactly what it says on the tin, but it’s important to emphasise that to check whether a field contains a value or not, you have to specify the Text property of the control.
  • The Set function enables us to specify the values of variables on the fly, whether they have been declared already or not somewhere else on the app. No additional syntax is required, making it very straightforward to create runtime variables that store values throughout an entire app session.
  • Navigate specifies any other screen on the app to open. We can also select a transition effect to use which, in this case, is the Fade transition.
  • Finally, all of the above is wrapped around an If logic statement that prevents the user from moving to the next screen if any of the Text Input controls do not contain a value (courtesy of the Or statement).

The function needs to be entered within the OnSelect property of the button control, and your form should resemble the below if done correctly:

With everything configured, its time to give the app a test drive. 🙂 The sequence below provides a demonstration of how the app should work if all of the above steps are followed:

A final, potentially optional step (depending on what your app is doing), is to ensure that the error message is hidden as soon as the user navigates away from the 1st screen. This can be achieved by updating the ErrorVisible variable back to false as soon as the user navigates onto the second screen, as indicated in the screenshot below:

Conclusions or Wot I Think

PowerApps is still very much a product in its infancy, very neatly fitting into the new wave of Microsoft products with regular release cycles, feature updates and ongoing development. It can be, therefore, unrealistic to expect a full range of features which satisfy all business scenarios to be available at this juncture. Having said that, one feature that could be added to greatly benefit data entry into forms is the ability to display pop-out dialog messages, depending on field requirement levels or other conditional logic. The key benefit of this would be the need not to resort to complex functions to achieve this functionality and to, instead, allow error messages or alerts to be configured via the PowerApps GUI. A similar comparison can perhaps be made with Business Rules in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Before their introduction, developers would have to resort to JScript functions to display form-level alerts based on conditional logic. Not everyone is familiar with JScript, meaning a significant barrier was in place for those looking to implement arguably straightforward business logic. Now, with Business Rules, we have the ability to replicate a lot of functionality that JScript allows for, speeding up the time it takes to implement solutions and providing a much clearer mechanism of implementing straightforward business logic. Hopefully, in the months ahead, we can start to see a similar type of feature introduced within PowerApps to aid in developing a similar solution demonstrated in this post.

Working with Barcodes on a PowerApp: A Few Tips

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The ability to develop a custom barcode scanning application, compatible with either a specific mobile, tablet or other device type, would traditionally be in the realm for a skilled developer to implement fully. The key benefit this brings is the ability to develop a highly tailored business application, with almost limitless potential. The major downside is, of course, the requirement for having this specific expertise within a business and sufficient time to plan, develop and test the application.

When it comes to using some of the newly introduced weapons in the Microsoft Online Services arsenal (such as Microsoft Flow, a topic which has been a recent focus on the blog), these traditional assumptions around application development can be discarded and empowering tools are provided to developers & non-developers to enable them to create highly custom business application without writing a single line of code. A perfect example of what can be achieved as a consequence has already been hinted at. With PowerApps, you have the ability to create a highly functional barcode scanning application that can perform a variety of functions – register event attendees details into a SQL database, lookup a Product stored on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and much, much more. The assumingly complex becomes bafflingly simplistic.

I’ve been lucky to (finally!) have a chance to play around with PowerApps and the barcode scanning control recently. What I wanted to do as part of this week’s blog post was provide a few tips on using this control, with the aim of easing anyone else’s journey when using it for the first time.

Make sure your barcode type is supported – and factor in multiple barcode types, if required

The one thing you have to get your head around fairly early on is that the barcode control can only support 1 barcode type at any given time. At the time of writing this post, the following barcode types are supported:

  • Codabar
  • Code 128
  • Code 39
  • EAN
  • Interleaved 2 of 5
  • UPC

Note in particular the lack of current support for QR codes, which are essentially a barcode on steroids. There are, however, plans to introduce this as an option in the very near future, so we won’t have to wait too long for this.

Be sure to RTFM

It can be easy to forget this rather forceful piece of advice, but the importance of familiarising yourself with the barcode control, its properties and some of the acknowledged limitations can go a long way towards streamlining the deployment of a workable barcode scanner app. I’ve collated together a list of the most useful articles below, which I highly encourage you to read through in their entirety:

Whilst PowerApps is generally quite a good tool to jump into without prerequisite knowledge, working with specific controls – such as this one – warrants a much more careful study to ensure you fully understand what is and isn’t supported. What’s also quite helpful about the articles (jumping back to barcode types for a second) is that an example is provided on how to create a drop-down control to change the type of barcode that can be scanned at runtime. Typically, for an internal app where a defined barcode type is utilised consistently, the requirement for this may not be present; but it is nice to know the option is there.

For the best success rate when scanning, ensure the barcode control occupies as much space as possible

On one of the example posts above, an example is provided of a barcode control situated atop a Gallery control with a search box. Whilst this may look appealing from a usability aspect, your main issue will be in ensuring that devices using the app can properly scan any potential barcode. For example, when testing iOS devices in this scenario, I found it literally impossible to ensure a consistent scan rate. I’ve not tested with other mobile devices to confirm the same issue occurs, but given that the issue on iOS appears to be down to a “memory issue”, I can imagine the same problem occurring for lower spec Android devices as well. Microsoft’s recommendation for optimal barcode scanning controls provides a workaround solution that can be adapted:

To delay running out of memory on devices that are running iOS, set the Height property of the Barcode control to 700 (or lower) and the Scanrate property to 30.

