When will User Guides be available?

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Posted on by Dave Boehm

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Poking around through the "Learn More" functionality is a VERY inefficient way to learn this product. I think the learning curve would be much shorter if you would provide user guides for the functional areas of this product. So far, I haven't been able to find anything like this. As an example, a User Guide for Financials should provide an overview of how the various portions of Financials work, and also how these portions interact with each other. The User guide should illustrate each of the screens, give in-depth explanations of each field on the screen, and also suggest best practices (where a best practice exists).

I suppose your "Learn More" approach is less time-consuming for you to produce, but it puts us users in a position much like a blind mole in a garden. If we burrow enough tunnels, we'll eventually find what we need. However, we'd be much better off being able to see this all from above...

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Agreed, desperately looking for documentation. Surprisingly scarce.

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Eva Dupont MSFT on at

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Thank you for your feedback! We appreciate that you tell us exactly what you are looking for because that helps us make decisions about our content going forward.

You are asking for a detailed user guide or training manual, and you are right that we don't have that available to you. This is not a cost saving approach on our side at all, and we are taking feedback from you and others to make improvements to our Learn More content on a continuous basis. But please let me explain why you can't find what you are looking for, and excuse the long answer:

The Learn More content was never intended to be the complete and detailed user guide that you are looking for. Nor will it become that. And that's because it's just one of several components that play together to deliver you guidance about Financials. For example, when you first signed up for Financials, you were presented with an introduction to the user interface and some key scenarios. From your Home page, you can access the Business Assistance window that provides links to videos and setup guides. Tooltips on fields give you a short description of the field. And most windows are designed in a way that we hope helps you complete the most common tasks in an efficient way.

As implied earlier, we do take your feedback seriously, and we will add more overviews and descriptions of scenarios to the Learn More content over time.

PS: Did you see our Roadmap at https://roadmap.dynamics.com/? This, too, will be updated on a regular basis so you can see what's already available and what's coming.

Regards,

Eva Dupont

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Dave Boehm 645 on at

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Thanks for responding, Eva.

1) The roadmap at Https://roadmap.dynamics.com/? show a list of pending items for Dynamics 365 for Operations, but no pending items for Dynamics 365 for Financials. Perhaps it should be updated, assuming you do intend to enhance the offering.

2) The heading of my question was "When Will User Guides Be Available?". You described several other alternative sources of information, but you never directly answered this question. I am left with the assumption that User Guides are not forthcoming, and will never be made available. Eva, I've looked through the "Learn More", I've seen the "Introduction to the User Interface" and your other videos. None of these provide a field-level explanation of the screens within your product. The field-level "Tooltips" are sometimes too vague to be useful. When I click on "Learn More" at the bottom of the ToolTip, I simply branch to the home page of your "Learn More" wiki. In any event, I'm having to resort to a trial-and-error approach in order to learn this product. This is very inefficient.

3) Eva, from reading your response, I get the impression that you are not particularly warm to the idea of a User Guide with best practices guidance. Could you at least enhance the "Learn More" directory so that it lists ALL of the possible pages that can be accessed? As an example, I knew that eventually you would offer project management as a part of your product. It is not listed anywhere in the "Dynamics 365 For Financials" directory on the left side of the "Learn More" screen. Had I not seen a posted response on this Community Forum suggesting to use the "Search" box to look for "Manage Projects", I might still be wondering when you would be offering it. It shouldn't take more than a few hours for someone in your organization to do this. As additional functionality is added, you could (and should) continue to update this directory. That way, we would at least know of everything that is offered in your product. We may not know exactly how it works, or how best to implement it, but we would at least know that it is there.

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If I may, I'd like to add a "me too".

The documentation is lacking and the intuitiveness of the product is not near what is required for SMB/mid-market. We are pleased with the Dynamics CRM experience and were hoping to leverage the integration between Financials and CRM to consolidate what are now separate tools in our present world (standalone CRM and standalone QB). Unfortunately, the time needed to learn through the aforementioned trial-and-error puts this product out of reach for our business.

I will continue to monitor these threads closely and perhaps evaluate the product again from time to time. However, as Dave has pointed out very clearly, the documentation is scarce and this needs serious work before we can adopt this product. Perhaps it needs to go back to "Preview" while the documentation is worked on and we can continue to test with it and provide feedback?

Final note, it would be really helpful if you provided guidance on day to day operations for folks leaving QB and coming to Financials in addition to the data migration tools. We've been living in QB for years, painfully I'll add, and there's zero information on transitioning from QB to Financials from a daily operations/process perspective, I feel something like this would help us onboard so much more quickly.

Wishing you all the best as you continue to develop the product!

