Editing the Site Map in a Dynamics CRM application can be a mission, particularly if you aren’t using any third party applications and editing the schema by hand, as it were. Fortunately, in the December 2016 update for Dynamics 365, Microsoft added an in-application Site Map editor called the Site Map Designer. This makes editing the Site Map for an application much easier, as it provides a handy drag and drop interface for interacting with the different Site Map elements.

How do I access it?

The Site Map can be either edited in the default solution or by importing the Site Map into a custom solution. Once the Site Map is in the desired solution, in the solution explorer navigate to Client Extensions > Site Map. In order to edit the Site Map, either double click the Site Map component or click edit.

The Interface

While the interface has a few quirks, it provides an easy way to work with the Site Map. The main component is a preview of what the Site Map currently looks like. On the right is a tabbed pane which contains in the left tab a collection of drag and drop objects which can be added to the Site Map – Areas, Groups, and Sub-Areas. In the right tab is an interface for editing the properties of a given item. The Command Bar above the Site Map contains three actions, Add, Clone and Delete.

When the Add button is clicked, a list of components available to add is given. When selected, this item is added to the Site Map. The Clone and Delete buttons work as expected, with the clone creating a copy of the currently selected component, and the delete button deleting the currently selected component.

But what about component properties?

The tabbed area at the right of the application window allows for editing the properties of a given component. Here are some of the general properties that can be edited:

Common editable properties for Area, Group and Sub-Area:

Title, ID, URL, More Titles, More Descriptions, Icon (Area and Sub-Area only)

Sub-Area specific:

Type (Dashboard, Entity, Web Resource, URL), Entity (Only usable if type is Entity), URL (Web Resource and URL only), Default Dashboard (Dashboard only), Title, Parameter Passing (Web Resource and URL only)

Publishing your customisations

Once you’ve made your customisations, you can save and publish the Site Map from within the Designer. The controls for doing this are in the top right hand corner of the screen, and work as advertised. It should be noted, it is not possible to publish the Site Map without first saving it. This area also contains a handy indicator as to whether the Site Map being viewed has been published or is a draft.

Custom Entities

The Site Map Designer provides access to all currently published entities. These entities can be added as Sub-Areas to the Site Map. In the below, I’ve added some previously created entities Event and Registration, which have been published from another solution.

Some Quirks

Nothings perfect, and so far I only have one complaint. If you click any area in the edit section that is not part of the Site Map schema, such as the greyed area at the bottom of the screen, the black ribbon with the text Dynamics 365 at the top of the screen, or any area on the Site Map not occupied by an Area, Group, or Sub-Area, the component section to the right of the interface locks down and doesn’t allow you to drag and drop anything other than Areas.

The add button at the top also locks down. While this may prevent users from adding Groups and Sub-Areas to places they are not able, it also means that in order to get this functionality back you have to select an Area, which automatically switches you to the Properties tab on the right. Oddly, clicking on a Group does not re allow the placement of Groups and Sub-Areas. Because I prefer to use the drag and drop component interface on the right, this is little inconvenient.

Business Process Flows have been around for a while in Dynamics CRM (now Dynamics 365 of course), since 2013 in fact. They are very useful in helping organisations model their processes in CRM and help guide users through stages of the process.

However, there are some limitations which are important to understand before embarking on configuring any BPFs. I’ll cover one of them here, namely moving between entities.

Many business processes need to cover more than one entity (i.e. record type) in CRM. The process may start with an account and then move to a case, or start with a contact and move to an opportunity etc.

There are some out of the box BPFs which cross over from one entity to another, e.g. the ‘Lead to Opportunity Sales Process’, shown below:

The first stage of this process, the ‘Qualify’ stage, is on the lead, but the later stages are on the opportunity. You can’t access the later stages until you define which opportunity you are using, hence the locks on those stages.

When you create a custom BPF, you can join any 2 entities, as long as both are enabled for BPFs. When you do, you can define the relationship that the BPF has to use for that entity join. So, for example I could have a BPF which started on a Case record and then moved to an Opportunity record. The screenshot below shows the BPF configuration screen, with Stage 2 selected:

The ‘Relationship’ field, which is defining the relationship the Opportunity in this stage has with the Case in Stage 1, shows ‘None’ and if you select the dropdown, no other option is available. This is because there is no relationship between Cases and Opportunities. There are none out of the box and I haven’t created any custom one. (By the way, the same limitation exists on the old BPF designer).

