Applies to: Project Service Automation for Dynamics 365

Were pleased to announce the latest update for the Project Service Automation application for Dynamics 365. This release includes some important improvements to quality, performance, and usability.

This release is compatible with Dynamics 365 9.x. To update to this release, visit the Admin Center for Dynamics 365 online, solutions page to install the update. For details, refer How to Install, Update a Preferred Solution

Project Service Automation (V 3.9.0.1)

• Bug fixes
  • Fixed: Time Entry grid – On first load, callbox for new button appears before grid loads
  • Fixed: Update utilization view to show dates in User’s CRM time zone
  • Fixed: Solution conflicts with jQuery
  • Fixed: Schedule dates are shifted a day earlier when a project is created from project template with tasks
  • Fixed: Updates to Project Based Opportunity Lines are not reflected in Estimated Revenue when set to System Calculated
  • Fixed: Rounding error when calculating milestone totals for fixed price project contract lines
  • Fixed: Validations for project task start dates and end dates (tasks must start in the year 2000 or after, tasks cannot be longer that 17 years in duration, projects cannot start more than 17 years in the future)
  • Fixed: Unable to delete Invoice Line Detail if corresponding Project Contract Milestone has been deleted
  • Fixed: Customers unable to see the custom error thrown from custom plug-in when deleting a Resource
  • Fixed: WBS: Error while calculating duration on start date change
  • Fixed: Project Contract Line – Invoice Frequency is being overwritten with the value from Project Parameters when line is saved
  • Fixed: Unable to Create a Quote from opportunity using Business Process Flow
  • Fixed: Time Entry Grid copy row functionality updated to copy the fields included in the ‘Copy Time Entry Columns’ view

The post Release Notes for Project Service Automation Update Release 9 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

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Next week at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, Microsoft will host our annual partner conference where our company wide vision will be shared, including Microsoft Business Applications. The Business Applications Total Addressable Market (TAM) is predicted to be at $125B by 2022, and 57 percent of this will be driven by ISVs. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are an important area of investment for the company, and represent a significant growth opportunity for partners in this market.

Partners are critical to this story, whether theyre ISVs building solutions on top of Dynamics 365, ISVs connecting their solutions with Dynamics 365, or systems integrators providing customization and integration for the customers environment. These partners bring deep industry expertise that helps customers solve important, industry-specific challenges, so we have been investing in technical and business solutions to help accelerate their growth.

Launching a new program and tech investments for Business Applications partners

In April we began to preview elements of this program and since then weve been listening to our partners on how best to help accelerate their business. Although their needs vary, overall, they are looking for two key things:

• New ways to reduce development time for a faster time to market, paired with new go-to-market support to increase business opportunities.
• Technology investments optimized for partners and designed to help them differentiate from their competitors.

With the program officially launching next week at Inspire, there are more details of the program that we would like to share.

Business Applications ISV Connect program

Our newly branded Business Applications ISV Connect program will help drive a healthy Dynamics 365 and PowerApps ecosystem by helping ISVs get to market faster, simplify publishing their solutions to both Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, and promote their solutions with customers. Microsoft is moving beyond transactional partnerships to aworld wherepartners are encouraged and incented to innovate on top of Microsoft products, adding value for customers and creating new solutions and revenue opportunities. This program is built on a revenue sharing model so we can reinvest in our ISVs with technical, marketing, and sales enablement benefits.

There will be a few areas of reinvestment. Every ISV in the program gets access to customer-approved tenants, technical enablement, marketing support, and more. Many ISVs would also like help in reaching customers and for those that choose to try and enter the premium tier of the program for their app(s), there is co-selling and co-marketing support. Co-selling provides ISVs with the ability to leverage the Microsoft sales force to magnify their reach with Microsofts customers globally.

There are less than six people in our company that are responsible for sales. This program opens up over a thousand sales people across 50 60 countries that will be motivated and inspired to sell our solution. – Mike Ridgway, Chief Executive Officer at Flintfox

More details can be found on the partner program web page, and partners can begin signing up starting next week at Inspire. Partners benefit from a strong ecosystem and with this new program, Microsoft will ensure that only healthy apps are part of the ecosystem by requiring certification. Successful marketplaces provide customers with trusted applications and Microsoft will help ensure non-certified applications cant be installed directly into customer tenants without deep, centrally driven security and performance reviews.

Technology investments for ISVs building on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

On the technology front, were delivering additional innovation for ISVs building on our platform, including pre-packaged elements like APIs, business logic, entities, and workflows for Dynamics 365 and PowerApps so ISVs can connect line of business apps to core business data without having to build new integration points.

At Inspire, well be talking about our plans for Azure DevOps and GitHub integration and well be launching a new solution called ISV Studio that provides a consolidated view into how ISV apps are performing across their customer tenants. Now in public preview, the ISV Studio will enable access to insights about key adoption metrics such as the number of tenants and install successes/failures, empowering ISVs to identify and act on bottlenecks slowing down adoption.

Continued investment in Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators for ISVs

Data is at the core of business applicationsyet many organizations cant realize its full value because its locked up in silos or in an unusable model. To help ISVs quickly create applications that better meet the unique needs of different industries, last year at Inspire we introduced our first Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerator for Healthcare. Since then, weve continued to work with industry experts to provide pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data that align to the common industry scenarios, including launching additional accelerators for higher education and nonprofits. These industry accelerators provide ISVs and more importantly their end customers with consistent entities and attributes relevant to their industry, making it easier to work with data across boundaries.

As part of our continued investment, we are making our latest industry accelerators, automotive and banking, generally available.

• Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator: The automotive sector has a customer journey that involves several parties resulting in many data silos. There is an additional complexity in that vehicles are always moving. With the automotive accelerator, we worked with Annata, Oxlo, and others to help ISV partners quickly develop customer experience management (e.g., marketing, lifetime engagement, etc.) solutions that can serve, for example, franchised dealer networks. It is open sourced on GitHub and available in AppSource for a test drive.
• Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator: Customer expectations of banking services continue to increase, and the ability for a bank to look at a customers profile end-to-end is becoming more critical. Working with Veripark, Wealth Dynamix, Fiserv, and others, we have laid the groundwork for partners to quickly build financial services solutions that can interoperate, and banks are able to view their customer journeys. This first version of the banking accelerator includes data models and sample apps supporting both retail and commercial banking and is freely available in AppSource and GitHub.

Were also announcing significant updates to the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, a sector where the need for a common approach to data is acutely felt as organizations have historically been left with an assortment of technology originally designed for for-profit companies that doesnt fit their needs. The latest set of capabilities, which are now in public preview, aim to cut costs and boost efficiencies for nonprofits through increased data transparency, streamlined implementation of solutions and increased operability across systems. This is adding to existing capabilities that help nonprofits with core processes such as program delivery, fundraising, and volunteer management.

