Thoughts on LinkedIn 'Read with AI' feature

 I recently created a post for LinkedIn promoting a friends post. I decided to use the 'Rewrite with AI' feature of LinkedIn and wanted to give my before and after feelings. There are a lot of people posting using AI and using AI pictures. I've been hesitant, but experimental, to use it in in my day to day and here is why. 

Clearly in my post I'm trying to plug my friend's post. It really was good but I didn't need to 'sell' it. Its good content. But when I converted my 'I'm plugging my friends post' via AI, it came across using logic I'd expect from a college academic with zero real world experience in this space. It was very inauthentic. Its hard to tell why its inauthentic but it doesn't sound like me. 

I think if I was a company trying to sell something new or made a lazy post, I think this feature is good. But when it comes to staying on brand, using AI makes you stand out like a sore thumb. Its missing the 'me' in how I speak. Much like if I talked in person, I would sound wildly different than someone else saying the same sentence in a different way with a different accent with different inflections. 

I'd say use this feature with caution. I like it and I will continue to play with it for almost every post. But the fact its not taking previous posts I make as part of algorithm (that i can tell), I'll likely never post with it. 

Simulate and test D365 Commerce email layouts for multiple mobile devices with only Chrome and no need for installing addins

 I had a customer that needed to preview a Dynamics 365 email receipt and see what their HTML receipt will look like in multiple browsers, mobile devices, etc. 

Here is my suggestion on how to test it without buying a ton of different devices. I noticed there really wasn't any documentation on this associated with D365 so I'm doing this so I can just refer to this URL when teaching this to others. 

I recommend Chrome for this, but not saying another can't be used. Its just what I use. And I'm using Gmail as its what I had an example receipt for. 

Its important to note that no addins are needed and just Chrome, so most everyone can use this even when security locks down the Chrome store. 

1. Open Chrome
2. You'll want to see the webpage in mobile mode, not desktop mode, so navigate to m.gmail.com, not just gmail.com so you'll see the mobile layout. 
3. Select the email example you want to test against
4. Open the developer tools in Chrome (Figure 1) 
5. Click on the 'toggle device toolbar' (Figure 2)
6. Select the device to emulate (Figure 3)
7. Test the website in portrait and landscape mode (Figure 4)
8. If you dont see the device to emulate, you can select many more or create your own (Figure 5)

Figure 1 - Developer Tools in chrome

Figure 2 - Toggle Device Toolbar

Figure 3 - select what device to simulate

Figure 4 - View the website on the target device emulation in portrait or landscape mode

Figure 5 - Simulate all sorts of devices

Dynamics 365 Commerce Credit Card Decline receipt printing

 For those that may have used D365 Commerce and credit cards, you've likely noticed the card decline receipts that print from the printer. Likely when you are testing a payment processor and its chewing through your thermal paper like a baseball team and big league chew. 

You can turn this feature on or off through the use the Print Card Decline Receipt boolean on the Dynamics 365 Commerce Functionality profiles. See below. 

Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations field missing after update

Occasionally, a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations user may report missing a field after an upgrade was applied to production. The field could be named anything, such as 'Hold' or similar. Everything is working completely fine but that field they had is no longer on a grid or form they use daily. The user may state they have not used the Personalization feature and it has been in the system this way since they went live.

Upon further investigation, it was found that there was a field called 'Do Not Process' on the sales order header that was added to the primary sales order grid and renamed to 'Hold'. 

Most people don't realize you can rename a field in Personalization but you absolutely can. Personalizations can be imported into the user profiles so users do not need to interact with Personalizations to have them applied. This is often to streamline processes for a group of people while avoiding customizations. 

Mystery solved!

D365 Commerce making changes to Adyen payment and service connector considerations

 Hello all, 

I wanted to make a quick note about changing Adyen account and payment connector settings within Dynamics 365 Commerce. From time to time, you'll need to make changes to account or payment connector settings in Dynamics 365 Commerce as a result of an upgrade.

The way that things work, you can make these changes but you need to make sure you invoice all orders and capture payments (so the system shows no outstanding funds due), and then change the settings. 

By failing to do that, you'll run into an incongruence of payment settings between the previous authorizations with the old configs vs the new configs using the old authorizations. 

