No Stone Left Unturned
With the end of the year fast approaching, we thought it would help to quickly revisit one of the major news items in the world of Microsoft Dynamics 365. While Microsoft has released numerous updates, by far the most impactful was for Dynamics 365 v9.0, which in our opinion fixes the largest number of customer feature requests. With the keeping the ageless “keep it simple, stupid” saying in mind, we will highlight a few of the many platform improvements Microsoft incorporated into its Dynamics v9.0 release.
Starting With Design
One of the requests we frequently received was asking for a supported method to reduce the white space on the form. Dynamics 365 v9.0 has vastly improved user experience with a new form design, tabs, and consistent spacing and fonts. In general, this release aims to reduce and even eliminate white space as shown below. Let’s get started.
Interface – The forms are now divided into sections and have bounding boxes to keep related content inside the same area for content display. You will notice a heavy use of grey borders in the default theme. More on themes later.
Standardization – The spacing of sections, tabs, fields, and fonts have been standardized across the entire platform.
Touch – There are horizontal tabs and buttons which significantly improves the touch-enabled experience.
Fields – Empty fields on a form now permit visual cues to indicate what type of data should be entered in that specific field. Previously, customers would often miss fields because they weren’t sure which type of data could be entered.
Sub-Grid – The colours of the sub-grid can be customized by ticking the box titled “Display label on the Form” and choosing a Panel header colour.
Field Labels – There is a new system-wide setting that permits the field labels to text wrap instead of being cut-off. This is a big win for users as this was in the top 5 of user requests for improvements to Dynamics 365.
Themes – Earlier we referred to a default theme, which means there have to be non-default theme, right? Correct! There are now 3 standard themes you can choose from.
Search – Finally, Advanced Find now offers a long-requested user feature, which is the “Does not equal” search operator. Make your searches easier as you can now, for example, locate all contacts for which you are not the owner of.
More On Dynamics 365 v9.0
Interested in diving deeper? Read the Microsoft Dynamics 365 User Interface Design: Quick Wins for a Quick Makeover or Advanced Find in Microsoft Dynamics 365: Knowing More Than “Where’s Waldo?” blog posts where we go more in depth on a couple of the items listed above.
Want to learn more about other features from the Dynamics 365 v9.0 release? Either check out Microsoft’s A Feature A Day blog or wait for more content from yours truly, as we will be releasing a part two with some more of Microsoft’s improvements.
