Jukka Niiranen Digital Illustrated Finland

In CRM 2015 Online Update 1 when the user clicks "Export to Excel - Open in Excel Online", the contents of the CRM records view is not shown in the same format as specified in the CRM user's format settings. Instead the Excel Online window always uses the US format. Changing the user settings in Office 365 user profile doesn't seem to have any effect.

While viewing this data in Excel Online the wrong formats are mainly an inconvenience for most users. However, if the user makes modifications to any cell values and tries to import the changed data or new rows back to CRM, this will cause incorrect data to be entered to CRM, or alternatively import error entries as CRM will interpret the values in the format set for the CRM user, not the ones that Excel Online has used for constructing the import file behind the scenes.

For example, if I have an entity with a date field and a record that has June 1st as the value, this will show up as "1.6.2015" in the CRM UI, based on the Finnish format settings. When I open the same records in Excel Online, the value will read as "6/1/2015" based on the US settings that are applied there. Now, if I want to set that date to today's date, which is June 14th, I'll need to change the value to "6/14/2015", following the US format. When I then try to save this data back to CRM, this record will not be imported, as CRM will interpret the value as "6.14.2015", which is obviously not valid since there isn't a month to match the number 14.

When an activity like task is created from the Social Pane on the parent entity form, the system does not populate the Regarding field upon the first create event of the activity. Instead you can see from audit history that there's a second update event on the activity right after create, in which the Regarding field is filled with the reference to the parent entity.

This is a problem if you'd want to have a real-time workflow run right after a user creates a new task from the Social Pane. The workflow logic cannot reference any fields from the parent entity - or even be aware of for which entity the task has been created in the first place. Automation of any follow-up actions from the activity create event is therefore impossible, since it would only work in scenarios where the user creates the activity from the normal list view (even Activity Associated View), but not the Social Pane.

In my opinion, functional differences like this should not exist for a very core feature of a CRM platform, i.e. managing communication and actions towards business records. Especially when the platform contains a prominent yet uncustomizable UI component like the Social Pane.

You can trigger a Microsoft Flow from Dynamics 365 Command Bar and create various posts, like messages in Microsoft Teams. Great! It would be really convenient if we could also replicate these messages as native Activity Feeds Posts inside Dynamics 365 database, thus directly visible on the entity form. Unfortunately the Flow connector for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement doesn't expose the Regarding field when trying to define field values in the "Create a new record" step.

Please expose the Regarding field for Microsoft Flow. Since Activity Feeds are still very much present in V9 Unified Interface, it doesn't look like there's a plan to deprecate them, so fully supporting them as a mechanism for status updates related to business records would be very welcome.