With this in mind, you can create a dedicated screen on your PowerApp for barcode scanning that occupies sufficient space, whilst also providing an easy to operate experience for your end users. An optimal layout example is provided below:

Then, with a bit of expression/formula trickery, functionality for this screen can be nicely rounded out as follows:

  • Set the Default property value of the Text Input control to the name of the scanner control. This will then place the value of any scanned barcode within the input control, allowing the user to modify if necessary.
  • For the Scan button, define the Back() expression for the OnSelect action. Then, set the Default property value to the Text Input control on the screen above to whatever control needs to have the value of the scanned barcode control (e.g. if working with a gallery/search box, then you would set this on the search box).
  • Finally, the Cancel button needs to do the same as the Scan button, in addition to safely discarding whatever has been scanned. This can be achieved by specifying the Clear command for the control that is being passed the scanned value when the Scan button is selected. Rather handily, we can specify multiple expression/formulas for a single event via the use of a semi-colon delimiter. Therefore, to go back to the previous screen and clear the value of the Text Input control called MySearchBox, use the following expression:
    • Back();MySearchBox.Clear

By having a barcode control that mimics the size indicated above, scan rates for iOS devices are improved by a significant margin and the control becomes a dream to use 🙂

And the rest…

To round things off, there are a couple of other concepts surrounding barcode controls that I thought may be useful to point out:

  • The Camera property value is not documented at all for this control, but my understanding is that it provides a mechanism for specifying the device camera number/ID to use for the control. So, for example, if you have a Windows 10 tablet device and want to ensure that the front camera is used to scan barcodes for an entry registration system, you can use this option to force this. Utilising this setting, I would imagine, limits your app across multiple device types, so I would advise caution in its use. Let me know in the comments below if you have any joy using this property at all.
  • By default, the Barcode detection setting is enabled. This displays a yellow box when a possible scan area is detected and also a red line to indicate when a barcode value is read successfully. This setting is designed to assist when scanning, but I have noticed it can be erratic from time to time. It can be disabled safely without reducing the scanning functionality too much; you just won’t know straight away when you have scanned something successfully.
  • As the control is reliant on individual device camera privacy settings, you will need to ensure that any corporate device policies do not block the usage of the camera whilst using PowerApps and, in addition, you will need to give explicit camera access permission when launching the app for the first time. I did encounter a strange issue on iOS where the camera did not load after granting this permission. A device reboot seemed to resolve the issue.

Conclusions or Wot I Think

I am a strong believer in providing fast and effective resolution of any potential business requirement or concern. Typically, those working within an IT department will not be directly responsible for generating revenue or value for the business beyond IT support. This is what makes an attack-focused, proactive and value generating outlook an essential requirement, in my view, to anyone working in an IT-focused role. In tandem with this approach, having the tools at your disposal that will aid you in adhering to these tenents are ones that should be adopted readily and, after prudent assessment (i.e. balanced and not time costly), without fear. PowerApps, and the use cases hinted towards within this post, scores very highly on my list of essential tools in fostering this approach. It really ensures that typical “Power” users within an organisation can develop quick and easy solutions, with lack of previous experience not necessarily being a burden. In my own case, having had a firm background using Microsoft stack solutions in the past meant that my initial journey with PowerApps was that much easier. Ultimately, I think, PowerApps aims to save time and reduce the business concerns that arise from bloated software deployments, putting a much more business-focused onus on individuals to develop valuable solutions within a particular department or organisation.

Top 6 Most Exciting Features in the Dynamics 365 Spring 2018 Release

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Very much like a stopped clock telling the correct time twice a day, you can guarantee there will be two Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement releases each year. The first such occasion this year has come around quickly, with Microsoft setting out the stall for the Spring 2018 release earlier this week. The headline messages around this release are all around providing reassurance that the application is GDPR ready and in emphasising the maturity of Power Apps & Microsoft Flow as products within their own right and in conjunction with Dynamics 365. I’ve been studying the release notes in greater detail and, as part of this week’s blog post, I wanted to delve underneath the headlines and extrapolate some of the less touted, but potentially most impactful, new features that I am most looking forward to.

Answer Tags for Voice of the Customer Surveys

I made a commitment earlier this year to utilise the Voice of the Customer solution more. When used correctly, and if you are already heavily invested in Dynamics 365, the solution can present a straightforward and cost-effective way of starting to understand what customers are thinking, both with respect to specific experiences they have with your business and towards the organisation overall. One new feature to be introduced with Voice of the Customer, which I am looking forward to getting my hands on, is the ability to use Answer Tags to dynamically structure any subsequent questions within the survey. A good example of how this works in practice can be seen below, as shown in the release notes:

The key driver behind the automation of customer feedback tools should be to ensure that customers receive tailored and relevant surveys relating to services they have received, whilst also taking away any administrative headache when distributing and collating feedback answers. The feature above helps to solidify the benefits that Voice of the Customer can deliver when utilised in tandem with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, as well as allowing for more powerful and broadly applicable surveys to be structured at design time.

