Creating Configuration Packages is a great way to import/export table data in Business Central. In this blog, we will go over some tips in creating these packages.

Building the Configuration Package:

In Configuration Packages, we give you the option to remove/add columns to the pages you are trying to integrate. It is recommended to make sure that the fields you include in the Configuration package are the fields that you would normally ‘manually’ enter when entering the transaction in the front end solution.

To access the fields you would click the Fields button on the Configuration Package page:

To Add/Remove a column from the integration you would check/uncheck the Include Field Check box:

You can also order the fields of a configuration package. The best practice would be to order the fields in the same order as you would manually entering the line. That way you ensure the proper checks are being made as some fields change based on another field.

To change the order of the columns you would use the Move up/Move Down buttons:

When manually entering a transaction, if there are fields that are automatically populated, before importing the transaction that field data will need to be in the system. For example, if you are importing Customers and you are including the Payment Terms, you need to make sure that the Payment Terms which you are including in the import exist in the system.

Adding Shortcut Dimensions (1&2) to a package:

There are a few ways to create Configuration Packages in Business Central. The first is through the Configuration Package page and the other is through Configuration Worksheet page. Through the Configuration Package page there is not an option to include Shortcut Dimensions in the integration. With the Configuration Worksheet there is an option check box called Dimensions as Columns. Below is the tooltip from that option field:

Specifies whether the configuration includes dimensions as columns. When you select the Dimensions as Columns check box, the dimensions are included in the Excel worksheet that you create for configuration. In order to select this check box, you must include the Default Dimension and Dimension Value tables in the configuration package.

Comparing integrated data vs manually entered data:

There are multiple ways to for data to flow into Business Central (Manual entry, Edit in Excel, Configuration Package/Worksheets). If the data you are importing is not looking correct on the page you can manually enter the line on the page and export the configuration package. You can then compare the manually entered line vs the integrated line to see what specific columns are populated that might be different than the imported file.

Integrating Historical data:

We dont allow importing into historical (Archive) tables. If you are importing Invoices and Payments/Cash Receipts those will need to be applied to be fully settled on the Customer/Vendor accounts.

Helpful Links:

Prepare a Configuration package

Importing Business Data from Other Finance Systems

The post Configuration Package tips from Business Central support. appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Every organization is becoming a data company, striving to manage and extract value from volumes of data across departments, from traditional sources such as operations, finance, sales, and marketing to digital sales and marketing initiatives, and new observational sources like device telemetry and customer sentiment analysis.

The struggle most organizations face is managing data stashed in silos across on-premises databases and cloud services and normalizing the data to be used by services to process, analyze, and extract meaningful value from it.

Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators take a big step to help solve these data conundrums.

With built-in collaboration with industry leaders, the freely-available accelerators extend the Common Data Model to include new entities to support a data schema for concepts within specific industries, enabling ISVs and other solution providers to quickly build industry vertical solutions.

Industry accelerators include powerful connected experiences that are designed to support common, existing business needs for specific industries, enabling solutions that deliver new insights and more personalized customer engagements. This helps simplify efforts to procure partner solutions or build custom applications by providing access to a unified data layer that saves customers the time and resources they would have spent creating their own proprietary data layer or attempting to integrate disparate systems and solutions.

Five industry accelerators are currently available, either in preview or generally available, to help accelerate innovation and deployment:

Automotive

The Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator is designed to provide a consistent, centralized data service that automotive organizations can use to deliver differentiated customer experiences. By building on the automotive common data model, businesses can merge data surrounding deals, sales contracts, specifications, fleet, warranties, inspections, test drives, branding, customer-vehicle relationships, vehicle and equipment, leads, service and after-sales management, and more.

The accelerator was developed in partnership with automotive technology partners such asAnnataandOxlo, to lower the barrier of entry for vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), mobility providers, dealer groups, and importers, and introduce standards that enable a richer customer experience.

A new white paper, Transform Automotive with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator, details the solutions and scenarios ideal for the Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator.

Banking and financial services

The Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is now generally available onAppSourceandGitHub. Developed in partnership with global financial services, 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)to rapidly bring to market solutions that deliver a better banking experience, one that differentiates banks from the competition and drives customer acquisition, loyalty, and long-lasting relationships.

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

Higher education

TheDynamics 365 Higher-Education Accelerator provides easy access to data entities such as students, faculty, extracurricular activities, previous education, test scores, courses, academic periods, programs, test types, registration status, and areas of interest. Institutions can create solutions that optimize student and faculty engagement, improve institutional effectiveness, and predict outcomes and gain insights from analytics.

When the accelerator is installed into Dynamics 365, the experience is transformed into one specifically built for higher education and allows institutions to quickly build PowerApps and Power BI visualizations. The higher-education data model, solutions, data samples, Power BI examples, software developer kit (SDK) extensions, and more are provided as part of the open-source creative license and available onGitHub and AppSource.

Nonprofit

Nonprofit organizations often contend with adopting technologies designed for for-profit companies that dont fit their specific needs. The Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, now in preview on GitHub and AppSource, aims to cut costs and boost efficiencies for nonprofits through interoperability, best practices, development of turnkey solutions, and deep analytics. It includes extensions to the Common Data Model to develop solutions for managing constituents, raising funds, grants and awards, program delivery, and tracking impact. The accelerator is developed in partnership with the Tech for social impact group within Microsoft Philanthropies, which works to empower nonprofit and humanitarian organizations around the world to advance their missions through the power of technology.

Read more about the Nonprofit Accelerator in this recent blog post, now available on AppSource and GitHub.

Healthcare

The Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator helps provide the interoperability you need to improve clinical care outcomes and drive more revenue. It unifies electronic health record (EHR) data while enabling a suite of systems and applications to help more easily manage and understand patient outcomes. When patient data is easily accessible, organizations can develop solutions that help gain a 360 view of patients and their individual experiences, better communicate and educate patients, make better patient care plans, decrease return visits, and more.

Download the eBook, Reimagining healthcare with Microsoft, for an overview of the accelerator and supporting solutions and scenarios. Also, keep up on the latest in our ongoing blog series by Doug Adams and Rebecca Crowe on the Microsoft US Health and Life Sciences team.

Take the next step

The five industry accelerators available today are the first in an ongoing effort to drive interoperability and innovation across industries. Stay tuned on the blog for updates and explore the resources below for a deeper dive into industry accelerators.

• Watch a presentation on the future of Microsoft Business Applications through industry accelerators
• Read an overview ofindustry accelerators
• Learn more aboutour investments in industry acceleratorsto enable ISVs and solution providers to help you succeed
• Learn more about theCommon Data Model

The post Industry Accelerators: Rapidly deploy solutions specific to your industry appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights helps customer service managers make better decisions and proactively improve customer satisfaction by providing AI-driven insights. We’ve been working hard to make the service available to as many people as possible, no matter what language they speak or use in their case data.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Customer Service Insights workspaces are available in 39 more languages, with Serbian (Cyrillic) and Serbian (Latin) coming soon. Along with the English-language service which is already generally available, that makes a total of 42 supported languages.

