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Demo of an App
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform
So here we are in these sales hub. This is the Dynamics 365 application that is built on the Power platform. What we’re looking at here is also called model driven app. So looking here, we have a dashboard. This is our sales activity social dashboard. It shows us a chart here of our open opportunities, one of our open leads. We have some relationship assistant cards available to us. And as you scroll down, you’ll see we have additional charts available as well as a view here of our current activities. We have different dashboards to choose from. We can build these as a system administrator. And our users can build their own as well.
Now, let’s start here across this navigation across the top of the page. This is what we tend to call the waffle. This is what takes us to our other applications in this instance. And so if we need a direct route to any of these, we could get there from Dynamics. Then we have our application selector within Dynamics. These are all of the apps that are available to my user. I can go directly here. Home will take me to a selector page where I can see all of these with more information with tiles. I can drill down into field service, the resource hub, or any of these items from here.
As we go across the top, you’ll see we are in the Sales Hub. Then we can see this breadcrumb like experience. Keep an eye up here, and you’ll see as we drill down into records, more things will come here. And we can keep track of the trail that we are on. Across the top here, we continue on to a relevant search. We have the ability here to jump into advanced find. We can create new records. We have our personal settings right here. And then we have information of the currently logged in user. If you need to make changes to this, this is a change that will happen on your user record for your office subscription.
So if we click here on this hamburger looking item, we’ll see navigation within our application. We have these split up into different work areas. So right now, we’ve got my work, which is a higher level collection of details. Then as we go into customers, sales, various sales, collateral, and so on, we see more information available to us. As we see right here next to contacts, we have this extra item here. That means I have recently viewed records that I can look at. So if I want to navigate directly to one of these records, I can do so quickly from here. You’ll see that down here in quotes and orders, we don’t have any recently viewed records.
We haven’t looked at those yet. If we want to navigate directly to that grid view, we just click on that item. So here we clicked on lead, and that brought us to our leads view. You will see that we have a view selector. So these are our system views. These are all here in alphabetical order. And then if I were as a user to have my own personal views, they would show up at the bottom of this list as well. So now that we are here on our leads grid view, let’s have a look across the top here. We can show charts.
So when we click on this, it will open up and give us right here in our viewing area a chart that represents the data contained from the view that is feeding it. We can create new records from here, refresh the grid, delete, or deactivate items. This email will send a link of the record to someone, which would depend upon them having access to their security role to see that data inside Dynamics. We can trigger a flow from a record here. Export to Excel will also allow us to view records in Excel Online. We can run quick campaigns, create a new view from here, and so on. This is where we search for individual records.
Our views here have the ability to be sorted. So when we click on the column, it changes the sort. You’ll learn later on that we can build these different sort of capabilities as well as different views. You’ll see more details about that later on. We’ve got the ability to add filtering. When you want to open a record, it really is as simple as clicking here on this link to the primary field, which will open up that record, or double clicking on the record. If we had a record selected, we could do more items with it.
You can see that we’ve got follow and unfollow has now been added up here, the ability to add it to a marketing list, merge with another record. You can open it and edit it this way. For our purposes, let’s go ahead and click on Aaron and have a look at this lead record. So while we’re here on this lead record, we see there’s several things available to us. We see lots of information available. Here is a basic area of CRM like information. So we have a topic for this. We’ve got information and job title for Aaron. We have our timeline here. And this will give us our collection of activities that have been recorded against Aaron’s record.
So you can see here that we have this post that was created, when the record was created. Aaron is involved in a marketing journey. So here we have details about that marketing journey. With Aaron’s record, we don’t currently have any relationship insights. It’s a fairly new record for us. And [INAUDIBLE] Predict was able to find information about Aaron. As you scroll down, you’ll see that there’s several different items available about Aaron, the company that he works for and so on. Across the top here, we have our header fields. And this is a pretty valuable screen real estate. So as you’re configuring your organisation, you want to think about what should go here, what will make your users experience more effective.
These, as you see, are all editable items. So you can just interact with them. And they will stay there as you scroll down the page. We have different sections available on our forms. So we can go into details. We can look at related items from here and take us directly to the sub grids. We have additional products added, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, [INAUDIBLE] Predict. Notice here on our breadcrumb area that we now have a link to Aaron. And then across the top here, we have different actionable items that we can do. We can launch word templates from here. Additionally, launch these flows from here.