Today, there are more than 60 dedicated Dynamics partners around the world creating purpose-built solutions for nonprofits and mapping their data structures to the Common Data Model for nonprofits, an unprecedented data standard that enables seamless integration between nonprofit data systems.

For example, ISV partner Wipfli is working with our Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator to create a volunteer management solution for Team Rubicon that they anticipate will enable them to mobilize threetimes the number of volunteers they were able to deploy to Houston to provide relief during Hurricane Harvey.

After the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator was released, our team went back and estimated a CRM replacement with customizations and integrations and estimated a 15 percent savings in implementation costs for the customer. The Nonprofit Accelerator allows us to accommodate implementation of these nonprofit-specific processes efficiently when serving these customers. – Kevin E. Fraser, Microsoft Dynamics ERP Lead, Ernst & Young LLP

Learn more at Inspire 2019 in Las Vegas or online

Inspire 2019 is a great opportunity to connect with partners on how to work together to serve our mutual customers. James Philips, Alysa Taylor, myself, and our teams will be there to assist you with your questions. I have also included some relevant sessions for you to attend.

Visit the Inspire microsite, which will be updated with materials, photos, and Corenote replays, for more highlights from the event.

Of course, well have more updates and customer stories in the weeks and months ahead. So, whether in Las Vegas next week, or online through streamed live sessions, we look forward to connecting with you and celebrating the vision, insight, and inspiration that is accelerating the digital transformation of our customers.

The post Accelerating opportunities for ISVs with new programs and technology appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Applies to: Project Service Automation for Dynamics 365

Were pleased to announce the latest update for the Project Service Automation application for Dynamics 365. This release includes bug fixes.

This release is compatible with Dynamics 365 9.x. To update to this release, visit the Admin Center for Dynamics 365 online, solutions page to install the update. For details, refer How to Install, Update a Preferred Solution

Project Service Automation (V2.4.14.27)

• Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Schedule dates are shifted a day earlier when project is created from project template with tasks
• Fixed: Unable to delete Invoice Line Detail if corresponding Project Contract Milestone has been deleted
• Fixed: Customer is unable to see the custom error thrown from the custom plug-in when deleting a resource
• Fixed: Redundant attributes found in update requests
• Fixed: Resource name is not reflected automatically when we select user while creating new resource

Project Service Automation Team

The post Release Notes for Project Service Automation Update Release 17 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Organization 9.0+ with Universal Resource Scheduling 3.8.x version

In the latest Field Service v8.8.x/Universal Resource Scheduling v3.8.x update, we released the Search Resource Availability API for scheduling single requirements. A list of available resources and their time slots can be retrieved by passing the details of a single resource requirement to this API as input. In this blog post, we will walk you through a scenario with an example of how to use this API.

Let’s consider this scenario: You are looking for list of available resources and their time slots for a requirement in which you have specific constraintsFrom and To dates of the requirement, Duration of the requirement, Effort needed for the requirement, Resource Types, Resource Characteristics, Rating, Roles, Territories, Organizational Units, and Resource preferences (preferred and restricted resources).

To be precise, in our example we are looking for available robotics technicians (Resources: Account, Contact, User) for three hours of work over the next three days, who are familiar with assembly maintenance in the Washington Territory and belong to the Organizational Units Seattle OU or Redmond OU.

Here is the list of input parameters used for our resource requirement and the exact values used in our example:

Note:

• To run this API, we are going to need the GUIDs for the BookableResources, Characteristics, Roles, Territories, and Organizational Units, which you can retrieve using the Web API.
• If the API is called from a client (browser or an app like canvas app) that is based on JavaScript/TypeScript, you would need to have the extended SOAP SDK, which is provided in the sample files for download.
• The extended SOAP SDK is not a Microsoft official release but is provided in the sample for guidance.
• We suggest you test this in your development or test environments first to validate your scenarios and results before you run it in your production environments.

To execute this search against your organization, you can download the sample files here. Once you download the sample folder, follow these steps:

1. Modify the hard-coded input parameters provided in the sample.js file to reflect the GUIDs of records (for example, Resources, Characteristics, Territories) in your org.
2. Add the files in the Sample folder as web resources in your organization.
3. Navigate to the newly added sample.htm page. It would look like <<YourOrgURL>>//WebResources/new_sample.htm.
4. Open the browser’s developer tools by using the F12 function key. Set breakpoints as needed and inspect the request/responses in the Developer Tool’s console.

We can see the list of time slots returned for the resources who match the search criteria with time slot types Off, Available, Scheduled returned. Jorge GaultandJoseph Gonsalvesare the two potential resources who can fulfill our Resource Requirement/Work Orderbetween the times of 09:00 to 17:00 hours GMT on June 26th and 27th.

Once these time slots are returned by the API, you could choose to display the available time slots on your custom web portal, app or a canvas app. If the user chooses an available time slot, you could use your custom logic to create a booking.

A few other scenarios that could leverage the API are as follows:

• Build a custom web app or a Dynamics 365 portal to provide appointment scheduling for their end users to show the available time slots for the service/product they offer from a Dynamics 365 CE organization data.
• Build a PowerApps canvas app to support scheduling scenarios for their line-of-business apps.

Vinay Nalam,

Program Manager, Dynamics 365 Engineering

Additional Resources:

Docs: The primary documentation for Dynamics 365 for Field Service.

Scheduling Docs: Documentation for Resource Scheduling.

Learn: Learning path for Resource Scheduling.

Field Service YouTube Channel: Includes concept videos for Field Service.

Ideas: The portal where you can contribute product feedback and ideas for Resource Scheduling.

Forum: Go here to ask questions, find answers, and see upcoming events.

Blog: On the blog, you’ll find ongoing release notes and posts from the product team.

The post How to use Resource Scheduling’s Search Resource Availability API appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

We all know the power of a great first impression. On the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service team, weve been wondering: what’s the best greeting message to begin the conversation with a virtual agent? Because our team helps Microsoft Customer Support run one of the largest virtual agent implementations in the world (on support.microsoft.com), we were able to run some experiments with our own customers to find out.

People have a lot of opinions about what you need to tell users up front when they start conversing with a bot. In particular, many people believe you need to tell customers that they can always get to a human agent. We tested this theory and others by running customers through five quite different greetings, with over 40,000 user sessions per greeting option.

Key learning 1: Brevity is the soul of bots

What the data told us first and foremost is that brief is best. Especially when a user has already been interacting with self-help content, getting out of the users way fast increases engagement (interacting with the virtual agent rather than just closing it), increases problem resolution (which we measure with a survey after each session), and decreases escalation to human agents. Our best performing greeting was Im the Microsoft Virtual Agent. How can I help you today?

