Sticky notes are dead: digital Kanban boards for Dynamics and Power Apps

Dynamics 365PCF & Custom ControlsDynamics 365 MarketingModel-driven Power Apps

20 Oct

Paper to do lists are easily misplaced and turned into your child’s latest art project. There is only so much the human brain can remember. Keeping reminders in your brain is a massive unnecessary cognitive load. So how can we better manage both our personal and team workloads to ensure we can reach maximum performance and productivity?

Kanban boards are a really powerful visual tool for communication of capacity and full transparency of work for teams and individuals alike. They are like to-do lists on speed and definitely not some special voodoo reserved just for agile software development teams.

Unfortunately the 21st century world of co-located, socially distanced teams the traditional Kanban board in all its post-it note glory is a thing of the past. Lets look at how we can use custom controls and Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) for model-driven Power Apps to help our users and teams to better manage their workloads.

Dynamics Sales Kanban control

The Kanban board was a big feature release as part of the Dynamics release wave 1 April 2020 [2] but only for Dynamics Sales (for now). Our humble Power Apps license doesn’t include this custom control, but hopefully not forever. Lets have a quick look at this out of the box magic. It’s really quite sophisticated with a heap of functionality to act on, filter and search board items. It can be added to the Opportunity or Activity (activitypointer) entity and is driven off the Status Reason (statuscode) field of the Business Process flow stage

Dynamics Sales Kanban board by status

Dynamics Sales Kanban board by business process flow stage

Just to clarify, it really won’t work on anything other than Opportunity or Activities but it does fail very gracefully

You might not have Dynamics Sales, but that doesn’t mean your Kanban dreams have to end - PCF has a solution for you! Lets have a look at two really great Kanban options that we can use on any entity we like, from the PCF Gallery

Option Set Kanban

This is really great because its not driven purely off the status reason of the record. It can be driven off one or many option sets you have. SO long as you include it in the view, you can drive your board with it! It can be added to entities, views and subgrids too. Plus the colour theme respects the colours assigned to your option sets. Nice! I find the visual experience of this so clean and simple yet super effective. It’s not so clear from the interface how to open the records from the board but it is easily done with a double click.

Credits to Vinicius Basile for this beauty [4]

This one is a really simple set up, just install the solution and add the control to your entity, form or subgrid. You have the power to optimise it more with adding fields to the views and also with the option set colours.

Adding the control to your form requires no extra configuration

EDIT: you can change the choice colours in the power apps modern maker studio now too!

Power Kanban

Now this is a slightly confusing one to set up, but it’s totally worth it for the flexibility it offers. For some detailed screenshots that highlight all the functionality check out this page on the GitHub page [5] but here’s a little GIF I made from playing around with it earlier. I especially love the side by side view for viewing and editing items on the board without leaving the page - wow!

Credits to Florian Krönert for this magical tool [6]

What I really like about the design is that instead of a blank loading screen which is common in PCF - this one shows a nice loading and informative progress indicator which is super important for the user experience when a milisecond load is not possible.

Once installed you need to head to Advanced, from the default app, you can use this URL to get straight there https://YOURDOMAIN.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx?app=d365default&forceUCI=1&pagetype=advancedfind then locate the entity ‘PowerKanban Config’. Hit results and the Create New. Each record in this entity speciffic the configuration for a board, which means you can set up as many boards as you like!

{
    "primaryEntity": {
        "logicalName": "lead",
        "swimLaneSource": "statuscode"
    },
    "secondaryEntity": {
        "logicalName": "task",
        "parentLookup": "regardingobjectid",
        "swimLaneSource": "statuscode"
    }
}

It looks like you can use lots of complex configurations as detailed in this page on GitHub [7] but anything beyond the basic configuration started to blow my mind. This one is still pretty impressive, allowing you to add a primary and secondary entity for example Leads and Tasks.

There is an example of setting up the PowerKanban Config record below.

Unique Name: used in the Custom Control set up - call it whatever you want!

Entity Logical Name: the underlying name of the entity you want the Kanban board to show on

Value: the configuration JSON such as the snippet here, you can change this to show any entity you like whether its custom or out of the box

Even if your users don’t ‘do’ Kanban I would really encourage you to introduce these kind of controls, think of them like subgrids but at a whole new level - you will wonder how you ever got anything done without it! If you want some more ideas on what you can do with data on grids to make it more engaging, useful and interesting of your users check out my other posts on Custom Controls [8] and PCF [9]. One final thought… Kanban’s don’t just have to be used for the standard things like Leads & Opportunities - what about using them as a way to mange your marketing emails as they flow through states of draft, approval and live? The opportunities are endless thanks to PCF!