In this post, we are going to look at the challenge of how to display streaming data sets directly onto a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement form. While there already exists a way to embed Power BI dashboards and reports within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, these are not on a form level. To see how to do this currently, have a look here. When followed, you should observe results similar to the following, where a dashboard is initially displayed and then you can click though

In the previous post, we looked at how we could incorporate Google Nest devices into the Connected Field Service (CFS) solution. This post will look at extending some of these scenarios particularly around the video stream available from the Nest camera. To get started, the first scenario we are going to achieve is to record the video stream from the device to a SharePoint folder that is associated with the Dynamics 365 Customer Asset record. In terms of prerequisites, you wi

If you haven't yet had the chance to look into Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service, I definitely recommend that you do! While customer service is key to just about every organisation on the planet, Field Service enables this function to become mobile. Yes, I am simplifying this somewhat, but in my eyes, that is the key conceptual difference. What makes Microsoft different in this space is that they have a comprehensive IoT ability backed by the class-leading Azure platfo

This post is going to look at leveraging some of the Microsoft Cognitive services to take the simple concept of email and turn it into a world class differentiator based on language and sentiment analysis, think of this as email machine learning! Firstly, go and check out the Microsoft Cognitive Services as they provide a huge array of capability and most of them you can try for free! To get started we are going to log into our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement instance and we

Microsoft recently announced some changes to the way in which security is going to be handled in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. You can read about it here. This has quite a profound impact not least of which is the Portal component in Dynamics 365. To this end, I thought it relevant to see how we can mitigate this risk by upgrading a Dynamics 365 to the latest version to ensure that the change does not effect the portal adversely. So let's go about it. First, log into the

In this article, we are going to create some entities within our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement instance to store the progress (and particularly the failures) of the population of our Azure Search index. First, log into your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement instance after which you should see this: Next, click on the drop down arrow next to ‘Sales’ and navigate to the ‘Settings’ menu item and then select ‘Solutions’ as follows: Here, you should have a solution called ‘Kylie

During the course of any Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement project, you are likely to experience these "undocumented features". More currently referred to as bugs, they always seem to crop up at the most inopportune times. The Kylie Bot project is no different and suffers from the same bugs. To be specific, there were issues with persisting the user object across the conversations we were facilitating with Kylie Bot. The cause of these issues was that the Internet Information

In Part 9 of the Kylie Bot series, we published our Bot into the world. The challenge is that we didn't give people a way to access the bot. This post will focus on embedding the bot into a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portal that we have created previously. To get started, navigate here. You should see this screen: You will be prompted to login, so use your Microsoft credentials as follows: You will also need to enter your password like this: Next, you should see a page

Finally, we add the meaningful part to our Kylie Bot where we can return some knowledge to the user. Let’s get started straight away! The first thing we will need is to add a CRMKnowledgeBaseArticle class to the Models folder of the CRMApi project. Right click on the Models folder and select ‘Add->Class’ like this: Next, name the class like this: And finally, copy the following code into the class to represent our required properties: namespace CRMApi.Models { public clas

During the Kylie Bot blog post series, one of the steps was to create a custom activity entity to record all of the conversations users are having with the Bot. While customising some of the views, I came across the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen asking me if I wanted to include the entity in the Relevance Search? The answer is actually yes I do because I want to enable my users to search the content and related content of the entity, not just the entity itself. So le

During Part 7, we did a lot of work with asynchronous calls and it's often very difficult to test these because the calls to interfaces don't always return when you expect them to. Stephen Cleary helped me out here with the following blog. The result is that I have created a console application that you can use to test the async calls that we make to our CRMApi in the KylieBot project. See the link to the project here. Also, a couple of things to note during my experiments wi

In the previous post we created a CRMApi project. To deliver the value of the this project though, we need to publish the Api and connect to it from our Kylie Bot. Let's get started. First, right click on the CRMApi project and select 'Publish' like this: You should then be presented with this: Select the 'Microsoft Azure App Service' option and then the 'Create New' radio button and then click on the 'Publish' button. You should then see this screen: Note that credentials ar

When settings up a Portal that is attached to Dynamics 365, there are several solutions and functions that get automatically deployed for you. Most of these work very well and without you evening realising that they are there. Some however aren't as subtle. The most obvious example of this is when a user registers on a portal and then tries to confirm their email address. The 'Confirm Email' option is available on the portal profile as follows: However, clicking on this confi

Now that we have a Dynamics 365 instance and an associated portal, let's go and link these two up to our Kylie Bot. This requires a bit of work in the Dynamics instance. Let's start by logging into the instance with the details from the previous post where we created our trial instance. Navigating through the Office 365 landing page to the Dynamics 365 tile should present the standard Dynamics 365 landing page where we can navigate to a new section that will have been added w

While this may seem a trivial task, trials are a great way to get the feel of a product before purchasing an actual license. The trial we are going to spin up today will be an enterprise version of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. To begin the process, navigate here. Follow the steps as per the screenshots below: Fill in your unique details: Create your tenant where your Dynamics 365 instance will be provisioned: Prove you're not a robot: Save your login credentials: Next, c