Common Data Service Terminology updates

For those of us who have been using Microsoft Dynamics from the early days, the only names that we ever knew for the data schema elements has been entities, fields and attributes, records, and for the different fields types where we will be seeing the changes applied option sets, picklists and two option values.

Considerations for Embedding Canvas Apps in Model Driven forms

We have all seen different articles and posts that detail the steps of how to embed a Canvas App within a Model-Driven form by adding the Canvas App control to a field on the form, but sometimes that might not be enough for the requirements that we have in place.

How to start with Project Oakdale (MS Teams and Power Apps)

In this blog post I will review the recent announcement from Microsoft Ignite, where we saw first hand Project Oakdale, or Power Apps within Microsoft Teams. The post will show you how to enable Power Apps within your teams tenant, and how to start working on your first app.

Update Data in your CDS using Azure SQL Server, Azure Functions or Connectors from SQL Data

Recently, while working on a project that needed to update the Exchange rates in CDS, I was tasked at finding a solution that would be able to retrieve data from a SQL Server hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine. There were so many different approaches, and security was the main one, but I decided to do a deep dive and testing out how Power Automate will be able to accommodate these requests.

Using the Maker Portal to Export to Data Lake

In my current role the matter of using a data lake has come up, and I wanted to get ready in case this implementation will become a need. I followed instructions from some of the published Microsoft blogs, and this blog post provides step by step instructions on how to configure the Azure Storage account to enable the Export to Data Lake feature as well as running the same process from within the Power Apps Maker Portal

Customer Service Workspace (Preview) in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan

For anyone who has experience with Microsoft Omni channel interface, and has enabled the 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan, there is a new app that appeared with the name Customer Service Workspace (Preview). As noted in the release plan, the multisession app allows customer service agent to multitask on several customer cases simultaneously and seamlessly switch among issues without losing context of the in-progress work.

Sending Emails to all customers using Power Automate

Recently in the forums, there were a few questions on how to send emails to all of my customers. While there might be different options, and the right solution to this might greatly depend on the frequency that you need to be sending this as well as the number of contacts, I thought I would demonstrate a few different approaches to implement this using Microsoft Power Automate.

T-SQL Endpoint for Common Data Service

Since the announcement by Microsoft at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit last month, and even before, I’ve been eager to take a look at the new SQL Connection for the Common Data Service Endpoint. What this means is that we can not write and execute SQL queries against the entity data.

Changing record statuses in UCI and 2020 Wave 1 release

When working with model driven apps, we have the ability to navigate through the flow of the record using the Business Process Flow. The BPF is a great way to navigate through the different stages of the record, but what if that is just not enough. What if in order to complete the record I have to go through 10 or maybe more stages.

Advanced AutoNumber Source Code now available

A few years back we developed an AutoNumber solution that enables the implementation of AutoNumbers for Dynamics 365 and the Common Data Service. This AutoNumber solution allows the creation of rules for simple autonumbers with prefix, suffix and number of digits, but also has a lot of advanced features for getting numbers from related fields or option sets.