Dynamics 365 Monthly Update – July 2017

Featured News

Dynamics 365 (online) update: Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement is the applications that make up the CRM portion of Dynamics 365:

• Sales
• Customer Service
• Field Service
• Project Service Automation

Microsoft is excited to announce the new Customer Engagement features in the next update for Dynamics 365 (online).

The main areas of investment in this release are:

• UX enhancements to improve readability and usability of the web apps, and to make data entry faster and easier.
• Extensibility and app platform enhancements, including improvements to security and data management.

Additionally, there are enhancements to the in-app Designer tools that allow admins and customizers to tailor apps through a graphical user interface instead of writing code (App Designer, SiteMap Designer, and Business Process Flow Designer). For more information on the new features, review the following articles:

What's coming for Customer Engagement, Enterprise edition, in the next update for Dynamics 365 (online)

Developers: What's coming in Customer Engagement in the next update for Dynamics 365 (online)

Any customers interested in taking a look at the Dynamics 365 previews should sign up for the Dynamics 365 Insider Program.

Important changes coming in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Some features of the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement solution will be deprecated in the near future. “Deprecated” means Microsoft intends to remove the feature or capability from a future major release of Dynamics 365. The feature or capability will continue to work and is fully supported until it is officially removed. The announcements and deprecations described in this article apply to the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement as of the July 2017 update.

Several important deprecated features include:

• D365 for Outlook (Outlook client) is deprecated
• Service Scheduling in D365 is deprecated
• Dialogs are deprecated
• Usage of Parature knowledgebase as the Dynamics 365 knowledge management solution is deprecated
• Project Service Finder app is deprecated
• Contracts, Contract Line Items, and Contract Template entities are deprecated
• Standard SLAs are deprecated
• Relationship Roles are deprecated
• Mail Merge is deprecated
• Announcements are deprecated
• Ready-to-use BPFs are deprecated
• Some client APIs are deprecated
• EntityMetadata.IsInteractionCentricEnabled property is deprecated
• Silverlight (XAP) web resource is deprecated

Dynamics 365 update: Field Service and Project Services Automation

With the goal of continuously improving quality, performance, usability, and responding to some of the customer feature feedbacks, Microsoft recently released an update in July for Dynamics 365 for Field Service, Project Service Automation and Resource Scheduling Optimization solutions. Here are some of the new capabilities and bug fixes introduced in this update:

• Universal resource scheduling enhancements
• Bug fixes with agreement bookings, work orders and incidents
• Performance improvements in project copy and move operations
• Changed authentication from WS-Trust to OAuth

For specific details on all the changes included in this update, review this post on the Dynamics 365 Team blog.

SharePoint 5000 Items Limitation

Customers with more than 5000 documents in their SharePoint libraries may be unable to view the documents in their CRM instance. A document library with 5000 or more documents might experience resource throttling. This resource throttling can also affect other features. For example, Microsoft OneNote integration will not work when the SharePoint Server site has 5000 or more documents. For more information, review this article: Resource throttles and limits.

Customers with document libraries with 5000 or more documents can view them in CRM using the default grid view.

However, if sorting is configured on columns other than the default sorted column, an error may be returned indicating that the throttling limit has been exceeded. The Important considerations for server-based SharePoint integration Technet article has been updated to include this limitation.

CRM Online to Dynamics 365 License Reassignment Requirement

When customers renew their licensing and transition from legacy Dynamics CRM online SKUs to Dynamics 365 SKUs, they must complete a license reassignment for their users within 90 days post renewal (90 days from the legacy license expiration). Failure to complete this will result in users with the legacy expired CRM online license assigned unable to access their Dynamics instances.

License reassignments need to be performed by an Office 365 Global Administrator or Office 365 User Administrator. This can be done via the Office 365 Portal or PowerShell, which is handy if the customer has a significant number of users for which they need to reassign licenses. Below are some helpful links:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt788655.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn771770.aspx

Dynamics 365 Portal Update 8.3.0.215

Portal capabilities version 8.3.0.215 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is now available. This release includes an updated portal host and updated solution packages. The portal host will automatically be updated by Microsoft, but action must be taken to upgrade the solution packages. Until the solution packages are updated, some enhancements will not be available to portal administrators and/or users.

For a full list of all portal updates released to date and their corresponding KB articles, please reference this KB article.

For instructions on how to upgrade the portal solution packages, please refer to this KB article.

Microsoft Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.6

Microsoft is excited to announce the release of Social Engagement 2017 Update 1.6. This service update includes a number of enhancements and fixes. A full list of product fixes included can be reviewed in this knowledge base article.

Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights: July 2017 Refresh

The July 2017 Refresh for Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights (Preview) is now available. This release introduces the preview of 3 new applications:

• Predictive Match uses contextual information to associate activities or records across channels with known customers
• Predictive Scoring enables any business user to predict any business outcome, by automatically generating Machine Learning models
• Segmentation allows you to identify the right audience based on your all your historical customer data and related entities

For more information, review this post in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Team blog.