If you click on this arrow right here, it will give us the views of the records that are contained in that same originating view that we came from so that we can navigate directly to those without having to move on and back and forth between the grid views. I like to keep this close because it does take a lot of screen real estate. But it’s super easy to go back and forth to it. My specific user that I’m logged in as right now has access to more than one form. So we can navigate to that directly from here. If my user only had access to that one form, there would be no selector here.
So across the top of this form here, you’ll see this area right here. And this is called a business process flow. Here for our sales process flow, we have the lead stage, which is qualify. Then we move on to develop, propose, and closing. You’ll see here in a minute that as we proceed through develop, propose, and close, that that actually is when the lead becomes an opportunity record. For our purposes, a lead is a lightweight potential of a sale. Perhaps, we’ll have a transaction as we progress through our relationship with Aaron. Then once we graduate that lead to become an opportunity that’s more likely that we will have that deal.
We’ll see the business process flow has actions available to us. Once we click on this item, we can add some details here. We can change the purchase time frame. We could offer some budget information, maybe give some details about the purchase process. For our purposes right now, we’re going to graduate this lead to become an opportunity. So to do so, we qualify that lead. And you’ll see that this is doing some spinning for us. And what’s happening in the background is some creation of new records. So when this finishes, we’ll have a brand new opportunity record, as well as a new contact record and a new account record.
We get all of those because that was the information we had available to us on this lead record. So we had Aaron’s information– first name and last name. That becomes our contact. We had the company that Aaron represents available to us. That becomes an account record. And then the opportunity record keeps that relationship to that originating lead. And from there, it will show us more items we can use to perhaps get more information about that potential sale that we have. You’ll notice we have a few things that are different now. But first, I want to go back and have a quick look at that record we just retired.
So if we go back to qualify, you’ll see that our lead record has now been marked as read only. None of these items can be changed at this point in time because we are no longer as this lead. We have now graduated to become an opportunity. So I’m going to switch this over here to our opportunity record. And now we’ll go back. And we’ll see that we have additional things available. We have a new form available to us where we see slightly different information. On our time line control here, we have had a phone call record that was created. We have some automation logic in place that will create that automatically for us.
So that we have the follow up to set that phone call. So perhaps maybe we can work harder on getting this opportunity to close. We have this auto generated post to let us know when this was qualified as an opportunity. You’ll see here that we can add more items directly from here on our timeline. If we wanted to look for a specific item– say we had had a longer term relationship with this individual and maybe we have some past activities we would like to look at a reference– maybe there’s too many for us to quickly manage. So we can go ahead and do that here and search for these items directly here from within our timeline pane.
Back to our business process flow, we can progress through our business process flow. As a customizer, you have the opportunity here to add some automation, such as workflows that are triggered off the changes here. You also have the option to add some restrictions around how quickly your users can proceed through this based on some tasks that may need to be completed beforehand. So we will step through our stages here. And we can mark those stages completed. And you’ll see that we can move on to the next stage. Now as a user who would be modifying this record, I would maybe to add an item here. Let’s add a budget amount.
Down here on this bottom right corner, we have this save icon. This will be available to your users whenever they want to click Save, even though your forms do have an autosave function that will be saving their changes as they go along. Sometimes users just feel more comfortable having the ability to explicitly click a Save button. As we progress through our opportunity here, we can add product line items. We could perhaps add field service potential items if that was something that we needed. All of those to proceed through this opportunity however best serves our business model to generate that sale. So this opportunity can grow and become some quotes, can have invoice related to it, and so on.
Now all of these things that I’ve demonstrated today have basically been around the sales process. But all of these constructs are the same regardless of what the business model is. If you’re using Dynamics for your customer engagement for sales or for customer service or for field service or to manage any other business processes that you have within your business. Every business has different needs. And all of the Dynamics platform, all of the Power platform can offer us those items to manage that data and those business needs for our own organisation. And you’ll continue to learn more about all these moving parts that I just showed throughout the series of these courses.
In the previous step, we explored The Dynamics 365 Apps. In this step, we demonstrate an application.
In this video, Julie Yak takes us through a demo of an application. We look at the Sales Hub and sales activity social dashboard built on the Power Platform with various charts and functionalities available.
Join the discussion
Throughout the steps ahead, we will cover how to create these different charts, dashboards and functionalities shown in the video. Which features of the app are you looking forward to learning about most?Use the discussion area below to let us know your thoughts. Try to respond to at least one other post and once you’re happy with your contribution, click the Mark as complete button to check the Step off, then you can move to the next step, which is An overview of CDS and CDM.
This article is from the online course:
Dynamics 365: Using Power Platform Applications
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Dynamics 365: Using Power Platform Applications
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