Dynamics 365 Monthly Update-October 2019

Featured News

Dynamics 365 CE: Legacy web client is deprecated

As of September 2019, the legacy web client is deprecated.

Customers must transition to Unified Interface before October 1, 2020

Microsoft will continue to provide support, security and other critical updates to the legacy web client until October 1, 2020 but won't release any additional functionality beyond what has already been announced.

On October 1, 2020, the legacy web client will no longer be available.

Organizations should make the transition to the Unified Interface as soon as possible to take advantage of Microsoft’s ongoing investments in reliability, performance, and functionality.

In the coming months, for those that have not already made the transition, we will be sending reminders and scheduling updates to transition customers to Unified Interface prior to October 1, 2020. For further information and steps to make a smooth transition, view our helpful resources and community site:

• Unified Interface Community Group
• Getting Started Unified Interface Playbook
• User Experience and Unified Interface transition whitepaper
• Quick Start Guide – add Unified Interface App to existing environment
• Quick Start Guide – set an environment to Unified Interface as default

Others deprecations coming in Dynamics 365 CE

• Task flows are deprecated and will be removed by October 1, 2020. 
  • They will be replaced by the immersive experience for business process flows that is planned for release.
  • See more information on this page: Business process flow immersive experiences

• Process dialogs are deprecated and will be removed by October 1, 2020.
  • Suggested replacement options include Business Process Flows or Canvas Apps.
  • See more information on this page: Replace dialogs with business process flows or canvas apps

For a full list of deprecated items, review this page and learn about the suggested replacement options.

Upcoming events:

Microsoft Business Applications October Virtual Launch Event: Thursday October 10th,2019

This free event offers an in-depth look at the new capabilities and features announced in the 2019 release wave 2 across Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Sign up for the live stream today for reminders, agenda updates, and instructions to tune in live on Thursday, October 10, 2019 8:00 AM–9:30 AM Pacific Time.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications Group, and other Microsoft leaders will discuss and demonstrate the new features across Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Learn more about the live event from this post.

In case you miss the live event, catch the session on demand in Community.

Licensing changes coming: API Limits Based on Licenses

For new customers; starting October 1, 2019 the API request allocations will be based on licenses.

Existing customers will have a transition period until October 1, 2020 or the expiration of their current subscription term, whichever is longer.

Find more details on the API Limits here.

To be noted that the API limits based on licenses is different than the Common Data Service API limit topic.

PowerApps: Announcing the general availability of the new model-driven form designer

The new model-driven form designer is out of preview and available for general use.

• The new form designer enables makers to productively author main, quick view and quick create forms.                  
• It provides a WYSIWYG preview that shows exactly how the form will look like to end-users at all times.
• The fields pane with searching and filtering capabilities helps makers quickly find and add fields to the form.
• The components pane makes it easy to discover and use components and provide a rich end-user experience.
• Using drag-drop or cut-paste directly on the form preview, makers can add and move fields and components, to the exact desired location.

See the list below of all the new goodness that the new form designer provides.

• Overview of the model-driven form designer
• Create, edit, or configure forms using the form designer
• Add, configure, move, or delete fields on a form
• Add, configure, move, or delete components on a form
• Add, configure, move, or delete sections on a form
• Add, configure, move, or delete tabs on a form
• Configure header properties in the form designer
• Add and configure a sub-grid component on a form
• Add and configure a quick view component on a form
• Configure a lookup component on a form
• Using the tree view in the form designer

For more information, review this post on PowerApps blog.

PowerApps: Announcing the general availability of the PowerApps component framework for model-driven applications and PowerApps CLI

The PowerApps component framework for model-driven apps and the PowerApps CLI are generally available.

About PowerApps component framework: Professional developers can now add code components to the user experiences that are available out of the box and use them in production for model-driven apps.

• The framework enables developers to create fully code components for use across the full breadth of PowerApps capabilities.

• Code components have access to a rich set of framework APIs which expose capabilities like control lifecycle management, contextual data and metadata access, seamless server access, utility and data formatting methods, and device features like camera, location and microphone along with easy to invoke UX elements like lookups, and full page rendering, etc.

About Microsoft PowerApps CLI: Microsoft PowerApps CLI is a simple, single-stop developer command-line interface which empowers the developers and app makers to create code components.

The CLI will assist you with component creation by guiding you through predefined creation steps, while the built-in test harness can be used to quickly test mock data inputs, debug and visualize your code components in real-time as you write your code.  Review this page to get started Microsoft PowerApps CLI.

For more information, review this post on the Microsoft PowerApps Blog.

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Updates & Releases

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Release

The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 online version 9.1 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others.

To determine which version your organization has applied, check your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online version number.

Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, then click About.

Service Update 96 (9.1.0.9603 or higher) resolved issues include:

• Lookups in the form header did not filter items.
• Imports failed with the an error ("Cannot insert duplicate key in object.").*
• An error occurred when creating a new record with a custom entity containing a read-only, business-required field..

Service Update 94 (9.1.0.9401 or higher) resolved issues include:

• When navigating to the Quick Create page via the "Edit and Create" link in a note, and then pressing the Esc button, the user was not returned to the note.
• After deactivating a record, a checkbox was disabled in the "Specify Auto Response Settings" screen.
• A duplicate scrollbar appeared in the body of certain Email activity records when viewed from Unified Interface using the Chrome browser.

Service Update 92 (9.1.0.9201 or higher) resolved issues include:

• When an appointment containing rich text was created and synced to Outlook, the appointment's description text lost its formatting.*
• A blank tab was opened in the Chrome browser when the user selected "Collaborate", "Create new team" or "Create new channel".
• Home menu icons were hidden when the menu was minimized.*

Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-premise Updates

The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise version 8.2 and 9.0 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others. These cumulative update rollups include all the hotfixes that were released for limited distribution.

Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 9.0

Service Update 0.8(9.0.8.9) resolved issues include:

• Unified Interface: Categorized searches could not be performed.
• Unified Interface: Out-of-box dashboards contained large gaps where panels should have been displayed.
• Solutions: Campaign navigation was unavailable from related records.

Service Update 0.7 (9.0.7.7) resolved issues include:

• The Ribbon command bar does not display when you add a new SLA item.
• The icon of a sitemap area can't be changed through the SiteMap Editor.
• Custom entity fields are read-only in Web Client.

Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 8.2

Service Update 8.2.10 (8.2.10) resolved issues include:

• Unified Interface: Emails did not contain a language ("lang") definition in the "body" tab of their HTML, resulting in problems with using screen readers to read them.*
• Unified Interface: The print preview window did not appear automatically when the print icon was selected.
• Platform Services: When using a relative OData path in a batch request, either the external or internal URL in the IFD deployment failed.

Service Update 8.2.9 (8.2.9) resolved issues include:

• SLA times were calculated incorrectly when holiday schedules spanned across multiple days.
• When a solution was exported, single quotation marks were added to its file name.
• A SQL error occurred when a System administrator in Unified Interface and Classic Interface attempted to delete an account.

Portal Capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Releases

Portal capabilities version 9.1.9.72 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is now generally available for all Portals.

For a full list of all portal updates released to date and their corresponding KB articles, please reference this KB article.

The latest Portal Capabilities Update Portal host Version 9.1.9.72 describes the features and enhancements that were included in this update.  It resolves following issues and more:

• Create Related Record buttons with different labels on the same subgrid metadata will always render with the description of the first one
• Entity List for Entitlement entity does not honor Page Size and Pagination
• Sharepoint grid fails to load when any of the related entity contains special characters

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Additional News

Power Platform: October 2019 release wave 2

Power Platform new capabilities to analyze, act, and automate.

We’re updating PowerApps with improvements to help you build higher-quality apps more easily and better engage your customer and partners.

• Portals, allows anyone to build a low-code web portal that surfaces data stored in Common Data Service to employees or users outside their organizations.
• Add intelligence to PowerApps with AI Builder our low code artificial intelligence platform that supports the Power Platform.
• Build and consume reusable canvas components
• New Common Data Service form designer adds support for event handlers
• Unified Interface: Improved usability, density, and filtering capabilities for the Unified Interface grid

Check out the full list of PowerApps updates with key dates and deep dive demo videos.

Microsoft Flow: October 2019 release wave 2

Microsoft Flow makers will find new features for smarter and more powerful experiences that let them leverage world-class business process capabilities, including working with business processes offline. And administrators benefit from richer tooling, such as PowerShell Command lets (cmdlets) and the new Power Platform Admin Center.

Take a look at some few examples below:

• Flows that use other solution components are generally available

  • You will be able to take full advantage of the new types of components that are added to a solution.

  • The latest features, like canvas apps, flows, connections, custom connectors, and environment variables, will now follow the full end-to-end lifecycle, including:

    • Canvas apps with flows are supported within solutions.

    • Add custom connectors that were not originally created from a solution.

    • Dependencies are tracked and enforced for new solution components.

    • Flows natively consume environment variables.

• Share flows as templates

  • When you send a copy of a flow, recipients can create their own copies of the original flow.

  • These recipients own their copies, and their copies use the recipient's connections (not the original owner's connections).

  • Recipients can make any changes they want after they create their own copy.

See the full list of  what’s new with Flow with key dates and deep dive demo videos.

AI Builder: October 2019 release wave 2

AI Builder is now generally available in PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, allowing everyone from pro developers to front-line workers to build apps and workflows that leverage AI models based on our low code platform. It also gives everyone in your organization—regardless of their technical experience—the ability to add AI capabilities to the apps they create and use.

Power BI updates: October 2019 release wave 2

For this release, we’ve focused Power BI updates on four key areas that drive a data culture: intuitive experiences, a unified BI platform, big data analytics, and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI).

Check out the full list of Power BI updates that have been released for public preview or early access and for general availability around Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Embedded, Power BI Mobile, Power BI Report Server & Power BI template apps.

Product updates page: Simplify your 2019 release wave 2 readiness experience.

Since introduced during our last newsletter, the product updates has been updated with additional key contents about features in the 2019 release wave 2. Watch the overview videos to experience in a simple way some of the new capabilities first-hand for this October 2019 release wave 2.

Download guide section to facilitate where to go download the overview guides from to learn about the key capabilities and features of the related product group.

Watch video section help facilitate where to go watch the overview videos to experience some of the new capabilities first-hand for the release wave.

*See highlighted in bold, the new contents to the Product Updates page:

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Training Corner

PowerApps checker now includes App checker results for Canvas apps in solutions

For Canvas apps packaged in a solution, you can see a list of potential issues directly using directly using PowerApps checker in any of its forms, Solution checker in the PowerApps maker portal, PowerShell module, Azure DevOps task, or direct web API interactions.

The App checker lists any formula errors, accessibility warnings and now also performance optimization tips in your app, and provide items to fix to make your app accessible.

We’ll be including more solution components in the PowerApps checker results in the  future, so let us know what you think or provide any feedback through the PowerApps Forum.

What’s New in Dataflows and Data Integration –

Lots of new features and enhancements to our Data Integration capabilities in PowerApps have been released since September 2019, enabling users to seamlessly connect to, transform and combine data from a wide range of data sources and load it into the Common Data Service, from where it can be used for creating apps, automated flows or analytics.

Here is a list of few new items and new capabilities:

• “Data Integration” renamed to “Dataflows”
• Support for Analytical dataflows
• Merge Queries – Visual join kind selection
• Move Columns left/right/beginning/end
• List Transforms: Statistics, Sort, Keep/Remove/Reverse items

For more details about each of these new capabilities, read this post on PowerApps blog.

PowerApps Video Round Up!

Here is an amazing selection of PowerApps videos for ramping up on various PowerApps topics.

• Creating Update-able Power BI Reports with PowerApps
• Creating a PowerApps Menu Components
• PowerApps Deep Linking How To
• PowerApps With Function
• Getting Started with the PowerApps Component Framework
• Connect XrmToolBox To CDS
• PowerApps CDS Security

For the full list on videos check out this post on PowerApps blog.

If you haven’t already, checked out the Community Video Gallery and bookmark the link for great contents from MVPs and Dynamics 365 CE experts.