Announcing Hero Guard solution for Dynamics 365

Recently a teammate pinged me urgently to help out with a tough situation. He was about to deliver a presentation that included a carefully configured demo record (and related data) in Dynamics 365. There were several cooks in the kitchen helping test the environment to make sure everything looked good…then something happened.

Often, when configuring in a demo environment, we don’t use ALM practices, soft deletes, or security role authorization. It’s not real data and we can easily tailor the data to align to a specific scenario. Normally this is great, but it’s not great when someone accidentally deletes this carefully constructed “Hero” record, along with the related data.

Since my coworker was about 30 minutes away from presenting there wasn’t enough time to restore from a backup. Our best course of action was to rebuilt based on screenshots he had as a fallback…stressful! We got a good-enough record built out in time (but it wasn’t nearly as robust…we had actual activity built up over multiple weeks to tell the story). A somewhat happy ending.

Now there’s a solution

In our debrief, I mentioned a design for a solution. A simple set of configurations to guard against this kind of thing happening for key records in the environment. Over the years I’ve talked with several folks about this concept when swapping stories in similar situations. This one was the last straw.

So I configured the solution: Hero Guard

• Installs into any Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement environment
• Very lightweight design (clean bill of health from the Power Platform Solution Checker)
• Includes no custom code (just configuration)

After installing, it takes only a few seconds to add Guard for the Hero record they’re going to protect.

You can review, download, or contribute on GitHub

I’m not interested in monetizing this solution. This is for the good of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform community. Your demo/training/test data should be guarded! As the community continues to embrace Makers (a.k.a. citizen developers), now is an ideal time to release it into the wild. Find it at https://github.com/mathyousee/Hero-Guard

The project is open-source on GitHub, with both the managed and unmanaged solutions available. Version 1 works with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement environments. The next step is to release a Power Platform version which doesn’t require any sales/service entities.

If you have other ideas for the solution or want to give feedback, please do so through the project on GitHub.

Minimum privileges in model-driven PowerApps

When you’re building an app in the Common Data Service for Apps, how do you keep it secure?

I was digging around for answers to a customer question on the docs.com site when I ran across something that made me stop in my tracks. If you’re planning on making a model-driven PowerApp, you should pay attention.

Microsoft offers a minimum privilege security role that you can import to your environment and build upon for your app.

You might be wondering: Why should I leverage this when making an app?

Keep your app secure

PowerApps harness the world-class identity management and security provided through Azure & Office 365, while offering it though an easy to configure and deploy interface for your own app. If you’re an app maker, you don’t need to understand the mechanics of managing database security, tracking activity, and offering single-sign-on to users. The PowerApps platform, backed by the Common Data Service for Apps takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

The part you’re responsible for is to set up security definitions based on what you want your app to do. This is where the minimum privilege security role makes life easy. It’s a starting point with all of the basic level permissions that let a user log into an app, navigate, and use core actions and capabilities that are shared across apps.

From there, you add incremental privileges to a copy of that. For instance, a standard user may only be able to see and modify their own records, while a manager may be able to see and modify the records of everyone on the team.

Make your app more modular

Previous methods have existed to do this same thing, the most common two being:

• Copy one of the out-of-the-box roles, like Salesperson, then strip away the Sales stuff
• Assume users will have another security role with the minimum privileges

The first one is the approach I’ve preferred in the past, but it takes extra work to make sure you remove every little dependency to the Sales app. Suppose you want to deploy to an environment where Sales isn’t deployed.

The second app is less and less viable as the Common Data Service and PowerApps platform stand more on their own, separate from the 1st party apps. Frankly, unless a user is going to leverage capabilities that are part of the 1st party apps it’s tough to assume users will be assigned one of the out of the box security roles. Are you willing to make that assumption?

Make your app easier to deploy

I was having a discussion with a colleague about a community project we’re working on to build out some capabilities to extend the Health Accelerator. He was asking why we’d include security roles with our solution, since customers can tailor security for their deployment anyway.

The discussion we got into was on driving a quicker and easier deployment of the solution. Sure, an administrator (or partner) could analyze the specific needs for their deployment and tailor roles…in fact, they still can. But what about the customer that wants to install and get going right away?

