I wrote a total of three articles on the 2020 Release wave 1, which can be found on this blog. There were a few things that didn’t work in my Dynamics 365 environment at the time I wrote the previous articles, which meant that I couldn’t really report on them. Some of these items have been fixed after working with Microsoft support so I wanted to write another article regarding those items. The items that I am going to discuss in this article are:
- Knowledge Base Search enhancements
- Enhancements in the queue page
- Configurable Case Resolution Form
- Feature I found
Knowledge Base Search Enhancements
As stated in my previous article, there is now a separate area where users can search for and view knowledge base articles. Users can find the knowledge search by logging into the customer service hub, selecting the ‘Service’ area and clicking on ‘Knowledge Search’ under the ‘Knowledge’ section. My issue was that when I was searching for knowledge base articles, nothing would load, it looked like it was searching the database but the screen remained blank. I was having the same issue on the case record, no knowledge base articles were showing up and after a few minutes, I would see an error message: “Sorry, there was an error loading the search results. Please retry and if the issue persists, please contact Microsoft support.”
I found that the reason this wasn’t working in my instance was that relevance search was turned on and that caused an issue. I turned it off by clicking on the gear in the top right corner, and selecting ‘Advanced Settings”, then navigate to ‘Settings’ and ‘System Settings’. The ability to enable or disable relevance search is on the ‘General’ tab.
After I turned this off my problem with the knowledge base search not loading was fixed. After 24 hours I turned it back on, and after that, it was still working. I believe that Microsoft is working on a fix prior to the actual rollout of this functionality, but if you’re testing this out in a sandbox and it’s not working, this is how you can get it to work.
Enhancements in the queue page
I’m not sure if this wasn’t working or if I didn’t realize what these updates were, but I think I found them, after comparing navigation to my instance that doesn’t have the 2020 release wave 1 enabled.
Today queues don’t have record set navigation, which will be enabled in 2020 release wave 1. For those of you who aren’t familiar with record set navigation, this is when you open a record from a view, after which you’ll see an arrow icon next to the save record that allows you to pull up the record set navigation view. We currently have this for a lot of entities and that might be why I didn’t notice this enhancement. When a user opens a record from the queue, they can then access this type of navigation to review other items in the queue as needed.
Configurable Case Resolution Form
It turns out that something happened to my instance which set the case resolution entity to ‘read-only’ for mobile. This was very strange because all I did was make a copy of my production environment into my sandbox environment (my production environment does NOT have the case resolution entity set to read-only for mobile) and then I opted in for early access. If you want to know how opt-in for early access, you can read that here.
When I set the ‘Resolve Case Dialog’ to use the quick create dialog or the customizable dialog (this can be configured under the Service Configuration section in the Service Management area), I wasn’t able to close a case. I kept getting the error ‘Selected entity is read-only for this client‘ because of this improper setting on the case resolution entity.
I worked with Microsoft support to get this resolved because those settings are grayed out in the solution file, which means I can’t change them on my end. After the support team changed the setting, this started working! Now let’s talk about the two different options I just mentioned. When you configure how you want to resolve dialog for cases to act, you have 3 options:
- Standard Dialog
- Customizable Dialog
- Quick Create Dialog
The standard dialog is exactly that, the close dialog box that we have seen from the beginning. If you want to continue using this dialog box, then make sure you pick that option.
The customizable dialog is also a pop-up type of form, similar to the standard dialog but as the name of the form suggests, we have the ability to configure this form, add fields, remove fields, etc. When you select this option when configuring the resolve case dialog option, the system will use the ‘information’ main form of the case resolution entity. So any form changes need to be made to that form. When configuring the system to use the quick create dialog, it will load the quick create form of the case resolution entity when a user closes a case. The name of the form is Case Resolution Quick Create Form, but there is only one quick create form for this entity, so you can’t miss it. This form is also configurable, just like the customizable dialog mentioned above.
Quick Find
One last improvement which I wanted to mention is the quick find enhancement called ‘Search this view’. This gives users the ability to perform a search in the currently selected view. This search applies the current view’s filters while searching on the fields that are configured in the quick find view. The results will also not be shown in the quick find view, instead, the current view will be used meaning the columns used in the current view will be shown in the results. Search example: Jack owns a contact called Jake Smith. If I am in the ‘My Contacts’ view and I am searching Jake Smith, the results will show 0. If I change the view to ‘All Contacts’ I will find the contact. Keep in mind that this functionality can be turned on/off from system settings on the General tab, under Set up Search. I thought it was important to mention this feature because this is a big change to how users search for data and/or more importantly, how they get search results. If you are going to implement this search I would recommend informing your users. If you don’t, you risk people not realizing that they are searching a view that’s already filtered (I.E My leads showing only leads assigned to the logged in user) resulting in search results that might not be as expected…
I hope you enjoyed this post! Be sure to check back next week for a new article!