In this article, I demonstrate the transformation of Dynamics 365 UTC Date/Time values to New Zealand (NZ) Local Date/Time and Date values in Power BI, taking into account Daylight Saving Time.

This demonstration highlights a significant difference in the transformation of these values when the Power BI data model is refreshed in Power BI Desktop versus the Power BI Online Service.

NZ Standard Time (NZ ST) is UTC+12 and NZ Daylight Saving Time (NZ DST) is UTC+13. NZL DST starts on the first Sunday of September with clocks going forward 1 hour at 2:00 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday of April with clocks going back 1 hour at 3:00 a.m. In 2019, NZ DST ends on 7th April and starts on 29th September.

The following tables show some Dynamics 365 Created On (UTC) Date/Time values loaded into a Power BI data model and then transformed to Date/Time and Date values using several different transformation approaches.

In the following image, the data model is hosted and has been refreshed in Power BI Desktop on a local workstation where the Time Zone is “(UTC+12) Auckland, Wellington”. The records enclosed in the red rectangles show the Created On (UTC) Date/Time values that fall within NZ DST. The green highlight indicates which of these have been transformed to the correct corresponding NZ Local Date/Time values; i.e. the transformations have applied an offset of +13 hours for NZ DST and +12 hours for NZ ST.

The columns in this table are as follows:

• Created On (UTC): Is the Date/Time as it is stored in Dynamics 365. In Power BI these UTC Date/Time values are Date/Time/Zone values; e.g. 6/04/2019 12:00:00 p.m. +00:00 in the Power BI data view and 6/04/2019 12:00:00 p.m. in the Power BI report view.

• Created On (Date/Time): Is the UTC Date/Time/Zone value transformed to a Date/Time value in Power BI using the Data Type transformation option in Power Query.

• Created On (To Local): is the UTC Date/Time/Zone value transformed to a Local Time value in Power BI using the Local Time transformation option in Power Query.

• Created On (Custom FX): Is the UTC Date/Time/Zone value transformed to NZ Local Date/Time value using a custom function in Power Query.

• Created On (Date): Is the UTC Date/Time/Zone value transformed to a Date value in Power BI using the Data Type transformation option in Power Query.

When published to the Power BI Online Service the same values are initially displayed. This is until the data model is then refreshed.

In the following image, the data model is hosted and has been refreshed in the Power BI Online Service where the Time Zone is “(UTC+00) Universal Co-ordinated Time”. This cannot currently be changed. The yellow highlight indicates which values have not been transformed to the correct corresponding NZ Local Date/Time and Date values. In fact, these are all UTC Date/Time and Date values. They have not been transformed to NZ Local Date/Time and Date values. The only exceptions are the Date/Time values highlighted in green that have been transformed using a custom function in Power BI.

This is an important issue to be aware of. This issue applies to other Time Zones as well. In the Power BI Online Service, the data model is refreshed in the “(UTC+00) Universal Co-ordinated Time” time zone. Therefore Power Query and Data Analysis Expression (DAX) Date/Time and Date transformations and functions such as Now() and Today() are based on that time zone for data models that are refreshed from within the Power BI Service.

It is not best practice to store Dates and Times in the same column in a Power BI data model. They should be split into separate Date and Time columns. Also, the time portion only needs to be retained if it is required for analysis and reporting purposes, otherwise it can be discarded. However, any Time Zone transformation should be performed first in order to ensure that the resulting Date and Time values are correct.

In my next article, I will describe the custom function that has been used to correctly transform the Dynamics 365 UTC Date/Time/Zone values to local Date/Time values. UTC Date/Time/Zone values transformed using this function can then also be transformed to Date values.

Background: what is an API?

API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. With more growing inclination towards mobile technologies and cloud based operations, more emphasis has been growing towards leveraging JSON APIs, instead of using conventional SOAP based web services and the associated trade-offs. Think of the time when you used to go to individual websites with your credentials eg. Facebook, LinkedIn, Makemytrip, etc.) And you used to browse through various utility sections, tirelessly. Owing to increasing demands in APIs, now you can simply switch to associated webApps from the PlayStore/Apple-Store of your phone, and browse through various sections effortlessly. 

Dynamics 365 for finance and operations throughout its journey till Ax2012, vividly supported usages of SOAP based exchanges through its usages of AIF utilities and other exchanges. AX7/Dynamics 365 has a robust integration capabilities using both SOAP and oData exchanges by leveraging its Entity framework. You can outbound your data easily exposing the oData endpoint to an external system and let them play with your data (of course through proper validation/authorization).

