Martin P. Lopez — Writing

Teams Webinar V2 in Customer Insights Journeys: First Lessons Learned

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In June I wrote about how to set up Teams Webinar V2 authentication for Customer Insights - Journeys: the app registration, the federated credentials, the Graph permissions, the access policy.

Since then, that article has done something I didn’t fully expect. People don’t ask me how to set it up anymore. They ask why it still doesn’t work 🙋

And the interesting part is that it’s almost always the same short list of things. Not the setup itself, which most admins get through fine, but the gap between “the configuration is saved” and “my webinar actually behaves the way I promised the business it would”.

So this is the follow-up: the first lessons from running this in the wild, and the checklist I now run before anyone books a webinar.

NOTE

TL;DR:

The Teams Webinar V2 setup itself is not what breaks. Two months of follow-ups later, the configuration from the June article has held up. The problems all sit in the gap between “the configuration is saved” and “the webinar behaves the way I promised the business it would”.

Most custom event forms are missing the Meeting Options control. They were last edited before Webinar V2 existed, so the button simply isn’t there. It’s not a drag-and-drop control: you have to copy MeetingOptions from the out-of-the-box form into your own form XML.

A greyed-out Meeting Options button is a security role gap. Custom event management roles usually lack the read privilege on Event teams properties (msevtmgt_eventteamsproperties).

The Graph permissions must be Application permissions, not Delegated. Adding them as delegated looks complete and saves without complaint, but the app can’t use them and the error you get downstream never mentions consent.

If everything is by the book and it still fails, clear the browser cache and sign in again. And plan for the real bottleneck: the setup touches Customer Insights, Entra ID and Teams, which in most organisations means three owners, three change processes and three weeks for one hour of technical work.

What held up

Two things from the June article I’d write exactly the same way again.

One app registration for the whole tenant is enough. Nobody has come back to me with a case that needed one app per Customer Insights environment. Adding a separate federated credential per environment on the same registration has been the right shape every time, and it keeps the permission grant and the consent in one place instead of three.

The setup is a one-time cost. Once it’s correct, it stays correct. None of the problems below came from the configuration drifting on its own. They came from customer setups that differ from the out-of-the-box configuration, which, in my experience, is much more common than not.

The lessons

1. The Form doesn’t display the Meeting Options

This is the most common error and it happens to people that followed the recommended guidelines and do their form customizations in a separate form, not the out-of-the-box form. The problem with this is that probably, by the time that the form was last edited, the Webinar V2 option was not available, so many customers have the problem that the Meeting Options button directly doesn’t show:

The problem with this issue is that it’s not a drag-and-drop control that you can put in a form directly, so you will have to go through the form.xml underneath to do this.

If you ever edited an XML Form of Dynamics 365, you’ll know they are very easy to break. So I used the help of AI to insert the control named MeetingOptions inside the existing XML.

The best way I found to do this (so far) is to provide the AI with the out-of-the-box form and then your custom form that you use normally, and ask it to copy the MeetingOptions control into your normal custom form. This will have a good result in my experience.

I’m a bit old school, so I used a tool in the XrmToolbox called Form Xml Editor to extract the Xml of the forms and to upload the form with the Meeting Options control

TIP

This is the (new) way

This issue will very likely not be solved with an export in the near future.

With the evolution of the Dataverse Skills, you can do this with an AI directly, I just didn’t try it this use case

If you take one thing from this note: Make sure to add the controls that you use from the out-of-the-box event form to your custom form (if you use one).

2. Meeting Options appears, but the button is disabled

If your marketing people are using a security role that is not out of the box, for instance, if you have defined an event management security role, it might look like you have a meeting options button that shows disabled. They will need the permission to read “Event teams properties” (msevtmgt_eventteamsproperties), which you can give directly to the group.

This will give the permissions that were missing for it to work properly.

3. I set up the Graph permissions but it still doesn’t work

The Graph permissions step is where I see the most silent failures.

Adding delegated permissions only to the app registration is sadly not making the cut. An admin normally would doubt to give Application Permissions as it can lead to a security threat and it might require an approval process, so he normally adds everything the documentation lists, saves, sees the full list as delegated permissions, and reasonably concludes the step is done.

It isn’t. Until Application permissions is granted for the tenant, the app can’t actually use those permissions, and the failure you get downstream doesn’t say “consent is missing”. It says something much vaguer about the webinar not being created.

Make sure the Application Permissions are not Delegated permissions. That’s the whole lesson.

4. We did everything in the documentation, we still get the error message

Sometimes it can take a bit of time for Dynamics 365 to apply these application setups, but mostly what I see is just a cache problem.

Make sure that after you did everything in the documentation, you clear the cache completely in the browser, or even sign out and sign in again. That normally makes it work.

5. The real bottleneck is the security process

I said this at the end of the June article and two months of follow-ups have only made me more confident about it.

The setup touches Customer Insights, Entra ID and Teams, and in most organisations those are three different people with three different change processes. The technical work is maybe an hour. Getting those three people in the same conversation, make them understand which permissions they really need and get approval is the part that takes three weeks.

If you’re a marketer or a functional consultant, the useful move is not to learn the setup, it’s to start the conversation early and bring the June article with you. If you’re the admin who owns all three, you already know how much easier your life is 😅

My lessons learned checklist

The short version I now run through before anyone commits to a date:

Open the event form your marketers actually use and confirm the Meeting Options control is there → if it’s a custom form, assume it isn’t until you’ve seen it.
Check the security role behind a greyed-out button → read on Event teams properties (msevtmgt_eventteamsproperties), not just the standard event privileges.
Confirm the Graph permissions are Application permissions and granted for the tenant → the permission list looking complete is not the same as the app being able to use it.
Clear the cache and sign out and in again before declaring it broken → a good part of the “we did everything and it still fails” cases end here.
Get the Customer Insights, Entra and Teams owners into the same conversation early → before a date is promised to anyone.

Steps 1 to 4 are maybe an hour of work. Step 5 is the one that decides whether that hour happens this week or in three weeks, and it’s the one people start last.

Conclusion

None of these are hard problems. What do they have in common?

The form saves without the control it needs. The role saves without the privilege it needs. The permissions save as delegated and the list looks exactly as complete as it would if they were right. Everything looks like it worked, right up until someone asks why they don’t see the meeting Options button or they see it, but is greyed out. That’s a bad place to discover a misconfiguration, luckily it happens before the webinar goes live and you have the chance to fix it.

I wish these kinds of problems would be included in the official documentation, but until then, if this article can help someone, I’m happy to write it 😊

If you haven’t done the setup yet, start with the full walkthrough from June → this note assumes you’ve already been through it.

Beyond the Default: Set Up and Brand a Customer Insights - Journeys Event Web App

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After writing the article on how to create a branded portal in 20 minutes in Power Pages, I discovered this feature from Customer Insights Journeys.

You can create a web app directly from Customer Insights Journeys and then deploy it to your hosting service, like Azure or Vercel. To test it, I created the event page of Roasting Flow which will display the events of my fake coffee shop 😉

I find the idea super interesting especially with the possibilities of extending and branding the application with AI. Because you host the site yourself, you do not need Power Pages capacity for the public event website. You are still responsible for your hosting costs and the licensing of Customer Insights - Journeys.

In this article, I go over how to set up a web app, run it locally, how I branded it so it aligns with my branding, and then tips to publish it online.

NOTE

TL;DR:

Customer Insights – Journeys can generate a lightweight event web app built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Create separate web application records for http://localhost:3000 and your production HTTPS domain, authenticate both domains, and download the application.

You can then run it locally with Node.js, customize its branding, and deploy the contents of the public directory to a static hosting provider such as Azure Static Web Apps. Before deployment, verify the production values in public/js/config.js, and make sure each live event is published to the correct web application.

What are the Event Web Apps from Customer Insights Journeys?

The event web apps from Customer Insights Journeys are a feature where you can easily create a lightweight website to display your events directly integrated with dynamics customer insights. When you create one web application, you are able to download a zip file that contains the whole website in a lightweight web application built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Once you have it downloaded locally, you can edit it and brand it to your needs.

This allows you to be pretty flexible with regards to what you can do in the portal with the events, or not, or how to display them, apply some filters, sorting options, or searching options, as you are fully in control of your website. As well as multi-language options, which I think it’s better handled than in Power Pages.

Why not just stick to Power Pages?

Power Pages provides a low-code, managed option within the Power Platform and includes an event registration template for Customer Insights - Journeys. It is a good option when you want to build and maintain the website primarily through Power Pages Studio rather than working directly with the source code.

However, hosting your own web application gives you more control over the front-end experience, deployment process, and hosting provider. You can modify how events are displayed, introduce custom functionality, and use the development tools and frameworks that best fit your requirements.

Licensing is another consideration. Power Pages requires additional capacity for authenticated or anonymous users, whereas a self-hosted event web app uses the hosting plan you select. The most cost-effective option will depend on your expected traffic, maintenance requirements, and the capabilities your event website needs.

Yes, I vibe-coded the branding

In my case, I vibe-coded the branding for my web application. It simplifies the process of branding on the web portal, but most importantly, it will respect the structure that Customer Insights has created for the event portal and just build on top of that, avoid unnecessarily restructuring the application.

As with any AI-generated code, I reviewed and tested the changes before deploying them.

How I set it up

Configuring Dynamics

First thing we do in Customer Insights Journeys is go to our settings and scroll down to the event management section to click on web applications and then create a new one.

We will give that web application a name and an origin. The origin must match the domain where the application is hosted so that the browser’s CORS requests to the Customer Insights - Journeys API are allowed. I recommend creating two web applications:

One with the origin to your actual domain, which in my case is https://events.roastingflow.com
One with the origin pointing to http://localhost:3000

This one will be entirely for your local calls, so you can see that it shows your events and it shows your event forms correctly.

Once it gets saved, the token is displayed, and the endpoints are also displayed like this:

And under the endpoint documentation field, we will have an event portal web app field with a button attached to it, which allows us to download the zip file. This contains the actual website zip, we download it at this step.

In order to see the registration forms, it is needed to first verify the domain in Customer Insights Journeys. We will go to Settings Domains and enter the external form hosting for your actual domain and localhost.

you can fillout localhost and it will be verified automatically, no DNS stories

Open the event, go to General > Publishing, select Event portal using web application, choose the appropriate web application, and publish the event. Only live events published to the web application will appear on the site.

Running it locally

Once we download the zip, we can extract it and will find a README.md which is super useful with instructions on how to use the web app, here the prerequisites we have to run it locally:

Set up a web application record for your domain in Customer Insights - Journeys > Settings > Web applications (required to allow the portal to call the public API)
Authenticate your domains in Customer Insights - Journeys > Settings > Domains (required for embedded event registration forms)
Node.js v22 or higher (optional; only needed if you use the provided development server)

The first two we did in the previous step. So after we installed node.js, we can test our web app by opening a terminal in the directory of the webapp and running first npm install. After the packages are installed, we can run npm start, and we’ll get the server that is working locally:

If we go to the address in a browser in our computer (the one after “Server running at ”), we’ll be able to see our event website and navigate it:

Once we have this we can setup the branding of the web app.

Brand it with AI

I will not go deep in this part, I’ll just say, that I used Claude Code to brand the website using the following prompt (for my case):

This folder contains a webapp of Dynamics Customer Insights. It shows the events of this coffee shop "https://www.roastingflow.com/" Can you make it coherent with the style, logos and structures of the original webpage? It will be events.roastingflow.com in the future

This generated the plan you can find in my GitHub repository of the website.

The result you can find in the Event Portal of Roasting Flow

Deploy it to your hosting service

Once we got out portal correctly running locally , we can deploy it to our hosting provider. This means that the portal will be accessible to the rest of the world. In my case I use GitHub to host my code and Azure Static Web Apps to host the website. But Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages would be fine as well.

Before deployment, verify that BASE_URL, ORG_ID, TOKEN, and WEBAPP_ID in public/js/config.js contain the values from your production web application record.

The website will only show the events if these values come from the Web App Record we created with the domain for production (in my case events.roastingflow.com). If we use the ones from localhost it will not work.

WARNING

IMPORTANT

Before deployment, verify that BASE_URL, ORG_ID, TOKEN, and WEBAPP_ID in public/js/config.js contain the values from your production web application record.

The production domain must match the origin configured for that record. Values created for http://localhost:3000 are intended for local development and should not be used by the production website.

WEBAPP_ID is optional. When it is provided, the website only displays events published to that specific web application.

