Dynamics 365 CE integrations scenarios with Azure Functions

Over the past year or so, our team has worked on almost exclusively cloud-based Dynamics 365/CRM implementations. Common requirements haven’t changed, long running batch processes, integrations with external systems, maintenance jobs etc. We have found ourselves using Azure Functions in almost all projects for the past year. In this article, I define what Azure Functions, how they are priced, and I provide some of the use cases that we have seen when it comes to Dynamics 365/CRM integrations.

What are Azure Functions

Definition

Azure Functions is commonly referred to as serverless computer service. What this means is that it is a cloud-based service that allows you to run code on demand without having to deploy it to any infrastructure, and to only pay for the usage that you make. Microsoft developed this Framework to allow us to write code in a language of your choice (C#, JavaScript, PowerShell, PHP, Python), have it do all sorts of cool stuff, deploy it somewhere and run it on demand. The notion of “on demand” is broad and it takes us to the triggers discussion. Functions can run a wide set of triggers, including Timer, HTTP call, Webhooks, Service Bus, Queue Storage and others.

Pricing model

The pricing model is relatively straight forward. There are two models. The first one is the App Service plan. I will not spend too much time on this one. App Service plans are the type Azure services that you subscribe to when you want to host a web application (web site, web service etc.). If you already have such a subscription, you can simply deploy your Azure Functions into it at no extra cost.

The other pricing model is a consumption based model. This model takes two components to do pricing:

1. Number of executions: any time a function is executed (i.e. triggered), it counts as an execution
   
2. Resource consumption (in GB-s): any time a function runs, the platform calculates the amount the memory (RAM) that is used and for how long. This translates into a number of Gigabytes-seconds (GB-s) that you have to pay for. It is also a number that is sometimes hard to predict because you cannot easily know how much memory your piece of code will require when it runs.
   

There are monthly free grants of 1M executions and 400,000 GB-s resource consumption. After that, you start to pay a certain amount by execution and by GB-s used. Prices can vary slightly based on the region that you are in.

In most cases, it tends to be the most adapted for business scenarios that we have worked on, meaning the price that you pay and the guarantied scale for performance outweighs the benefits of buying let’s say an inexpensive App Service to reduce your monthly cost.

Dynamics 365/CRM and Azure Function use cases

As we’ve worked on CRM Online projects, we have often faced scenarios in which we have considered and often used Azure Functions. I grouped them in use cases.

• Recurring jobs: these types of processes are typically built using console apps running as scheduled tasks, SSIS Jobs or sometimes even recurring Dynamics 365/CRM workflows. It could also be a DevOps PowerShell script that developers run every day from their workstations. Azure functions with timer triggers work well to address many of these scenarios.
  
• Reusable business logic: when you have a bloc of code that is called from multiple plugins/integration jobs or custom applications, lots of times you will find code being copied manually or file references use heavily. It makes sense to consider moving the code to an Azure function with an HTTP trigger and have the function being called by multiple processes.
  
• Plugin scenarios impacted by sandbox limitations: there are plenty of restrictions when you run your plugins or custom workflow activities in Sandbox mode. For example, referencing external libraries is not officially supported, running processes that last more than 2 minutes, calling web services with complex authentication, writing on disk etc. Most of the limitations are completely removed when working with Azure Functions.
  
• Reducing the cost of alternative tools: In all the scenario above, there is usually some financial impact with licences (Windows Servers, SQL Server, SSIS Connectors etc.). The local servers also have to be monitored and maintained. Azure functions remove some the servers and tools licensing cost and shifts it to a “pay per use” model while suppressing the need to maintain servers on premise.
  

These use cases along with resource skills availability have made us use seriously consider Azure Functions in our solutions architecture for the past year or so. I strongly recommend taking a look at them if you haven’t.

Getting started…

I had the pleasure of presenting this content on an xRMVirtual User Group webinar. The slides are available below.

Check back for the link to the webcast, I will publish it when it makes it to the website. In the mean time, here are some articles to get started with Azure Functions and Dynamics 365.

Getting started with Azure Functions here.
Integrating D365 with Azure Functions – Part 1 and Part 2

Enjoy!

Bulk Address Validation plugin for XrmToolbox

A couple of years ago, our team developed a free SharpXRM Dynamics CRM Address Validation add-on meant to be a tool to help companies perform easy and accurate address verification and geocoding using the Bing Map API. While the add on had good success and adoption with over 5000 downloads from our site, it has become difficult to support and keep up to date with the rapid evolution pace of the Dynamics 365/CE platform. We have made the difficult decision to retire the add-on.

We created an alternative solution: an XrmToolbox plugin to do bulk address verification and geocoding on any record type with address fields. We have been testing it for a few months in beta. This article describes how the plugin works. We have a plan to release the source code on GitHub in the near future.