When it comes to consuming external APIs, the story gets tricky as now you need to validate by using a precarious ways of authentication and authorizations, before you set to send/receive actual information. APIs behave in different ways of authentication, and your code must be ready to consider/accommodate accordingly. 

How APIs are linked with modern day world

Imagine you are building an application which allows the end-user to view themselves on a map and then book a taxi nearby (like Uber). Now you need access to certain information to make this application work (such as an accurate map). What do you do? Instead of making a map based application (which requires massive data collection), you search for alternatives and say you stumble upon something called the Google Maps API. This API allows you to access accurate map data at a particular price. PROBLEM SOLVED. You develop your application, use this API and the application gets deployed. You become a Billionaire.

So, based on the above scenario, an API is nothing but an endpoint (like a url) to which you send a request and receive back data.

So, in the above case, UBER makes requests to Google’s servers for map based data through their Gmap API (since Google already has all the map data) and pays a fee for the data.

Hence, in this case, an API is nothing but accessing information stored in databases/datawarehouses of other 3rd parties.(In this case Uber accessing data stored in Google’s databases…)

So, an API is something which eases/enhances your software development.

REST API

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful Web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of Web services, such as SOAP Web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

As the Internet industry progresses, creating a REST API becomes more concrete with emerging best practices. As RESTful web services don't follow a prescribed standard except for HTTP, it's important to build your RESTful API in accordance with industry best practices to ease development and increase client adoption.

CRUD!

The name REpresentational State Transfer (REST) implies exchanging data. The server acts as a data store, and the client retrieves and stores data. The server transfers object states to the client. The client can update these states too.

Most REST APIs implement CRUD: Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete.
Generally supported sets of API methods are: GET, POST, DELETE, GET, PATCH, and PUT. These are HTTP methods that correspond to operations.
We can map these operations into CRUD.

• POST—Create
• GET—Retrieve
• PUT / PATCH—Update
• DELETE—Delete

Steps for a successful integration

When you know your business needs, you need to set up a channel with the third party. When you do that the API asks you for your identity. Once granted you can share/receive the information from the endpoint.

Step 1: setting up channel

Here you need to define the URL that you need to access. In general API's are like below, they have server name, paths, etc.

http://<server name>/v1/export/Publisher/Standard_Publisher_Report?format=csv

There are mainly 4 methods involve in API Testing like GET, POST, Delete, and PUT.

• GET- the GET method is used to extract information from the given server using a given URI. While using GET request, it should only extract data and should have no other effect on the data.

• POST- A POST request is used to create a new entity. It can also be used to send data to the server, for example, customer information, file upload, etc. using HTML forms.

• PUT- Create a new entity or update an existing one.

• DELETE- Removes all current representations of the target resource given by a URI.

In D365, you can initialize this by:

System.Net.WebRequestwebReq = System.Net.WebRequest::Create(<URL>);

webReq.set_Method(“POST”); //Alternately you can do a ‘GET’ here

webReq.set_ContentType(‘application/json’); //a RESTful service generally makes use of JSONs

Step 2: Authentication

Authentication vs Authorization

The two functions are often tied together in single solutions – in fact, one of the solutions we’re going to discuss in a moment is a hybrid system of authentication and authorization. As such, and due to their similarities in functional application, it’s quite easy to confuse these two elements.

The easiest way to divide authorization and authentication is to ask: what do they actually prove? In simple terms, Authentication is when an entity proves an identity. In other words, Authentication proves that you are who you say you are. This is akin to having an identification card – an item given by a trusted authority that the requester, such as a police officer, can use as evidence that suggests you are in fact who you say you are.

Authorization is an entirely different concept, though it is certainly closely related. In simple terms, Authorization is when an entity proves a right to access. In other words, Authorization proves you have the right to make a request. When you try to go backstage at a concert or an event, you don’t necessarily have to prove that you are who you say you are – you furnish the ticket, which is de facto proof that you have the right to be where you’re trying to get into.

Generally available options are:

1. Using bearer tokens
2. Credentials(using user IDs and password) – the ‘Basic Auth’ mode
3. Using API key
4. Digest Auth
5. OAuth 1.0
6. OAuth 2.0
7. Hawk Authentication
8. AWS Signature
9. NTLM Authentication

Note on

OAuth authentication

OAuthallows an end user's account information to be used by third-party services, such as Facebook, without exposing the user's password. Generally, OAuth provides to clients a "secure delegated access" to server resources on behalf of a resource owner. It specifies a process for resource owners to authorize third-party access to their server resources without sharing their credentials.

