Jukka Niiranen

Category: News and events

  • The End Is Near for Dynamics 365 (Customer Driven) Updates

    The End Is Near for Dynamics 365 (Customer Driven) Updates

    Have you been administering organizations running on the online version of Dynamics CRM / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for a while now? If so, you will be familiar with this screen:

    That is essentially CDU in flesh. CDU of course stands for Customer Driven Update, the process through which Microsoft has allowed online customers to decide when their instances are updated to the latest available version of Dynamics 365 CE. While it hasn’t been a completely open schedule of “pick whichever date you want”, the availability of update slots for a period of up to six months has formed the backbone of how many organizations plan the dates on their business application development roadmaps.

    This is all about to change very soon, as CDU will be going away. The plan was laid out on a post in the beginning of July already, but I suspect not everyone has yet quite grasped the practical impact of what “Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365” truly means. Admins of online tenants with v8.2 orgs will have been receiving the following notifications into their mailbox recently:

    Those who have reacted to this request to schedule their V9 updates will have seen a fairly familiar calendar with update time slots all the way up until January 2019. The thing you should keep in mind is that this is the last time you will ever see that CDU calendar. You cannot freely schedule your Dynamics 365 CE online updates ever again, once you’re on V9+. Enjoy your final Customer Driven Update, folks!

    “What’s going on here?!? Is Microsoft giving up on maintaining their Dynamics 365 CE cloud? Will we no longer get updates for this product?”

    It’s exactly the opposite, in fact. Microsoft is so determined to get all of their online customers to run the latest & greatest bits that they’re transforming their update delivery model into continuous deployment. From February 2019 onward, everyone will (in theory) be running the exact same version and no org will be left behind – or be allowed to. Then shortly after, it’s time for the next major release, V10, coming in April 2019:

    Alright, so there is no way of opting out from major releases and waiting for the dust to settle for a while before rolling it into your own instances. This just means you better be ready for the changes as they take place, so preparation and thorough understanding of the releases notes for the coming versions is going to be crucial. And how will we be able to test the new version in advance, you might ask. The answer is you can’t do that just yet, but before V10 rolls out there will be a new mechanism in place for a First Release instance:

    As we can see from the Release Stations diagram above, the updates will be rolled out to different “rings” over a period of several weeks. Not even Microsoft wants to deploy the updates to every single environment at the click of one button, so they start from the smaller geos like Japan and Canada, gather telemetry on the update process and then gradually move to the largest geos of North America and Europe.

    Telemetry will also play a key role in how Microsoft plans to deal with the inevitable need to deprecate and remove older functionality from the platform. Although the new Dynamics 365 update policy aims to preserve backward compatibility and present new features as “off by default”, there are going to be scenarios where it’s not just a matter of adding more and more stuff onto the ever expanding cloud platform. Since MS hosts all of the online instances, they can also measure how much each product feature or platform component is utilized by the customers. Decisions on how to deal with deprecation will therefore be much more data driven than it could have been in the past.

    Just because the product is moving into an ever more “cloud native” delivery model doesn’t mean that there’s no need to test your customizations, extensions and integrations. While the process aims to reduce the chances of breaking changes interfering with the day-to-day use of Dynamics 365, there will of course be some changes that break stuff in reality. While the First Release environment will only give you a few weeks notice for performing your own changes in preparation of the version update, the Insider programs for Dynamics 365 will be your best hope to have earlier access to the information on what’s coming & how it may impact you.

    To fully grasp the how, why and when of this new update policy for Dynamics 365, I highly recommend you to watch the session from Business Applications Summit 2018 on Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence. I’m hoping that Microsoft will make this information available in more convenient formats than live recordings in the future, so that this bold “one version for all” vision can be better understood by partners and customers. After all, we’re only in the process of digesting the October ’18 releases notes highlights, but in reality the V10 update isn’t that far away in the horizon anymore.

    For all of us who are used to thinking about Dynamics 365 version updates as projects, it’s time to start shifting our thought process to the continuous delivery mode. Many of the “born in the cloud” products like Dynamics 365 Business Central or PowerApps are already now operating according to this one version principle, so it makes perfect sense to try and align the Common Data Service for Apps platform and the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications with this new reality. Not just from a technical standpoint, but also the adoption of new product features that can be enabled when needed is going to be quite different from the traditional way of features arriving at the very moment a version update is deployed.

  • Winter in July: Release Notes for Next Dynamics 365 Version

    Winter in July: Release Notes for Next Dynamics 365 Version

    While I’m over in Finland enjoying the biggest and longest heatwave ever, some of my fellow MVPs and Dynamics 365 community members were attending the first ever Microsoft Business Applications Summit this week on the other side of the globe in Seattle. As much as I would have enjoyed sitting in cold & dark conference rooms instead of trying to hide from the burning sunlight, this time I had to rely on the others to share the latest news from #MSBizAppsSummit while I attempt to enjoy the summer vacation.

    A large share of the conference’s announcements are covered in the October ’18 Release Notes, which you can download in PDF format right here. This is a massive “drop” that follows the format of what we already saw with the previous April ’18 release. Even though it’s been made available during the summer heat, it’s actually a list of features that Microsoft intends to (mostly) make available between October 2018 and March 2019. So, winter came early this year, which is a positive thing, since now we have several months of advance notice of what’s in the product team’s pipeline. These release notes essentially replace the earlier roadmap.dynamics.com website, which in itself was kinda cool (running on top of Dynamics 365 Portals and all) but didn’t communicate the actual road ahead all that well. So, these twice a year PDF releases with ongoing updates to their detailed content is the thing you need to pay attention to now.

    One small but notable difference is that Microsoft is no longer calling it “Dynamics 365 Release Notes” but “Business Applications Release Notes”, which together with the Summit’s name reflects the new context in which we all should approach whatever parts of the toolkit we use in our end user solutions. Recently also the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program updated its terminology, and now the previous Business Solutions MVPs are in the Business Applications MVP category.