Key learning 2: Think about penguins

Are you thinking about penguins now? When we say up front that users can ask to talk to a person at any time we actually prime people to escalate to a human agent. In other words, were putting the idea in peoples heads. Removing this suggestion decreased the escalation rate by about 7%.

When we designed the experiment, we worried that not including this phrase might decrease the number of people willing to engage with the virtual agent at all, but in fact we did not see any decrease in peoples interaction with the virtual agent. Instead, more people gave the virtual agent a chance to solve their problem instead of pulling the talk to a person ripcord.

So our advice is to skip the you can talk to a person at any time language.

Another benefit of this approach is that when users first converse with a virtual agent (before reaching a human), the virtual agent can help gather information that makes any eventual human agent contact much more efficient.

Ongoing learning

Our initial experiment on greetings was such a great learning experience, well continue to do head-to-head experiments with additional greetings options, trying to find the sweet spot. Well also be following up with experiments about other key user experiences, and share what we learn.

You can stop thinking about penguins now.

The post Make a great first impression with your virtual agent appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Delivering care outside the hospital offers providers an exceptional opportunity to improve patient outcomes and enhance the patient experience. Hospitals that expand into home healthcare, for example, can reach more patients with better care while tapping into a profitable new revenue stream. For many providers, however, home health services are not producing the outcomes they expected. And theres a simple reason why; Home healthcare is complex.

With so many moving parts, delivering care outside the hospital walls requires careful coordination and efficient resource allocation. Thankfully, new technologies are making mobile care delivery easier than ever. Home health services in particular and the field service sector in general, can greatly benefit from advanced technologies. But theres a catch! To extract the full power of these technologies and provide the highest level of care, providers must empower their remote care workers with a foundational level of access to EHR data.

Using connected data to achieve your home health objectives

Connected data is essential for effective care delivery outside the hospital walls. To get the insights and information they need to be successful, field care teams must be able to easily access and exchange data across multiple systems and devices.

Whats possible with connected data and improved interoperability? Here are nine things you can do to optimize home healthcare outcomes:

1. Improve care efficiency: Facilitate collaboration by enabling real-time communication across teams, developing individualized care plans, and involving patients in their own care management.
2. Empower patients: Incorporate patient self-reporting into home care regimens via surveys, interactive mobile apps, and portal experiences to motivate patients to participate in their care.
3. Ensure care plan compliance: Monitor patients remotely through devices that know patients locations and status. Use the data collected to empower physicians with real-time, intelligent insights and enable immediate alerts.
4. Deliver precision health: Collect and analyze granular data on each patient via virtual, intelligent tools. Leverage the predictive insights you gain to provide more effective, individualized care.
5. Reduce operational costs: Leverage improved visibility into operations to better manage devices and inventory with remote monitoring and automation.
6. Reduce readmissions: Use connected data and machine learning to track patient health and intervene at the right time to avoid readmissions.
7. Improve patient experiences: Enable patients to access information anytime, anywhere and provide access to mobile clinicians to improve communication.
8. Build long-term loyalty: Combine patient engagement touchpoints with clinical data history to break down clinical and business silos. Visibility across the entire patient journey enables the insights required to provide highly personalized interactions that build long-term loyalty.
9. Create new revenue streams: Gather data from the field and other sources to gain a better view of new health issues that need to be addressed with new services or programs.

Increasing time-to-value with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator

At Microsoft, we developed the new Healthcare Accelerator solution to help providers unleash the full power of their patient data. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator connects your hospitals EHR data while enabling systems and applications to help you optimize the remote delivery of care in the field. Without a connected data system, home health providers are left vulnerable to a larger margin of error and a lack of informed decision-making.

When your data is connected, you can better leverage digital technologies to elevate home health services. For example, you can:

• More intelligently dispatch care workers with things like optimized routes and skill-based assignments
• Provide care workers with complete patient insight, records, real-time guidance, and cross-team collaboration
• Manage more visits and care workers with fewer dispatchers
• Synchronize inventory, set reorder points, and track inventory
• Remove the risk of medical errors through more accurate data
• Make better informed decisions and take the right action to improve care

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator in conjunction with the Microsoft Cloud, creates the interoperability you need to improve clinical care outcomes and drive more revenue.

Take the next step

Explore our new eBook, Reimagining healthcare with Microsoft, to understand how unlocking interoperability can help you reduce costs, increase revenue, and manage risk to improve patient outcomes dramatically.

The post 9 ways to use EHR data to improve home health care outcomes appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Layout (build 109.1907.10002.0)

The Dynamics 365 Layout team is pleased to announce the availability of the following features and improvements in the July update:

• Locked layouts
• Improved experience for HoloLens 2
• Localization support on HoloLens 2

Locked layouts

Now you can lock a layout to prevent unintentional changes.

To lock a layout, air tap Lock layout in the sidebar menu. This locks the current layout for editing.

After a layout has been locked, if someone selects a model in the layout, on the third consecutive attempt, a pop-up will appear to let them know that the layout is locked for editing. A similar pop-up is displayed when attempting to place a model from the Layout menu into the current layout.

A lock graphic is displayed in the top right corner of the layout tile.

To unlock a layout, air tap Unlock layout in the sidebar menu. Anyone can unlock a layout.

Improved experience for HoloLens 2

The Layout team has worked hard to provide the best in-app experience on HoloLens 2. Layout is automatically downloaded and installed on HoloLens 2 during the HoloLens 2 start-up experience. You can use your existing Azure Active Directory credentials to sign in to HoloLens 2 and use Layout.

If you dont have an active Layout subscription, try the app for free for up to 90 days.

Localization support on HoloLens 2

Starting with the July update, you can use Layout in the following locales on HoloLens 2:

• US
• Canada (English and French)
• UK
• Australia
• Germany
• France
• China
• Japan
• Taiwan (no speech support)
• Hong Kong (no speech support)

The Layout app uses the locale you choose when you set up HoloLens 2.

Note that voice for the room-scan process is not supported for non-English languages in this update.

For more information on any of these new features, see the Dynamics 365 Layout User guide.

The post July 2019 update of Dynamics 365 Layout provides locked layouts, improved HoloLens 2 experience appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

As previously announced, we are in the process of updating all outdated installations of Dynamics 365 for Marketing to the April 2019 release. We have now improved our update process to include testing on a minimal-copy support instance before we apply the update to any existing instance. Weve updated the previous blog post with more information about this process, so please read it again for complete details.

The post Improved testing introduced for planned updates of Dynamics 365 for Marketing appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Financial institutions face increasing competitive pressure to deliver the digital experiences reshaping the way banks do business. Todays customer expects a more personalized, hassle-free experience from banks with mobile and online banking tools rapidly replacing traditional face-to-face interactions.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator, now generally available, includes an industry-standard data model that enables banking and financial organizations to rapidly build intelligent, data-driven financial services solutions across retail and commercial lines of business, accelerating time to value for a range of competitive customer scenarios.