For BPFs, what this means is that when I move from the Case to the Opportunity, I wouldn’t be able to move the process to an existing Opportunity.

As you can see here, when I select the ‘Next Stage’ (Stage 1 is on the Case, and Stage 2 is on the Opportunity), it tells me that no Opportunity records exist, but does give me the chance to create one.

So, in what situations can you go from one entity to an existing record on another entity using a BPF? To do that a 1-to-many relationship has to exist, i.e. the entity in the stage before the entity change has to be the parent entity and the entity in the stage after the entity change has to be the child entity. So, if you have created a BPF which goes from, say, Account to Contact, when you are designing this BPF in CRM, you get the chance to select the existing 1-to-many relationship called ‘Company Name’ which exists out of the box:

Now, when I go into an account, and move it to the contact stage of the BPF, CRM asks me which existing contact I want to use, and shows me the contact s related to that account through the Company Name relationship.

I can still create a new contact if I want to, and move the BPF on to that new contact.

So, in summary, in order to go from one record to another existing record in a BPF, you can only go through a 1-to-many relationship. You can’t go through a many-to-many and you can’t go through a many-to-1.

There is one exception to this. When you start in one entity and go to a child entity in a subsequent stage and then back to the primary entity in a later stage, you can go back to the record from the first stage, but only that record, e.g. Stage 1 is for Account, Stage 2 is for Contact, using the Company Name relationship, and Stage 3 is for Account again. When you set up the BPF, on Stage 3, if you select Account, you can't select any relationship. When you use the BPF, if you started at ABC Ltd in Stage 1 then went to Joe Bloggs who works for ABC Ltd in Stage 2, when you click on Next Stage from Stage 2, you are taken straight to ABC Ltd.

This is both good and bad. Good that you can go from child to parent in later stages, but bad that you can only go to the record from the earlier stage. So, in the example, if you wanted to go to an account which is different than the Account in the earlier stage, you wouldn't be able to do it.

A further limitation worth mentioning is that you can’t go from parent to child on a self-referential relationship, e.g. you can’t go from a parent account to a child account in a BPF.

There are other limitations on BPFs, which I hope to blog on in future. BPF’s are still a great CRM feature though and can really help your users, so don’t be shy in giving them a try!

Happy CRMing everyone!

Attachments in Dynamics 365 generally consist of important Microsoft Office documents, image files, PDF files and other crucial files for your organization. What you may not know is that you can save money and reduce your Dynamics 365 data usage by storing your attachments outside of CRM. This post will let you know how to do just that and teach you how to change the size limit for any attachments you intend to store inside of CRM.

An often overlooked feature of CRM is the ability to alter the file size limit for attachments. To do this navigate to System Settings and click on the Email tab. Here you will find a section called ‘Set file size limit for attachments’ in which you can set the maximum file size for attachments in kilobytes. The default size limit for attachments is 5120kB/5MB but can be increased to 32768Kb/32MB for older versions of CRM and 131072Kb/128MB for newer versions of CRM. This is great for any business that regularly deals with large attachments and needs to ensure that they can be stored in CRM.

Attachments are stored inside the CRM database and any extra storage is priced at a premium rate of $9.99 USD per GB while SharePoint is much cheaper at around $0.20 USD for every extra GB of storage. It is therefore important to consider moving your attachments from the CRM database into a document management and storage system such as SharePoint to save money. A good way to do this is by using the Attachment Extractor for Microsoft Dynamics 365 by mscrm-addons. This tool allows you to quickly extract your attachments to SharePoint and makes great use of the native Dynamics 365 SharePoint integration so you can easily attach and surface SharePoint documents from within CRM.

By following these tips your organization won’t have to pay escalating costs for additional data storage in order to continue making changes to CRM. Don’t forget that you can check how much space your CRM organization is using under the ‘Resources in Use’ section of the administration area. Monitoring this section is a great way to prevent your cloud storage limit from maxing out, so you can continue to make changes to CRM without issues.

