Contextual Email communication in D365 CE Wave 2

2019’s Wave 2 release have really put things where they should be. Once I enabled Early Opt-in while writing this post, this is a great feature for Sales people I came across and couldn’t resist sharing with you all – Contextual Email Communication! So kindly wait until updates are automatically applied to your org or try the same in your Sandbox first.

Isn’t going exclusively to Activity/Email entity extremely off-putting? I mean, you navigate away from your record you were working on and that isn’t productive, is it?

That’s when Contextual Email window comes in really handy. Here’s how you enable it in your 2019 Updates.

App Settings in Sales Hub

In your Sales Hub, navigate to App Settings.
Among other settings, look for Enhanced email and flick the switch from off to On.
Then click Apply at the bottom right and you’re set!

Contextual/Enhanced Email

Now, when you’re, say, in an Opportunity and you want to send an email to the Contact on the Opportunity right away from Dynamics. –

Click on the + icon on the Timeline.
And the new docked window will appear right there on the Form without navigating you away from Dynamics unlike it was happening up until now!

Hope this cool new feature really eases the stress to Email from Dynamics 365!

Store ‘Today’s Date’ in a field to use in workflow conditions in D365 CE

September 24, 2019 priyeshwagh777 Customizations, dynamics 365 administration, Dynamics 365 CE Dynamics 365 CE, dynamics crm, workflow

Most of us need this in our workflow conditions to check against – to have today’s date handy and then use them in If conditions in workflows. But, the filter in If conditions in workflows don’t let you dynamically select On or after ‘Today’.

And when you want to compare to today’s date on selection of On or After, you are forced to enter a date and not dynamically select Today.

To overcome this, here’s what you can do to simply store Today’s Date in all records.

Calculated Date and Time field

So workaround this, you can simply create a new Date and Time type of Calculated field to store the current date and use it in your workflow conditions or wherever you need it.

Make sure the type of the field is Calculated and then, Edit the criteria.

Select Now() function to set the value of the field.

And the final criteria condition will simply look like the below

Once you save and publish all your changes, you’ll see that the field is automatically populated with today’s date.

Using in Workflow Conditions

Now, you can use the same in the workflow conditions as shown below –

and you should be able to use this in your workflow conditions which could look like this

Hope this quick workaround comes handy!

Modified By (Delegate) & Created By (Delegate) in D365

September 10, 2019September 10, 2019 priyeshwagh777 CRM with .NET Web Applications, Customizations, Dynamics 365, dynamics 365 administration, dynamics 365 customization dynamics 365 administration, dynamics crm plugin, plugin

These fields which are everywhere but you don’t really pay attention to really mean something worth.

So if you feel you want to get hold of someone for modifying a record. Maybe also take a look at Modified By (Delegate) just in case so that the actual user might be someone else who wanted to do another thing on that record. 🙂

Impersonation is one of the basic aspects of a plugin step that you need to carefully design to let another user (usually Admins for most implementations) make the plugin run under their context instead of giving more security roles/privileges to every other new user.

Well, same goes for Created By & Created By (Delegate) also!

Modified By

Usually, when you update something on a record, the Modified By is updated as expected. But notice that Modified By (Delegate) is not updated.

That’s because you are the rightful owner of the record and there’s no other person involved.

But what is someone else is modifying the record (who don’t have access to that record)?

In that case, Modified On (Delegate) field is populated with the name of that user. In such scenarios, Modified By (Delegate) user is the one who caused changes to the record.

Why Modified By (Delegate) was populated

The reason this was populated was because the record was updated through a plugin by a user who doesn’t have Write access to the record.

But because the user invoked a plugin which was Impersonating as a User who has rights to the records, the record was successfully updated. And this, the actual user who called the plugin is the one who will be populated in the Modified By (Delegate) field.

Hope this quick tip helps!

Duplicate Detection in Dynamics 365 using Keys

September 5, 2019May 5, 2020 priyeshwagh777 Dynamics 365, dynamics 365 administration, Dynamics 365 CE duplicate detection in crm, duplicate detection in dynamics 365, keys

A superb way of restricting duplicate record creation is using Keys in Dynamics 365CE. This is definitely one of the most useful and easy to use features in Dynamics CRM.

In this example, I will create a Key for Email (emailaddress1) field to ensure there are only unique record values for this fields in my environment.