    The previous April 2018 release was the first time when we saw the new organizational structure of Microsoft Business Applications Group (“BAG”) bringing previously separate product offerings under one roof, with CRM & ERP products being represented in the same release notes list as PowerApps, Flow, Power BI. That also was the time when things like the Common Data Service for Apps were announced as replacements for what XRM previously stood for. However, from a raw functionality level there appeared to be a greater urgency in reaching GDPR compliance before the May 25th deadline than to actually push out new integrated features for the CDS for Apps platform.

    Reading through the October 2018 release notes, this time it’s very different. There are huge steps being take to bring together the “ex-XRM” technologies with the newer products and make it truly one Power Platform. Here are selected highlights:

    • PowerApps Canvas Apps and Flows can now been included inside CDS for Apps solutions, giving them the ALM story for enterprise grade deployment across different dev/test/UAT/prod instances. This clearly makes them no longer a “power user” focus tool but a building block for credible business applications.
    • PowerApps Canvas Apps can be embedded inside the model-driven app entity forms. The traditional UI of XRM apps that was generated from metadata will get a touch of pixel-perfect design options that the Canvas Apps have always been about. This ability coincides with the new options to freely set the app size instead of earlier phone/tablet format limitations.
    • Flow is promised to reach parity with async workflows. Even though the transactional capabilities of real-time workflows (similar to plug-ins) is not yet within October 2018 scope, that’s one bold step to make the XRM workflows history and move their logic into Flows.
    • Power BI reports & tiles can be embedded onto CDS for Apps entity forms and the record context as well as any record attribute can be passed to them for data query and visualization filtering. Surely pretty much anyone has at one time wished “gee, wouldn’t it be sweet if instead of working with this limited ASP.NET chart XML from Dynamics CRM 2011 we could leverage those modern Power BI charts instead”. Well, that day is getting closer!
    • PowerApps Canvas Apps will FINALLY offer native support for lookups, option sets and datetime fields. For anyone who’s tried to replicate pretty much any CRM functionality with PowerApps, this will have been a very early stumbling block. Not so easy to solve with separate product teams inside MSFT apparently, but within the new Business Applications Group these gaps for real life solutions can now be filled.
    • There will be a single mobile “player” for both Model-driven Apps and Canvas Apps. When previously the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement mobile app for Unified Interface and the PowerApps apps lived behind separate app icons on your phone, soon the users may no longer see any difference when switching between different business applications.

    These are only a few items in the long list of upcoming features that the 239 pages of October 2018 release notes contain. A lot of important unification is also taking place in the author and admin experience of how Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps, CDS for Apps platform, PowerApps Canvas Apps and Flow can be used together for your solution design needs. Similarly, a lot of advances are being made on the UCI front, with the legacy web client being more and more replace with Unified Interface. Then there’s the whole CDS for Analytics side of things coming up, with promises for new AI apps and capabilities. You’re going to need to read through a wealth of blog posts to grasp the full spectrum of what Microsoft is planning to launch, so a good place to start is the Scott Durow Top 10 favourite features in this release.

    The April 2018 release for Dynamics 365 CE was a bit of a surprise due to the fact that it wasn’t officially a major release like v10 or even v9.1, instead it was only a v9.0.2 update. Deployed automatically to your v9 instances, with no CDU process to schedule the update from the available time slots. Now in July we got a confirmation from Microsoft that this reflects the way all future updates will be rolled out, in the blog post Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365. Looking at how the Power Platform will increasingly be consisting of functionality that isn’t found in the “XRM server”, the automatic updates make a whole lot of sense. It remains to be seen how the remaining on-premises customers will be serviced with the updates and to what extent there will be feature parity. At least we now got a confirmation at the Business Applications Summit 2018 that there will be a new on-prem release this fall, so there appears to be a plan to bring things like UCI available for those who still prefer to run their own business application servers.

  • Business Application Platform at Microsoft Build 2018

    Business Application Platform at Microsoft Build 2018

    Build is the lead event for all things developer related in the Microsoft ecosystem. This year was the first time that the Business Applications side of MS’s stack also had dedicated tracks in the event agenda. While I didn’t attend the event myself (the Elisa Microsoft developer community was of course represented in Seattle), I was quite curious to see what kind of story is being told to the dev crowd about CDS for Apps, Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Flow and Power BI. Luckily there’s the virtual Build Live experience for viewing the live streams from the event these days.

    What’s not so fortunate is that the Build site doesn’t seem to provide a very good experience for discovering the specific content from a particular technology. At least the content selector for “Business Apps” doesn’t really show all too many relevant sessions at the time of writing:

    The good news is that us virtual attendees can also access the session catalog for My Build, which allows to perform either free text searches or filter the content to products in the Business Application Platform category:

    Once we know the IDs for the sessions we’re interested in, we can then dig the content from from Channel 9’s Build 2018 page. There we can continue our journey to the YouTube videos of session recordings and SlideShare for the presentation decks. Not really all that hard for anyone who’s accustomed to navigating the maze of portals that MS partners encounter, but of course it might be a bit tricky for newcomers into the ecosystem. So, just for the sake of convenience I though it might be useful to have the most relevant Business Applications content fro Build 2018 collected onto a single page. Which is what this blog post essentially is about.

    Accelerate your SaaS App development using the power of the Business Application Platform (BRK3411)

    “Join this session to learn how the Business Application Platform can accelerate the time to market for your next Line of Business SaaS app. Through the lens of an ISV/software developer, we will walk you through the entire application development process showcasing what it takes to build a new, composite app from the ground up using out of the box no-code/no-code tooling, to extending with custom code and connectors through to packaging and publishing to AppSource allowing you to reach 120M+ monthly active users. During this session we will also touch upon the value of the Common Data Service for Apps as it applies specifically to you as an ISV, how you can extend and contribute to the ISV ecosystem flywheel and greatly reduce both cost and time to market for new SaaS apps.”

