Aggregated Intelligence: July 2018

Monday, July 30, 2018

Icons for Dynamics CRM

FlatIcons.net is a great resource for free icons for Dynamics CRM.

I have found the following settings work best: (you need a 16x16 and 32x32 icon and I use 0 padding on both).

The icon color is set to 656565.

And here is an example of how it looks

Monday, July 23, 2018

Dynamics CRM–My Apps link is gone. Fixing access to apps

Not sure if this is a v9.0 issue or not, but I dont have the “My Apps” link, which is needed to manage applications available to your organization (specifically, I needed to manage roles to hide some of the apps from users).

To fix this:

Open the default site map:

Go to Customizations >> Customize the System
Client Extensions
Open the “Site Map”

Add “My Apps” link

Select the Settings area.
Drag a “Sub Area” onto one of the groups (I added mine under “Customization”)
Set the following values:

Type: URL
URL: /tools/AppModuleContainer/applandingtilepage.aspx
Title: My Apps

Save and Publish.

You should now have a link to My Apps:

And you should be able to fix the roles via:

Friday, July 06, 2018

SLAs behind the scenes

To understand how SLAs work, its good to follow along how things get setup on a new entity that is enabled for tracking SLAs.

First lets go over the 3 entities that define the SLA:

SLA: This is the main SLA record. This entity records whether its the default SLA, to which entity it applies, etc. In addition it has a collection of 1 or more SLA Items:
SLA Item: The SLA item contain information as to what criteria should be used to apply the SLA Item (each of which can define a different criteria under which they apply (Applicable When) and each of which may have a different set of time limits and actions. The SLA item also tracks which field on the entity it is supposed to update (this is used by the SLA KPI instance). In the above case, the SLA Item would be pointed the new_resolvebykpi. One could add more than one SLA KPI field.
SLA KPI Instance: When the entity gets created, a SLA KPI instance is created to track the SLA. This SLA gets the details based on the SLA and SLA-Item records at the time of the entity creation (an important thing to remember, as changes dont get applied retro-actively to existing SLA KPI instances). A separate KPI instance will be created for each KPI being tracked on the entity.

When you enable an entity for SLA: (Red boxes)

The entity gets a lookup field created called SLAID, that points to the SLA
In addition, on the SLA KPI Instance entity, a new N:1 field is setup that allows the SLA KPI Instance to point at the entity on which the SLA is being tracked.

When you add a KPI field (you do this by setting it up as a lookup to SLA KPI Instance) (green box)

The new field allows CRM to track each KPI separately.

Workflows that manage the SLAs:

Once the SLAs have been created and a new entity is created on which an SLA is being tracked, the work-flows fire and setup the fields on the SLA KPI Instance records based on the SLA details.
These workflows can be found by performing the following advanced find:
Something to note: You will find multiple work flows when you run your search. If you sort it by status, lets first go over the workflows that are in activated status:

There is one workflow that will have the name of your SLA. This is the main workflow and is invoked by the system and creates the SLA KPI Instance records. It also updates the SLA KPI Instances based on pause statuses, etc.
There is a workflow for each of the SLA items you created. These workflows have wait steps that allow the workflow to track the Warning timeout and failure timeout values. These workflows look basically like this:

These workflows run in the background and hence there can be timing issues and the UI doesnt always update when the timers run out. This is the same reason that when you perform a resolution action (Such as setting a boolean field like First Response Sent), it doesnt update the UI immediately and you sometimes have to refresh the UI to see the updated status.
Finally, you will find that there are some workflows that are in a draft status. Everytime, the SLA is deactivated and reactivated, it creates a new copy of the Workflows and deactivates the old ones. This does clutter the system and I have not found a way to clean up these old workflows. My best guess is that these workflows are kept around for historical purposes. I am not sure if a background process comes along and deletes these workflows later.

Enabling an entity for SLAs

For a quick intro, first read: http://blog.aggregatedintelligence.com/2018/07/creating-enhanced-sla.html

Enhanced SLAs allow you to track SLAs on any entity. For this example we will use the “Workflow” entity (which behind the scenes is pretty much a custom entity).

