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All robust platform can have a daunting data structure. With some, and in certain situations, you might not directly care about the intricacies. But if you are looking to create reports and visualization, identifying the complexities around data structure becomes quite important.
When working in Power BI, and connecting to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, the first step is to identify the entities and relationships that will help you to create relevant dashboards.
You could just ask a Dynamics developer to walk you through it, but that’s not always an option.
Back with older versions of Dynamics CRM, the SDK used to include these complex and large ERD diagrams. They were hard to read, and too stuffed of information. I remember spending time cleaning them up and removing non-relevant entities and relationship so I can present a small portion in documentation.
But fast forward to today. As a Power BI resource that is just starting to look at leveraging data from Dynamics 365, you can start first by looking at the entities. You can find a listing of the entities in the SDK (available for 8.2 at this time).
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UPDATE: The issue has been resolved. If you still encounter issues, open a support ticket.
Message:
OData: The feed’s metadata document appears to be invalid. Table: Subject.
If you’ve been working with Power BI and pulling data from Dynamics 365, you might have encountered an issue with the OData connection. This applies when connecting to Dynamics 365 either using Power BI, Excel, or even when using the Power BI content packs for Sales Analytics and Customer Service Analytics. You will either get the following error when using Power BI or Excel:
Or you will see in your logs on Power BI:
This is a relatively recent occurrence (first I’ve encountered it was on Feb. 07, 2018), and it does not affect all environments. It’s been identified as a known issue and logged on the Power BI support site at
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/support/
Waiting for the next update on a resolution.
As we’ve seen in the previous articles on How to work with Power BI in Dynamics 365 for Sales and Service as well as How to work with Power BI in Dynamics 365 for Sales and Service–Part 2, we can leverage the existing content packs to simplify our data presentation for the Sales and Service modules in Dynamics 365. And that works fine if your requirements conform to what’s already built in those content packs. But most of the time that’s not necessarily the case.
Let’s have a look at how you can work with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement data in Power BI from scratch. We’re going to be doing this from Power BI desktop. If you don’t have it installed on your machine, grab it from the Microsoft Store or from here.
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As we’ve seen in the previous post, getting content from Dynamics 365 for Sales or Service into Power BI is a relatively easy task when leveraging the Content Packs created by the great guys at the Power BI team.
Now, with the content packs in place, let’s go back to our Dynamics 365 instance and bring the data with a nice lipstick on.
First off, you must enable Power BI visualizations.
Go to Settings > Administration. Here open System Settings and on the Reporting tab, enable Power BI visuals.
With the obvious impact that Power BI brings to data analysis and visualization, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement stands to benefit from a few pre-packaged features available.
Not only we can bring CRM information onto Power BI, but we can also easily present Power BI elements inside Dynamics 365. So, it’s a win-win situation.
To make things easier for us all, the great guys at Power BI sat down and created two specific Content Packs for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement. They are the Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365 and the Customer Service Analytics for Dynamics 365.
Sweet, this these content packs in place, a Dynamics power user can start creating their own personal dashboards in CRM and share them with the team. This is where the beauty is, as you don’t need a developer or administrator involved once the content packs are made available.
Of course, you will want to leverage the support of your Power BI specialist to configure and extend the content packs to better fit your business, but once that’s done, Bob’s your Uncle. Read the rest of this entry »