Tips and Tricks

If you’re not familiar with Azure Static Web Apps (SWA), you’re a developer and didn’t consider it as an option. I recommend it especially for this use case. Depending on your needs, it can get hosted for free even. Here the Microsoft Learn Documentation.
If you use Azure SWA and want to avoid problems with the token and webapp_id, you can take advantage of the environment variables of the app to have the right token and webapp_id dynamically filled out. Feel free to fork my repo in GitHub where it’s done already.
If you want to dig deeper in the API options, Web Applications leverage the same API that Jonas Schwarzwälder talks about in this amazing article

Conclusion

Customer Insights - Journeys event web apps provide an interesting alternative when you need more control than the standard event experience offers. The generated application already includes event listings, search, event details, embedded registration forms, and multilingual support, while still giving you complete control over its appearance and hosting.

Using AI made the initial branding work much faster, but branding is only the beginning. Because the source code is yours to customize, you can introduce different event layouts, advanced filtering and sorting, additional languages, and experiences tailored to your audience.

Over the next few weeks, I will continue exploring what can be built with this architecture. Particularly its internationalization capabilities and ways to create a more flexible event discovery experience.

Advanced Connector Policies: Don’t Break Customer Insights - Journeys Publishing

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some days start like any other: morning cup of coffee, daily meeting with colleagues, solve some problems from customers, etc.

But today I got a message from a user. He couldn’t publish a customer journey and he didn’t know why. He sent me the weirdest screenshot. This is more or less what he sent me:

The Journey could not be published due to the following data loss prevention (DLP) policy: 'Advanced Connector Policy'. Contact your administrator to update the policy. Further information can be found here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2181032

My first thought was, “When did we set up the Advanced Connector Policies?”

But then I remembered that it was recently and that I wasn’t involved in the process of setting it up, so I could not give any feedback on adding Customer Insights connectors to the Advanced Connector Policies. Luckily, as soon as I did, the journey started running just as before.

In this article, I’ll go over what Advanced Connector Policies (ACP) are, why it is good to implement them and how to do it without interrupting your Customer Insights - Journeys

And if you are facing a similar issue, you can send your system administrator this article directly. Unless it is you, in that case you can go directly to “How did I do it”.

NOTE

TL;DR:

If Customer Insights - Journeys fails when publishing a journey after Advanced Connector Policies are enabled, check whether the required Customer Insights - Journeys connector is allowed in your policy.

The key connector to look for is the native Journeys connector, currently documented by Microsoft as Dynamics 365 Marketing V2 with the ID shared_d365marketingforapps.

Without it, journey publishing can be blocked by governance rules even though the journey itself looks valid.

What are the Advanced Connector Policies

Advanced Connector Policies are rules that govern how connectors can be used within Power Apps, Power Automate and Copilot Studio.

Each connector can be classified as allowed or blocked. By default it will block most of the connectors and only leave the Microsoft standard ones, but you can any time adapt this allowed connectors list to your needs.

This is the evolution of the idea of Data Loss Policies (DLPs), which allowed to classify the connectors and allow only certain categories. Microsoft simplified this by giving just an allowed and blocked list

Advanced Connector Policies can be configured at the environment group level for bulk governance or directly on individual environments for targeted governance. They are especially powerful with Managed Environments, where administrators get more control over connectors and actions.

It is not obligatory to implement these rules to all the environments, but it is recommended if you want to apply governance to your power platform environments.

Why should we set them up?

Advanced Connector policies are intended to reduce the risk of users unintentionally exposing organizational data through connectors used by Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio.

But we use Customer Insights Journeys, not any of those tools

Yes and no. When you use journeys, Microsoft is using Power Automate flows behind the curtains to do the actions in those journeys. So that means that if a connector that they use in their flows isn’t approved, by the time of publishing, the flow will fail.

Every time you find a Power Automate flow starting with CXP_ it's a journey logic

How I set it up

I will not go very deep into how to set it up, because there’s a perfectly valid Microsoft article around how to set up the advanced connector policies. But I will give some pointers on how I set it up for Customer Insights Journeys.

Microsoft explains that it used to have another connector called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, but now the one to allow is the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys V2 connector (with ID shared_d365marketingforapps).

If you used to have Outbound Marketing, you might find it under Dynamics 365 Marketing.

And for those of you who might think “isn’t the normal Dynamics Customer Insights connector necessary?”

In this case, this connector refers to the Customer Insights - Data connectors of Power Automate.

If you’re not using it for any of your Power Apps, Power Automate flows or Copilot Studio Agents, it can remain blocked.

TIP

Note

If you do have Customer Insights Data and use segments in Customer Insights Journeys, your segments will still synchronize even with this connector blocked.

In this case, Dataverse is synced with Dynamics Customer Insights Data not by Power Automate, but by system job.

Conclusion

Advanced Connector Policies are a useful step forward for Power Platform governance. They give administrators a cleaner way to control which connectors are allowed and reduce the risk of data being used in places where it should not be.

But in this specific case, I think the experience could be better.

Most Customer Insights - Journeys users are marketers. They should not need to know which internal connector is required to publish a journey, or why a governance setting in Power Platform suddenly blocks their work.

If Customer Insights - Journeys is installed in an environment, the required native connector should either be clearly highlighted during ACP configuration or automatically suggested as part of the allowed list.

Hopefully, Microsoft improves this experience and this article becomes obsolete soon. Until then, I hope this helps you avoid a confusing publishing error and keeps your journeys running.

Invite Leads to Your Customer Insights Journeys Events

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Customer Insights Journeys, events run on Contacts. Registrations, check-ins, reminders, the whole journey, all of it is contact-shaped.

Which is fine, until you remember that plenty of the people you’d love to have at your event aren’t contacts at all: they’re sitting in your Leads. Prospects Sales is already working with, or people who raised their hand on a form but are not in your contact base yet.

So you invite those leads to the event anyway and Customer Insights Journeys happily registers them as contacts. Now there’s a subtle catch: the new Event Registration points at a contact, while the Lead it actually belongs to is left on the sidelines, disconnected. 🙋

And this check isn't going to help you, it'll generate another lead for the contact. Better let if turned off for this post

In this article, we explore a solution on how to solve this problem easily with a Power Automate Flow. This flow keeps the contact and the lead togetherwhenever a new registration is created, it finds the matching open Lead and links it to the registrant’s Contact. If no open Lead exists yet, it creates one and connects it back to the event.

NOTE

TL;DR:

Events register Contacts, but you want your Leads at them too, so this Power Automate flow keeps the two linked.

It triggers whenever an Event Registration is added (Dataverse, scope Organization).
It searches for an open Lead (statecode eq 0) with the registrant’s email. Found one? → it links that Lead to the Contact (sets Parent Contact). None yet? → it creates a new Lead, stamped with the Originating Event.
The payoff: invite leads to your events and keep every registrant’s contact tied to the lead it belongs to. 🔗

How the out-of-the-box behavior works

Microsoft will by default link the contact and the lead in the following way:

It will first associate the lead with a contact, setting up a parent contact field with the contact assigned.
Then it will create a new record on the connection entity, where it will make the contact be related to the lead as the role of a stakeholder.

Something I discovered while writing this article is that when you make an association of the lead via the parent contact field, it will automatically create a connection record as a stakeholder for the contact. So there is no need for an extra step in the flow where we create this record.

The flow logic

Before clicking around, it helps to picture the decision:

Build it

1. The trigger

Add the Dataverse trigger When a row is added, modified or deleted and configure it:

Change type: Added
Table name: Event Registrations (msevtmgt_eventregistration)
Scope: Organization

The Scope is the part people get wrong. With User scope the flow only fires for registrations you own, useless here. Organization means it catches every registration in the environment, which is what we want when this runs under a service account.

💡 If you want to limit the events in which this happen I would recommend creating a field on the event table which will activate or deactivate the generation of leads. This can also be added as a filter in the Filter rows option in a trigger.

Pick 'Event Registrations' as the table and set the scope to 'Organization', otherwise you'll wonder why it never triggers for anyone but you.

2. Get the Contact

Add Get a row by ID (Dataverse):

Table name: Contacts
Row ID: the contact from the registration. In the expression editor:

triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_contactid_value']

The registration stores the contact as a lookup, and _..._value is how you read a lookup’s GUID straight off the trigger output. We need the full contact record next, mainly for the email and the name.

3. Find an existing open Lead

Add List rows (Dataverse) on the Leads table and open Show advanced options:

Filter rows: emailaddress1 eq '@{outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/emailaddress1']}' and statecode eq 0
Sort by: createdon asc
Row count: 1 Read it left to right: same email and still active. We sort by creation date ascending and take one, so if there are several matches we deterministically grab the oldest one (the original) instead of a random duplicate. But here the logic should be adapted to your organization way of handling leads.

Mind the single quotes around the email in the filter.

4. The condition

Add a Condition. On the left side, use this expression (not dynamic content, type it in the expression editor):

length(outputs('Retrieve_Leads_with_same_email')?['body/value'])

Operator is greater than, right side 0.

List rows always returns an array under body/value. length() counts it: greater than zero means we found a Lead. This is cleaner and faster than looping.

5a. If YES → link the existing Lead

In the If yes branch, add Update a row (Dataverse):

Table name: Leads
Row ID: first(outputs('Retrieve_Leads_with_same_email')?['body/value'])?['leadid']
Parent Contact for lead (Contacts): set this lookup to the contact: /contacts/@{outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/contactid']}

Two small things trip people up here. First, first(...) grabs the single Lead out of that array (we asked for one, but it’s still an array). Second, a lookup in Update a row isn’t a plain GUID, you bind it as a path: /contacts/<guid>. The field is Parent Contact for lead, which is the standard Lead → Contact relationship.

The Row ID uses first() to pull the one Lead from the list, and Parent Contact for lead is bound as /contacts/<contactid>, not just the raw GUID.

5b. If NO → create a new Lead

The If no branch has two actions. Order matters: get the event first, then create the Lead.

Get a row by ID (Dataverse) - Get Event:

Table name: Events (msevtmgt_events)
Row ID: triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_eventid_value']

Add a new row (Dataverse) - Create new Lead:

Topic (subject) → the event’s name: outputs('Get_Event')?['body/msevtmgt_name']
Email → outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/emailaddress1']
Last Name → outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/lastname']
First Name → outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/firstname']
Parent Contact for lead (Contacts) → /contacts/@{outputs('Get_Contact')?['body/contactid']}
Originating Event (Events) → /msevtmgt_events/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_eventid_value']}

That Originating Event field is key. It’s the native CIJ field on the Lead, so once you set it, the platform itself knows this Lead came from this event and it shows up in the event’s insights without any extra work from you.

Both lookups Parent Contact for lead and Originating Event are bound as paths (/contacts/... and /msevtmgt_events/...). The Topic carries the event’s name so Sales instantly sees the context.

Things I’d watch out for

A few pointers before you flip this on for real:

Test in a sandbox first. Register a couple of test contacts one brand new, one who already has an open Lead, and confirm both paths behave (create vs. link).
Run it as a service account with the right Dataverse privileges (create/update on Leads and Connections), not under your personal user. Not sure how to do it? It’s pretty well explained in this article: Power Automate with a Service Principal
Wrap it in a solution and use a connection reference so you’re not rebuilding connections when you ship to Prod. The exported flow already does this.
Lead matching logic. This example uses the oldest open Lead with the same email address, but adapt this to your organization’s lead process. In some setups, you may want to match by campaign, event, business unit, owner, or source instead.
Bulk registrations. This fires once per registration row. If you ever import registrations in big batches, keep an eye on your flow run volume.

Conclusion

Customer Insights Journeys does a good job of handling event registrations, but the Lead-to-Contact relationship can easily become disconnected when you invite Leads to your events.

With a small Power Automate flow, you can close that gap: every new event registration checks for an existing open Lead, links it to the registered Contact, or creates a new Lead when needed. The result is cleaner data, better event attribution, and a much clearer handover between marketing and sales.

But the main idea stays the same: do not let your event registrations live only on the Contact side. Keep the Lead connected too, so Sales can see the full context of who registered, where they came from, and how they already interacted with your company.

Upgrade Your Customer Insights Journeys Events to Teams Webinar V2

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a while now, clients who run webinars in Customer Insights Journeys have been reaching out to me for help setting up Teams Webinar V2.

Their current Teams webinar option is being marked as “legacy”, which is basically like saying Beetlejuice for software products 😬

The timeline is also important: Microsoft is retiring Teams live events and the related Graph APIs effective June 30, 2026. For legacy Teams Webinar and Teams Meeting events, Microsoft honors already scheduled events through February 28, 2027. After that period, Teams Webinar V2 or Teams Meeting V2 should be used.

Most clients contact me when they try to save a new event as a Teams Webinar V2 and see a message like this:

For non-german speakers, the title might look even more intimidating 😅

Luckily, Microsoft warns us in the documentation of the Teams V2 that before using it, you need to set up authentication for Teams webinars v2.

They also documented in this Microsoft Learn page, which is the foundation of this article, but in here I share my learnings implementing it, including a script-assisted approach for admins who prefer to automate part of the setup.

