Maximus Li

The Canada Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) used Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to send annual surveys to banks, mutual funds, and other financial institutions across Canada. However, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice failed to meet CIRO's needs due to limitations like limited question types, restricted layouts, and excessive manual work after survey completion.

I gathered information on the existing environment, business logic, processes, restrictions, and pain points, then built a concept data model and set up a development environment using an out-of-the-box account and contact tables. I created a model-driven app, customizing tables, relationships, forms, views, business rules, workflows, and plugins to meet CIRO's needs. After testing, I implemented a Power Pages portal with secure authentication, allowing only customers with valid email domains to sign up and complete the survey in English or French.

Survey answers were validated based on business logic, plugins, and JavaScript verifications. Once submitted, the survey results triggered follow-up processes managed by Annual Report Questionnaire (ARQ) survey management. All questions and answers were saved to the Dataverse for auditing purposes.

The client had three Dynamics on-premises environments that needed to be migrated to the cloud. Several out-of-the-box functions were no longer supported, customizations had ceased to work, and the source code was outdated. I gathered technical and business details of the existing environments, analyzed the issues, and drafted proposal plans to address these challenges while incorporating enhancements to align with Microsoft's best practices. Collaborating closely with the client, I successfully migrated the AIRS, EWRB, and SPS environments to the cloud, ensuring the transfer of all data and audit logs. As a result, the client achieved over 50% savings in operational costs by running their apps online.

The Ministry of the Attorney General used legacy environments with financial and legal data stored on an IBM mainframe. The client needed a model-driven Power App for the front end, integrated with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 F&O) for the back end.

This project faced several challenges: massive data size (terabytes) spanning 99 years, a legacy app running on an IBM mainframe, and the need for integration with D365 F&O. Additionally, the Ontario government initially signed a 6-month contract, which extended for another six months while the project itself spans three years, leading to resource gaps.

As a senior technical architect, I worked with stakeholders to gather data and business processes from existing legacy systems. I built data models, set up Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) environments, and customized tables, relationships, fields, views, business rules, workflows, and plugins. I also collaborated with the Microsoft FastTrack team to configure D365 F&O Lifecycle Services, deploy F&O environments, and integrate data between Dynamics and F&O. I configured the Dual-write service to synchronize data and ensured that system settings and configurations met compliance, technical, and business requirements.