Where to get the XrmToolbox Plugin

First, you must have the XrmToolbox installed. Once you have it open, go to Tools -> Plugin Store and search the plugin lists for “Bulk Address Verifier and Geocoder” and install the plugin

How it works

Prerequisite: You should have a Bing Map API key. If you don’t have any, you can generate one by following the instructions here. Keep in mind that free Bing Maps API keys come with usage restrictions (limited daily lookups and limited lookups per second).

1. Enter your Bing Maps API Key
   
2. Click on the “Retrieve Entities” button to load the entities drop down list
   
3. Select the entity with addresses you’d like to validate and geocode
   
4. Select the views that will return the accounts that you want to run the address verification and geocoding on
   
5. Select the source and destination fields
   
6. Note that Latitude, Longitude and Details are only displayed in the destination fields.
   
7. Use the “Copy input to output” if you want to write the validated address in the same fields are the source.
   
8. Click on Start Validation to run the address verification process. The Validation status text box will display the status of address verification on each record that is processed. If you select to have the verification details in the account (by using the Details output field), information about any failure will be inserted in that field.
   

Another Option

Our paid version of the Address Verification for Dynamics 365 has been available in GA for a while. It is available for try for free on the product page. It’s got some nice features, such as an auto-complete widget, client or server-side verification, to go along with a very simple configuration experience. If you have any questions or would like to know more, you can reach out to support@sharpxrm.com, we’ll be happy to respond to any question you might have.

Mobile Options for Dynamics 365/CRM

Often in CRM implementation project, there is a need to have CRM data available on mobile devices. When using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, there are a few options available and it is sometimes unclear how to decide which is the best fit for an organization. In this article, I start by giving common scenarios in which mobile access is required before describing some of the available solutions and corresponding use case.

Common Requirements for CRM Mobile Access

Sales people are often on the road, meeting with customers and prospects, attending conferences or trade shows. When they use a platform like Dynamics 365/CRM to support their activities, having access to their sales tools can be extremely beneficial: they can check out customers history on the spot prior to meetings, add notes after a visit. They can also lookup, create or update CRM contact information while away from the office and computers.

For Field Service professionals (e.g. internet cable installation agents), they need to have plenty of information to work efficiently: where to go, what to do when they get there, who they are supposed to meet, where they are supposed to go next based on their current location etc. For these types of uses, the level of interaction with the CRM data is higher than for typical sales individual, and it is more critical to their work (i.e. they could hardly do their job without it).

Another use case that I have often seen is the timekeeping requirement. We see this regularly in various Professional Services scenarios (consulting, legal, contracting etc.). Professional Services’ firm employees that are often moving from one task to another, one meeting to another, one client site to another, having the ability to enter the time spent on various tasks could add great added value.

While there are plenty of other mobile CRM requirement scenarios, I think these three are a good fit to illustrate several types of usage and need for people on the move. Now Let’s see what our options are and tag them to the scenarios they apply to.

Dynamics 365 for Phones and Tablets

Commonly referred to as MoCA for Mobile Client Application, this is the application provided at no additional cost by Microsoft as part of the Dynamics 365 offering.

• Supported CRM Source
  
  • D365/CRM Online
    
  • D365/CRM On Premises with Claim-based + IFD
    
• Installation Process
  
  • Download the platform application store on Windows, Android and Apple devices (tablets and phones, compatibility varies based on your Dyn 365 version – more details here)
    
  • Once the application is downloaded, connect to one CRM Organization using its access URL and your credentials
    
• Configuration & Extensibility
  
  • Uses the out of the box CRM web configuration (as long as the components are enabled for mobile, example for Dashboards here)
    
  • The application can be extended the same way as the web forms. Most JavaScript API will work but not all – see details. You can write or skip some JavaScript code execution based on the current experience.
    
  • You can view your web custom resources on mobile (this of course has design / build implication to make sure the content renders nicely on mobile)
    
  • The application can function in Offline mode.
    
• Access to Phone
  
  • When connected to Dyn365 Online Organization – access to GPS and Camera
    
• Cost
  
  • No additional cost. It is included with your Microsoft Dynamics 365 licences
    

The OOB mobile application works nicely, providing us with facing visuals such as dashboards and tiles to access various areas. It does lack the look and feel of a native phone application in my opinion, and feels very much like a fancy/very well-built web page displayed through a mobile app. It is a major area of investment for Microsoft so expect it to get better over time.

I usually recommended using it in low application usage type scenarios that includes data consultations, charts visualization and quick updates (add, update contacts, accounts, notes etc.). This fits the Sales People scenario above nicely. It is free of charge which is a big plus when mobile access is not considered critical but a nice to have for your organization.

Power Apps

PowerApps is Microsoft’s new platform to rapidly build custom business applications for Mobile devices. Because it is part of the Office 365 suite, it can connect to most of the services and applications available in the Microsoft Cloud, including Dynamics 365/CRM.

• Supported CRM Source
  
  • D365/CRM Online
    
• Installation Process
  
  • Download the PowerApps application from the store on Windows, Android and Apple devices, connect to your Office 365 account and you will see the list of all Apps deployed within your organization and made available to you
    
  • There is no need to add additional credentials to connect to CRM (unless specified by the App Builder)
    
• Configuration & Extensibility
  
  • PowerApps are build by a Power user or an expert, typically using the PowerApps Studio application, or using the app configuration tool on the web.
    