If you’re this person, you can send this article to your IT Administrator, as it can get a bit technical.

If you’re brave enough (and have the right permissions), you can also try it out yourself 😉

NOTE

TL;DR:

Teams Webinar V2 in Customer Insights Journeys requires an additional authentication setup before registrations and attendance tracking can work correctly.

The setup connects Customer Insights Journeys with Microsoft Teams through an Entra app registration, federated credentials, Microsoft Graph permissions, and a Teams Application Access Policy.

My recommendation: follow Microsoft’s documented setup first, but pay special attention to the federated credential subject, the required Graph permissions, and the PowerShell access policy.

You do not necessarily need one app registration per Customer Insights environment; in my implementation, I used one app registration with separate federated credentials for different environments.

Also, remember that attendance/check-in data depends on sending registrants the proper Join in Teams link from the Customer Insights email designer.

Why is this required?

Teams does not allow Customer Insights Journeys to create webinar registrations or download attendance reports using the standard integration alone.

That is why an additional authentication setup is required between our Customer Insights and Teams to send Teams registrations to specific attendees and keep track of the people who attended your webinar.

This allows 2 pretty cool features:

Each registered person in Customer Insights can be seen from the Teams App
When the Event ends, all the attendees will be checked in with their registrations in Customer Insights Journeys, so you’ll know exactly which people attended your webinar automatically!

I did some tests and it works very well:

A little note on this: these features depend on using the Join in Teams link from the Customer Insights email designer. So, be mindful to add the button in your Emails!

How I implemented it

I originally followed the article of Microsoft, but I stumbled upon the following questions:

they don’t give you any guidance on how to handle multiple environments of CIJ (Customer Insights Journeys). Do I have to repeat the process for each registration?
I required PowerShell at the last stage, so not everything can be done by clicking which led me to think, can this be a simple script?

Now my conclusions:

No, there is no need to register an app for every environment. You can register an app registration, give the right permissions for virtual events and when configuring the Federated credentials in your App, you can give different federated credentials for the different environments:

Yes, especially the azure and teams part, I think it’s easier to generate your own credential in CIJ.

The Microsoft way (manual)

My plan is not to rewrite something that Microsoft has already documented well. Instead, I’ll summarize the main steps in order and link directly to the relevant Microsoft Learn sections.

My implementation notes

The App-ID can be found here:
When configuring the Federated Credentials, you should substitute the tenant in the <TenantID> when setting the Issuer https://login.microsoftonline.com/<TenantID>/v2.0
For the PowerShell step should install the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module. You can just run the following in PowerShell:

Install-Module -Name PowerShellGet -Force -AllowClobber

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -Force -AllowClobber

Optional: script-assisted setup for admins

CAUTION

ATTENTION: Run at your own risk

I don’t take responsibility of the consequences of running this PowerShell. I don’t recommend running a script you don’t understand.

For admins who repeat this setup across environments, a script-assisted approach can save time. I would only recommend this if you understand what the script is doing and have the right permissions in Microsoft Entra and Teams.

At a high level, the script can help with:

Creating or reusing the Entra app registration
Adding the required Microsoft Graph permissions
Creating federated credentials for each Customer Insights environment
Connecting to Microsoft Teams PowerShell
Creating and assigning the required Application Access Policy

Do not run automation like this directly in production without reviewing it first. Start in a test environment, validate the permissions, and make sure the policy scope matches your organization’s governance model.

You can find the Script in my GitHub Repository

Conclusion

Moving to Teams Webinar V2 is not just a cosmetic change in Customer Insights Journeys. It introduces a new authentication model between Customer Insights, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph, and Entra ID.

That can feel like a lot, especially for teams that only wanted to create a webinar and send invitations

But once the setup is done correctly, the experience is much better: registrations can sync to Teams, attendees can receive their individual Join in Teams links, and Customer Insights can automatically populate attendance data after the event.

My biggest learning from implementing this is that the process is not necessarily difficult, but it touches several admin areas. That means the real challenge is usually coordination: knowing who owns Customer Insights, who owns Entra ID, and who can run the Teams PowerShell commands. (If you are that person for every area, you’re not alone 😅, and it makes the setup quicker)

If you are a functional consultant or marketer, use this article as a checklist and involve your tenant administrator early.

If you are the admin, validate the setup first in a non-production environment and document which app registration, federated credentials, permissions, and access policies were created.

Once this foundation is in place, Teams Webinar V2 becomes much easier to use and your event registrations and attendance tracking can finally work the way users expect

Update: after a couple of months of running this with clients, I collected the issues that kept coming back in a follow-up note — Teams Webinar V2: First Lessons Learned.

How to Configure Reply-To for No-Reply Senders in Customer Insights Journeys

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This week I was taking a look behind the trenches and checked out Odoo Marketing Automation capabilities, and I noticed that they can configure an automatic reply for people who respond to the sender mailbox. Which made me think a lot of things:

Why were they creating this action after every email sent?
Can’t they just trigger this in a different workflow?
What is the benefit of replying every time if the customer still does not get any real help? 😅

But most importantly, it made me question How is this handled in Customer Insights Journeys?

This is the journey I took to discover a simple but very useful feature in Customer Insights Journeys. 😎

NOTE

TL;DR:

In Customer Insights Journeys, you do not need to build a journey, custom trigger, or Power Automate flow just to handle replies to a no-reply sender address. You can configure a Reply-to address directly in the sender settings of your branding profile.

When recipients hit “Reply” their email client uses the Reply-to header and sends the response to the configured mailbox instead of the no-reply address.

My Initial Ideas

In my process of how to solve this in Dynamics Customer Insights I had 2 ideas:

The Journey Idea

My first thought on how to solve this was: “There must be a trigger for this and I can create a journey to handle it for sure”

Yeah, right...

“Well, without an out-of-the-box trigger, I cannot create a journey for this.”
So that led me to the next idea.

The Custom Trigger with Power Automate

So I decided to try creating a Power Automate flow triggered when an email is received in the no-reply mailbox.

The idea was to send that event to a custom trigger in Customer Insights Journeys and then use a journey to send the customer an email, similar to what I saw in Odoo but centralized inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

This could also open more interesting scenarios, such as flagging the contact as someone who interacted with the email but had a problem, identifying emails that are not performing well, or even creating a case directly in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

PROBLEM: I don’t even have a no-reply mailbox, it’s clearly a “no-reply” email address 😅

That is when I decided to look at the sender configuration in Customer Insights Journeys emails.

How Microsoft Learn Explains It

I found the Microsoft Learn article article where the sender configuration is explained.

This configuration is currently available in the branding profile. Under the sender tab, you can select the different senders for your brand. When you open one of them, you can see the sender configuration, including the Reply-to address:

The email in the Reply-to field is the recipient when someone hits reply.

My Test

So I decided to make a test email with this default sender to try it out…

When hitting reply it doesn't include the no-reply email address

Behind the scenes

This is a protocol that is documented as the Internet Message Format. So it universally works with all modern email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.).

When you inspect the details of the message, you can see this as one of the email headers:

The important part is that the visible sender and the reply destination do not need to be the same. The sender can still appear as your no-reply address, while replies are directed to the mailbox configured in the Reply-to header.

Conclusion

Today I learned two things:

You always learn something when you stay curious.
Some of the best features in a tool are so well integrated that you almost do not notice them.

In this case, Customer Insights Journeys already had the answer: configure the Reply-to address in the sender settings and let the email standard do the rest.

Lead Scoring in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: The 5Ws and How to Start

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lead Scoring has always been a great unknown to me in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. I’ve known about it since the days of outbound marketing, but I never had the chance to see it implemented in a real customer project or help customers adopt it.

This article gets its inspiration from the session “The chaos of Customer Insights projects - The mistakes we keep making (and pretending we don’t)” by Vivian Voss in ColorCloud 2026. She asked the public if in their projects of Customer Insights Journeys, their clients could define what a lead is. I think only one person raised a hand. Vivian highlighted that one of the biggest bottlenecks is that marketing and sales teams often don’t collaborate closely enough.

This made me think, that it is probably the main cause for people to not even consider the feature lead scoring. But I wanted to explore it further because I believe it can significantly improve conversion rates.

NOTE

TL;DR:

Lead Scoring in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps organizations identify which prospects are most likely to convert based on engagement and profile data.

By combining behavioral signals like email clicks, event registrations, and form submissions with demographic information, marketing and sales teams can focus on the leads that matter most.

In this article, we’ll explore:

what Lead Scoring actually is,
when it makes sense to use it,
and how to start building a practical scoring strategy in Customer Insights - Journeys.

What Exactly Is Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring is essentially a prioritization system. It allows you to give a score to a lead based on the data that we collected from the lead.

In order to score the lead you have to give or remove points to interactions or data from the lead. For example:

Opened email → +2
Clicked CTA (Call to Action) → +10
Demo request → +50
No interaction for 30 days → -20

This helps identify how engaged a lead is with your product or service. This engagement level can change over time (taking our example, if there is no interaction for 30 days, the engagement is not the same as when he clicked the Call to Action) and ultimately can give us an estimated probability of whether the client is prone to buy or not.

Negative scoring is just as important as positive scoring because inactivity or disengagement can indicate reduced buying intent.

Not all actions are equal, and you can adapt this scoring points over time. At least with Dynamics Customer Insights Journeys 😉

Who Is Lead Scoring For

This is an important question because Lead Scoring should be a shared effort between sales and marketing teams. If each team works separately and specially handle leads differently, lead scoring will only be implemented halfway and it won’t reach the purpose. The Marketing team will qualify the lead thanks to lead scoring and the sales team will follow up on the lead. So they need a common definition on when a lead is qualified.

Regarding organizations, I think it makes the most sense in organizations with many leads, if an organization is not having that many leads or even they don’t use leads at all, lead scoring is going to be like buying a big motorbike when you are already struggling riding a bike.

TIP

It is always good to start somewhere, so if this is your case, this is how I would do it:

Define what a lead is (involve the Sales and Marketing Teams in this decision)
Define the handling process of a lead (who will be accountable and until when) and the sources of the leads
Adapt your processes for leads (Marketing Forms, Journeys, Segments)
Introduce Lead Scoring, test different models and decide what works best for you

Where Does Lead Scoring Make Sense

Lead scoring can help you best when you need to get the overview of the leads and you have very different ways of evaluating them. If you’re already setting up webinar or event campaigns in customer insights journeys, it makes a lot of sense to introduce lead scoring to better assess which leads are more engaged with you alongside their participation of your campaign. Actually, Lead Scoring is most valuable when intent is gradual rather than immediate.

So, for instance, if someone downloading a brochure is not necessarily ready to buy. But if they later attend a webinar and visit pricing pages, intent becomes clearer.

Lead Scoring is also very useful to evaluate leads for the information you already have about them. Taking a look at demographic or firmographic information of the lead, you can better asses if they are easier to qualify or not.

An example of this is if you know that your services have a higher conversion rate with big enterprise companies than Small to Medium Companies, you can score the leads from the big companies higher. Or if your lead is from a CEO, it might score higher than a engineer, as it can make a purchasing decision easier than the engineer.

When Should You Use Lead Scoring

There are situations in a company that beg for Lead Qualifications:

When marketing is generating more leads than sales can process
when sales complains about lead quality
when engagement data already exists
when customer journeys become complex

On the other hand, Lead Scoring might not be as helpful in early stages, as the system doesn’t have many leads to handle. If you only receive a handful of leads per month, Lead Scoring may create unnecessary complexity to your processes.

Why is Lead Scoring a good idea

I feel like Lead Scoring might be one of the cornerstones of Marketing Automation. The possibility to automate the evaluation of leads in such a level of complexity makes scale in leads handling so much better.

As the prioritization takes over, sales can do a faster follow-up with the leads that are qualified, which ultimately will result in higher conversion rates of the leads. This reduces the manual qualification to the minimum and makes a bridge between the marketing team and the sales team.

Customer Insights Journeys is designed to take all the information you’re collecting from your emails, journeys, events, etc. and allows you to make your scoring models adapted to your clear necessities.

Needless to say it’s a feature included in the Customer Insights Journey license and Microsoft is not going to charge you less if you don’t use it 😁

How to Start

Before building your first scoring model, remember that the goal is not to create a perfect mathematical system. The objective is to help sales teams prioritize conversations more effectively.

Start with a small number of meaningful interactions and refine the model over time based on actual conversion results.

