Setting up Project Operations Lite | Blog Series

January 2, 2024January 8, 2024 priyeshwagh777 Project Operations Dataverse, Dynamics 365, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, Project Operations, project operations lite, project operations setup

I felt that I should document steps to setup a Project Operations Lite Trial environment for everyone who’s trying to spin up a Project Operations Instance and trying to get the basic setup done as of January 2024.

Hopefully, this blog series will help you to quickly access and understand the info you need to setup your Project Operations Lite trial environment –

Provisioning a Project Operations Trial

Blog	Description
Starting a Project Operations Lite Trial Environment	Describes how you can provision a new trial for Project Operations Lite and

Setting up Master Data in Project Operations Lite

Blog	Description
Setting Up Default Organizational Unit, Cost and Sales Price List in Project Operations Lite	Find and rename a default Organizational Unit, attach a Cost Price List to the default Org Unit and also create a Sales Price List (Roles, Prices will be added in preceding post)
Resource Roles and adding Role Prices to Cost and Sales Price List in Project Operations	Review and Create Resource Roles, Add Resource Roles to Sales and Cost Price Lists

Billing / Invoicing

Blog	Description
Time and Materials Billing Backlog table in Project Operations	Explains what Time and Materials Billing Backlog table in Dataverse in Project Operations is used for.

Copilot for Project Operations

Blog	Description
Enable Copilot for Project Operations	Enable / Disable Copilot as a feature for Project Operations
Create Project Plan using Copilot in Project Operations	Create a Project Plan for your Project using Copilot based on the Description and other details on the Project record.

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Resource Roles and adding Role Prices to Cost and Sales Price List in Project Operations

January 1, 2024 priyeshwagh777 Project Operations Dataverse, Dynamics 365, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, project operations configuration, project operations lite

Now that in the previous blog posts of this series, the Organization Units, Cost Price and Sales Prices were setup – Setting Up Default Organizational Unit, Cost and Sales Price List in Project Operations Lite, let’s look at what Roles (or Resource Roles) are and how you can add them to the Price Lists

Resource Roles

Let’s see how we can add Resource Roles –

Navigate to Resources Area and then select Resources sub-area in Project Operations App.
Now, navigate to Roles on the Sitemap and you’ll see some existing Roles already available out-of-the-box
If you open any existing roles, you’ll see that Billing Types the type/behavior of the Role which we’ll discuss in further sections.

Now, let’s add the Resource in both Cost and Sales Price Lists in the next section.

Add Role in Cost Price List

Now, lets assume we want to assign a Cost Price to the Consulting Lead role (which is of type Chargeable). Let’s see below on how we can do this –

Navigate to the Organizational Units in Settings area in Project Operations since it’s easy to go than to find the Cost Price as you might not remember the exact name every time.
Open the Organization Unit record which is your default Organization Unit for the PO environment.
Now, since we had already associated a Cost Price in the previous sections, you can open the Price List.
Now, once you open the Cost Price List, go to Role prices tab and click on + New Role Price to add the existing Role to this price list and define the Cost of the Role to the organization.
Now, make sure you select the Role and also select the Organization Unit even if you have selected the Cost Price List from the Organization Unit. That’s because you can add multiple prices for the same role across different Organization Units.

I’m keeping a sample Cost Price of $150
Once you Save and Close, the Role Price will be defined in this Cost Price for this Org Unit.

Alternatively, let’s also add the same Role in the Sales Price List as well from this series.

Add Role in Sales Price List

Let’s also add the same Consulting Lead role to the Sales Price List as well –

Navigate to the Sales area and then look for Price Lists. Look for the Sales Price List you created for your organization.
In the Sales Price list, go to Role Prices and click on Add New Role Price
Now, as Sales Prices are supposed to be higher than Cost Prices, I’m using a Price of $240 for the Consulting Lead which was $150 in the Cost Price
And once you Save and Close, it’ll be added to the Sales Price list as shown below.

