In previous months, Microsoft updated the email designer and included some additional features some as allowing us to include images, not only by using a Url, but also by uploading a file or using drag and drop functionality and dropping an image file into the editor directly.

Email Attachments

Now with the Release Wave 2 plan, attachments have received a minor uplift. This is probably the first of many, but it is a starting point. After you add a new attachment, you now have the option to Preview, Download or Delete the attachment by using the More Actions Menu in the Attachment subgrid.

If you click on the Preview in the More Items menu, a modal window will open displaying the image or pdf of the file that you uploaded to be included in the email message (as shown in the image below). This works for image file types and portable document format (pdf), but not for Office documents at this point in time. The Preview option does not appear in the More Items menu for document types where preview is not supported.

Email Templates

If you navigate to Power Apps Admin Center (https://aka.ms/ppac), and go to Settings -> Templates and select Email Templates, that link will still redirect you (at the time of writing this article) to the classic interface where you can modify the email templates. If you go to your maker portal and open the Customer Service Hub, you will notice that in the Service area under the Templates group, there is an Email Templates subarea.

If you open a new or existing email template, you will notice that the same designer that is available for the email message, is also available here, hence a new design experience for email templates. You can add attachments to the email template as before and also insert dynamic text using the new designer.

On the command bar, you will see a button for Insert dynamic text. Clicking on the button will open a panel on the right hand side, which will enable you to select the entity, the field and the custom text for the field that you want to embed in your email template (as shown below). Dynamic text fields show up in the email message in light blue (as shown in the previous image)

The New Email form also has some additional capabilities. When you click on the Insert Template button, the system will ask you to select that template (once you have selected the recipients), however, if you click on the drop down next to the email template, you get the option to convert your current email message into an email template, directly from the New Email form.

I am hopeful that this enhancements to emails and email templates will provide an improved experience to Dynamics 365 users.

The post Email enhancements in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

In CRM 2011, when the user would click on the Qualify button, a popup window would appear, where the user would have the option to convert the Lead into an Account, a Contact and/or an Opportunity.

If the Account would be checked, an Account record would be created from information in the Lead form. If a Contact would be checked, a Contact record would be created from the information in the Lead form.

If an Opportunity is checked, and you did not select an Account or Contact as well, then the Potential Customer is required in order to convert the lead into the Opportunity. If the Account and/or Contact are checked as well, that information will be used in the Opportunity record.

That is old news, as this functionality was changed in CRM 2015. In CRM 2015 (all the way to Dynamics 365 v9), the popup was removed, and the qualification was based on the logic and the information in the Lead entity.

The fields Existing Account and Existing Contact fields would specify whether the lead is using an existing customer which would determine what would be used to Create the Opportunity. If the information in the existing Account and existing Contact lookup fields do not contain any data, upon Qualification, the Account and Contact record would be created. The duplicate detection rules would of course kick in if the information in the Company Name and Email address fields match existing Accounts or Contacts.

Now, in 2019 Wave 2, this is changing again, and it seems like we have found a middle ground. Microsoft is simplifying the lead management experience by first autopopulating contact and company related fields when the existing account and/or existing contact fields are selected. The notes and attachments captured in the lead phase will be displayed in the opportunity as well.

Finally we come back to the popup. The popup is back, but can be configured not to be displayed based on organization settings.

If selected to be displayed, the only questions that would be displayed is Yes/No questions whether or not to create an Account, a Contact and/or an Opportunity when the lead is qualified.

Let’s hope that this is a viable solutions for most organizations. I know that for some of my projects, we had to come up with alternatives to some of the newly created OOB functionality, and am definitely glad of this additions to the product.

The post Lead Qualification Updates in Wave 2 appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

WIth the announcement of the October 2018 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 (version number yet to be determined), which includes a mass number of features, one of the features that was included was management of SharePoint documents inside Dynamics portals.

This feature extends the document management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to portals, providing a consistent experience and allowing users to leverage their investment in SharePoint with Dynamics 365 for document management. Documents that are associated with entity records can be managed by portal users and stored in the SharePoint document library, providing seamless collaboration capabilities offered natively by SharePoint. SharePoint document libraries configured with entities in Dynamics 365 can be surfaced via the portal entity and web forms.

The additional of SharePoint documents for portals provides the following features:

• Adding documents to a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Viewing and downloading documents in a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Creating folders in a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Deleting documents in a SharePoint Library via Portals

The screenshot below shows adding a new file to the document library, a much cleaner interface than the existing Azure blob (notes) option.

Enjoy reading the new features that are available in the October 2018 release of Dynamics 365 available here. You can also download the 236 page pdf which contains the contents of the link and the features in this release.

The post SharePoint Documents are back in Dynamics Portals October 2018 Release appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.