Tips for Requesting Support for Dynamics 365

Miguel Nepomuceno, 08 June 2018

Magnetism and our clients submit service requests to Microsoft for any issues and problems dealing with Microsoft Dynamics 365. These problems usually require investigation from Microsoft or are issues we have no control in resolving (which are becoming more prevalent as more clients are moving into the cloud).

When submitting a ticket to Microsoft support, you can expect slow response times if you do not provide enough information. It is very important to supply as much information as possible, so a support agent can provide you with the best level of support as fast as possible.

In this blog, I will go over how to log a service request to Microsoft for issues with Dynamics 365. I will also cover ways how you can get a quicker response from Microsoft Support and quickly resolve these issues. Note that this blog focuses on Dynamics 365 Online.

To be able to submit a Service Request to Microsoft for a given Dynamics 365 instance, you would need to have access to the Office 365 Admin Portal. You can go to this by navigating to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/ or from Dynamics 365 by clicking the App launcher and selecting Admin (found in the top left-hand corner of Dynamics 365 in the browser):

In the Office 365 Admin Portal, in the navigation menu, under Support, click “New service request”.

This will open a “Need help?” form in the right-hand side of the browser. From here, you will fill in the text box to describe what issues or errors that requires action from Microsoft. It is important that for Microsoft to resolve this issue as fast as possible, we need to assist them in their investigation. This means being descriptive and detailed, such as stating the steps in reproducing the issue, what you would expect versus what is happening, and details about the error being display on screen.

What should be done next is instead of submitting the entered query in the text box by pressing Ctrl + Enter, you need to click the “Get help” button. What ends up happening is that the greyed out, faded and unclickable (it appears to be almost hidden) “View solutions” and “Contact us” controls are refreshed. Both these controls get activated to be accessible and can be clicked to be expanded (the “Contact us” control is replaced with “Let us call you”).

From here you’d want to submit your contact details such that Microsoft is able to contact you regarding the ticket. What is also important here is the ability for you to submit attachments (which a normal service request query cannot do). This is important because it gives you more flexibility in what kind of information you can give to Microsoft to aid them in their investigation. Attachments allow us to include screenshots, log files, and other files. After submitting all of this by clicking the ‘Call me’ button, a Microsoft engineer from their support team will usually contact you with your issue via phone call.

Here are a few pointers on what you can state and declare when submitting a query:

• •  Steps to Reproduce – what specific steps did you take to encounter or to reproduce the issue e.g. opening an entity record and clicking the Mail Merge button, tracking an Appointment against a Lead record in Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, resetting the Sandbox instance in the Office 365 Admin Center.
• •  Acceptance Criteria – what you expect to happen vs. what actually happened e.g. a prompt pops up in the screen when I click the Deactivate button on an Account, but it instead causes the browser to display an HTTP 404 Error.
• •  Impact – how many users are affected, are there any workarounds to the issue, if there is no workaround is the service I am providing or is the functionality completely unavailable.
• •  Attachments – include screenshots, log files (when the error prompt allows you to ‘Download Log File’), and other files.

Service requests allows us to log any questions or issues relating with Office 365 and Dynamics 365. I hope this blog gives you a guide in not only logging a service request, but also how to log a service request such that it can be acted on and be resolved by Microsoft at the quickest time possible. By being able to specify as many details regarding the question or issue, we can respond and resolve these with Microsoft without being impeded in our everyday use of Dynamics 365.