Hope this post was useful!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Setting Up Default Organizational Unit, Cost and Sales Price List in Project Operations Lite

January 1, 2024 priyeshwagh777 Project Operations Dataverse, Dynamics 365, organizational units in project operations, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, price lists in project operations lite, Project Operations, project operations lite, roles in project operations lite

One of the first things to do when starting a new Project Operations Lite environment is to start setting up organizational data for your environment and in that, setting up Organizational Units, Price Lists and Roles is one of the first things to start setting up –

Let’s see on how you can start the same!

Organizational Unit

One of the first things is to find the Default Org unit for your Project Operations Lite environment –

Ensure that in your Project Operations environment, you are in Project Operations app. On the SiteMap, switch to the Projects area and then, Settings sub-area.
Now, locate Parameters and there should be 1 record in the Parameters which is mapped to the Default Organization Unit. Select the same (click on the clickable Default Organization Unit lookup itself to directly go to the Organizational Unit [or referred to as Contracting Unit in further blogs])
Once in the Org Unit record, update the name to what should be relevant based on your use case.
I’ve renamed this to a more readable name based on my example. Now, it should be easy for you to deal with this Org Unit while referencing further.

Cost Price List in Organizational Unit

Now that the Org Unit is found and renamed correctly, let’s add a Cost Price List first –

In your Org Unit record, click on Add Existing Price List.
Then, click on New Record button upon clicking the Look for records lookup field.
Select Price Lists as the record type and it should be the only option there.
Then, it’ll open the Price List record creation form on the window and you can start filling in the details. Make sure the Context selected is of type Cost.
Also, the Effective Start Date and Effective End Date should be relevant as all calculations will be successful only if the dates to be processed for transactions fall inside the intended Price List dates.

Save and Close the record once completed.
Then the saved record will be shows as selected on the lookup field and you can then click on Add button at the bottom.
Once added, the sub-grid on the Org Unit will take a while to refresh and then show you the tagged Cost Price List correctly.

Now, you have tagged a Cost Price List successfully. Let’s quickly add a Sales Price List.

Sales Price List

Now that you have created and tagged a Cost Price List in the previous section, let’s quickly create a Sales Price List shell so that you have a corresponding Sales Price List to look at as well –

Navigate to the Sales area and then select, Sales sub-area in the Sitemap.
Here, click on the Price Lists table and then click to add a new Price List record.
Note that the Context of the record should be Sales this time since we want to create a Sales Price List. Save & Close once the record looks satisfactory based on your relevant information to fill in.
Now, you can see that the Sales and Cost Price Lists are ready in your environment.

Next Section here will cover adding Resource Roles, and then adding Role Prices to the Sales and Cost Price Lists.

In later parts of this series, we’ll continue to add more to the Price Lists, Roles etc.

Hope this post was useful!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Thank you!

Starting a Project Operations Lite Trial Environment

January 1, 2024 priyeshwagh777 CRM with .NET Web Applications Dataverse, Dynamics 365, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, Project Operations, project operations lite, project operations lite trial

One of the first things you want to get done is to spin up a Project Operations Trial environment. Here’s how you do it!
Note that no Credit Card is required for a Project Operations trial environment.

Project Operations Trial Environment

Here’s how you start a Project Operations trial environment –

Navigate to https://trials.dynamics.com/ which will be redirected to https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365-free-trial/ and the page you’ll see will be something like this –
Scroll down on the page till you see the option for Project Operations. Click on Try for free.
Once you click on Try for free, you can enter a new email on which you want to start a trial. I’ve come up with a sample email which I haven’t used before. I prefer not to enter an email/username which I already use.
Click Next and then you can select Setup my account.
Then, you can validate/enter the details which would be something like this and click Next.
Then, choose if you want to receive an OTP via Text or a Call. Text is my preferred way so I selected that and clicked on Send verification code.
I received an OTP which I entered as asked on the next pane and clicked Verify.
Further, I’ll be shown the login details of the trial environment I want to create. Once this is done and I save the information, I click on Next.
Then, you’ll be shown the details of the environment you’ll be provisioning. Save this info before proceeding.
Next, click on Start using Dynamics 365 Project Operations (CE) – Preview Trial. It’ll redirect you to the questionnaire page on a new tab where you’ll need to answer the questions before choosing the Deployment Type.

