Portal Links Issue - Clicking on the hyperlink on the portal lands in Portal home page

We have customer service portal for creating and managing cases from portal. As part of process we send Case Portal URL / Case knowledge article URL to the customer.  But when the customer clicks on the link it goes to the login page (ADFS) and when he signs in instead of going to the URL he clicked the customer is navigated to the portal home page. Looks like the return URL is always the home page. but this doesnt happen when he is already logged into the portal and directly the url is rendered. 

https://Example.microsoftcrmportals.com/en-US/articles/?code=KA-01111 

For example, when the customer clicks on the above link he lands to the sign in page, after signing in, he is taken to home page of instead of the above URL 

Solution: 

From CRM Go to Portal>>Site Settings>> Authentication/Registration/ProfileRedirectEnabled

Turn this to false. This should do the magic

Sets whether or not the portal can redirect the user to the profile page after successful sign-in. By default, it is set to true.

Clearing Portal Cache

To clear the server-side cache

1. Sign in to the portal as an administrator.
2. Navigate to the URL as follows: portal_url/_services/about
3. Select Clear Cache.

Limitations of Virtual Entities

Limitations of Virtual Entities

There are some limitations to virtual entities that you need to be aware of when evaluating whether you can use virtual entities with your external data.

·         Data is read-only. The virtual entity feature doesn’t support pushing changes made in Dynamics 365 back to the external system.

·         Only organization-owned entities are supported. The security filtering applied to user-owned entities is not supported. Access to the virtual entity data can be turned on or off for individual users based on their security role. Field-level security is not supported.

·         It must be possible to model the external data as a Dynamics 365 entity. This means:

·         All entities in the external data source must have an associated GUID primary key.

·         All entity properties must be represented as Dynamics 365 attributes. You can use simple types representing text, numbers, optionsets, dates, images, and lookups.

·         You must be able to model any entity relationships in Dynamics 365.

·         An attribute on a virtual entity cannot be calculated or rollup. Any desired calculations must be done on the external side, possibly within or directed by the data provider.

·         Auditing and change tracking is not supported. These may be implemented within the external data store.

·         Virtual entities cannot be enabled for queues.

·         Offline caching of values is not supported for virtual entities.

·         A virtual entity cannot represent an activity and do not support business process flows.

·         Once created, a virtual entity cannot be changed to be a standard (non-virtual) entity. The reverse is also true: a standard entity cannot be converted into a virtual entity.

Virtual entities have these restrictions.

·         All virtual entitites are read-only.

·         Existing entities cannot be converted to virtual entities.

·         By default, virtual entities contain only a Name and Id field. No other system managed fields, such as Status or Created On/Modified On are supported.

·         Virtual entities don't support custom fields with the Currency, Image, or Customer data types.

·         Virtual entities don't support auditing.

·         Virtual entity fields can't be used in rollups or calculated fields.

·         A virtual entity can't be an activity type of entity.

·         Many features that affect entity table rows cannot be enabled with virtual entities. Examples include queues, knowledge management, SLAs, duplicate detection, change tracking, mobile offline capability, field security, Relevance Search, Portals for Dynamics 365 web portal solutions, and N:N relationships between virtual entities.

·         Virtual entities are organization owned and don't support the row-level Commond Data Service for Apps security concepts. We recommend that you implement your own security model for the external data source.

·         We recommend that you target a single data source when you use virtual entities in Advanced Finds. For example, creating an Advanced Find that ultimately creates a join between the Common Data Service for Apps native data and the virtual entity external data isn't supported.

·         Field metadata properties that validate on update don’t apply to virtual entities. For example, a Whole Number field on a virtual entity field may be set to have a minimum value of zero. However, since the value is coming from an external data source, a query will return values less than zero when retrieved from a virtual entity. The minimum value property is not implied in the query. You would still need to filter the values to be greater than 0 if that’s what is desired.

·         Virtual entities don't support change tracking and cannot be synchronized by using a Dynamics 365 feature, such as the Data Export Service.

Dynamics 365 V9.0 Optimum space... Issue resolution and workaround!!! Tips and Tricks

In my previous blog, we had discussed the issue of white space in D365 screens. Although there is not a direct solution to the issue; there is definitely a work around which can be a solution for one having big screens and laptops... I had posted this blog in facebook and other groups from which I received  some good comments and suggestions. #OliverFlint suggested a solution which resolves this issue. In this post, we will discuss the solution/workaround and discuss the pros/cons of the approach.

