How to get assistance without the Relationship Assistant!

Dynamics 365 has brought with it a new and amazing feature called the 'Relationship Assistant'. It is part of a preview feature (unsupported and US only) called 'Relationship Insights' which promises to bring some amazing productivity tools to the Dynamics 365 platform.

Relationship Assistant shows actionable cards in both the web client and mobile client using a mix of both plain old filter conditions and machine learning.

Machine Learning Cards

One of the most exciting part of the Relationship Assistant is the use of machine learning to examine the contents of your emails and predict what you need to do next:

Customer Question Card

Issue Detected Card

'Plain old query' Cards

Whilst the machine learning aspects may be out of our reach to us mere mortals at this time, the cards that are based on simpler filter conditions such as 'Due Today' and 'Meeting Today' are items that can be easily shown in a dashboard without this preview feature. Here are some examples of information that can be gained from simple date queries:

Due Today Card

Meeting Today Card

Missed Close Date Card

(Images taken from the Relationship Assistant Card reference - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/preview-feature-action-cards-reference.aspx)

Create your own 'Relationship Assistant' Dashboard

The main challenge with producing information shown above is the date aspect to the query. We can easily show a single set of records that use the 'Next X days' type of operator, but you could not easily use 'todays' date in a dashboard chart – at least not until CRM2015 introduced calculated fields. Now it is rather easy to produce a dashboard similar to the following:

    • The key feature of dashboards is that they are can be tailored to show your own data which can be drilled into to show the underlying records. This is comparable to the 'actionable' aspect of the relationship assistant where you could drill into the tasks due to 'today' and open them to work upon.

    Notice the field 'Due' that can have the value 'Completed', 'Due Next 7 Days', 'Due Today', 'Overdue', or 'Scheduled'. This field isn't stored as a persistent field in the database, but instead it is a calculated field so there are no nightly jobs or workflows required to update a field based on the current date.

    Adding a 'Due Status' field to an Activity Entity

    1. Create a solution with the Activity Entity that you want to add the 'Due Status' field to
    2. Create a new field called 'Due Diff' – this will give us a field that shows the number of days before/after the activity due date.
    4. Click 'Edit' and type the expression
      DiffInDays(scheduledstart, Now())
      Note: This assumes that this is an Appointment and you want to use the scheduledstart date to control the due date.
    5. Add a new global Option Set that holds the possible values for the Due status
    6. Create a new Calculated Option Set field called 'Due' on the Activity record. Use the Existing Option Set created above.
    8. Click 'Edit' on the Calculated Field type and add the following logic:
    9. Create a chart something like:
    10. Publish and add the charts to a dashboard!

    Of course other more complex options exist but with all the excitement and awesomeness of Machine Learning it is important to remember that we can achieve great things with just the right kind of queries, charts and dashboards!

    Hope this helps!

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