Essential Microsoft Dynamics 365 for the Administrator

One of the most important and beneficial integrations with Microsoft Dynamics is that between the platform and Microsoft 365 itself (essentially, Outlook.) This integration allows the user to send and receive emails from within Microsoft Dynamics, and also allows Outlook Contacts, Tasks, Appointments to be synchronized with Microsoft Dynamics 365 as well. This module walks through the steps to ensure that your users can use this integration.  This can be configured on a per-user basis, so it's not an all-or-none proposition.   You will notice that this module is from the perspective of those who are subscribing to Microsoft 365 along with their Dynamics subscription. If your organization is using another email provider, please see the Resources for this lesson.

There are some important data management functions that the administrator will sooner or later need to perform. Bulk Delete allows for the deletion of data in an efficient manner, Duplicate Detection can prevent or at least mitigate data duplication issues, which are the bane of any Administrator. It's also important to be able to import data using the data import wizard, as well as creating a data import map.  These topics are covered in this module.

When importing data, there are a couple of common issues that cause failures. One is data duplication, especially if you have Duplicate Detection rules set (which you should!)  The other issue is more subtle, where a "reference" is duplicated.  This module  dives into these two issues and walks through the concept of the duplicate reference and the "lookup" field, and how the data import wizard establishes reference for lookups, and what you can do to avoid issues with duplicate references.

In the Resources section of this lecture, please find a note to further explain the concept of mapping lookup fields along with two sample data files - one for Accounts and one for Contacts. This will help you understand the concept of mapping lookup fields. There are times when this is absolutely necessary - especially when dealing with organizations that do not necessarily believe that duplicate data is a problem.  When you deal with references, it most certainly is.  This is a way to work around that issue.

There are literally over a hundred topics I could have chosen to add to this free, Basic Admin course, but I chose Global Option Sets for a few reasons - 1) They are a pet peeve of mine - so many deployments fail to use them and end up managing multiple Local Option sets and trying to keep them in sync, and 2) It lends itself well to field relationship mapping, which is especially important to understand if you use the Sales app, since the Lead to Opportunity/Contact/Account flow is extremely powerful.

In the last fourteen years, I have NEVER been on a Sales deployment where we didn't create fields on the Leads and then map them over to the Account, Contact, and Opportunity. Very often these characterizing fields were Option Sets - and as soon as Microsoft released the Global Option set, we realized the importance immediately.

In this final module, we identify a problem to solve, then analyze the issues around the problem, especially with respect to the current architecture of Microsoft Dynamics 365, then determine the best design.  Once we have a decent design, we carry out the customization and then deploy the changes, all the while using best practices - for instance, working inside of a Solution.

While none of this requires one line of code, we nevertheless call this "Solution Development" - why?  Because we are developing a solution.  It's that simple.

Whether you would actually make use of a solution to track costs in Opportunities in Dynamics 365 Sales (which is not easy to do without some level of customization), or whether you want to learn how to step through the process of performing customizations in your Dynamics environment, I hope you will find this module useful. 

And if you would like to learn more about customization, then please let me know.  Thanks!