In addition, for public preview we’ve added four more language models (for a total of five) to support better automatic grouping of cases into topics.

Workspaces available in 42 languages

We know that people are more comfortable and productive working in their preferred language, so weve translated the user interface elements in the workspace, including menus, buttons, messages, and reports (not including your case data). Customer Service Insights displays your workspace based on the language set in your web browser. For more information on how to set your language preference, see choose your language settings.

The table shows a list of supported languages. (We ‘ll update this blog post when the two coming-soon languages are supported.)

Five language models for improved AI insights (Public Preview)

Customer Service Insights uses natural language understanding and other artificial intelligence technology to discover actionable insights by automatically grouping similar support cases into topics. To find similar cases more accurately, we’ve added four language models in addition to the English one, which includes three models optimized for French, German, and Spanish, and a general model for all languages. Each new language model has the capability to process English cases, in addition to the other language its optimized for. This feature is currently in public preview.

The language-specific models enable better understanding for the corresponding languages. When Customer Service Insights refreshes your workspace and processes the case data, it automatically detects the primary languages used in your cases. If most of your cases are in the languages supported by a single model (either English or one of bilingual language models), that model will be used to discover topics from all your cases (we set the threshold as 70% today and are open to your feedback). Otherwise, the general model is used.

More languages to come based on your feedback

You’ll find more details about language support in the help article Supported languages for Customer Service Insights. We’ll continue enhancing the language support in your workspace and the AI model. Your feedback is critical for us to prioritize whats next. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please don’t hesitate to submit an idea or vote on others ideas.

If you have questions about these or other features, we’re always available at the Customer Service Insights forum to help you.

Enjoy!

The post Announcing availability of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights in 42 languages appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

The landscape in which ERP solutions operate is undergoing major changes. Those changes are also being referred to as the digital transformation or the industrial evolution 4.0. For Dynamics NAV to stay relevant, the product had to join that transformation and become a cloud solution, operating in the heart of the intelligent cloud. It had to become Business Central.

This fundamental change of the technology ecosystem requires fundamental changes to Business Central, which now must deal with the increased complexity of the ecosystem in which it operates. With the business application being a monolith, made for a code customization model, there are several challenges which arise, as the application is:

Hard to understand and to document	Hard to extend and build upon	Hard to evolve	Hard to maintain

In order to restore simplicity and move forward efficiently, one of our initiatives is to componentize the monolithic application into smaller modules.

By componentizing the business logic in Business Central from the bottom-up, we get to start over and build the foundation, upon which a more extensible business logic can evolve. We are building a new foundation upon which the business applications of the future will be built.

Initially, we are factoring out all functionality that isnt business logic as such. This code is a gang of low level helpers that support functionality and frameworks we call it the System Application, the interface to the Business Central platform and cloud ecosystem:

By constructing the System Application out of small building blocks, the so-called modules, we achieve a variety of advantages, as modules have the following properties:

They separate concerns and are functionally coherent	They have stable, well documented APIs that are exposed through facades	They encapsulate complexity and hide implementation details	They have a small attack surface, which makes them easier to secure
They are faster to compile and publish, which supports a good developer experience	Their size and clear purpose allow for a code contribution model and focused design discussions	They are easier to performance test and monitor	They allow for individual versioning and effective upgrading

For the first release of the System Application, the collection of modules looks as follows:

As the foundation is work in progress, you should expect new modules to be appearing regularly. If you would like to look into the latest state, you can always go to the GitHub repository where we will publish the latest improvements: https://github.com/Microsoft/alappextensions

In a series of blog posts, you will learn more about the architecture of the System Application, and you will get more details about the individual modules.

The post Breaking the monolith: Introducing the Business Central System Application appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

The new Service scheduling on Unified interface in built on top of Universal resource scheduling. If you are using legacy Service scheduling on web client and are planning your move to Unified interface, you need to plan your migration of data from legacy Service scheduling data to the new one.

Once you plan your migration, you can do the following.

• Manually configure records in the new experience. For more information, see Configure entity records in the new scheduling experience, or,

• Migrate using the migration solution.

Get Migration solution

Join the preview program on Insiders portal

Go to Dynamics 365 Service Scheduling – Migration to join the preview program on Insider portal and provide org details on which youd like to enable the migration tool

Install the migration solution

Go to Dynamics 365 admin center and follow the installation steps to install the migration solution. After successful installation, go to Customer service hub Scheduling Data migration

Migrate data

As part of the data migration, youll be able to migrate all the configuration and scheduling data associated with legacy Service scheduling

• Migrate configuration data

The following will be the snapshot of configuration data post migration

• Migrate Service activity scheduling data

The migrated Service activities will have equivalent Bookings for the resources that have been scheduled on legacy Service scheduling

Learn more about Service Scheduling migration tool

• The preview is currently supported in English
• Learn more about the Migration Tool, from the feature documentation

We are eager to see how you leverage the migration tool in your migration to the new Service scheduling experience, and we look forward to your feedback!

The post Migrate from legacy Service Scheduling to the Service Scheduling on Unified interface appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Applies to: Field Service version 8.8.2.160 on Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement version 9.x

Visit the Admin Center for Dynamics 365 solutions page to install the update. For details, refer to how to install or update a preferred solution.

Please visit Field Service Docs for Field Service updates and related content.

Field Service enhancements

Enhancements

• Performance enhancements.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Master Field of Child Assets (Sub-Assets) Do Not Update When Parent Asset’s Parent is Changed.
• Fixed: Fix incorrect field description of Travel Charge Item (msdyn_travelchargeitemid) field on FS settings.
• Fixed: New button missing on the standard invoice form if form does not have FS library.
• Fixed: When Work Order Product line status value is set to Used by Default, the work Order Totals are not being calculated.
• Fixed: Conditional upgrade issue when both FS and PSA are present, improved handling of Generic Resources resource type required.
• Fixed: Issue converting case to work order where billing account is not carried to the work order from case.

Connected Field Service (CFS) enhancements

Enhancements

• Device Readings (preview): To help you understand the current state of a device, its repair history, and the effect of performed work orders, the Connected Field Service add-in displays near real time device readings and historical sensor measurements in a chart alongside work order details. This feature utilizes Azure Time Series Insights for providing this embedded IoT experience. For more information about the device readings capabilities, please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/field-service/cfs-visualizations-iot-hub
• The connected field service deployment app has modified to optionally provision Azure Time Series Insights in both new and existing CFS deployments.
• Solution Health Checker: New rules have been added for Connected Field Service in solution health checker, that checks for alert parenting configuration as well as endpoint configuration for IoTHub.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Function msdyn.caseForm.onLoad on Case form is missing Library and causing an error.
• Fixed: Cryptic error on IoTDevice form for when an IoTDevice creation fails since the DeviceId already exists for another device.

The post Enhancements and Bug Fixes for Field Service Version 8.8.2.160 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

With the newest version of Outlook clients, the Outlook team has changed the way add-in manifest files specify their contextual rules for matching text within the body of the email. This change rolled out in requirement set version 1.5, which is used by the latest version of the Outlook 2016 desktop client as well as the new version of OWA. In short, the Document View add-in is no longer usable in the newest Outlook clients.