  • The configurators will let you start from a template or start from scratch, and connect to existing cloud services such as Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft sources. The documentation to get started is great.
    
  • There is a large set of configuration options (types of controls available, business rules formulas).
    
• Access to Phone
  
  • PowerApps has commands to use the phone’s GPS and Camera. However, the interaction between the GPS and Camera and Dynamics 365 have to be customized (i.e. when the position is taken, you have to configure your app to consume and perhaps save the information in a Dynamics 365 record)
    
• Cost
  
  • It is included in select Dynamics 365 and Office 365 plans. It is usually the best way to get it as you will connect to applications related to these services. The regular price is $7 USD per user per month, and $40 USD for app makers.
    

Aside from the application installation and access model that is uncommon (starting PowerApps which will display your list of available apps in your org), the app themselves look and feel much like native phone applications.

It takes more effort to get a PowerApps based-application to provide fancy graphics such as charts or customer web pages but it usually meets requirements for simple, targeted functions on-the-go, such as doing time entry. We give the user a few lists (their projects, the time entries etc.), we give them a screen to view project summary, a page to create, update time entries and link them to a project, and we are done. Again, simple, targeted function, which matches the Professional Services scenario described above.

In you are using Dynamics 365 and have Plan 1 licenses, then there is no additional cost. The effort to build PowerApps can be very low depending on the complexity of your business needs. This has potential to provide enormous value at a very reasonable cost.

Resco Mobile CRM

This is, by far, the Cadillac of mobile applications for Dynamics 365. Resco Mobile CRM is a completely configurable mobile application that can connect to Dynamics 365 and competitor Salesforce. It allows for simple configuration such as Mobile forms, views, as well as more complex business rules and custom behaviors.

• Supported CRM Source
  
  • D365/CRM Online
    
  • D365/CRM On Premises with Claim-based + IFD
    
• Installation Process
  
  • Download the platform application store on Windows, Android and Apple devices
    
  • Once the application is downloaded, connect to one CRM Organization using its access URL and your credentials
    
• Configuration & Extensibility
  
  • Configure home screens, forms, views and additional custom behaviors through the Woodford configurator. It is a Silverlight-based application that connects to your CRM and allows you to configure the Mobile application to meet your need (don’t panic, they are rolling out an HTML5 based app to replace the Silverlight configurator).
    
  • All the client side configuration (forms, views, form scripts, client side business rules) are not available. New views, forms and business rules must be recreated in Woodford
    
  • There are a lot of advanced features such as Map or Calendar View of selected record types, Dashboards Routing and Route optimization ($)
    
  • There is also the possibility of extending the Mobile application using JavaScript-like code to perform all sorts of operations (hiding, showing fields, custom web pages etc.).
    
  • The application can function in online or offline mode.
    
• Access to Phone
  
  • Access to GPS, Camera, phone storage to upload pictures of other types of files
    
• Cost
  
  • Licenses are per user per month, the Professional License cost US$25 while the Enterprise License is US$40.
    

The thing that I really liked when we started to use Resco Mobile was that it just felt like a native phone application. The controls are the same as what you are used to in other apps, it is very responsive and just does not feel like a web page made available through a Mobile App. For use cases where users must use their phone as a main part of their job, such as a Field Service professional, who goes from one place to another, checks cases and customer information, takes pictures, gets customer signatures etc., using Resco to interact with Dynamics 365/CRM seems like a no-brainer. This is in part justified by the fact that Microsoft uses Resco Mobile as its mobile application for the Dynamics 365 for Field Services application.

Keep in mind that outside of the licenses, there is a large configuration effort that has to go into configuring and sometimes customizing the mobile experience which can take time and cost money.

If you have a large user base, you have to factor in the license price per user / month over time and see if this still makes sense for your scenario.

Recurring Jobs Strategies for Dynamics CRM/365

With the rise of the cloud, I have seen lots of small businesses building their technology strategy with a very little amount of local infrastructure. Similarly, I also see larger enterprises migrating to the cloud and trying to remove most of their local infrastructure. In Dynamics CRM/365 implementations, we often need to run recurring jobs that executes business logic (data integration or synchronization, complex calculated field etc.). This article talks about the different places where you can have these Dynamics 365/CRM connected jobs running periodically.

Windows Executable or SSIS Packages

Windows Executable are a simple and very common approach. The principle is to write an Console Application and use CRM SDK to connect to CRM and C#/.NET and other APIs to connect to various systems as required to do all sorts of data processing. After the console app is coded and tested, it is typically deployed on a Windows Server machine as a Scheduled Task. Using a Window Services is a similar approach, the main difference is that the recurrence of the execution needs to be managed at the application level (in the Window Service code) instead of leveraging the Task Scheduler built-in feature. This strategy gives a lot of flexibility:

• no constrains on how long the process can run for
  
• you provide the hardware required to handle your activities
  
• you leverage internal resources if they have .NET/C#/CRM SDK knowledge
  
• no need to build a UI which saves a lot of time on the development side
  

If your business operates mostly in the cloud and you don’t have available servers to install and run you application(s), you can create a Virtual Machine in the cloud and deploy your executables on it (as long as your CRM/Dyn365 organizations and other integrated systems are accessible from the VM).

