Posts

Building a Self-Service Dataverse Choice Manager: Architecting Controlled Metadata Changes in Dynamics 365.

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Summary In rapidly evolving sales organizations, business requirements rarely remain static. New products, services, sales categories, commercial models, and operational scenarios can continuously introduce the need for additional values in Dynamics 365. For one of our clients, this resulted in a recurring dependency on the technical team. Whenever the business needed to add or modify values in a Dynamics 365 Choice column, they had to approach the implementation team for a seemingly small configuration change. At first glance, replacing the Choice column with a Lookup table appeared to be a natural solution. However, that approach would introduce a much larger change: migrating existing records, replacing references throughout the application, modifying system processes, reviewing integrations, and potentially impacting logic that already depended on the existing Choice values. Instead of redesigning the data model to solve a c...

Plugin Class Code Recovery using XRMToolBox & C# DotPeek

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In an ideal Dynamics 365 (Dataverse) project, plugin source code lives safely in a version-controlled repository, flows cleanly through Azure DevOps pipelines, and is always recoverable. In reality, many of us inherit environments where that discipline didn’t exist. I recently worked with a customer where: a. Plugin assemblies were already deployed and working in the environment. b. The original development had been done by a different developer. c. DevOps pipelines and repositories no longer contained the plugin solution or it’s code. d. Only the compiled assemblies existed in the Plugin Registration Tool. This created a common but uncomfortable challenge in the Dynamics 365 world: How do you maintain, debug, or enhance plugins when the source code is lost? Rewriting everything from scratch was risky and time-consuming. Guessing behavior based on runtime results wasn’t reliable. Fortunately, Dynamics 365 and the .NET ecosystem give us a practical and effective alternative. Using Xr...

Using D365 CRM Field-Level Security to maintain confidentiality of Intra-Organizational Data.

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  Summary In most CRM implementations, data exposure should be encapsulated for both inside & outside the organization. Sales, Finance, Operations, HR — everyone works in the same system. Collaboration increases. Visibility increases. But so does risk. This is based on real-world project experience, for a practical example I had implemented for a technology consulting and cybersecurity services firm based in Houston, Texas, USA, specializing in modern digital transformation and enterprise security solutions. This blog explains: 1] Why Security Roles alone are not enough. 2] How users can still access data through Advanced Find, etc. 3] What Field-Level Security offers beyond entity-level restriction. 4] Step-by-step implementation. 5] Business advantages you gain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents The Real Problem: Intra-Organizational Data Exp...