By having these predefined security roles, customers can install and test the solution with minimal up-front work–without impacting their ability to tailor later. These predefined roles also serve as a template for basic user types (like those of the Dynamics 365 1st party apps like Sales, Service, etc.).

Take action!

If you’ve read this far, it’s time to get hands-on.

• Read more about PowerApp security roles
• Download your copy of the minimum privileges security role
• Let me know what other little goodies like this are out on docs.com!

NO ADMIN REQUIRED: Launch your canvas PowerApp from a Dynamics 365 Record

My latest canvas PowerApps creation provides a streamlined interface for managing “technical close plan” records in Dynamics 365 (set of configured entities associated with Opportunities). I built this app for myself and my peers to spend less time navigating between screens when building out our close plans so that we could have timely and accurate close plans visible to the whole pursuit team.

I estimate a time savings of a few minutes per deal per week. Over time that really adds up. Also, there’s a great peace of mind that I get personally knowing that I’m on top of it.

The only trouble is, I typically work with records inside of Dynamics, and didn’t want to have to jump out to a new browser window (or grab my phone), open the PowerApp, search for the specific record, etc.. That would chew into the time savings too much for my liking.

Why not just embed a PowerApp in the record form or add a menu button?

Unfortunately, both of those assume you have System Customizer or Administrator access to the environment. That’d be a great way to go, but I’m just a regular old user this time—and I don’t have an “in” with the admin either.

I didn’t want to recreate the saved Opportunity lists (system and personal views)…because I’m not a fan of reinventing the wheel inside of my apps, especially when I’m using the Dynamics 365 or CDS connector.

So I built my PowerApp with the assumption that I would spoon-feed in a specific Opportunity record through some other means (with some TBD level of automation).

Then I built a bookmarklet

“What’s a bookmarklet?” You know what a bookmark is in your browser: click a link and go to a website. A bookmarklet looks like the same thing, except when you click, it runs a little script to do something.

In my case, the bookmarklet finds the record GUID based the page I have open, then opens my PowerApp in a new window and passes in that GUID as a parameter.

I couldn’t find something readymade, but I did borrow the script to get the GUID. Big thanks to Benjamin John, who published a couple of blogs with a bunch of Dynamics 365 bookmarklets.

Handling the parameter

When the PowerApp is launched, specifically when the first screen loads, I use a function to check for the parameter and store it as a global variable:

Set(gvSelectedOpp,First(Filter(Opportunities,opportunityid=Param("opty_id"))));If(gvSelectedOpp.opportunityid<>"111111bc-1111-1111-1111-000111101111",Navigate(scrOppDetails,Fade))

The second function (the If… after the “;”) checks to see if the parameter was there and the app navigates to the details screen. There are a bunch of ways to do this, so I picked one that’s overly complicated but fun to look at. Oh the joyous freedoms of being a Citizen Developer 😉

Conclusion and call for collaborators

All in all, this was a couple of hours from initial research to final product and it’s already saved me a bunch of time in accessing the right record from my PowerApp. It also made me think back to a time before I had Admin privileges in most environments I touch. That’s a fun and creative part of the problem-solving brain that I was happy to say hello to again.

If you’re interested, I released the JavaScript for the bookmarklet as a project on GitHub. I recognize that it’s using the older (but still functioning) page.xrm object which is not ideal moving forward. I’m open to help from a real developer who can help update it to leverage the Web API equivalent.

The top 4 reasons I love docs.com

Your first question might be “what is docs.com?” and that’s fair. You may have heard of docs.microsoft.com, which is what it redirects to (or maybe you already figured that out by typing it in your own browser…).

Over the course of the last year (?) Microsoft has made a very notable push to consolidate their public-facing documentation all to the docs.microsoft.com site–and I love it! These are the top reasons I’m a big fan.

Consistency in documentation

Part of good reference documentation is that it isn’t radically different from one product to the next–especially in the case of the Microsoft clouds of Azure, Business Applications, and Office 365 where the products are engineered to work with each other. Having consistency across these helps connect that experience. A few places this is evident includes:

• Navigation / outline
• Style guide
• Easily searchable text
• Better cross-linking
• Visual ascetic of the page
• Separation of product feedback and documentation feedback
• Release notes aren’t buried elsewhere

Searchability

It seems to me like there’s been a significant effort to make this site SEO-friendly (SEO-focused?). I get high-ranking hits of this documentation using the major search providers–which is great considering how fresh much of the content is.

searching through the outline of the current section

Within the site, the outline (navigation) for each item includes search (if you’re trying to find something within this logical area, with the top-level search just a click away.