Developed in partnership with global financial services including Microsoft independent software vendor (ISV) partners such as Veripark, Wealth Dynamix, Fiserv, Personetics, and others, the banking data model extends the Common Data Model to provide a shared and consistent metadata definition for common banking and financial industry data elements including loans, mortgages, referrals, branch details, collateral, deal, limit, facilities, and more. This common schema allows customers and ISVs to build solutions on the same data modelopen-sourced and interoperable with open banking and the banking industry architecture network (BIAN)enabling new interoperability, a 360-degree view of customers, and streamlined processes and insights.

Empowering digital experiences for financial services

Delivering a differentiated customer experience requires a business strategy and capabilities around the deep customer insights and data that underpin powerful customer engagement. Financial firms must tap into the tremendous volumes of data available today to empower innovation, from artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to personalized chat bots and enhance the customer experience. Deriving value from large, diverse, and often fragmented data sets is difficult, as much of it typically resides in multiple siloes across internal and external systems, and without a well-defined data definition.

The Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator empowers financial institutions with the consistent, well-structured data they need to quickly bring powerful, innovative solutions to market. Building off the accelerator enables partners, including systems integrators (SIs) and ISVs, banks, and developers to speed the creation of solutions that deliver a better banking experience; one that differentiates banks from the competition and drives customer acquisition, loyalty, and long-lasting relationships.

In addition to the data model, the Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator includes sample apps, workflows, and dashboards for commercial and retail banking as well as a PowerApp allowing a relationship manager to quickly create and share referrals and see their upcoming appointments. These samples as well as a test drive experience can be found today on Microsoft AppSource.

The power of unified, industry-standard data models

The Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator joins a growing list of industry-specific accelerators for healthcare, education, nonprofits, and automotive. Each accelerator is a foundational element of Microsoft Business Applications that enables ISVs and other solution providers a way to build industry-specific solutions on the Microsoft Power Platform. These solutions can connect to existing business applications, can be embedded in new applications on Dynamics 365, and can extend existing first party applications, such as Dynamics 365 and Office 365, and the Microsoft 365 Proposal Manager

How to get started

Read our Transform Banking with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator white paper for a closer look at how the Banking Accelerator helps empower innovation.

The Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is free for all of our financial services customers and partners, and available to ISVs and solution providers at Microsoft AppSource and GitHub. Included in the accelerator is a banking data model, sample applications, and connected scenarios across Microsofts cloud, business applications, and productivity tools to help take customer engagement to new levels.

More to explore:

• Read the Microsoft Industry blog to learn how banks can take their customer engagement to new levels.
• Read an overview of Industry Accelerators.
• Learn more about our investments in Industry Accelerators to enable ISVs and solutions providers to help you succeed.
• Learn more about the Common Data Model.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is now generally available appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Following up on Janet Lewiss blog on the public preview and Guggs blog post from last week mentioning the GA of the Auto and Banking Accelerators, the following blog post is a double click into the Banking Accelerator which is now available on AppSource and GitHub.

The following blog is attributed to my colleagues and friends:Imran Aslam and Georgy Sazonov (Microsoft Technical Solution Professionals)

Introduction:

Today we are very excited to announce that Microsoft takes another step towards its continued effort in helping our Financial Services (Banking) customers through their digital transformation by making the Common Data Model more relevant by providing them the ability to rapidly enhance both their employee and customer experience using the Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerators. With the Banking Accelerator, our customers and partners will be able to use an industry standard data model to provide the differentiated experiences that their customers are demanding in both Retail and Commercial lines of businesses. Included in the Accelerator is a banking data model, sample applications, and connected scenarios across Microsofts cloud, business applications and productivity tools to help take customer engagement to new levels.

To get started, the Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is a solution that sits on top of an existing Dynamics 365 or PowerApps instance, hence all it requires is the download via AppSource or through GitHub by acquiring the solution file, extracting and installing, its that simple. The solution has been further split into both Retail and Commercial banking and can be implemented with one or both. The Accelerator contains installable solutions that include standard entity attribute extensions, new banking entities, pre-built dashboards, workflows, sample data as well as other tools to help customers and partners build and deploy new banking solutions.

At a glance:

The Accelerator model contains a set of new entities to support Financial Services Data model as well as many attribute extensions to existing Common Data Model entities:

• Company
• Person
• Prospect
• Bank
• Branch
• Collateral
• Financial Product
• Know Your Customer (KYC)
• Limit
• Requested Facility
• Syndicates
• Opportunity

The Data Model can be extended so financial services institutions and partners can build new solutions to address their specific needs. The accelerator comes with sample applications that includes a number of business processes, forms and dashboards that are relevant for Retail and Commercial banking

Retail Banking Application Overview

The Retail Banking Application is a place where retail banking users can go to gain access to all of the records and reports that they need to manage their day. Relationship Managers, Risk Analysts and Branch Managers can all use this application to perform their necessary job functions.

Dashboards

• Retail Relationship Manager Dashboard
• Daily Dashboard
• Prospect and Referrals

Business Process Flow

The following represents the workflows that have been released in the accelerator

• Customer On-boarding
• KYC
• Mortgage Application
• Certificate of Deposit

Lest take a close look into some capabilities of Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator for Personal Banking

Analytics and Insights

Different personas will be using different dashboards to address their needs, for instance, Relationship Manager will be using Daily Dashboard to get a high-level overview of their day, along with important charts like any Opportunities scheduled to close this week and KYCs with expiring business licenses this week.

Using Prospect and Referral Dashboard the Relationship Manager will also be able to find out more about the prospects and any new leads or referrals that have been assigned to him

From the Dashboard, Relationship Manager can navigate to specific customer record to review Customer 360 Form. Customer 360 Form presents all necessary information to help the Relationship Manager make informed decisions. Sample Customer 360 forms include information such as profile details, financial products customer has with the bank, household information, interaction history etc. The data can come from multiple sources such as CRM and/or core banking systems through multiple integration options available in Business Application Platform

Personal Profile

Household Information

Financial Products

Business Process Flows

Using a standardized business process flow, the application guides Relationship Manger to provide the required information needed to successfully complete the application. In most scenarios the process spans multiple LOB applications that can be integrated into one orchestrated process using Microsoft Flow

For Instance, Certificate of Deposit application process includes all steps required to complete the application. It guides Relationship Manager and helps validate and collect the necessary information.

