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Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Services

Featured News

Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces | New perspective

Announcement

  • We announced the preview version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, previously Dynamics 365 Connected Store.
  • This is our expansion from retail scenarios to all spaces.
  • With Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, your organization can harness observational data with ease, use AI-powered models to unlock insights about your environment, and respond in real-time to trends and patterns.
  • As an out-of-the-box solution, Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces is built to be extensible, customizable, and seamlessly work with your existing hardware.
  • The preview will be available in early December 2021.

Capabilities

  • These pre-built AI models (skills) will be available for preview:
  • Shopper analytics—using cameras pointed at entry and exit locations, receive counts and trends for footfall in the store, and how they change by the hour and by day.
  • Display effectiveness—measure the effectiveness of displays (end caps in your store) to get an understanding of how many people walked past the display, and how many have actively engaged with it.
  • Queue management -measure the customer wait time experienced in queues

Visit the Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces website for a deeper look at this new solution.
Empower your employees and improve in-store customer experience.

Learn more on this page of Dynamics 365 community blog.

Context IQ—A new way to collaborate in a hyperconnected business

Announcement

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced Context IQ, a set of capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 that integrate collaboration into the flow of work, surfacing the right information, people and insights in the moment, in context with the task at hand.

Capabilities

  • Context IQ capabilities help you build a hyperconnected business that empowers people to collaborate as one business, everywhere—so people can thrive wherever, and however, they work.
  • Watch the On-demand Ignite session, “Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365” to see some of the capabilities below in action
    • Teams chat embedded within Dynamics 365. Available in preview for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement App
      • Context IQ will suggest colleagues relevant to Dynamics 365 records to promote people discovery for faster deal or case resolution.
    • Live copresence throughout Dynamics 365 applications. Available in preview for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps.
      • See who is actively working on a Dynamics 365 record and available to chat and collaborate hovering over a profile name.
    • A unified meetings experience for sellers. Available for preview in early 2022.
      • During a Teams meeting, sellers can quickly access and share key sales information from Dynamics 365.
    • Digital voice and conversation intelligence for Dynamics 365 Sales. Available in preview for Dynamics 365 Sales
      • Now, sellers can conduct and answer calls, join online meetings, and receive and answer emails from Dynamics 365 with one click. Leverage an integrated Teams dialer for outbound and inbound calling for Dynamics 365 Sales.
    • Find what you need faster by surfacing results from your files, documents, customer records, and people across Microsoft Search.
      • In preview now for SharePoint, Bing, and Office. Preview for Microsoft Teams to follow in 2022.
    • Use @mention to quickly find and share a Dynamics 365 record.
      • Available in preview for Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 applications in 2022.
      • We’re making it simple to share and collaborate on a Dynamics 365 record in the flow of work, without switching apps.
    • Introducing Microsoft Loop, a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across apps—It is enabling teams to think, plan, and create together.
      • Microsoft Loop consists of three elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces
      • Learn more on the new components for collaboration portables across Microsoft Apps here.

For overview check this page of Dynamics 365 blog.

Microsoft Customer Experience Platform | Build deeper connections

  • The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, introduced at Microsoft Ignite, is a complete solution that puts organizations in control of their customer data to personalize, automate and orchestrate journeys during the entire customer lifecycle of awareness, to purchase, to service.
  • With a deep understanding of customers and rich, out-of-the-box AI and insights, organizations can now determine and predict intent to deliver the right content on the right channel and in the right moment.
  • Microsoft is excited to be working with a growing list of digital agencies to help organizations more efficiently unlock their data, predict customer intent, and deliver impactful end-to-end journeys.
  • Read our large customer stories on the Dynamics 365 blog 

Watch the Microsoft Ignite session to see these capabilities in action.

Deprecations & Service Retirement | Power Platform | Dynamics 365 | Portals

Power Platform | Deprecations | Upcoming 2022 Services/Features retirement

February 2022 | Deprecations & Service retirement

Support for viewing and managing application users in legacy web client is deprecated

  • Effective February 2022, the list of "Application Users" will not be available under Advanced Settings > Security > Users.
  • You can use the Power Platform admin center to view and manage application users.
  • Check the post here.

Support for Microsoft 365 Groups and Yammer in Dynamics 365 is deprecated

  • Effective February 2022, support for Microsoft 365 Groups (previously known as Office Groups) and Yammer in Dynamics 365 will be deprecated.
  • This will impact customers who use Microsoft 365 Groups and/or Yammer for collaboration in Dynamics 365.
  • We recommend that customers transition to Microsoft Teams for more advanced collaboration functionalities.
  • For information about integrating Dynamics 365 with Teams, see Integrate customer engagement apps in Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Teams.
  • If you've questions about the deprecation, contact your Microsoft Customer Service representative or Microsoft Partner.

April 2022 | Deprecations & Service retirement

Upcoming WS-TRUST\OrganizationServiceProxy Authentication Type Shutdown in the spring of 2022

We are doing this to provide better Identity security, authentication support, cross platform support and to enabled future improvements in our overall platform supported product suite.  Effective February 4, 2020, the WS-Trust authentication type that is used by custom clients to connect to Dataverse is deprecated.

  • Who is affected?
    • This affects you, your customer, or your tools if your connecting to Dataverse\PowerPlatform and:
    • You’re using a version of our SDK Client OLDER then 9.0.2.3 (shipped in April of 2018 )
    • You’re using Office365 Authentication with the CrmServiceClient on ANY version.
    • You’re Using the OrgnaizationServiceProxy directly, either via the CrmServiceClient, or using it directly from the Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.dll
    • This does NOT affect Plugins that run on the Dataverse Server.
  • Requested GO-DO’s
    • If you are in the in the use case above, make plans and fix it now without waiting until close to the deadline. 
    • If you are using tools, Partner or ISV provided tools, raise awareness,  provide the link HERE which walks though identification and updates required. 
  • Retirement phased approach
    • Effective April 2021, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new environments within a tenant.
    • The retirement of new environments starts April 1, 2021 and rolls out gradually in all regions within a 6-week window.
    • Effective April 2022, the authentication protocol will be retired for all new and existing environments within a tenant.
    • More information: Use of Office365 authentication with the WS-Trust security protocol

Model-driven app controls Deprecation & Retirement

  • Some older controls for model-driven apps are deprecated.
  • These controls include Flip Switch, Calendar Control (V1), Linear Slider, Radial Knob, Arc Knob, Linear Gauge; along with the Website Preview control, MultiSelectPicklistControl (V1), and the Flip Label (two radio buttons format option).
  • Why is this needed?
    • These controls are outdated and don’t conform to our current standards for useability and accessibility.
    • For example, we’ve received feedback that the Flip Label control is difficult to determine its intended use and users commonly don’t see the options available to choose from, such as "yes / no" or "enable / disable."
  • Impact
    • Starting April 2021, these controls can no longer be added to forms.
    • For instances of Flip Label control, the control will be transitioned to a drop-down.
    • For all other controls, they'll continue to work within existing forms until April 2022.

October 2022 | Deprecations & Service retirement

Some client APIs Deprecation & Retirement
Deprecated Client API : ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx

  • The ClientGlobalContext.js.aspx page is deprecated and scheduled to be unavailable after October 1, 2022.
  • Use Power Apps component framework overview to build configurable and reusable components that enable external integrations in a supported way or use custom pages to add custom full page or dialog or pane experiences into model-driven apps, with the flexibility of the canvas designer.
  • Check the list of deprecated client APIs here

November 2022 | Deprecations & Service retirement

Dataverse OData v2.0 Service removal

  • We plan to remove the Dataverse OData v2.0 Organization Data Service on November 11, 2022.
  • This announcement does not involve the deprecated Organization Service SOAP endpoint.
  • At this time, no date has been announced for the removal of the SOAP endpoint.
  • The Organization Data Service was deprecated with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement v8.0 in favor of the Web API, an OData v4.0 service.
  • Today, less than .06% of requests to Dataverse use this endpoint. Removing this endpoint will enable Dataverse to improve overall performance.
  • Any code that uses the Organization Data Service should be migrated to use the Web API before that time.
  • More information: OData v2.0 Service removal date announcement

Data export Service

  • Data Export Service (DES) is deprecated.
  • Data Export Service will continue to work and will be fully supported until it reaches end-of-support and end-of-life a year from this announcement date, in November 2022.
  • This notice is to allow you sufficient time to plan and onboard to Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse which is a successor to Data Export Service.
  • The Playbook will guide them through the initialization, planning, and adoption phases.
  • For more details, check out this page on Power Apps blog.

Portals | Important Changes, Deprecations & Service retirement coming in Power Apps Portals

Table permission changes for forms and lists on new portals

  • Starting with release 9.3.7.x, newly created portals will have table permissions enforced for all forms and lists irrespective of the Enable Table Permissions setting.
  • To configure anonymous access explicitly, use proper table permissions, and web role setup instead.
  • More information HERE

SameSite mode changes

  • Starting with portals version 9.3.6.x, makers can mark SameSite mode as Strict for all portal cookies where applicable.
  • With this change, we're adding a new website setting to control the SameSite mode for all cookies, configurable at specific cookie level.
  • Starting October 2021, all newly provisioned portals will have Strict as the Default value instead of None.
  • To learn how to configure site settings for portals, go to Configure site settings for portals.
  • More information HERE

Deprecations | Useful Links

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Power Platform & Dynamics 365 | Release Waves & Service Updates

Manage Updates

Release Waves bring new innovations, new features and capabilities into the products.
Service Updates continuously bring stability and reliability into the products with set of repaired functionalities, hotfixes.

Public Preview | Managing your maintenance Window for database and application updates in Power Platform Admin Center.

Understanding Release Waves Update

Current Release Wave: 2021 Release Wave 2

Tips to Stay informed on Updates notifications
Stay Informed on important service updates and other major updates changes with Message Center notifications through Email preferences for Dynamics and PowerApps using Microsoft 365 Admin center or Manage email notifications to admins using PowerShell

Service Updates | Microsoft Dataverse

Dataverse Updates are typically deployed every week and reflect the environment update information.

Dataverse 9.2.0 Service Update | Latest version available:

What is included?

  • Repaired functionality for unified Interface, accessibility.
  • Resolution of actions that produce errors, unhandled exceptions or system or component failures.

How to determine if your organization has received the service update?

  • To determine whether your organization had this update applied, check your Microsoft Dataverse version number.
  • Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, and then click About.
  • Click here to see the Latest Version Availability for your Dataverse

Service Updates |  Power Platform & Dynamics 365 Apps


Sales App | Service Updates

  • Sales App/Solution Service Updates are typically deployed every 2 weeks and the schedule will be published every other Wednesday.
  • Sales App/Solution Version are deployed based on region specific times.
  • Click here to see the Latest version availability and Next App/Solution Version based on you region.

Customer Service | Service Updates

  • Customer Service App/Solution Service Updates page is updated every Tuesday.
  • App/Solution Version are deployed based on region specific times.
  • Click here to see the Latest version availability and Next App/Solution Version based on you region.

Field Service | Service Updates

  • Click here for information Field Service Updates and Service Update release schedule for your region.

Power Automate Service Updates

  • Power Automate is not available in all regions at once.
  • Instead, each version is made available incrementally in different regions of the world.
  • Click here for the last Power Automate Release Note and Release schedule for your region.

Power Apps/ Unified Interface/Power Apps Studio/Mobile Make.PowerApps.com Service Updates
Latest Version Available:

Product information

  • Power Apps is not available in all regions at once.
  • Instead, each version is made available incrementally in different regions of the world.

Power Apps Portals | Service Updates

Latest Version Available:

  • Latest Portal updates 9.3.11.x is now available.
  • Click here for the latest Portal version availability.

Product Information

  • A portal consists of the following components Portal Solutions and Portal website Host.
  • Portal Website Host is typically updated automatically on a monthly basis to the latest versions.
  • Portal Solutions are updated by customers.

Portal Update, Upgrade information

Power BI Desktop & Power BI Server | Service Updates

Latest Version Available

Product Information

  • Power BI Desktop is updated and released on a monthly basis, incorporating customer feedback and new features.
    • Only the most recent version of Power BI Desktop is supported; customers who contact support for Power BI Desktop will be asked to upgrade to the most recent version. Get the latest version of Power BI Desktop from the Download Center
  • Power BI Service | The following updates are new to the Power BI service this month: Get started with goals in Power BI (preview)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-premises | Release & Service Updates

For the latest Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise release version 9.0 and 9.1 visit Service Updates

Dynamics CRM (on-premises) 9.1

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 9.0


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Power Apps & Dataverse | Product Updates

Dataverse | Data Export Service Deprecation | Replacement with Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse GA

Data Export Service (DES) is deprecated, an add-on feature available via Microsoft AppSource which provides the ability to replicate data from Microsoft Dataverse to an Azure SQL store in a customer-owned Azure subscription.

  • Data Export Service will continue to work and will be fully supported until it reaches end-of-support and end-of-life a year from this announcement date, in November 2022.
  • This notice is to allow you sufficient time to plan and onboard to Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse which is a successor to Data Export Service.

Why is Data Export Service deprecating and what is the replacement?

  • Right tooling to enable advanced scenarios to help understand future behaviors.
  • Vehicle to push data to a store but also analyze this data for insights.
  • End-to-end way to work with data in Microsoft Dataverse, from running AI and machine learning, integrating with external datasets, and slicing and dicing large volumes of Dataverse data.

Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse

  • Accelerate time-to-insights using Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse a built-in and available out-of-the-box tool.

Using Azure Synapse Link, we currently support two options to export data from Dataverse:

  • Export Dataverse data to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2
  • Export Datverse data to Azure Synapse Analytics

While exporting Dataverse Data to ADLS Gen2 provides flexibility to stage data and later move to the desired destination, exporting Azure Synapse Analytics is highly recommended since it provides an end-to-end way to work with data in Dataverse.

Capabilities of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse

What is Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?

  • Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse enables you to get near real-time insights over your data in Microsoft Dataverse.
  • With a few clicks, you can bring your Dataverse data to Azure Synapse, visualize data in your Azure Synapse workspace, and rapidly start processing the data to discover insights using advanced analytics capabilities for serverless data lake exploration, code-free data integration, data flows for extract, transform, load (ETL) pipelines, and optimized Apache Spark for big data analytics.

Where to start onboarding to Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse?

  • The Playbook will guide through the pre-requisites, initialization, planning, and adoption phases. It will also help assess the existing usage patterns and map them to equivalent scenarios in Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with a step-by-step guide.
  • Check the FAQ Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse for frequently asked questions.

For more details, check out this page on Power Apps blog.

Custom Page runtime | General Availability

We are happy to announce that Custom Page Runtime has reached General Availability in all regions for most of the functionality in the July public preview.

  • Capabilities reaching General Availability include runtime for custom pages, solutioning/ALM, all connectors, code components, controls listed here, and monitor.
  • We will indicate the status of different capabilities at the beginning of Custom Page Overview in a table and also mark sections with “preview”.

Check out the details on this page.

New ways to add intelligence to your Power Apps | Bring Your Own AI model

Bring Your own AI model (GA). Companies can leverage existing investments in data science. Any AI model, built with any language, framework, or tooling, can now be used in Power Platform via AI Builder.

Now, anyone can bring their own custom AI models into AI Builder – enabling you to build solutions around your company’s investments in AI. You can build custom models using any developer tool chain and deploy your models to any cloud service, like Azure. All you need to do is register your model with AI Builder, and it can be used alongside any other pre-trained or custom models.

Check out the details on this page.

New ways to add intelligence to your Power Apps | Power Apps New Preview Features

Use AI in your apps with Power Fx (Preview). Using Power Fx, makers can now use any AI model on any control in canvas apps.

  • Image classification with Lobe (Preview). Domain experts can train image classification models on their computers with Lobe and upload those models to AI Builder to be used in Power Platform.
  • AI Builder starter capacity is now included in select Power Apps and Power Automate license plans.

Walk through these in more details on this page.

Co-presence Multiplayer Apps & Sharing | Preview | Unlock easier Collaboration

Preview Collaboration features:

Co-presence

  • Co-presence shows you who is looking at the current record by showing their avatar in the top right corner of the command bar, just like Office apps do.
  • Clicking on the avatar allows you to see that person’s online presence, as well as start an email or a chat with them.
  • App users, such as the record owner, are displayed with their picture and on-line status. During the preview period this feature will be extended to user lookups and grid user columns.

Sharing

  • Links to records can be shared easily via the “Share” button in the top right corner of the command bar.
  • Copying the link allows you to easily paste it into any app.
  • This feature will be expanded during the preview period to allow copy-pasted shared links to give read-only access to the record to people who click on the link, allowing more streamlined collaboration with people outside of your team.
  • How to enable the preview of collaboration features, see our docs.

For more details, check out this page on Power Apps blog.

Business Units Security Concepts | Announcing Public Preview for modernize business units

  • We have modernized the business units security concepts in Dataverse.
  • Business units’ data access can now support matrix data access structure .
  • The matrix structure is typical for sales organizations where a regional sales manager can access data in multiple regions, or retail organizations where a store clerk works at multiple stores.
  • Users are no longer restricted to accessing/managing data in their own business unit.
  • They can now access and own records across business units. Security roles from different business units can be assigned to the users regardless of the business unit the users belong to.
  • This feature enables the Owning Business Unit column of the record so that it can be set/updated by the users.
  • The Owning Business Unit column determines the business unit that owns the record.