In this video I am going to demonstrate how to install and configure the free Microsoft Dynamics 365 app for Windows 10 and how to sign-in to an online trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales using the app. I will also demonstrate some basic navigation to get you started with using the app.

In this video demonstrate how to configure Server Side Synchronization, Queues, and Automatic Record Creation and Update Rules for processing and converting Email Messages to Cases in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service.

For the purposes of this video demonstration, an online trial of Dynamics 365 for Service is used and Gmail, instead of Microsoft Exchange, is used. This video also demonstrates an alternate approach for the configuration of Auto-Response Email Messages that provides the ability to avoid auto-response email loops.

The topics are:

00:00 – Introduction
00:18 – Topic
00:59 – Configuration Overview
02:03 – Gmail Account (Pop Download and Dynamics 365 App Password)
02:50 – Dynamics 365
02:56 – Email Server Profile
04:54 – Email Configuration Settings
06:35 – Email Templates (for Auto-Response Email Messages)
07:40 – Teams and Default Queues
10:48 – Queues
14:27 – Email Enabled Queue Mailboxes
17:34 – Record Creation and Update Rules
23:50 – Email to Case Conversion Example
25:58 – Alternate Auto response Email Configuration
27:36 – Conclusion

Errata
02:34 “customized App with the name” should be “an App Password with the name”.
27:23 – “send an auto-response email template” should be “send an auto-response email”.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 introduced a handy feature which allows you to add subcomponents (or entity assets) to a solution. This means you can strip down your solutions to only include the subcomponents you need.

I recently needed to remove fields from a solution because no changes were made to those fields. I attempted to select multiple fields and use the Remove Component button but encountered the following warning:

It made sense to me that “same type” referred to the Type column in the screenshot above, i.e. the data type of the field. I tried to select multiple Single Line of Text fields and remove them in bulk but encountered the same warning.

It turns out that Type refers to custom fields vs system fields. This means that you can only remove fields in bulk if all the selected fields are custom fields or all the selected fields are system fields, but not a combination of both.

I recently developed a Dynamics 365 CRM system that would be used for both English and German users. Both sets of users would have access to Products, but only the German users could not see the necessary command bar buttons even though they had the necessary permissions.

I had a look at the buttons display and enable rules and found this rule on them “Mscrm.IsUserUsingBaseLanguage”. The rule checked if the current user’s language setting were the same as the organisation base language. If it wasn’t then the button would be hidden.

When I removed this rule, and tried creating a product while using Dynamics CRM in German I was presented with this error:

Rows with localizable attributes can only be created when the user interface (UI) language for the current user is set to the organization's base language.

This meant that anyone who wants to create products must be using the CRM organisations base language and I had to put the button back.

Field localisation allows you to define translations for data, it’s not reserved only for schema. Forcing entities with localised fields to be created in the organisation base language ensures that there is a base line for any records to be created / languages that will be used.

Some things to note when working with localised field labels:

1.    A user does not need to have the System Administrator security role. If they have permission to update the entity they can change the labels.

2.    Records with localized fields are read-only unless your preferred language is the organization’s base language.

3.    You can only create records with localized fields if you are using the organization’s base language.

4.    If you update the base language value for a localizable field any localized values for that field are not changed.

5.    If you set the base language value to null or an empty string, all localized values for that property will also be cleared. Even if they have an updated localised field label.

In this video I demonstrate how the SLA KPI Instance Statuses in Dynamics 365 work for Resolved and Cancelled Cases that are closed prior to the ‘Failure Time’ for a ‘Resolve By KPI’, configured using an ‘Enhanced SLA’, is reached.

In particular, this demonstration highlights how the SLA KPI Instance Status is always eventually set to ‘Noncompliant’, after initially progressing from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Nearing Noncompliance’ for Cancelled Cases even when the Case was cancelled before either the ‘Warning Time’ or the ‘Failure Time’ of the ‘Resolve By KPI’ is reached.

This demonstration then also shows how the ‘Resolve By KPI’ configured using an ‘Enhanced SLA’ can be configured so that the SLA KPI Instance Status for Cases that are cancelled prior to the Failure Time will have a Status of ‘Success’ rather than a Status of ‘Noncompliant’.

