Monday, March 13, 2023

D365 CE Preview Feature (Collaboration and Co-authoring)

One of the most common ask from our customers is, does the app block one user from accessing or making changes to a record if another user has opened the record on their screen?

While this is not quite like restraining a user from updating a record because of multiple users accessing it, this feature does allow you to see the other folks that are collaborating on the same record.

You’ll need to enable this in your environment to take advantage of this feature.

  • Open https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com
  • Select the environment where you want to enable the functionality.
  • Click on Settings on the command bar (located on the top of the screen).
  • Expand the Product section and select Features.



  • Scroll down to Collaboration section on the left side of the screen.
  • Turn on 'Show other people when they're using the same form'.
  • Now when 2 or more users access the same form, you'll see the co-presence indicator showing all the users. It is very similar to what we see on Microsoft 365 Apps (Word, Excel, etc.).
  • This is only enabled for Account, Contact, Opportunity and Case forms during preview.



Here I would also highlight 2 other features that you can enable.
  • You can also see you can initiate a Teams meeting directly from appointments. For that flip the switch 'End users can add and join Teams meetings from appointments in model-driven app' under the Collaboration section.
  • There is also co-authoring for model-driven apps where you can see the users making changes to forms, views or dashboards using the power apps maker portal. With coauthoring you can see who is working on the same app at the same time, and you can see their applied changes in real-time.
Interesting!