    A good introduction to what the steps for app development are when working on the Business Application Platform (BAP) as opposed to other environments. Includes a demo of the development path as well as discussion on what investments are being made to deliver a more seamless app delivery experience in the future.

    Be sure to check out the slides if you want to see the “before” and “after” architecture of XRM, PowerApps + CDS 1.0, and the final Common Data Service for Apps (a.k.a. CDS 2.0):

    There are more ways than ever for partners to work with the platform, now that it also encompasses PowerApps and CDM:

    Watch the session recording on YouTube, then view the presentation on SlideShare:

    Extending PowerApps and the Common Data Service for Apps with custom controls and server side logic (BRK3403)

    “Professional developer extensibility is a key capability to the Business Application Platform. We’ll focus on enriching model-driven PowerApps solutions with server-side code and custom controls on the Common Data Service for Apps. We’ll utilize the developer toolkit and write code for native plugin development, use of functions and logic apps, Web API, Administration API, and the Virtual Entity subsystem.”

    Whenever Matt Barbour delivers a session, you’re going to want to pay close attention. This session is no exception, as Matt talks through the story how XRM evolved into CDS for Apps in his candid manner and explains to us what decisions and choices were made along the way. No matter if you’re an XRM old timer or only starting to look deeper into app development story of CDS for Apps, you need to watch this session.

    While the logical architecture of CDS is quite familiar to friends of the XRM SDK, the important bits are about how plug-ins will eventually be replaced by Azure Functions, how Microsoft Flow now owns the Business Rules story, and all these details about future investment areas that you can pick up from Matt’s presentation. After all, the former XRM solution management system will be how you’ll deploy also Canvas Apps, Flows, connections and gateways from one instance to another in the future, so it’s far more relevant to an ever larger audience.

    Watch the session recording on YouTube. No slides available so far, but Matt only had a few anyway and mostly focused on the demo side.

    Build and extend applications for Office 365 with PowerApps and Flow (BRK2303)

    “Come discover the capabilities of PowerApps and Flow as the unified high productivity application development and workflow platform across Office 365 and Dynamics 365. As the successor to InfoPath and Access Web Apps, PowerApps enables users to build both simple forms to advanced, feature-rich apps, while Flow as the successor to SharePoint Designer Workflow, enables users to build automated workflows for a range of scenarios from notifications to approvals. In this session, we’ll cover integrations with SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph, Excel, and more. Start extending and building apps and workflows for Office 365 and Dynamics 365 today!”

    If the earlier presentations were more developer focused platform discussion, this is a more citizen developer themed session that demonstrates the built-in integration points of where the different MS provided apps meet each other. If you have less hands-on experience with the non-Dynamics side of things, then have a look at these demonstrations to catch up on things.

    The slide deck contains a lot of good reference material for you to store on your hard drive for customer facing presentations. There are also updated product roadmaps for PowerApps and Flow that are always interesting:

    Watch the session recording on YouTube, then view the presentation on SlideShare:

    Automating business processes and approvals with Microsoft Flow (BRK2302)

    “Use Microsoft Flow to easily add business process automation and approval processes to your solutions. You’ll learn to build Flows with a few simple clicks and extend your learnings to more advanced techniques and expressions used to build complex workflows. Finally discover how you can take it up to Azure Logic Apps when it makes sense.”

    Stephen Siciliano has been doing great presentations on Microsoft Flow that sort of work as the missing manual to how us citizen developers can approach scenarios where Flow doesn’t quite offer any obvious ready-made features – yet there are capabilities hidden in the tool that could solve the problem. Judging by the slides, this looks like another information session where you’re bound to learn many things you thought Flow couldn’t even do.

    Funnily enough, Stephen’s deck actually seems to offer the best answer to the question that most Microsoft Build attendees probably would present when encountering this Business Applications side of MSFT for the first time: how does the Business Application Platform differ from the Azure platform?

    Check out the slides below, and the session recording on YouTube.

    Deep dive into building apps on Common Data Service for Apps (BRK3404)

    “In this session, we’ll deep dive into the concepts needed to build applications on CDS for Apps, whether you leverage it PowerApps or in your custom built solutions. We’ll cover all the fundamentals like entity modelling, business rules, business processes, and include an introduction to extensibility options like Plugins, Virtual Entities, and more.”

    No one can escape the Digital Feedback Loop slide, not even the developers. This is a demo-heavy presentation where a sample app is built and the various capabilities of Model-driven Apps are explained. All pretty familiar to anyone who’s done app building with XRM.

    Video only, no slides.

    More Business Application Platform content from Build

    For session recordings that touch upon parts of the platform we’re working with, here are some more that I picked up from the Build 2018 catalog:

    Did I miss any session that you think is worth watching? Then be sure to leave a comment!

  • Discussing Spring 2018 Highlights at CRM Rocks

    Discussing Spring 2018 Highlights at CRM Rocks

    The amount of new information that was launched upon the world in the 2018 Spring Wave for Microsoft Business Applications was overwhelming, to put it short. When you’ve got a 245 page release notes document that covers not just the Dynamics 365 stack of CRM and ERP apps but also related platform functionality like PowerApps and Power BI, there’s certainly a lot to digest for even the experienced professionals in this field.

    If you want to know what I consider to be the highlights of this release wave and what my thoughts are around them, then check out the latest episode of CRM Rocks podcast where I discuss the Spring 2018 Release together with Markus Erlandsson. For an index of the topics we covered in this 1h session, below are  my show notes:

    You can find the podcast on iTunes or just head over to crmrocks.com to grab the audio recording. Enjoy!

  • Microsoft Business Forward 2018 Event and Spring Wave for Dynamics 365

    Microsoft Business Forward 2018 Event and Spring Wave for Dynamics 365

    The public launch of the Dynamics 365 Spring Wave was at the Microsoft Business Forward event in Amsterdam on March 21st, 2018. Here are some highlights from the event, shared over on Twitter with the #MSBusinessFwd and #MSDyn365 hashtags. (If you’re viewing this post on Dynamics Community page then you might want to visit the original post on Surviving CRM site to see the embedded content.)

    There’s A LOT to chew on in this release and there’s literally 10+ blog posts released today by Microsoft, spanning from traditional Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement team blog to PowerApps to even Power BI. You can start drilling down into this wealth of new information from the announcement by James Phillips: Accelerating digital transformation with the spring 2018 release for Dynamics 365 and Business Application Platform.

  • Top 3 Themes for Dynamics 365 in 2017

    Top 3 Themes for Dynamics 365 in 2017

    The first day of the new year is a good moment to reflect on what 2017 gave us (or didn’t give) in the Dynamics 365 business. Here are the top 3 themes that came to my mind when I looked backed at the last 12 months of news, releases and overall directions coming from Microsoft.

    Business Applications

    A major theme that emerged this year and found its way into most of the communication coming from Redmond was Business Applications. Those two words on their own of course don’t mean anything very revolutionary, but it’s rather the way in which they were used to broaden the context of Microsoft’s business software beyond just Dynamics that’s of greater significance. If 2016 was the year when CRM and ERP were commercially bundled into Dynamics 365, then in 2017 the scope began to reach further beyond that. At the start of the year the XRM platform was given the Customer Engagement name, with the absolute minimum fanfare allotted for the occasion, so the true focus for product marketing was obviously somewhere else.

    Looking around at what specific software products sit alongside Dynamics 365 in the high level MS technology stack illustrations, it’s quite logical that we’re now seeing the “Power Suite” tied into pretty much every commercial narrative around Microsoft’s business cloud. More precisely, the technology grouped under this suite with no official name is very central to the story being told to both business and technical decision makers for one reason: its purpose is to connect the big three MS clouds. Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure are all equal beneficiaries from the toolkit that is provided by PowerApps, Flow, Power BI, CDS and their numerous connectors.

    On an everyday level it may still not be all that common for the real life CRM solutions to heavily rely on the Power Suite technology, like using MS Flow instead of D365 workflows. Because it was first rolled out as a power user focused set of tools for an individual information worker rather than something you’d deploy across a large organization, the practical as well as perceived maturity of this technology has formed a barrier of sort for full-on adoption. The long term outlook for it does look bright in my opinion, however. There’s only so much that Dynamics 365 as a platform can do on its own (be it the XRM, AX or NAV flavor), but if you can connect it with the outside world of MS and non-MS services without the traditional integration development effort, that opens up the door to a world of possibilities. I’m pretty sure customers will be interested in taking a step through that doorway and having a look around during 2018.

    App/Plat Separation

    Taking a few steps down from the higher level clouds and diving into the platform formerly known as XRM, 2017 was a busy year. This didn’t really come as a surprise to me, since I had a wonderful opportunity to get a peak at what the product team had planned for this calendar year already in the last MVP Summit in November 2016. My initial reaction to it was “are you guys SERIOUSLY going to push all of this out in the next release?” Well, a clear majority of the planned features and changes was indeed shipped during 2017 eventually, although the naming of V9 as the “July 2017 Update” didn’t turn out to be such a great idea.

    There were massive changes introduced to XRM (which I’ll continue to call for what it is), both above and beneath the surface. Rolling out Unified Interface initially to the mobile devices and eventually to every UI is going to change the client side of XRM in ways that are even greater than the previous user experience overhaul in CRM 2013. Opening up the client UI to custom extensions with the Custom Control Framework (CCF) sometime later (hopefully in 2018) is a major step in enabling and encouraging the reuse of configurable UI controls for data visualization. Finally, the App/Plat Separation that has moved the previously built-in application features of Sales, Service etc. into optional solution packages is now turning XRM into the type of generic application platform that it has earlier often been depicted as – in the technical decision maker slide decks from MS, at least.

    The combined effect of this transformation which materialized largely in V9 is that XRM should now be a lot more future proof. Having the individual applications as their own packages is a bit like how at one point in the late Windows Phone operating system’s lifecycle the Office apps needed to be separated from the OS, so that they could be serviced and updated without having to ship a new WP build. (Naturally I hope that the fate of D365 will be considerably more glorious than that of WP.) The new UI controls in CCF that now aren’t tied to a single app feature but can rather consume any data coming from XRM database or from external sources via Virtual Entities are bound (pardon the pub) to be more useful in delivering solutions to varying customer needs. Sharing the same client framework across different devices and embedded apps is going to reduce the amount of effort needed to get these solution features in the hands of different user groups.

    Licensing Model

    Sometimes the planned features take a little longer to ship than was originally estimated, which certainly is no surprise to anyone working in the business of software. Other times it turns our that what you initially promised to deliver isn’t actually going to meet the needs of the outside world after all. The delays experienced in getting V9 out to the customers represent the former scenario, while what happened to the Business Edition is an example of the latter.

    There’s no denying that with the growth of the platform and all the new cloud services attached to it, Dynamics CRM had grown from humble beginnings to enterprise scale in the recent years. Therefore the idea of labeling the suite as a true enterprise product and building a different lightweight offering for the needs of smaller CRM environments probably made a lot of commercial sense when MS announced the Dynamics 365 branding with the Enterprise and Business licensing plans to the world in WPC 2016. Only the practical problem remained of how to actually mold a new offering out of the big suite – at least without taking several shots at one’s own foot while setting up constraints for customization and expansion for those customers who’d initially start their exercise from the lower end of the license pool.

    Those 14 months from announcement to eventual cancellation of a separate Business Edition were filled with confusion on all sides – from partners to customers, and probably within Microsoft, too. Although this did leave an unfortunate stain on the year 2017 for Dynamics 365, the long term outcome from the decision to NOT roll out an artificially separated lower tier may turn out to be a better choice after all. It’s all still wide open on how the promised “lower price point” licenses and apps will be packaged, but at least it sounds to me like MS has acknowledged they need to build bridges instead of walls around the growing set of applications in Dynamics 365. For instance: just take a look at the documentation of the upcoming Dynamics 365 for Marketing application and tell me if it looks like an SMB only -product that no existing (Enterprise) customers would have any use for? Exactly. Sanity must prevail and customers be given a chance to license the technology that best fits their needs.