Commercial Banking Application Overview

In a Banks Commercial Lines of Business, the goal is to focus on building long lasting relationships with customers and businesses who are day in, and day out either looking for the best banking products that suite their business needs, or are planning to grow their business or looking to secure enough capital to get ready for a busy season. So, for the Commercial Banking Team it is important to have a 360-degree view of his customers data so they can understand the needs of his customers, collaborate as a team and act accordingly by providing solutions that best matches their requirements. The Commercial use cases focus on a Commercial Relationship Manager who is working with a customer and a Loan Officer who will collaborate with the RM to help close deals.

Analytics and Insights:

The Relationship Manager starts of his day by reviewing his Today`s Insights dashboard that will provide a single pane of glass into the key accounts he needs to focus his time on and if there are any holds that might require his attention. He can also quickly drill into any loans that are maturing, any news leads or referrals that have been assigned to him, and finally reviews his timeline that provides a list of activities that he needs to act on during the day. The idea of the dashboard is to focus on some of the main KPI`s that matter to a commercial RM in this role, which is loan utilization, new accounts, AUM/Wallet Share etc. The experience can be further enhanced using out of the box AI such as relationship assistant that will help monitor key transactions and activities to help an RM stay on top of key changes to his portfolio/book of business.

Company 360:

In planning to qualify a new lead or renewal on a Loan, the Relationship Manager starts by reviewing all the activities that have taken place within an account (company), reviews the clients holdings both internal and external and does a needs analysis to better understand the accounts position and what loan would work best with the least amount of risk to the bank. After his assessment he initiates a new Loan opportunity using his quick create menu. The goal here was to create a Single Source of Truth for the RM where he can review client financials, transactions, next best actions, offers, alerts, account hierarchy and also review org charts which are out of the box Dynamics 365 features to provide a holistic 360 view of a customers account.

Business Process:

Using a standardized business process flow, the application will guide the Relationship Manager or the Loan Officer to provide the required information needed to successfully full-fill the loan. Any steps that require data from 3rd party applications or tools can be easily brought in using Microsoft Flow and approvals of all levels can also be handled using an out of the box Flow Approval Process. The goal here is to provide that single business process that gathers data not only from within Dynamics but also Customer Information Files (CIFs) and other tools so that anyone with access to the record with the Commercial Account Team can review and act on as necessary.

As commercial loans can either be just a single Line of Credit or Letter of Credit, for more complex deal situations the Banking Data model also provides the ability to combine multiple credit products into facilities to cater to situations where a complex product deal structure is required based on the customers financial needs. You will utilize the Requested Facilities entity to accomplish that.

After all the relevant documents have been gathered, compliance and risk assessment done, approvals have been completed and all requirements have been full filled from any back-end system the opportunity can automatically be closed and funds can be released. A final step will also include the Dynamics record being updated with the new Financial Product attached to the customer.

Also included in the Accelerator is a business process flow for a new Business Account Origination.

Manager Insights:

For a branch manager its very important to stay on top of their advisors performance and make sure that they have a healthy pipeline in place to match their forecast and meet or exceed their quota. Using his Manager dashboards, he can review all the open applications and track their progress over time.In this case, they can review the Application Overview Dashboard from Power BI within CRM in the Retail or Commercial Banking Applications. This dashboard includes multiple reports that provides various insights.

Conclusion

We encourage you download and give the Banking Accelerator a spin and let us know how your experience has been. The team is already gearing up for the future and looking forward to helping customers take their customer engagement to new levels, using advanced and open technologies to accelerate transformation faster than ever. We will continue to work with our customers, partners and certified institutions such as BIAN to enhance the accelerators as our clients needs changes and looking forward to providing solution for other lines of business within our Financial Institutions.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is now Generally Available on AppSource appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Were you ever surprised to see “You dont have permissions…” message for a specific Business Central object, while you were sure you had permission to run it (“I even get it if I assign SUPER permission!!”? Then please read further to learn about the underlying authorization logic we employ in the Business Central online service and become better equipped to troubleshoot and report permissions issues in the future.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central online, we use two levels of permissions for the application objects:

• Permissions that describe which objects a customer is entitled to use according to their Azure Active Directory role or the license they purchased from Microsoft
  • This type of permission is called entitlements in Business Central online
• Permissions that describe which objects an administrator or a partner gave the customer access to inside Business Central
  • This type of permission is (still) called permissions in Business Central online and on-premises

Entitlements

In Business Central on-premises, the first category of permissions is implemented in a license file (*.flf). The license file contains per-object definition of the access, matching what the customer has purchased. In Business Central online, the license file (*.flf) is not used for defining purchased access to the objects, instead we use the entitlements. Naturally, in the cloud world, the entitlements cannot be edited neither by our partners, nor by our customers they are defined and maintained by Microsoft. If you want to study which entitlements are given for a specific license or Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) role when working with Business Central online, you can inspect the entitlements in the standard demo database that we ship with the on-premises versions and via Docker.

The entitlements are stored in the Entitlement table in the application database. Entitlements are then grouped into entitlement sets which can be found in the Entitlement Set table.

The entitlement sets in their turn are linked to the Azure ADservice plans which correspond to the purchased license, or to specific Azure AD roles(memberships). The mapping between the service plans, roles and entitlement sets is defined in the Membership Entitlement table.

The service plans are registered for the users in Azure AD when the license is assigned to them in the Microsoft 365 admin center (replaces the Office 365 admin center):

As an admin of the Azure AD tenant, you can also look up the service plan that is assigned to the user programmatically via the Azure AD Graph API:

The following are the standard Dynamics 365 Business Central service plans:

In terms of accessing Business Central by Azure AD role membership (without a license) – the Global administrator role is the only internal Azure AD role that has access to Business Central. Users with Admin agent and Helpdesk agent roles also don’t require a license, these roles are assigned through CSP via the Partner Center and used by the partners for support purposes (delegated admins). These roles are also limited by the entitlements, and you can see which entitlements are applied to them by looking into the Membership Entitlement table (entries for NAV_INTERNAL_ADMIN, NAV_DELEGATED_ADMIN and NAV_HELPDESK).

The User Group Plan table in the tenant database stores the mapping between the service plans and the user groups. Based on this mapping, the service determines which user group is assigned to a user by default when a user logs in to Business Central for the first time. The user group assigns a specific license (or makes the user a member of a specific Azure AD role):

The User Plan table in the tenant database is populated automatically with the user ID and the service plan that was detected for them during login.

When a user logs in to Business Central, the service applies the intersection of the entitlements that are associated with the user’s service plan (or Azure AD role) and the permissions that are defined for that user. Entitlements always have higher priority over permissions. For example, even is the user is given SUPER permissions by the admin but has the Team Member license assigned the user can still only access the objects defined by the Team Member entitlements.

Now you know how the entitlements look like internally in our service and how they are used to manage user access to the Business Central objects. As the end user – you can also analyze both permissions and entitlements assigned for each object using the Effective Permissions page, which is accessible from the User card:

The entitlements in Business Central are defined only for the application objects in the Microsoft ID range.

