Profiling Your Customers

Overview

The video shows how a partner can tailor a Business Central trial to each prospect. A questionnaire on the partner’s website collects interests, current systems and company size. The answers are stored in a system table inside Business Central, and the combination of choices selects a set of onboarding elements.

Key points

• Questionnaire answers are stored in a system table in Business Central, and can be used before the user signs in.
• Different AppSource apps and solutions can be loaded during trial setup based on the combination of answers.
• A customer role center can be loaded, attached to a role and set for the current user before sign-in, and the welcome banner text can be changed, by subscribing to the relevant events shown in the sample app.
• Checklist tasks lead the first experience with videos, setup steps and calls to action. The presenter says the sample checklist is an example for inspiration, not a template to copy as is.
• The assisted setup list can be filtered to a custom category by calling the open assisted setup function in the guide experience item, so customers see only setup steps relevant to the solution.
• Teaching tips support markdown (bold, italics) and links, are set with the about title and about text properties in AL, and can be added to report request pages and to query objects opened in analysis mode.
• Reports can ship with Excel layouts that refresh data and graphs on print. A sample onboarding app on GitHub can be forked, and more is at aka.ms/bconboarding.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• page “assisted setup list page” at 5:31
• page “guide experience item” at 13:17
• query “query objects” at 15:16

Not found in BC28-30: page “assisted setup list page”, page “guide experience item”, query “query objects”.

Quotes

• 0:42 “We then store the information from the questionnaire, the answers in a system table inside Business Central and you can use those before the”
• 2:27 “It means that the combination of these choices imply a collection of onboarding elements, checklist tasks, banner, role center, what have you, in a”
• 3:11 “And then, the important part here is that all of that context, where you came from, the outcome of the questionnaire, is passed along”
• 4:29 “So, we’re going to talk through some of the onboarding elements in this checklist. This checklist is not intended to be the great checklist”
• 11:28 “Now, the great thing about what you just saw here is that this app that I loaded here is available on GitHub. It’s the”
• 11:55 “Well, first of all, we loaded a customer role center. There’s a few things that’s important for doing that. So, we loaded a customer”
• 13:17 “Branch off checklists to do more elaborate setups. You saw me uh opening the assisted setup list filtered to your custom category, and you”
• 13:17 “filtered to your custom category, and you do that by calling the open assisted setup function in the guide experience item.”
• 14:39 “with other teaching tips, you can use the about title and about text properties to do that in AL.”
• 15:29 “To learn more, visit aka.ms/bconboarding.”

Disclaimers in the video

• 7:55 preview: So, we also added new things in this release. So, if I start now, and this is actually is a report that I’m starting.

Presenters (as heard): Søren.