To Setup Lead Scoring Models I followed this Post by Megan V Walker along with the Microsoft Documentation. But in short I’ll put the steps I followed:

I activated the feature Switch for Lead Scoring
I created a new Model
I added conditions to my scoring model set up to add or substract on my conditions
Published my Scoring Model
Saw the analytics and the score of my leads

My Simple Lead Scoring Strategy

I used a very simple Lead Scoring Strategy. I created a lead scoring to identify the coffee geeks that are more willing to buy coffee beans in May. I setup the following conditions:

Interaction	Score
Email received	+1
Email opened	+10
Barista Course Registered and Checked In	+30
Email opted Out	-10

Here an overview of my scoring model:

After implementing the scoring model you can also automate the conversion into marketing qualified leads (MQL) combining the models (or not) and giving it a threshold to which they’re ready to be worked on by Sales:

Different models can have different thresholds to qualify, and models can become obsolete after a campaign or event. There’s always the possibility to stop the qualification model and modify it to fit best your new models.

Conclusion

Lead Scoring is not about building the most complex scoring model possible. It’s about helping marketing and sales teams focus on the leads that actually matter.

The best scoring models are usually not the ones with dozens of conditions and perfectly calculated formulas. They are the ones teams understand, trust, and consistently use in their daily processes.

If you’re starting with Lead Scoring in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, keep it simple:

define what a qualified lead means,
align marketing and sales around that definition,
start with a few meaningful interactions,
refine the model over time using real data.

A scoring model should evolve together with your campaigns, your customer behavior, and your business goals.

Customer Insights - Journeys already provides the tools to make this possible. The real challenge is not the technology itself, it’s creating a shared understanding of what buying intent actually looks like in your organization.

And honestly, that conversation alone may already improve your marketing process more than the scoring model itself.

“Can I Bring Someone?” - Solving Plus-One Waitlisting in Customer Insights Journeys (Part 2)

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Waitlists can be a powerful tool, but they can become difficult to manage, especially when manual processes are involved.

Handling waitlisted registrations can be straightforward, but once we involve companions, it can quickly become tricky.

Because what can we do with 2 registrations? how do we communicate the client that we have only place for one? Do we allow them to cancel one of the registrations?

In my experience, we should give as much control to attendees as possible. Luckily, this is achievable by setting up journeys and informing them via email about the status of their registration.

NOTE

TL;DR:

Handling waitlists with companions in Customer Insights Journeys can quickly become complex.

This solution uses:

2 journeys (attendee + companion)
2 emails (waitlist start + waitlist end)
1 trigger (registration status change)

Together, they allow you to:

Automatically notify users when they enter the waitlist
Let attendees cancel their registration directly from email
React when spots become available
Clearly communicate when the waitlist closes

The result: a fully automated, user-friendly waitlist experience.

Why This Matters

Handling waitlists becomes significantly more complex when companions are involved.

Without automation, you risk:

Confusing communication (who got in?)
Manual updates and errors
Poor attendee experience

This approach ensures every scenario is handled automatically and clearly communicated.

Solution Overview

In my experience, the best approach is:

One Email to handle an attendee or companion entering the waitlist
One Email to handle if the Event Registration has closed and we couldn’t secure a place for the attendee and/or the companion
One new Trigger to trigger on an Event Registration status change (So people can exit the waitlist journey)
Two Journeys (one for the attendee and one for the companion) to handle the emails

This approach works well if:

you already have a journey handling your event registrations on create
you have normally one event at a time (If there are more, we can always create event specific journeys)
you already struggle with handling standard waitlisting scenarios

The process

General Assumptions

This is Part 2 of the series, I assume you already know how to handle plus one registrations and automatically place them on the waitlist, but it is especially important that Companion exists as a value in the Primary role Optionset inside the event registration.

I recommend to take a look at Part 1.

1. “Waitlist - Start” Email

Create an email and use the following placeholders:

The relationships are:

Under trigger --> Marketing Event Registration in the Waitlist --> Reference for Marketing Event Registration
- Primary Role
- RegistrationID
For the EventName trigger --> Marketing Event Registration in the Waitlist --> Reference for Marketing Event --> Event Name
FirstName is the default contact --> First Name

I like to distinguish the registration types in the title of the email, because if both registrations are waitlisted, the contact who signed up for the waitlist will receive 2 emails. One for the Attendee and one for the Companion.

This is the reason to provide the Registration ID, event name and primary role of the registration.

Adding a cancellation button also gives attendees more control over their registration, in case they want to free up their spot or they’re not interested in the event if they cannot go together.

So we add the button, it should be linked to a certain event, for which we can use our relationships from the trigger and event registration 😉

To reference the text in the email, you can use the following:

</p>Hi {{FirstName}},<br><br>Thank you again for your interest in attending our upcoming event, we truly appreciate the enthusiasm and support we've received.<br><br>Due to an overwhelming number of registrations, we’ve had to place some attendees and/or their companions on a waitlist. While we wish we could accommodate everyone right away, this step helps us ensure the best possible experience for all participants.<p><br></p><p>This Email refers to the Event Registration: <span style="font-weight: bold;">{{RegistrationID}}</span> for our <span style="font-weight: bold;">{{Eventname}}</span> as <span style="font-weight: bold;">{{Primaryrole}}</span><br></p><p><br></p>
<p>If you decide to cancel your registration or that of your companion, you can do so directly from this summary by clicking on the designated cancellation option.</p>
<p><br></p>
<div data-editorblocktype="Button" align="-webkit-center" style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" class="buttonWrapper" data-link-type="EventCancellation"><a class="buttonClass" href="{{event_cancellation_1}}&amp;eventRegistrationId={{RegistrationID}}#_msdynmkt_donottrack=0,_msdynmkt_linkid=9293b116-acfa-43e1-925e-cd27885658b1" style="text-align: center; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; display: inline-block; text-decoration: none; width: fit-content; height: auto; max-width: 100%; line-height: normal; background-color: rgb(7, 66, 171); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-radius: 4px; padding: 10px 20px;mso-hide: none !important;" data-msdyn-tracking-id="b039e73e35e3a81775469549356" data-value-type="dynamic" data-placeholder-key="event_cancellation_1">
<span style="display: inline-block; min-width: 1px; font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">Cancel Registration</span>
</a></div><p><br></p>
<p>The good news is that plans can change, and spots often become available. If that happens, we’ll reach out to you right away with an update.</p>
<p><br>In the meantime, thank you for your patience and understanding - it means a lot to us. We’re hopeful we’ll still be able to welcome you to the event.
</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Warm regards,
</p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Martin</p>

It should look like this:

2. “Waitlist - Finish” Email

Here we have to create an email that will be used to handle attendees and companions, but in different ways.

We’ll introduce an inline condition to personalize the message, we’ll filter the message depending if it’s an attendee and we say that we’re sorry they cannot attend or if they’re not, they are told that they can’t bring a companion:

For this Email, we’ll be using the same relationships as the previous Email.

Here the HTML of the text;

<p>Hi {{FirstName}},<br><br>Thank you very much for your interest in our event and for taking the time to register.<br></p>
<p><br></p>
{{#if IsWaitlistAttendee}}Due to the high level of demand, we regret to inform you that we were unable to secure a spot for you.
    As the event is now fully booked and the waitlist has officially closed, no additional places will become available.<br><br>
{{else}}Due to the high level of demand, we regret to inform you that we were unable to secure a spot for your companion.
    As the event is now fully booked and the waitlist has officially closed, no additional places will become available.<br><br>
{{/if}}This Email refers to the Event Registration:&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">{{RegistrationID}}</span> for our&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">{{Eventname}} </span>as&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">{{Primaryrole}}</span><p><br></p><p>We truly appreciate your enthusiasm and understanding. While we’re disappointed not to be able to welcome you this time, we hope to have the opportunity to host you at a future event.<br><br>
If you’d like to stay informed about upcoming events, we’d be happy to keep you in the loop.
<br><br>Thank you again, and we hope to connect with you soon.<br><br>Warm regards,
</p><p> </p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Martin</p>

It should be kept simple, it should look like this:

3. “Event Registration Status Change” Trigger

This trigger is designed to remove contacts from the journeys if their registrations get canceled or registered. To set it up:

Name the trigger Event Registration Status Change
What action will activate the trigger? When a record related to a customer is created or updated
In which table is the record created or updated? Event Registration
Who is the audience for this trigger? Contact
Which attribute contains the audience? Contact
When is the trigger activated? An existing record was updated
Which attribute updates should activate the trigger? Status reason

4. “Waitlist Attendees” Journey

Create a trigger Journey and choose the Marketing Event Registration Waitlisted Trigger and add the condition that the Primary role is Attendee and allow to repeat the journey After 1 Minutes:

Add the Waitlist - Start Email that we created to the journey as the first action.

Then we add a wait condition and set it up to Until a specified by a trigger

As we have access to the event from the trigger, I set this up to the date you plan to close the waitlist, in this example 1 day before the start of the event.

This will send the second email we created to the people that are in the waitlist at that point.

For those who entered the journey but got registered automatically if someone else unregisters, we should exit them from this journey, so we should configure the alternate exits, and that’s when our trigger comes to play.

We would select it as an alternate exit and we will add the following conditions:

Status Reason does not equal Waitlisted
Primary Role equals Attendee

With this journey the waitlisted registrations for the people in the attendee role will be handled, additionally, we’ll add a journey for the companions.

5. “Waitlist Companions” Journey

Save as the previous Journey and setup the start and the exit so that it is filtered for the companion instead of the attendee as a primary role:

Last Tips

This setup can cause issues if you have multiple events using these journeys for waitlisting and registration. To avoid this I recommend using these journeys as a template and create 2 Journeys filtered by event so they don’t overlap.

Conclusion

Handling waitlists is already challenging—but when companions are involved, the complexity increases quickly.

By separating attendees and companions into dedicated journeys, and combining them with:

dynamic emails
a status change trigger
and clear communication logic

you can turn a messy manual process into a fully automated and user-friendly experience.

The key idea is simple:

Give control back to the attendee while keeping the system reactive.

This pattern is not limited to events—you can reuse it in:

capacity-based campaigns
VIP access scenarios
or any process where availability changes over time

If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I highly recommend starting there to understand how the waitlisting logic is initialized.

And if you try this approach in your projects, I’d love to hear how it worked for you 😉

“Can I Bring Someone?” Solving Plus-One Waitlisting in Customer Insights Journeys (Part 1)

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Events are rarely a solo experience.

In many scenarios, attendees want to bring a guest — a colleague, a partner, or a friend. But in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, handling “plus one” scenarios is not supported out-of-the-box.

This creates a real problem:

Your event shows 1 registration
But 2 people actually show up

Multiply that across dozens of attendees… and suddenly your event is over capacity.

In this article, I’ll show you how to solve this using:

The built-in waitlist feature
A Power Automate flow to create companion registrations

NOTE

TL;DR:

Customer Insights Journeys includes a built-in waitlist for events
It works well for single attendees but not for “plus one” scenarios
We can extend it with Power Automate to create and manage companion registrations

The Problem with Plus-One Registrations

The typical flow looks like this:

A contact registers and selects “I’ll bring someone”
A single registration is created
The event capacity increases by 1
In reality, 2 people attend

This leads to:

Overbooked venues
Poor attendee experience
Manual corrections by organizers

Possible Approaches (and Why They Fall Short)

❌ Disable plus-one option

Simple, but negatively impacts user experience.

❌ Manual registration handling

Works for small events, but not scalable.

The Solution

We extend the standard process with:

A new “Companion” role in Event Registration
A Power Automate flow that:
- Detects plus-one selections
- Creates an additional registration
- Applies waitlisting when needed

How does the process look like

Before diving into the implementation, here’s the idea:

The attendee registers normally
We detect if they selected “plus one”
We create an additional registration:
- If capacity allows → Registered
- If not → Waitlisted
We assign a custom role (Companion) to distinguish it

This keeps the event capacity accurate and leverages the native waitlist logic.

How to make this happen

This solution involves only one customization:

Adding a new option in the “Primary Role” of the registration

If this sounds too heavy, you can use a ready-made solution: Companion Role Solution in Github.

Once created, you’ll see the new option in the registration form.

If companion it's not a correct word for an acompañante/Begleitungperson, I'm sorry, not a native english speaker 😅

Setup of the Form

For setting up the form, you’ll need an unmapped field in the form (I recommend of type Dropdown) with the options to come alone or with a plus one.