The objects in the ISV partner ID range that are brought in through the AppSource extensions, and the objects in the 50000+ range that come from per-tenant extensions are not managed by Microsoft entitlements and therefore fully accessible with any Microsoft license. You, as a partner, should therefore ensure that the access to your objects is regulated through the Business Central permissions or self-monetization techniques.

Make sure you also read Working with Sandboxes and Entitlements article, which provides an overview of the user groups assigned to the users by the service, according to their license or AAD group membership. The article also explains peculiarities of working with our Docker images and sandboxes, where entitlements and permissions work a little bit differently.

The post Business Central entitlements explained appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Introduction

With the deprecation of Voice of the Customer, we recommend you start using Microsoft Forms Pro for getting your customer feedback. Forms Pro provides seamless integration for surveys within Microsoft Business Applications, including Dynamics 365 and Office 365.

Using Forms Pro, you can send surveys to Dynamics 365 contacts either manually or automatically based on business events in Dynamics 365 such as sending survey when an order is fulfilled or when a customer case is resolved.

Like Voice of Customer, survey responses from Forms Pro are saved directly to Dynamics 365 and automatically appear on the activity timeline of the contact and the relevant record, such as case or order.

While Forms Pro provides similar built-in integration capabilities like that of Voice of Customer, we are leveraging the authoring experience from Office Forms to make it simpler for any business users to use, test, and send the survey. The simple user experience may significantly improve your productivity when creating a survey. The new Forms Pro survey has a different survey design and architecture; hence, you need to recreate the Voice of the Customer survey using Forms Pro. This blog provides some guidance and tips on how to switch from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro.

Survey creation

Surveys from Voice of the Customer cannot be migrated automatically to Forms Pro so you would need to recreate the surveys in Forms Pro. Similar to Voice of the Customer, Forms Pro also supports a survey designer to create the survey, apply themes, add questions, and add pages to the survey. The survey designing experience of Forms Pro is much more simplified and intuitive. Please note that not all of the question types of Voice of the Customer are supported in Forms Pro. The below table provides information on the list of question types supported in Forms Pro and how they map to the Voice of the Customer question types.

User can configure the question properties like making it mandatory or defining restrictions in the designer. Unlike Voice of the Customer, Forms Pro does not support creation of multiple groups of questions in a single page.

Forms Pro also supports advanced features like branching logic, piping custom data in surveys, and branding the survey. More details about survey creation can be found here: Create a survey

Survey distribution

Voice of the Customer supports two ways for surveys distribution: automated and ad-hoc. Forms Pro can also help you achieve both scenarios.

Automated survey distribution

For scenarios like sending a survey email when a case is resolved in Dynamics 365, Voice of the Customer supports automated sending of survey email using CRM workflows which triggers on Dynamics 365 events. If you are using Voice of the Customer for such a scenario, you can achieve the same using Forms Pro. Forms Pro has integration with Microsoft Flow, which will enable you to send automated survey emails on Dynamics 365 events.

You should recreate the same survey in Forms Pro and then configure a Flow which will send automated survey emails. You can define the same trigger that you are using in CRM workflows in Microsoft Flow. Once you have configured and tested the survey, you can stop the Voice of the Customer CRM workflow and start collecting feedback using Forms Pro.

Similar to Voice of the Customer, when you send the surveys to contacts in Dynamics 365, the survey invitations and corresponding responses are associated with the contacts. Also, the survey invitations and responses are activities that can be linked to any out-of-the-box or custom entity through the Regarding field.

Ad-hoc survey distribution

If you use Voice of the Customer surveys to send the survey emails to a contact or a contact group in Dynamics 365, you can do the same in Forms Pro. Forms Pro provides in-app email distribution system which allows you to compose your own email and send it directly to your contacts in Dynamics 365.

Similar to Voice of the Customer, the links created in Forms Pro are personalized and can help you to track the responders to your surveys. You can also create personalized survey links automatically and use your own distribution channels to send the survey invitation.

More details about survey distribution can be found here: Send a survey to get responses

Survey response

Like Voice of the Customer, the survey invitations and responses are stored in Dynamics 365 entities associated with your business data. Forms Pro has its own entities where it stores the survey invite and response data.

Similar to Voice of the Customer, when you send surveys to contacts in Dynamics 365, the survey invitations and corresponding responses are associated with the contacts. Also, the survey invitations and responses are activities that can be linked to any out-of-the-box or custom entity through the Regarding field.

Please note that the entity model in Forms Pro is similar to Voice of the Customer; hence, you should be able to perform all the follow up actions on these entities as you would have configured in Voice of the Customer. More information about Forms Pro entities can be found here: Entity Reference for Microsoft Forms Pro

You can view the individual survey responses in Forms Pro. One of the advantages of using Forms Pro is the rich Power BI Embedded experience for survey analysis. It provides out-of-the-box chart view for the question responses. It also does sentiment analysis and gathers other meaningful insights out of the survey response data. More details about analyzing responses can be found here: Analyze responses and invitations

Transitioning survey from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro

If you have an older survey which is now closed, there is no need to transfer it to Forms Pro. For the running surveys that are expected to be live after July 2020, you should transition it to Forms Pro. You should create a new survey and start sending invitations using Forms Pro. When transitioning from Voice of the Customer to Forms Pro, you need to consider the overlapping period between the Voice of the Customer survey and the replacement Forms Pro survey. You should ensure that the old Voice of the Customer survey is not closed till you no longer expect responses from the invitations sent for the Voice of the Customer survey.

During the transition period, you must include survey responses from both Voice of the Customer and Forms Pro while creating a report. After the transition period, you can create the report from Forms Pro survey responses only.

Enabling Forms Pro in your Dynamics 365 organization

You can enable Forms Pro in your Dynamics 365 organization by installing the Forms Pro application from the Mirosoft AppSource. You must have the System Administrator role to install it.

Once the application is installed, the Forms Pro entities will appear in the organization. To create surveys in this organization, you must have the Survey Owner role. More details about working with environments can be found here: Work with environments

The post Replace your Voice of the Customer surveys with Microsoft Forms Pro appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

The term smart city usually focuses on infrastructure and how big data and information technology can be used to better manage urban assets such as waterworks, roads, and public transit. Smart denotes physical assets connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) via sensor technology streaming data such as smart parking meters or smart streetlights. Smart cities use data captured by IoT devices to monitor and perform preemptive maintenance to ensure city services are always at optimal levels. But thats just part of it. Smart cities can focus on internal local government processes such as digitizing records or an online process for permit applications or licenses. Citizens may describe a smart city by the ease of getting around or the reduction in crime. The bottom line: every descriptor is right. Built properly, a smart city will provide different value to different stakeholders.

The smart foundation

Technology is at the foundation of a smart city, but its one of many layers. If technology is the engine, then the fuel drives the outcome. A smart city leverages technology to achieve key outcomes for its stakeholders that include citizens, businesses, government, and visitors. Outcomes can be as broad as making government easier and more effective to do business with to optimizing transportation, transit, and traffic management systems. These results must matter to the stakeholders and should align around the needs of the city such as efficiency, sustainability, mobility, economic development, health, public safety, and quality of life.

A smart city is a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem comprised of people, businesses, policies, and laws tightly woven together to create the desired outcomes. Smart cities are adaptive, responsive, and always relevant to those that live, work, and visit the municipality. A smart city integrates technology to continually accelerate, facilitate, and transform itself.

Smart city v.2.0

Many cities have upgraded their infrastructure using sensing technologies and data analytics to better manage municipal assets such as public transportation, utilities, and roads. This connected infrastructure is comprised of physical assets networked via sensor technology that streams valuable data from smart assets. Connected sensors transmit operational data that helps cities optimize performance and maintain their physical infrastructure. Sensors send diagnostic notifications of anomalies in asset performance to field service personnel, who then diagnose and schedule preemptive maintenance. These systems are so intuitive that field service personnel can identify which part is failing and can bring a replacement rather than diagnosing onsite and scheduling another service call. This workflow eliminates system failures and reduces costs, and most of all ensures that those who live, work, and visit the city are rarely inconvenienced. Smart, isnt it?

Initially, a smart city consisted of leveraging technology to connect public assets. But now there is a growing shift to better engaging governments, citizens, and business with the goal of improving services and the quality of life. Cities can generate a wealth of data to improve the quality of life of their citizens while spending tax money more wisely. The following examples are all enabled by insight thats gleaned from connecting devices and sensors that communicate data about their ecosystem and their status within it:

• Optimizing public transit. Collecting ticket sales data on mass transit to determine the level of service required during peak and low volume times. Understanding volume times helps manage overcrowding popular routes and improve citizen satisfaction. These insights can save tax dollars by eliminating or rerouting underutilized routes, creating express routes or adjusting the frequency during low volume times to reduce emissions.
• Peak times, peak pricing. Cities can increase fares and tolls during peak times to generate additional revenue for new transit or public works projects. Tolls or fares can be charged with a swipe of a card or a scan of a bar code, and road tolls can even be automated using license plate scanning.
• Enhancing communication. Not only do buses, trains, and other mass transit communicate with each other, public transit can notify commuters if its not on schedule to improve customer satisfaction. Alerting commuters of traffic congestion with real-time traffic monitoring through closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) and AI-enabled apps can reduce commuter frustrations. Commuters can adjust schedules and take alternate routes or avoid driving by taking public transit.
• Increasing flow. Traffic signal timing can be adjusted for smoother traffic flow by analyzing traffic patterns by signal location, time of day, proximity to busy parking garages, or even providing citizens with a view of parking availability. Cities can also better manage factors such as the logistics of inbound freight and regulate things like double parking of delivery trucks during congested timeframes.
• Staying cleaner. Cities can stay cleaner when trash bins signal that theyre full. Sensors automatically send alerts when a specific weight of the bin is met. Sanitation can then respond when notified rather than creating roadblocks by picking up half-empty rubbish bins.
• Ensuring safety. Cities are safer when law enforcement can identify crime hot spots and respond more quickly to incidents. Streetlights with cameras can be activated by motion detectors rather than running continuously through the night.

The focus of the next-generation smart city is enhancing the citizen experience. Citizens want to connect with their community, share ideas and concerns, learn whats going on, understand changes in services, and make requests in a frictionless and intuitive manner. They want to interact with the environment and city services as part of a well-planned, efficient, and livable eco-system. And finally, they want to connect with fellow citizens to advance common interests, enjoy public spaces, and be a part of the community.

This enhanced experience focuses on giving citizens a secure way to connect and build trust through exceptional customer service. Municipal employees are empowered to do more with fewer resources and are able to make informed decisions with a deeper understanding of the citizens they serve.

Better together

How do you get started creating your own smart city? First you need a flexible, yet strong foundation. Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a strong, agile backbone to build a smart city. Dynamics 365 for Field Service connects sensors and other IoT devices to create that solid foundation. Data generated from IoT devices is digested by Dynamics 365 for Field Service and automatically notifies technicians of irregularities. By design, the technology can isolate the issue and help technicians dispatch the right service personnel to resolve the issue before citizens are even aware there was a problem. Preemptive and predictive maintenance of city assets can save taxpayer dollars significantly by committing repairs before there are costly breakdowns. And knowing what the issue is and what parts are required for the fix the first time eliminates costly return visits.

Dynamics 365 for Field Service provides a solid foundation that can be layered with Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, a comprehensive customer service application that helps civic employees personalize every interaction by viewing the entire citizen journey over time. Cities can enhance the experience with 24-hour support with live chat and/or a virtual agent or bot. Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service was specifically designed to let those closest to the citizen create, launch, and maintain bots, eliminating the need for developers or data scientists. Bots can answer routine inquiries any time 24/7 and if the issue is more complex, deliver a warm hand-off to a city employee to handle.

To gain greater insight into the citizens of the community, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights can provide city managers interfacing with constituents greater insights into opportunities to improve the experience. Customer Service Insights leverages artificial intelligence to help municipal managers glean rich insights into gaps in service. By identifying these gaps, managers can prioritize what will have the greatest positive impact on the community.

Get smarter, get started

Let us help you enhance citizen experiences, increase sustainability and resilience, and promote innovation for your city services. Learn how Dynamics 365 for Field Service can be the foundation for your smart city.

The post Building smart cities of the future with Microsoft appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

We recently announced a change to the number of updates that will be released in a calendar year for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. As outlined in this topic, we will be moving to a release cadence where there will be 8 updates delivered in one calendar year. Our configuration experience in LCS, which shows an update calendar for the next 6 months, was not updated to reflect this due to a pending change in code. Starting today, your update calendar will accurately reflect the same 8 updates as our calendar year model. As per the announcement, we will not be releasing updates in September, December, March, and June. This means that the calendar now only reflects the dates when updates are released and will be rolled out to your environments. For example, we are not releasing an update in September, so your calendar will no longer show an upcoming update for that month.

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The post Lifecycle Services – July 2019 (Release 2) release notes appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 for Sales

Sales Health solution version: 9.0.1907.2003

What is the Sales Health solution?

Sales Health solution enables rules-based validations for Dynamics 365 for Sales components of a customer’s organization. Administrators can run the predefined rulesperiodically or whenever they encounter an issue to discover potential problems, such as wrong customization and common mistakes. If any of the predefined rules fail, administrators can follow the suggested mitigations to resolve the issues.

