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Create Office 365 Delegated Admin request

By: Luca Sgaravato / 7 Dec 2016 in Office 365

You can send an invitation to your customer and ask authorization for delegated admin.

Open the Partner app

2. Go to Build your business > Request delegated admin. This will prepare send an email with a link to be clicked to confirm access.

3. Copy the information and offer URL for the delegated administration, and then paste it into a customized email, document, or webpage.

4. Send the Email to your customer

If customer’s approves the request you’ll receive a confirmation email and by then you’ll have full administrative privileges on his tenant (no need for specific credentials).

What is delegated administration?

From TechNet.

Delegated administration allows a partner to have full administrative access to all the customer’s services and subscriptions. This means you can perform administrative tasks on behalf of customers (including setting up mailboxes, adding or removing users and groups, data migration, and submitting service requests to Microsoft Customer Service and Support). Delegated administration capability is offered exclusively for partners who are enrolled in Cloud Essentials, Cloud Accelerate or the Cloud Deployment programs.

Before you can start administering a customer’s account, the customer must authorize you as a delegated administrator. To get customer approval, you send them an offer for delegated administration, which you can include with a trial invitation or purchase offer. The customer authorizes a Delegated Administration partner by responding to the partner’s invitational email.

Privilege Type Append not defined on entity ‘UserQuery’

By: Luca Sgaravato / 6 Dec 2016 in Dynamics CRM

Affected environment: CRM 2016 Update 1 On-Premises, all browsers

Scenario

Today I logged on a CRM organization as system administrator and created a saved view in order to collect data before performing un update.

I wanted to share the saved view with my customer in order to let her check if the filter criteria satisfied requirements. So I tried to share the view but I only got this error

Log file stated:

<OrganizationServiceFault xmlns:i=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts“>
<ErrorCode>-2147220970</ErrorCode>
<ErrorDetails xmlns:d2p1=”http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic” />
<Message>Privilege Type Append not defined on entity ‘UserQuery’.</Message>
<Timestamp>2016-12-06T14:43:19.48376087Z</Timestamp>
<InnerFault i:nil=”true” />
<TraceText i:nil=”true” />
</OrganizationServiceFault>

Saved View Entity do not contain any Append privilege. So what to do?

Solution

Go to Settings>Security>Hierarchy Security and check if Hierarchy Security is enabled. If that’s the case move Saved Views to the “Excluded Entities”, Save and Close and that’s all! Problem solved!

References

Upgrading Windows Phone 8.1 devices to Windows 10 Mobile

By: Luca Sgaravato / 30 Nov 2016 in Uncategorized

Here’s the procedure to follow if you want to upgrade your mobile device OS from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 Mobile.

Upgrade is not performed through system updates. Instead Upgrade Advisor App is required.

Not all Windows Phone 8.1 devices can be upgraded to W10. For an up-to-date listing check here.

Official documentation from Microsoft on how to upgrade is available at here.

Suggestion: perform all upgrade steps when device is connected to Wi-Fi network (lot of data downloaded during upgrade)

Step 1: install Upgrade Advisor App

On your device download and install the Upgrade Advisor App via Windows Store.

Step 2: check and perform upgrade

Once the app is installed execute it. When you open the app, it checks your phone and lets you know if it’s eligible to install the upgrade, if an update is required before you can install the upgrade, or if your phone can’t be upgraded.

If your device can be upgraded to W10 Mobile then run the upgrade. It will take up to more then 1 hour for the upgrade to complete (depending on connection speed, device performance, …). App will download W10 and then setup it.

Reboot required.

Step 3: reconfigure apps (if required)

You’ll probably need to reconfigure some apps (i.e. Outlook)

Step 4: download Windows 10 updates

Once upgrade is complete you’ll probably need to download W10 updates (500+ MB).

Reboot required.

w10_ua_2 w10_ua_1

Schedule workflows on Dynamics CRM

By: Luca Sgaravato / 29 Nov 2016 in Dynamics CRM

Playing with Dynamics CRM you probably faced many times the necessity to schedule workflows. (No) Big surprise…there is nothing OOB available! In this post I collect all the approaches and solutions I spotted or used through time.

vintage-switchboard-operator When talking about scheduling workflows we have two main scenarios:

Recurring workflows: WF to run periodically (hourly, monthly, …) or based on conditions (birthday greetings, warranty end reminders,…)
One shot delayed workflows: you simply have to schedule WF one time in the future

This post will focus on scenario no.1. Scenario no.2 can be targeted as a specific case of scenario no.1 or creating a workflow with the scheduled delay and running it by hand (on-demand process).