⚠️ Important: Save the logical field name, this will be used to fetch the response in Power Automate

Make sure:

The field is required
Default value is “No, I’m coming alone” (recommended)

Also ensure:

The event has waitlist enabled — otherwise, everyone will be registered

Power Automate Flow for creating the extra registrations

Now we build the flow that will handle plus-one registrations automatically

1. Trigger

We’ll set up the following:

Change type —> Added
Table Name —> Event Registrations
Scope —> Organization
Filter Rows —> msevtmgt_primaryrole eq null

2. Retrieve Field Submissions

We’ll add the List Rows Action for the Table Field Submissions:

Then it’s easier and more efficient to use a fetchxml query, you just have to modify the [LOGICALNAME] for the logical field name that you gave in your form while setting it up

    <fetch top="1">
      <entity name="msdynmkt_marketingfieldsubmission">
        <attribute name="msdynmkt_localizedfieldvalue" />
        <filter>
          <condition attribute="msdynmkt_localizedfieldname" operator="like" value="[LOGICALNAME]" />
        </filter>
        <order attribute="msdynmkt_localizedfieldname" />
        <link-entity name="msdynmkt_marketingformsubmission" from="msdynmkt_marketingformsubmissionid" to="msdynmkt_marketingformsubmissionid" alias="Formsubmission">
          <filter>
            <condition attribute="msdynmkt_eventregistration" operator="eq" value="@{triggerOutputs()?['body/msevtmgt_eventregistrationid']}" />
          </filter>
        </link-entity>
      </entity>
    </fetch>

3. Update Primary Registration

We’ll Update a Row with of the entity Event Registrations. With this action, we’ll update the current registration to give the role of the Attendee. In the Row ID, make sure to choose the Event Registration from the trigger a.k.a @{triggerOutputs()?['body/msevtmgt_eventregistrationid']}

4. Add a condition

We’ll add a condition where we check if the Localized Value Field (1) or in technical name @items('Apply_to_each')?['msdynmkt_localizedfieldvalue'] is equal to 2 (2) (which is the value os the second dropdown normally).

Be sure to use string(2) when you’re comparing it, as the value in the localized value field will be a string.

5. Add a Registration for the plus one

Add a new Row, where the following elements are there:

Table Name —> Event Registrations
Event (Events) —> /msevtmgt_events/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_eventid_value']}
Contact (Contacts) —> /contacts/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_contactid_value']}
Registration ID —> @null (this is an expression)
Primary Role —> Companion
Status code —> Registered

The names might differ from the picture as my marketing environment is in german, as I'm based in Switzerland

6. Add a waitlisted registration for the plus one

Add a new Row, where the following elements are there:

Table Name —> Event Registrations
Event (Events) —> /msevtmgt_events/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_eventid_value']}
Contact (Contacts) —> /contacts/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/_msevtmgt_contactid_value']}
Registration ID —> @null (this is an expression)
Primary Role —> Companion
Status code —> Waitlisted

But the main point of this action, it’s that it should run only when the previous action has failed (this happens due to an event being over capacity).

The steps can be found in this Microsoft Learn Article, but basically can be summarized in:

... —> Configure run after —> has failed

After configuring this, you should see a different line connecting your two “Add a Row”

Stay tuned for the Part 2

Great! This has been the first part of the “Can I Bring Someone?” Series. We’d gone over:

How to capture plus-one intent in forms
How to extend registration roles
How to automate companion registrations with Power Automate

In Part 2, we’ll take it further:

Notify users if their plus one is waitlisted
Allow them to cancel if needed
Send updates when spots become available

I hope this first part helps you build a cleaner and more reliable registration process. In the next article of the series, we’ll look at how to communicate the outcome to attendees and make the experience smoother when plus ones are involved.

Until then, take care 🐣

⚠️ UPDATE Part 2 is already available in “Can I Bring Someone?” - Solving Plus-One Waitlisting in Customer Insights Journeys (Part 2)

Guide Users in Customer Insights - Journeys with Custom Help Panes

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Customer Insights - Journeys offers a powerful set of features: emails, journeys, segments, triggers, events, and forms.

But for many marketing teams, the challenge isn’t the lack of functionality - it’s navigating all those features efficiently.

New users often ask questions like:

Where do I start? What should I configure first? Did I miss a step?

Training sessions and documentation help, but they require users to leave the application to find answers.

What if the guidance could live directly inside the interface?

That’s exactly what Custom Help Panes allow you to do.

NOTE

TL;DR:

Customer Insights – Journeys runs on a model-driven app, which means you can enable Custom Help Panes.

These panes allow you to:

Embed contextual help directly inside forms
Guide users through processes like email or event creation
Link to other pages inside the application
Provide checklists and best practices

Instead of external documentation, marketers get step-by-step guidance inside the product.

What Are Custom Help Panes

Custom help panes allow you to add context-sensitive help content inside model-driven apps. (In case you were wondering, Customer Insights - Journeys is based in a model-driven app)

They appear as a side panel next to the form or page and can contain:

Rich text
Links
Images
Videos
Coach marks and help balloons

One useful behavior: the help pane remains open while the user navigates between forms, so you can guide users across multiple steps.

This makes it ideal for step-by-step marketing processes!.

Why They Are Useful for CI Journeys

Instead of making a documentation about all the steps the marketers have to do to create an email, or a journey, you can just directly add a help pane to the Journey or the Email!

But it’s better to see some real life examples 🐣

Example 1 – Email creation

Inside the email form you can create a Email creation guidance. Here a sample of how the pane can look like Help pane content example:

TIP

Example Help Page for Email

Purpose

Use this checklist when creating marketing emails in Customer Insights - Journeys to ensure branding, compliance, and deliverability best practices are followed.

1. Use an Approved Template

Start from an approved marketing template.

Checklist:

Use the official company email template
Verify branding elements (logo, colors, fonts)
Do not remove required footer elements
Ensure layout works on desktop and mobile

2. Verify Sender Information

Ensure the sender is recognizable and trustworthy.

Checklist:

Confirm the Sender Name
Confirm the Sender Email Address
Use an approved sender domain
Avoid generic names like Marketing Team unless defined by brand guidelines

Example:

Sender Name: Martin P Lopez
Sender Email Address: events@martinplopez.com

3. Check Personalization

Validate all dynamic content.

Checklist:

Review dynamic fields
Add fallback values where needed
Preview using sample contacts

Example:

Hello {{FirstName | default:"there"}}

4. Review the Compliance Profile

Customer Insights - Journeys enforces consent and regulatory requirements through Compliance Profiles.

Before using the email:

Select the correct Compliance Profile
Verify the communication purpose (e.g., commercial, informational)
Ensure unsubscribe links are present
Ensure the preference center link is included

If unsure, use the default marketing compliance profile defined by your organization.

5. Test the Email

Always test before using the email in a journey.

Checklist:

Use Preview and Test Send
Send a test email to yourself
Verify:
- Mobile rendering
- Images
- Links and buttons
- Personalization fields

6. Final Validation

Before activating the email or using it in a journey:

Subject line reviewed
Preheader text added
Compliance profile confirmed
Links tested
Email approved (if applicable)

💡 Tip Clear subject lines and minimal spam trigger words improve deliverability.

This is how it might look like:

Example 2 – Event creation

Here is another example of how a checklist can help you organize your event:

TIP

Example Help Page for an Event

Purpose

Use this checklist when creating events in Customer Insights – Journeys.

1. Define Event Details

Checklist:

Event name
Description
Event type (online / hybrid / in‑person)
Date and time
Location or meeting link

2. Configure Registration

Checklist:

Registration form created
Required fields defined
Capacity limits configured
Waitlist enabled if needed

Example fields:

First Name
Last Name
Email
Company

3. Configure Event Communications

Recommended emails:

Registration confirmation
Event reminder
Post‑event follow‑up
Follow-up for No-Show (optional)
Unregistered Confirmation (optional)

Example timeline:

Registration Confirmation → Immediately
Reminder → 1 Day Before Event
Reminder → 1 Hour Before Event

4. Configure Event Journeys

Recommended emails:

Registration confirmation
Event reminder
Post‑event follow‑up
Follow-up for No-Show (optional)
Unregistered Confirmation (optional)

Example timeline:

Registration Confirmation → Immediately
Reminder → 1 Day Before Event
Reminder → 1 Hour Before Event

5. Test the Registration Process

Complete a test registration
Verify confirmation email
Validate reminder emails

This is how it might look like:

Using help panes as process maps

But the real value comes from how you structure your Help Panes. So it can be used as a map inside your intention.

So imagine you have a normal campaign script:

How great would it be if you could link your next step directly in your help pane?

Campaign Launch Guide

Creating a map of the campaign for each step, and adding it as a section to your pane helps you identify where you are in your standard process and what are the next steps:

TIP

Tip

Don’t forget to hyperlink the map with the section you want to redirect to, that’s how you get 100% of the value from this feature.

Event Launch Guide

To organize an event usually requires more elements as one might think, help guide them through this process

I recommend using this sequence when creating an event in Dynamics Customer Insights Journeys:

But how do I take this to the Help pane? Just like before, add a section with a checklist of the step you’re in and section with a map to know which section is next or was before:

For the Checklist, I’d recommend less is more, keep it simple and put no more than 5 checks.

And if your event includes an external registration portal, you can also build a branded event website connected to Customer Insights - Journeys.

How to enable

Microsoft documentation already explains the setup process very well: Create guided help for your model-driven app

Here are the high-level steps:

Open Power Platform Admin Center
Navigate to Environment Settings
Enable Custom Help Panes
Create help pages in Dataverse (recommended inside a solution)
Assign security roles

Important:

To enable this feature, you might require Power Platform Administrator or Dynamics 365 Administrator role in your tenant
Users need permission to read the Help Page table, adapt the security role accordingly
Authors need privileges to create and edit help pages.

More Info about Security and privileges under Privileges required

Best practices

Help panes are linked to a specific language. If the user doesn’t have a help pane for his language, he won’t see anything.
If you use balloons or checkmarks take into account that this elements are linked to the HTML element. So if the element is inside a collapsed HTML element, it will not show or not show correctly. Keep in mind that the users can be more confused than helped with this kind of things.
Dropdown or Optionset elements don’t always work with Coachmarks or ballons (for instance in Email)
I’m more of a reader but if you have workshops in video and you can divide them into different sections, you can directly embed the videos in the help panes
Use the links to reference other sections of Customer Insights - Journeys

Final Thoughts

Custom Help Panes are one of the most underrated capabilities in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps model-driven applications.

Instead of relying on external documentation or training sessions, you can guide users directly inside the interface.

For teams using Customer Insights - Journeys, this means:

Fewer onboarding questions
Better process consistency
Faster campaign execution

With just a few help pages and checklists, you can transform the application from a complex tool into a guided marketing workspace.

Clean Up Dataverse File Columns with Power Automate

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few weeks after delivering a Power Automate process that generates and stores PDFs in a Dataverse file column, my client asked for something simple:

“Can we make this process run on demand?”

That’s when I hit an unexpected limitation:

You cannot clear a Dataverse File column using “Update a row”.

I assumed it would be straightforward. But when I tried to use the Update a Row action, the file column didn’t even appear 😐

NOTE

TL;DR:

If you need to clear a Dataverse File column using Power Automate, you cannot do it with Update a row.

Instead:

Use Perform an unbound action
Select the DeleteFile action
Pass the FileId of the file stored in the column

Dataverse stores file content in a separate File record. Deleting that record using DeleteFile properly removes the file from the column.

Things I tried

First, I attempted to use Update a Row and set the file column to null.

That doesn’t work — because the File column does not appear in the action.

⚠️ Note: For Image columns, clearing with null does work using Update a Row. This limitation applies specifically to File columns.

Next, I tried using the Upload a file or an image action and passed null as content:

Interestingly, this creates a blank file instead of deleting it:

It works as a workaround — but it does not actually remove the file. It simply replaces it with an empty one.

Not good enough.

Why This Happens

When you upload a file into a Dataverse File column:

Dataverse creates a separate File record behind the scenes
The File column does not directly store the binary content
Instead, it stores a reference (FileId) to that File record

That’s why the column doesn’t appear in Update a row for clearing with null.

To properly remove the file, you must delete the underlying File record.

The Solution

My instinct told me:

“If this exists in Dataverse, there must be an action for it.”

In Power Automate, that usually means checking:

Perform a bound action
Perform an unbound action

Since File columns are generic and not tied to a specific table type, this had to be an unbound action.

After scrolling through the list…

That is quite a list of actions...

I found exactly what I needed:

DeleteFile

When selecting it, the action requires one parameter:

FileId

And that’s the key insight.

When a file is stored in a File column, the record exposes its FileId — which you can retrieve dynamically.

If you pass that FileId into the DeleteFile action — the file is completely removed.

Voilà 😎

Step-by-Step: Deleting a Dataverse File Column

1️⃣ Add Perform an unbound action
2️⃣ Select action: DeleteFile
3️⃣ In the FileId parameter, pass the FileId from your record
4️⃣ Save and test

Once executed, the file content is fully removed from the column.

Important Notes

This applies to File columns, not Image columns.
You must have proper permissions to delete files.
Many advanced Dataverse capabilities are exposed via unbound actions — even if they’re not available in standard connector actions.

Conclusion

If you ever feel stuck because something isn’t available in a standard Dataverse connector action, check the bound and unbound actions.

Very often, the platform already provides a proper way to handle it — you just need to look a little deeper.