    Hello 2018

    What can we expect to see from Dynamics 365 in this new year then? There are no definite product roadmaps from Microsoft that would publicly disclose what’s planned for be released in which year, since the software business no longer operates on the type of schedule that we saw when products were shipped in shrink wrap every 2-3 years. It now looks more like a mesh of forever updating cloud applications and web services that move along according to their own backlogs and team velocity. Given that the real business applications that customer organizations deploy are a combination of several products that in turn use a variety of back end services, who can actually tell when a certain feature will be “ready”? For example, Dynamics 365 for Marketing utilizes Customer Insights, which in turn relies on the following Azure services:

    • Azure Data Lake Store
    • Azure Data Lake Analytics
    • Azure HDInsight (Spark, Phoenix, HBase)
    • Azure SQL Database
    • Azure Key Vault
    • Azure Secret Store
    • Azure Event Hub
    • Azure Stream Analytics
    • Azure Redis Cache
    • Azure Service Fabric
    • Azure Active Directory
    • Azure Monitoring
    • Azure Metrics
    • Azure Websites
    • Azure Service Bus
    • Azure Storage

    That’s what the future is made of, and that’s why it is so unevenly distributed. We may well see MS announce the next Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement capabilities before existing customers are even able to update their instances to V9. The specific points in time where a particular capability is 1) announced, 2) in private preview, 3) in public preview, 4) available for new environments and 5) deployed for live customer environments may therefore be spread out over a time period that makes even assigning a proper year to it challenging at times – let alone a calendar month like “July 2017”. In this light, I’m personally mainly expecting to see how the above three themes from 2017 will play out as they get closer to impacting the real life scenarios of customer organizations all over the globe that get to put it all into action in their digital business processes.

  • Postcards from Microsoft Ignite 2017, part 2

    Postcards from Microsoft Ignite 2017, part 2

    Back to Florida again – at least on a mental level. In part 1 of my Microsoft Ignite conference diary I described the overall setting of Dynamics 365 in the context of the Business Applications story. This time let’s have a look at some of the details on what the XRM platform can do now and in the near future. The live tweet content can be found from my #MSIgnite Storified collection part 2, but here’s the story behind those social posts.

    The GA (general availability) target of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement V9 was set to the week after Ignite. This was indeed the case, as I didn’t even have a chance to arrive back home from Ignite before I had my first V9 trial instance running the in the cloud. People who had participated in the Dynamics 365 Insider program were already granted access to the preview instances of this major release but now each and every new trial is provisioned with the V9 bits. A few days later there also was an official blog post that announced the availability of “Dynamics 365 October service update”. The naming of course is a bit confusing, since up until this point Microsoft had stuck to the “July 2017 Update” name – and that’s what still shows up in the D365 Admin Center UI. Don’t you agree that life would be much simpler if we’d all just use the version numbers instead of marketing names? Oh, and if we had the KB article already available for the 9.0.0.1103 GA build, that would be even sweeter.

    After the initial Preview Executive Briefing sessions for V9 that were conducted before the summer holiday season, Ignite was the place where the next big presentation on Unified Interface took place (at least to my knowledge). Oren Ryngler and Linda Simovic took us through a detailed demo of all the UX goodies that V9 has to offer. Unfortunately the slide deck is not available for download even for Ignite attendees, but you can view the full recording of the presentation on YouTube. I bet that even if you participated in the preview program, you’d be hard pressed to recall all the wonderful details packed into the Unified Interface. Principles like “Gradual exposure to complexity”, AI capabilities like Grid Recommendations or the new chart types are something you can expect to discover in the video.

    There was another excellent session where Linda discussed what the underlying motivations behind the Unified Interface initiative (or “Unified Client Infrastructure” / UCI) were. Even more interesting was the quick peak at the Custom Control Framework (CCF) that is a significant benefit unlocked by UCI. Described as “extensibility framework for building UI components that visualize data”, we’ve already heard that Microsoft has been busy rebuilding everything in the default app UI as Custom Controls (“but if it’s default then how can it be custom?” Ah, never mind the semantics…). What we don’t yet have is a definitive date for when the APIs for building true Custom Controls will be opened up to customers and partners. What’s REALLY interesting is that the product team’s roadmap includes a “Control Gallery” marketplace for viewing and purchasing these as solutions. If it all works out, then the Unified Interface in V9 is just the start of the true transformation of XRM UI into something more than fields and grids on an entity form.

    While the UI story is always going to get far more social media coverage due to fancy screenshots from the visible application, there’s a lot more bubbling under in V9 than just the promise of a Custom Control Framework. Matt Barbour presented the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE Platform Update for Developers, delivering a concise “what you need to know” package for people working with XRM solutions or API based extensions. Now that everything in the OoB apps has been separated from “system” into actual solutions, managing the dependencies via solution segmentation is actually a big deal. Why it’s even a bigger thing from application maintenance perspective is that the next V10 major version will ONLY accept V9+ solutions – so start getting used to them right away. In addition to the earlier announced V9 platform enhancements of Virtual Entities and Multi-Select Option Sets, we also received a “one more thing” with Auto Number fields! Thousands of custom numbering solutions can finally be put to rest, at least after you install the Auto Number Manager for XrmToolBox to access the configuration options for this new native field type.

    There were several shorter sessions in the Expo area of Ignite that offered practical tips for how to do more with less when it comes to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. While I remain firmly in the no-code territory myself, the PowerShell scripting capabilities available in the new Online Management API or the more familiar Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell module demonstrated by Shwan Dieken and Sean McNellis from the PFE team open up automation capabilities even I can easily relate to. Don’t forget to check out this huge link list put together by Shawn & Sean for the latest admin tips & tricks you need to be aware of. Over on the MVP powered sessions of Ignite, George Doubinski also showed a wealth of automation tips to reduce manual labor for Dynamics pros. What I bet you didn’t know how easy the integration of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with a WordPress website can be, thanks to the plugin developed by George & Co at AlexaCRM.