The rise of the Unified Interface

The rebrand of the entire Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement application has been much promised and touted over the past year. With this release, it becomes a reality. Pretty much every key application module – Customer Service, Sales, Field Service & Project Service Automation – has been updated to utilise the new Unified Interface. The following applications/solutions will also be Unified Interface ready as part of the release:

  • Dynamics 365 App for Outlook
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Gamification

The Unified Interface is very much an offshoot of the Interactive Service Hub, which it now replaces fully as part of this release (Interactive Service Hub users should read this article carefully, as there are some important points to consider if you plan to upgrade in the near future). I saw the new unified interface in action when attending the CRMUG Meeting in Reading last year, and its introduction represents one of the ways Microsoft is investing heavily within the Dynamics 365 product moving forward. Its key benefits in comparison to the current experience can be summarised as follows:

  • Consistent end-user experience when accessing the application from desktop, mobile or tablet operating systems.
  • Fully mobile responsive template, that adjusts to your specific device to provide the optimal experience
  • Better utilisation of empty spacing across entity views, forms etc.

With this release, administrators and developers need to start actively considering the impact the Unified Interface has on their systems and plan accordingly. Whilst I imagine there to be some pain involved as part of this, the end result – a much crisper and effective end-user interface – is worth the trade-off.

PowerShell Management for PowerApps

Up until now, your options for the automation of administrative tasks for PowerApps were limited. This issue was addressed to a certain extent for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Online very recently, via the introduction of PowerShell modules to facilitate organisation backups, instance resets and/or administrative mode toggling. These types of tools can go a long way if you have implemented automated release management tools for your various environments, taking human error out of the equation and streamlining deployments.

PowerApps looks to be going in the right direction in this regard, as the Spring Wave release will introduce a set of cmdlets that allow for the following actions to be accomplished:

  • Environments and environment permissions
  • PowerApps and app permission
  • Flows and flow permissions
  • Export and import of resource packages across environments
  • PowerApps and Flow licenses report (of active users)

Whilst definitely more administrative as opposed to deployment focused, their introduction is no doubt a welcome step in the right direction.

Future of the Common Data Service

Microsoft released the Common Data Service (CDS) in late 2016, around the same time as Microsoft Flow and the Dynamics CRM rebrand. The premise was simple and admirable: a common framework for you to develop the data you need for your business, that is instantly re-usable across multiple applications. My chief concern when this was first announced is where this left the traditional customisation experience for Dynamics CRM/365 Customer Engagement, commonly referred to as xRM. Having to countenance potential redevelopments of “legacy” xRM systems, just to make them compatible with the CDS could prove to be a costly and unnecessary exercise; this can perhaps be summed up best by the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”.

There seems to have been a recognition of this dilemma as part of this release, with the following announcement regarding the Common Data Service and PowerApps specifically:

This release also includes major advancements to the Common Data Service for Apps (the data platform that comes with PowerApps) and client UX creation tools. These new capabilities are backward-compatible with the Dynamics 365 platform (frequently called the xRM platform), which means that Dynamics 365 customizers and partners can use already-acquired skills to create apps with PowerApps.

What I think this means, in simple terms, is that the customisation experience between Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Apps will, in time, become virtually indistinguishable. And this is great for a number of reasons – it negates any excuse that individuals/organisations may raise to explore PowerApps further, gives us the ability to quickly develop our own custom mobile applications for our particular Dynamics 365 solution and provides an easy framework to unify business data across multiple applications. This very much parallels the intended experience that Power BI has for traditional Excel users – namely, providing an identical toolbox that can be leveraged to quickly deploy solutions with reduced technical debt. As with a lot of these announcements, we’re not going to know exactly how things operate until they are in our hands, but the immediate upshot appears to be the nullification of any new learning requirements for CDS.

If you are looking for further detail regarding this change, then the ever so excellent Jukka Niiranen has published a blog post which really breaks down the detail behind this better than I ever could 🙂

Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service

Email Notifications for Microsoft Flow Failures

Similar to Voice of the Customer, I also promised myself to use Microsoft Flow more this year. After some uneventful early testing, the tool has become (for me) an indisposable means of achieving integration requirements that would traditionally require custom code and a dedicated server environment to execute. Microsoft Flows do get some much-deserved love and attention as part of this release, and the one new feature which I think is going to be of the biggest help is email notifications for flow failures. The announced feature details are as follows:

Enable email notifications to detect flow failures. To enable this feature, go to the Flow details page, and then, on the contextual menu (…), subscribe to receiving emails about flow failures. These useful email notifications provide:

  • Information about why your flow failed.

  • Meaningful remediation steps.

  • Additional resources to help you build robust flows that never fail.

There’s so much more about this release that you could talk for days about…

…but I would be unsure whether anyone would still be listening by the end! You can dive into the detail behind each of the above highlights and what else to expect in the next release by downloading the release notes yourself. Let me know in the comments below what you are looking forward to the most as part of the next release.