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New features in CRM 2016

CRM 2016 introduces a role-based experience for customer service agents. Users can view their current workload and interact with records through a real-time dashboard.

Cases can now be updated directly from the dashboard by selecting the case and the appropriate action.

Case Enhancements

Case management is simplified and better than ever. Users can now save case details directly on a case record and apply routing rules all in one action by clicking the Save & Route button.

Knowledge Management Capabilities

The new knowledge base article designer now features an enhanced WYSIWYG editor and allows for embedding videos and images. Articles can easily be scheduled to publish or expire for a future date. Knowledge can be enabled on any entity and over 80 languages are now supported. Articles can be shared with external users or analyzed internally to better understand how information is being used.

Word Templates

You can now standardize common CRM data-generated documents. Word templates can be initiated from any form or automated through a workflow. Extract data from CRM into a standardized word document with ease and create custom templates or leverage existing word templates from Microsoft!

Excel Templates

New Excel templates let you use a Microsoft Dynamics provided template or create your own reusable templates to quickly analyze data your way. CRM 2016 allows users to work with data from a downloaded template or from Excel Online. With the CRM Mobile Application, you can also export to Excel directly from a tablet or mobile device. Pretty Excel-lent, huh?

Delve

Unique to each user, Delve uses analytics to identify top trending documents in CRM relevant to the user. Delve looks for connections as to what the user is working on, common groups or teams, and identifies documents that may be relevant such as a newly saved presentation or proposal. Users can view trending documents relevant to them from a dashboard or Office 365.

*Note: data permissions still apply, meaning that if the user does not have permission to view the information it will not be presented.

Consolidated View of Documents in CRM

Display any Office document file from OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, or Office 365 groups directly in CRM. Documents will remain private until the user elects to share.

With the CRM Mobile App, these same documents can be viewed or modified directly from a tablet or mobile device.

CRM App for Outlook

Track emails, add Contacts from within an email, or create new records to track emails against all with the CRM App for Outlook. In addition to Internet Explorer and Chrome, CRM 2016 is expanded to include support for Firefox, Safari for Mac, and Outlook for Mac. One especially cool new feature is that you can track an email while composing it.

Updating CRM on the Go

In future blogs we will focus on Mobile enhancements and features specific to system administrators and customizers. However, we just had to leave you with this amazing new feature. Have you ever wanted to update a field from a mobile device leveraging touch capability? Let’s say you are an Account Manager and while having a conversation with a customer you want to update the Estimated Revenue field. By using a slider control, you can quickly update this field by simply moving the slider. Pretty awesome!

View usage activity metrics with a new preview feature, Organization Insights

With the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have delivered a new preview feature, Organization Insights, which provides the system administrator(s) of a CRM Online organization with the ability to view usage activity metrics to gain a better understanding of how well the CRM instance is being used.

The Organization Insights dashboard shows information such as top users and how many operations, page requests, etc., are occurring over various lookback periods.

org insi2

Specifically, the following metrics are provided as part of the Organization Insights preview feature:

  • Active Users – Total number of active users (unique users) who performed an operation that caused one of these SDK calls: Retrieve, RetrieveMultiple, Delete, Create, and Update.
  • Most Active Users (Reads) – Names of most active users who performed an operation that caused a Retrieve or Retrieve Multiple SDK call in the CRM instance over a selected time period.
  • Most Active Users (Changes) – Names of most active users who performed a Create, Update, or Delete SDK call in the CRM instance over a selected time period
  • Active Users Performing Specific Operations – Shows how many unique users are split across Create, Retrieve, RetrieveMultiple, Update, and Delete SDK calls.
  • Total Operations – Shows the total number of Create,Retrieve,Retrieve Multiple, Update, andDelete SDK calls for all entities in the CRM instance
  • Total Page Requests – Shows the number of requests for form,dashboards, andreports pages.

 

For more details about the Organization Insights preview feature, please refer to this TechNet article.

To enable Organization Insights
To enable the Organization Insights Preview feature, log into your CRM Online organization (running build 8.1.0.359or later), and then navigate to Settings->Administration->System Settings.

On the Previews tab, view the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Previews and select the check box to acknowledge your acceptance, and then to the right ofOrganization Insights Preview, select the Yes radio button.

When the feature is enabled, system administrators can access the associated dashboard from the System Dashboards dropdown list. System administrators will also be able to create their custom dashboards and add specific charts to their own CRM dashboards

Important points to note for the intellisense of calculated fields

Consider below scenario to understand calculated field intelligence logic.

1. I have created custom field called lookup and relate to system entity called ‘Unit’ with named ‘new_uomid’.

2.  Created new custom field as string (Calculated) and tried to set action (Calculated field) with lookup value as ‘new_uomid’.  I have added dot after ‘new_uomid’ field to get intellisense but it did not appears.

3. Then , I have created new custom field called lookup and relate to system entity called ‘Account’ with named ‘new_accountid’

4. Open existing string field and tried to set action (Calculated field) with lookup value ‘new_accountid’, then I have added dot to get intelligence and it is working properly.

Reason : Each entity have metadata property called ‘IsValidForAdvancedFind’. If this properly is true then only you will get intellisense option in calculated field for selected entity. In simple words if entity is visible in advanced filed view  then you will get intellisense option in calculated field.

Sample plugin to create record when other entity record was created

The below example shows how to create an Contact record whenever we had an account record getting created.

Find the code as below.

Step 1:


using System;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;// include this dll from SDK
namespace plugin_721
{
public class Class1 : IPlugin
{
public void Execute(IServiceProvider service1)
{
IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)service1.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
if (context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)
{
Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
entity.LogicalName = "account";
try
{
Entity createcontact = new Entity("contact");
if (context.PrimaryEntityId != null)
{
createcontact["firstname"] = "pavan";
}
IOrganizationServiceFactory servicefactory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)service1.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));
IOrganizationService service = servicefactory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);
service.Create(createcontact);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//code you for displaying when exception was caught, not compulsory
}
}
}
}
}

view raw

Plugin.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Step 2: 

Dont forget to sign in the assembly.

Build the code in the visual studio to get the dll file.

Step 3:

Open Plugin registration tool from  crm 2016 SDK\SDK\Tools\PluginRegistration

  1. create a new connection
  2. give the organization login details select O365 if online
  3. Select your region
  4. Displays the organizations if found
  5. Click Register–>Register new Assembly–>Select your DLL
  6. Select sandbox & Database if online–> Register
  7. Goto the Assembly and create a new step for that
  8. Select the details asked, can select required pipeline execution order, stage, execution mode, deployment
  9. Enter register step
  10. Your plugin was registered
  11. Go and check, when you had created a new account, this code would create a contact pavan(You can give whatever you want).

Cheers,

PMDY

 

Depth property in plugins

Depth is often used to stop infinite loops where a plugin updates a value which triggers the plugin to run again

A common cause of this is bad programming practise where a plugin retrieves the target entity and at the end of the plugin updates the entity.

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