Murray Fife's Blog, page 14

The new Business Platform Admin Center

Last week I saw something interesting in one of the presentations at Ignite. There is a new way to access all of the Data integration and environments for PowerApps.

How to do it…

Just go to admin.businessplatform.microsoft.com.

It is the same as going to PowerApps, and then accessing it through the settings:

But, it may be a better portal if you just want to show the integration, and not meander through the PowerApps page.

Using the Data Management tools and Flow to import data from OneDrive

The Data Management tools within Dynamics 365 for Operations open up a whole slew of different ways that you can get data into the system. And it also has an option to create batch import job that will allow us to watch for data.

This opens up a whole slew of options for us because we can use these batch jobs to import data from other systems, because they can just package the data up for us and then send us the data. It creates a very easy way to create integrations because these data packag...

Creating a Custom PowerApp Connector Using Azure Functions

PowerApps and Flow are great, and there are a lot of standard connectors that we can use within our PowerApps and Flows. But sometimes we may want to do something just a little different where there is no connector out of the box.

This is when we may want to create a custom connector within PowerApps.

The next question is how do we write the function for the custom connector, and the answer to that is we can do it through Azure using Function Apps. These allow us to register a function serv...

Creating a Skype QnA Bot Using the Azure Bot Service

Bots are cool. They are going to save all of us by automating all of the tasks and researching that we have to do by hand, and lead us into Utopia. Which is totally true.

Although, you may think that creating a Bot is complicated, and that you need to be a seasoned coder om order to create them.

And if you want to unleash the Bot onto the rest of the world through mediums like Skype, then you have to be an even more advanced coder because you need to understand the API’s and communication i...

Using the Compose feature to build different content styles based on the purpose using Author Tools

Writing walkthrough guides and technical documentation is more about the flow that you are describing rather than the actual writing itself because you are wanting to explain the process, not to write the next best seller on the NY Times book list.

But there is still a little creativity that you need to make the walkthrough interesting to the reader.

Although I have noticed that there are a number of different variations of the way that people want to have walkthrough guides structured depe...

Creating a Customer Inquiry Phone PowerApp for Dynamics 365

PowerApps is definitely one of the coolest tools that we have in our back pockets for extending out Dynamics 365, because it allows non developers to quickly and easily create new apps for Dynamics 365 without doing a lot of coding. It’s almost so easy you will feel like you are cheating.

In this walkthrough we will show you how easy this is by creating a sample application that will allow you to browse customers, orders and order lines directly from a phone, and we can probably do this in a...

Branding the Azure Active Directory login page

Branding Dynamics 365 is something to give the system a little more of a personalized experience for the organization that we are working with, but we can take this one step further if we want by branding the login landing page that we always need to use to get access to the system.

For example, although colorful, the default login page for Dynamics 365 looks a little generic.

In this walkthrough we will show you how you can do this. All you need is make a couple of tweaks to the Azure Acti...

Using Functions within Flow using the Compose Action

Flow is great, and just being able to point and click to build integrations is the thing that makes it so usable. But sometimes you want to be a little bit cleverer with your data and even use functions that remodel the data.

For example, when creating a new Customer within Dynamics 365 for Operations through Flow when a new Account is created in the Common Data Service, if you are like me, then maybe you will want to have a consistent naming convention, and you don’t want to use the standa...

Adding Power BI Dashboards to Dynamics 365 for Sales

Power BI is a great tool for visualizing your data from Dynamics 365, but wouldn’t it be great if all of your reports and dashboards that you create were embedded directly into your dashboards. Don’t fret, you can do this without writing a single line of code.

Let’s see how to do this and how it works.

Topics Covered

Enabling Power BI
Adding Power BI Dashboards as Sales Dashboards
Drilling through the Data within Power BI

Enabling Power BI

Before we start adding Power BI to our dashb...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations (Dynamics AX) New Graduate Boot Camp

In May I will be helping out with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations (Dynamics AX) boot camp in West Palm Beach at Palm Beach Atlantic University to train new graduates.　 So I thought that I would forward on the information about that and also the other boot camps that are being held this year in conjunction with the Microsoft Academic Alliance.

All classes/courses/boot camps to be held in West Palm Beach at Palm Beach Atlantic University and the classes for 2017 are:

May 22-26th – Microso...