In this video tutorial, Matt Shearsby gives an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics, focusing on the key features of the user interface.
Matt explains how you can personalise your user experience with purchase order preparation in Microsoft Dynamics, and talks through Dynamics's workspaces and search functionality, as well as the context sensitive guidance Dynamics provides. Finally, Matt provides a rundown of Microsoft Dynamics's mobile capabilities and how it can guide your business to mobile readiness. We've also provided a transcription of the video below.
Click below to watch the video:
Video transcription
Hello everyone and welcome to this video. It's a brief introduction to Microsoft Dynamics focusing on the user interface.
Tailored user experience
We'll start off by looking at tailored user experience, seeing that currently I'm logged in as a system administrator, I have access to many roles within the system.
Now I'm going to switch my user and login as Paula. Once I've logged in, you can see that my access is far more restricted and it's focused around project management capabilities and my Employee Self Service. Next up I'll log in as Sally. Sally works in the sales department and she has specific roles allocated to sales order management, she can see some basic workspaces around sales. Finally, I'll switch and log in as Peter, who works in procurement. We can see that he has access to all procurement activities, and again, he has access to the employee station as well.
Workspaces - take you where you need
Next up, we'll look at workspaces and we are going to look at personalization. Now, in the employee workspace, I can see a lot of information related to myself, in this case, Peter as an employee. Let's take a more detailed look at some of the more functional workspaces. I've opened purchase order preparation, this gives me access to everything related to personal preparation at my fingertips, for example, I can see any approved orders, I can see them in a list and I can actually access them through a tile as well. If I want to, I can confirm them.
Opening up all purchase orders, what we can see here is a good example of a list page. First thing I'm going to do is apply a filter so I can see the data I'm interested in. In this case, I want to see anything that is status draft, and I want to change it so it sorts by delivery date as well. Now, I don't like where that status is, so what I'm going to do is apply a little bit of personalization. I'm going to move the approval column over to the left exactly where I need it to be.
Now when I close out of here, I can add this to a tile in my workspace. I'm going to refresh my screen, click on my new tile. It opens up, automatically filters that I put forward and actually you can see my personalizations have all been applied. Now maybe I just don't like that; it's simple enough to remove it - I could just clear personalization. Now when I reopen the form it opens with the full list and with the approval status on the right.
Taking this a little bit further, back in the purchase order preparation, again open all purchase orders and apply some filters as I did before. In this case, I'm interested in approved purchase orders that are still 'status - open'. What I can do is save this filter, give it an appropriate name and set it as my default view. What that means is that every time I open this form, it's going to open in that default view by checking out as many or as few of these as I like. So now when I open my old purchase orders you can see that is opened with my default view of approved and open orders.
Now I can take that even further actually and again, if I open my all purchase orders form, I can actually add this to a workspace as you saw me do before. Now if I go to my workspace tile, I can actually choose to personalize this and pin it to the dashboard. What that means now is if I refresh the main menu, you'll be able to see under my purchase order preparation tile, I now have a direct link into there so I can navigate straight to that screen without going through the tile.
Search function for easy navigation
Next up, we look at search functions. I'm quickly going to put into the search 'all purchase', that tells me all the forms that match this search criteria and allows me to navigate directly to them. You have noticed as well that it also gave the menu path. In the forms, I can actually search in the bar as well as site search term. You'll see grayed out options that aren't enabled at the moment and other options that are, and also extending our filter view that we looked at earlier, I can actually set up multiple fields parameters within the filter windows well. You'll see basically I can add search criteria across pretty much all fields within the purchase orders. Conveniently enough, if I want to filter these as well, I can filter this list so I can see supplier account and select it. I'm now able just to simply type my search criteria. As you saw earlier on, we'll also be able to save this as a filter view as well if you want, it's just another way of accessing that.
Next up we'll look at menu navigation. First up, you can see here I have access to my favourites - a list of 10 possible menu items that I can add to my favourites list, much like in Edge, I've also got the last 10 menu items that I have access to listed out. Also, from my point of view, I can see all my workspaces here, these are replicated on the right. And finally I can actually see the classic menu structure. So this is where I can access perhaps the less used functions such as those used to set up the system, the parameters and the configuration. Everything's available within here though and as mentioned earlier, this is also available through search, I find myself typically using workspaces and search function rather than menus.
Context sensitive help
Next up, we will look at the help functionality. So we click on the Help icon and I am going to do a quick search for the relevant help. First up, I'm going to look at the standard help that's available. So it's found anything that matches my search terms. If I click on the first item, I'm taken to the Microsoft curated documents around purchase order overview. This allows me to navigate and find out as much as I possibly want to know about purchase orders. Specifically, in this case around the creation of purchase orders as well. This content is maintained and regulated by Microsoft. Next up I'll look at task guide. So, let's go on the list and I'll find one that's relevant to what I was looking for - creation of a purchase order.
The first thing I'm presented with is a list of activities that I need to do in sequence, this could be quite useful on it's own but it only tells half the story. If I click the task guide, I start to receive these boxes that tell me what to do. It's telling me to navigate, but actually, I can also just search, it's got the intelligence to know that I've done that. Now it guides me through each step of the process. So clicking on new, it tells me I need to select a supplier account in this instance. Then it takes me through step-by-step making sure I complete all the relevant information. Interesting point here - this isn't telling me to do something, it's just giving me additional information about what this field does, and similarly with the delivery data as well. So it's not just about being able to guide people through the steps but also to get them to understand why they're doing those steps.
Another one that's giving me further information, it tells me to collapse the window, and click OK. At this point, I've created my purchase order header. Now, the guide will go on to guide me through the steps to create the line. I don't think we need to do that at this time. So these can be easily captured and recorded by your team or by the consultants as well and I think you'll agree that they're a great way of guiding people through the system of things they either don't do often or haven't done before.
Mobile ready
Finally, within this session, we can look at mobile capabilities. Here I've got my mobile phone logged into Dynamics, you'll see that the system has changed the way the events are rendered, I can still navigate effectively through the solution though. I can see, for example, in my Employee Self Service open task information related to myself. Now there's no way that I recommend that this is going to be something that was used on a day-to-day basis, but it's very good if you want quick access. There's also a series of mobile apps that are related to the solution. Here we can see me capturing some simple information related to an expense. We're going to capture some basic expense category information - how I paid for it, how much it was for, and who it was with.
Finally, I'm going to choose an image that I already have of the hotel receipt and attach it with it. As soon as I've done that, that's then synching with Dynamics. So if I jump back into the full client experience through Edge, you can see if I refresh this, I now have an expense and we can see the line in here. We can actually see the receipts associated with it as well.
That's it for this video. I hope you've taken some value out the content, please get in contact with Inciper if you'd like to learn more.
