One of the most powerful features of D365 F&O is the ability to personalise and tailor the user experience. This can have huge benefits ranging from increased process efficiencies to accelerated user adoption.
However, as with any tailoring capabilities, realising their full potential often requires an element of control. Allowing too much autonomy can compromise the aim of having a consistent user experience and create blockers when it comes to training and support.
Types of Personalisation
Firstly, I think its worth a bit of a re-cap and also to call out the the different types of personalisations that are available across D365 F&O:
- System wide – These personalisations are made centrally by users on the setup page. Examples include default legal entity at login, colour scheme, notification options etc. Mike did a great overview of these options as part of his user interface series (Navigating the D365 F&O interface (Part 2))
- Restricted – This category of personalisations cover those changes made by users as part of their day-to-day system interaction and will most likely go unnoticed. Examples include last-run parameter values in reports, expanding/minimising fast tabs, showing/hiding details view pane etc.
- Full – Full personalisation access covers those conscious and deliberate changes made by users while interacting with a form, table, workspace etc. They typically, although not always, require interaction with the personalisation tool bar and can include actions such as table filters, hiding columns, adding columns to grids etc. My previous post (D365 F&O – Let’s make it personal!) covers off these capabilities in more depth. It is the full access personalisations that you would most likely be looking to administer centrally.
Administration Options
There are fundamentally two angles to take when it comes to the administration and management of user personalisations; Users and Administrators; I’ll look at both. However, it is key to note that the former is predicated on having the required access rights governed by your user security role configuration.
User Options
The easiest way to view and manage your individual personalisations is by navigating to Settings > User Options:
Then selecting Personalisation:
This will show a screen of all system personalisations applied to your user account. It will include the system standard views and also any that you have you added. For example the screenshot below is the ‘Service Products’ view that I created in my previous post:
From this view you have a number of options:
- Export – Allows you to export the selected personalisation locally so that it can be manually imported into another environment, or to reimport at a later date if all personalisations are deleted. Selecting this options triggers a download action automatically in the background.
- Copy to users – Allows you to copy the selected personalisation to other users in the system. Note – the copy process is based upon the user security role assignment. However, in this instance you are only able to specify the specific user accounts rather than all users with a defined security role.
- Delete all personalisations – This is a bit of ‘Ronseal‘ button; it does exactly as it says. It will remove all personalisations for the user. If this option is desired then it is recommended you export any personalisations you wish to keep otherwise you will need to manually recreate them.
- Reset feature callouts – Following any platform update all users will receive a notification (call out) listing the new application features that are now available to them. Once dismissed, this notification stops, but selecting this options resets that dismissal and creates the prompt again. (An easy way to annoy your users, for those of a mischievous temperament).
Admin Options
As you would expect more extensive personalisation administration options are available when being centrally managed. It is key to note here, that although in this context I am referring to a system administrator role, the duties and privileges required to maintain the following activities sitSystem Integration Testing is the testing of a system with extensive configuration, integration and/or customisation, to ensure all are functioning properly and data integrity is preserved. within the All roles (testing), Saved Views Administrator and Information Technology Manager roles1
Navigate to System Administration>Setup>Personalisation:
The personalisation settings here are considerably more extensive than those viewed from a user perspective. An overview of each is as follows:
Published Views
This pane shows all published saved views across the system. A useful data label here when managing your views is ‘Number of roles assigned’, which can give you an indication of how extensive a saved view is used across the system.
Note – Published views are those that have been shared and/or are active and available for selection by the end users and are the default views applied when interacting with the related pages and forms.
Unpublished Views
This page mirrors the structure of the ‘Published Views’ page above. However, these are draft views which have not yet been published and are therefore not available for end users to select in the system.
Personal Views
This page replicates the capabilities seen from an end user perspective. However, it provides a list of all user views across the system rather than those unique to that individual user account. Much like the options covered earlier these views can be exported, deleted and copied to users. However, in addition to those options you are also able to ‘Publish’ a selected view. Publishing a personal view creates a new organisation wide default view, for the security roles specified2. You also have the option to restrict the view to specific legal entities such that, for example, saved views for western Europe, could differ from those of North America.
User Settings
This is where the controls really kick in:
User settings allow you to specify, at a user account level, whether personalisation is allowed and to what extent. Access levels available are ‘Full’ or ‘Restricted’ (as covered above) and can be applied at an account level or even down to specific pages. For example, it may be that you want to allow users the option to apply personalisations generally, but due to the volume of users, you want to provide a consistent user experience on the expenses list page and therefore remove the ability for this page to be personalised.
System settings
This is the central control for system personalisations and allows you to control whether you grant users the ability to personalise their user experience and create saved views. It also provides overarching actions such as ‘delete all personalisations’ and ‘reset all feature callouts’ that, when activated, apply system wide updates to all users and user settings.
Finally, one additional item to call out here is one of the ribbon options ‘Import Views’:
As mentioned at various points throughout this article you are able to export user and organisation wide views. Unsurprisingly, this option allows you to import these views. Imports can be applied to specific users, and create records in the ‘Personalised Views’ table or can be organisation wide or ‘Published’ views that apply to at a security role level across the organisation.
The personalisation views of D365 F&O are extensive and, when used correctly, can provide a great source of process efficiency for the end users. This level of flexibility can be concerning for organisations, especially when considering the drive to provide a consistent user interface. However, I personally believe that as the main consumers of the system it should be the end users that provide the primary drivers for change and standardisation when it comes to personalised views. The administration around this should be leveraged to drive consistency rather than enforce restrictions.
- A combination of these roles is required to fulfil all personalisation administration options. However, the standard duties and related privileges within these roles allow for these actions. ↩︎
- When publishing multiple views that apply to the same page only the latest published view will become the users default view. ↩︎