Time to move the blog. Almost 13 years has passed on blog spot and it is now time to move to my own domain and Wordpress. Hence you will now find my blog at https://powerplatform.se with the name #PPDBbG or long version being Power Platform and Dynamics Blog by Gustaf. I have moved all posts there too, so you will find the old ones there. Gustaf Westerlund MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB www.crmkonsulterna.se ..read more

Working with a Flow to do some text analysis and sentiment analysis on Voice of the customer responses. The trick, as the payment model is per run, is to trigger it per Survey Response, and not Question Response. Hence the logic has to loop through all the question responses. The way you create a filter in Flow for the query is to use Odata filters. However, I found that these were a casing nightmare, which those of you who have worked with more, probably also have noticed. After troubleshooting a lot with different queries in the browser I finally found that the following actually worked ..read more

Tonight Microsoft rolled out an update to Dynamics 365 that seemed to have had a few issues. Most noteably if you have any Lookup-fields in a quickfind views "Find"-columns, it will break. Most of the time, not always. Microsoft knows about this, there are angry threads talking about this, like this one:  https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/301925?pi61802=3#responses and you can of course create your own support ticket with Microsoft at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ The temporary solution to get this working, or the essential parts for your system, is to re ..read more

For the first time ever 9 Business Solutions MVP:s will converge on Stockholm to share their knowledge! In the amazing Dynamics 365 Saturday event which will be held on the 10:th of November 2018 at the Microsoft Office in Kista, just outside Stockholm. As usual, the Dynamics 365 Saturdays are free. As the main organizer, me, my company CRM-Konsulterna and the MVP Jonas Rapp, will also help out it is of course very satisfying to have so many talented people sign up to speak. A lot is happening, and version 9.1 was just rolled out today in EMEA if you didn't notice. Hence there is a lot to ta ..read more

The server side sync is a technology for connecting Dynamics 365 CE to an Exchange server. When connecting an Online Dynamics 365 to an onprem Exchange there are some requirement that need to be met. These can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/sv-se/library/mt622059.aspx Piping data to and from Exchange and Dynamics By Quartl [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons However, I just had a meeting with Microsoft and based on the version shown 2018-09-05, they have now added some new features that they haven't had time to get into the documentation yet. Some of the most i ..read more

PowerApps or as the new name for it is, Canvas driven Apps, is a very fast low/no-code way of creating applications that can fill in the blanks where Dynamics 365 CE sometimes fit. Can for instance be when there is a mapping entity, a complex calendar functionality or even integrations with a camera or other applications directly. These things can be done, some are even supported within the new UI/UCI if you are running it through the tablet/mobile client. However, there is currently no easy way that I have found to just add a PowerApp/Canvas Drive App (I will just call it PowerApp below to ma ..read more

Setting up Dynamics 365 Data Export Service requires a Azure KeyVault to be set up which is typically done using a PowerShell script which can be found in the Data Export Service setup wizard. However, if you run into issues setting this up, it might be easier to do this directly in Azure by minimizing the steps of the scripts. This was a tip that my friend and Business Solution MVP Scott Durow recommended. He mentions this in his very instructive video, but doesn't actually show how, so I thought I'd just detail how I made it work. First some background. The reason why I even started investi ..read more

On the eve of GDPR what could be more fitting than a post on GDPR. I think everyone is probably deadly tired of all the consent emails and I think that they will probably even have reached our friends in the US and Asia by now. This article relates to legal matters on GDPR and are based on my personal interpretations and are not to be viewed as legal advice. One interesting thing that has to be considered in relation to GDPR is how to handle personal information in non-production environments/instances. Microsoft have made it painfully easy with the instance manager to be able to copy the pr ..read more

In case you haven't seen it, the Dynamics 365 Admin Portal it is a great place to create and manage you Dynamics 365 tickets. You get to it using this URL: https://admin.dynamics.com/ I haven't found a link to the admin portal from the instance manger or any other place in O365 or Dyn365 yet so I have just created a bookmark for it, so I suggest you do the same. Also, as I am a frequent Microsoft Support user, and often have customers with many instances, I have tried to consolidate many instances into one ticket. They don't want that. Better to create one ticket for each instance ..read more

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash Related to my last post, on working with the API quickly, Microsoft have now released official documentation that they will, effectivly March the 19:th start limiting the number of API-calls per instance that is allowed to stop what is called "noisy neighbour" problems. First of all, read the full article here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/developer/api-limits  Let's break this down a bit, 60 000 calls per 5 minutes, translates to about 200 calls per second. If you break this, you ..read more