    Like I wrote on the back of my first Ignite postcard, the Business Applications story that Microsoft wants to tell us consists of a lot more than just Dynamics 365 these days. While it’s been all too easy to disregard the earlier sales pitch for PowerApps and Flow as just a citizen developer fable that doesn’t apply when working on Real Projects, they are gradually gaining the types of ALM capabilities that put them higher up on the list of tools to consider for solving customers’ business problems. While there were some disappointments, like the continuing non-story of Adobe Marketing Cloud + Dynamics 365, you could easily find yourself thinking “hmm, that’s actually pretty cool” while watching the demos for this “Power platform” of non-XRM business tools. Even though CDS still largely is “a box to connect other boxes on a PowerPoint”, the added features like embedded PowerQuery and the accompanying new data sources give us a sign that progress is being made.

    As always, the big questions is about when’s the right time to jump in to the new technology if you want to deliver successful customer projects with it. Events like Microsoft Ignite are great for calibrating your own perceptions and expectations, not just via the official product demos but also the community response to them. I know I walked away from the conference with a far better understanding of what Microsoft is pursuing with their latest product development investments – even though I’ll need to review a bunch of the session recordings to actually grasp the finer details of each individual technology.

  • Postcards from Microsoft Ignite 2017, part 1

    Postcards from Microsoft Ignite 2017, part 1

    Greetings from the Sunshine State! This Fall I was fortunate enough to have chance to attend my first ever Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. Staying true to my habits, I did tweet out quite a lot of content from the live event with #MSIgnite hashtag. If you missed that stream, feel free to revisit the collection over at Storify, where I curated a story called “#MSIgnite 2017: Business Applications”. (Unlike with the V9 preview, I’ve decided to refrain from embedding the infinite scroll version of the story into this blog post. You’re welcome!) Here’s a little written summary on my thoughts about the event’s contents.

    If you’ve been to or kept an eye on Microsoft Ignite before, you’ll know that it’s an event that has traditionally catered the more mainstream product lines like Office 365 and Windows. I did not expect any major announcements from the Dynamics 365 team at Ignite, so my intention was to explore the broader story around MS Business Applications. Most of us who are working in cloud environments with Dynamics products must be well aware of how much there is going on around the core XRM platform (still the best name for it), but rarely do we have a chance to focus on something that isn’t directly linked with the sales/service/marketing processes of CRM system development projects.

    That’s a bit of a shame, since at the end of the day that’s precisely where Microsoft’s big competitive advantage lies. The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts in this occasion, and if the size of the Ignite conference would be used as the yardstick, I’d say the whole is actually HUGE. Sure, it wasn’t anywhere near Dreamforce in terms of the attendee count, but if you’re not looking for a rock festival to hang out with your business partners but rather want to deepen your understanding of the current and future capabilities of a cloud technology platform, it doesn’t need to get any larger than this. I reached my 10k step target each day just walking between the sessions, which tells you the Orange County Conference Center floor space was truly put into full use in trying to fit in the complete MS business technology stack. You sometimes literally had to take a shuttle bus from one side of the conference to the other to make it to the sessions in time!

    The biggest piece of news for D365 was already from the earlier week’s Directions North America 2017 event, where Microsoft admitted that after 1 year of waiting, there was not going to be a Business Edition release of the XRM based apps at all. Or even for the ERP side of the house – at least from a product naming perspective. While none of the technology investments made in preparation of Business Edition was actually cancelled, it’s understandable that this caused a lot of stir among the Dynamics ecosystem. Without going deeper into the topic, I believe MS made the right choice and it’s only a shame it took them so long after the initial Dynamics 365 rebranding announcement to find the right path forward. While we wait for the new licensing model details, we still remain in a product naming limbo that was also very much present in any Dynamics related session at Ignite. You must remember that what we’re experiencing in the XRM space ain’t nowhere near the amount of confusion that our ERP colleagues must go through. Godspeed, Dynamics X!

    Of course the story is no longer just centered around what to call your CRM & ERP platforms. In practically all the Ignite sessions that touched my field of work, the solutions being demonstrated were always mashups of several MS technologies. Clearly the intention was to underline the possibilities of seamless integration between the latest cloud apps from almost any two product teams. Yeah, I hate the word buzzword “seamless” as much as any experienced IT consultant does, but my point is that it seems like the phase of inventing new MS cloud products has reached an end and now the focus is truly on ensuring they can connect with one another. This also means challenging the assumptions of what the role of each product is in the customer’s solution architecture. Instead of using XRM as the UI for business data presentation, could a better result be reached via a Power BI dashboard that has embedded Visio process visualization and PowerApps screens with record level drill-down? Possibly yes, and these alternatives are what MS wants us to actively explore.

    The floor space given to PowerApps at Ignite 2017 made it the clear headline product in the Business Applications track. Maybe it was just my session schedule planning, but it felt like all roads eventually lead to PowerApps. It’s of course a very neat way to demonstrate the benefits of having your business data in systems that are easily accessible by these low-code/no-code apps. What was somewhat confusing to hear, though, was that the current “UI first” approach of designing PowerApps on a free canvas was promised to get a new model-driven app design option alongside it. You know, with entity based forms, server-side business logic and even Business Process Flows. “But wait, weren’t those the defining characteristics of an XRM app?” Bingo. It literally was a set of Dynamics CRM customization UI screenshots snatched into a PowerApps roadmap presentation. These two paths are converging quickly now and you’re going to want to keep an eye on what the next chapter in the Business Applications has in store for us.

    I’ll need to go lie down in a brief coma now to recover from the jetlag caused by a Miami-Helsinki flight (cheers to Finnair for offering the direct connection, though!). I promise make a return with part 2 in a few days time, as there is a lot more souvenir sweets to digest from Microsoft Ignite 2017.