This will obviosuly be a very big trick when you look into online ecomm orders coming in bound, orders in multiple statuses, etc. You almost need a hard stop on new orders being authorized for payments, or temporary change the process to collect payments up front, which is usually not possible. 

So looking at this dilemma, it might seem unrealistic to making any config changes to the Adyen Dynamics 365 Commerce settings. But what if you have to and can't stop the flow of orders?

For one potential solution, you could create a tool that can be used to update the current open authorizations after the config change is made. This will allow you to make the change in PROD and then create new auths as needed. For open authorizations after that change is made, apply your tool to update those open records to accommodate the new configs. 

If you wait and those open auths expire, sometimes as early as 7 days, you'll have to recapture the payment either manually or via a reauth if you have card on file.

So the lesson here is to get ahead of correcting the open auths if you can't put a hard stop to your order/payment flow. 

Hopefully this post will help proactive dialog for those who encounter this uncommon, hopefully rare scenario. 

What I've been up to in past few years and new company: Illumina Technology Solutions

Hey everyone! I have not kept up on my promise to produce more content from my blog under DAXDude. The past two years have been crazy, ala literally everyone in the world via COVID.

However, I do owe everyone who has hit me up a collective response to what has happened over the past few years causing me to not blog as much. 

That and I wanted to wish everyone a happy new yea 2023. 

March 2020 - A new Baby+COVID world

On March 10th, 2020, my wife and I went into the hospital to welcome our second child, Colette. We entered in a world of caution and uncertainty, but the same day to day as March 10th 2015, and left the hospital on March 14th in a world of turmoil and masks and hazmat suits. 

August 2021 - Blue Horseshoe Acquisition by Accenture

In July, I caught word that we would be selling the company that I started with who had 25 people at the time and then got 

June 2022 - New company: Illumina Technology Solutions

I started a new company called Illumina Technology Solutions with several other highly talented people. I'm able to truly pursue my passions and work with others that are also 'rockstars' in their area. We are trying to address the pains in the D365 community most companies have, such as taking routine updates, security, regression testing, support, ecommerce and POS, etc. We'll have a heavy focus in D365 Commerce as that is the background of our group, but we have deep understanding and experience in the other areas of the system.

Already, we have been able to jump into a few accounts as well as assist a few partners in helping to grow their companies. I anticipate significant growth as we continue to establish ourselves as industry experts that are incredibly partner friendly and focus on the thing that matters: sustainable and successful customer implementations. 

Its been a lot of work starting the company and trying to lay a solid foundation for accelerated growth in a sustainable way. I'm CTO which has put a lot on my plate in addition to family stuff. I'll try to post more on this site as these do help people in the community and I think more non-Microsoft content needs to be created again. Things change so much but with D365, I think a lot of the 'debug' and 'error' type situations aren't covered as much. So I'll try to patch those gaps in here as I encounter them.

Happy new year 2023!

Happy Dax'ing

~DAXDude

Solved: D365 Fields automatically populating on form errantly - Due to a Chrome addin

So here is an interesting post that I hope will help someone out with. I'm going to add some keywords in here too that might match what someone is looking for when looking for something along the lines of "Dynamics 365 Finance/Commerce/Supply Chain Form fields overriding:

There was a scenario where, in production, a user was seeing data mysterious change to an old test server and login credentials. The user would continuously need to go into the system and reset the credentials and server IP for the integration to work. We were not sure if it was a person, a batch process, etc. 

We found out that the issue was on the form itself, and whenever a user went into that form and made some kind of action such as expanding tabs or right clicking and selecting personalization. It would overide the data on the fields, not in the table itself. The data would only actually commit to the tables when the form was saved. 

After a lot of debugging, we found the issue: A Chrome Web browser addin (LastPass). There was an entry that would recognize the form and automatically default data, much like you would if you were entering credentials for a login page or an address. 

There were no indicators or form popups indicating that the fields were being auto-populated. They were just occurring which led the original mystery of why this was happening. Very concerning as all you really needed to do to mess up the data was go into a page and make some kind of action, including non-data related actions. 

Debug tip if you're seeing something similar: Turn off all add-ins on your browser and see if you can replicate the issue. Or compare if other users are seeing similar issues. 

Happy Dax'ing!

~DAXDude