Document Generation Enhancements in 2020 Release Wave 2

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2, Microsoft has made some enhancements to the document generation capabilities and file attachments in model-driven apps. This first post will cover the document generation capabilities and the generation of pdf documents based on document templates.

SharePoint Documents are back in Dynamics Portals October 2018 Release

Ever since Microsoft purchased AdxStudios and replaced the product with Dynamics Portals, one of the biggest pains was the removal of SharePoint documents. The interim solution of course was available using Azure blobs with the Dynamics Labs solution which provided document uploads, but using the Out of the Box SharePoint Documents was a miss by a lot of Portal Developers.

Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online Integration – Azure Configuration

The next part of this solution is to configure Microsoft Azure. If you do not have an Azure account, you can create a Trial account of Pay as you go account. If you are a partner or have a BizSpark subscription you get a certain amount of credits per month, which should be more than enough for the type of implementation that needs to be done using Azure.

Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online Integration – SharePoint

The easiest part of this solution is to configure SharePoint. There is no custom development involved, but just the creation of the document library, the folders, custom lists and the attributes that we want to use for the solution. We will need to start with the creation of the custom lists as they will be used for the creation of the lookup attributes.

Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online Integration – Overview

Over the past few years we have encountered multiple scenarios where the Out of the Box SharePoint Integration component, did not fulfill the requirements of our clients using Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. Some of these had to do with capturing additional attributes in SharePoint, and sharing similar data across different entities in SharePoint.