  • XRM Rebooted with Dynamics 365 Embedded?

    XRM Rebooted with Dynamics 365 Embedded?

    The next major release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, the July 2017 Update, has been called “the biggest release to date” by the product team. If you look at the number of features that a single release now touches, with the product offering being further divided into Enterprise Edition and Business Edition, the number of work streams sure is massive. It’s amazing to think how much wider the scope of Dynamics 365 is today compared to “just” five years ago when it was still Dynamics CRM and the primary target seemed to be making the traditional sales-service-marketing CRM package to work with modern browsers (non-IE), devices (mobile) and infrastructure (cloud). Here’s the roadmap presented in WPC 2012:

    Times change and even the Worldwide Partner Conference has evolved into Microsoft Inspire now – which I think is far too close to Microsoft Ignite as a name, since I’ve found myself mixing #MSInspire with #MSIgnite all the time. Anyway, this annual MS partner conference launched on July 10th with a keynote led by Satya Nadella. The recording of this is naturally already available, but you could also check out my Storify collection of the most interesting tweets from the event:

    One of the announcements that didn’t get much space on the big stage but certainly has big potential implications for the Dynamics ecosystem was the announcement of a new ISV Cloud Embed program for partners. With a reference to their earlier success with offering Azure IaaS and PaaS services as the foundation for ISV applications, Microsoft now states that it will offer also higher level services available as building blocks for ISV apps. The list shown below includes “Dynamics 365 Embedded”.

    Yes, it shows a number of other embeddable products too, like PowerApps and Flow, but c’mon – those are newcomers to the Microsoft product portfolio. Dynamics as in CRM and later Customer Engagement has been around for a decade and a half now! One does not simply rip the CRM roots out of the platform (assuming that it even is the CRM part and not AX/NAV) and then use the remaining parts as a building block for an ISV app. Except that it might just be happening soon.

    This is not a brand new concept of course. Since I have a tendency of documenting the platform evolution of Dynamics CRM/XRM/365/CE/etc. onto my blog posts, all I have to do is search and reference my earlier writings these days. Back in 2010 when Office 365 was launched, I posted the first reference to the concept of “Dynamics CRM Services”. This is turned out to be pure slideware in the end, as the early illustrations of what the high level Azure services architecture was planned to be never quite materialized in that format. Read this post from Simon Hutson for a great overview of the buzz and confusion around CRM Services.

    The statement in 2008 was:

    “In the future, developers will have access to SharePoint & CRM functionality for collaboration and building stronger customer relationships. With the flexibility to use familiar developer tools like Visual Studio, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that utilize SharePoint and CRM capabilities as developer services for their own applications. Developers can expect a breadth of SharePoint & CRM capabilities across the spectrum of on-premises, online & the Azure Services Platform.”

    With this week’s statement on Dynamics 365 Embedded, could the “future” referenced in the original text actually arrive ten years later? We don’t know for sure yet, but there are a lot of signs pointing towards that direction. If you followed the V9 Preview Executive Briefing or skimmed through my collected tweets from it, then you might already be aware of the concept of App/Plat Separation that’s taking place right this very moment. The earlier built-in application functionality of sales, marketing and services that you always got preinstalled with a CRM instance are now being moved into solutions like the newer Field Service etc. already are. Not only that, but also the built-in ASPX controls for data presentation components like grids and dialogs are now being rewritten with the new Custom Control Framework.

    And what about Azure? Well, it’s everywhere you look now with the new features built for Dynamics 365. Then there’s also… something that will become more clear as the GA of V9 approaches. With all of this technical architecture being lined up for the next generation XRM, it looks like the only thing missing really is a commercial model for selling Dynamics 365 without the CRM. Now that we have the ISV Cloud Embed program announced at Inspire 2017, I would say the time has come to give the people what they want:

    That Twitter poll ain’t open anymore, but please feel free to place your bets in the comments section of this post! What might the Embedded future of Dynamics 365 be and what still needs to happen in your opinion?

  • The Long Road to Unified Interface in Dynamics 365

    The Long Road to Unified Interface in Dynamics 365

    On June 20th Microsoft started taking the cover off its next major release of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (formerly known as CRM): v9.0. The biggest announcements in the first day of the Dynamics 365 Preview Executive Briefing were around the client story. With the new Unified Interface (sometimes also referred to as “UCI” for Unified Client Interface/Infrastructure) the plan is to bring a single client technology to cover all the different UI’s across devices. Web, Outlook, Mobile, Tablet.

    This is very exciting news, but there’s a lot of details and footnotes that people in the Dynamics ecosystem need to be aware of. Let’s dive right in!

    The Client Fragmentation of Dynamics CRM

    Most of you will have probably been around when the previous big UX refresh took place with CRM 2013. We then received the MoCA Framework based tablet app with Windows 8 style tile UI and later saw this framework being used in many other places. We even received a brand new client to be used on the (desktop) web, the Interactive Service Hub (ISH). In fact, one year ago it almost looked like MoCA would be eating the world:

    The only problem with this strategy seemed to be that all of these individual parts never formed a sensible whole. Instead, there were so many “seams” visible everywhere you looked in the Dynamics CRM client landscape that many times you just wanted to keep your focus on the traditional web client and wait for things to clear up in these newer areas of the platform. A few examples:

    • Knowledge Articles were introduced only on ISH, but at the same time ISH was too limited/buggy to be used in most of the existing customer service scenarios with customizations in place.
    • Visual Controls were introduced in the phone and tablet, but the main web app forms just kept getting more and more white with nothing but text fields.
    • Dashboards with filters were made available on ISH, but much of the entities (i.e. sales) that typically are analyzed with dashboards were not allowed on the ISH side.