Why is it used?

The rules have detailed information about potential problems and their solutions. When these rules are run, they help customers resolve the issues on their own, and this helps reduce support calls.

When to run the rules and how the rules help?

User roles and their responsibilities

Users with the System Administrator role can do the following:

• Create an analysis job
• View the analysis result details
• Follow the output message and fix issues if the return status is “fail”
• Export the rule output to Excel and attach it to a service ticket if the issue related to sales components isn’t resolved

Users with the Solution Checker role can only view the analysis results.

Out-of-the-box rules

Here’s a list of the out-of-the-box rules that are available with the solution:

Rule return status

The rule status indicates whether the rule passed, failed, or there was a configuration error.

How to run the rules?

1. From the Dynamics 365 for Sales app, go to My Apps. You can access the My Apps page by going to the URL: https://<org URL>/apps.
2. Open Solution Health Hub.
3. To create a new analysis job, on the command bar, and select New.
4. In the Create Analysis Job dialog box, select the Lookup icon, and select the Sales Health rule set. Then, click OK.

5. A summary of rule set executions will be shown in a few seconds.
6. Click on each rule to see the detail output.

More details:

SolutionHealthHub

Powerapps checker

The post Sales Health solution appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

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Applies to: Dynamics 365 Product Visualize (version 1.3)

We’re pleased to announce the July release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Product Visualize, which adds three new features to the app:

• Ability to show or hide 3D model layers
• Gestures for manipulating 3D objects
• Ability to store annotations in the Common Data Service

Show or hide 3D model layers

In Dynamics 365 Product Visualize, a single 3D model consists of one or more layers, which you can think of as categorized objects, often grouped by function or location.

Layers are created in model design software tools such as CAD and can be built in a nested or flattened format.

To show or hide a layer, select the row for the layer you want to show or hide, and then select the Show or Hide button.

Layers can also include other layers. To expand or collapse a layer, tap the [+] or [-] button.

For more information on working with layers, see Show or hide layers in a 3D model in Dynamics 365 Product Visualize.

New gestures for manipulating 3D objects

After placing digital content in the environment using Dynamics 365 Product Visualize, users can use intuitive gestures to move, rotate, lift, and resize 3D objects:

For more information on the new gestures, see Move, rotate, or change the size of your model.

Storing annotations in the Common Data Service

As of this release, any new annotations (notes) will be stored in the Common Data Service instead of in Microsoft SharePoint. This makes the annotations available to other Dynamics 365 apps or connectors. To store annotations in the Common Data Service, you’ll need to upgrade the Dynamics 365 Product Visualize solution. The solution also enables to you see your notes directly from Dynamics 365 for Sales. Learn more about upgrading the Dynamics 365 Product Visualize solution.

Bug fix

The July release also fixes a bug related to automatically posting activities to the opportunity timeline.

The post July release of Dynamics 365 Product Visualize adds ability to show or hide 3D model layers and new gestures appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

If youre a partner led organization that depends on indirect channels as one of the primary business growth drivers, choosing the right partner engagement relationship management solution is the key to drive scale. The average partner program contains a number of distinct components. With partner solutions such as partner relationship management (PRM) and Ecosystem Cloud, alliance managers can manage complex solution sales across multiple vendors and service partners to drive revenue, reduce time to market, and minimize the effort of project management and coordination. Alliance managers and partner facing roles can in turn focus on driving sales processes and managing partner relationships.

95% of Microsofts commercial revenue flows directly through our partner ecosystem. More than 7,500 partners join that ecosystem every month and it is these partners that empower Microsoft to achieve more as they are often closer to our customers.

Were excited to share that with our newly announced partnership with two of the best in class channel management application vendors, Impartner and WorkSpan, Dynamics 365 for Sales customers can now accelerate revenue faster with partners. Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics partners with Impartner and WorkSpan below.

Impartner

Impartner and Microsoft have joined forces to energize your channel. Now, you can extend the sales process and pipeline visibility that you have for your direct sales team in Dynamics 365 for Sales to your partners with the Impartner partner relationship management solution. The Impartner PRM platform provides a large selection of turnkey modules to configure your PRM to match the needs of your channel. Some highlights include:

• Manage indirect sales with the same level of insight and scrutiny that is traditionally used to manage direct sales Rather than relying on quarterly business reviews, channel sales teams and their indirect sales partners can communicate and pass critical deal information back and forth through the portal on a 247 basis. Crack open the black box of channel sales and remove the surprise of revenue production (or the lack thereof) from the indirect channel.Our customers can not only see their channel pipeline, they can now report and manage it all from within Dynamics 365.
• Provide indirect sales partners with a single login experience to access all enablement tools to make them effective Impartner makes it easy for partners to manage leads and opportunities, request and use co-operative marketing funds, get trained and certified on product offerings, get updates on business goals and incentives, and much more, all through a perfectly personalized portal experience that matches your branding specifications.
• Bring process and discipline to the indirect sales channel Impartner provides a unified set of analytics and management tools that seamlessly align with the Microsoft suite of tools traditionally used to manage the direct sales channel. Learn how the collaboration between Microsoft and Impartner offers new ways indirect sales teams can more effectively engage with partners.

Get Started

• Impartner PRM + Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Impartner PRM on AppSource

Get started with Impartner

WorkSpan

The integration between WorkSpan and Dynamics 365 enables collaboration and closer alignment of sales motions between Dynamics customers internal sales teams and partner teams. Sales teams have greater trust in their partner teams that can lead to better sales velocity and increased revenues from partnerships. With WorkSpan Ecosystem Cloud, enterprises can orchestrate multi-partner and partner-to-partner sales motions, and deliver end-to-end offerings to enable the best customer experiences. This new integration gives Dynamics 365 customers:

• Opportunities in Dynamics that are seamlessly synced to WorkSpan. New partner opportunities, opportunity products, and updates to these joint opportunities in Dynamics are automatically synced to WorkSpan. In WorkSpan, enterprises can securely share critical opportunity data with partners and ensure that the right partner activities are triggered by the sales stage.
• Real-time view of the partner engagement and contribution, from within Dynamics. Sales teams in Dynamics will be able to see a view of the progress of the joint opportunity in WorkSpan. They can also see the partner activities and contribution on the deal like customer meetings, development of collateral and point of contact, and engage directly with the partner teams to accelerate the deal.

Get Started

• WorkSpan announces collaboration with Microsoft Dynamics 365
• WorkSpan on AppSource

Get started with WorkSpan

Check out how Impartner and WorkSpan help innovate and grow your partner channels.

We’re always looking for feedback and would like to hear from you. Please head to the Dynamics 365 Community to start a discussion, ask questions, and tell us what you think!

Solutions such as PRM and Ecosystem Cloud are available at the Microsoft AppSource today.

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