How to setup demo users in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Some years back, I did provide a blog post where you could change some settings on the Contoso demo users and login using the original credentials. Like many other things, there was a change done by Microsoft. As partners and customers, we were not allowed anymore to use the Azure AD credentials from Microsoft Contoso demo users. Microsoft on their turn provided a blog which guides you to reuse the users with credentials from your own Azure Active Directory. Every time I had to deploy a new environment, it took me some time to setup users which I wanted to use for demos or testing. I got the idea to solve this with a script using Microsoft Flow. In this post, I will tell about this and you may download and use it for your own environments.

Importance of demo users

Like wrote in my older blog, there are example users with example roles. These can be used to do demonstrations or testing. There are still many pre-sales consultants who show the features of Microsoft Dynamics using the system administrator role. This is showing all features which could confuse and distract people from what they, in fact, need to judge on. I will tell you a real story about this.

Once, when I was externally hired by another partner, they had to show the purchase requisitions on AX 2012. After the first demo provided by themselves, the customer had a lot of questions. How does this process work for a person who is not allowed to create requisitions? What does it look like when someone is able to create and maintain requisitions? What is shown to a manager who needs to approve the requisition? The partner answered with statements like: “The person who is not allowed to see the requisitions would not be able to see it.”. They also showed the enterprise portal menu which had also time entries, employee self-service and so on. So, the customer was not able to make a clear picture due to the full screens.

They asked me to redo the demo to help them out. Then I did create three security roles and applied them to three different users. Before starting the demonstration, I wrote down the person names and privileges. Then started the demo to show that indeed the first person had an empty menu and could not create requisitions. The second person could create the requisitions for herself and her colleague. The customers eyes opened and they were able to talk about the personas. They even used the names when they had some additional questions.

So, when you do prepare your demos try to use users with security roles attached instead of the overwhelming full set of features.

Setup demo users

To easily enable the option to use the Contoso personas without a lot of manual effort, I created a script in Microsoft Flow. You can see this script in action by watching the video below. You may also subscribe to my YouTube channel.

GitHub

As mentioned above, you can download the Flow from GitHub. You can follow the next link: https://github.com/Dynamicspedia/MicrosoftFlow. When you have downloaded the package (starts with the name SetupDynamics365FOdemousers, you can import it in your Microsoft Flow environment. You need to specify your own credentials. In addition, you need to change the environment on the Finance and Operations actions. There are two actions as shown in the screenshot below.

Once you have completed the changes, you can use the Flow on your environment. As always, make sure you test it carefully first. I do hope you will enjoy this automation.

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!