Blog

Announcing the announcement of the Spring ‘19 Release notes!

Earlier today Microsoft announced some important information about the Spring release notes for Dynamics. That blog post can be found here:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/2018/12/12/announcing-the-dynamics-365-april-19-release-timeline/

As indicated in that blog, this is an important release because all D365 customers will be on the same version.

Key dates for the release notes can be found here:

https://aka.ms/bagreleasecalendar

Most notably they will be released on January 21st.

Bookmark this URL! You’ll find the release notes here once they’re released! https://aka.ms/businessappsreleasenotes

New Flow Rich Text Editor

There is new Flow action in preview which lets you format your text without needing to use HTML or CSS when using the Send Email action. This is a feature that has been long overdue and now lets you quickly format your Flow emails!

Flow Features

Some of the formatting features you get are listed below:

  • Font
  • Font color
  • Text size
  • Bold, underlined, italicized text
  • Bulleted Lists
  • Numbered Lists
  • Hyperlinks

PowerBI Connector – CDS for Apps

Recently they added a new connector for PowerBI – and you may want to use it in place of your Dynamics 365 connector!

Here are some of the key benefits:

Improved performance

Data load and refresh times will be decreased. This was a big pain point with the D365 connector when working with large datasets.

Sorting the entities by custom and system entities

When you decide to bring in tables, you can see which entities are system and which are custom from the data table selector.

Friendly option set values

Options sets will show up as their friendly values. Before, you would have to build a table with the Value and Name and merge it with the entity table to get the friendly values.

Alphabetical order of column names in tables

This was one of my biggest pain points because the columns seemed to show up in no particular order using the D365 connector. With the CDS Connector, the columns will be in alphabetical order when you need to edit the queries.

Key Features of the New Dynamics Integration with Teams

Chatbot

Talk to the Dynamics 365 Bot to search, update and post to records.

The bot will prompt you with some example questions, and from there you can imagine this comes in handy when you want information quickly without having to go to Dynamics.

Add record as a tab

Add records to a Teams channel to get easy access to any record. Such as the Account, Contact, Opportunity or Project.

This is great for managing Projects. Put the Project record right in the Teams channel you are using to collaborate with your other project team members and you can quickly pull up the project estimates, as well as key information you are using to keep track of it in Dynamics.

Conversations

Get and keep conversations going about the record you have created a tab for.

View your dashboards

Gain quick insights into your data with the dashboards embedded right into Teams. Whether they are Dynamics Dashboards, or PowerBI dashboards that you have embedded into D365, get the quick insights you may need at your fingertips.

 

In summary, this new Teams integration with Dynamics will allow your users to perform most of their work in Teams. They won’t necessarily have to go to Dynamics 365 every time they need to perform an action on a record or get insights on a report/dashboard.