Missing Privilege – Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

While working through the requirements for the new light-weight Dynamics 365 App for Outlook something unusual presented itself.

One of the key requirements is that Users have the below Security Role privilege.
(More details on all requirements here)

Opening my Security Role, selecting the Business Management tab, and in the Privacy Related Privileges, I noticed that the “Dynamics 365 App for Outlook” privilege was missing entirely. I couldn’t “tick” the privilege as it wasn’t there!

Thinking I must be going crazy, I went and checked the System Administrator security role. Not there either!

After triple-checking every other requirement and scratching my head a lot, I raised the concern with Microsoft Support as this was clearly a deeper issue. Roll forward a few weeks, after an escalating to the Product team, and we have somewhat of an answer.

Apparently there was some head scratching going on behind the scenes also, and at first it was thought to be an isolated incident on my tenant. But after trying to forcefully add the privilege to the back-end tables (which didn’t work!) they figured out that it’s a bigger problem than that. Without going into too much detail, it appears that this is a wider spread problem with other tenants also.

Microsoft’s plan is to release a fix for this issue in the next update v9.0.2.1429

Unfortunately this isn’t due until the end of August (about 4 weeks time at time of writing). While the wait isn’t pleasant, in the old days this could have been a lot worse! The increase in release cadence and regular patches certainly is squashing some of these issues in a pretty quick fashion. Well done Microsoft!

It’s always special to discover a new bug!