Azure guest accounts in CDS/Dyn365

Azure guest accounts in CDS/Dyn365

Azure Active Directory (AAD) has a feature where it allows users of foreign tennants to be granted access to the current tennant. In other word, if you are running contoso.com and a user of northwind.com would like to have access, you can add this user as a guest account in Azure. However, I have found that giving this user access to Dynamics is not fully straight forward, although, it is far from rocket science. In this article I will show how this is done.

Do note that I have heard from people in the product team that there are features of the powerplatfor that cannot currently be accessed using a guest account, I think it was Canvas Apps and Flow. I will have to try this out and get back to you (or someone else could! – I would appreciate a link back to this article) in a later article. I also do think that they are workin on this.

On a high level, what we need to do is:

  1. Add user in AAD
  2. Grant License
  3. Wait for the user to pop up in CDS/Dynamics
  4. Assign a security role in CDS/Dynamics

To start with, we need to go to the Azure Portal: https://portal.azure.com – and click on the AAD menu item on the left.

 

 

Browse to portal.azure.com -> click Azure Active Directory (AAD) -> Click Users

Click “New guest user”

Enter the email address of the user, and perhaps some nice personal email message showing you are not some evil spammer!

Then go to portal.office.com and you will now be able to see the new guest user in here.

Select the guest user and click “Edit product licenses” – Note, I have not been able to set licenses directly by opening the user, only this way.

Assign the license required, P2 or Dynamics Customer Engagement App or Plan – in the example above, a Dyn365CE Plan 1 (trial)

After you have assigned the guest user a license, you have to wait a while until the asynchronous service in O365 provisions the user in the CDS. This often is rather quick, but sometimes takes more time. When I was making this, it took more than 15 minutes.

To find the user in CDS/Dyn365 go to Settings and click on Security. (Old UI)

And then click on “Users” in the Security area.

This is how a guest user look like in Dynamics 365/CDS. It has a # sign in front of it. As you can see, I have another one with my name previously created.

The last thing that has to be done is to grant the guest user the correct role.

After this, just give the user the direct URL to the system and they should be able to log in with their normal users.

This is a very useful method to use when setting up trials for someone as they do not have to sign in with another account to access they system. I strongly recommend it.

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, there might still be some issues with using canvas apps and Flow using guest users, so do be aware that not all features could be available.

 

Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step

Uninstalling Employee Self Service Portal – step by step

A customer of involontarily gotten a Dynamics 365 Employee portal installed. I had to remove it. It has 21 (!?) solutions which are interdependent. This is how I fixed it.

As always, I start off by trying to find if anyone else has run into the same issue, almost. This guy had with another portal type:
https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/dynamicscrmbestpractices/archive/2017/10/14/dynamics-365-uninstalling-microsoft-portals-steps 

And then my Portal buddy Nick Doelman did some heavy lifting (he actually does!) and sent me this link. It did turn out to be a bit old though. Still useful, but the solutions described in it are not entirely accurate.

https://community.dynamics.com/365/b/dynamics365portalssupport/archive/2017/02/27/portal-troubleshooting-part-three-uninstalling-portal-solutions 

Sitemap

First of all, before you do anything else, start by removing the following things from the sitemap (unless you havn’t added more things pointing to Portal components)

1. The entire Portal “Area”
2. The SubArea and Group under Settings for Portal Settings.

Solution removal

So which solutions are we to uninstall? I will take it from the top, in the order I uninstalled them.

1 ESSPortal
2 BaseHtmlEditor_portal
3 MicrosoftForumsWorkflows
4 MicrosoftForums
5 Feedback
6 KnowledgeManagement

When removing KnowledgeManagement I got this error:
The entity with ObjectTypeCode = 10460 was not found in the MetadataCache
Tried different way, after some time, just refreshed and it was gone. Maybe this should be removed earlier. Not entirely sure which entity this was, as it was removed and I didn’t save a metadata reference before starting.

7 MicrosoftAzureStorage
8 MicrosoftBingMapsHelper
9 CustomerService
10 WebNotification
11 MicrosoftGetRecordIDWokrflowHelper
12 MicrosoftIdentity
There are two dialogs that 
Process/Dialog – Change Password, Removed all Steps. Save & Close
Reset Security Stamp – Removed all steps. Save & Close

13 MicrosoftIdentityWorkflows
14 MicrosoftIdentitySystemWorkflows
15 MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseWorkflows
16 MicrosoftCrmPortalBaseSystemWorkflows
17 Portal Timeline
18 MicrosoftWebForms

When removing this solution I also got the same weird error: The entity with ObjectTypeCode = 10439 was not found in the MetadataCache. 

What I found was that it was actually the sitemap that I hadn’t cleaned up from Portal things. This is why I recommend removing all portal related entries from all Sitemaps before starting to remove any solutions.

19 MicrosoftCrmPortalBase
20 MicrosoftCrmPortalDependencies
21 Portal Privacy Extensions