Note that this global search also has a product filter based on where I am…slick!

Less fragmentation

This same documentation used to be scattered around a bunch of product specific pages, TechNet articles, MSDN, product manuals, separate roadmap sites, “official” community sites (and probably more).

Now it doesn’t take heroic efforts to track this stuff down. Resources for end users, admins, IT pros, and developers are all here–which is especially great since so many people who would go looking for this don’t fall neatly into just one of those buckets. A huge amount of content is out there already, with some still pointing to old articles (that are being ported and retired).

Date stamping

Every page has the date stamp right at the top of the page, giving a quick heads up as to how fresh the content is or when it may have last been reviewed. In this same area it calls out the people who have contributed to writing the page as well, which for some reason just feels good to remember there are real human beings behind the updates 🙂

Final thoughts

I also find it interesting that all of the documentation is written in Markdown and maintained on GitHub repositories. It’s very open to be able to see edit history, publishing over time, and all sorts of other stuff out there.

Would you have even known the documentation is managed through github?

Have fun!

XRM Toolbox with Dynamics 365 and Model Driven PowerApps

To anyone building model-driven PowerApps, Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, or the Common Data Service for Apps, XRM Toolbox needs to be your friend. In a recent Implement This podcast episode I discussed a couple of favorite tools in the toolbox.

Specifically we talk about:

• Iconator and making icons
• Bulk Workflow Execution tool
• Other related topics

View the full show notes (and the video I mention) at implementthis.org

Cascade Rules in the Common Data Service for Apps

Recently Britta and I recorded and released a podcast episode about “cascade rules” behavior. When building relationships between entities in the Common Data Service, these settings influence the behavior of visibility, assignment, and other system capabilities.

This capability can be leveraged when building model-driven PowerApps and extending Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.

View the full episode show notes at implementthis.org

Quick Update

Podcasting Updates

Business Applications Community

Microsoft Power Platform FTW

Dynamics 365 and Flow – Implement This Podcast

At a local Dynamics-team meeting, we had a healthy discussion about Microsoft Flow and its fit for business applications as a cross-platform workflow engine. I've been a long-time user of If This Then That (IFTTT) and I'm excited at the prospects of having this kind of service-connecting tool right here within the Microsoft toolset. It shows the embracing of Connecting the Data with 3rd party services(if you will indulge me), without having to rely on custom code 🙂 

Coming out of that meeting, Britta and I wished that the discussion had been recorded. It wasn't. But we put our heads together to outline the topics that were covered and discussed them on this episode of our podcast Implement This. The content is still relevant

You can listen at the top of this post, or click through to the episode on our website.

Dynamics 365 Workflow Foundations – Implement This Podcast

Show Notes:

The Dynamics 365 Workflow engine, which is the behind-the-scenes part of the process engine, is massively powerful. For host Britta Rekstad, who has presented on how to use Dynamics workflow at multiple conferences, this is an absolutely critical aspect of the platform for new admins to understand.

Co-host Matthew C. Anderson shares about how some of his early experiences in configuring Dynamics 365 involved workflow. This experience also included a spoken agreement to be careful as the workflow engine (used without care) can cause some pain for other users and admins alike.

Discussed on the show

• Official Microsoft Documentation: Workflow Overview
• More MS Documentation: Configuring workflow steps

We seem to have different perspectives on using the workflow engine, however, there’s no disagreement on how important and powerful this tool is when implementing Dynamics 365. A very flexible tool, this part of the process engine sits out-of-sight to most users but serves an important role.

What’s on your mind?

Have a question you’d like answered on a future podcast? Submit one by visiting implementthis.org

ProdCast: Productivity Tools Update

Joel and I revisit our discussion about productivity tools. This time we discuss:

• Moment for IOS
• Focus – Screen Free Driving
• Quality Time for Android
• Passion Planner
• That’s not productive: Multitasking

http://prodcast.libsyn.com/prodcast-16-productivity-tools-update

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