Hyperautomation: Unleashing enterprise efficiency with Microsoft Power Automate

Full article here.

The enterprise journey toward operational excellence is ongoing, and the adoption of hyperautomation has become a pivotal milestone. Microsoft Power Platform stands at the forefront of this movement, offering a suite of tools that transform the way businesses approach digital transformation at scale – and Microsoft Power Automate is a key accelerator.

Imagine a world where every repetitive task, every mundane process, and every time-consuming operation is transformed into a symphony of automated actions, working in perfect harmony to deliver results at lightning speed. This isn’t just a fantasy; it’s a reality that Power Automate can bring, and it’s revolutionizing the way enterprises operate on a global scale.

Below you will learn about a comprehensive scenario with a Center of Excellence (CoE) team, using many of the capabilities in Power Automate, such as Microsoft Copilot, process mining, digital and robotic process automation (RPA), AI models, and more across Power Platform.

Set of updates for Makers, Admins, and users across Power Apps, Dataverse and Copilot.
Details here: Power Apps March 2024 Feature Update

New things in Dynamics for 2024. Good to know.

Read more here: What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 in 2024

Many good things happening with Dynamics 365 Sales. Happy to work with product that’s being actively developed and improved.

Read more here: What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Sales

So there are some visual changes coming to Power Apps. Dynamics is built on Power Apps, so … there’s a new look coming to Dynamics as well. Though seems not available yet, I’m curious about what the visual changes will actually be. And will it be better?

Read more about Refreshed look for model-driven apps.

Dynamics keeps getting better.

Details here.

It’s actually good. Maybe not always easy to know how to find what you’re looking for, but once you get the hang of it, it’s good.

Dynamics docs / Microsoft Learn

When working on customers’ CRM needs, we often forget that in addition to using the built in Dynamics 365 components & capabilities, it’s extendable in many different ways. Custom controls is one such aspect.

Let’s say that for some reason the built in Two Option (yes/no) toggle doesn’t satisfy the needs. Well, a quick search in the PCF Gallery gives us 9 more control options how to display such 2 option field. Below is a screenshot, and visit https://pcf.gallery to browse readily available custom control goodies. Or build a completely new custom control yourself.

Well known Dynamics 365 and surrounding platform professionals sharing their knowledge in context of Dynamics 365 Sales, Power Apps, administrative tools, approaches, solutions and more. It’s gold!

Watch on YouTube: XrmToolCast.

Those who have used Dynamics 365 Sales for a while will have noticed that there are a few colors dominating in Charts . Below are some first few colors from the default palette as defined by Microsoft and I have a feeling many Dynamics 365 Users will be like “Yeah I’ve seen these…” also, “… how do I change the colors?”

Next image is how it looks in an actual Chart in CRM environment.

So we figure we don’t like those colors and want to change to something like this:

So here’s how to do that. First, click on Export Chart (you can pick any Chart, concept is the same):

What you will get is an .xml file downloaded to your device. Open it up in any text editor and I’ve highlighted the place where colors are defined, just look for “PaletteCustomColors” and what’s following it. That’s the list of colors in plain text.

Colors are in RGB (reg, green, blue) format. Use any preferred color picker (can be easily found online) and pick the colors that you want to have in charts. Insert your custom color RGB numbers at the beginning of the color list.

Save the file and upload back to CRM:

If Chart doesn’t switch to the new color palette at once, do a refresh on the browser window. We can see our new colors in action:

It is often that CRM users are not completely satisfied with the way Views are constructed. For example an Account view as in image below might not satisfy daily production needs.

We can easily change the columns included to make CRM work for us better:

Add or remove columns as needed:

Here we’ve made some View changes:

We can have this View just for a little while for a specific need or save it to be able to reuse:

And we’re ready to use our new Accounts View.

In a similar way we can filter records in Views or adjust how records are sorted.

Comparing older and the current Dynamics 365 Sales mobile apps is like night and day. But today we are getting practically the same CRM functionality on mobile as it is desktop. The layout changes dynamically and of course one must get used to Dynamics CRM on mobile. But it can be a brilliant helper when away from desktop.

Below just a couple of screenshots from Dynamics CRM on Android.

Get the app for Android phones on Google Play store.

While mostly CRM users ask to implement some new features in CRM, there’s also a substantial part with requests to remove various elements from Dynamics CRM.

Dynamics 365 Sales out of the box comes with many features and interface elements. Often organizations need only a small subset of all that’s available + maybe some custom CRM “flavor”.

It is quite typical to disable or delete various out of the box CRM components such as
built in Forms, Views, Reports, buttons in Ribbon, pre-built Business Process Flows and others, as the whole can be somewhat overwhelming when starting with Dynamics 365.

Picture below is just a random example where close to half of what’s on screen out-of-the-box could be unnecessary extras. Simplifying daily use interfaces brings many benefits.