Deployment Type Questionnaire

As we left off from the Step #9 in the above section, you’ll be taken to a questionnaire Wizard in order to provision a Project Operations trial –

Yes to managing Opportunities as they move through the process.
Yes to requiring advance or extensible resource management.
Yes to requirement of workflow for approval of Time and Expense.
No to advanced Expense management.
No to Non-Stocked Materials
No to Stocked materials as well.
Select the version here. Even if you would have answered the questions randomly, you would have still gotten to choose a different version than recommended. Hence, the answers above point to a recommendation of Project Operations Lite type of Deployment.
Click Begin Setup once Lite Deployment is selected.
Setup will start provisioning once you click on Start.
And it’ll take a while and it’ll say that it will redirect you to the Power Platform Admin Center.
And once you are redirected to Power Platform Admin Center and you’ll see that the environment is provisioning. This will take a few minutes before completion.

Set Name and URL for your environment

Provisioning a Project Operations trial will get set a predefined URL and name which you should update to be readable –

Open the environment once the link is clickable and the State is set to Ready.
Then, click on the Edit button
Once you click Edit, you’ll get to update the Name and the URL. Set to something that is relevant to the purpose of the environment.
Once you click on Save, you’ll see this loading page which will take a while to complete and finally, your Project Operations Lite environment setup will be ready!

Here’s Microsoft’s Documentation detailing which all Deployment Types have different Project Operations features available – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/project-operations/environment/determine-deployment-type?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Hope this post was useful!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Difference between Project Operations Deployment Types

January 1, 2024 priyeshwagh777 Project Operations Dataverse, Dynamics 365, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, Project Operations, project operations deployment types

Now, as you know that there are the following 3 types of Project Operations Deployments –

Project Operations Lite (Deal to Proforma Invoicing).
Project Operations for resource/non-stocked scenarios.
Project Operations for production/stocked scenarios.

To keep the comparison understandable and simple, let’s review the below in a short summary.

Comparison

Project Operations Lite	Project Operations for Resource/Non-stocked	Project Operations for Production/Stocked
Finance & Operations module is not setup	Finance & Operations setup is required	Finance & Operations Setup is required
No Dual Write Integration	Dual Write Integration is required.	Dual Write Integration is required.
Up to Pro-forma Invoicing is available	Pro-forma Invoicing in PO and Customer-facing Invoicing in F&O	Full Invoicing in F&O
Basic Expense	Basic and Full Expense with Receipt OCR	Full Expense with Receipt OCR

Hope this quick summary was useful. I’ll continue adding more to this article over time.

Here’s official Microsoft Documentation for full deployment guidance with questionnaire –

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/project-operations/environment/determine-deployment-type?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Thank you!

Permanently Delete users from Power Platform

December 31, 2023 priyeshwagh777 Power Platform Admin Center Dataverse, delete user in Entra ID, delete user in power platform, Dynamics 365, permanently delete user, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform

Often times, as organizations have users enabled and disabled, over the course of time we see a lot of Disabled Users pile up in the system. Power Platform now lets you delete these Users permanently from the system.

Warning: Please note that this process will not get back the User you delete as you are going to permanently delete the User from Entra ID as well as Power Platform.

Enable Delete Users feature from Admin Center

First, you’ll need to enable this in the Power Platform Admin Center

Select the environment you wish to enable this feature in and then click on Settings.
Then, look for Features section.
you’ll find the option for Delete Disabled Users which would be OFF by default. Switch it to ON.

Zooming in a little bit, this is how the turned on feature should look –
Once you turn this ON, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save to save the changes you just made.

Now that you have turned this on. You can now Delete the Disabled Users.