While preparing this article, I tried generating an AI image to illustrate the problem. Ironically, the AI generated something very close to the solution 😅

And I think this is important:

Even if someone has written about this before, your explanation, your scenario, and your experience will help someone in a different way.

If this article saves someone 30 minutes of frustration — it’s worth publishing.

👉 If you need help with this kind of stuff, feel free to send me an Email, . I’ll gladly try to help 😉

Personalized Christmas Emails in Seconds with Power Automate + AI

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When I was a kid, I remember spending hours preparing Christmas cards by hand - paper, crayons, glitter, and a lot of patience. Writing a thoughtful message, waiting for the glue to dry, finding a stamp, and finally dropping the envelope into the school mailbox was all part of the ritual.

Today, very few people send physical Christmas cards anymore. But the intention behind them hasn’t changed: letting people know we’re thinking of them and that they matter.

Companies feel the same need toward their customers. They want to communicate in a way that feels personal and genuine - but when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of contacts, that quickly becomes a challenge. Generic email templates don’t feel special, and complex conditional logic only goes so far.

This is where Power Automate and Artificial Intelligence come into play. By combining Dataverse data with AI-powered prompts inside a flow, it’s possible to generate highly personalized emails at scale - messages that adapt to each recipient’s context without sacrificing automation.

In this article, I’ll show how you can use Power Automate + AI to turn a single click into hundreds (or thousands) of truly personal emails.

NOTE

TL;DR:

With Power Automate and the AI Prompt connector, you can generate hundreds or thousands of highly personalized emails using Dataverse contact data - without building complex logic or templates.

In this article, I’ll show how to use AI prompts inside a flow to add context, tone, and intelligence to your email communications, while keeping everything scalable and automated.

The personalization-at-scale problem

Personalization has been a buzzword for years, but in practice it’s often reduced to little more than:

“Hi {{FirstName}}”

The result?
Messages are sent at scale, but they don’t feel personal - and recipients notice.

At the same time, writing individual emails manually simply doesn’t scale. No one has the time to craft hundreds of unique messages, even if the intent is there.

What’s missing is a way to keep:

the efficiency of automation
while regaining the human tone and context of a personal message

That gap is exactly where AI can add real value.

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking: Alright Martin, but this is the third Post I read today about AI being the solution

I can say, yes, buuuuut probably not within Power Automate 🙌

Introducing: Power Automate + AI Prompts

Power Automate has always been excellent at orchestrating processes: triggering actions, retrieving data, and sending messages. What it traditionally lacked was the ability to think about the content it was sending.

That changes with the AI Prompt connector.

By introducing AI into your flows, you can move beyond fixed templates and rules, and instead generate content dynamically, based on real data and context.

In this approach:

Dataverse provides structured information about each contact
(name, role, company, preferences, history, etc.)
Power Automate controls when and to whom messages are sent
AI prompts decide how the message should be written

Instead of hardcoding dozens of variations, you describe what kind of message you want:

the tone (formal, friendly, festive…)
the context (customer relationship, event, time of year)
the key facts the AI should consider

The AI then generates a unique message for each recipient, using the data you pass into the prompt.

The result is a powerful combination:

One flow
One prompt
Potentially thousands of emails
- each one different, relevant, and human-sounding.

This doesn’t replace automation. It enhances it, turning Power Automate from a message delivery engine into a personalization engine.

WARNING

Responsible use note

AI-generated text can be wrong or inappropriate. Consider adding approval for high-value customers, logging outputs, and avoiding sensitive attributes unless you have consent and a clear business need.

Let’s build it

Step 1: Create the flow

For starters, I recommend creating a manually triggered Power Automate Flow with a Dataverse “List rows” action. This will allow us to control exactly when the emails are sent and to whom.

TIP

Recommendations

Rename the action to describe what it does (best practice): e.g., List Dataverse Contacts
Use Select columns for only the fields you’ll pass to the prompt
Filter out contacts without an email address to avoid failures

Step 2: Create the AI Prompt

The next step is to select the Run a prompt action. This lets us generate a personalized email using the Dataverse data we just retrieved

We’ll create a new prompt from scratch, so click on ”+ New custom prompt”, this will open a window like the following:

In my experience, I found very useful and straightforward to use the `Get Started with Copilot (Preview)` Option. It works very well to give you a draft

Here my final version of my prompt, so you can feel free to use it:

You are tasked with composing personalized Christmas email based on provided contact information.
The email should be tailored to each individual using their first name, last name, birthdate, gender, and country.
Additionally, the email content must be translated appropriately to match the language or cultural context of the recipient’s country.

### Instructions:
1. **Personalization:**
   - Use the first name and last name to address the recipient warmly and personally.
   - Optionally, incorporate a friendly mention of their birthdate if relevant and appropriate.
2. **Cultural Sensitivity:**
   - Adapt the tone and style of the Christmas greeting to suit the cultural norms of the recipient’s country.
3. **Translation:**
   - Translate the entire email content into the primary language of the recipient’s country.
   - Ensure the translation preserves the warmth and festive spirit of the original message.
4. **Email Content:**
   - Include a warm Christmas greeting.
   - Optionally, add a positive, festive message or wish for the upcoming year (2026).
5. **Output:**
   - Provide the personalized and translated email text.

### Guidelines:
- Do not assume the language of the country without verification; use common language associations (e.g., Spain → Spanish, France → French).
- Keep the message respectful, warm, and festive.
- Avoid overly formal or informal language unless culturally appropriate.
- Extract all personalization details strictly from the provided contact info.
- Add a Signature of Martin P Lopez

### Output Format:
Output the personalized Christmas email in json format:
example:
{
"subject":"",
"email":""
}

Include a Subject for the Email in the subject and the email content in html in the email.
Provide the contact information here: 
firstname: {{firstname}}
lastname:  {{lastname}}
birthdate:  {{birthdate}}   
gender:  {{gender}}
country:  {{country}}

TIP

Notes regarding the prompt

Feel free to edit the prompt as you need, this prompt should be used as reference.
I used the cultural sensitivity, translation and output instructions as I provide different Countries of reference
In the email content I found problems when you don’t indicate the coming year, so I recommend adding it
In the Guidelines I indicated to add my signature, that worked very nicely for all languages
I find very useful to have an output in JSON so you can have the subject and body of the email as output
In the last part, the dynamic contents are added. They’re a normal text contents, we provide the data from Dataverse afterwards.
My recommendation is to give a clear name of the function to the prompt as a best practice
The Output in HTML is to ensure the Email is formatted correctly with spacing.
For better results I recommend the ChatGPT 4.1 Model instead of the Mini, it will improve the result a lot.

Once we’re done, we save the prompt and we can map the variables with the data from Dataverse:

For the gender I use the `item()?['gendercode@OData.Community.Display.V1.FormattedValue']` expression, as by default it will give you 1 or 2 as value

Power Automate will automatically wrap the prompt and email actions in an Apply to each loop over the returned contacts.

Step 3: Send the Email

Now add the Outlook action to send the emails. Map the prompt output (subject and email) to the email subject and body, and use the contact’s email address from Dataverse as the recipient. The flow should be ready!

Be mindful, that the `Send an Email (V2)` Action will send all the emails directly, if you prefer to review them before sending, I recommend the `Draft an email message` Action

Conclusion

I really like this solution, it’s simple, easy to implement and gives many extension possibilities:

Send everything dynamically uploading an Excel of contacts to a SharePoint site
Connect and expand with Dynamics Customer Insights Journeys
Adapt it to be more personal in your marketing strategy, for example by sending Event follow-ups, VIP customer outreach or targeted campaigns

This opens up a lot of possibilities and creates a super-powered version of Power Automate. I’m excited about what’s coming in 2026…😊

How about you? You think this combination has other possibilities, I’d love to read them! 😉 email me or tag me on LinkedIn!

Don’t Waste Your Thank-You Page: Use Dynamic Data to Drive Next-Step Actions

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

If you’ve worked with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys, you’ve probably noticed that the default form submission experience - a simple logo and “Thank you” message - often feels underwhelming for users.

You’re not alone 😁 Many teams want something more engaging, more branded, and more helpful than the out-of-the-box version. Luckily, Dynamics 365 allows you to redirect users to a custom thank-you page, giving you full control over design and content.

BEFORE: AFTER:

In this article, we’ll walk through how to quickly create a personalized, dynamic thank-you page - including how to pass form submission data using sessionStorage so you can greet each user with relevant information right after they hit submit.

This idea (using sessionStorage) comes from an article by the great Megan V Walker, worth a read if this topic interests you 👉 Format Session Registration Confirmation Page On Your Own Domain

TL;DR:
Dynamics 365 CI Journeys lets you redirect form submissions to a custom thank-you page.
By saving form data into sessionStorage during onsubmit, you can create a fully personalized thank-you experience that updates instantly - no server calls needed.

Step 1: Build Your Custom Thank-You Page

We’ll continue with the example page I created in Power Pages in my previous article. And as we are using Power Pages, we’ll keep it simple and click on + Page in our Website editor.

This will open a Copilot option, which I had tried out by writing `Make a Thank You Page to redirect to when a user submits for an event`

The Result is definitely not bad 😎

Now let’s customize it.

Add dynamic placeholders

Open Edit Code, then we can modify our h1 and h3 tags to add a span tag which we’ll change dynamically. Here is my Page:

<div data-component-theme="portalThemeColor8" class="row sectionBlockLayout" style='padding: 8px; margin: 0px; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; min-height: 60vh; background-image: url("/Event-2.jpg"); background-position: center center; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: cover;'>
  <div class="container">
    <div class="col-md-12 columnBlockLayout" style="min-width: 250px; flex-grow: 1; display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; align-items: center; margin: 120px 0px;">
      <h1 style="text-align: center; color: #ffffff; text-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.7);">Thank You, <span data-form-field="firstname">there!</span></h1>
      <h3 style="text-align: center; color: #ffffff; text-shadow: 1px 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.6);">Your registration for the <span data-form-field="event">event</span> was successful.</h3>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
<div data-component-theme="portalThemeColor" class="row sectionBlockLayout" style="margin: 0px; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; min-height: auto; padding: 40px 0px;">
  <div class="container">
    <div class="col-lg-12 columnBlockLayout" style="min-width: 250px; flex-grow: 1; display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; padding: 20px;">
      <h2>What Happens Next?</h2>
      <p>We have sent a confirmation email with all the event details to your inbox. Please check your email and add the event to your calendar.</p>
      <button onclick="window.location.href='/'" type="button" value="/" class="button1" style="width: fit-content;">Return to Homepage</button>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Add script to update the placeholders

Open the *.customjs.js of the newly created Thank You Page and paste the following javascript that will substitute the dynamic value of page for the variables we will save in the session storage when we submit the form:

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
  populateThankYouPageFromSession();
  });

  function populateThankYouPageFromSession(options) {
    const config = Object.assign(
      {
        storageKey: 'ciFormData',
        clearAfterUse: true
      },
      options
    );

    const raw = sessionStorage.getItem(config.storageKey);

    if (!raw) {
      console.warn('No form data found in sessionStorage under key:', config.storageKey);
      return;
    }

    let formData;
    try {
      formData = JSON.parse(raw);
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Could not parse form data from sessionStorage:', error);
      return;
    }

    const boundElements = document.querySelectorAll('[data-form-field]');
    boundElements.forEach(function (el) {
      const fieldName = el.getAttribute('data-form-field');
      if (!fieldName) return;

      const value = formData[fieldName];

      if (value === undefined || value === null || value === '') {
        return;
      }

      if (el.tagName === 'INPUT' || el.tagName === 'TEXTAREA') {
        el.value = value;
      } else {
        el.textContent = value;
      }
    });

    if (config.clearAfterUse) {
      sessionStorage.removeItem(config.storageKey);
    }
  }

Your page should look like this:

Step 2: Configure the Form in Customer Insights Journeys

Enable Redirect

Open your event form in CI Journeys and set:

Post submission action: Redirect
Redirect URL: full URL of your new thank-you page

⚠️ If your thank-you page is on a different domain than your form, sessionStorage will not persist.
Use localStorage instead if needed.

Save form values into session storage

Edit the HTML of your form and paste the script after the closing </style> tag:

<script>
  document.addEventListener("d365mkt-afterformsubmit", function (event) {
    const detail = event.detail || {};
    const payload = detail.payload || {};

    const eventTitle =
      document.querySelector("h1 .msdynmkt_personalization")?.textContent?.trim() || "";

    const firstname =
      payload.firstname ||
      document.querySelector('input[name="firstname"]')?.value ||
      "";

    const formData = {
      firstname,
      event: eventTitle
    };

    sessionStorage.setItem("ciFormData", JSON.stringify(formData));
  });
</script>

After adding this script is the moment of the truth, cross your fingers, go to your registration page, fill it out and…

Now you have a fully dynamic, branded thank-you experience! 😊

CSP Configuration (Power Pages Only)

If the page redirects correctly but does not show the dynamic data, Power Pages may be blocking inline scripts.

