What I learned attending Dynamics 365 Saturday in Lawrenceburg, IN

Last Saturday I attended Dynamics 365 Saturday event in Lawrenceburg, IN. The event was packed with talented subject matter experts presenting on a ton of different topics from Finance and Operations to Customer Engagement, Business Central and Power Platform.

I have such a passion for presenting and Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement so this was a perfect combination! Besides being able to learn and share knowledge at these types of events, I personally also really enjoy the networking part. I met the very talented individuals Aaron Back and Vivek Bavishi who were both presenting on several topics as well. Unfortunately since I was presenting 5.5 sessions (5 full sessions and 1 shared session with Meghan McMullen) I didn’t have time to actually sit back and attend any of the other presentations.
This didn’t stop me from learning tho! I had a great conversation with Aaron about Dynamics 365 CE field controls, where he showed me some things I hadn’t seen before!

He also showed me something very similar to Organization Insights, which allows users to view metrics about their D365 instances, which I will share with everyone in this article.
Note: The original Organization Insights has been deprecated

In order to view the Common Data Service for Apps dashboard, navigate to the Power Platform Admin Center and select Common Data Service under Analytics. You’ll now see the Common Data Service for Apps analytics, where additional tabs are available across the top. You can view data related to Users, Access Modes, Entity Usage, etc.
You also have the option to change the environment and the data range for which you’re reviewing data!

New Entity Customization Interface
Aaron also showed me the new Dynamics 365 form editor which is part of the new customization interface. In order to access it, you have to navigate to https://make.powerapps.com and expand the data section on the left hand side. Click on entities to get a full list of all the Dynamics 365 CE entities. Once you click on an entity, you’ll see anything related to that entity on the horizontal tabs, such as fields, relationships, business rules, views, forms, etc. I will be focusing on the form editor in this article.

Form Editor (Preview)
The Form editor is currently in preview, and unfortunately not all the functionality that is available in the ‘classic’ form editor is available in the new editor a of yet, but the thing I like about this interface is that we’re able to see what the form looks like as we are configuring it. There are also some new features that are not available in the ‘classic’ form editor today.

Fields
When navigating to the fields section on the new form editor, this shows us a list of fields that are available for this entity. Just like in the classic interface we can choose to show all fields or only show fields that are available. A new feature is the ability to search for fields, so there will be less need to scroll down the list of fields which can be time consuming.

Components
When clicking on the components button on the left side, this allows users to add tabs and sections to the form. This is also not a drag-and-drop interface, users will have to click on the ellipse on the right side of the column tab or column section and select ‘Add to Form’. The search bar above the layout section allows users to search for a particular type of tab or section.

Tree View
Here we’re able to see the different tabs, sections and fields that live in those sections in a hierarchy type of view. I was hoping to be able to drag and drop fields from here, but unfortunately that is not possible (yet??).

Also note the ‘Switch to classic’ button on the command bar, which will open the current form in the classic interface.

All and all some pretty new cool stuff, and reason enough to attend a Dynamics 365 Saturday event in your area! Click here for a list of upcoming events and I hope you meet you out there sometime soon!