Using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Packages is pretty much identical to the Windows Executable approach. The difference is that you use SSIS, combined with a third-party tool for your CRUD operations with CRM/Dyn365 such as KingswaySoft, to contain your business logic and manipulate your systems data. You can then schedule SQL Jobs to run SSIS packages on a recurring basis. This technique is used when there is stronger knowledge on the SQL/SSIS side within an enterprise. Again, if you do not have a local infrastructure, you will have to create a Virtual Machine in the cloud with the required SQL Server components to create SQL Jobs and execute SSIS packages.

Recurring CRM Workflow(s)

While Dynamics CRM/365 does not have true task scheduler functionality, out of the box processes (workflows) can be used to achieve similar type of functionality. This is done by using the “Process Timeout” operation within a CRM Workflow. Check this article from PowerObjects on exactly how to setup recurring workflows in CRM 2016.

In order to run custom business logic, data integration or calculation, you can create Custom Workflow Activities and call them from within the recurring workflow. The custom activity is native C#/.NET Code so you can do all sorts of operations from there. I love this approach because it allows you to keep your recurring processes mechanism inside the CRM solution. It makes the deployment lighter and simpler, you don’t have to deploy a package on a SQL Server, you don’t need to deploy an application on a server and configure it. That being said, this approach has quite a few limitations:

1. It is not simple to reference libraries other than .NET and CRM libraries, fellow MVP Gonzalo Ruiz has a good article on how to achieve this here. If your custom business logic makes references to many external assemblies, it will be a bit more challenging to integration in a Custom Workflow activity (it’s a good idea to target web services instead).
   
2. When your custom workflow activity as running is isolation mode or Sandboxed (this is always the case in cloud-base Dynamics CRM/365 Online tenants), there are limitations on what you can in the custom workflow activity (e.g. how to call external web applications, no IO operations, cannot access registry etc.). There is also a 2-minute timeout limit for any process running in Sandbox.
   

If your business logic is long to execute (more than 2 minutes), this is not a viable option.

Using Microsoft Flow

Flow is relatively new to the Microsoft Cloud. It is a configurable workflow engine that allows to automated operations related to a large variety of cloud applications. The workflows have triggers that originate from cloud applications (e.g. email received from a specific sender, document created in OneDrive, or Contact created in Dynamics 365) or timer based.

Flow offers a connector to Dynamics 365 in the cloud with a few trigger operations (record created, updated, deleted) and basic actions on Dynamics 365 such as creating, retrieving, updating or deleting a record or retrieving a list of records. This is a detailed article from Wayne Walton that perfectly summarized what Flow is and how it can be used, you can read it here.

While Flows can run on a schedule (every x seconds, minutes, days, hours), there is a limit to the systems you can connect to from flow (last time I checked, there was integration built with just over 80 SaaS apps). If you want flow to execute custom business logic, you can develop and expose a Web API to the web and configure Flow to call it with contextual parameters. Custom operations can then be processed from within the Web API.

The biggest advantage of using Flow is the ease of configuration. Power users with enough knowledge of Flow and Dynamics 365 can easily configure workflows. However, depending on the complexity of the operations that need to be executed, you might find yourself limited with the basic operations available. This could force you to write a custom Web API for additional processing. Overkill if you ask me, but there are situations in which this could make sense.

Other facts to take into consideration:

• Flow can only connect to Dynamics 365/CRM organization in the Microsoft Cloud. If you are running on-premises with IFD, it will not work.
  
• The License for flow is based on a number of runs per month (4500 with Plan 1 and 15000 with Plan 2).
  

Azure Functions

If you are not familiar with Azure Functions, you really should do that soon: “Azure Functions is a solution for easily running small pieces of code, or “functions,” in the cloud. You can write just the code you need for the problem at hand, without worrying about a whole application or the infrastructure to run it” (reference here).

You can write functions in the development language of your choice (C#, F#, Node.js, PHP or Python) that connect to various external services or systems, including Dynamics 365. See this walkthrough if interested in knowing what’s involved. Azure Functions support events based on a configurable timer.

What I particularly like about Azure Functions is that it is a pure serverless architecture to run custom code. If you had a small console application deployed as a scheduled task, you can easily bring your code into Azure Functions and do the same operations.

If you are a company that does not want to deal with the overhead of having and maintaining servers internally to run your recurring processes, this is definitely the way to go. The billing calculation is complicated, but in short you only pay for the resources your code consumes when it runs. That means if you don’t run anything for a period of time, you have nothing to pay. Another positive about Azure Functions is that we can reference the CRM SDK which means should be able to connect to IFD-configured on premise installations (I haven’t tried this but I am pretty confident).