Pre-Requisite: Permanently Delete User

Now, let’s see how this process is to be carried out –

Assuming the license of the User is now removed and if you Refresh the User in Power Platform Admin Center, you’ll see that the User will appear in the Disabled Users filtered list.
Even if you delete the User in M365, you can refresh the Power Platform and see the User Name still present
Now, if you open the User which you see with a different username in Power Platform Admin Center and click on it to open it in classic UI and see the Delete button to Delete the User
Here’s the delete button.
When you click on Delete and confirm it’ll throw the error message that this cannot be deleted.

Now, the next step is to permanently delete the User from Entra ID. Here’s a blog post to permanently delete the User from Entra ID: Permanently Delete a User in Entra ID

Delete in Power Platform

Now that the User is permanently deleted in Entra ID, you can re-attempt the delete the user in Power Platform.

Now, retry the step from the User page in classic UI as you’ll see the button there.
Now, you can click on the User in the Power Platform Admin Center and see that the user is showing that it has been deleted in the Environment
And you can see the button to now Delete Permanently in the environment as well.
And it’ll ask you if you want to really delete the User.

Hope this helps!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Thank you!

Manually Add Licensed Users in Dataverse Environment in Power Platform Admin Center

December 31, 2023 priyeshwagh777 Power Platform Admin Center Dataverse, dataverse users, Dynamics 365, enabled users in crm, manually add dataverse users, power apps, Power Automate, Power Platform, Power Platform Admin Center

In case you want to reflect a recently licensed user in a Dataverse environment but you don’t see it reflect immediately, here’s how you can manually add users to the Dataverse environment yourself.

Check that the User has an appropriate license

From Microsoft 365 Admin Portal, ensure that the user has been successfully been given a license –

In Users, click on the User and ensure the user has correct License required to be added to the environment.
And even if you refresh the Enabled Users (in classic CRM UI), you don’t see the User.

Here’s how you can quickly add a User instead of trying to sync all users (It’s possible to do that but slightly lengthy process). I’ll cover it in a separate post and link it here.
First, let’s see in the below section on how to quickly add a User –

Add Users from Power Platform Admin Center

Given that you have the correct Dynamics 365 Administrator privileges, here’s how you can add Users manually –

Go to the Environment in Power Platform Admin Center
Go to the Users section once you expand on Users Permissions tab
You’ll see that User is still not part of the environment. Here’s how you can add the User. Click on the + Add User button.
Then, search for the User with their Email Address and you’ll see it populate once the user qualifies the criteria mentioned on the pane under User access requirements.
Then, click on Add.
In the next step, you’ll be asked to provide a Security Role to the User. For example, I’m assigning a Salesperson security role from the default Business Unit. And then clicking Save.
This User will be added with the Security Roles. If you don’t see the name immediately, click on Refresh.
You’ll see the User appear in the environment list.
Also, you’ll see the User in the classic UI if you click on Manage users in Dynamics 365.
Here’s how it’ll appear in the Classic UI.

Hope this was useful!

Here are some Power Automate posts you want to check out –

Thank you!

Configure Dataverse Search in Power Platform Admin Center | Dynamics 365

October 25, 2021October 25, 2021 priyeshwagh777 Dataverse, Microsoft PowerApps dataverse search, Dynamics 365, model driven apps, power apps

Relevance Search in Dynamics 365 CRM recently got renamed to “Dataverse Seach” as you might have seen some updates.

Here’s how to configure the Dataverse Seach in the new Solutions Explorer!

Scenario

Now, in case you search on the Global Search bar for a record and the table which it lies in doesn’t show up – In this case table I’m looking in is ‘Subscription’ – that means that this entity is not configured for Dataverse Search

Dataverse Search

Here are some points on the Dataverse Search –

Dataverse search is enabled directly is you are opted in to 2021 Wave 2 Updates on your environment.
Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ and open the desired environment’s Features section from Settings.

You’ll find that Dataverse Search is already ON.
Now, navigate to https://make.powerapps.com/ to configure the Dataverse Search for a specific entity.
Go to Solutions and look for the Solution which has your entity
In this example, I’ll use the custom entity I’ve created called as ‘Subscription’
In any solution which has this entity, I can click on Overview on the left.

