Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

With July 2017 update (v 9.0) there is a great set of new features introduced.

Now onward, the apps that make up the customer relationship management (CRM) portion of Dynamics 365 are referred to as “Customer Engagement” and include Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and their related services.

In this article I am going to touch base few new features at a high level. I will be covering each feature in detailed in follow up articles.

UX Enhancements:

• Removal of unneeded white space on forms and dashboards.
• On forms, long text labels and values are wrapped. Admins can control word wrap through system level settings.

• The color of a sub-grid header can be customized at the form level
  • While adding sub grid to a form, now we have an option to set ‘Panel Header Color’

• Themes – There are now three new standard themes to choose from.

• Email editor control has been updated with rich editing capability.
• Enhancements to ‘Sitemap Designer’ and ‘View Designer’

Advanced Find:

• Advanced Find has got ‘Not In’ query option using “Does not contain data” operator.
• Refer my previous article

Activity management:

• New Quick Create forms have been introduced for Task, Phone Call, and Appointment with customization capabilities.

Dynamics 365 mobile app:

• The new mobile app is built on the new Unified Interface, which provides key accessibility and responsive design benefits.
• If you can add iFrames and web resources in forms and dashboards in a Dynamics 365 (online) web app, they will be enabled in Dynamics 365 for phones as well, if you check the box to enable iFrames and web resources for phones.

Virtual Entities:

• A virtual entity is a custom entity in Dynamics 365 (online) that retrieves data at runtime from an external data source.
• Records based on virtual entities are available from all Dynamics 365 (online) clients, including custom applications developed using the Dynamics 365 SDK.
• Several options, such as Access Teams, Queues, and Quick Create, aren’t available with virtual entities.
• Virtual entities are organization owned.
• All virtual entities are read-only.
• Existing entities cannot be converted to virtual entities.
• Virtual entities don’t support auditing.
• Virtual entity fields can’t be used in rollups or calculated fields.

MultiSelect option set:

• Refer previous article

Web resource dependencies:

• In this release, you can now specify web resources during customization that will be used at run-time to include dependencies. This makes it easier to ensure that HTML, JavaScript resources, and all dependent resources are loaded appropriately.

Web resource localization:

• This release includes support for a new resource type, RESX, which is an XML-based file format that supports comments associated with key+value translation pairs and is supported in Visual Studio.
• You can associate RESX web resources with any JavaScript web resource that uses them so that you can use a new client-side API to access localized strings at run time.

Vector Image web resources:

• Use vector images for any icon presented in the application.
• The advantage of vector images over other image web resources is that they scale.
• You can define one vector image and re-use it rather than provide multiple sizes of images.
• You can use this web resource to define a single icon for an entity rather different sized images.

Web API improvements:

• GrantAccess, ModifyAccess, and RetrieveSharedPrincipalsAndAccess messages are now available using the Web API.

Client API Enhancements:

• Xrm.Page.context is deprecated in this release and will be replaced by Xrm.Utility.getGlobalContext
• Xrm.Page.data.save(saveOptions) method’s ‘saveOptions’ to include a new value called SaveMode to let the onSave event handlers know why the save is happening.

Grid Click event – Override the default open behavior of data rows in an entity-bound grid:

• As an OOB grid behavior, on double click of data row or clicking hyper link in Data row will open the entity record.
• With this release, we can now override the default behavior to define your own custom behavior.
• Create a command definition for an entity with Mscrm.OpenRecordItem as the value of the Id attribute (<CommandDefinition> (RibbonDiffXml)), and define custom action for the command <Actions> (RibbonDiffXml)
• System will look for this command Id for an entity when you try to open a record from the entity-bound grid, and if present, will execute the custom action instead of opening the entity record (default behavior).

Customer Service Hub:

• The Customer Service Hub (called Interactive Service Hub in earlier releases) has been rebuilt on the new Unified Interface as a stand-alone application.

Business process flows enhancements:

• Business Process flow is now an entity and you can create custom views.
• Business Process entities can now be made available on the site map

Useful articles:

• What’s new in Dynamics 365
• What’s new for developers
• Customer service hub
• What’s new for Admin and End Users

🙂