In order to solve this, we can adjust our power pages by allowing this, I found a perfect article for this 👉 Power Pages CSP: Starter Settings

Add this to your CSP settings:

script-src 'self' 'unsafe-eval' 'unsafe-inline' https://*.microsoft.com content.powerapps.com https://*.azureedge.net;

Here we can see the example of how to configure it, as the article says, you can create or edit it.

Conclusion

Upgrading your thank-you page from the out-of-the-box message to a dynamic, branded experience is a small change with a big impact.

By capturing values in sessionStorage during submission and injecting them into Power Pages, you can:

Personalize the confirmation
Reinforce your brand
Guide users to meaningful next steps
Reuse this pattern across all CI Journeys forms

It’s a lightweight technique that dramatically improves user experience and makes your event flows feel more polished and intentional.

If you try it out, I’d love to hear how it worked for you, email me or tag me on LinkedIn!

Build a Branded Event Website in 20 Minutes with Power Pages and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Some years ago, I was responsible for two Power Pages sites (at that time called Dynamics Portals) that were connected to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (back then: Dynamics 365 Marketing). At that time, adapting and branding an event portal was… painful. It took a lot of effort to get something that looked good and felt on-brand.

Fast forward to today: after a few renames and a lot of updates, Microsoft has evolved these tools to the point where I was able to set up a portal, brand it, and connect it to my Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys environment in as little as 20 minutes.

The best part? After a bit of experimenting, I realized you can do this mostly by customizing and copying a code snippet — no deep coding skills needed.

The Webpage is responsive and people can register to events easily

I decided to put together this guide for you, so you can also set up your branded event website with no code knowledge needed. 😊

I’m basing this on Microsoft’s guide:
Build an event registration portal with Power Pages

…but I had to fight a bit with the tools to understand what’s the quickest and least painful way of setting things up. This article is that shortcut.

TL;DR:

Use the Event portal template in Power Pages.

Quickly brand the hero, header and footer with your logo and imagery.

Replace the default registration logic with the embedded form snippet from Customer Insights – Journeys.

In CIJ, add your domain and Power Pages website under Event Management.

Create an event, point it to your portal and publish — your branded event page is live. 🚀

What will you need?

For this use case, if you want to do it in record time, we have to be prepared beforehand, so I advice you to have the following prepared:

Logo of your company (without background works even better, I’m using a png)
A cover picture that will match with your company Branding
The name of your Company and a Heading Text
A license of Powerapps (One can start with a Trial license and convert it in a production license)
An Omega Speedmaster or Rolex Daytona to measure your speed (optional — the clock app on your computer works just as well 😁)

⚠️ Important: This guide is accurate & working at date of publishing

How to build it

To achieve this in record time, we’ll divide the process into two parts:

Set up Power Pages
Set up Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

1. Set up Power Pages

Create the site

Start at Power Pages Get Started.

Select the correct environment in the top-right corner.
Select Start with a template.

Find an Event Portal template in Dynamics 365 and select 'Choose this template'

Give your site a name and set the language.
Select Done in the bottom-right corner.

You can change the web address later to use your own domain name. If that’s interesting for you, I’ll write a separate article on how to do it.

It takes a few minutes to get your site ready. When it finishes, it redirects you to the home page to edit.

Substitute heading, cover, and logos

Now we have our website ready, but at first you might see something like this:

Give the page a refresh (Ctrl + F5 is even better) and you should see something like this:

Here we can click on **Edit background** to change the cover picture to match our company branding.

Click Edit background to change the hero image. You can Upload Image and reuse that image later on other pages.

You can click on the title text in the hero area to edit it. This is where you tell visitors what this site is about:

Scroll down to the footer. There, click on the Contoso logo (the standard logo) and change it to your own:

If the logo is too tall (like it was for me), you can adjust the width to whatever feels appropriate — the layout will adjust automatically while maintaining the aspect ratio.

For the header, I found it easier to change the logo and site name via Edit code, because changing it only in the designer wasn’t reliable at the time of writing. This might be improved by Microsoft later, but here’s the workaround.

Click Edit code:

From the next stage, click on **Open Visual Studio Code** and a new tab will open.

In Visual Studio Code, open the content snippets folder. There you’ll find:

Logo URL (2)
Site name (3)

In 'Site name' you define the text displayed in the header.

In Logo URL, set the file name of the logo you uploaded (after the \). For example:

Update the Logo URL with the name of your uploaded logo file and the Site name with your company name.

Save (Ctrl+S) and refresh your portal.

Now you have a nicely branded page!

Adapt home cards to events

Back in the Power Pages designer, you can adapt the cards on the home page to display your event information.

You can:

Choose a different layout
Select which event fields to display
Adjust the list to show only upcoming events

This is where you turn the template into your event showcase.

Make the portal public

When the portal is ready to go public:

Go to the top of the designer and click on the site title.
Select Manage site visibility.

Choose Public and confirm. This will allow people (outside your organization) to access the site and register for your events.

2. Set up the portal in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

We also need a bit of setup on the Dynamics side to connect your new Power Pages site to Events in Customer Insights – Journeys.

Add the domain

We need to validate our domain for external form hosting. This is required so the forms from Customer Insights – Journeys can load in a registered domain.

The good news: you don’t need to touch DNS or add records manually.

In Customer Insights – Journeys, go to Settings → Domains.
Create a new domain.
In the form that opens, provide your Power Pages URL (the site you just created).

If you’re unsure about the URL, go back to the Power Pages designer and click Preview in the top-right corner — copy that URL.

Make sure you only check **External form validation**. This will get approved almost instantly.

Click Next, then Verify, then Done. This should be automatic because the host of this webpage is Microsoft.

Add the Power Pages website

Now we’ll link the website itself.

Go to Settings again.
Under Event management, open Power Pages websites.
Add your newly created site.

Include in the Registration page URL the portal URL plus the path '/Register-to-Event'. Use this screenshot as an example.

Make sure the Registration page URL points to your Power Pages site plus /Register-to-Event.

Create an event and publish it to the Power Page

Now for the fun part — try creating an event.

Create a new Event in Customer Insights – Journeys.
When it’s ready, in Where do you want attendees to register for this event?, select Event portal using Power Pages.
If it doesn’t automatically select your portal, choose it manually from the lookup.

When everything is filled out, publish the event. You’ll get a registration URL on your newly created portal.

Publish the event.

You’ll now get a registration URL that points to your new branded Power Pages portal.

Conclusion

You should now have:

A branded portal
Showing events you publish in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
With a working registration form embedded directly from CIJ

All ready for real visitors and registrations.

I highly recommend you try it out in a test event first:

Publish a couple of events
Register as a test attendee
Confirm the registration and check that the data lands correctly in Customer Insights – Journeys

While preparing this article, I timed myself. The quickest I managed to set everything up was 15 minutes and 14 seconds. ⏱️

Do you think you can beat that?
Try to set it up yourself — I’d love to hear your times! 😁

👉 Email me your time or any questions, and feel free to tag me on LinkedIn so we can turn this into the fastest “time-to-live” event portal scenario in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

How Solution Health Hub Prevents Downtime in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Have you ever had a journey that suddenly stops triggering? You could swear it worked yesterday, but now it isn’t firing when it should. Maybe you experienced trying to publish a form or a journey and it’s taking forever until it gives you an error that doesn’t give you much information…

I have to admit, I was once (or twice) where you were (or are) and invested time to debug what was happening. Luckily, I got help from Microsoft engineers who recommended this solution—so I’m sharing it with as many people as possible. 😊

What it is: an app in your Dynamics 365 environment that automatically checks the health of installed solutions—including Customer Insights – Journeys—and provides targeted, one-click fixes for common issues. In this post I’ll show you how I use it.

TL;DR:
If journeys stop triggering or publishing fails with unhelpful errors, use the Solution Health Hub. Create a Marketing Rule Set analysis job, let it run (~2 minutes), then click Resolve on failed checks. Re-run until all results are Pass.

Common problems (and why they happen)

I mentioned a few scenarios in the introduction that I’ve solved with Solution Health Hub. Other common problems include:

A real-time trigger stopped working, with no visible error.
An upgrade fails because background processes are owned by disabled users.
SMS/push don’t go out because a required security role/profile is missing.
Journeys configuration records went missing after partial uninstalls/installs.

If you read until here you might be asking yourself: Ok, I have these problems and you’re gonna help me solve them, but why does that happen?

Why this happens: Customer Insights – Journeys has many moving parts (plugins, background processes, application users, roles). If one dependency is missing or misconfigured, the whole publishing/triggering pipeline can stall. Common root causes include:

Plugin steps or background workflows/flows disabled during imports, upgrades, or cleanups.
Owners of critical processes are disabled users.
Key configuration entities missing after partial uninstalls or failed installs.
MarketingServices app user or roles lack required permissions.
Direct customizations to OOB components conflicting with managed updates.
Dataverse hiccups (throttling/network) leaving components partially applied.

How to use the Solution Health Hub

Open the app, create a new analysis job, let it run (≈2 minutes), then review the results and click Resolve where checks failed—easy, right? 😎

I will summarize the most important points in the article, but I’m basing myself in the Documentation provided by Microsoft in this Article 👉 Troubleshoot issues with Solution Health Hub for Customer Insights – Journeys

1) Create a new analysis job

In the app, the default view is Analysis Jobs. Click New, then in the dialog select Marketing Rule Set and click OK.

Once created, it will automatically open the Analysis Job that you just created with status Running. In about 2 minutes (up to ~5 minutes on the first run) it should complete and display results.

2) Go Over the results and resolve failures

Once completed, scroll to the subgrid at the bottom and review the Return Status column:

For any row with Fail, select it and click Resolve on the ribbon.
Confirm in the dialog (OK).
You’ll see Resolution is in progress → then Resolution is completed. 🎉

⚠️ Important: run the analysis job again to confirm everything turns Pass. I’ve had Microsoft engineers explicitly ask for a second pass to be sure.

Recommendations and Tips

✅ Run Solution Health Hub before and after upgrades.
✅ Re-run the analysis until all checks = Pass.
✅ If Resolve isn’t available for CheckIfProcessesOwnedByDisabledUsers, open the analysis result → review Failing Records → reassign those processes to a system/admin user.

Permissions: You’ll generally need System Administrator (or similar admin privileges) to run/resolve across environments.

⚠️ Customization Warning
If you customized out-of-box components, Solution Health Hub resolutions may reapply the Microsoft baseline to the active layer, which can overwrite your changes.
Recommendation: avoid altering OOB components directly; use custom components.

Conclusion

Downtime in Customer Insights – Journeys is not normally caused by you doing something wrong. It’s the complexity of dependencies. As we saw above, a single missing permission, disabled step, or orphaned owner can halt triggers and publishing.

Solution Health Hub is your built-in first-aid kit: it diagnoses, explains, and often auto-fixes issues before they become lost campaigns or late-night fire drills. After you use it a few times, you’ll wonder why you ever debugged this manually.

👉 Next step: run a Marketing Rule Set analysis in your environment. Even if everything is green, you’ll have the peace of mind that your system sits on a healthy baseline—and you’ll know exactly where to look if something breaks.

Have you already used the Solution Health Hub in your projects? I’d love to hear your experiences — email me a comment, tag me on LinkedIn so we can help more teams keep Customer Insights – Journeys running smoothly. 😉

Dataverse Clone Wars: Bulk-Merging Duplicates with SSIS (KingswaySoft Guide)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A long time ago in a database far, far away… 😁

It is a time of chaos. The mighty Dataverse is under siege by an overwhelming army of duplicate records. Accounts and contacts have been cloned endlessly, threatening to destabilize the CRM galaxy.

Armed only with an SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) package, a brave data engineer rises to bring balance to the system. Their mission: to bulk merge duplicates, unify scattered data, and restore peace to the Dataverse.

At this point, you might be asking yourself:
“Is SSIS really the only choice? I never heard of SSIS, but Power Automate always makes my dreams come true.”

And I tell you No, Power Automate can do it, but you might want to go for a walk while it finishes…

TL;DR:
Use the ready-made KingswaySoft SSIS package to bulk-merge duplicates in Dataverse.
Connect via SOAP (or OAuth), define your match logic (e.g., emailaddress1), adjust comparison settings, preview results with Data Viewer, and always test safely in a sandbox before going full Jedi.

Why not do it in Power Automate?

Power Automate can trigger actions that can merge Records — I tried this myself, but making it efficient is a challenge I’ve yet to accept.

The main issue isn’t functionality — it’s scale. When you’re comparing thousands of records, Power Automate becomes more of a Padawan than a Jedi Master.

