News.mscrm-addons.com Blog

Recap: Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 07:47:35 GMT

The Microsoft Applications Summit event in Atlanta exceeded all our expectations. To begin with, we would like to thank you for giving us your precious time and attention! It was a great pleasure meeting you at our booth!

This event focused on the development of business applications and the important concept of enterprise digital transformation. A successful business enterprise in 2019 must transform itself from old analog and on-premise technologies to digital and cloud-based technologies. This summit explained how to accomplish that task. Every session and workshop was filled with demos, hints and hacks to help you ramp up your skills and transform your business. There were plenty of learning opportunties featuring a range of tools and topics for all levels of expertise. Visionary leaders presented exclusive looks at the latest trends and product roadmaps.

It was the perfect place for Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, PowerApps and Flow users to connect, collaborate and pack in as much learning as possible. Our team was overwhelmed by the big interest in our products and booth! All our team members enjoyed presenting the visitors how our addons can simplify the daily business.

All in all, the event was a complete success for partners and customers. Being part of this event was a great and really very special experience! Thank you again for your interest in our products. We really enjoyed being part of this great Microsoft Event! We also want to thank the organizers of that outstanding event for their commitment! We hope to see you again at the Microsoft Business Summit 2020, April 20-21 in Anaheim, CA!

Recap: eXtreme365 and User Group Summit in Amsterdam

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 13:25:06 GMT

An awesome week in the country of bikes, cheese, clogs, Heineken .... ended. We had such a great time last week at eXtreme365 and User Group Summit in Amsterdam. Thank you for joining us! It was a pleasure for us to be part of such a great experience and to meet old and also new business partners and customers.

The week started with extreme365 with a lot of great content from Microsoft and partners. It was a high-energy event where we could gain a deep-dive understanding of Microsoft´s roadmap, expert community insight on overcoming real-world challenges and exceptional relationship building. The atmosphere at eXtreme365 was perfect, which was due to the excellent speakers and truly informative sessions. The event was amazing and full of great people.

Followed by User Group Summit with crowds of people, great exhibitors and a lot of new contacts and customer meetings. Amazing keynote speakers, small group sessions, gripping speeches and lots of networking opportunities converted this event into a Microsoft Dynamics 365 festival. All in one we had great sessions and learned great Dynamics people!

eXtreme365 & UG Summit - photo gallery

Also, we had the chance to showcase "Professional documents in Dynamics 365 for customer engagement PowerApps & Flow" live in front of a responsive audience. Michael Dohr outlined excellently how to standardize, simplify and automate your document processes with DocumentsCorePack. He showed different options to work with documents in:

Customer Engagement: document design, generation, processing and automation within Dynamics 365
Flow: Generate and process documents in Microsoft Flow
PowerApps: Generate and process documents in a Canvas-App
Simple template design within Microsoft Word

He also highlighted the values and benefits of our partner network, as well as the main advantages of our solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365. It was awesome - crowded rooms at both events!

All this mixed with Amsterdam spirit. We could not have spent this week better!
Thanks to all who came to meet the team!

Step-by-Step: How to set up User-Prompts

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 13:48:31 GMT

This blog article covers a Step-by-Step example on how to set up user-prompts in DocumentsCorePack Template Designer.

Prompts enable the user to add or modify document elements without opening the document. The additional options for prompts are displayed in an additional window of the DocumentsCorePack dialog.

Figure 1: Prompts within the DCP Dialog

The following steps contain a description of how to set up such prompts in your templates.

Step 1: Create a Prompt
A prompt is defined in a template within the advanced template settings. To access the prompts settings navigate to ❶ "Insert MailMerge Fields" to open the DocumentsCorePack Taskpane. Go to ❷ "Advanced Template Settings" and select ❸ "Prompts".

Figure 2: MSCRM-ADDONS.com AutoMergeWorkingItems properties

The Prompts-Editor allows you to ❶ create, ❷ edit and ❸ delete prompts. Also, the ❹ sort order of how the prompts should appear can be modified as well.

Figure 3: Prompt Editor

Step 2: Add a prompt
You can add a prompts by using the add button. Each prompt requires a name (special certain chars are not allowed).

Figure 4: Add Prompt

There are 3 different types of different prompts that you can select:

Text (as single or multiline)
A text allows the user to enter additional text in the DCP dialog that will be added to the generated document.
A text prompt can be a simple single line of text or also a text box by using the allow line breaks option.
By setting the required checkbox you can define if a user has to enter data.
Checkbox
A checkbox prompt enables you to either add or remove optional content in the document.
A checkbox is by default mandatory.
Select
A select prompt enables you to keep only one specific section, out of several setup blocks in the document.

Each prompt also requires at least one label. A label is a text that is displayed in the DocumentsCorePack Dialog in front of the actual control (see Figure 1). If a label for the current user language in Dynamics 365 is set this translation will be displayed. If there is no label that matches the current user's language, the first one in the list is displayed.

Figure 5: Label

After you have set up the prompts in the settings, you are able to insert them into your document.

Step 3: Insert a prompt in your document
You will find an additional selection in the "Insert Field" -> "Computed Item" -> ❶ "Prompt Field". Each entry represents a prompt that you have created previously.

Figure 6: Insert prompt

A ❶ text box does not require any further septs as it will be replaced with the text entered by the user. For prompts of the type ❷ checkbox and ❸ select, you will have to replace the current placeholder text with your desired content.

Figure 7: Template before and after replacement of placeholders

Step 4: Save your template
Before you can use or test your template you have to save it. Use the Save template-option of the DocumentsCorePack client in order to publish the template to Dynamics 365.

Please Note: Prompts do not work with the Template Designer, only by using the DocumentsCorePack Server Dialog ("Create Document").

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

Step-by-Step: How to set up a proposal using MultiPart

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 17:48:18 GMT

This step-by-step description outlines how to create and custom a one-click-actions using MultiPart. In this example, we want to create a proposal which consists of severalDocParts: a cover letter, a company profile, the proposal, terms and conditions (in different languages) and the appendix.

Usually, you create a document from a single template. By using the MultiPart-function, you have the possibility to create a document from several elements, which can be dynamic (template) or static (docuemnt stored as note or on SharePoint). For more information, please also have a look at the corresponding documentation here.

To start the configuration, please open your Dynamics 365 Settings, navigate to the MSCRM-ADDONS-section and select DocumentsCorePack(DCP), like you can see in the figure below.

In the window below click on the❶ [New Single]-button, which opens the dialog above, where you have to enter the ❷ name of your action, "Proposal" in this example.

Next, define your DocParts:

❹ Proposal
This DocPart contains two templates - the "Proposal long version" and the "Proposal short version". Therefore please create two DocParts as explained before, select them by checking the checkbox on the left side and combine them by hitting the [Combine selected DocParts]-button (highlighted in yellow).

❻ Appendix
Define the appendix like the other DocParts before and set it to optional.

Step 3: Processing Settings
At this step, you can define the actions which should be done. In our example, we want our action to send the document as ❶ a pdf as ❷ email attachment to ❸ a potential customer and ❹ save it to SharePoint.

Step 4: Review Settings
You have the possibility to review your document, create PNG preview and automatically open your document like you can see in the figure below.

After configuring all steps, you have to save your actual one-click-action.

If a Dynamics 365 user now clicks on the [Create Document]-button, the user will be automatically provided with the new one-click-action (here: Proposal).

Hit the [Next]-button to see how this example looks like. In the figure below, you can see the result of your proposal which contains the elements defined before. As configured above, some DocParts are optional, where the user can decide if he wants to add these to his document by checking the checkbox. The "combined DocParts" like you can see below Terms and Conditions, allow users to select between the different DocParts by opening the drop-down menu.

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

How to insert Condition Fields in DocumentsCorePack Template Designer

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 08:03:03 GMT

Certain properties of DocumentsCorePack templates consist of conditions based on Dynamics 365 fields. The Condition field property allows you to define dynamic content that is either displayed or removed from the final document based on a certain condition.

This step-by-step description will show you how to set conditions in DocumentsCorePack Template Designer. In this example, we want to create a quote and choose between Mr and Ms depending on the gender of the recipient.

Step 1: Create a quote template
First, we need to create the basic layout of the template. Clicking on the [Insert MailMerge Fields]-button in the www.mscrm-addons.com command bar will open the DocumentsCorePack Designer on the right side. More information about how to create DocumentsCorePack templates can be found here.

The figure below shows an example template of a quote.

Step 2: Use the Condition field option
After creating your template, please set the cursor at the position where you would like to insert a condition field. In our example, we want to set the condition in the subject line after "Dear" choosing between Mr and Ms based on the recipient like you can see highlighted in yellow in the figure above. Then, go to Insert Computed Item and select Condition field.

Step 3: Configure the setup of your condition fields

❶ Give your condition a descriptive name. It makes it easy to re-use existing conditions in a template.

❷ Enable the creation of an else block and define the layout of the inserted condition fields - in this case next to each other.

❸ Use the condition designer to create your condition. In this example, we want to create the condition for the entity "Primary Contact (Contact)". We want our condition to choose between Mr and Ms depending on the gender of the recipient. Therefore we select in the first drop-down menu the field Gender and as operator equals. Depending on the data type of the field you either have an additional control that opens a new dialog to select the compare value - in this case, Male.

A more detailed description of the condition designer can be found here.

Below you can see placeholders for the formatting options next to each other. Because you selected to insert an "ELSE" block you have the second placeholder like you can see in the figure below.

Step 3: Set your custom text block
Within these placeholders, you can now enter the content of your conditions. In this example, IF Gender equals to Male it should display "Mr" and ELSE "Ms".

Step 4: Save your template
Before you can use or test your template you have to save it. Either you save your template locally with the standard Save or Save as the functionality of Word or you use the Save template-option of the DocumentsCorePack client in order to publish the template to Dynamics 365.

Step 5: Test your template
As you have made changes to your template you might want to test them quickly. A step by step description of how to test your template can be found here. Below you can see the result of your created template containing the condition we set, highlighted in yellow.

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

Step-by-Step: How to configure a One-Click-Action

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 07:59:24 GMT

This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to create a new one-click-action based on a single record. In this example, we want to create a new action based on the Quote entity. We want our action to send a quote as pdf by email to a customer and save it to SharePoint. Please also have a look at the corresponding documentation here.

To do so, please open your Dynamics 365 Settings, navigate to the MSCRM-ADDONS-section and select DocumentsCorePack, like you can see below.

The main configuration window provides you with a few tabs that allow you configure DCP in general. Please go to the ❶ One-Click-Actions-tab, the new feature of DCP ServerBased. It opens the window below, which shows you all ❷ available entities. The ❸ search function helps you find the entity for which you want to create a one-click-action.

Step 2: Template Settings
These settings help you to configure your template selection in detail. In our example, we choose the ❶ Predefine Template option and select our template - in this case, ❷ Quote.docx. This means the user does not have a DocumentsCorePack template selection, the template is used automatically. For more information on how to create a template, please have a look at this blog article.

Step 3: Processing Settings
At this step, you can define the actions which should be done. In our example, we want our action to send a quote as ❶ pdf by ❷ email to a customer and ❸ save it to SharePoint.

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.

Recap: Summit EMEA in Dublin

Wed, 02 May 2018 08:29:21 GMT

Thank you for joining us at Summit EMEA in Dublin! It was a pleasure for us to be part of such a great experience!

The atmosphere at Summit EMEA was perfect, which was not only due to the well-selected location but also to the excellent speakers and truly informative sessions. Amazing keynote speakers, small group sessions, gripping speeches and lots of networking opportunities converted this event into a Microsoft Dynamics 365 festival.

Figure 1: Summit EMEA Dublin 2018

Summit EMEA was amazing and full of great people. From the very first moment, we knew that being a Silver Sponsor had been a great decision. All in all, the event was a complete success for partners and customers. Being part of this event was a great and really very special experience! We want to thank the organizers of that outstanding event for their commitment!

There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet.
- William Butler Yeats

ActivityTools - How to make custom activities available

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 16:00:30 GMT

If you create new custom activities after the installation of ActivityTools they will not be shown in the activity type drop down and in the NEW ACTIVITY menu of ActivityTools.

This article shows how you can make them available.

In the ActivityTools main configuration window navigate to the General Settings-tab and click on the [Update]-button next to Update Language Setting.

Figure 5: Activity type drop down with custom activity