Posts in Category: dynamics 365

Site Maps and Custom Entities – Oh My!

You can now create your own groups and areas in Dynamics365 giving you further customization over your user’s experience in the application when accessing your custom entities.

I recently got a chance to play with this and was really impressed with it’s simplicity.

Note: This does not replace the security permissions to your entities which must be in place alongside these changes which are User Interface only.

You can see from my screenshot that you can add new areas (in my case “Custom”), new groups (in my case “My Goodies”) and then Subareas (in my case I dropped in a new custom entity but there are other options here too.

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Using Dynamics365 as a Queue for Data Synchronization

Over the years, I’ve migrated a lot of data from on-premise systems into Dynamics365 (whether they be existing CRM system, homegrown solutions or off the shelf packages).  I’ve used a number of third-party tools to accomplish these tasks (Scribe and Kingsway) but have also written my own when the need arose.

On a recent project, faced with yet more synchronization requests and the need for more infrastructure to manage changes, mediate conflicts, prevent ping-ponging data writes, etc, etc.  I started to change my thinking from being able to have everything on-premise (i.e., the ability to queue up new Virtual Images and tons of server space et al) to think of how I solve this problem if all I had was Dynamics365 and the server I am moving data from.

To

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The Simplest Connection to Dynamics365

Whenever starting something new, you always want to find the quickest way to make something happen.

Think Hello World – I want Hello World (but not really Hello World) so I can start doing all that cool stuff.

I was searching the other day for some code on how to make an initial connection to Dynamics365 for the start of a new project.

Here were the objectives;

  1. I didn’t want to download someone else’s library on creating a connection.
  2. I wanted to learn how to connect to Dynamics365.

The first point is really important because although there are some really, really great libraries out there, it prevents the accomplishment of my second objective which was – I wanted to write the code, not consume someone else’s code.

The best way to learn how something really works is

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Setting up Dynamics365 for the First Time

I recently went down the path of purchasing a Microsoft Action Pack so immediately went to setting it up in my pre-existing Office365 Tenant and ran into a few gotchas that might save you some time.

Office365 Business Essentials and Enterprise Plan 1 Licensing

I currently have an Office365 Business Essentials plan but when creating my Dynamics tenant quick realized that my users that were licensed under my Business Essentials license cannot be readily imported into Dynamics365 due to SharePoint plan conflicts.

There is a path to upgrade users through the Office365 Admin, but that’s for another blog.

Setting up Dynamics365

When creating your tenant for Dynamics, it’s not solely about your licenses, but also about creating the actual tenant.  To do this, you need to first navigate down to the Settings section of your Office365

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Tips for a Successful Dynamics365 Data Migration

When moving data from either a homegrown application or even a pre-existing Dynamics365 system there are few tricks that can save you a great deal of time and take your project beyond simply completing the data migration and to instead making it a cornerstone in the success of your migration to Dynamics365.  I’ve done a number of data migrations ranging from the small (less than 25,000 records from one database) to the larger (greater than 1,000,000+ records from a variety of databases).

Whether you are using tools like Scribe or Kingsway or building your own application – you should always use the available SDKs and not go to the database.  In writing that I feel as though as this is slowly becoming a double-negative as you cannot access the database directly for cloud instances of Dynamics365.

Check

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