How to upgrade your Tenant from Field service 7.x to 8.x (UCI Client)

I recently tried upgrading FS for one of my customer’s tenant but couldn’t see an option to upgrade to the latest 8.x from the administrative portal.

Asked the same question to the product team and gladly they shared the process customers can follow to do this.

To Opt-in please perform the following steps:

1. Access the Dynamics Insider Portal here: http://experience.dynamics.com/insider
2. Log in with your Insider credentials.
3. On the Insider home page, search for a program with the name “Opt-in to Upgrade Project and Field Service – Unified Interface.”
4. Click that program link in the search results and choose to “Join Now” in the page that opens. This will add you as a participant to the program.
5. On the program page, access the link provided to sign up:  “Signup Link to opt-in for the latest Field & Project Service UCI Release (GA)”
6. The link will open a simple questionnaire and one of the questions is the instance URL; please provide the URL of the instance.
7. Microsoft will receive the details you provide and, within a few days, will enable the install or upgrade of the latest versions of Field and Project Service on the instance that you provided. Once enabled, you will receive a confirmation email from Microsoft.
8. Once you receive the email, you can access your Dynamics 365 Admin portal to install or upgrade Field Service and/or Project Service Automation on the enabled instance.
9. For any questions and discussion on the functionality, please use the Forum on the program page. Use the Microsoft Support process to log any issues/bugs.
10. If the identified instance has both Field and Project Service installed, please plan to upgrade both solutions before resuming normal use of the instance.
11. For a smooth install experience, please make sure that the identified instance meets all the prerequisites listed on the Insider Program page.
12. These releases of Field and Project Service will only be available for install or upgrade on the identified instances. They will not show up for any other orgs, even if they are on the same tenant.

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Not able to install windows service using InstallUtil.exe command

We recently faced an issue where we had a few windows services interacting with Dynamics 365 CE instance on prem.

We were using the InstallUtil utility in windows to install the service in all environments and never faced issue with installation, but the service failed to install in Prod.

Here is the InstallUtil command we were using:

InstallUtil "C:\xyz\abc.exe"

The problem was after executing the utility there was no error in console and no error in event logs but we couldn’t see the service in windows services explorer.

Also we checked the count of services before and after running the InstallUti utility and the result was the same

powershell   (Get-Service | Measure-Object).Count

We ended up using the SC CREATE command to install the service and it worked just fine for us.

SC CREATE "abc.exe" binpath="C:\xyz\abc.exe" displayname="abc.exe"

No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI

We were getting a very silly error on deploying a webapi based service.

It was a GETAction

[Route("api/OCS/unbarmsisdn/{msisdnparam}")]
public IHttpActionResult UnbarMsisdn(string msisdn)
{

....

}

We were getting the following Error message:

No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI

 

The problem was simple but can be easily missed.

Let’s look at the method definition again:

[Route("api/OCS/unbarmsisdn/{msisdnparam}")]
public IHttpActionResult UnbarMsisdn(string msisdn)
{

....

}

 

If you noticed there’s a difference between the Method parameter and the Route Decorator parameter. Both parameters should have the same name and you should be able to browse the method using the browser.

 

 

A generic Sync filter for Customer Assets in Field services

As we know the Microsoft Field service app has offline capability but there are few design decisions that can help you and your customers in long run.

One important aspect is to decide upon the sync filters which drive what data is available for Users while they work in offline mode.

In this post I would be focussing on Sync filter for Customer assets and it becomes even more important if your customer has a lot of Assets in the field.

Deciding upon sync filters should be a continuous improving/ agile process rather than spending time on thinking  the best solution for the very first time.

Here was our Sync filter journey for Customer assets:

• We started with No sync filter. This is because we weren’t sure how many assets would the customer have/create over the period
• Next step was to at least filter out inactive assets
• Now when the asset number started growing, we deciding upon just showing the Assemblies which are nothing but Asset containers at each site. This worked for a while but then technicians had no insight when at a site that this assembly had what assets.
• We finalised upon showing all Assets (Parent/ Child) in the territories that the User works in. This was great, now the User could see every asset that he/she deals with.
• After a while this also starting blowing apart as few Users were catering to multiple territories and by default there’s a hard limit of 10000 records that you can sync for an entity in offline mode.
• The business then decided to re do their territories and create new territories for overlapping areas.

The point here is that no one solution will fit all customers and solution for today may become obsolete tomorrow.

One good thing with woodford sync filters is that we can use fetchxml to build them,

Here’s the sync filter fetch xml we finalised upon:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<fetch xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1.0">
<entity name="msdyn_customerasset">
<filter type="and">
<condition attribute="statecode" operator="eq" value="0" />
</filter>
<link-entity name="account" alias="L0" from="accountid" to="msdyn_account" link-type="inner">
<link-entity name="territory" alias="L1" from="territoryid" to="msdyn_serviceterritory" link-type="inner">
<link-entity name="msdyn_resourceterritory" alias="L2" from="msdyn_territory" to="territoryid" link-type="inner">
<link-entity name="bookableresource" alias="L3" from="bookableresourceid" to="msdyn_resource" link-type="inner">
<filter type="and">
<condition attribute="userid" operator="eq-userid" />
</filter>
</link-entity>
</link-entity>
</link-entity>
</link-entity>
</entity>
</fetch>

Activating field service mobile licenses for D365

If your customer has D365 FS licenses and you were using Woodford solution to customize the Microsoft FS mobile app or Resco FS app, the woodford trial would eventually expire after a period of 30 days.

However for each D365 FS license you can activate a FS mobile app license as well, how to do it is explained in detail on the following URL:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/field-service/activate-fs-mobile-app-license

 

 

 

New PowerBI dashboard button not showing in D365

Recently we had a requirement to show existing PowerBI dashboards in Dynamics 365.

When we tried to create a Power BI dashboard in dynamics, we couldn’t see the “New PowerBI dashboard” option on Dashboards page.

The problem was the PowerBI dashboards feature in Dynamics has to be enabled before we can go ahead and add a dashboard.

This is how to enable it:

• Sign-in to Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a user with the system administrator security role.
• Go to Settings > Administration > System Settings.
• On the Reporting tab in the Allow Power BI visualization embedding option, select Yes to enable.
• Click OK.

Once you are done, refresh the Dashboards page and you should now be able to see the Add new button.

 

Note: To access PowerBI dashboards in Dynamics, the users would need Power BI pro license. Exception being if customer has power BI premium, in that case only users creating power bi reports need to have power bi pro licenses.

 

Resco Field service mobile app – Error loading woodford solution – CRM metadata failed to refresh

If you are trying to make any customizations to the Resco Field service Mobile app, you would encounter few strange issues at times which can block development.

Note: In case you are unaware, the silverlight based woodford solution just works in IE(Tested in IE11) and that too in non-incognito mode i.e. if you are working in incognito mode, the solution will fail to load.

Also many times the solution gets loaded but towards the end it gives you error saying CRM metadata failed to refresh and then all you can access is your Profile tab (and other non dev related tabs).

I haven’t been able to find a solution to the above problem except for restarting IE again, seems like a caching issue.