XrmToolBox Plugin for the Online Management API

Engineered Code created and maintains the XrmToolBox Plugin for the Online Management API. This plugin allows administrators to perform actions on their Dynamics 365 instances like creating and restoring backups, deleting instances, and toggling Admin Mode.

Features

We’ve implemented the following features:

• View list of instances
• View details about the types of instances available in your tenant
• View details for a particular instance (URL, type, version, etc.)
• Provision instance
• Delete sandbox instance
• View backups for an instance
• Disable or enable Admin Mode for sandbox instance, including the ability to enable or disable background processes
• Initiate a backup of an instance
• Restore a backup to a sandbox instance
• Manage Tenant Application Identities, including creating, deleting, enabling and disabling

Note that as per a request from Microsoft, we have removed the feature that allowed a backup to be saved to Azure Storage, since this functionality is intended only for internal Microsoft use, as per the documentation.

Authentication

The Online Management API uses Azure Active Directory for authentication, so this needs to be setup before using the plugin. This means that the existing connections typically used in the XrmToolBox are not used.

To authenticate, you’ll need:

1. Service URL for your region: something like https://admin.services.crm3.dynamics.com, where the .crm3. part matches your Dynamics 365 Online URL
2. App ID and Redirect URL for you Azure Active Directory App: see the steps below

To create your Azure Active Directory App:

1. Login to the Azure portal, browse to the Azure Active Directory, and click App registrations
2. Click New application registration
3. Provide a Name, select Native as the Application type, enter a valid URI for the Redirect URI, and click Create. The Redirect URI doesn’t need to be an actual valid page, so you can enter something like http://yourdomain.com/
4. Once your App registration is created, take note of your Application ID, and then click Required permissions and click Add
5. Under Select an API, choose Dynamics CRM Online and click Select
6. Under Select permissions, choose Access CRM Online as organization users and click Select
7. Click Done.