Fix on the way

The Document View Outlook add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has been updated to version 2.1.0.0, which includes the required changes so that any document numbers found within the email body will be highlighted once again, giving you the ability to quickly look at document information in the context of your email. This update is part of the upcoming 2019 release wave 2 for Business Central.

Great! What about in the meantime?

If youre feeling adventurous, you can download and modify your Document View add-in manifest file so that you can get your Document View back sooner than thenext major update of Business Central.

Step One: Download the add-in manifest file

The first step is to get to the Office Add-in Management page in Business Central and download the Document View manifest file.

This will download a file titled Document View.xml to your machine. We will need to open this file in a text editor.

Step Two: Append a new section to the add-in manifest file

Once you have opened your Document View manifest file, identify the closing </OfficeApp> tag.

In between </Rule> and </OfficeApp>, we will be adding a new XML section to the file. Make a new line after the </Rule> element, then copy and paste the XML below into this area.

<DisableEntityHighlighting>false</DisableEntityHighlighting> <VersionOverrides xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/mailappversionoverrides" xsi:type="VersionOverridesV1_0"> <!-- VersionOverrides for the v1.1 schema --> <VersionOverrides xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/mailappversionoverrides/1.1" xsi:type="VersionOverridesV1_1"> <Requirements> <bt:Sets DefaultMinVersion="1.5"> <bt:Set Name="Mailbox" /> </bt:Sets> </Requirements> <Hosts> <Host xsi:type="MailHost"> <DesktopFormFactor> <!-- DetectedEntity --> <ExtensionPoint xsi:type="DetectedEntity"> <Label resid="contextLabel" /> <SourceLocation resid="detectedEntityUrl" /> <Rule xsi:type="RuleCollection" Mode="And"> <Rule xsi:type="ItemIs" ItemType="Message" /> <Rule xsi:type="RuleCollection" Mode="Or"><Rule xsi:type="ItemHasRegularExpressionMatch" ... /> <Rule xsi:type="ItemHasRegularExpressionMatch" ... /></Rule> </Rule> </ExtensionPoint> </DesktopFormFactor> </Host> </Hosts> <Resources> <bt:Urls> <bt:Url id="detectedEntityUrl" DefaultValue="Copy URL From Above" /> </bt:Urls> <bt:ShortStrings> <bt:String id="contextLabel" DefaultValue="Document View" /> </bt:ShortStrings> </Resources> </VersionOverrides> </VersionOverrides>

Figure 3 – New manifest section

Make note of the two highlighted sections. In the next step, we will copy values from the original part of your manifest file, replacing these values.

Step Three: Update the templated values

Regular Expression Rules

In the original part of the manifest file, there were either one or two regular expression rules. One is to match document names (such as invoice, order, and so on), and one matches document numbers (such as SQU-1001, INV-1000, and so on). Find these two rules (depending on how you have your number series set up, there may only be one rule). Then copy them and replace the rules in the new section (highlighted in Figure 3).

Detected Entity URL

The last thing to update is the detectedEntityUrl value within the Resources section of the manifest file. You will get this from one of the URLs in the top part of the manifest file, within the FormSettings section.

Once you have made the required changes, make sure to save your manifest file. It is now ready to deploy to Outlook.

Step Four: Deploy your add-in manifest file

To deploy the new manifest file, we will need to open up OWA. As there are multiple ways to deploy Outlook add-ins, if you already have a preferred method, you can do that and skip this step. The easiest way Ive found to deploy add-ins is to navigate directly to this URL: https://outlook.office.com/owa/?path=/options/manageapps. Give it a second to load, and then you should see something similar to Figure 6.

Click the + button at the top of the add-in list. Then choose Add from a file. In the flyout window on the right, browse to your updated manifest file, then click Next and review the confirmation warning. Finally, click Install. Assuming everything in your manifest file is correct, you will get a success confirmation.

Thats it

Your Outlook add-in is now ready to go, and it should now highlight document numbers the same way that you are used to.

The post Where did my Dynamics 365 Business Central Document View in Outlook go? appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

If you are upgrading customers from Dynamics NAV 2017 or earlier versions to the latest version of Dynamics 365 Business Central, then you probably have an existing Help solution for the customized functionality in their old Dynamics NAV solution. However, Business Central does not support the field-based approach to context-sensitive Help that Dynamics NAV 2017 and earlier use. So what to do?

The difference between Help in Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central

In this blog post, I will suggest a couple of options. None of them are particularly simple or easy workarounds, because Business Central understands Help in a completely different way compared to Dynamics NAV. It’s far easier to extend and customize the Help for Business Central than it was for Dynamics NAV 2009, for example – at least, I think so. The structure for the Help for the base application in Dynamics NAV was easy to understand but annoying to maintain: We shipped thousands of HTML files with each release, and you then had to guess which of them were completely new, which had been updated, and what that meant for your customized Help.

Here’s a list that I have shared before that outlines the journey the docs have been on since 1999:

Many of you never cared what Microsoft did with the Help, such as those of you who never installed the Microsoft content, or if you gave your customers PDF files rather than installed Help. That’s totally fine, and this blog post is not meant for you. Instead, I recommend that you read our content on how to migrate your content.

The rest of this blog post is for those of you who have existing content in the object-based format for a version of Dynamics NAV. In other words, you were planning to use the familiar Help Server with files such as T_12345.htm, T_12345_1.htm, N_12345.htm, R_12345.htm, and B_12345.htm.

But for Business Central, that no longer works for context-sensitive Help. Business Central relies on tooltips for the field descriptions and a mapping between page objects and conceptual Help for the description of features and workflows. So again: What to do?

Option 1: Use the object-based content as-is

This option is for those of you who prefer to keep things as-is until Microsoft comes up with a magic solution of some sort. That’s a perfectly legitimate approach, but it would mean that your Business Central customers would not get access to context-sensitive Help for your functionality.

If that’s an acceptable experience for your customers, then you can deploy a Help Server instance, populate it with your HTML files, and make sure that as much as possible is listed in the ToC.xml file so that users can find the relevant Help through navigation.

On a related note, you can still download the files that were made available for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017.

The download consists of 45 CAB files with the content from the Dynamics NAV 2016 DVD rebranded to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017. The download includes CAB files with the W1 application Help translated into each of the supported languages plus the local functionality for the country/region where that language is spoken. There are also CAB files with local functionality in English. The files were published as a single download so each administrator could choose exactly the files that they needed at the time. For more information, see Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 Classic Help Download.

Option 2: Update the Page Documentation system table with page-level UI-to-Help mapping

This option is for those of you who like to play around with PowerShell. I don’t, so I haven’t been able to give you an example of who to populate that mysterious system table that in the current version of Business Central provides a UI-to-Help mapping between page objects and Help.

In the current version, table 2000000198 Page Documentation, lists all page objects in the default version of Business Central and associates each of them with a target Help article. This means that multiple page objects can be associated with the same Help article, such as when a specific workflow involves multiple pages.