API key

The API key is a unique identifier that is used to authenticate requests associated with your project for usage and billing purposes.

Digest Authentication

Hawk is an authentication mechanism, famous because of its replay attack protection.It is a way to prevent users to tamper with request content or to replay the same request multiple times.This is especially useful in games where you don't want users to publish fake scores or if you call costly API's (send SMS, trigger a costly lambda job, etc.).

Digest access authentication is one of the agreed-upon methods a web server can use to negotiate credentials, such as username or password, with a user's web browser. This can be used to confirm the identity of a user before sending sensitive information, such as online banking transaction history. It applies a hash function to the username and password before sending them over the network. In contrast, basic access authentication uses the easily reversible Base64 encoding instead of hashing, making it non-secure unless used in conjunction with TLS.

Berar token

A Bearer Token is an opaque string, not intended to have any meaning to clients using it. Some servers will issue tokens that are a short string of hexadecimal characters, while others may use structured tokens such as JSON Web Tokens.

Define a header

The REST headers and parameters contain a wealth of information that can help you track down issues when you encounter them. HTTP Headers are an important part of the API request and response as they represent the meta-data associated with the API request and response. Headers carry information for:

1. Request and Response Body
2. Request Authorization
3. Response Caching 
4. Response Cookies

In D365 you can define a header as follows:

System.Net.WebHeaderCollection header;

header = webRequest.Headers;

Generally you can pass on a token to a request by:

header.Add(“Authorization”, token); //Where token is a string variable containing the obtained token.

Passing on a JSON body on your request

System.IO.StreamWriter writer = new System.IO.StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream());

Writer.writerLine(jsonBody);//Where jsonBody is a string based JSON payload you wish to pass on

Writer.Flush();

Writer.Close();

Writer.Dispose();

Obtaining the response

System.Net.WebResponse response = webRequest.getResponse();

StrstrResponse = Response.getResponseStream().ReadToEnd();

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There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Strategy 3: Optimize the opportunity management process with a more relevant approach

Every bank and credit union has customer acquisition as a top priority.

Meet customers and prospects where they are – and set goals for sales, service, and retention

Banks must segment, profile, and track leads reliably to optimize customer acquisition strategies across all channels.

Strengthening the customer experience starts with sales and onboarding.

How Dynamics 365 can help: Utilize networks, identify the best targets, and proactively manage the sales and service process

To generate the best leads, banks must interact with customers in their centers of influence. Communicate with customers effectively by leveraging multiple channels, including social media. Multichannel marketing campaigns and networking integrations with LinkedIn provide the ability to reach customers with the products they want in the manner they want.

Crowe CRM for Banking allows you to provide proactive, personalized offers based on in-depth analysis and customer insights. Leads are scored and prioritized, which helps focus your resources on those most likely to close.

Streamlining and managing the sales cycle aids in delivering timely, responsive customer proposals and can shorten sales cycles.

Having a holistic view of the customer enables cross-departmental collaboration, which can improve team selling and win rates. Posting to the customer timeline allows for additional collaboration opportunities.

Only 31 percent of consumers think their financial institutions know them and their needs well.

Source: The Financial Brand

The relationship assistant feature facilitates push notifications, including guided selling processes. For example, if a customer meets the profile for a new credit card, the relationship assistant brings that to the attention of the staff, who can then initiate the sales process with talk tracks to propose a new card to the customer.

11 percent of consumers left their bank in the past year – and switching to virtual banks is at double-digit levels.

Source: Accenture

Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper: 5 Ways Banks Overcome Strategic Challenges with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.

Crowe CRM for Banking

Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With Crowe CRM for Banking for Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.

For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit www.crowe.com/crm.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

Follow us on Twitter: @CroweCRM

The post 5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 3 appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Are you manually exporting data from your ERP system to Excel and compiling several spreadsheets? Are you manually formatting reports and presentations? If this is you, there is hope and no need to dread over your company’s budgeting process. There are tools to improve your budgeting and reporting processes. We will cover key features you could expect from modern corporate performance management (CPM) solutions.

