Kanban and Calendar view of Dynamics 365 activities

With the new Unified Interface of Dynamics, there are many new features that became available, which we wanted to see for so long but were never enabled in the platform.

One of those features is the Kanban view and Calendar view of an Entity.

For those who may not know, Kanban is a Japanese manufacturing term where the supply of components is regulated through the use of instruction cards along a continuous line. So a Kanban view is a way to visualize different work items, in card forms, divided by a certain category (e.g. Status: New, In-Progress, Completed)

Now let’s take a look at how to enable these views for any entity (In our case we will show for Activity entity)

First of all we need to enable that control in the Activities entity settings(if not enabled already). For enabling it we need to:

• Go to our Solution where we are making changes(or create a new solution).
• Add Activities entity to the solution(no sub-components required to be added)
• On the main settings page, click on the Controls tab as shown in the screenshot below

• And then click on Add Control in order to add the Kanban and Calendar controls to the list here.

• Once you add them it should show up as shown in the screenshot below.
• You can select which UI you want to show the controls on(Web/Tab/Phone)
• For the Calendar control you can edit certain properties as shown.

Basically you are assigning/binding certain fields to show up on the calendar view so that the records could be viewed and understood better.

• Now save the entity and publish it.
• To access these views, you would need to go to the Activities list screen. And click on the more options ellipsis(…). The pop-out menu should show these options:

• And this is how it looks as Kanban view:

You can switch the view up top on the left to see different view data similar to how you switch in List views.

For other entities, if there is a Business Process flow, it will give you an option on the top right to switch the Kanban buckets from Status wise distribution to BPF stage-wise distribution.

If you are not using the BPF categories, then the BPF view may show blank. In that case, switch to Status view and you should be able to see the records shown in different buckets based on the status values (e.g. New, In-Progress, Completed, etc.)

• Switch to the Calendar view to look at your activities on a Daily/Weekly/Monthly calendar view(similar to how you find in Outlook).

See below:

Basically this gives the user a better user-friendly way to look at things and plan his/her work.

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