And then if you look at the right hand side – click on Manage Index
It’ll show the entity which is not enabled for Search – But, notice that it is unchecked – means it is not enabled.

Now, enable and save it

Check if Table is enabled for Dataverse Search

Enable the Table for Search Results. Now, when you are in the Solution in the new Solution Explorer – Look for the Table. In my example, it is Subscription table.
I’ll open the Settings of the Table.
In the Settings of the Subscription table, you’ll need to expand the Advanced options.
Now, scroll below and you’ll see the option for Appear in Search Results is enabled.
And once this is enabled, the results will show up in Dynamics 365

Indexed Columns

Now, here’s how to understand the count of Indexed columns. Limit of 950 columns is imposed in a Dynamics 365 environment.
Refer Microsoft’s Official Post – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/configure-relevance-search-organization#select-tables-for-dataverse-search?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5003911

Here’s a snippet from the above mentioned Microsoft Docs to show the count of Indexed Columns calculated towards a Dataverse Search

Hope this helped!

Here are some more Canvas Power Apps posts you might want to check –

Thank you!

Single record and multiple record auditing in Dynamics 365 to Audit record access | M365 Compliance

July 13, 2021 priyeshwagh777 dynamics 365 administration Dynamics 365, o365 compliance, record access auditing in dynamics 365

One of the most important asks for organizations who are sensitive about tracking their data is – Which records are accessed by the user?
There’s a powerful tool in Compliance Center i.e. Audit that can record this as to when a certain D365 record was accessed and all the details about the same.

What is recorded?

Single record – Only access to Dynamics 365 record opening will be audited/captured.

Multiple record – Access to Dynamics 365 record as well as other controls that were in context of the record like sub-grid controls, timeline controls etc. will be audited/captured.

Pre-requisites

The User whose D365 Record Opening activities are to be logged must either have a O365 / M365 Enterprise E3 / E5 License assigned to them.
The environment should be a Production one.

Turn on Recording of Audit (Dynamics 365 & M365 Compliance Center)

Now, to be able to record Auditing of User Record Access, you’ll need to make sure the Auditing is turned ON at these places –

In Dynamics 365, make sure the Auditing is turned ON at the Global Level and that Audit Read Access is enabled too.
Next, make sure the entity’s whose record access you want to capture should have their Auditing as well as Single and/or Multiple Record Access Auditing turned ON as well.
Now, the M365 Admin Center (https://compliance.microsoft.com/) should also be enabled for recording the Audit of User access. This will start recording User and Admin Activity.

It’ll ask for confirmation and then start updating. In my experience, this failed a few times and I wasn’t able to know for sure when it actually got enabled.

Then, it takes a few moments

In my case, this resulted in an error.
Now, I’m not sure if I missed anything although I made sure everything was correct. And when I checked after some time, it was enabled even without me retrying it. But it could just be for me and might work correctly for you.

Recording of Auditing

Let’s test a scenario where a User is not an Admin User and they try to access the Account record on which we’ve enabled Single and Multiple User Access Auditing –

Please note that it takes about 3-4 hours to the log information to be available in (https://compliance.microsoft.com/homepage)

Now, if you navigate to Audit and search.
Make sure your criteria is as narrow as possibly by including only the user you really want to find if that’s the case
In my scenario, I was logged in as Priyesh Wagh user and opened a record in CRM.

So, just to look at what all was logged, my search criteria will look like this –
I’ll make sure All Dynamics 365 Activities is selected if you want to look at everything which is D365 CRM related.
Next, since I’m only looking for my own user who opened the CRM record, I’ll search and select the user in the below filter.
Not to mention the time frame is also narrowed to get limited results. 😊
Here, my results will show up.

If I zoom on in, I’ll see the different types of logs that are filed in the Compliance Center – The retrieve Account is the actual record where all the other events are registered based on the different controls that were loaded when I opened the record itself.
In my experiment, I opened the same record twice, so it recorded the Retrieve account twice along with other event logs.
If I open the record, I’ll see this info about everything that was tracked along with the link to the record as well –