Dynamics 365 Sales - 2020 Release wave 1

Microsoft’s 2020 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 includes a number of innovations designed to help you transform your business. This release contains many great features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, and Business Central. In this blog we will take a look at some of the new features for Sales.

Steps to enable 2020 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365

1. Go to Admin.powerplatform.com
2. Select Environments

3. Click on the environment name

4. On the right side you will see Updates Release 2020 wave 1

5. Click on Manage and Update Now

6. Once it’s done, you are ready to go.

Feature 1: Kanban view for Opportunities

Steps to enable kanban view for Opportunities:

1. Go to Settings → Customizations → Customize the System
2. Expand Entities → Click on Opportunity entity
3. Click on Controls and add a new control as Kanban
4. Enable kanban view, at least for the web

5. Save and Publish

Feature 2: Kanban view for Activities

Steps to enable kanban for Activities:

1. Go to Settings → Customizations → Customize the System
2. Expand Entities → Click on Activity entity
3. Click on Controls and add a new control as Kanban
4. Enable kanban view, at least for the web

5. Save and Publish

Feature 3: New way to filter activity type

Feature 4: Opportunity in pop-up screen

When you drag and drop an opportunity to another process stage it will open the opportunity in a new pop-up screen.

You can open it to full screen by clicking on the full-screen button in the top right corner.

Feature 5: Expanded system view list

Feature 6: New Sort and Filter in view

Feature 7: New Opportunity Product form

Feature 8: Add a product without price list

Feature 9: New way to format notes

Feature 10: New way to send an email

Feature 11: New Timeline Activity status

Feature 12: New Show Chart for the related record

Feature 13: New dashboard layout

Feature 14: Configure Sales Hub from a centralized location

Enhanced Email Option in Dynamics 365 UCI

Introduction

In the traditional Dynamics 365 CRM if you are creating an Email activity for any entity record then CRM redirects you away from the current record. So if you need any information from that record then you have to go to that record and thus this is somewhat a time-consuming process for those who write emails quite often. But now with this new feature, you can write emails within the record with a popup window called Contextual Email Window.

With Contextual Email Window, you will not be navigated away from your record and will be able to compose an email within that record.

Following are the steps to enable this feature:

1. Go to App Settings area

2. Select Enhanced Email option under Sales Administration, it will give you option “Enable Enhanced Email” to enable it click on the toggle button on the right side. After enabling this option click on Apply to save the changes, as shown below screenshot:

3. After that navigate to any entity, let’s suppose we choose Account entity. Create new record or else open existing record, click on “+” sign on Timeline in Dynamics 365 CRM to create email activity record, as below:

4. It will open new docked window to create email record within Account record, as given in below screenshot:

How to use Solution Layers in Dynamics 365 CRM

Introduction

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM has introduced the feature called ‘Solution Layers’ in V9.x. In this blog, we will describe the use of ‘Solutions Layers’.

As the user of Dynamics 365 CRM, we usually play with the solutions in our CRM for many purposes. We export/import many components like entity, dashboards, etc. using solutions within different Dynamics 365 CRM.

We have thus, came across scenarios, where the same components can be used by many solutions. Many a time, we have used the same components in different solutions for different purposes.

Now, let’s walk through the Solution Layers feature and gain a better understanding about the same.

Here, we can see the ‘Solution Layers’ button in Default and other solutions of Dynamics 365 V9.

Go to Settings > Customizations > Default / Required solution.

Now, to view solution layer of any components included in the selected solution, select any one component like Account entity and click on solution layer button.

On click of this button, it will show the list of all managed solutions which included selected component, as shown in the below screenshot:

It will also show managed solution list in the same order in which the solutions has been imported in your organization. The above screenshot indicates that the Account entity has been used by the list of solutions shown in the screenshot.

Now, to view the properties of components used in solution layers, click on layer and it will show the properties of components.

As we can see in the above screenshot, it is showing two tabs – ‘Changed Properties’ and ‘All Properties’.

In ‘Changed Properties’, it will provide details of properties that has been changed for component in the selected solution.

Whereas ‘All Properties’ shows the list of all properties whether it has changed or not, as shown in the below screenshot:

Conclusion

In this way, the Solution Layers button will help us to track changes in the properties of components used in solutions.

How to Connect to CDS/Dynamics 365 CRM

Question

"I need to write a small console app that can authenticate to an online CRM instance with multi-factor authentication turned on. Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to accomplish this?"

Here is the code😉😉

using Microsoft.Xrm.Tooling.Connector;

var connectionString = @"

AuthType=OAuth;

Username=<username>;

Url=https://<yourorg>.crm.dynamics.com;

AppId=51f81489-12ee-4a9e-aaae-a2591f45987d;

RedirectUri=app://58145B91-0C36-4500-8554-080854F2AC97;

TokenCacheStorePath=c:\MyTokenCache;

LoginPrompt=Auto";

var client = new CrmServiceClient(connectionString);

if (client.IsReady)

{

    Console.WriteLine("OK");

}

else

{

    Console.WriteLine(client.LastCrmError);

}



[Don’t forget to] Add Nuget package Microsoft.CrmSdk.XrmTooling.CoreAssembly