Learn, do, earn with Dynamics 365 - Session 8

Jess is a very motivated young lady. She works hard on this course as well as on a graduate scheme with eBecs. She researched her subject and applied it to an activity that made sense for her: running. She has created an entity to log her daily runs and then recorded fake times and distances, of course, I told you she's a busy lady!

She was clearly very well prepared and very confident on her presentation, which comes to show her commitment to her work - take that, millennial haters!

You can find her detailed article on Views, Charts and Dashboards here, and you can see her shine in the session recording you can find at the bottom of this article.

Document Templates

Apart from Jess's awesome presentation, I also did a quick run through document templates in Dynamics 365.

This handy feature allows users to generate Word and Excel documents straight from Dynamics 365, without having to write code, as we used to do before Dynamics CRM 2016.

You can generate documents that contain entity information, as well as information from related entities.

This is very useful if you want to email Quotes, or Invoices or if you have approval processes. The latter is the most common used in my experience.

Example: Cake shop has tier A customers who can get massive amounts of cake for various parties. The cake shop owner agrees to get paid one week after cake delivery, but wants each sale to be approved by the chef, the storage manager and himself. The sales person would then export the opportunity with all the products and email the documentation, where everyone can sign it off.

There are some simple documents you can generate out of the box, but if you want to change the layout, add more fields or create new documents, you can do so as shown in this step by step guide, or this one.

When creating document templates be sure to have some patience. The fields and related entities you can use have their schema name, so it takes a little bit of getting used to. You also have ALL the fields as they are in the database. Just something to keep in mind when estimating.

Session 8 recording to see all this in action. I totally recommend Jess's bit (23' onwards).

Pic source: https://www.simicart.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/analytics-1.jpg