Supported browsers – update

Supported browsers – update

One of my most popular posts is a collation on which browsers are actually supported for Dynamics 365 CE. This is not strange since it is a common issue, we often have customers call our support complaining that Dynamics doesn’t work well, and as described in the original article, the cause is usually that they are using an unsupported browser.

Also the Micrsoft Technet article for this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/supported-web-browsers-and-mobile-devices
and the detailed version: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699710.aspx mainly focuses on Edge and Internet Explorer compatibility for the different windows versions. And despite Microsoft’s hopes, the rest of the world have not totally turned to all of their programs, yet.

There are currently some issues with version 9.0 as well, why I thought it might be a good idea to write a new article on which browsers are the supported one in a easily overviewable grid.

A brief explanation to the different abbreviations used in the picture:

  • SW – Supported and Working.
  • SW* – Supported and Working on OS X as designed but with somewhat limited functionality. If you compare Dynamics on OS X running Safari with it running Edge on a Win 10 you will notice that there are more options.
  • SW** – The app is not the same thing as the browser at the moment. The Unified Interface will make them almost the same. There will still be differences, in that the app will have better integrations to the device’s hardware, like camera, etc. Especially for the earlier versions, the app was very limited. It is more powerful know. For field service there is also a special Field Service App which is not as HTML/JS based (it is based on Resco).
  • SW*** – I have not had the chance to test if version 9.0 works on a Nexus 10 running Chrome but the official documentation says it should work. However, as v.9.0 does not work with Chrome at the moment, (this will probably be fixed very soon) I would actually be surprised if it worked for Chrome on Nexus 10.
  • NS – Not supported. This does not mean, however, that you cannot get it to work. I have heard of people that mange to get Chrome on OS X to go into some “PC” mode which tricks Dynamics. This still doesn’t make it supported, but it might work for you. The problem might be if you have any issues, that Microsoft Support could leave you hanging.
  • SNW – Supported but Not Working – As for Chrome on Windows, the general story is that Microsoft only support the latest version of it. However, despite version 9.0 official supporting Chrome on Windows, it doesn’t seem to actually work. I would presume that they will fix this soon. The problem is that Dynamics 365 won’t actually load.
The support matrix for the browsers is generally a tricky question. The matrix above is also simplified a bit as I have not included the parameter of the different versions of Operating systems. It can probably be presumed that Microsoft will make greater efforts into making sure that the latest and possibly even some versions before that, that they know customers are using for Edge and Internet Explorer, work well with Dynamics 365. I know some of you will probably think I am crazy for even mentioning Internet Explorer, but I have several customers who still have IE as the company standard browser, and it is not due to Dynamics 365.
As for Firefox, Chrome and Safari, these browsers might be very popular, but from a Microsoft perspective I can see a very tricky situation, and that is that they roll out changes without notifying anyone. This was, for instance, done by Google a couple of years ago when they changed their handling of modal dialogs. This caused many dialog handling features of Dynamics CRM (at that time) to break. It took some time for Microsoft to identify the change, fix it, make sure there were no regression errors, roll it through all testing scenarios and deployment stages and controlls they do until they were able to get a fix out. It did come out quite fast, but there were some people nagging at Microsoft for having a bad product, which I personally find a bit unfair.
The essence of the two paragraphs above is; feel free to use Chrome, Safari or Firefox but I would suggest always having Edge and/or IE as a backup option in the case that an update comes to the main browser that severely affects the usage of Dynamics 365.
And I hope that Microsoft soon fixes the error that stops us from using Chrome with ver. 9.0. Any day now!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Some dashboards are more equal than other

Some dashboards are more equal than other

Typically you are not allowed to remove components from the system layer in Dynamics 365/CRM

Is this dashboard more pig than horse?

but for some reason this does not apply to dashboards in some earlier versions of Dynamics CRM. It seems this bug has recently been fixed but if you have a version of CRM where this was possible or have been upgraded from this version, you might be missing it. I just tried this in the Online version
8.2.0.798 and in this version it is not possible to delete dashboards but I have managed to in earlier versions.

My friend Jerry Weinstock has blogged about this as well.

One particular dashboard that the system is in dire need of for its mobile features is the “Sales Dashboard” as this is the default dashboard for the mobile and tablet clients. This cannot be changed although the default dashboard can be changed within the mobile client by the user after it has been started. See MSDN for more info in this.

In case you do manage to delete it or it has been deleted, Power Objects blog have described how to restore dashboards from instance with this dashboard in it. In short, create an unmanaged solution in that other instance containing the “Sales Dashboard” and then export and import the solution into the instance missing it.

Before closing the window showing the results, open the log of the import and get the guid of the dashboard and then use the url of another dashboard to insert the GUID into the url to get to the “Sales Dashboard” and change it’s name and/or the label of the the tab to what it typically is in case it doesn’t show up directly.

In case you do not have one, here is a link to an unmanaged solution file (version 8.0) containing just the sales dashboard. SalesDashboard_1_0_0_0_target_CRM_8.0.zip

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Video – How to enable editable grids

So, time to try something new. I recorded a small screencast with SnagIt to show how easy it is to enable the awsome new feature Editable grids in Dynamics 365. So, please have a look and let me know what you think!

And yes, I know I keep saying CRM, and Dynamics CRM. I have been working with this product for more than 11 years now. It’s going to take some time for this old dog to sit.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Dynamics CRM 2016 Released

Dynamics CRM 2016 Released

Finally it is here! Dynamics CRM 2016 was announced yesterday as general availability. If  you havn’t tried it yet, do spin up a trial to test it out.

By the way, when doing that, don’t do it the normal way, start an Office E3 trial by going here first https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-enterprise-e3-business-software
and then start a CRM trial from within that. That way you can try out the SharePoint integration with OneNote etc. which is a lot harder to do if you just start a normal trial.

So, what is new? Well, Microsoft are kind enough to write a help page telling us! If you press the question mark in the right hand corner in CRM you will come to CRM Help & Training. At the bottom there is a “What’s new link” which will show you, just that.

Personally I really like the excellent Interactive Service Hub but I really hope it will be a bit better integrated into the rest of the system.

The new solution framework also promises a lot. It is an area which a lot of us have been wishing for new stuff for a long long time. Sadly I havn’t had time to dive deep into it yet, and you really need several instances to test it fully!

The new word and excel document generation functionality is also great!

In short, get cracking!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Vids from TechDays

Vids from TechDays

My new colleague Veronica Kamph and
@ tech-days

Last week I held two presentations at Techdays in Sweden, one on how to use Dr. John P. Kotter’s 8
step method for Change management when implementing CRM to reduce the risk of bad user adoption and making sure that you make the organization accept the system. This presentation was a re-visit as I have held it before several times and presentations are just like training, they do get better and better the more times you do them. I have also written about it on this blog.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays-Sweden/TechDays-Sweden-2015/Change-CRM

I also held a presentation on how to set up CRM 2015 from scratch and see how much could be done in an hour. However, I was very unlucky as the CRM provisioning service was unavailable during the time of the demo, after a few minutes of trying, I switched to an instance I had set up the day before. The effect of this, however, was that the full effect of the demo, to set it up from scratch, was not fully achieved, but if you have not seen Dynamics CRM in action before, do check it out as I show some of the extensibility features and how easy they are to work with. And for those of you who wonder, the CRM provisioning service is very seldom down, this was the first time I had ever experienced it.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays-Sweden/TechDays-Sweden-2015/CRM-2015-0-to-200-in-an-hour

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se