Learn More on the full capability on this page of Power Apps blog.

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Power Apps Portals | Product Updates

Power Apps portals| Use code components on pages (Preview)

  • We are excited to announce that capability of adding code components using Liquid template tag within Power Apps portals is now available with portals version 9.3.10.x  (updates are currently rolling out).

Preview Feature Capabilities

Power Apps portals | Query data using portals Web API | Public preview

Web API operations in portals so far were limited to creating, updating, deleting, associating and disassociating tables. With this public preview, we’re adding the capability to retrieve data using GET requests through portals Web API

How to get started? Prerequisites:

  • Your portal version must be 9.3.10.x or later for this feature to work.
  • Enable table and field for Web API operations. More information: Site settings for the Web API 
  • The portals Web API accesses table records and follows the table permissions  given to users through the associated  web role.
  • Ensure you configure table permissions  accordingly. More information: Create web roles

Preview Feature Capabilities

The feature provides the following capabilities during this public preview:

  • Query records
  • Apply system query options
  • Request specific properties
  • Filter results
  • Order results
  • Aggregate and grouping results
  • Retrieve a count of rows
  • Column comparison
  • Retrieve related table records with a query

Full details and step by step example on this page of Power Apps Portals.

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Power Automate | Product Updates

Power Automate | Updates to the Power Platform request Limits

We are dramatically raising the Power platform daily request volume throttles that have existed for Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Dynamics 365 users.

  • For example, the Power Automate per user plan is jumping from 5,000 requests per user per day to 40,000 requests per user per day.
  • This is designed to be more than sufficient for the vast majority of customer scenarios.

For more information on Power Platform requests please visit aka.ms/platformlimits.

Power Automate | Admins can now manage RPA automations with ease using Data Loss Prevention for desktop flows | Preview

Admins can now manage RPA automations with ease using Data Loss Prevention for desktop flows (Preview)

  • Admin can create a DLP policy with desktop flows restrictions.
  • This capability is currently in preview for free. When this feature becomes generally available in 2022, it will be available for environments with premium accounts only.
  • This feature will be rolling out to all cloud regions base on following schedule.
  • Data loss prevention for desktop flows is only available for versions of Power Automate Desktop 2.14.173.21294 or newer.
  • If you are using an older version, please uninstall and update to the latest
  • To learn more details about DLP for desktop flows, please check here

For more information check out this Power Automate blog page.

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Power BI | Product Updates

Power BI | November 2021 Feature Summary

Check out the video for this month summary  -

  • New features include capabilities for:
    • Reporting
    • Modeling
    • Service
    • Embedded Analytics
    • Developers
    • Visualizations

Check out this page for full details on the new features.

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Learning & Training Corner

Power Platform Resources for Adoption

Where do I go to find out more about Power Platform adoption and Learn More about Power Apps ?

Bookmark and take advantage of the two new websites below:

Power Apps Portal | Security Best Practices

In this episode we would like to discuss some of the key security best practices during implementations.

Power Apps |  Currency, Date and Time, Migrating Access to Dataverse and Dataverse for Teams

Improve your Dataverse and Power Apps skills, with these four videos to understand some of the complex datatypes and new features

  • Currency in Dataverse provides an overview of why using Currency can be a better option than using Decimal for financial transitions and records. It covers the settings, logic present with the Data Type, and even provides examples of using this feature in apps and how to create a basic app to manage currency information.
  • Explaining Date and Time in Dataverse Using Power Apps  –Understand why your Date Time settings may be behaving differently than you anticipate. It provides detailed information about how Date Time is stored, how Power Apps submits and retrieves data, and the impacts your settings have on your data.
  • Migrating MS Access data to Dataverse and Power Apps – This video provides a demo of the new capability to migrate existing MS Access databased into Dataverse using the automated Access migration  tool.  This is an end to end demo discussing Steps to migrate in Access, showing Access forms modifying data that is stored in Dataverse, and that Access can see all changes made through a Power App.
  • Access migration to Dataverse for Teams – This video provides a demo of the new capability to migrate existing MS Access databased into Dataverse for Teams using the automated Access migration  tool.  This is an end to end demo discussing Steps to migrate in Access, showing Access forms modifying data that is stored in Dataverse, and that Access can see all changes made through a Teams based Power App.

Check out more videos in the Dataverse playlist on YouTube.

   
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