The table associates page IDs with target articles, but the URL to where to find the target article is specified at the application level that defaults to thehttps://docs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/business-central/ site. In an extension, you can overrule this URL so that all calls for Help go to your site instead, for example. For more information, seeConfiguring the Help Experience for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Caution: The following content is intended as an example. You can choose to do things differently, and while you can use these scripts as inspiration, reusing the Dynamics NAV legacy Help, the legacy Dynamics NAV Help Server, and populating the system table,Page Documentation, is not the recommended path going forward. We recommend that you convert any existing content to the Business Central format instead, and that you fork our GitHub repos.

The way that Microsoft populated the system table was based on an Excel sheet in the following format:

In this example, you want to replace the values of the fields in theRelative Pathcolumn with classic page-level Help files:

With the Windows client and C/SIDE with the Object Designer soon gone, you cannot run that table anymore from the development environment. But you can find it in the SQL Server database and manipulate it there, for example. Or use PowerShell to set the ContextSensitiveHelpPage property on the relevant AL page objects, for example.

This option means that your users get context-sensitive Help on a page level, and you can then let them rely on Search and links to find information about tables, fields, and reports, if that is important to them and to you.

Option 3: Squeeze your field-level Help into tooltips and ditch the rest

This option is for those of you who want to deliver an experience that complies with the Business Central user assistance model but are fed up waiting for us to deliver you tools to help you achieve that. We might still surprise you in that area, but I can’t blame you for thinking you’re better off figuring it out on your own.

Again, this is where my lack of skills in PowerShell scripting comes into play. But I know it’s possible to write a script that takes the opening paragraph from a field topic such as T_12345_1.htm and puts that into the TooltipML property on the relevant page object. Or even better: Port the field description into the Tooltip property elements in the XLIFF file for your app, using whatever third party tool you use to process XLIFF files.

The following snippet illustrates what this might look like in an XLIFF file.

<ding="utf-8"?><xliff version="1.2" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.2" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.2 xliff-core-1.2-transitional.xsd"> <file datatype="xml" source-language="en-US" target-language=da-DK original="ALProject1"> <body> <group id="body"> <trans-unit id="PageExtension 3469146285 - Control 2143966609 - Property 1295455071" maxWidth="999" size-unit="char" translate="yes" xml:space="preserve"> <source>Specifies the company's taxpayer identification number.</source> <target>Specificerer firmaets skatteydernummer.</target> <note from="Xliff Generator" annotates="general" priority="3">Page - Page</note> </trans-unit> </group> </body> </file></xliff>

Yes, you guessed it: We’re still working on getting our tooltips into XLIFF files.

Is this yet another breaking change?

No, it’s not. Business Central was born as a cloud-first offering, and the Business Central user assistance model serves that purpose. Getting from the Dynamics NAV 2016 Help experience to the Business Central user assistance model is not even as big a challenge as when we dropped the application manuals – and that wasn’t all that big a change to begin with because most of you kept the manuals from Navision Financials and shared them with your customers, if you were working on the product back then.

Then why is it so complicated, you may ask. Well, I might answer, it’s isn’t all that complicated. Here I have outlined a couple of scenarios, and there are probably many more. Depending on your particular solution and which format your existing Help is, things are either a bit tough or smooth and easy. Just like the code behind your solution – code customization makes upgrades more difficult, that’s just how it is. With the Help, you can even take it by degrees, slowly reworking the content you already have.

To make things easier going forward, join us in GitHub! For more information, see Extend, Customize, and Collaborate on the Help for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Wait! What about Dynamics NAV 2018?

Oh, yeah … As you hopefully know, we were working on Dynamics NAV 2018 and Business Central at the same time, and as a result, the code change that disabled the classic way of looking up context-sensitive Help based on object IDs trickled back into Dynamics NAV 2018.

We did it on purpose at the time as part of a simplification effort that aimed at making things better for Business Central online, but we forgot that it would affect Dynamics NAV 2018 customers.

The good news is that you can use your classic object-based Help on a Help Server instance for both Dynamics NAV 2018 and Business Central on-premises. But as explained above, the website cannot give your users context-sensitive Help.

I hope we will have good news about context-sensitive Help in a few months, so cheer up, and let’s move forward.

The post Reusing classic object-based Help on your Dynamics 365 Business Central Help Server appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

In todays competitive buying market, customers have access to more content, purchasing channels, and brand options than ever before. With an overload of information and choices available, businesses can no longer survive by simply providing the bare minimum necessary to keep customers from leaving. Instead, they must demonstrate they understand and value their customers and can deliver exceptional experiences and outcomes.

While a highly relevant customer experience is essential, simply implementing a personalized marketing strategy is no longer enough. Its necessary that organizations structure themselves around the customer across all lines of business. They must stop looking at customers from siloed marketing, sales, and service perspectives and leverage a 360-degree view of the customer that accounts for every interaction they have with the brand.

Several data management platforms and methods exist, like customer relationship management (CRM) and master data management (MDM), that organizations often leverage to help consolidate data sources, though these solutions still leave the burden of configuration, ongoing management, and compliance all on the shoulders of IT while isolating marketing and IT functions.

Beyond the traditional customer relationship management (CRM) platform

Creating highly personal experiences across all channels and touch points like email, social media, purchases, or contact centers, is extremely difficult when customer data is fragmented in multiple independent applications and departments. According to a marketing insights study by Adobe, 60 percent of companies still struggle to personalize content in real time. And according to Marketo, 78.6 percent of consumers said they are only likely to engage with a brand using coupons or other offers if those promotions are directly tied to how they have interacted with the brand previously.

While typical customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that most organizations rely on can help surface some customer data, they typically only deliver narrowly specific details like a customers name, address, or basic purchase history. In order to add or process additional types of data, organizations are challenged with integrating sources across multiple departments and third-party applications. Establishing and maintaining those connections can cost excess time and money, and to derive any actionable insights requires additional investment in machine learning or analytics capabilities.

Why master data management (MDM) misses the mark

With a set of processes requiring configuration and management by IT, master data management brings together data throughout an organization and essentially delivers a master record, ensuring data accuracy and consistency. What it can do is help provide a singular point of reference for structured data including customer names, phone numbers, and transactions, yet it cant account for the large quantity of unstructured and event-based data such as social media engagements, emails, phone call transcripts, etc. generated by todays customers. Master data management still requires that data be integrated in multiple platforms and external marketing tools in order to surface insights and take action, which is difficult and time consuming for IT and creates potential slowdowns and roadblocks for marketing teams who need the ability to react immediately to customer needs.

Deliver customer-centric experiences with a customer data platform

The ability to deliver exceptional experiences at scale requires a complete, unified view of customers from both transactional and behavioral data that enables intelligent, actionable insights, something that many companies still struggle to achieve and results in poor, disjointed customer experiences. This is where the customer data platform (CDP) is helping to evolve the customer experience landscape, providing organizations with the means to not only gain a deep understanding of their customers, but to then leverage insights that power proactive action and meaningful engagement throughout every touch point.

What sets Dynamics 365 Customer Insights apart?

In a world where companies have only a few minutes to make a lasting impression, organizations need to do more than simply compile customer data they need to derive actionable insights and get those insights into the hands of every employee who interacts with customers. Marketing, sales, and service professionals need firsthand access to holistic customer information, enabling seamless and intelligent customer experiences no matter which department theyre interacting with.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, organizations can seamlessly unify data from every channel in a much simpler fashion and derive insights to enable intelligent action at every touch point. Effortlessly connect data from every source of interaction and arm employees with a single source of truth right within the external business applications they use every day including seamless, pre-built integration with the rest of the Dynamics 365 marketing, sales, and service applications many organizations already leverage.

Unlike other customer data platforms, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a self-service solution that enables faster time to value with zero to minimal consulting engagement, freeing up time, costs, and resources typically required from IT. Atop a unified data estate, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights utilizes analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to create 360-degree customer profiles with actionable insights, adding proprietary customer data enrichment with Microsoft Graph for more complete customer segments. Organizations can connect to a myriad of data sources to seamlessly run analytics on their data estate through Power BI, build custom lines of business applications through PowerApps, and leverage intelligent insights to trigger business processes in Microsoft Flow. Additional extensibility is made possible through a large ecosystem of Microsoft partners to help organizations optimize and tailor solutions that address specific industry or business needs, maximizing the capabilities of their marketing, sales, and service departments.

Learn more

Its exciting to see how Microsoft is innovating in the area of the customer data platform and empowering organizations to harness their customer data to change the way they engage with customers and drive results. To learn more, download this customer experiences eBook or visit the Customer Insights website get started with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The post Customer data platform: Going beyond MDMs and CRMs appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

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 3.10.0.31)

• Bug fixes
  • Time and Expense
    • Fixed: Importing time entry from resource bookings only imports time entry for the start time date.
    • Fixed: On initial load of time entry grid control, clicking on a row check box doesn’t work.
    • Fixed: When window width is reduced, the grid width is not resized to account for the check mark column.
    • Fixed: Selecting a submitted row and clicking delete should not remove the row.
    • Fixed: Approve recall requests failures for journalline attribute msdyn_transactionorigin1.msdyn_transaction.
  • Project Management
    • Fixed: Project Approval fails at IsUserApprover.
    • Fixed: Tracking view numbers for planned cost are incorrect for tasks that are manually scheduled on the WBS.
    • Fixed: ResourceAssignmentCalculatorEquallyDivide generates negative hour values for effort contours in an assignment.
    • Fixed: Custom control TS build does not properly replace constants with their values.
  • Sales
    • Fixed: Quote and Opportunity line form repeats name of record twice in form title.
    • Fixed: Approve recall requests failures for journal line attribute.
    • Fixed: Associated view for actuals on the project contract must show actuals of any transaction class.

Project Service Automation Team

The post Release Notes for Project Service Automation Update Release 10 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Increased customer engagement, time savings, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction are factors driving many organizations to deploy customer service bots.

And its easy to see why – customer service bots, such as those built on the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service framework, enable scalable and cost-effective solutions for businesses to fulfill this drive.

The customers for these bots could be external customers or employees within a company, or any relationship between an end user (customer) and a product or service.

But in order to build a successful bot there are a number of considerations and concerns.

In this blog, Im going to go over the importance of identifying your business processes and therefore what needs to be automated and what you should consider when thinking about who your customers are.

Identify your business processes

Before you can start planning a bot, you need to have an idea of what business processes you want the bot to handle.

The very first step is to look at identifying those business processes that can be fulfilled with the least amount of human interaction, but that provide users with a solution to their queries.

For example, a retail organization can review the various business processes within their customers shopping journey; an example is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Example customer journey showing retail business processes

In this example, a customer support bot could help users find the right product at the best price. It could also help in knowing if a product is available in inventory depending on the shipping type.

If you are a subscription-based or service-based business, your business process could be similar to the cycle described in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Subscription-based and service-based cycle

For these types of businesses, a customer service bot can play a part prior to starting the service by helping customers choose the right plan, starting or stopping the service, and usage of the service including helping with service interruption or outages, billing, and payment.

These are just two common examples. Other examples include help desk support for an IT department in an organization, in which case the bot could assist with common troubleshooting steps, or a government agency that needs to provide licenses and permit forms to citizens.

Know your customers

Your customers, their segmentation, and personality traits play an important role in successful usage of your bot. Some of these factors include:

• Age group Do your customers fit within defined age groups?
• Type of users How proficient are your customers with the product or service?
• Geographic spread Where are your customers located?
• Language Do your customers speak the same language, or do you need to support multiple languages?

Each of these customer segmentation traits impacts the design, length, and types of interaction that need to be automated.

For example, some segment of customers will only use a support bot after they have exhausted all self-service options. On the other hand, some customers who will wait for a solution after a lengthy conversation with a human agent might not exhibit the same level of patience with a bot, and thus its important to deliver a solution quickly.

The geographic spread of your customer base can impact the design of the bot, as solutions within the topic could vary within geography. For example, solutions for payment acceptance problems will differ from country to country due to different business rules and payment acquirers across countries.

In addition to who your customers are, its important to analyze what your customers care about the most. Similar to the Pareto principle where “80% of problems may be caused by as little as 20% of the product, our experience with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service bots has shown that 80% of customer queries are related to the following top 20% of topics or features:

• Most popular programs
• Most marketed or newly launched
• Most problematic business process of your business (for example, visibility of detailed order tracking, real time inventory visibility across multiple channels, payments and billing)
• Complex to understand for end consumers (for example, complex licensing or pricing plans, complex business rules that are not easily understood)
• New releases or feature updates

Every business is different. Hence, it is imperative to figure out the right business processes for your Virtual Agent. Start with building these top 20% of topics that cause 80% of problems to drive maximum containment with best value.

In this blog Ive gone over some of the considerations when first designing or thinking about launching a customer service bot framework. In particular, its important to identify the business processes that you most want to automate, and to understand which customers you need to target based on your product.

Stay tuned for more blogs in the future about further considerations when designing a customer support solution with bots on the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service framework!

To learn more, visit:

• Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service:https://aka.ms/GetMyVirtualAgent
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights:https://aka.ms/GetMyInsights

The post Build a better bot: know your business and customers appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Were pleased to announce the latest update for the Project Service Automation, V2.4.15.33, 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

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Entity Views not following ‘Only Related Records’ data source rules.

End of Life Notice

Note: After February 2020, we will no longer support Field Service and Project Service Automation legacy versions.

This includes:

• Project Service Automation (PSA) version 1.x or 2.x
• Field Service (FS) version 6.x or 7.x

Please ensure that you have plans to upgrade to the latest version of these solutions. These solutions should be upgraded no later than February 2020.

Administrators can follow instructions to enable their environments to install the latest PSA or FS, or you can contact support to enable the install on your organizations.

We have published a quick start guide with special focus on Field and Project Service to help organizations get started in the upgrade process.

Lastly, please plan to conduct the upgrade and test your use cases in a non-production environment prior to conducting this upgrade on a production environment.

Project Service Automation Team

The post Release Notes for Project Service Automation Update Release 18, V2.4.15.33 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

As part of getting your Dynamics 365 Business Central app validated for AppSource, you are expected to deliver content that helps users understand how to use the functionality that your app provides. Think of this as Help or docs, and you’re off to a good start. But there is more to it than that, and that’s what this blog post will try to help you get onboard with.

The Business Central user assistance model – and what that means to you

We have three levels of user assistance, meaning ways in which the product helps users understand what is going on. You can read about that in the docs, but here are the three things we want you to do:

• Help users get started
• Help users get unblocked
• Help users learn more

Help users get started

The user assistance concept of Get Started is not just about getting started with Business Central on the first day. Its also about getting started all the other days, and about getting started with infrequent and unfamiliar tasks. Assistance in the shape of wizards is very helpful for setting things up, or filling in data for a complicated report, for example. Designing Home pages that are truly designed for that particular role or job is also very useful in helping users get started with their work every day they can easily get to their most important tasks, and that means that Business Central helps them get their work done more efficiently.

You’ll also want to make it easy to onboard new customers – and your existing customers’ new employees. For example, you can prepare a trial version of Business Central that you share with prospects and new users so that they can try out Business Central, or you can do in-hourse training based on such a trial tenant. Add tours or in-product videos, since such content can help with the onboarding.

We dont have a firm rulebook that you can measure your app against, but we encourage you to design your interface with the intention to help users get started every day in mind.

Help users get unblocked

Even the best designed user interface can still be confusing to some. It can be difficult to predict what users will find confusing, and that is why we have applied tooltips to all (or almost all) controls and actions in the base application. In combination with descriptive captions and instructional text, the tooltips are our current implementation of embedded user assistance, which is an important principle in todays world of software design.

The tooltips are there to help users unblock themselves by providing an answer to the most likely questions the users might have, such as What data can I input here? or What is the data used for?. Keep that in mind when you develop the user interface of your solution.

Help users learn more

So, you added the tooltips, you designed a user interface that helps users get started with their work, but the users are still asking for more?

Yes, of course they are users are people, and people always want more, in case you didnt know that from your own experience. But thats not the point of the docs that we publish under the user assistance concept of Learn more. This content is in part intended to answer those questions that the user interface (including the tooltips) cant answer, such as where that page fits into the bigger workflow, or what comes next, or what would be the alternative, and so on.

Were publishing our content to an online library (Docs.microsoft.com) so that it can also serve as onboarding material and as feature overviews that you can share with prospects. The content is written in MarkDown, and our source files are available in a public GitHub repo so that you can extend and customize it for your customers. You can read about that in the Contributor Guide.

The link between the Help articles and the various pages in the user interface is managed based a mapping between page objects and target articles, but the configuration of where those targets are published is set at the application level – and that means that you can customize that configuration.

Customize the Help experience

With the April’19 release, we made it easier for you to customize the links to the Help. Your app can hi-jack the configuration of where the content lives for all or specific languages, and you can add context-sensitive, relative links to the Help in your code for individual page objects. If your solution is used on-premises, then you can configure the clients to use either an online library (actually, it can also be a private website) or the legacy Dynamics NAV Help Server.

You dont have to convert your existing content to MarkDown, but we recommend that you do because it makes your job easier down the road. Working in GitHub and MarkDown means that you have access to a world of open source tools and no longer have a hard dependency on Microsoft providing you with tools. For more information, see Migrate Legacy Help to the Business Central Format.

Configuring for online and on-premises

You can use the same content for both online and on-premises deployments of Business Central – we do that: The same user interface design, the same tooltips, the same Learn more content. But you can also choose to have one set of content published to a public website for your online customers, and another set of content published to your on-premises customers’ own websites.

In fact, you can make things as simple and as complicated as you like. The rulebook is pretty much gone, and the ties are off. You can extend and customize the user assistance so that it works for your solution and your users.

Example

But let’s take a look at what it could like like in your AL app.

App-level configuration

Let’s say that you’re building a localization app, or perhaps you’re building a vertical solution. In both cases, you’ll want to take over the configuration of where the links to find context-sensitive Help. This is done in the app.json file for your app as shown in this example:

"contextSensitiveHelpUrl": "https://mysite.com/{0}/documentation","supportedLocales": ["en-GB", "en-IE],

In this example, thecontextSensitiveHelpUrl and supportedLocales properties specify that the links to the Help must go to the mysite.com site when the user is using the product in one of the two specified languages. In contrast, the help property in the app manifest specifies the link that describes the app or solution itself, and it’s used in AppSource.

That’s it.

Page-level configuration

Let’s say you’re building an app that adds a couple of page objects to the base application in Business Central. In this case, you’ll want to add a link to context-sensitive Help to each of your pages as shown here:

page 50101 "Reward Card"{PageType = Card;SourceTable = Reward;ContextSensitiveHelpPage = 'sales-rewards';}

With relative links like these, you don’t have to publish Help for the base application on your site, just Help for your particular solution. That’s what these object-level links do. The experience for the users is that if they want Help for the Customer Card page, they get Microsoft’s Help. If they want Help for the Rewards page, they get your Help. If they want Help for your Rewards field on the Customer Card page, they get your Help as well. Easy, isn’t it?

On-premises configuration

For on-premises deployments, you have access to configuration and customization in a different way. On-premises, you own the end-to-end customization. As mentioned, you have a choice between using the same online library as your app in AppSource uses. Alternatively, use the legacy Dynamics NAV Help Server. For more information, see On-premises deployments.

Third party tools

There is a world of tools and best practices out there, isn’t that just great? The hard requirements are gone so that you can pursue the experience that your customers expect. Here are a couple of examples of what you can choose to do:

• You can add tours based on 3^rd party providers such as ClickLearn or WalkMe
• You can record and publish videos to highlight your features
• You can create and print a manual
• You can publish e-learning tutorials to a public or private site

For example, some of you have told me about an Open Source project where you can create content in MarkDown and then publish to an auto-generated website. Its kind of cool, so check it out at https://www.mkdocs.org/. If you choose MKDocs, then you can configure your solution to use that site as the “online library” described above.

Oon a related note, one of my colleagues has published some tips and tricks for publishing to your own clone of Docs.microsoft.com on his private blog. There, he describes how you can automate the build processes in a way that evenI (almost) understand.

Migrating content

For those of you who have been customizing the Help for Dynamics NAV, this is a major change. I hope you’ll agree with me that it’s a change to the better. You don’t have to use file-compare tools to figure out what we have changed in strangely formatted HTML files. You also don’t have to build anything using a particular tool.

On the other hand, some of you have made huge investments to the Help customization for Dynamics NAV. So what about that, now that you’re moving to Business Central? I wrote about this in another blog post: Reusing classic object-based Help on your Dynamics 365 Business Central Help Server.

You can also find links to related content in the docs at Extend, Customize, and Collaborate on the Help for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

PS: This blog post was first published in December 2018 on the Communities platform but has been migrated and updated here on the Dynamics 365 blog.

The post Extending and customizing the Help in Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Earlier, I blogged about the Dynamics 365 Business Central user assistance model and what we expect you to do about it. In this blog post, I’ll talk more about the Learn More content that we publish on the Docs.microsoft.com site, how we collaborate on delivering it, the tools and processes we use, and how you might be able to adopt some of our best practices.

