Team member licensing – hammer coming down!

Team member licensing – hammer coming down!

The team member licensing option is something that has been a subject of debate for quite some time. What can it actually be used for and what not? I have heard “experts” suggesting that it be used for integrations but if your read the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, appendix A, you can read all about what Team member licensing is and isn’t. Typical scenarios for Team members are:

  • Read only users
  • Users that use only slim parts of the system, and not the “cool” First-Party-App features in Sales, Customer Service, Field Service etc.
  • Users that just track activities

There are some updates to the details of what a team member can and cannot do, and I think the most important is that a team member cannot CUD (Create, Update or Delete) accounts any more.

How urgent is this? Well, for new instances being created, this will be enforced as of April 1 2020. But for existing instances, it will be enforced on July 1 2020. Hence, you still have some time if you have an exiting org.  

You can opt-in to early access updates. Goes without saying that you shouldn’t do in your production system, and probably not even in you dev/test environments since as soon as you have you won’t be able to depoy changes. So, having an out-of-ALM-environment where you can test this might be a good idea. 

So, the BIG question is, “Are we compliant?” 

Well, there is actually a report that you can generate from the Power Platform Admin Center and I have recorded a video below that shows how you can use that and collate the data with pivoting in Excel.

Top Table Usage in PPAC

Top Table Usage in PPAC

Top Ten Table usage is back from being lost when Organizational Insights was discontinued. A bit tricky to find so check out the video. Awesome tool when trying to reduce the size of large instances, especially important now that the prices per GB are going up to $40/GB (subject to you license agreement).

Forms Pro Flow activity set regarding

Forms Pro Flow activity set regarding

Forms Pro is an awesome new tool that combines the datamodel support that we previously got from Voice of the Customer (VoC) with the look and feel from Office Forms. It also has nice native support for Flow and many other parts of the Power Platform. It is still in Preview, make sure you check it out. A great resource for this is Megan Walkers blog as she has written several artice about this.

One thing that we recently ran into with the new Flow activitiy that can generate personalized sendouts, was how to format the syntax of the regarding field. The reason for the confusion is that it is different than how the Common Data Service (CDS) connector handles the Regarding field, which is with two fields, one for the object id and one for the type. In Forms Pro, it is all in one field in the syntax

<objecttypename> objectid

as can be seen in the picture below.

You can actually get a hint about the syntax if you check the “mouse over”. I wasn’t able to screen capture it.

I want to give a great thanks to Megan Walker and this article for giving me this insight! 

Considerations of email address in registering CRM Online

Considerations of email address in registering CRM Online

When setting up CRM Online, especially when doing it on an already existing Office 365 Environment, there are some things that you need to know that might not be that evident, so I thought I might elaborate a bit on it.

First of all, the email address that is entered when setting up the Office 365 organization or the Trial organisation for CRM Online is very important as emails regarding the CRM service (and other services provisioned through the Office 365 portal) will be notified via this email address.

Swedish version of the Trial registration – Email field marked. It says “We will be sending important information to this email address”

Other users set up as administrators will also be receiving notifications on the email addresses set up as Alternate email address under Settings.

So is this a problem? If you are just using CRM Online, and the alternate email address you input is you main work email, no, this is probably not a problem. There are however other scenarios where this might be a problem;
– The Company is using Office 365 as their main work email address and the alternate email addresses are gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail addresses that are seldom checked. For some reason, the CRM service is not payed properly and warnings about the fact that it is to be shut down are sent out to these seldom check email address. Then the CRM system is deactivated for all users and nobody understand why until the users flagged as administrators in O365 (usually very few) finally check their alternate email inboxes and find the warning. Until this is fixed, several Days or weeks may pass with the system down severely damaging user acceptance and profits.
– The original admins setting up the system are no longer with the Company and their alternate email addresses were not directed to “impersonal” email addresses but to their own. When the billing is missed, the effects are similar to the case above.

So, my general recommendations in this case is to make sure that the alternate email addresses used are set with great care and to impersonal email aliases that will remain independent of people leaving the Company. They are to be aliases that are monitored at least once every second day. If using Office 365, the general recommendation is to not use Office 365 email boxes to monitor itself, but perhaps looping it to a Group alias outside which also include addresses within the O365 might be an idea as long as there are people outside the O365 in the alias as well.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint

Alternate Access mapping is a new technique used in SharePoint 3 for handling url:s when you access sharepoint from different environments, for instance, maybe you both want to be able to access your sharepoint internaly using http://sharepoint and externally using https://sharepoint.humandata.se, well, by using a good firewall the redirection is possible but the problem arises when you want searching and other url:s to work properly.

To be able to handle this properly, a function called Alternate Access Mapping is used. The SharePoint Technology Team blog discusses it further and describes how to set it up.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/19/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-2-of-3.aspx

Since this is quite a normal setup, and there are certain aspects of this that are a bit complicated, like only having to log on once, we at Humandata are working on a best-practice for how to set this up properly that is based on the Microsoft best-practice. When we’re done, I’ll let you know.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se