One of the downside of using Azure Functions is the development experience. While this is changing, at the beginning you could only write your code in the Azure Functions code editor which makes you lose the magic of Visual Studio.

 

Of course, these are a few existing options for recurring processes as it relates to Dynamics 365/CRM. Ultimately, the decision for each enterprise comes from its strategy, its people and its willingness to make investment.

Hope this helps !

Tips to conduct a successful upgrade from CRM On Premise to Dynamics 365 Online

This blog post is more relevant if you are looking to upgrade from CRM 2013 or 2015 on premise to Dynamics 365 Online. However, some sections are relevant for all upgrades of Dynamics CRM/365 in general.

With all the features that are added at a very rapid pace to Dynamics 365 and all the features that are exclusive to the cloud version, a lot of companies are looking to upgrade from the current on premises version of CRM to Dynamics 365 online. What are some of the key aspects to consider before and after upgrading?

Before you upgrade

It’s a good idea to look at some of the known issues with your version of Dynamics CRM. For example,

• The growth of the Async Operation Base table that can cause performance issues (Microsoft provides a resolution here);
  
• The growth of the Principal Object Access (POA) table which can also cause performance issues and is mostly due to an excessive use of the record sharing feature (read Scott Sewell’s article about the POA table here)
  

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but the idea is look at what are the known issues or gotcha’s that cause problems in your current version of CRM and fix them prior to starting your upgrade. That way, you will not be upgrading you problems.

The Upgrade Process

While we wait for Microsoft to give us great news allow to import existing Dynamics CRM/365 databases to the cloud for restore, the current migration path to Dynamics 365 in the cloud is to create a solution package that contains cloud-compatible components and import it into a Dyn365 Online organization. That operation is followed by a data migration using the tool(s) of your choice (KingswaySoft, Scribe, CRM Import Wizard, custom solution etc.) to move your data from the on premise version of CRM to the Dynamics 365 in the cloud.

If you are on CRM 2013 SP1 or above, check to Solution Import version compatibility to ensure that your Solution can import into a Dynamics 365 organization. If you are in version prior to CRM 2013, you must upgrade to CRM 2013 SP1.

Now that you know that your solution will be able to import in Dynamics 365, there are changes that need  to be made prior to the move to the cloud and after.

General Considerations

• You must ensure there is an existing mapping for your CRM users on premise with the cloud subscription your Dyn365 will be running on. You can use Azure AD Connect to make sure you users exists in both active directory.
  
• You need to ensure there is connectivity between your existing integration points and your CRM Online instance. Generally, this means that your integration points must be somehow exposed to the internet.
  

Before you move to Dyn365 Online

• Download, install and run the Custom Code Validation (from CRM 2015, for 2013). This will allow you to identify the possible bad JavaScript code and update prior to the upgrade.
  
• In Dynamics 365 Online, all CRM plugins and custom workflow activities are configured to run in an isolated environment often refer to as sandbox.
  
  • Running in sandbox means some operations are not allowed. Update your plugins and custom workflow activities following the guidelines if needed:
    
    • Remove any IO operations read/write disk
      
    • Remove any operation that access the event logs
      
    • Remove any operation that access the registry
      
    • Ensure plugins and custom activities connect to web the right way (see recommendation from Microsoft here)
      
    • Validate there are no lengthy processes such as asynchronous workflows and/or custom activities. Processes running in a sandbox are configured to timeout after two minutes. If you have any processes of the sort, your options are:
      
      • Find a way to reduce the execution time of the existing processes
        
      • Remove the processes from CRM and replace by new functionality
        
      • Move the business logic to an external process that connects to CRM and perform the business logic on a dedicated machine managed by CFIA.
        
  • Finally, update the plugins and custom activities to running in fully trusted environment to run in sandbox using the plugin registration tool. If this is not done, you will not be able to import your CRM Solution in Dyn365 Online.
    
• In Dynamics 365 Online, access to the CRM database views is not allowed. Reports written in SQL must be replaced
  
  • Update SQL-based reports to use Fetch XML for querying data
    
  • When it is not possible to reproduce the same type of complex queries with Fetch XML, you must consider other ways to run your reports (e.g. PowerBI, manual data export to SQL Azure database…)
    

These steps will remove components that will prevent your solution to be uploaded for Dynamics 365 Online. Once you have gone through the list, you can export your CRM 201x solution package and import it to your Dyn365 Online Organization (import to a dev org as unmanaged).

After you have moved for Dyn365 Online

This is when the fun begins! These are some of the key steps that you have to go through after the solution from a previous version of CRM has been loaded into Dynamics 365 Online.

• Update plugin and custom workflows libraries SDK references (remove references to SDK version 6.x, 7.x, 8.0, 8.1, and add references to assemblies to SDK version 8.2, fix errors compile errors if any is found)
  
• Update client side JavaScript code with new/enhanced Xrm.Page API methods
  
• Update client side JavaScript code that calls the OData REST Endpoint to call the Web API instead (use Jason Lattimer’s REST Builder for a HUGE time gain).
  
