This is my first post on my new blog, and I’m going to start with a admission: This post is all about the amazing work Ben Vollmer has published providing real world examples of IoT in action using the connected field service app from AppSource.
After seeing Linkedin and Twitter posts following the London CRM Saturday session which ran in January 2018, I was specifically interested to see the connected field service IoT device in action. I decided to buy the device and have a go at getting Ben’s demo working myself.
I have to say, it wasn’t that easy at first, and not having the same forum of the original interactive session available to me meant I had to go off and find the answers myself.
This blog post is not intended to take any credit for the idea, more to provide the steps I followed and provide links to sites I used so that should I, or anyone else need to set this up again, there would be no need to trawl the internet again!
Right, now that’s out of the way, here’s how i managed to get this working…
- Purchase the MXChip AZ3166 device, which is Microsoft’s official Azure IoT device:
- Microsoft’s MXChip AZ3166 product page
- MXChip approved sellers
- I personally purchased mine from DFRobot
- Download and follow the guide from Ben’s Pointdrive site
- Note: Make sure you download the v2 MXChip document
- Make sure you download THIS firmware
- Follow [THIS advice] if you have trouble applying the firmware(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mxchip-devkit-iot-central-firmware-flashing-errors-ben-vollmer/)
It’s important to note that Azure and Dynamics 365 CE are necessary for this demo to work. You’ll need to have enough privileges in both tenancy to allow for all of the components to be created and configured by the automated Connected Field Service AppSource installer.
This is where I came up against a problem. I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner, and with that privilege comes some nice benefits like internal user rights (IUR) Dynamics 365 CE instances and MSDN subscriptions coming with monthly Azure credits. The problem for me was that my IUR instance uses a Microsoft account for access. My MSDN subscription, and therefore Azure, are set up using my MCP account details. I couldn’t get the Connected Field Service app to work with this combination at all. I tried all sorts of “workarounds”.., for example creating Azure guest accounts for my IUR user and using powershell to set their UserType to Member… but nothing seemed to work.
Essentially, as part of the install steps, there is a page which asks you to either select your Azure Subscription if the installer finds one, or alternatively, offers the option of logging in with a different account. No matter what I tried when using the account combination described above, the installer was never able to find an associated Azure subscription. Clicking the link to login using a different account signed me out of the current session and then basically killed the installer.
The only way I could get this to work, was to get the credit card out and actually buy a pay-and-go azure subscription using the Microsoft account my IUR account used. It now works great. I can see the dashboard update based on temperature change. I’m keen to see how some of the other devices can be fed into the StreamAnalytics and displayed through PowerBI, so when I have something demonstrable, I’ll post another blog post about it.
In the mean time, if anyone reads this that has any idea what was going on with the Azure account recognition, please let me know!
NOTE: THIS IS A POST FROM 365PLATFORM 1.0. TERMINOLOGY AND LINKS MAY NO LONGER BE VALID.
