Dynamics 365 Monthly Update – June 2017

Featured News

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (on-premises) Update 2.1

Azure Access Control Service (ACS) has been deprecated

With the deprecation of the Azure Access Control Service (ACS), it is important for customers to implement the following updates:

• Update Dynamics CRM Client SDK version to avoid calls to ACS
•  Update Service Bus Endpoints to use SAS Authentication

Parature, from Microsoft End of Life and Transition Announcement

Microsoft continues to innovate and invest heavily in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, and to transition the capabilities of Parature to Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. A toolkit has been developed to help simplify the migration process and over the coming months, Parature customers will receive access to the toolkit. toolkit will include the following components:

• A data migration tool to migrate accounts, contacts, cases (tickets), knowledge base articles, and files;
• Portal templates you can choose from to quickly deploy a modern support portal; and
• A customer service configuration template, which includes out of the box workflows, fields and other
  configurations.
• Videos, documentation and other tutorials to enable customers to self-manage their data migration.

Customers are free to begin their migration prior to receiving access to the toolkit. A list of recommended partners that customers can engage with independently to manage the migration will be provided. Customers may continue to use Parature per the terms of their agreement. There will be no  additional enhancements or changes to current Parature capabilities. Microsoft  will continue to provide technical support until either migration has been  completed, or until May 15, 2018, whichever is first. All migrations must be  completed on or before May 15, 2018, at which point all support for Parature  ends and the service will be terminated. Customers who choose not to migrate  will have 90 days after the service is discontinued on May 15, 2018 to retrieve their data.

Updates & Releases

Support Ending for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 will reach end of extended support on April 10, 2018.  Customers using this version, should upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or a later version before April 10, 2018 to ensure supportability.

The following resources are available to help with the upgrade:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 IT Pro Technical Library
• Upgrade CRM 4.0 Organization to CRM 2011
• Upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Have questions about supported products? Visit Microsoft Support Lifecycle to view a list of supported products and related policies.

Microsoft Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.5

The MSE 2017 Update 1.5 was released in June 2017. This Service Update includes a number of fixes that enhance the overall Microsoft Social Engagement service.

Improvements

• Improved loading times for Search Setup page with a large number of search topics.
• Improved user experience when working with maps
• Fixed an issue with provisioning Social Engagement in some countries/regions.
• Fixed an issue with closing the welcome screen when using Social Selling Assistant in private browsing mode on an iOS device.
• Fixed an issue with global notifications in Social Selling Assistant when using IE11.
• Fixed an issue with label on timespan drop-down in Activity Maps.
• Fixed an issue on Settings > Global Settings > Location Groups with missing tooltips.
• Fixed a layout issue on Search Setup when editing search topic categories using Firefox browser.
• Fixed an issue on Settings > Social Profiles with missing tooltips.
• Increased contrast ratio on re-tweet dialog for better readability.
• Increased line spacing within paragraphs on posts displayed in Social Center and Social Selling Assistant for better readability.

Additional News

Microsoft Cloud Unified Penetration Testing Rules of Engagement

Guidance is now available for customers wishing to perform penetration tests against their Microsoft Cloud components:

• Azure Active Directory
• Microsoft Intune
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Microsoft Account
• Office 365
• Visual Studio Team Services

In many cases, the Microsoft Cloud uses shared infrastructure to host all customer assets. Care must be taken to limit all penetration tests to a specific customer’s assets and avoid unintended consequences to other customers. These Rules of Engagement are designed to allow the effective evaluation of some assets while preventing harm to other assets or the infrastructure itself.

All penetration tests must follow the Microsoft Cloud Penetration Testing Rules of Engagement. Any violation of these Rules of Engagement or the relevant service terms may result in suspension or termination of accounts and legal action as set forth in the Microsoft Online Service Terms.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 required IP address ranges and URLs

Dynamics 365 online users have experienced some difficulty with accessing their environment due to certain IP address ranges being blocked. To avoid this issue, the IP address ranges used by Dynamics 365 should be available and not blocked by firewalls, antivirus or other network appliances. For the list of ranges, review the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online IP Address Ranges and Microsoft Azure Datacenter IP Ranges.

 Some customers experience issues where they are unable to access Dynamics 365 online, specific URLs fail to load or the following error is returned when trying to configure Dynamics 365 for Outlook: “The server address (URL) is not valid”. This may be due to a proxy or firewall preventing the Dynamics 365 URLs from accessing server resources. Review the following article for a list of URLs that should be whitelisted: Internet accessible URLs required for connectivity to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 enters the Microsoft Cloud in Germany

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is now available for customers in Germany, the European Union and European Free Trade Association countries. This new and unique offering stores customer data in the German datacenters and the customer data is under the control of T-Systems, acting as a data trustee.

The datacenters are located in Frankfurt/Main and Magdeburg and provide the same service levels, security and quality standards as Microsoft’s global cloud offerings, such as multi-factor authentication, data encryption by SSL/TLS protocols based on German certificates, physical security controls, and protection against natural disasters and power outages.

For more information about this opportunity, take a look at this news article. To get an update on all the available datacenters hosting
Dynamics 365, review this TechNet article: New datacenter regions for Dynamics 365.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 + LinkedIn

In April, Microsoft announced with LinkedIn a new integration with Dynamics 365 to help salespeople deliver better outcomes using insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn’s 500 million professionals. Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 increases the effectiveness of salespeople by tapping into their professional networks and relationships, giving them the ability to improve their pipeline by:

• Leveraging signals across email, CRM and LinkedIn to get contextual recommendations for the next best action within Dynamics 365 for Sales, facilitating introductions directly through the company’s network, and sending InMail, messages and customized connection requests
• Engaging buyers with tailored content throughout the account lifecycle, and getting account and lead updates including news mentions and job changes
• Building strong relationships with existing contacts through access to LinkedIn profile details including photos, current roles and work history.

Training Corner

Training Sites & eLearning

Get the most up to date training and eLearning information for Dynamics 365 from the Help Center. The highly anticipated Training & Adoption Kit for Dynamics 365 is also available for download which includes user guides, quick reference cards, eBooks for end users and admins. Feel free to modify the content and distribute to your customers.

Want to know what new features are available for both online and on-prem customers? Then check out What’s new in Dynamics 365 Help and Training.

Best practices for automating business process flows

The Fall 2016 release of Dynamics 365 (version 8.2) introduced enhancements to business process flows, enabling a number of important customer scenarios (including Concurrent business process flows and Business process flow automation). Organizations that wanted to automate their business processes relied on a few work-arounds, most notably the need to force values on the ProcessID, StageId (active stage) or TraversedPath attributes. Frequently, these techniques would fail with an error message: “Invalid stage transition. Transition to stage <stage name> is not in the process active path” or present visual glitches. Some best practices on how to address these challenges are identified in this Dynamics 365 blog post.

Set default Business Process on a form while creating new record

Problem statement:
Users are unable to switch or set default Business Process on a form while creating a new record.

Scenario:
Assuming a given entity has several forms associated with it and each form can be associated with one or more business processes. When a user tries to create a new record, the selected form will use the default Business Process for the entity – forcing them to update unnecessary fields that relate to this process flow and adding confusion.

Solution:
Via customization, users can add a simple script to automatically switch the Business Process Flow based on certain criteria on form load.

For more information, review this post on the Dynamics 365 blog.