The purpose of the docs

As I mentioned in the earlier blog post, we have three layers of user assistance where the context-sensitive links to Learn more play an important part by providing context and links to additional information. In other words, this is not really product Help in the classic sense where the product Help is intended to answer all questions in daily use of the product. There is nothing wrong with that type of Help and, believe me, I’ve written lots of it. But when we started work on what is now Dynamics 365 Business Central, we decided to tackle user assistance in a different way. Business Central is cloud-first, and that changes how we think about the functionality and the user experience.

So the docs are still docs, but the content is not an online version of a user manual. The product itself does far more of the job of helping people figure out how to complete tasks compared to way back when I started working on software in the ’90s.

In other words, the docs are there as a supplement, not a prerequisite. This applies to the business functionality content more than to the developer and IT-Pro content, but we work on both sets of content in roughly the same way: In MarkDown files in GitHub repositories where we collaborate with program managers (PMs) and engineers to develop the content.

Let’s take a look at how that works in the daily lives of the Business Central team.

How content is created and published

All content on the docs.microsoft.com site is created and published in the same way:

1. Person A creates a MarkDown file, adds content, and then submits it to a GitHub repository.
   The new file is automatically processed by our build system for the docs.microsoft site and rendered on an internal staging server where we can preview the content before it’s published.
2. If Person A is a technical writer like me, they will then send a link to the internal staging server to the PM and/or software engineer that they are collaborating with for technical review. The reviewers will submit a pull request with changes that Person A will then merge into the relevant branch.
3. If Person A is a PM or engineer, they will ask a writer to review the changes before the pull request is merged into the master branch. The writer usually makes light edits as part of the pull request and, if needed, more substantial edits in a separate iteration.
4. After a couple of iterations, the content is ready to be published as part of the weekly refresh (we publish every single Monday, in case you didn’t know), unless it has to wait until the next major update for Business Central.
   We have subbranches for individual features that are then merged into the relevant branch when it’s ready to be published as part of the monthly service update or the major update in April or October. Keeping track of what must be published when is not always easy, but we have two main tracks: Bug fixes and new features for the next major release.

The build system that the docs.microsoft.com site uses is essentially a bunch of scripts, but the main engine is the DocFx tool that you can also use. For more information, see https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/. We’re privileged by the fact that Microsoft is a pretty large company, so I don’t know much about the build system because it’s managed by a completely different team in a completely different part of the company in a completely different country.

Working in MarkDown files

I’m a technical writer, so I do heavy-duty work in MarkDown files in my local clone of the different repositories on my laptop. The PMs that I work with mainly do more lightweight work, so they tend to just make changes right in the browser at the equivalent of https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/dynamics365smb-docs/tree/master/business-central. But let’s take a closer look at the tools I use. These examples are based on our internal, private repo that you can’t access, but the same principles apply to the public repos.

First of all, I use Visual Studio Code with a couple of nifty extensions, not least the Docs Authoring Pack, which I highly recommend. In general, jump over and take a look at what some of my colleagues are publishing in the Docs Contributor Guide!

Then I use GitHub Desktop to get updates from GitHub and then push my changes back to GitHub – my teammates are working in the same repositories as I am, and we synchronize changes several times a day to make sure we aren’t undoing each other’s work. It’s one of the drawbacks of having moved to GitHub: If you’re not careful with your commits, you can accidentally overwrite changes made by someone else, so pay attention to what is being merged in your pull requests!

This is what it looks like when I start work after someone else has submitted changes:

Once I pull those changes down, GitHub merges them into my clone so that I am ready to work on the latest version. In case you’re wondering, the screenshot is from the private repo that we use internally, but it’s the same mechanism in all repos.

Here’s what I see when I then open the folder with the Business Central docs in Visual Studio Code:

The green squiggly lines are validation errors thrown by the Docs Authoring Pack. In this case they’re shown because it wants a blank line after each heading. When I first wrote this article I was using theAtommarkdown authoring tool, which doesn’t insist on blank lines after headings. Visual Studio code does, hence the squiggles.

After I’ve made my changes, I use GitHub Desktop to commit them.

Note the blue button at the bottom of the window – this is GitHub telling me what I’m about to do. in this case, I’m pushing to the master branch, which is the basis for content ready to go live. If I had intended this change to get published later, then I would have to stop here and commit my change to another branch.

In this case, it’s a small update that I want to apply to the already released content, so I’m committing to the master branch. After I commit the changes, I have to push the commit to GitHub.

This step is about pushing my change from my clone up into the online GitHub repository. The terminology can be confusing at first, but the trick is to think of the clone as being on your computer and the “real” repository being up in the cloud. At least, that’s done the trick for me.

Collaboration

As mentioned, having moved our docs to GitHub repos has enabled collaboration scenarios that we have dreamed about for many years. You as our partners, can extend and customize our docs easily because the public GitHub repo is always there for you to pick up from. No more native tooling because there is a world of open source tools readily available. And you can submit GitHub Issues or pull requests if there is something you want to change in the docs. This transparency and flexibility works very well for the way that our product, Dynamics 365 Business Central, is extended and customized, don’t you think?

We welcome your contributions, even when it might seem that we don’t, such as when it takes a while before we process your feedback. We’re a small team with a lot of work to do, and we don’t mean to appear like we don’t appreciate your feedback. And that goes across our portfolio – application and developer content for Business Central, application and developer content for Dynamics NAV, and the emerging application and developer content for Dynamics GP.

For Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP, our own support folks are actively contributing to the docs already, and you can as well. However, we only accept contributions to the English (US) source at this point in time.

For Business Central, we very much also welcome contributions, but as you know, the product is still evolving, and that means that docs are as well. For example, if you are frustrated that you can’t read about how to develop a specific solution in the new development environment, then that’s probably because the tooling isn’t available yet. Don’t be frustrated. Instead, rejoice in the fact that you are part of the collective journey that we are on in a true partnership to evolve Business Central.

So if you want to contribute to the content, just find the relevant place in the docs, notice the file name in the URL (it’s the last bit of the URL, such as contributor-guide), then find the right repo in GitHub ( business functionality is at https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/dynamics365smb-docs, developer content is at https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/dynamics365smb-devitpro-pb), find the file, and hit the Edit button. You will then get a notification like this:

You’ll need a GitHub account to do this, of course, but that’s easy to get. In your fork of the repo, you then make the changes that you want to make, and you end up submitting a pull request to our repo. For more information, see the GitHub docs.

We share our tools and processes with you, so join us, and collaborate on the content. We welcome you! For more information, see Extend, Customize, and Collaborate on the Help for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Content in agile development projects

Some of you have moved to agile development methodologies, but you’re struggling to find out how you can deliver Help for your apps and solutions. Depending on whether you have in-house technical writers, or if you depend on external service providers to generate the docs for you, you’ll find different solutions to this problem, I am certain.

If you’re looking for inspiration, I have written several examples on LinkedIn about how to use agile methodologies to help you structure work and produce the content that you need.