Overall, it might be expected or required that Dynamics 365 sets the SLA KPI Instance Status to ‘Cancelled’ for Cancelled Cases but this is not so.

00:00 – Introduction
00:17 – Topic
01:36 – SLA KPI Instance Option Set Values
01:45 – Timer Control
02:19 – Customised Case Form (used for this demonstration)
03:23 – Sample Default SLA 1 (used for Sample Case 1 and Sample Case 2)
03:47 – Sample Case 1 (SLA KPI Instance = Succeeded when Case is Resolved prior to the Failure Time)
05:01 – Sample Case 2 (SLA KPI Instance = Noncompliant when Case is Cancelled prior to the Failure Time)
06:28 – Sample Default SLA 2 (used for Sample Case 3)
07:34 – Sample Case 3 (SLA KPI Instance = Succeeded when Case is Cancelled prior to the Failure Time)
08:27 – Reporting

Using localized fields to display product records in Dynamics CRM is a good way to make your Dynamics 365 system language independent and user friendly. But what if you also want to use those localized names to set the name of another custom entity using a plugin that looks up to these products?

In a client Dynamics 365 implementation, we were going to have German and English users and we had custom entities with lookups to entities with localized fields. Unless you do some clever manipulation, the name of all new records no matter the user will have the same (default language) product name displayed in them.

In my situation, we wanted to record the products that a client ordered after a meeting (appointment) so decided that the name of our new appointment product record should be: “{Appointment.Subject} - {Product.Name}”. For example, we had a product called “Beef” in our system, the German translation is “Rindfleisch”. Getting the record name by doing a retrieve query on the product will result in all the records having the default language name (i.e. “Beef”) regardless of the owning users preferred language.

If German user created and an appointment product for beef, the generated name would be “Treffen - Beef” (meeting – beef). This is not the required result because their preferred language is German and we would want the record name to be “Treffen - Rindfleisch”. We decided that the name of our new appointment product record should be based on the language settings of the owner of the new record.

Fortunately, there are user settings that you can query to make this naming a bit more intuitive. I needed to get the product name in the owning users preferred language.

In the code sample below we pass in the localized entity reference, (in my case this was the product entity) the user whose language settings should be used to find the localized records name and the schema name of the field you want to retrieve the translation for.

Note that the Sdk variable is of type IOrganizationService and is used to perform common CRUD operations against the Dynamics CRM platform.

We’ve recently worked on a large Case management system for a client, which uses Record Creation and Update Rules in Dynamics 365. The basic configuration of the client Dynamics CRM system is as follows:

1.    Multiple Queues and corresponding mailboxes with email addresses
2.    Email Router configured to monitor Queue mailboxes in Exchange
3.    Record Creation and Update Rules to create Cases when Email Messages are delivered to CRM and routed to Queues

Through our testing, we realized that the Record Creation and Update Rules steps would often fail in several scenarios. The System Jobs would show the failed steps with a status of Error: Needs Attention.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to resume the failed steps by restarting the System Jobs. Instead, we needed to build a light-weight Windows Service that would retry the Record Creation and Update Rule steps on Queue Items.

The Windows Service simply queries Queue Item records for incoming email messages. For each Queue Item retrieved, we execute the ApplyRecordCreationAndUpdateRulesRequest which retries the Record Creation and Update Rule.

The great thing about this request is that it will not retry a Record Creation and Update Rule step on a Queue Item that had already been processed successfully. In our scenario, it would prevent duplicate Cases from being created in Dynamics 365.

The auto-complete control is a great feature in Dynamics CRM 365 to display a list of suggested text values as you type. In older Dynamics CRM versions, unsupported JavaScript or a web resource would have been required to achieve this Auto-complete functionality.

The following steps demonstrate how to use the Auto-complete control to display address suggestions from the New Zealand Post Address API:

1.    Obtain New Zealand Post Client Id and Secret

When you register with New Zealand Post and set up your free account, a Client Id and Client Secret would be generated which will be used in every HTTP request to the New Zealand Post Address API

2.    Setup the on key press event

Bind the on key press event of a single-line text field. This converts the single-line of text control to an Auto-complete control.