Enable the entity to track SLAs:

Go to customizations and then open the General tab for the custom entity you wish to work with (in this case, I am doing it for “Work Order”).

Doing this adds 2 new fields on the entity: slaid and salinvokeid

Add a KPI field:

Now that entity is enable for KPI, you need to add a KPI Instance field. Lets add one to track the resolved by KPI.
Under “fields” Click on New.
Set the following values:

Display Name: Resolve By KPI
Name: xxx_ResolveByKPI
Data Type: Lookup
Target Record Type: SLA KPI Instance

Click Save and Close

Publish the changes
Setup an SLA

Go to Settings >> Service Management >> Service Level Agreements
Click on New. Under entities, you should see your custom entity (in this case Work Order). If not, check step 1.
Click Ok. Leave the defaults on the next screen and click “Save”
Add a new SLA Item by clicking “+” under “SLA Details”
Set the following values:

Enter name: SLA Resolve By – Default
SLA KPI: Resolve By KPI (If you dont have anything in the drop down, check step (2)).
Applicable When: leave empty
Success Criteria: I am tailoring this for Work Order, but you could simply choose Status: Inactive, etc
Work Order >> System Status >> Equals >> Open – Completed; Closed – Posted

Setup SLA Item Failure and Item Warning values (I used: 3 days and 1 day respectively).
Click Save and Close.
Activate the SLA and set it as default.

Add the SLA KPI quick view to the custom entity form.

Open the custom entity form (in this case Work Order).
Insert a “Quick View Form”
Save and publish

Testing:

Create a new record for your custom entity (in this case, I created a work-order)
You should see your SLA details:

And after the System Status was set to Open – Completed:

Note: You will likely have to refresh for the timer to go away, as there seems to be a bug or a timing issue with UI (the data itself is all correct).

Notes:

As of this blog post, here are some limits you need to be aware of (and they only apply to the online CRM instance):

The maximum number of entities that can have active SLAs for your organization is 7.
The maximum number of SLA KPIs allowed per entity for your organization is 5.

Creating an Enhanced SLA

For this example, we will create an SLA on the Case entity to measure the first response sent KPI. We will set it up to such that we expect the First response to be sent within 15 minutes of the case being created and a warning will be displayed if the first response has not been sent within 5 minutes.

Create an SLA Record

Settings >> Service Management
New
Leave the default entries and click “Save”

Click the “+” under “SLA Details” to create a new SLA Item

Enter a name: “First Response”
Applicable When: Leave empty
Success Criteria: This is the field that will be checked to see if this SLA item is considered a success or not:
SLA item failure: This is the time after which this SLA is considered as having been failed.
SLA item warning: this is the time after which the SLA will be shown as being close to failure state.
Note: After you save, you will have the ability to define actions that should be undertaken if the success, failure, or warning states have been achieved. This can be used to send an email, etc.
Click Save

Activate the SLA and then set it as Default.
Create a quick view to show the SLA details
Now that you have create the SLA, you need to be able to display it to the user. For enhanced SLAs, you do this using a quick view.

Open up the default solution (Customizations)
Under entities, navigate to “SLA KPI Instance”
Under Forms, select, “Create a Quick View Form”
Chose “Insert” tab and then click “Timer”
Enter the following details:

Save and then Publish the Form.
Your final step is to include the Quick View on to the Case form

In the same customizations window, go to Entities >> Case >> Forms.
Open your Case form.
Make sure the “First Response Sent” field is on the form.
Next, insert a quick view form with the following info:
Save and Publish the Form.

Testing the changes:

Create a case record.
It should look like this:
After you set “First Response Sent” to Yes and Save, the view should look like this:

Note: If the count down timer does not automatically stop and show success, then try and refresh the page, as I think there maybe a bug in the display code that doesnt let it update right after the save.

Dynamics CRM–Finding Workflows connected to SLAs

You need to setup your advanced find like so: