JohanPersson.nu

My Digital Brain

  • Enable vs Enabled Features

    I have learned that it is important to read the fine print… otherwise you will miss things. This happened to me and a colleague the other day.

    In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Microsoft add new features all the time. These are controlled in Feature Management workspace where you can also read up on the new features to understand important impact.

    A cool feature is that there is a Data Entity in the Data Management Framework which exports and imports the feature set for a given environment and enables moving feature settings from one environment to another making easier to manage the lifecycle of your features and sync them with for instance releases

    Now comes the part that I completely missed (which in hindsight is quite obvious):

    There is a column called Enable Date, which I thought meant “The date the feature was enabled”, what it actually means “The date the feature is enabled”… notice the subtle difference?? I did not 🙁

    What the column actually does is to set a schedule for when the feature will be enable. When you use DMF to import a list of feature settings with this field set means that you will schedule the enablement of the feature. It is a great feature but might cause some issues if you are not aware of it. Especially for features that can not be turned off.

    Remember: Read and understand the fine print

  • What happened to batch groups??

    I need to confess something… Sometime I do not read all of the release notes as thoroughly as I maybe should. This was made clear to me the other day when I tried to set up a batch job and make sure it was executing in a new Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Production environment. Or maybe I read it, but did not really understand it…

    Before, you were able to create a batch group and add servers to it. This was used in for instance AX 2012 or D365FO to control execution and divide resources in an optimal way between batch jobs. Especially when you were dealing with large, time consuming, batches that you needed to ensure ran correctly while not starving smaller (time critical) jobs of resources

    Starting with version 10.0.29 the default behaviour is that all Batch Servers are assigned to all Batch Groups. Each Batch Group has a scheduling priority set to either Low, Normal, High, Critical or Reserved Capacity and the batch jobs are then assigned to the Batch Group meaning that you will (almost) always have load balancing over all servers. The exception to the rule is if you choose Reserved Capacity.

    Reserved Capacity means that you on an environment level can exclude a percentage of the total batch capacity (aka Batch Threads). The setup is done in System Parameters – Batch global settings. The default setting is “No reserved capacity”, meaning that all batch servers threads are available to the load-balancing. You are able to change this to Low, Medium or High (10, 15 or 25 percent) which will then exclude batch capacity from the pool. Worth knowing is that when no batch jobs with Reserve Capacity are executing the reserved batch threads will be sitting idle.


    Links
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/sysadmin/priority-based-batch-scheduling

  • Missing MR report in new legal entity

    Yesterday a colleague contacted me about missing all of the reports in Financial Reporting (previously Management Reporting). After looking around a bit and doing the mandatory reset of the DataMart (which did not help) I found this article mentioning the minimum steps needed in a new legal entity for it to appear in the Financial Reporting UI.

    Link
    https://docs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/finance/general-ledger/financial-reporting-getting-started

  • Microsoft 365 add-ins blocked

    Today one of ´my colleagues had an issue on her customer laptop. The issue was that she was not able to use the “Open in Excel” funcitonality in Dynamics 365 for Operations and Supply Chain. Apparently someone had blocked the Office addin that was required to make it work.

    There are 2 options to handle this… the easiest (and less secure) option is to allow the user to run and install Office Addins. The setting resides in the Office Admin Center and requires an Admin to change it. If some one has disabled it, go the Office Admin Portal – Setting – Org Setting – User owned apps and services and enable “Let users access the Office Store”

    The second option is to provision the specific apps to the users that need them. This is also done by an admin in the Office Admin Portal.

    In the Office Admin Portal, go to Settings, Integrated Apps and click Add-ins

    Click Deploy Add-in

    Click Next

    Click Choose from the Store

    Seach for Dynamics and click Add next to the Microsoft Dynamics Office Add-in

    Click Continue

    Now you will get the option to set which users will get the add.in deployed. You have the options of Everyone, an Azure AD Group (preferred) and just you. The last option is used for testing and you will later in the wizard get the option to change.

    Note: If you are logged in ad Global Admin, that is the user that will get the add-in. You should preferably not use your “regular user” to manage your organizations infrastructure. If you are curious, google Tiering…

    Verify that your deployment was successful

    You are now done. If everything works, now you get another option to assign which users should get the app.

    You can click on the add-in and adjust the deployment scope.

    That is it… Good Luck

    Links
    Prevent add-in downloads by turning off the Office Store across all clients (Except Outlook)
    Deploy add-ins in the Microsoft 365 admin center

  • Cost for Azure Hosted Build Pipelines

    In Dynamics 365 For Finance and Supply Chain we rely heavily on Azure DevOps for managing aspects of our projects, especially development and deploying packages.

    Today a customer told me that they hit the roof on the free/included alotment for parallell build in Azure Hosted Pipelines. They wanted to understand what it had been used for. I found a very handy new preview feature called Historical Views for Pipelines.

    To turn it on you you click on the settings icon in the top right corner and click Preview Features. The feature can be turned on for single users or entire organizations.

    This feature will help you understand your usage.

    The first thing you need to in order to purchase more parallel jobs is to set up billing for your Azure DevOps organization. Go to Organization Setting – Billing. The billing options are the same ones that you are using for “regular” Azure.

    After you have set up billing, go to Organization Settings – Parallel Jobs and select Purchase Parallel jobs.

    The pricing for additional paralell jobs are $40/month which gives you 1 paralell job with unlimited minutes.

    Links
    Historical graph for agent pools – Azure Pipelines | Microsoft Docs
    Microsoft-hosted agents for Azure Pipelines – Azure Pipelines | Microsoft Docs
    Configure and pay for parallel jobs – Azure DevOps | Microsoft Docs
    Manage preview features – Azure DevOps Services | Microsoft Docs
    Set up billing for your organization – Azure DevOps Services | Microsoft Docs
    Azure DevOps Services Pricing | Microsoft Azure

  • Uppdating the e-Commerce solution in Dynamics 365 FO

    A while ago Microsoft launched an e-Commerce platform for Dynamics 365 and they keep release updated versions in line with the OneVersion vision. Since I have not had the opportunity to work a lot with the solution I thought I would write down some learnings… if nothing else for myself. In this article I will look at how to update.

    The first step is getting the update from Microsoft. As usual we start in the Asset Library. From the D365FO environment page click Manage to go to the Management console for e-Commerce.

    Select the e-Commerce tab

    Go to the Assett Libabry

    Go to e-Commerce Packages and click Import

    On the Import screen, note that all of the packages have notification marking the mail FnO version. Choose the latest package with your FnO version and click Pick.

    When you are back in LCS, select the imported package and click Release Candidate

    Once the package is set to Release Candidate it will show up in package deploy of the e-Commerce Management. To deploy it, click Apply Extension

  • DMF not creating new project

    I had a question today regarding a user that, when she tried to create a new Import project in the Data Management Framework, she ended up in an old existing project.

    We tried to clean out usage data and also restarted the server and browser to clear potential cache issues.

    Another colleague told me that the issue is relates to saved views… and low an behold, when changing the standard view to be the default it all worked again.

  • Warning:[DWCE0001] Export was skipped. Max lookup count supported in Initial Sync stage is 10. Current lookup count 11

    Today I was setting up the Dual-Write sync for one of my customers and I bumped into this error message:

    Warning:[DWCE0001] Export was skipped. Max lookup count supported in Initial Sync stage is 10. Current lookup count 11

    The issue here is that there is a limit in DataVerse that (I would guess) for performance issues there is a hard limit on a maximum of lookup fields.

    In our case we had these fields in the default mapping for Customer V3 -> Account using lookup:

    transactioncurrencyid.isocurrencycode
    msdyn_customergroupid.msdyn_groupid
    msdyn_billingaccount.accountnumber
    msdyn_paymentday.msdyn_name
    msdyn_customerpaymentmethod.msdyn_name
    msdyn_paymentschedule.msdyn_name
    msdyn_paymentterm.msdyn_name
    msdyn_vendor.msdyn_vendoraccountnumber
    primarycontactid.msdyn_contactpersonid
    msdyn_salestaxgroup.msdyn_name
    msdyn_company.cdm_companycode

    The workaround is to remove one of the problematic mappings, do the initial sync and add it back. Remember to take a screenshot of the mapping that you are removing so you can put it back exactly the same.

  • Missing Warehouse app step instructions in D365FO

    This week we have been having an issue with the warehouse at a customer. We are in the process of rolling out a new Legal entity and when moving the Legal entity to a new environment using DMF we noticed that the Warehouse app step instructions stopped working and was replaces with very cryptic labels

    This issue was not present in the environment we used to set up the legal entity, but rather it occurred when we moved it.

    Turns your enabling the feature (Warehouse app step instructions) sets the default steps in all existing Legal Entities but if we create a new one they are not.

    To create these in a new legal entity we need to click “Create Default Steps” in the Mobile Device Steps module.

    There is also no data entity for moving mobile device steps from one environment to another which might be a good idea for future improvement.

    That is all for today

  • Finding the PC name of a POS register

    In my previous post I showed you how to get the installed version of the POS software on each register. In some cases you might need to manually update this if the update has not worked correctly you will need to connect to the actual PC (or even go on site).

    Unfortunately the information in D365FO does not contain the computer name. To get the computer name we need to look in LCS Telemetry. The only value I found to map between the export from D365FO and LCS is Physical Device ID. In order to be able to match the two Excel spread sheets we will need to add the field Physical Device ID to the Export from D365FO.

    To export telemetry from LifeCycleServices, Log into LCS, select the environment you are looking at and click in Environment Monitoring.

    The maximum number of loglines is 5000 and in order to see what we want to see we will need to limit the results a bit. First of all set Query Name to Retail Channel events. Select a time interval (10 days or so) and set log source to Retail Modern POS. To further limit the results the query return I add 1018 on the search terms. Export the information by clicking Export Grid.

    Copy the entire sheet and paste it into a second tab in the D365FO Excel. Name the two tabs D365FO and Telemetry. In the Telemetry tab go to Data and click Remove Duplicates. Click Unselect All and then choose the Role Instance column and click OK.

    In the D365FO tab, choose the first cell in the first empty column and paste the following in the formula field

    =XLOOKUP(LEFT([@[Physical device ID]];25);Telemetry!Q:Q;Telemetry!G:G;;-1)

    Note: You might need to adjust the Column name at the start of the formula in order to fit your export. The columns pointing to the Telemetry tab should be OK if you keep it standard. Fill all the cells in the columns with the same formula. This should add the PC Name to the Excel.

    That is it for today 🙂