Budgeting and Reporting Can be Easy

Take Excel to the next step. Every organization needs a powerful financial reporting tool to speed up decisions to remain competitive. Report writers enable organizations to analyze and manage their data without leaving any faulty data. It may be a shock that many people design their spreadsheets to manage critical business processes with very little auditing. This means that most spreadsheets have a poor foundation which leaves room for potential issues. Find a financial tool that offers the benefit of Excel-based reporting and form design including a database-driven storage and cloud-based architecture to make budgeting and reporting much easier and simpler.

Modern CPM solutions, like Solver, have powerful Excel report designer add-ins that connect to a cloud portal where all end users enter budgets and run reports in a browser environment. It is necessary to communicate the value of budgeting to the entire company and how it supports strategic goals. Every organization should find a solution that has customizable budgeting templates to help organize and deploy your budget according to specific industry best practices.

When Analyzing the Finished Budget, Use Power BI

Many CPM tools offer modules that make it easier to deploy and maintain your dashboards. The ideal solution provides a user-friendly, pre-configured cloud data warehouse that has several data connectors. Consolidating all of your data sources with a modern data warehouse makes it faster and easier to design dashboards and to analyze your data with powerful dashboard solutions like Microsoft’s Power BI. By utilizing a reporting tool like Solver with a leading analytics and dashboard tool like Power BI, your company will get the best of CPM and BI. Learn more to see how these two Microsoft Azure-based solutions will help you.

Clearly, a CPM solution has the ultimate goal of helping a company make faster and better business decisions. Instead of carrying the burden of maintaining multiple report writers and a lack of enterprise-wide dashboards, a CPM software tool like Solver offers reporting, planning and dashboards across many systems.

If you want to read more on how to improve your budgeting, planning, and forecasting, read more here.

With technology rapidly changing around us, you — like most business owners — are regularly faced with the tough decision of sticking with the older technology you know or upgrading to state-of-the-art systems. At this point, Microsoft Dynamics GP is falling behind in the races, with Microsoft Dynamics Business Central taking the clear lead. Don’t get left behind when it comes time to decided to fork out the cash to upgrade your on-premise system or head for the cloud.

The reality is that your current Microsoft Dynamics GP has limitations that are going to start impacting your bottom line and your growth rate. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is the next iteration of the company’s cloud-based business applications. What Microsoft has rolled out with Dynamics 365 Business Central gives you all the tools you need to improve your business’s performance. However, it is entirely understandable to approach the decision with caution on the onset, as migrating from an on-premise system to a cloud system is a huge undertaking.

Cutting Costs in the Cloud

At a glance, the cost of switching from on-premise enterprise resource planning to the cloud doesn’t make any sense — the cost of the subscription service for the cloud is hefty. However, when you start breaking down the numbers and looking at all the expenses that are associated with your on-premise ERP system, you’ll begin to understand why so many companies are moving to the cloud as a way to save money.

There are five key costs that take a toll when you’re running an on-premise ERP system. These costs are the annual maintenance, support services, upgrades, hardware, and full-time IT staff. On the flip side, if you’re migrating to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, you’ll find that you need significantly fewer dedicated IT staff, all upgrades and updates are included in your subscription, and your costs per year will be more stable and easier to predict. All very good things for your bottom line.

Focus on Features

The other primary reason companies are switching from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is because of access to more useful features. The system includes built-in intelligent business apps that will allow you and your team to connect and share data about sales, inventory, and more.

If your company is already operating Office, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is a game-changer. It creates a seamless integration between the ERP and the entire Microsoft stack. Just one of the many possibilities this creates is for your sales team to create sales orders in the ERP via their email.

The system also offers industry-specific tools that will allow you to take full advantage of the flexibility of Microsoft Dynamic Business Central. Part of this increased flexibility is your team’s ability to effortlessly tap into data and access resources from mobile devices — allowing you and your employees to work on the run. Of course, the reality is that there are so many more features to the system, including charting financial performance in real-time, end-to-end view across operations, and the ability to adapt to regulatory discrepancies between the various states and countries you operate in.

Final Thoughts: Is it Time to Upgrade ?

Having all your systems integrated into a single platform via Microsoft Dynamics Business Central will provide essential insights into the well-being of your company and will allow you to generate the reports you need to make smart business decisions.

Though migrating from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central will begin saving you money within a couple of years and offers a host of powerful features, the decision to make the move should not be made lightly. If you think that Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is the right fit for your company, reach out to the experts at Qixas Group before you take the plunge.

We are back from the travel bursts, some reorganization, and “hold my beer I’m too busy to do it myself” spurts. The first post after this short hiatus is not going to be about Power Automate, however tempting it might be. We’ll get to that subject later on this week. In the meantime, something a bit more pressing.

