Configuring Activities Feeds in Dynamics 365 CE 2019 Wave 2

This is an update to the way activity feeds can be configured in Dynamics 365 CE 2019 release wave2

There have been a few posts in the past relating to how to configure activity feeds for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE. In the current version, there were a couple of slight tweaks I had to do to get it to work. I have also included a simple enhancement via workflow to deliver better outcomes for users.

1. Under Settings under Customisations, confirm that Notes and Activities are enabled on your entity:

2. Under Settings | Activity Feeds Configuration, select the entity you would like to enable posts and follow/unfollow feature on and click Activate.

3. Go into the entity main form and publish the entity. If you want to enable posts on the timeline of this entity, edit the properties and ensure that posts are included.

4. Create a new dashboard and insert the timeline control onto that dashboard and save. This timeline will show you all activities and posts relating to records that you follow across all entities where activity feeds have been enabled

5. If you open an existing record, you will also see that the Follow and Unfollow ribbon buttons are now enabled for that entity.

A request I often get is that users want to follow records such as opportunities automatically whenever they get connected to that record. In the latest version of Dynamics 365 CE, you can now easily achieve this via workflow.

1. Create a new workflow on the Connection entity and add your steps as required to create a new Follow record.

Based on the above workflow, when a sales user gets added to the sales team sub grid on the opportunity, the workflow will automatically create a follow record between that user and the opportunity. Any activities and posts will appear on the timeline on both the opportunity as well as the dashboard timeline we added earlier.

As you probably noticed, its recommended that you use Microsoft Flow instead of the Dynamics 365 Workflow engine to build out your workflows.

If you need to auto unfollow, you probably need a plugin for that and there are plenty of blogs out there that talks about this.