So if your duplicates are manageable in number, Power Automate might still be the right tool. I recommend this article:
👉 Automatic Duplicate Account Merge in Dynamics 365 Sales with Power Automate

But if you’re facing 50,000+ contacts or accounts, SSIS will handle the load like a true Sith Lord of data.

Requirements

To prepare your SSIS package for battle, you’ll need the following tools:

Visual Studio 2019/2022 (Professional or Enterprise edition)
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Visual Studio
KingswaySoft SSIS Productivity Pack
KingswaySoft SSIS Integration Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics 365

If it’s your first time working with SSIS — I’m proud of you! 🫡
Start here: How to install SSIS, KingswaySoft, and Visual Studio for Dynamics 365

⚠️ Safety first

Run in a sandbox environment first.

Export a CSV of candidate duplicates (source + master).

Keep an audit log of merges (winnerid → loserid) so you can restore data if needed.

Start small: test with Top 100 records before a full-scale run.

The Battle

Once we’re all set, the nice guys of Kingswaysoft already offered a packaged solution to your problems, you just have to set it up 😊

Click here to download the Kingswaysoft SSIS Package

Open Visual Studio and create a new project: Integration Services Project.

If you're not able to see this kind of Project make sure you installed the 'SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Visual Studio' package

Ok, now unzip the KingswaySoft package and add it to your project. In the Solution Explorer, right-click SSIS Packages → Add Existing Package.

Choose File System as the Package Location, and then browse to the unzipped package path.

When you see “Succeeded in upgrading the package” means you’re on the right track 😉

Next, open the MergeCRMDuplicates.dtsx package, and double-click the Find and Merge CRM Duplicate Contacts task in the Control Flow. You’ll land right in the command center:

It does feel familiar, doesn’t it?

Setting up the Connection

Then we can Click on “Dynamics CRM Connection Manager” and set up the Connection to our Dynamics environment:

I would choose for a single use case the following option, then you just have to fill out the User Name and your Dataverse URL. Make sure to test connection before clicking Ok 😁

Connection tip: Even though to use the Dynamics 365/Dataverse Connection Manager with OAuth (Web API) seems more appealing than SOAP. In my experience the SOAP connection technology is more developed than the Web API with Kingswaysoft. I had cases in which the logics built in SSIS were working perfectly with SOAP but not with WebAPI. For reference: Using the CRM/Dataverse/CDS Connection Manager

The Duplicate Logic

In my example, contacts are duplicated by email address.
The KingswaySoft package already retrieves all contacts, so I opened the Duplicate Detection on name component and will rename it to Duplicate Detection on email for clarity.

Here you can define:

The column to match on (e.g., emailaddress1)
The match type (Exact Match, Fuzzy Match, etc.)
The similarity threshold (percentage of similarity to be considered a match)

For the example case I'll pick the emailaddress1 as column, with exact match.

The real power of this step lies in the comparison settings. These options normalize your column values before matching — for example:

Ignore extra spaces
Treat uppercase/lowercase as equal
Trim trailing punctuation

You can also set a Ranking Strategy — this determines which record “wins” when multiple duplicates are found.

Translation: when multiple records match, the ranking defines which one becomes the master.

By default, it uses Similarity Score, but when you use exact matching, they’ll all have a score of 1.
I like to set a custom strategy where the oldest record wins, assuming it’s the original.
In other cases, I prioritize contacts that aren’t “marketing-only” — merging those into the primary one.

Testing and Merging the data

Want to see what’s happening before executing the merge?
Right-click on a connector line in your control flow and select Enable Data Viewer.
This lets you preview the matching results, review scores, and ensure your logic works as expected.

Now, let the package run — you’ll see the number of merged contacts rising heroically as duplicates fall one by one.

Final Pointers

You merged contacts you weren’t supposed to and you can’t find them?

Don’t panic. They’re not gone — just inactivated.
You can filter by “Last Modified” to the date/time you ran the SSIS package and find them easily.

You want to unmerge them?

Simply reactivate the contact. It won’t be linked anymore — though relationships or field values may already have been consolidated.

Conclusion

You might be thinking: “How many times did he write KingswaySoft?”
They were 10 times, counting this one — and no, I don’t work for them 😁

But their SSIS solution is truly plug-and-play. You don’t need to configure much to wipe out duplicates efficiently.
Even though SSIS isn’t the newest tool in the Power Platform arsenal, it remains a battle-tested solution and a reference for Dataverse data migrations and cleansing.

Did you do something similar with duplicates? Have a better approach? Or ran into issues setting this up?
I’d love to hear your story — email me here or tag me on LinkedIn! 🚀

How to Prevent Duplicate Event Registrations in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (with Form Submission Validation)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Some months ago, I got the question if there was a way to limit the Registrations for an event to one Registration per person in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys. I thought then, that there is no setting for this, so I decided to investigate, and after some research I stumbled into this documentation of Microsoft: Customize form submission validation

Then I thought that if there is a way of validating a form before the submission, we could avoid it altogether. So I set my mind on it and after some testing and validation, I developed a Plugin that will validate the event registration by running on form Submission and will prevent the submission to be sent in case there is already an event registration.

Yes, ok, but Martin, what does this mean?

There is a way to limit the registration process by checking if this person is already registered in the Event

HOW?

Step 1: data-form-validation in Event Registration Form

It all starts by setting the data-form-validation to true in the form where you want to integrate this:

Find the Form Tag in your Form HTML and simply add the data-validate-submission='true' part

Without this, your plugin won’t fire, because this will allow us to trigger the plugins registered under the “msdynmkt_validateformsubmission” Message.

Here an example in code:

    <form aria-label="{{EventName}}" class="marketingForm" data-validate-submission="true"
      data-successmessage="Thank you for submitting the form." data-errormessage="There was an error, please try again."
      data-waitlistmessage="You have been added to the waitlist.">

Step 2: Create a PlugIn

Now create a plugin that will first deserialize the form parameters, then iterate through them to find the email and the event id and retrieve with a fetchxml if there are registrations for the event with the email you got from form:

And for our low-code/no-code users, here’s what the plugin does in plain language: it reads the submission, checks if the email is already registered for that event, and if yes, it blocks the submission.

using System;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query;

namespace UniqueEmailRegistrations
{

    public class CheckIfEmailRegistered : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            var tracing = (ITracingService)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(ITracingService));
            var context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
            var factory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));
            var service = factory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);


            var requestString = context.InputParameters.Contains("msdynmkt_formsubmissionrequest")
                ? (string)context.InputParameters["msdynmkt_formsubmissionrequest"]
                : null;

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(requestString))
            {
                tracing.Trace("No msdynmkt_formsubmissionrequest found; skipping validation.");
                context.OutputParameters["msdynmkt_validationresponse"] = Serialize(new ValidateFormSubmissionResponse
                {
                    IsValid = true,
                    ValidationOnlyFields = new List<string>()
                });
                return;
            }

            var submission = Deserialize<FormSubmissionRequest>(requestString);

            string GetField(string key)
            {
                if (submission?.Fields != null && submission.Fields.TryGetValue(key, out var value))
                    return value;
                return null;
            }

            var emailRaw = GetField("emailaddress1");
            var eventRaw = GetField("event");

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(emailRaw))
            {
                tracing.Trace("Email field is empty or missing; skipping duplicate validation.");
                context.OutputParameters["msdynmkt_validationresponse"] = Serialize(new ValidateFormSubmissionResponse
                {
                    IsValid = true,
                    ValidationOnlyFields = new List<string>()
                });
                return;
            }


            if (!Guid.TryParse(eventRaw, out var eventId) || eventId == Guid.Empty)
            {
                tracing.Trace($"Event field missing or not a GUID: '{eventRaw}'. Skipping duplicate validation.");
                context.OutputParameters["msdynmkt_validationresponse"] = Serialize(new ValidateFormSubmissionResponse
                {
                    IsValid = true,
                    ValidationOnlyFields = new List<string>()
                });
                return;
            }

            var fetchXml = $@"
                <fetch>
                  <entity name='msevtmgt_eventregistration'>
                    <attribute name='msevtmgt_eventregistrationid' />
                    <filter>
                      <condition attribute='msevtmgt_eventid' operator='eq' value='{eventId}' />
                    </filter>
                    <link-entity name='contact' from='contactid' to='msevtmgt_contactid' link-type='inner'>
                      <filter>
                        <condition attribute='emailaddress1' operator='eq' value='{emailRaw}' />
                      </filter>
                    </link-entity>
                  </entity>
                </fetch>";

            tracing.Trace("Running duplicate check with FetchXML:");
            tracing.Trace(fetchXml);

            bool alreadyRegistered = false;
            try
            {
                var result = service.RetrieveMultiple(new FetchExpression(fetchXml));
                alreadyRegistered = (result != null && result.Entities != null && result.Entities.Count > 0);
                tracing.Trace($"Duplicate check result: alreadyRegistered={alreadyRegistered}");
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                tracing.Trace("Error during duplicate check: " + ex.ToString());
            }

            var response = new ValidateFormSubmissionResponse
            {
                IsValid = !alreadyRegistered,
                ValidationOnlyFields = alreadyRegistered ? new List<string> { "emailaddress1" } : new List<string>()
            };

            context.OutputParameters["msdynmkt_validationresponse"] = Serialize(response);
        }
        private T Deserialize<T>(string jsonString)
        {
            var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T));
            T result;
            using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(jsonString)))
            {
                result = (T)serializer.ReadObject(stream);
            }
            return result;
        }

        private string Serialize<T>(T obj)
        {
            string result;
            var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T));
            using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
            {
                serializer.WriteObject(memoryStream, obj);
                result = Encoding.Default.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());
            }
            return result;
        }
        public class FormSubmissionRequest { public Dictionary<string, string> Fields { get; set; } }
        public class ValidateFormSubmissionResponse { public bool IsValid { get; set; } public List<string> ValidationOnlyFields { get; set; } }

    }
}

Step 3: Register the plugIn

Make sure you follow the directives of Microsoft and you register it:

The step name is: “msdynmkt_validateformsubmission”
The Execution Mode is Synchronous
The Execution Order is 10 (This is to prevent conflict with plugins that microsoft have running)
The Event Pipeline Stage Of Execution is Post Operation

Step 4: Dynamically provide the event guid in the form

One has to add the Event guid to the form, and thanks to Real Time Marketing, we can do this now dynamically! So if we add a new custom Field and don’t forget to call it “event”. Then we change the Field Label for the dynamic text that is the Event (msevtmgt_eventid) of the Event from Form, we’ll have it:

Don't forget to call 'EventId', this will play a role in your plugin

Then we can copy this dynamic placeholder as the value of the input of the newly created field and then hide it, so the users don’t see it. The HTML should look similar to this one:

  <div class="textFormFieldBlock" data-editorblocktype="TextFormField" data-prefill="false" data-hide="hide">
    <label title="Field label" for="shorttext564-1758226821033">
      <span class="msdynmkt_personalization">{{EventId}}</span><br>
    </label>
    <input id="shorttext564-1758226821033" type="text" name="event" placeholder="Field label" title="Field label" maxlength="256" value="{{EventId}}">
  </div>

Step 5: Adjust your error Message

One should make sure that the Users get an error message that they can understand, that’s why it’s recommendable to adjust the HTML of the form to offer more information on the validation. Here is an HTML that you can add to the form, so that if the submission gives an error, it will show an explanatory message next to the submission failed:

<script>
document.addEventListener("d365mkt-afterformsubmit", function(event) {
  if (!event.detail.successful) {  
  const baseText =  "Error submitting the form";
  const oneTimeMsg = "You can only register once";

  const selector = ".onFormSubmittedFeedbackInternalContainer[data-submissionresponse='error'] .onFormSubmittedFeedbackMessage";

  function applyOnce() {
    const msgEl = document.querySelector(selector);
    if (!msgEl) return false;

    const targetHTML = baseText + "<br>" + oneTimeMsg;
    if (msgEl.innerHTML.trim() !== targetHTML) {
      msgEl.innerHTML = targetHTML;
    }
    return true;
  }

  if (applyOnce()) return;

  const observer = new MutationObserver((_, obs) => {
    if (applyOnce()) {
      obs.disconnect();
    }
  });

  observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });

  setTimeout(() => observer.disconnect(), 5000);
  }
});
</script>

Tip: Don’t forget to add this between the Form Tags of your Form HTML, Real Time Marketing requires this to work

But I don’t know how to code, what do I do?

You can always download and install my sample Solution. This will check automatically if there is a contact registered with the email address that is trying to register now and it will give the users an error like the following one:

This is not very descriptive...

Just be sure to make the Step 1 for the plugin to trigger and if you’re feeling brave, I really encourage and recommend the step 5, as it will make the user experience way better 😉

Simple but effective

If you’ve tried this approach, let me know on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear how you’re handling event registrations!