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Just to note my agreement with Dave, Seamus and mtstl that this product desperately needs a proper manual or user guide (with chapters and and index). I am trying to learn this product and want to be working with the application in front of me and the guide beside me to refer to. I do not want to be flitting all over the internet to find out how Dynamics 365 for Financials is meant to work.

Another mole in the garden.

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Ben Bolte on at

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I agree with everyone about the lack of information. What I feel is lacking is a step by step guide to getting setup. While I realize the business assistance window has information to help, it's not in the order of priority. Clients don't have workflows now...and have a functioning system. Focusing on here's the 25 things you must do to be operational, and then another list of "nice to haves" would really be helpful. How does a user know when they are done with setting it up now?

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Eva Dupont MSFT on at

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Hi again,

Thank you all for your feedback! We are working on improving the accessibility of the Learn More content as well as working on making Financials easier to get started with. We'll be rolling out improvements gradually over the next several months, so please don't give up hope yet.

Specifically, we are painfully aware of the limitation of the navigation pane on the Learn More site, and we do apologize for the limitations that make it harder than necessary for you to find the content that we have published. This is not something we wanted to provide as an experience, and we are working hard to changing the experience drastically.

We do respect your need for extensive user guides. Different people learn in different ways, some are perfectly happy with the in-product videos, others want the technical descriptions, and yet others want detailed, scenario-based walkthroughs. And the list continues. I can't promise you that we will deliver exactly what you need to get started with Financials, but we have taken your feedback and are looking into how we can make the complete library of guidance available to you in an easily discoverable and transparent way.

Finally, the roadmap for Dynamics 365 does have content for Financials, but you have to change the filter to the Business edition in order to see it. Here we are also rolling out several updates in the coming months.

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I'm in the same boat with everyone else. At this point I rarely look at the Dynamics 365 documentation. However, I have found that the Dynamics NAV documentation provides a lot of the missing answers. Since Dynamics 365 is essentially Dynamics NAV with many of the features removed the documentation for NAV usually covers all of the features in D365 and then some. For instance, there is a youtube video for the overview of the NAV jobs module. Almost all of the content applies to Dynamics 365 and is how I learned most of the jobs module functionality.

Jobs Overview: www.youtube.com/watch

That being said, Dave's suggestion for detailed field descriptions would be very welcome. The descriptions are way too vague and do not give any information about how or where the field is used in other areas of the system. For instance, when posting job journal lines, you are required to enter a Document Number. Why am I required to give a document number to post a G/L expense to a job task? It doesn't make sense to me but there is no documentation to provide an explanation.

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Dave Boehm 645 on at

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Eva,

I initially started this thread on November 26, 2016. Three days later, you initially responded. Your response was very diplomatic, but you basically blew off the suggestion of a User Guide with best practices. I am pleased to see that you are beginning to reconsider, now that you are hearing the same thing from others around the world.

I am a CPA and consultant in the US. I paralleled my own company's QuickBooks with D365 BE throughout December, 2016. I considered this to be the best way to learn the solution. I went live with D365 BE on 1/1/2017.

I think the entire O365/CRM/D365 BE solution is truly a revolutionary step forward in I.T. I intend to convert others from QuickBooks/Sage/Dynamics SL/Dynamics GP/etc. to D365 BE when I feel the solution has matured to the point where it demonstrates itself as truly superior.

You've mentioned producing a number of different types of learning aids. Please start with something that explains each page within the solution. You can call it a "User Guide", a "Learn more" or anything you like. In any event, we need to have one comprehensive place to go in order to see all this solution includes. The additional learning aids you've mentioned would be nice, as time permits.

The clients I deal with trust me to do what is best for them. I will not betray that trust by bringing them to D365 BE prematurely. I would estimate it has taken me 5 and 10 times longer to learn D365 BE than it should have taken. This is due directly to the lack of documentation.

I would not put my clients through this same ordeal--nor would they put up with it. They are not stupid people. They would drop D365 BE (and me) like a hot potato.

I realize my views are somewhat self-serving, but I have made a large commitment of my own time to D365 BE and believe it has tremendous potential. I also believe the steepness of the learning curve is the worst drawback to implementing this solution. By bringing this solution out without adequate documentation you have not only shot yourself in the foot, but you are also hampering the rest of us who are committed to implementing this solution.

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Eva Dupont MSFT on at

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Once again, thank you very much for your feedback! We truly appreciate your enthusiasm for Financials, and we hereby invite you to work with us on the next version of the user assistance for Financials.

We are setting up a forum specifically to validate our plans with you before we launch. If you would like to join us in these conversations, please contact us at mdsmbhelp@microsoft.com - we'll then send you more details.

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