• Update Business Rules to leverage enhanced features where needed (e.g. ability to clear values, default branch, client and server scope etc.)
  
• Open each Process Workflow, Dialog, Action (one by one), fix errors if any and activate
  
• Open each Business Process Flow (one by one), fix errors if any and activate
  
• Open each CRM form from used entities, verify the look and feel, adjust as needed
  
• Open each dashboard (if any), validate look and feel and adjust as needed
  
• Validate Sitemap and Application ribbons
  
• Update your Email Router configuration (or Migrate settings from the Email Router to Server Side Synchronization)
  
• Review and update functionalities as needed (e.g. replace plugins with Synchronous workflows or Business Rules, leverage other new features where possible and required) – this is a classic one liner that can take days, weeks or months to be completed depending on how complex your system is J
  
• Export the solution as managed and import in your pre-prod (or other environment based on your internal release model) for testing
• Gear up for your data migration using the tool(s) of your choice, test it, test it, test it again, then run it J
  
• Go to production J

There you have it. It is always good to have a checklist of things to look for when upgrading a Dynamics CRM to the cloud (also applicable for partner hosted scenarios).

Plugin on Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple – How bad is it?

I have managed to be in the Dynamics CRM/365 world for over 7 years without having to write a single plugin on Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple. The recommendation that I give is to stay away from those. The reason is simple, it sounds horrible from a performance standpoint, and even people from Microsoft have recommended against it in many scenarios. Faced with an issue recently where we had to really consider it, I did some research and testing to try to measure the impact of such plugins on system performance. This article provides some background as to why we recommend against these types of plugins, and it also provides some of our finding after we tested for performance.

Why are Plugins on Retrieve Multiple scary?

When looking at the event execution pipeline for Dynamics CRM/365, we need to consider that there are a lot of steps involved as part of every CRM transactions. To do anything, we need to go through the CRM web service APIs which will start the chain of events in the pipeline (pre-validate, pre-event, core action/database access and then post-event).

This means that in general, it is a good practice to build everything for optimized performance to give your user base a good experience. It’s not like having a custom database where you can create store procedures easily, add triggers and so on, taking advantage of the SQL Server features and infrastructure.

Now, back to Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple plugins.

Retrieve Multiple: Think about it this way, you retrieve a list of 200 accounts, your plugin on Retrieve Multiple fires once and gives you the list of accounts being returned to the screen with all columns being retrieved. For each of these row, you do some type of operation. It doesn’t too sound good, does it?

Retrieve: You double click on an account from a list view. As the account columns are being retrieved to display the account form on the screen, you plugin on Retrieve fires and gives you the account object. At that point you can modify the content of the columns being retured as required before they are returned to the screen for the user. This really doesn’t sound too bad.

Some Findings on the impact on Performance

To provide some context into what we were trying to do, I wrote about multi-language lookup in a previous blog post. One of the solution that we have considered for one of our client is to use a plugin on Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple in order to change the value of the lookup primary fields in order to display a value in the user’s current language. The method we used is similar to what Aileen Gusni does here and almost identical to what Scott Durow does here.

We store a Region in a custom Entity. Accounts have a lookup that indicates its region.

Scenario 1:

The Region’s Primary Field contains a concatenation of the English and French region names with a relatively safe separator (we use “|”). When you load the list view of accounts, we have a plugin on Retrieve Multiple that looks at the columns being returned. If the Region column is returned, we retrieve the user’s language, we split the name of the region with the separator (the name is available in the entity reference) and we replace its value in the target object by the region name in the user’s language. The plugin on Retrieve does the same operation on the single role being retrieved.

The average execution time for the Retrieve Multiple plugin when loading 150 rows was 15.43 milliseconds so 0.01543 seconds.
The average execution time for the Retrieve plugin to load one rows was too little for the system to return a value (we got 0 milliseconds every time).

Scenario 2:

The Region entity has English Name and French Name attributes. When you load the list view of accounts, we have a plugin on retrieve multiple that looks at the columns being returned. If the Region column is returned, we retrieve the user’s language, we then retrieve the English or French name from the Region entity and we replace its value in the target object by the region name in the user’s language. The plugin on Retrieve does the same operation on the single role being retrieved.

The average execution time for the Retrieve Multiple plugin to load 150 rows was 1003.94 milliseconds so 1.00394 seconds.
The average execution time for the Retrieve plugin to load one rows was 16.02 milliseconds so 0.01602 seconds.

What should you read into this?

While these numbers don’t look too crazy at all, especially in the first scenario, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration that are not really showing here and that will vary in almost any scenario.

• What is the infrastructure you are running on? The faster your severs and networks, the better the performance will be.
  
• What you do in these plugins matters a great deal. You should avoid or limit the number of read/writes to the database during the execution of those plugins.
  
• Our tests were made with a low level of users in the system, it is critical to scale up and see what these numbers look like at peak time of your system.
  