Methodologies

Using the Bulk Deletion Process to Schedule Recurring Workflows http://www.crmsoftwareblog.com/2012/08/using-the-bulk-deletion-process-to-schedule-recurring-workflows/
Trigger custom entity + Bulk Deletion Process http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2013/01/how-to-schedule-workflows-in-microsoft-crm-online.html
Wait step and child workflow http://www.powerobjects.com/2016/07/11/setting-up-recurring-workflows-in-dynamics-crm-2016/
How to create a repeating schedule workflow rule https://crmbusiness.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/how-to-create-a-repeating-schedule-workflow-rule/

Packaged solutions

Alexander Development Workflow Scheduler(http://alexanderdevelopment.net/post/2016/09/19/updated-solution-for-scheduling-recurring-dynamics-crm-workflows/)
North52 Scheduler (http://www.north52.com/business-process-activities/scheduler-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-xrm/)
Workflow Automation (for Dynamics CRM 2011) (https://workflowautomation.codeplex.com/)

The winner is…

All above solutions do work and each one has pros as well as cons (free vs pay, on-premises vs online, customizable vs uncustomizable, DIY vs solution, …).

As Apex CRM team we currently applied some of above approaches. Since it’s release we really loved Alexander’s solution and we applied it to our latest projects. Why we love it?

easy to configure and monitor
works on both Online and On-Premises
free

We’ll keep on working with Alexander’s solution and any related news will be posted here.

Scheduling definition sample

Apex Planner – How to set default Team / Resource Group / Site

By: Giovanni Tedaldi / 16 Nov 2016 in Apex Planner

Apex Planner – How to change activities’ Status

By: Giovanni Tedaldi / 28 Oct 2016 in Apex Planner

Apex Planner – How to view your appointments on open

By: Giovanni Tedaldi / 18 Oct 2016 in Apex Planner

Apex Planner – How to do some basic operations

By: Giovanni Tedaldi / 14 Oct 2016 in Apex Planner

Apex Planner – How to Find Availability

By: Giovanni Tedaldi / 10 Oct 2016 in Apex Planner

Meeting rooms booking in Dynamics CRM

By: Ilario Benetti / 5 Oct 2016 in Apex Planner, Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a good solution to manage meeting rooms or venues. This article explains how to create rooms and how to make reservations.

Creating venues and meeting rooms

Facilities/equipment is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM entity designed to create meeting rooms and venues. Go to settings->Business Management->Facilities/Equipment to create the meeting rooms. Each meeting room can be associated to a Business unit, to a Site and to a Time Zone. All those settings are very important if you have to manage different meeting rooms in different locations.

Booking rooms

Booking a Meeting rooms in Microsoft Dynamics CRM means adding the rooms to an Appointment or to Service Activities as a required or an optional resource. In the service calendar, you will then see all the bookings associated to the meeting rooms.

Service calendar and display options

Unfortunately, the standard service calendar does not allow to save a default view. Also, you cannot choose a default site or how many days you want to display by default. You have to edit each appointment to move bookings and to assign a booking to a different room as the drag and drop is not implemented in the calendar. When you look at different meeting rooms in different locations with different time zone, the standard service calendar shows all the bookings in the time zone of the current user. A room booked in New York from 8AM to 12AM appears as booked from 3AM to 7AM to a user logged in London.

Advanced calendar options

Apex Planner overcomes those issues by providing an advanced calendar expressly designed to enhance the Dynamics CRM calendar. Apex Planner features a user-based configuration with 30+ default settings to create the most efficient view of the calendar. Apex Planner allows drag and drop to reschedule, reassign and clone bookings. Apex Planner can also show Meeting Rooms Bookings in the room’s own time zone. On the other hand, Apex Planner preserves all the standard features of the Dynamics CRM calendar and it is also aware of custom entities, custom statuses and plug-ins you may have in your CRM implementation. Learn more about Apex Planner at http://www.apex.it/en/crm/apex-planner