3.    Pass the input text value on every key press

For every key press against the field obtain the field value and pass to the getSuggestions() function

4.    Generate API Query string

Generate the New Zealand Post API query string by concatenating the New Zealand Post API URL, Client Id, Client Secret and field value.

5.    Retrieve Address Suggestion from the New Zealand POST API

Send a HTTP request to the New Zealand POST API and process the response. A successful HTTP Status 200 response will contain JSON data which is parsed and added to an array of Address Suggestion objects.

6.    Populate the auto-complete control with the array of Address Suggestion objects

That’s all there is to it. A small amount of work to improve the user experience and also ensure that accurate address data is stored in your Dynamics 365 system.

Recently one of our clients had a situation with Dynamics 365 Marketing Lists where they wanted the ability to select and then assign Marketing List Members to themselves or to other users. As this functionality is not provided out of the box in Dynamics CRM I attempted a few workarounds before finally discovering a good fix.

For the first workaround, I attempted to remake the query one of the Marketing Lists was based on using Advanced Find. After this I could use the Assign button in the results ribbon to re-assign members of my choice. The problem with this was if the list member query was complex it would be very time consuming to remake.

For the second workaround, I attempted to search for all list members who were connected to a specific marketing list via Advanced Find. With the results page returned I could use the Assign button in the ribbon just like in the previous workaround. This method would only work if the CRM Marketing List was a static list and would not return any results if it was a dynamic list. With this is mind I thought it would be a good idea to create a copy of the dynamic marketing list using out of the box functionality. Doing this would create a static list which would allow me to once again use Advanced Find to assign members. This workaround also ended up being ruled out as it would result in too many unnecessary marketing lists which would clutter the system.

So, moving on I started to look at adding a new button to the command bar using the Ribbon Workbench. I thought the best place to add it would be on the associated view of the list member, which in my case was the Lead Entity. After adding a new button to the command bar of the Lead Entity, I saw that it was not added to the lists’ associated view. I found that the command bar buttons of the associated view were related to the ‘listmember’ intersect entity and not the Lead, Account or Contact entities in Dynamics CRM. This was an issue because the entity could not simply be added to a solution, so instead I decided to add the Application ribbon to the solution. I could now add a new custom button, with a display rule which would only show the button when the entity was ‘listmember’.

For this specific example the easiest method to provide functionality would be to re-use the OOTB assign functionality. Doing this however is unsupported so I would recommend writing custom code for the assign functionality instead. After publishing the solution, the newly created button appeared in the command bar of the marketing lists associated member view.

After setting up a Triggered Azure WebJob, you may run into the confusing error message in the logs after running it of “…aborted due to no output and CPU activity for 121 seconds. You may increase SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT setting to solve the issue”.

This is confusing as the SCM_COMMAND_IDLE_TIMEOUT setting actually applies to timeouts during deployment, not your WebJob being idle. The correct setting for WebJobs is WEBJOBS_IDLE_TIMEOUT (other WebJob configuration settings can be found here). This should be set in the configuration setting for the Web App, rather than in the App.config of the WebJob. Note that the value is in seconds.

Another solution is to output to the Console, which is especially useful for jobs that are doing long running asynchronous tasks or polling external services. For these cases adding a heartbeat style Console write every minute is better than increasing the Idle Timeout to huge numbers, especially if there are other jobs on the same Web App that would be effected.

Recently while attempting to view audit data I was surprised to see that values in the "New Value" column had been replaced by a weird symbol, which can be seen in the screenshot below. I found that it was a common problem which would occur when auditing had been turned off. After checking and confirming that auditing was still enabled, I decided to look into this more.

Through further investigation, I found that auditing can automatically be disabled and then re-enabled when a managed solution is deployed. From here I checked when the entity level auditing had been disabled and tried to match that date and time with a solution import. By doing this I found that it was disabled when a solution was imported, but this solution was unmanaged not managed.

It turns out that the issue is caused by not ticking the ‘Include entity metadata’ checkbox when deciding which entity assets to add to a solution. While deploying the solution without that checkbox ticked CRM attempts to revert the entity settings back to their default.

In the example below, the custom entity did not have auditing enabled when it was created so its default setting for auditing is for it to be disabled. When deploying this entity in a solution without that metadata box ticked, CRM temporarily disables the auditing, as this was the default, then re-enables it, because that is its current state.

