I have the POWER, Going with the Flow and Portal'ing to other Dimensions

Microsoft Power Apps, Flow and Portals

With Microsoft's Power Apps becoming mainstream more and more clients are asking for and expecting Power Apps creation and deployment.  However, there are so many people asking me "What is this "Power App-flow stuff"?
So let me try and explain it as I understand it.  Firstly  a picture...

Power Apps and Flow are part of the Microsoft stack of products and are closely related to the Office and Dynamics 365 suite.   You can think of  Power Apps as what we used to call 'Applets' , although a much more accurate description is Low-Code Application creation.

Power Apps take and store data via the Common Data Service (which is now actually part of Dynamics 365).  One of the great things though is the fact that you can create connectors to other applications and there are literally hundreds of connectors already built for you.

So what does this actually mean?  I hear you ask.  Well, I'm glad you asked.  Lets say you have a D365 instance and you want you create a simple app for staff to capture attendees names for an event your running, you can quickly (minutes) create a new Power App, that has just the information and inputs you need , for example, allow the user to select the event (look up to event) and then enter the attendees name telephone number and or email address.  Then at the event, the user can quickly add the users details. You could connect it to the Leads entity (connector) so that leads are created with each save of an attendees details.

That's an ultra simple example, but you can keep building on this and even build full on client portals.
More on Power Portals here 

Now we have a simplistic understanding of Power Apps, lets get with the Flow.
Flow is the power version of workflow that works across not only D365 but across your entire environment by making use of those connector things I mentioned earlier.

The easiest way to get your mind around Power Apps and Flow is to watch some explanation videos, my personal favourite channel is Megan V Walker 's youtube channel, check it out here
https://www.youtube.com/user/meganvwalker123

Field Service - a handy explanation

here is a handy explantion of 'what' field service is from the Dyanamics Enterprise suite of tools

Dynamics 365 Marketing - Repost

Dynamics 365 Marketing - great video and worth watching

Take 10 minutes to watch this video it is an excellent explanation of the Dynamics for Marketing and the great features it has.

Google Maps in CRM

Not one of mine, but well worth re-blogging. Take a look at this article by Pauline Magno of SMS Embed Google Maps in Dynamics CRM It gives an excellent starting point to building Google map integration with CRM. In a later blog I'll show you how to extend this concept and use pin drops to identify Contacts or Accounts on the map. The next logical stage will be to build a mechanism to allow the user to select a number of records (Contacts or accounts for example) either by advance find or manually, and then creating a 'drive route' between them.

Security Roles

When you are working with CRM and trying to evaluate if the security roles are compliant with the security policy currently in place, It can be a bit of a pain going from role to role to check each one. An even bigger pain if you need to take periodic snapshots of the roles. Yeah you can write yourself an nice little SSRS style report, or a console app that talks to the web services, or even buy a tool like CRM audit, but there is an easier way !
There is a great little tool called RoleSheetExporter by Johninfant on codeplex that you can download and use to do the job for you.
Basically it is a standalone app that you point at your CRM system. It produces an Excel workbook with a sheet for each security role, see example screen grab.

Because it creates an Excel document, you can then apply whatever fonts and formatting you want to make it stand out, e.g. you can use a conditional format on the delete column to highlight any value that is not 'NONE'.
A great, simple to use tool that can save you hours of effort, I highly recommend it.

What use is Visual Hierarchy?

We are all familiar with Organisation charts, and some of us find them useful. Well you can now build them in CRM (since CRM2015). I'm not going to write and tell you how, instead I'll just point you to Sonoma Partners blog 'Dynamics CRM 2015 Hierarchy Visualizations' for that, it's clear and easy to follow (as is all of their stuff).

How can we make use of them?

The answer to this really depends on what you do and how you use CRM. Here are some examples that I've come across:

• A manufacturer mapping outlets to distribution depots
• A software provider mapping modules to a suite
• Mapping customer organisations (Accounts) to show buying centres (think national retail chains buying products locally for each state or region)
• mapping the users to the company org chart

You don't just have to stick to system entities, you can add a hierarchy to your custom entities too, For example if you wanted to model types of financial institutions : Life, Super, Investment and their funds as a single entity type, but you also wanted to see how they related to each other, for example: ACME Investment Portfolio might be the parent entity for ACME Hedge Fund Investments and ACME Off Shore Diversified funds; Acme Off Shore Diversified Funds may be the parent entity for ACME Off Shore Europe, ACME Off Shore Middle East and AMCE off Shore Americas, etc. Using the Hierarchy feature you can quickly see where an entity fits in. Clicking on any given entity allows you to see its Parent, Siblings and Children, allowing you effectively drill down through the hierarchy.

What do I get from it?

It's not a silver bullet, it doesn't solve everything, but for visual oriented people (like me) it can be a very quick and simple way to navigate between entities.
As a management tool you can leverage it by modifying the information displayed. For example, if you are running a helpdesk you can model your client hierarchy so that the number of help requests is displayed on the Organisation and rolled up to the parent Organisation (you'll need to do a bit of scripting for that). When you view the organization hierarchy you'll see the number of requests coming in from that particular Organisation, if it is above expectations you can simply drill down to the child Organisation until you see where the bulk of the requests are coming from (think national support desk for a large Organisation like Telstra stores, for example) and you can quickly see sibling comparisons before having to switch to the actual helpdesk module.
As a sales tool, you can use it to model the client contacts to build your own Organisation chart allowing you to see where that contact fits in to the overall structure of your client organisation. It can help in identifying the decision makers, the influencers and the decenters.

what can't it do?

Well, it only works on 1 to many relationships where each end of the relationship is of the same (entity) type. So you can't mix Accounts and Contacts for example. You are also limited by the amount of information you can display on the card (in the hierarchy), so if you want to display 20 fields on each card, this won't work for you. Overall, it's only handy if you have a use for it. There's no point creating a hierarchy because you like it or to make yourself look cool, this feature should be part of your tool kit to solve specific requests, This feature just makes it a whole lot easier.

Creating a Global Option set from a spreadsheet

You may have come across this before. A user wants you to create an option set that can be used across multiple entities, and they give you a spreadsheet with a 1000 rows in it! Don’t despair, you can create a global option set with them in. Just not in a single step. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a field of type option set on your required form
2. Add a column to your spreadsheet so that you can easily Identify the new records you are about to create.
3. Import the data in the CRM system using your spreadsheet. The Identifier should be the primary key field for your record (i.e. last Name for contacts)
4. When mapping the to the option set, set it to create missing options
5. Import
6. Now you should have all the rows added as new items to your option set
7. Locate all the records you just imported and delete them
8. Your option set will still be there and still have all the imported values.
9. Now use a tool to convert the local option set to a global option set, here are two:
   • https://xrmoptionsetconverter.codeplex.com/
   • http://mscrmtools.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/new-xrmtoolbox-plugin-local-to-global.html

Hey presto, you should now have a global option set with all the values you imported. Simple, huh?