Voice of the Customer Update

A new version of the Voice of a Customer (VOC) solution has been released and customers have reported some confusion with applying the upgrade. To start the installation of the service solution, administrators should log into the Dynamics 365 Administration Center portal. In the portal, click the application tab (as shown below), select the Voice of the Customer application, and click on the manage icon which launches the Voice of the Customer install page.

After clicking manage, a consent window is shown to allow access to the CRM Online data. The tenant admin should grant access by clicking accept.

Next, select the CRM org from the drop-down list where the Voice of a Customer solution update will be installed. Note that this list will only show CRM orgs with version 8.2 installed.

Administrators should accept the EULA and privacy terms and conditions, then click install. The progress for the installation can be tracked in the Solutions page.

A Dynamics 365 Enterprise License is required. Customers with Dynamics CRM Online Professional licenses are not able to see the VOC 9.0 upgrade in the list of Applications in the Administration Portal. Changes are being made to remove the licensing check.

If the VOC application is missing in the Applications tab, please contact your Microsoft Technical Account Manager for assistance.

Microsoft 365 and Azure ExpressRoute

By utilizing a private connection, separate from other traffic to the public Internet, a more controlled and predictable connection can be established to business-critical services like Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365, while avoiding issues like bandwidth saturation by other Internet traffic. Traffic between the customer environment and the Microsoft data center won’t transit the public network giving additional confidence in privacy of the traffic.

When ExpressRoute is enabled the connection is made between the customer and Microsoft data centers and all traffic for designated subnets route via the Express-Route dedicated connection. When it reaches the Microsoft data center peering rules are applied to determine how to route the requests to the relevant service:

For more information on Dynamics 365 and Azure ExpressRoute, download this guide.

Filter data for mobile offline usage on Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 users can work with mobile applications in offline mode, even when the device is disconnected from the network. The application provides a rich offline experience which lets users work with all basic commands like create, read, update, delete and business processes - so productivity is not impacted.

Mobile Offline can be setup by a Dynamics 365 administrator. Administrators can select and choose the entities, and corresponding data that users can work with in offline mode based on business requirement. Filtering the right set of data for offline ensures effective utilization of device memory and network bandwidth.

Dynamics 365 provides offline service by replicating the data in Azure, and synchronizing the data from Azure to mobile client devices. For more information on how the process works, review this post in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Team blog.

Bing Maps SOAP and AJAX 7.0 Deprecation

Dynamics CRM and Dynamics 365 have dependencies on the Bing Maps SOAP Web Services and Bing Maps AJAX Control This article explains the details on which Bing Map controls are being deprecated. . The Bing Map functionality in CRM will break once the API is deprecated. This change will not affect customers using Dynamics 365 online services. For on-prem customers using the following versions, Administrators will need to install patch releases:

• Dynamics CRM 2013, Version 6.x
• Dynamics CRM 2015, Version 7.x
• Dynamics CRM 2016 and Dynamics 365, Version 8.x

The patch releases will be available in August so stay tuned for more details.

Office Graph Integration Removal

Office Graph integration for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement will be removed on August 31, 2017, at the same time that Office ends GQL query support. After August 31st, the Office Graph trending documents component will cease to function and customers will see the following error message:

We can't get to the trending documents. Try again later.

Administrators can disable Office Graph by:

• Going to Settings>Document Management>Office Graph Integration
• Removing the Trending Documents dashboard component from existing dashboards

Trending documents will continue to be available in the organization’s Delve instance.

Continuing the theme of content discovery, Document Suggestions is available to empower information discovery at just the right time. Document Suggestions helps make the Dynamics 365 web browser and mobile users aware of important documents related to what they're working on. See Enable document suggestions for more information.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Team Blog

The product team has posted quite a few articles for July on their team blog. Be sure to take a look at them:

How to determine which Business Process Flow (BPF) instance is shown when a record is opened

Localize Learning Path Content with XLIFF v 2.0 Format

Predicting business outcomes with Customer Insights

Dynamically build your schedule assistant search by changing the URL approach

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.

Dynamics 365 “How to” Articles

The Microsoft support site includes Dynamics 365 “How to” articles to help with performing specific operations. Review the page to get information on topics such as email setup and configuration, customizations and SDK and product integrations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Documentation

Another resource for Dynamics 365 is the documentation page. Get details on the apps, add-in solutions, integrations, customizations and development.

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook: Convert email with a few clicks

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 App for Outlook leverages the power of Dynamics 365 while using Outlook on the desktop, web, or phone. With the app, customers can link emails and appointments to existing Dynamics 365 records or create new records and link them to an email with one click. Keeping in mind that this process works with any entity type, the Convert email to a case with a few clicks article on the Dynamics 365 Team blog outlines how the process works.