Step 1: The simple solution is to adjust the screen resolution of the display to a  higher resolution (1920 x 1080 or 1440 x 900)

Step 2: If the above step did not resolve the issue, then change the size of texts, apps and other items to 100%

This should resolve the issue for laptops and  monitors with Higher screen resolution. In my HP 15.6 True HD Laptop, performing step 1 did not resolve the issue but step 2 did resolve the issue and below is the result. But the Text size, App size was not set to recommended size and looked very small. I am not comfortable and felt a little stressed and on my eyes too.

Dell 24 Inch HD monitor: Perfect resolution to the issue

Dell 13.3 HD Laptop: No resolution even with maximum screen resolution and the texts and apps looked really small.

Although this solution may resolve the issue of Workspace, but I feel it will be good if the solution worked in lower resolution monitors too. According to the below site 45% of the computer users are on low resolution monitors where the D365 screens may still be an issue! Sales person on the go carrying small laptops may still face the issue!!

http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/worldwide

Happy to discuss!!

Dynamics 365 V9.0 Optimum space ??

One of the big selling point of Microsoft for its new Version 9.0 of Dynamics 365 application is reducing white space. Although they have reduced a lot of white space, introduced text wrap and Default user message for empty section etc, I still feel that there are many blank spaces in the product. If you see the below screenshot there are many white spaces and new grey spaces introduced. You can also see that the body of the form (where most of the users work) has tremendously reduced. Now that is what as a end user I would hate, reducing my work space.

Now i did a small exercise and tried removing manually some of the empty spaces from the screen using paint. In the below screen all that is in red is the space I could save. On the right side I have shown places where I could shrunk some space. This is what as an end user (many of my clients) have asked and Microsoft fails every time to achieve this. I hope my thought process concurs with others!!

Happy to discuss and comments!!

Dynamics 365 Portals - Multiple Language Support

Microsoft Portal is a great feature of Dynamics 365 to extend the application to non-users like customers, vendors and channel partners. Portals can be enabled for a customer to browse through knowledge base articles, see information about the products and contracts or to create a service request or a case.
In this post we will see how to create portals in multiple languages. Portals by default come in English language and we will see how to enable Spanish Language to the portal.

Step 1: Enable Spanish Language in D365 application

Navigate to Settings>Adminstration>Languages and select the language that has to be enabled. In our example, Spanish is selected and click on "Apply". Now this process is going to take some time as it creates the necessary language settings.



Step 2: Add Language to the portal

Now navigate to Portal>> Websites and Select Portal for example "Customer Self-Service Portal". Scroll down and go to section "Supported Languages" and click on the "+" sign to add a new language record.



In the resulting new "Website Language" page  add the portal language (lookup) and mark it as published. By default the lookup does not display any language (product bug) hence perform the below step to show the language values

• Click on form editor
• Select the lookup and click on properties
• Click on "Event" Tab and disable the "adx.multilanguage/adx.website.js" 

This setting should add the language to the "Supported Language" grid

Step 3: Add Content Snippets and Web link sets

Adding the language will create content snippet and web link records for Spanish language. Open each of the record and modify the content to reflect Spanish

Step 4: Update Webpages

Webpages are other child pages of the portal. In our example, let us see how the KnowledgeBase webpage of the customer service portal is updated with Spanish content

Navigate to Portal>>Content>>Webpages and open Knowledge Base Home page

When the form is loaded, scroll down a little to find "Localized Content" section. In this section you will see the Spanish line item added to the localized content. Open the record to update localized content.




On the resulting "Web page: Content page" scroll down and locate "Content" section. Update the Spanish content


Step 5 : Restart Portal
- Go to Office365 Portal and navigate to Admin
- Select Dynamics 365 and navigate to Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- Go to Applications Tab
- Select the Poral and Click in Manage


In the resulting page- Click on the Portal Actions>>"Restart Portal" Tile




Result
1) Language code added in the weburl
2) Language optionset added in the webpage



3) On Selection of Spanish, the contents are updated

Advanced Find Update in D365 V9.0 or July update

Advanced find

Advanced find now has the option to build a NOT IN query. For example, users can query for all cases that do not have a related task.

To do this, users launch advanced find from the icon on the navigation bar. In the query, they choose what type of record to look for, and then select a related record type to see the Does not contain data operator.

Advanced find>> Select "Account" Entity

In the filter section, select the related entity, in this example  the Task entity. Now in the earlier version there was no option available to select options at that level. In V9.0 you can see filter in here which has options "Contains data" and "Does not contain data" in the related record type