Navigating in Dynamics 365 - Dynamics Tutorial

- [Instructor] Being able to navigate and understand the user interface is a very important part of getting comfortable with an application. In this chapter, you'll learn how to access and log into Dynamics 365 Customer Service. We'll review the site map and how you can navigate to other areas in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. And since Dynamics 365 is a relational database, we have the ability to navigate to related records by clicking these links directly from a view or a form. You'll learn how you can recognize them. After this chapter, you're going to be a pro at navigating Dynamics 365. You can access Dynamics 365 through a browser. So there's no need to install any software or anything like that. In order to log into the application, you'll need to go to make.powerapps.com and that will take you to this page where you need to enter your credentials in order to sign in. So I'm going to go ahead and do that real quick. Here is my password. And now it's going to ask me if I want to stay signed in so I don't have to reenter my credentials. I'm going to say yes. Now, this is going to take me to a page from where I can open any app that I have access to. Now, the first thing you want to make sure of is that you are in the correct environment. So I'm just going to select my environment over here and then on the left-hand side of the screen, you're going to see the apps section. So I'm going to navigate to that and from here, I'm going to be able to open any app again that I have access to. So we're going to go here to the Customer Service Hub app. Now, if you're following along, again, keep in mind that your screen might look a little different from mine. The site map is on the left-hand side. So you see these different sections, like My Work and below that, you see Dashboards and Activities and then you see another section, customers and below that, Accounts, Contacts, Social Profiles, et cetera. That is the site map and when we're clicking on these different areas, you see that this little blue bar will change. That's really telling you where exactly you are in the application. Now you see that I switched from dashboards to accounts. So now that blue bar is next to the accounts table. On the top of the site map, you see several buttons. You see the home button. So if I click on that, that will take me to my home screen, which we can configure as individual users, and we'll talk more about that a little bit later in this course. Then you also have your recent records. Those are items that you have recently accessed. So you saw earlier, I was on the tier one dashboard. That's what we're looking at right now. I was looking at a view of my active accounts, so this allows me to very quickly go back to views or records or dashboards that I have recently accessed. We also have below that our pinned records. As we are accessing records, you can see that this is actually going to shift down and kind of fall off of this list. If you want a view or dashboard or a record to be pinned and not fall off that list, you will click this little pin icon. So when I do that, if I now expand my pinned items, you can see that these stay here and allow me to very quickly access them. I don't have to go and drill into the different tables here. I can very quickly use my pinned records to very quickly access them. Let's navigate to the account table. What you're looking at right now is called a view and that's nothing more than a filtered list of records. So this particular view is called my active accounts, which basically means that this is a list of accounts that have the status of active that are assigned to me as an individual user. If I wanted to change that view, I can do that by just clicking on this little arrow here and from here, I can go ahead and select a different view. If we open a record, you can also see the little icon over here, which is called the record set. This is again the same records that were in that view that I was just in, active accounts, and this allows me to jump to other records that were in that view very quickly and very easily. I also talked a little bit about that in-record navigation. So you can see here, I have several columns or fields on this form and the one that says primary contact is actually in blue. That means that this is linked to another record. And if I wanted to navigate to that record, I can just go ahead and click on that link. And as you can see, this now opens my contact record, which is the record that was linked to that account in Dynamics 365. We also might have different areas in an app. The areas are located on the bottom left of the screen and you'll notice, if I pick a different area, my site map will also change. So for example, if I go here to help and support, you can see that the site map has now changed. We now have a resources section with the help center, the community, ideas and support, and we have the learning path section over here as well. Now that we covered navigation in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you should be very comfortable getting around in the application. Why don't you try logging in and accessing the different areas I showed you in the demonstration.