Microsoft Business Applications: Dynamics 365 – PowerApps – Dataverse- Flow – PowerBI
You can find the release notes at this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/
Some highlights are:
Sales forecasting – with the help of Cortana
Deeper integration with LinkedIn
Teams integration with Relationship Assistant
App licensing requirements presented to app makers while building PowerApps – know if your app will work with your licensing!
Canvas apps with responsive layouts
Save and reuse PowerApps components
Earlier today Microsoft announced some important information about the Spring release notes for Dynamics. That blog post can be found here:
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
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.
Adding a Map control to your PowerApp can be very helpful to end users, but it is not available out of the box (unless you continue to keep voting here). There are many use cases such as displaying a map based upon an Accounts address or displaying the location of a Work Order.
Here’s a quick way to add the map to your screen by using an Image control and a Bing Maps Key. Please follow the steps here for getting your own Bing Maps Key.
After you have gotten your key, time to go into your PowerApp.
Step 1: This step is as simple as adding a Text Input box to your screen and renaming it to “txtInput.” (Or in case you are linking the map to an already existing address, make sure that field or data card is on the screen).
Step 2: Add a Label control to the screen and rename it “BingMapsKey.” Take the key you got from following the steps in the above link and put it as the Text property of the label. Now that you have the Key and Label on the screen, set the Visible property to false, this way users cannot see the map key.
Step 3: Add an Image control to the screen and rename it “MapControl.” Make sure to size and position the map based upon the other controls, forms or galleries on the screen. Now set the Image property to “https://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/V1/Imagery/Map/Road/” & EncodeUrl(txtInput.Text) & “?mapSize=600,” & 300 & “&key=”&BingMapsKey.Text. The numbers I highlighted in Red help size the map accordingly, so you may need to play around with these numbers depending on the size of the control you created.
It’s as simple as that! Test out your map by “playing” the app and typing an address into the txtInput control.
