Today we continue with the blog series D365 V9.0 – A Feature a Day, and I am enjoying the self-discovery process of all the new improvements that have been made to the V9.0 platform. Today’s feature will be focusing on changes to sub grid controls.
Tag: Dynamics 365 (Page 1 of 2)
Welcome to my new blog series – D365 V9.0 – Andrew Ly’s – A Feature a Day, as most of you are aware by now Microsoft Dynamics 365 Version 9.0 has been official released to the public. And it is stunning.
So, I’ll be doing a bit of self-discovery over the next few weeks, focusing on some of the items that I’m interested in and sharing my thoughts with you. They’ll be brief but frequent postings, and I’ll try to stick strictly to one feature a day.
Today’s Feature – Label Wrapping
I was treated to a preview of ClickDimensions Social Engagement (8.8) in the last week, and I was left exceedingly impressed with the capabilities of this new platform. Released to partners at the end of July, it is available now for existing ClickDimension customers.
What is ClickDimensions Social Engagement (CSE)?
CSE is a brand new offering from ClickDimensions, and is supplied as an add-on module to existing ClickDimension customers. ClickDimensions has partnered with Social Media solution vendor Oktopost to provide a lot of the functionality you’re about to see.
At a high level, CSE provides your organisation with a simple yet powerful platform to manage all your social media activity.
The key features of the solution are:
Does this mean that we won’t need Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE)? What are the differences?
In short no, while they do overlap in certain features they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you can schedule all your posts to a calendar (incredibly useful!), whereas MSE posts your material immediately to various social platforms (no scheduling). While MSE comes with inbuilt rules that convert your posts to leads/cases, whereas CSE converts posts and stores them in what is known as the Inbox that presumably you could build workflows and do the same. Sentiment analysis is also only available to the MSE platform. So they have similar features but work in very different ways. In my opinion CSE is targeted more for marketing whilst MSE caters more for social analytics.
What does it look like?
Once the solution is installed, it opens in a separate window and provides you with your social listening dashboard. Configuration is achieved through the settings menu where you can specify social connectors, search phrases and so forth.
The analytics and scheduling system is pretty impressive, packed with a lot of useful information such as knowing when is the best time of day/week to post.
And a basic breakdown of which networks are your customers engaging on.
The leader board system is something quite refreshing, introducing new tools that score your social engagement efforts among team members (game on!).
Final thoughts
Social Engagement tools have come a long way particularly in the Microsoft Dynamics ISV space. It has been pretty obvious that social selling, social engagement and social perception of companies is becoming more of a priority to companies and the maturity of the tools you see today really reflect that.
The ClickDimensions winning feature in my opinion is how easy it is to schedule your posts, across networks, and from your marketing teams. This is core to the solution, and the process couldn’t be more simple. Though I haven’t read too much about potential extensions on the platform, it would be really good to be able to have the ability to create business rules that redirect inbound social posts to queues, cases and leads like MSE does. But overall, this is a fantastic product and cost/benefit wise it’s an exceptional offering aimed exactly at the right audience (SMEs, B2Bs). Looking forward to seeing more of this new platform!
Did you know that 70% of Australia’s GDP comes from the Services industry? But scarily in Australia, 23% of employees leave a job within the first 12 months. And many reports show that the average cost of employee turnover is equivalent to a year’s wage. So it goes without saying that Employees are our most valuable asset, and managing them well is critical to your organisation’s success, your quality of service, and our countries future.
One of the current limitations of using PowerBI with Dynamics 365, is that it will not automatically map your OptionSet values with labels. For example if you have defined OptionSet values for Gender as 1 = Male, 2 = Female within PowerBI visualisations this would appear as 1 and 2 rather than Male and Female. Thankfully Gap Consulting have created a nice XrmToolBox plugin called the “PowerBI Option-Set Assistant” to work around this limitation.
ClickDimensions recently introduced a new feature to their Marketing Automation suite, the ability to create posts on your Facebook Page. Today I will walk you through how simple it is to schedule and create Facebook Posts directly from Dynamics 365 using ClickDimensions.
Today I explore the Dynamics 365 for Windows on a Virtual Reality headset. Using my HTC Vive, I give my thoughts on the possibilities presented by recent innovations such as Hololens and where I think it may be useful from a Customer Service perspective.
So I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on my time with the Microsoft Dynamics platform. And if you will spare me a few moments to indulge you with my thoughts about how I believe you can have a personally and professionally fulfilling career with Microsoft Dynamics.
Today’s VBlog is about how to embed 3D Models directly into Dynamics 365 forms. I look forward to putting together a full write up soon.
In the meanwhile, if you like the video please subscribe to my new YouTube channel, and share on your networks. Hope you enjoy!
Social media is a powerful platform in which to engage your customers, understanding who are key influencers within your list of contacts and accounts is a cornerstone of every social engagement strategy. Channels such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn are emerging as disrupters in the traditional marketing space. In short, this information needs to be in real-time so that you can respond very quickly to changes in the social media sphere. In this blog, I will be demonstrating how you can quickly enable your Microsoft Dynamics 365 system to display real-time subscriber data from your accounts’ and contacts’ social channels.
The demonstration and code I will describe here is very simple to implement with basic form design and JavaScript know-how. It can be tailored and extended to channels other than YouTube as is shown in this demonstration. I am using SocialBlade as our data source, but there a number of others freely available on the net.
So here are the steps to enabling real-time social data within Dynamics.
- First, goto Settings>Customisations>Customize my System.
- Navigate to the Contact Entity.
- Navigate to Attributes.
- Create a new Attribute called “Youtube Username”
- Save and Close
- Navigate to Contact Entity > Forms this time.
- Create a brand new Main form called: “Social Blade” with the following properties
- First Tab (Social Profiles)
- Attributes: Full Name, and Youtube Username
- Second Tab (Social Blade)
- Add an Iframe (IFRAME_ socialbladewindow)
- Save and Close.
- Next Navigate to Web Resources.
- Create a new Web Resource of type Javascript. Enter the following code within the Editor window:
function fncSocialBladeOnLoad()
{
// URL segment
var sbURLstart = "https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/";
var sbURLend = "/realtime";
var targetURL = "";
//Get the default URL for the IFRAME, which includes the
// query string parameters
var IFrame = Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get("IFRAME_socialbladewindow");
// get Social Media usernames/channelnames
var YouTubeUsername = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("sms_youtubeusername").getValue();
if (YouTubeUsername != ""){
//Append the parameters to the new page URL
targetURL = sbURLstart + YouTubeUsername + sbURLend;
// Use the setSrc method so that the IFRAME uses the
IFrame.setSrc(targetURL);
}else{
IFrame.setSrc("about:blank");
}
}
- Open the previously created form. Click on Form Properties.
- Add the newly created Javascript to Form Libraries.
- Add an Event Handler and set this to the javascript library, with Function fncSocialBladeOnLoad.
- Then publish your customisations.
That’s it. If you want to see a video demonstration of the solution, please visit my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/HL0ZsYcSTNo
I do hope this gets you thinking about different ways in which we can monitor social engagement across social media channels. There are plenty of opportunities to tap into our key influencers, and this is a great no-cost way of doing so. Of course, when you’re ready to put both feet in when it comes to Social monitoring and engagement, check out Microsoft’s own Microsoft Social Engagement suite.