With all this said, I still recommend against it. Use with a great deal of caution! If/when possible, use calculated fields instead of writing plugins on these messages. This will also keep you away from limitation such as this one.

Hope this helps!

Dealing with Multi-Language Lookups

Very often, CRM entities are used as reference data tables, for example to keep a list of countries, states or provinces or other business/industry specific data. For some businesses I have seen entities to keep a list of distributors, list of business roles, regions to only name a few. When used that way, CRM entities provide a lot of great features that cannot easily be met with option sets such as the ability to manage large reference tables, lookup search, lookup filtering, ease of adding/editing/modifying data by power users without a deployment.

One of the issues with using CRM entities for reference data is that they is no concept of multi-language lookup in the Dynamics 365 / CRM platform. Lookups will always display the value of the primary field by default. This can cause an issue in places where you must have a fully multilingual application. In this article, I provide a few possible solutions to solve this issue.

As an example, we’ll use the context of a task for which we need to track its type. The list of the available task activity types is stored as records in an entity called “Task Activity“. The Task entity has a lookup to the Task Activity entity. The information needs to be stored in English and French

1 – Task Form with Lookup to Task Activity

2 – List of Task Activities

Resolution Option 1 – Concatenate multiple languages in one field with a separator

You will be disappointed, this is not a fancy solution. In the Task Activity entity, we have one field for the name in both languages and use concatenate both field values in the primary field using a workflow or plugin.

• Name English (Single line of text – 100)
  
• Name French (Single line of text – 100)
  
• Name (Single line of text – 203) – read only for users, populated with “Name English | French Name”
  

3 – Task Activity Form

This is the most common approach that I have seen when the number of languages is small (2 languages). This has a disadvantage of sometimes creating long name values that are not fully visible in the views and on the forms, but it’s cheap and you keep the ability to search using lookup, and display the columns in French or English the views if you need to.

Resolution Option 2 – Plugins on Retrieve & Retrieve Multiple

This solution is a little more interesting, but risky. In the Task Activity, we still have one field for the name in both languages and we still concatenate both field values in the primary field.

• Name English (Single line of text – 100)
  
• Name French (Single line of text – 100)
  
• Name (Single line of text – 203) – read only for users, populated with “Name English | French Name”
  

The principle is to write plugins on the Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple events of the Task Activity. In both of these plugins, you need to retrieve the connected user’s language (query the user settings table), and then replace the text being returned in the Name field by the value in the user’s language. This value can be obtained by querying the task activity record and retrieving the name in French or English, or simply splitting the Name field (primary field) with the separator and return the part in the desired user’s language. One plugin will handle the lookup column in list views (Retrieve Multiple), and the other will handle the form views (Retrieve).

Generally, it is not recommended to write plugins on the Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple events for performance reason. If the operations executed in those plugins are simple and optimized, it might be a viable solution. This is a solution that can scale well if you are dealing with more than 2 languages because in all cases, users see only the value in their selected language and the multiple values are transparent to them.

Stay tuned, I have an upcoming post where I provide some metrics about the impact of a plugin on Retrieve and Retrieve Multiple on performance.

Resolution Option 3 – Automated mapping of Option Set with Reference Entity Records

This is a bit of a complex solution, by far the fanciest. The idea is to use an option set instead of a lookup to reference the task activities, but the option set values will be “controlled” with records from the Task Activity CRM entity. It goes like this:

1. Create a global option set named Task Activity
   
2. Create your Task Activity entity with a primary “Name” field. Put the name of task activities in the primary language (language of the CRM org)
   
3. When a record is created in the Task Activity entity, use a plugin to create an option set value in the global option set
   
4. When a record is updated in the Task Activity entity, use a plugin to update the corresponding option set value in the global option set
   
5. When a Task Activity record is deleted/deactivated, use a plugin to update the corresponding global option set value by putting brackets around the name for example, and also pushing the value to the bottom of the option set list
   
6. You can then get the CRM Translation file and get the Task Activities values translated as part of the global solution.
   

4 – Records to Option Set Value mapping

The outcome is that for entities that need to capture the task activity information, there will be an option set field as opposed to the lookup field:

5 – Task Form with Option Set

While this has low impact on performance and leverages the out of the box language-aware option sets, it requires a serious time investment to define the development framework for each entity that required this mechanism to be implemented. It also requires a translator to update the CRM translation on a regular basis (every time there is a deployment). This is a fancy solution that requires a lot of coding and maintenance. In addition to that, you lose the ability to search and filter the content easily like you would do with lookups. You should make sure yours lists are not very long if you don’t want to end up with Option Set lists that are very long which will result in poor user experience.

I have rarely seen companies making such large investments to circumvent the lack of multi-language lookup in CRM. This is usually seen when there are laws that force you to have a system running fully in multiple languages.