Imagine you have working code, something innocuous, something perhaps like this fragment:

using (var client = new CrmServiceClient(connStr))
{
  if (client.IsReady)
  {
    Trace.WriteLine(
      $"User={client.GetMyCrmUserId()}");
    Trace.WriteLine(
      $"Org={client.ConnectedOrgFriendlyName}");
  }
  else
  {
    Trace.WriteLine("NOT READY");
  }
}

You admire this bastion of reliability for a second then go get a refill for a drink of your choice. When you come back 5 minutes later, your defenses are crushed and the code stopped working (a.k.a NOT READY message). No, this is not a joke, yes, participants of the Toronto BAD Masterclass witnessed it in real time and yes, it did happen in real life though perhaps less dramatic, just replace going for a drink with going home and coming back the next morning.

The worst part is that the logs won’t give you anything. Even if you enable logging as per Use Trace Not Console nugget of wisdom, you’d get an infamous fault exception at best:

Error: 
An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault
was received from the other party.  
See the inner FaultException  
for the fault code
and detail.

It does read like a mediocre haiku when you format it like that, doesn’t it?

If you have your own authentication implementation that goes a bit deeper (as we’ve done in our PHP Toolkit), you may get a less cryptic message

AADSTS53003: Blocked by conditional access.

Which is still a mystery – what conditional access? As with any murder story, there are two parts to whodunnit.

Part 1: The diligent

Unbeknownst to you, a curious but, unfortunately, overzealous and not very thorough Azure AD administrator discovered baseline protection policies and, among those, ability to block legacy authentication. “We don’t use POP, IMAP, SMTP, do we” – reasonably argued the admin and enabled the policy.

Turns out, “legacy authentication protocol” is a very broad and not very well defined scope that includes any user-level protocol where MFA cannot be applied. That unfortunately, includes WS-Trust authentication that is widely used by our beloved SOAP client that, as of the time of writing, is still a foundation of the SDK client including CrmServiceClient from XrmTooling.

Part 2: The oblivious

You guessed it – the connection string in the example above was using username/password combination. Perhaps, it was a historical oversight. Perhaps, despite the server-to-server authentication being available for a long time, the coder was clinging to the non-interactive user logins. Whatever is the reason, combined with the shooting in the dark admin, the code fell apart.

It was a hunting accident. Admin was aiming for a sitting duck (or so they thought), the code just happened to be in the line of sight.

Part 3: The solution

Review your code for any authentication that still uses username/password and replace it with the OAuth equivalent. If the process is interactive, use ADAL libraries. If the process is in a dungeon, use server-to-server authentication variation of those. Easiest way to deal with these scenario is to use XrmTooling with its plethora of authentication methods, both interactive and not so.

But whatever you do

STOP USING named Office 365 account for authentication

Tîpp Jäår

If you have Azure AD Premium, you should be able to buy some extra time by adding a policy exception that would let WS-Trust through. I wouldn’t recommend it though – could get messy and it’s better to fix the code, anyway.

Cover photo by kat wilcox from Pexels

We have exciting news to share! Microsoft is launching a US partner incentive program that spans across not one, not two, but three cloud solutions giving you the opportunity to earn up to $150,000!¹

Launching Sky’s the Limit: Triple Play! – Register now!

Want to grow your business and delight your customers by modernizing them into the cloud? There’s never been a better time to start a new or grow an existing Microsoft cloud practice. Now through March 31, 2020 you can earn additional incentives by adding new customers and increasing Microsoft Azure consumption.

You can pick and choose! Participate in one, two or all three of the cloud lift-off incentives and get rewarded. With Sky’s the Limit: Triple Play the earning options are in your hands.

So, what’s next?

1. Learn how each cloud lift-off incentive works on the Sky’s the Limit: Triple Play page where you can get to know the program, read the Terms and Conditions (Azure Lift Off T&Cs, Office 365/Microsoft 365 and Dynamics Lift Off T&Cs)** and review the FAQs.
2. Register for the program and receive your incentive targets right away.
3. Attend our November US SMB Partner Insider Call on November 6^th, to learn more about this incentive program.
4. Reach out to STLPromo@microsoft.com with any additional questions.
5. Start earning extra money with Sky’s the Limit: Triple Play today!

**sign in to download

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¹ You may be eligible for up to $150,00 in funding, subject to applicable terms and conditions.

The post Sky’s the Limit: Triple Play is here! appeared first on US Partner Community Blog.