Timeline Updates

For the people that are not familiar with the timeline in Dynamics 365, the timeline is a control that you’ve probably seen on many of the forms in Dynamics 365. It shows all activities related to a row and gives users insights to what interactions are scheduled and/or have occurred in the past. Depending on the row you are viewing, you’ll see different activities in the timeline. For example, if you’re viewing the timeline of an opportunity row, you’ll see all activities related to that opportunity, but if you open the related account, you’ll see all activities that are related to that account, and activities related to the account’s child records, such as contact, opportunities, cases, etc. I’ve noticed a few pretty cool updates to the timeline as I was configuring the timeline for a demo, which I will discuss in this article.

Bookmarks

Previously when users set filters on the timeline, they had the ability to set to ‘remember’ the filter settings on the timeline. This was a personal setting, but unfortunately there was only one filter setting that users were able to save at a time. For example, if a user filtered the timeline to see emails only, then they were able to save that ‘view’ but they wouldn’t be able to save multiple views. For example, if they also wanted to save a view in the timeline that only showed phone calls, they would need to manually configure the filter. I noticed today that there is now a new icon on the command bar in the timeline, which is called ‘Bookmarks’. With bookmarks, users can now save different filtered views on the timeline. This is still a personal view, which means only the person who created the bookmarks will have access to them, but this will make it a whole lot easier to quickly filter out activities on the timeline!
To create a bookmark, you’ll need to first select one or more filters on the timeline. In my first example, I am filtering to show emails only. I opened an account row and clicked on the filter icon on the timeline command bar. I checked the box next to ’emails’ to only show email messages in the timeline.

Then I clicked on the ‘Bookmark’ icon on the timeline command bar (as you can see on the image above, it’s the icon on the left side of the filter icon) and entered ‘Emails’ as the name of the bookmark. From here you can also set this book mark as the default view for ‘this form’, (this means the timeline view will be defaulted to this view for all rows using this form which in my case means all accounts) or you can set this view as the default timeline view for all forms in Dynamics 365. (This means anytime you open a row that has a timeline, the view will be filtered based on the filters in the bookmark you selected as default.) NOTE: As I stated earlier, this is a personal setting, so only the end-user who created the bookmarks will have this experience.
In this example I didn’t select the bookmark to be the default. Now when you click on the bookmark icon again, you’ll see the ‘Emails’ bookmark I just created. When you click on the three dots on the right side of the bookmark you have the option to rename the bookmark, update it or delete it. When you click ‘Update’ you can change the default options I mentioned before. There is no way to change the filters related to the bookmark, so you will have to delete the bookmark and create a new one with (new) filters. I also created a bookmark to only show ‘overdue’ activities, which you can do by filtering on the activity status. Now when I select the ‘Emails’ bookmark I created, it will show all emails on the timeline. I did notice if I then selected the ‘Overdue’ bookmark it seems to add the second bookmark’s filter on top of the first bookmark’s filter, which means it was now showing me overdue emails. To see all overdue activities, I needed to remove all the filters first, before selecting the ‘overdue’ bookmark. I hope this is something that will be fixed, because this sort of takes away from the whole concept of easy filtering by clicking a bookmark..
Another thing that’s important to understand is when you’re creating bookmarks, they will be accessible from the timeline of any form! So, if I would open an opportunity row, or any other row that has a timeline, the bookmark will be accessible to me. You might need to refresh the page to see the bookmarks on other tables/forms, but it does work! Another thing I really like is that if you do a hard refresh, the bookmarks remain available. Lastly, I didn’t have to ‘enable’ the bookmark feature, I noticed it became available after my instance was upgraded to 2023 Release Wave 2.

Pin an activity

This feature does exactly what you probably guess it would do, it allows users to pin an activity to the top of the timeline for easy access. The difference between this feature and the feature mentioned above, is that when a record is pinned to the timeline, this will not just be visible to the user who pinned the activity, other users will see the pinned record as well. The pinning of an activity is on a per row bases. So for example, if I pinned an email to the timeline of an opportunity, everyone who has access to that opportunity will see the pinned activity on the timeline when they open the same row.

Configuring Pin Action

For users to be able to pin records, an admin has to configure the timeline and add the ‘pin’ command to the timeline. You can do this by navigating to make.powerapps.com and selecting the table you want to configure the timeline pin action for. Open the form you want to configure this for and click on the timeline. This will open the timeline properties window in the side pane on the right side of the screen. Under ‘Activities’, select the activity type you want users to be able to pin on the timeline. Check the box next to ‘Select and order commands’. Keep in mind only the first five commands will show, so make sure the pin command is one of those five commands. After you made the changes, be sure to save and publish your changes.

Once you configured all the forms for which you want users to have the ability to pin records to the timeline, there is one more thing you will need to do. Each user that needs access to this feature, needs to have a security role that has the ‘Timeline Pin’ privilege enabled. You can find this privilege by opening a security role and navigating to the ‘Custom Entities’ tab and scrolling down to the ‘Timeline Pin’ privilege. The circles need to be colored green for folks to get access. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!