Microsoft Flow service helps you to create and manage automated workflows between your favourite applications and services that help you work smarter and be more productive. It empowers your ability to trigger workflows at the tap of a button, turn the flows off anytime, monitor to see where it failed, get history report and much more.

In this blog, we will create a flow that searches files in a OneDrive folder and creates Notes in Dynamics 365.

Step 1:  Login to the Microsoft flow site: https://flow.microsoft.com/

Step 2: Type “Attach OneDrive files about Dynamics Contacts as notes” in the search box and click the template per the below image.

Step 3: Subsequently, the flow template will request you to connect to your services.

Step 4:  After connecting to your services, choose the OneDrive folder for the flow to look at files in and select your organization and the entity name. Modify the condition to search for the files that matches the Last Name of your Dynamics 365 Contacts and then upon a successful match, create a Note with the Title as the file name.

Step 5: Click on the ‘Done’ button on the top right of the screen to enable your flow and that’s it! Your flow is now up and running.

You can test your flow by creating a file in the specified OneDrive folder with the name containing the Last Name of one of your Contacts in Dynamics 365 and you’ll notice that a Note will be created in Dynamics 365 automatically. You can also add more conditions, actions, switch cases, to do until loops etc. to your flows based on the requirements.

Have a look at some predefined Flow templates here to help you get started. Happy Flow Crm’ing everyone! 

Recently I was fortunate enough to participate in a workshop focused on Microsoft’s analytics service, Power BI. This blog will be the first in a series of blogs describing my experiences with Power BI. In this blog, I will focus on importing data into the Power BI desktop version. The remainder of the blogs will focus on Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and the finished Power BI products in a browser.

When opening Power BI, you are greeted with a welcome page and given the option to import your data from here. In this example I decided to ignore that welcome page and import data using the “Get Data” button in the ribbon. Clicking on this button drops down a list of common import methods which can be seen in the screenshot below. These options include importing via Excel sheet, Web URL, OData and a few more.

By clicking on “More…” from the previous dropdown list a small window opens with the remaining options. Power BI can easily import data from many places including SQL Servers, Dynamics 365, Zendesk, Github and Sharepoint.

In the screenshot below I ended up importing data from the “Rotten Tomatoes Top 100” Web Page. As you can see, Power BI detects multiple tables and displays the available ones on the left side. On the right side a preview of the data is shown along with the option to view it as a Web page or a Table. At the moment, the Table name isn’t very informative and the data isn’t as clean as I would like it, but I’ll be changing this using Power Query in the next blog.

Relationship Insights is an exciting new feature in Dynamics 365. It’s backed by Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms which give users even more power to engage with their customers.

In this demo, we give an overview Relationship Assistant, one of the components of Relationship Insights, and how it can help you reach even greater heights of customer service and sales.

Learning Path is a new feature that was introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help on-board new users. It’s a custom-made and interactive assistance that can be tailored for the users. This feature is available in December 2016 update and in all latest online versions. In this blog, I’d like to dive into few things about it.

Guided Tasks

Guided Tasks are interactive bubble sequence that guide the users over common or new tasks. They are typically a series of steps. In each step, the user click on the ‘Next’ button or completes a defined action to proceed to the next step. The bubble can also be configured with a ‘Learn More’ button that can be customized to redirect users to a Learning Path Sidebar (explained below) to get detailed information.

Sidebars

To provide more information to the users, further content to the Sidebars can be added that slides out from the right side of the application. They can include more text, links, videos, and other content to help users become familiar with the web page that they are on.

WYSIWIG Designer

With Learning Path designer, rich content can be inserted on a WYSIWYG editor. It consequently lets you enter different types of content such as YouTube videos, text, external web links and can redirect to other Learning Path tours.

Export the Content and Re-Use

This feature empowers you to just write the content once and re-use it by importing and exporting to multiple instances or creating a backup before making any changes to the content. This can be done from the Content Library by selecting the contents you wish to save and click Manage > Export.

Limitations

Learning Path is a great feature; however, it does have some limitations such as below:

- It’s only available for CRM Online.
- Sidebars can have at most 12 sections.
- User’s usage metrics to recognize users who have accomplished their Guided Tasks is not available at this stage.

