Monday 4 December 2017

A couple of things about the new Dynamics 365 CE UUI

As many of you are aware Microsoft released Version 9 for Dynamics 365 customer engagement. One of the primary features was the new Unified User Interface (UUI) which originally was going to be just for business edition, but that also seems to have changed / re branded / disappeared. No worries there, we get the new web refresh and UUI in the enterprise release! FAB!!!

All good and well but there are a few things you need to be made aware of if you are looking to implement version 9, especially if its primarily for the new UUI. Firstly, I need to give a shout out to some of the team that have been testing this with me: Rob DawsonMatt Webb & Jason Almeida… Thanks for having a crack at this with me… I bet we find more interesting little Easter eggs :)

One thing I need to make very clear is that the UUI and the WEB REFRESH are 2 very different interfaces. The Web refresh is the same browser interface that has just had a bit of a coat of paint to remove a lot of the white space. It does look a lot cleaner and “fresher”. Below is an example of my contact record in the web refresh. (Yes you can totally colour brand the subgrid headers)



The UUI is the new unified interface that has been generated with the platform refresh and will provide the same user experience across mobile, tablet, Outlook, web and Unified Service Desk access. This is going to be the preferred interface in the future and it more intuitive which is really going to promote user adoption. The controls are a lot more user friendly and are reliant on the new Custom Control Framework (CCF).

In my experience, the new UUI presented a few challenges during testing. I thought it may be useful to bring up these gaps before you decide to upgrade only to use the UUI. This all being said, the testing has all been undertaken on trial environments and have all been tested across different browsers. The different APPS enabled for UUI were also tested. It also doesn’t mean that you will experience these within the web refresh interface.



Email Activity Creation
Other than from within the Outlook interface I have not yet found a way to send an email from the new UUI. The attempts to send the emails were made directly from the time line on the account and contact forms where the actual email activity option is missing from the list. I also attempted from the quick create for activities from the top nav bar, where the option exists but nothing happens when you select it. You can click the little email shortcut on the right hand of the account or contact, but that will simply utilise the built-in email available on your device.



Advanced Find
I was unable to conduct any Advanced Find within the new UUI. This is a real core function within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. I can utilise the categorised and relevance search functionality.

Quick Create
A number of the quick create buttons on the top nav bar don’t seem to work. I can create core records from the quick create “+” icon but not from the other 2 icons.



Some other stuff…
There are a couple of other little gotchas in the UUI that you may want to look out for such as:
  • No ability to bulk delete (Probably safer this way)
  • Quick create doesn’t work with custom entities.
  • A few issues with the CCF (Certain controls giving a couple of issues) which definitely deserves a separate post.
  • Outlook client is a little clunky but seems to have a lot of potential though.


This being said, the new UUI is looking GOOD and working well for where it is in the release cycle. I feel as if this is fantastic functionality from Microsoft and as the platform gets updated these little kinks will get ironed out and worked out. The experience is definitely A LOT better than the web refresh. The interface is a lot cleaner and it flows better/ It feels as if information is more readily available to users in a more interactive manner.


As we discover things, I’ll keep posting. I’m sure there is loads of amazing functionality buried in there!

7 comments:

  1. And no charts on field either

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    1. Haven't tested that out yet... I'll give it a crack as soon as I got a moment. Thanks for the response.

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  2. I've noticed lots of visual glitches when testing on IE11.

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    1. Very honestly...I think we got all the best results out of Chrome.

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  3. Hi Chris,

    I am having a issue with uui, when we resize the browser, the footer of the form disappears. This works fine in classic mode, the issue is with uui for all browsers

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  4. I noticed that 2 elements from my Classic-view Site Map are not present on the UUI side panel map, and I can't figure out how to get them there. One of them is the standard 'Reports' entity.

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