Resolution Option 4 – Custom Screen for Lookup views & search

This is another fancy one for which I unfortunately don’t have any screenshot. We want to leverage option sets to “overwrite” lookup values and selection process with the following steps:

1. Create a set of standardized Web Resources for Lookup Display and lookup value selection
   
2. Display the web resources on the CRM Forms and hide the lookup controls
   
3. The web resources will have built-in logic to display the value in the language of the current user, as well as a mechanism to allow searches (could be auto-complete based)
   

Writing a standard web resource control for that purpose is relatively simple. However, you might have additional work to do if you want to take advantage of filtering based on other fields, or custom filters. Also, this solves the issue on the form in the sense that you will see the values in the right language on the form, but for list views, reports etc. the problem will still exist so you’ll need to find another solution there.

Closing Thoughts

As you can see there is no perfect solution. Each organization has to decide the level of investment and risk they want to take to make sure they have multi-language option sets. Living in Canada where we have two official languages, this is a challenge that we often see in public sector implementations because having fully bilingual system is mandated by law. There are very few countries where this is the case (which is probably why Microsoft has not made investments in this area). Most private sector companies will usually impose a primary language for the entire organization.

Hope this helps!

Microsoft Medics 365 – Session on Licensing & Upgrade

If you have questions about Dynamics 365 Licensing and Upgrade options, there is your chance to get them answered.

In the first ever edition of the Microsoft Medics 365, a panel of 6 Microsoft Business Solutions MVPs (formely known as Dynamics CRM MVPs) will discussing the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Model as well as the Upgrade process on November 29^th at 12pm ET.

Register here, we’ll be happy to share our knowledge and answer your questions!

Now that this is all over, feel free to check out the recording below. Any licensing questions, free free to ask here or on the Medics 365 Facebook page!

Where to store configuration data in Dynamics 365/CRM?

In almost all the complex systems that I’ve worked with, there has always been a need to store some configuration information. It could be URLs to external APIs or web sites, connection strings to a database for integration purposes, application specific parameters that drive business logic such as Security Roles, Accounts or Contacts. In Dynamics CRM/365, there is often a need to store the same type of information so that plugins, workflow and other integrated applications read them and perform business operation accordingly. In this article, I share the most common options and share some pros and cons associated to each of them.

Key Value Pair Entity

IF you’ve done some application design, you know what the concept of a key value pair table is. In the Dynamics CRM/365 context, it is an entity that contains two required text fields: one for the key and the other for the value. The key represents the name of your configuration variable and the value is, well, the value for the key. For each configuration element that needs to be stored in your system, you create a new row with a key and its value. The images below provide an example of a Key Value Pair entity in CRM in which we stored information to connect to an external web service and the ID of a Security Role, all as text values.

1 – List of Key Value Pairs in Dynamics CRM/365

2 – Key Value Pair Entity for Example

Pros

• Very simple data structure
• Easy to add/remove configuration values
• Code to read and use the variables does not change over time
• Retrieving a config element is a fast operation (one row with two columns)

Cons

• Data type for the value is a text field (not practical for lookups or other data types as you may have to store GUIDs for example)
• Inability to set default values
• Inability to use FLS on specific config elements
• The Keys must be hard-coded in code and/or documented and maintained somewhere

If you are planning to use a Key Value pair type of configuration table, my recommendation is to have one key field as text, and configuration value type field (option set with the type of field – example text, two options) and multiple value columns of different types (e.g. Value (lookup 1), Value (lookup 2), Value (text), Value (two option)). As a bonus, you can add some business rules to prevent the selection of the wrong data type based on the selected configuration value type.

Configuration Entity

Here, the idea is to have an entity in CRM with one field for each configuration element that needs to be stored. In the example below, we have a table that contains information to connect to an ERP web service as well as credentials, and a lookup to a System Admin role (similar information as above). It in this case, there should only one row in the configuration table.

3 – System Configuration List View (only one row available)

4 – System Configuration Entity form (shows all the configuration fields)

Pros

• No need to have a list of configuration key names (use the field names enforced at the database level)
• Each configuration element has the appropriate type (e.g Lookup, text field, two option, option set etc.)
• Ability to enable Field Level Security on specific parameters
• Allows for default values for certain data types
• Easier to setup by an end user (create one row, set values as opposed to create multiple rows with key and value)

Cons

• Schema change + Code update required anytime a new configuration element is needed
• You need to ensure there is only one record for the entity (plugin validation on create)
• Configuration table grows horizontally and not vertically over time

Wrap up

I have used both models extensively and they both work well. For a stable system with not a lot of moving piece, I tend to like the Configuration entity better. For system where things change all the time and new config items need to be added on a regular basis, using the key value pair entity is often more cost-effective. There is also the possibility to use an XML web resource for parameters or the plugin secure and unsecure configuration fields.

Regardless of the method you use, consider caching the configuration data when possible to increase your system’s performance. On the Client side with JavaScript, you can use a few different mechanisms for caching (local storage, cookie). On the server side for plugins, I often use a static cache but this only works for plugins executed in full trust mode (in other words, if you are in CRM Online, no caching on the server side).

Cheers!