    MoCA was born for the mobile first era of touch UI and understandably it didn’t have all of the traditional capabilities from the web client. However, there were plenty of gaps that didn’t make it ideal for mobile use either. One of the biggest issues I had with MoCA was the “configure once, deploy everywhere” principle, which tried to force the same full CRM configuration onto the mobile device screens. MoCA brought the CRM into your pocket, but most of the time what a user would need in their pocket is a simplified app focused on a limited set of tasks. The limitations with MoCA meant that Microsoft had to rely on a Resco based client for their Field Service app in which the use cases are primarily mobile only.

    This Time It’s Different

    The promise of Unified Interface is that the era of web vs. mobile is over and now we’ll see a UI that’ll both adapt to the device or screen in use, as well as offer the same customization options in each of them. Content will be presented in a way that will reflow into different states of the control as the space available to it changes.

    Unlike with MoCA, this time there can be multiple different apps also accessed on a mobile device. Also web-only features like form switching are now available on all devices which makes it far less challenging for the system customizer to design a solution when all the exceptions and limitations of specific client types are (in theory) no longer in the way. It’s important to set the expectations on a realistic level, though, since I’m quite sure we’ll need to make some more compromises on the web side of the house with this new Unified Interface, but hopefully it’ll be a price worth paying for true mobility of Dynamics 365 business apps.

    For an even more customized experience, the Custom Control Framework that has been gradually introduced as part of the application (like the Editable Grid, for example) is going to introduce a design surface for developers to extend Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps in exciting new ways. Not only that, the existing ASPX based UI controls that have been in the core CRM application since forever are now also being transformed into Custom Controls. This is a part of the larger application/platform separation initiative that’s a whole topic of its own. On a high level, the developers should soon have access to basically the same tools for building new UI controls as what Microsoft is using to build their business apps.

    All of this should help in removing many of the gaps that have currently stopped the rolling out of the individual application features in earlier releases for real life business scenarios. There are plenty of promises that MS is making on performance improvements of this new client technology, too. That’s an important aspect to keep in mind and realistically evaluate as the Unified Interface becomes available, since all of the eye candy in the world won’t be of much value if the actual user experience of working with the application isn’t meeting the ever growing expectations of fluid interaction with the data stored in and managed via Dynamics 365.

    Are We There Yet?

    So, all of this looks great – now can we have it by tomorrow, please? The short answer is “no” and the expanded one is “it depends”. As mentioned in my earlier blog post, much of the new features in Dynamics 365 will now be rolled out via Private Previews and Preview programs before general availability. Hopping on to the preview train will shorten the time it takes for gaining hands on experience with the new UI. However, there’s more to it.

    Earlier I mentioned the previous UI refresh of CRM 2013 release (“Orion”), but some of you might still remember the intermediate release of “Polaris” (whereas the official name December 2012 Service Update isn’t something even I remembered anymore). That was perhaps the first Online-only release that Microsoft developed, with a target of not even trying to upgrade all of the application features into the new UI concept but instead just a selected few entities (“COLAC”) received the refreshed forms and Business Process Flow. You could build a simple CRM demo for a new customer with it, but trying to upgrade existing systems into Polaris or building anything with more customization requirements was a no-no. They had to wait until the full CRM 2013 release became available.

    The reason I’m bringing up this is that initially the Unified Interface is likely to be a bit like Polaris. It’s going to be made available only to brand new instances with the Business Edition licensing, or for new Apps that are either built by Microsoft (Customer Service Hub, a.k.a. ISH v2) or by the customer. It will also be available on the Phone and Tablet apps as well as in the lightweight Dynamics 365 App for Outlook (which officially replaces Outlook Client that’s now deprecated). Everywhere else, though, it’s not going to be the time for Unified Interface yet, but instead a refresh of the web client that’ll look something like this:

    Starting to get confused? I don’t blame you! There’s a hint of irony in the fact that the “Unified” Interface will initially be yet another interface variation for the Dynamics 365 application. I’m sure it’s not the way Microsoft would prefer to have these things introduced but reality is usually a bit more messy than PowerPoint presentations. The new client technology simply represents such a major shift in how Dynamics 365 works that upgrading all the complex customizations of existing Enterprise customers into it in one go would not be a smart move. Remember that “everyone’s an enterprise customer” until the Business Edition finally is out the door.

    To truly understand the client strategy that Microsoft is pursuing, you simply have to look at the Business Edition now, regardless of your deployment’s size. It is the dreamy wonderland in which MS can cut back on unnecessary complexity of application features and not worry about breaking any existing deployments, since there is hardly any legacy there. A fresh start that doesn’t need to carry all of the overlapping functionality (like Contracts vs. Entitlements) or provide all the admin options necessary for hybrid environments. It’s not all pure bliss in the sense that all of this will eventually have to live in harmony with the more complex custom UI’s and business logic of big corporations with “non-simplified” CRM systems running on the Dynamics platform. Still, right now we’re seeing a move from “cloud first” to “Business Edition first” when it comes to client innovation.

    Just because the Business Edition is targeting the lower end of the product licensing fees doesn’t mean you should dismiss the functionality that is being introduced in it. If the Sales app mainly streamlines many of the unnecessary complexities of current opportunity management in Dynamics 365 Enterprise, then the Marketing app will bring advanced logic like Customer Journey management that many existing larger customers would surely love to get their hands on. Unified Interface is the big story here that’s driving the release policy. I suspect that it’s the primary reason why the new XRM based Marketing app is only available for Business Edition customers initially, since features like integration with Customer Insights based segmentation and scoring mechanisms are not a feature anyone would build solely with the SMB segment in mind.

    It will all make sense in the end (hopefully), but in the near future both the customers as well as Microsoft will have some work ahead of them before the new promised land of Unification is reached. This is of course not all that different from what other business application platforms with a long market presence must go through every once in a while. Some may claim that Microsoft is following the Salesforce Lightning UI concept here with their Unified Interface and the similarities are surely there to be found. In fact, what I wrote about this the last time when Salesforce was following Microsoft’s lead is still pretty relevant when it comes to user experience evolution, so why not revisit that blog post for some perspective: The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications.