Improve Security with Sales Contract Automation for Security

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this video is part of a series that is designed to support the audible version of deploying microsoft dynamics 365 sales and service which is available on both audible and amazon.com i'll be sure to include links to all versions of the book in the description of this video i hope this helps thanks for watching this is a quick update to this video because of some information that was created after the book was published written we thought that microsoft dynamics was not planning to deprecate contracts and contract lines we see here on july 10th 2020 we have a notice about deprecation so i'm going to define deprecated first deprecated means we intend to remove the feature or capability from a future major release the feature or capability will continue to work and is fully supported until it's officially removed the deprecation notice can span a few years after removal the feature or capability will no longer work we're notifying you now so you have sufficient time to plan and update your code so there's a couple of things that should be pointed out here first of all let's scroll down and find out that indeed this does apply if you go all the way to the bottom this applies all the way down here to um contracts contract line items and contract templates those are all three those three things are pretty much required when you use contracts for your service contract management and it says uh these entities are deprecated and will be removed and it says this functionality has been replaced by entitlements in dynamics 365 customer service so it's just really important before we before you move to the next part of this video that does show entitlements and does show contracts and contract lines that in the future they're not saying exactly when uh these features will be removed i will also say that it's it's um difficult at best in the current release to try to get contracts to actually work in terms of the mma work and everything but in terms of uh being able to see it so i'll just show you really quickly i believe i created one called contracts take a look at this notice that when you attempt to load contracts in a dashboard components are added to the dashboard they're not supported to be shown in this client and this is the customer service hub which is the unified interface version of dynamics so ultimately i need you to have this information before you begin to even watch this video so that you understand the current context everything else in the video remains the same okay thanks as we mentioned in the book it may be useful to understand the difference between entitlements and contracts and contract lines and some of the differences and features and functions of each we'll go through these here and then we'll demonstrate and look at a few of the features in the application itself so first of all entitlements are now considered to be the more or less default solution for contract management in microsoft dynamics 365 customer service for many years contracts and contract lines serve that purpose they are still there contracts and contract lines they're just sort of hidden and they need to be surfaced into the interface to allow people to use them and and manage them entitlements are directly related to the customer in a in a relatively simpler and flatter structure so there's not there's no two tiers or anything like that there's just simply entitlements and they're related directly to the customer with contracts and contract lines there's a two-tier structure where you really do need to create the contract where you manage the metadata around the contract and then the contract line or lines that determines the sort of type of service and some of the terms around that service on entitlements there's no pricing so there's no real pricing built in right now you can create your own pricing you can create your own custom attributes on the entitlement but there's none in the current configuration on contracts and contract lines there's actually a pricing feature where you can put different prices on different contract lines and those prices will roll up to the overall value of the contract entitlements generally are simpler there's less business rules there's less overhead i guess you could say uh whereas contracts and contract lines have more more features in a way or more statuses for instance like hold and copy and so forth there are some enforcements that go on with contracts and contract lines as well in terms of what you can and cannot do with respect to certain stages of the contract so if there's no way to just very easily and simply sort of bring a contract back to life so to speak entitlement's a little bit simpler entitlements can use both case creation and resolution case resolution to to count down or to consume an allocated number of cases contracts and contract lines can only count case resolutions so if you have a contract or a contract line that has a certain number of cases the counting only happens after the case is resolved that's also true if it's minutes or hours with entitlements you're able to actually use case creation and resolution for countdown of cases so that means that you will subtract a case from the allotment by creating one if you set it up that way as opposed to resolving that case it's a subtle nuance but it might be important for you entitlements feature a native ability to prevent new cases from being created by the system if the allotment or entitlement is expired or exhausted there is no such function for contracts and contract lines uh you could affect that by creating a plugin or javascript to match that functionality but you'd have to do that entitlements can be related to service level agreements contract and contract lines are not related to slas because the sla entity did not exist when contracts and contract lines were created and i think that they when microsoft rolled out entitlements they rolled out slas about the same time so they were designed to work together in that regard okay so let's take a look at some of these um some of these entities from within customer service you can't really manage directly entitlements and in order to even see entitlements you need to switch down here below from service in the site map to service management service management shows a list of the entities that are set up for for customer service in the modern unified interface which is what we're looking at right now and as you can see here we have entitlements right here under service terms so if i click on entitlements uh i can go ahead and create an entitlement and i'll show you what this looks like so let's just say um 200 cases [Music] we'll just grab a customer here now very similar to contracts entitlements have a beginning and an end we've given this a year and then here as i said you can specifically relate this to an sla to a service level agreement if you have one what we're essentially saying here is that this customer has purchased 200 cases from us in terms of service the allocation type is number of cases now as you can see you can have number of hours so it's possible to allocate number of hours that's similar as well to contract and contract lines and then this is the feature that we've talked about before where you can um set it to decrease remaining on case creation or resolution so we'll go ahead and do resolution so here you have total terms and this is where you have to put the number in this is actual number because you'll see it says remaining there so that could be ours right and that's why there's a decimal but uh we'll go ahead and just say total terms we'll just go ahead and save that and so now we have this customer has a uh an entitlement it's as you can see it's a relatively simple entity uh you can tie products to the entitlement you can tie contacts and entitlement channels which is interesting there's where you would create multiple channels if you needed to um and i'll show you how that looks what that looks like so an entitlement channel it would be something like you can see here uh phone calls so that means uh 150 of these this is optional by the way but 150 of these our phone and uh then what we can do is we can create another channel that says um the remaining 50 or some other way let's say um email let's just say and again you can see what the channels are about you can see how you can carve these out through different channels okay so that's the entitlement concept and of course the way it works is simply that for every case that primary biometrics is resolved so if anyone opens up a case for primary biometrics and the case is then resolved when it's resolved this will be decreased to 199 and so on on down the line to zero okay that's entitlements so now what we'll look at is contracts and contract lines okay uh one of the things that i want to point out is that um this is relatively new uh situation i believe is that you can't actually create a for instance a dashboard that shows contracts in the unified client so we're just going to do a shortcut just an end run just to show you how they look and work and you know it just could be that microsoft is going to deprecate these but it's it's still worth it for you to know that they exist and what they can do also you may end up with a version of dynamics that has them so go ahead and show that right here i'm going to go to contracts results and i'm going to click new contracts so you know contract template that's the thing contracts can't exist without a template so you have to choose a template i'm going to go ahead and choose the service template that's by default it comes up by default so let's look at contracts really quickly and uh you'll see some of the differences so here's contract let's just call this one same thing let's call it 200 cases same exact thing as entitlement let's choose a different uh we'll choose a different company this time and you'll see we have a contract start date and we have a contract end date and some of the little bit of functionality that's different is that uh it'll automatically calculate the days this is the bill to customer and then this is what we were talking about where there's pricing on the contract there isn't pricing on entitlements and then you can have things like uh whether there's any kind of a discount or not uh and then there's um a service level there's gold silver bronze this is entirely customizable and it's also optional obviously okay so that's very simple basic information about the contract so that's the contract so to get to contract lines you click here at the top and you click contract lines and now you would create an actual contract line and you can have more than one line on a contract and this could be the 200 cases and here you can associate it with a product notice with entitlements you can associate with more than one product or you can associate with just one you can put a location in here if you need to the start and end date is inherited and here's the quantity 200 of these cases and then here as i said before you have some pricing so if it's ten dollars a case that's two thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars depending on what your um prices are and uh the discount um you can put a discount in if you want to and then that'll show you what the net is uh you can do things like serial numbers and then here you really do need the total cases and minutes now you'll notice it's hours with a decimal in entitlements but here it's actually minutes if it was time based but we're doing case based in total number of cases so we're doing 200 we'll go ahead and put that 200 in there and then if you did do uh hours it would be it would be by minutes and you'd have to multiply by 60. and then the reason for that is because sometimes you can close a case with a resolution of 15 minutes right so they're using decimals and entitlements here we're using minutes to we have total cases of 200 and we'll save and close all right and that's essentially it for contracts and contract lines but now that you know the difference between these two features one of the most important things to think about is is the version you're using first of all and whether or not there's anything on the contract and contract line which is missing so much for entitlements that you would be inclined to use contracts and contract lines you don't know when they're going to go away in the future and if you're on an on premise it may never go away in the future because i know plenty of organizations that use dynamics on premise for years and years and nothing changes but the point is is that if there's anything you see on contracts and contract lines that is not on entitlements it's quite possible without any programming to make certain changes to the uh entitlement entity in dynamics and extend it to meet those missing requirements so for that reason we here lean toward the notion of using entitlements absolutely if you're planning to use the latest version of dynamics and if there's anything that's missing then that can usually be easily rectified the only reason we can see why you'd want to go with contracts and contract lines is if you happen to be on an on-premise version that is not going to change for some time in the foreseeable future all right i hope this has helped thank you you