Track the latest activity on your Dynamics 365 wall

When I introduced the Dynamics 365 dashboard, I mentioned the wall.

In this article, I would like to post on the wall. when you open the Dynamics 365 home page, you will be taken to the default dashboard page, where the wall posts the status of each entity and allows you to track the active activities.

For example, when a new business partner company is created, when a competitor for a sales project is created, when an order is received or lost, etc. The function is designed to post actions that are defined by rules.

About Wall Settings

By default, the Wall shows the latest posts in the All Records view. By default, the Wall is set to show the latest posts in the All Records view.

When you view the wall in the dashboard, the wall will look like the following, and you can check the settings by clicking on the ▼ of “All Records”.

In the above diagram, all records, sales projects, and client companies are followed, and as for the content of the postings, you can filter each of the client companies, representatives, sales projects, leads, and support projects that are relevant to you.

(*Supplement) About follow-up
To follow up, for example, you can select the record of a business partner representative and click Click “Follow” from … in the upper right corner to make it appear in the “Follow” section of your wall settings.

Checking the results, we see the following.

You can change which view you want to use by clicking on the gears in the content of the post. The view to use is “My XXX”, since the Wall information is where you display the information you are following and related to.

When you open the settings, you can change whether to show or hide the views, the order in which they are shown, and so on.

Manually post to the wall

There are two types of posting to the wall: manual posting by the user and automatic posting by the system. If you want to do it manually, you can click on “User Post”, describe what you want to post, and then click on the “Post” button.

This is how it was posted. This is done in the dashboard, but if you want to post individually in a form, such as for a client company, you will need to add a “note” to the form.

Compose a wall post

Open the form editor, and in the “Insert” tab, there is a “Memo”. You can insert this into your form to use the wall. By default, it will already be inserted and renamed as “Social Pane”.

Also, if you want to set up wall posts against a custom entity, you will need to configure the activity feed before adding it to the form.

Click on “Configure Activity Feed” in the “Settings” menu.

If the status is inactive here, the post will not be reflected, so if you want to use the post on your wall, please click “Activate”.

Automatically post to your wall

Rather than posting a wall manually, I think an automatic posting feature would be much more convenient. For example, if a new activity is created in a sales case, or changes ownership, or if the wall is automatically posted immediately “at that time” when the expected sales are updated, it would be possible to track the “who, what, and when” of the update.

In addition, check the “Activity Feed Rules” for the rules that Dynamics 365 targets for automatic updates.

As you can see, you cannot add new rules except for the ones that are created by default. As you can see, you cannot add new rules other than the ones created by default, as you can see from the absence of the +New button in the menu.

The function of posting is very useful, and if you want to take advantage of it when other fields are updated, etc., you can achieve this by using a process.

Now, hypothetically, I will tell you how to create a new process if you want to automatically post to the wall when the field “Representative Phone” of a company you do business with is updated.

First, go to the New Process screen as usual, and configure as follows. The target entity is “Client Company”. (*For details on how to create a process, please refer to “Using Dynamics 365 Processes (Workflow)”)

Configure the workflow as follows.

You have selected “Representative Phone” as the trigger for “Record Field Change”.

Then, under “Add Step”, click “Create Record”.

Then, set the entity to be created to “Post”. Edit the content of the post in “Property Settings”.

Then, we configured the following. Save and close the settings.

*The yellow filled areas {} will contain dynamic values.

Once you have saved the process, activate it.

Now, update the “Main Phone” (or “Phone” on the form) of the company you are dealing with and save it.

If you look at the “Process Session” of the process you just created, you will see that a post has been created.

If you refresh the form of the company you are dealing with, the wall, you will see that a post has been created.

In this way, it is very useful to be able to detect changes, allocations, and deletions of fields by multiplying submissions and processes.

For example, by running the process described above at the timing when a field that may be important to a business meeting is updated, the people involved in the meeting can immediately grasp the situation and take action with a sense of speed. This will also allow the supervisor to watch the sales activities of subordinates and give advice at the right time.

Please try to take advantage of these useful features.