For more information, see my post on LinkedIn. And keep up the good work that you’re already doing!

PS: This blog post was first published on the Communities blog in December 2018 but has been migrated and updated here on the Dynamics 365 blog.

The post Collaborate on content for Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

As we turn business logic from the System layer into extensions, were putting extra focus on isolating sensitive information such as Azure Key Vault secrets, and providing a standard way to store the information. One of the changes in that direction is to deprecate the Service Password table, which will happen in 2019 release wave 2. The Service Password table was important because we used it to develop secure features and safely store sensitive information. Moving online, however, required a new approach, so we developed what we call Isolated Storage, which is an integrated platform feature that we expose through application code. Find more information about Isolated Storage here.

Isolated Storage provides additional capabilities for developing extensions. First, Isolated Storage is related to the context of the extension itself so that secrets for one extension cannot be read by another extension, which means that one extension cannot access the data in another.

Second, Isolated Storage provides user-level control through the DataContext option. Application developers can allow all users to access an extension, only users in a certain company, or only a specific user in a specific company.

Third, Isolated Storage is safe, and sensitive data is always encrypted in online version (in OnPrem version the settings is controlled by user). For on-premises versions, weve changed how encryption works with secret management. Previously, secrets stored in the Service Password table were automatically encrypted and decrypted according to whether encryption was turned on or off. Isolated Storage is not tightly connected with encryption settings, however. A secret that was inserted while encryption was turned off will remain unencrypted if encryption is turned on. The only scenario where Isolated Storage will follow changes in encryption settings is when you turn off encryption. In that case, the secret will be decrypted.

The new approach requires attention on how to write code that manipulates sensitive data.

1. Do not write wrapper functions around Isolated Storage functionality that can be exposed to other extension (like ReadFromIsolatedStorage and InsertIntoIsolatedStorage) because the caller function can impersonate itself and manipulate sensitive data using the wrong DataContext.

 procedure InsertIntoIsolatedStorage(SecretKey : Text; SecretValue : Text;Datascope@1002 : DataScope) : Boolean;

2. If you write an extension that both on-premises and online versions will use, consider that the encryption might be turned off for the on-premises version, so the code should look like:

 if not ENCRYPTIONENABLED thenexit(ISOLATEDSTORAGE.SET(COPYSTR(SecretKey,1,200),SecretValue ,Datascope));exit(ISOLATEDSTORAGE.SETENCRYPTED(SecretKey,SecretValue,Datascope));

3. The function that manipulates the secrets should not return sensitive information by VAR.

procedure InsertIntoIsolatedStorage(var SecretKey : Text; SecretValue : Text;Datascope@1002 : DataScope) : Boolean; begin SecretKey := FORMAT(CreateGuid()); if not ENCRYPTIONENABLED then exit(ISOLATEDSTORAGE.SET(COPYSTR(SecretKey,1,200),SecretValue ,Datascope)); exit(ISOLATEDSTORAGE.SETENCRYPTED(SecretKey,SecretValue,Datascope));

The post Changes in Secret Management appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Whats the number one problem healthcare executives need to solve in order to improve care delivery and reduce operational costs? In a word: Interoperability.

Theres a lot of buzz these days around the idea of interoperability in healthcare. But what does the term actually mean? Heres a snippet from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) newly proposed definition:

Interoperability is the ability of different information systems, devices, or applications to connect, in a coordinated manner, within and across organizational boundaries to access, exchange, and cooperatively use data amongst stakeholders, with the goal of optimizing the health of individuals and populations.

For healthcare providers, the ultimate goal of interoperability is to improve patient care. But it promises exceptional financial benefits too.

Interoperability provides healthcare executives with broad visibility into clinical and financial data. Most importantly, it lets them turn that data into actionable intelligence they can use to improve the delivery of care for their patients, while saving money for their institutions.

Healthcare practitioners who can easily access and share data in real time across the organization will be able to make smarter decisions, fasterleading to increased efficiency, lower operational costs, and better care.

What healthcare providers can achieve with interoperability

Providers that achieve interoperability will benefit in countless ways. Here are just some things you can do when you unleash the full power of your data:

• Better manage your supply chain, improve inventory control, and eliminate waste
• Increase your savings by improving procurement margins and expediting delivery savings
• Increase staff efficiency, productivity, and longevity by automating routine tasks and reducing redundant steps, and maintaining valued staff and skillsets
• Improve patient experiences by adapting to changing needs and behaviors
• Prepare for mergers and acquisitions by demonstrating exceptional operational efficiency

How Microsoft can help

Within any healthcare organization, numerous systems exist that provide vast amounts of invaluable data. But unless providers can seamlessly connect that data, they won’t be able to achieve the interoperability required to use it effectively.

At Microsoft, were changing the healthcare landscape with interoperability. Our Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator solution unifies your data, while enabling systems and applications that help you staff appropriately streamline processes, reduce costs, and increase revenue.

Unlike other healthcare technologies, our integrated, comprehensive platform connects solutions across workloads. You can start with point-and-click apps, then extend the model by configuring additional entities, relationships, and business logic.

Here are four reasons the Microsoft cloud is right for healthcare:

1. AI and advanced analytics: Use the insights you gain from artificial intelligence and analytics to help you identify patternsand implement improvements in your operational processes and clinical workflows.
2. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) strategy:Unlock your data with FHIR and securely exchange your data across systems. Microsoft is dedicated to helping improve healthcare through widespread interoperability. We advocate for the adoption of FHIR as a healthcare common standard.
3. Security: Built with cybersecurity and threat defense, the Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator solution lets you securely connect your data across systems. Microsoft is deeply committed to interoperability in healthcare, and we invest over $1 billion USD annually in security.
4. Compliance information regulation: Meet your compliance obligations with integrated solutions that help you assess and manage your risk, protect sensitive and business-critical data, and respond efficiently to data discovery requests.

From care delivery to supply chain management, and even retail and point of sale operations, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator, along with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, helps you achieve the interoperability you need to streamline efficiency and efficacy across your entire organization.

To learn more, download our free eBook, Reimagining healthcare with Microsoft.

The post The number one barrier to better patient care and how to break through it appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.

Didn’t you wish there was some expert that would just explain how to use Dynamics 365 and Power Platform technologies?

Purvin Patel brings his firehose of information to the community every Monday at 10am (Pacific) as part of a weekly webinar series. You should expect deep dives, special guests, MVPs talking about cool things they have made, some nifty tips and tricks and what is coming down the road. There are even rumors that he will give a Bluetooth speaker away to the best question asked for each webinar? These webinars are free for everyone! We cater to all; whether you know how to code, low code, and absolutely if you don’t even know a single line of code.

We will post the recordings on the Dynamics Community a week later under Resources > Webinars. So if Mondays are a downer for you, block off some time and hang out with Purvin.

And MUCH MUCH more to come.

Note: These are public events andcan beaccessedvia the Microsoft Teams app or in a browser. Forany issues accessing the meeting in Teams,please refer tohttps://support.office.com/home/contact

The post Weekly Webinars for the Business Applications Community for September 2019! appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.