When working on a server with multiple instances of CRM you may need to locate the user groups that relate to your CRM deployment. Unfortunately, you will be met with a large list of groups each with a Guid in their name that seems to have come out of nowhere, and doesn’t match the Guids for your groups in SQL. Fortunately there is a way to identify which of these groups relates to your deployment.

Here’s how (note in this demonstration I only had one instance of CRM installed):

Go to the MSCRM_config database and query the ConfigSettings table. Get the id of the groups you need to check.

Go to active directory and find any groups with the same name as the one you are looking for.

Don’t compare the name of the group to the id you just retrieved. Right click and go to properties. Select the Attribute Editor tab and find the objectGUID.

Compare this to the GUIDs you got from the ConfigSettings table. Work through the list until you find the one that matches your GUID that’s your group.

In a previous blog, I’ve talked about enhancing test strategy and planning across the Dynamics 365 software development lifecycle using XMind. We incorporate XMind as a fundamental test documentation tool when testing for projects with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Doing so adds flexibility and modularity into test planning with XMind’s different functionalities, while also aiding the user through visual presentation. XMind offers additional functionalities when upgrading to XMind Pro like exporting to Word/ Excel/ PDF, presentation mode, Gantt Chart and audio notes. I will go over some techniques on how you can optimize the use of XMind Pro for better test planning and test documentation practices.

The export functionality is an important feature in XMind Plus and Pro (XMind 8 version). It allows users to export an XMind map into various document formats such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and in PDF format. Doing so can be useful, especially when sending test execution reports to clients who do not have XMind installed or available in their machine. Furthermore, users with availability and familiarity of using the Office suite tools such as Excel and Word can use exported XMind data easily (unfortunately, no import functionality available for all versions of XMind 8 from the Office suite tools). With the ability to export and use XMind data to different tools mean users have more flexibility available in their fingertips, mainly using Excel and Word like applying functions/ formulas, text editing and data visualization.

XMind 8 Pro features export functionality into different types, most commonly from the Microsoft Office suite such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Other document types include HTML, PDF format, Gantt chart (Microsoft Project) and other mind map formats (e.g. FreeMind)

It is important to note that when we want to export XMind data into an Excel spreadsheet, we want to organize our XMind map efficiently and methodically such that it can be laid out as intended when imported. XMind export wizard has some export settings you can use in how the table is layout with relation to how the exported XMind map is organized (via topic-subtopic components) and what the column header names are based on.

As a general rule, when considering the export functionality, it is best to limit branches of topic-subtopics to a set amount such that it can be neatly organized into columns in our exported file, ready for us to use. An example of a simple XMind map with the Merged Cell table layout would give the following exported Excel spreadsheet:

Ensure that your topic-subtopic components comply with the table layout that you have set for export. It is best to maintain a set maximum such that the rows and columns provide consistency and usefulness throughout the test execution reports and better visual presentation. Every additional subtopic level adds an additional column into the exported Excel spreadsheet.

Bigger branches mean more columns! If you usually make large branches, best practices would be using hyperlinks to separate and modularize components into different sheets for a more organized XMind map structure. We can connect a topic to a separate sheet and link it the main page such that relevant maps are organized separately. Doing so can also reduce clutter from having overly large mind maps within a sheet.

Having the ability to export multiple sheets within a document is only available in Excel (Word and PowerPoint exports individual sheets only). The ‘New Sheet From Topic’ option creates a new sheet and connection from the Main Topic selected. The corresponding linked sheets in XMind are highlighted in red and can be navigated by selecting the connection link (and vice versa back to the main page link). Note that deleting the link from a newly created sheet does not delete the sheet but rather deletes the connection itself. Newly created sheet would still remain within your XMind document.

The upgrade to XMind Plus and Pro extends towards giving the user more flexibility when using XMind maps. The ability to export XMind maps is powerful way for users to utilise Microsoft Office suite tools and other document formats with XMind map data. This also adds with the familiarity users have with using the suite tools. We can generate test execution reports using XMind data, utilising other functionality with a modularised structure. Determining the best practices for testing and development lifecycle would ultimately depend on your project, company and user processes. I’ll leave that up for you to decide.