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Updated BPM search and Task guide help broken

Update

(January 22, 2018)

As of January 22, we are pleased to announce that all re-indexing tasks have been completed. We appreciate your patience during this time. Going forward, if you are experiencing any issues with search, follow the standard process for reporting an issue in LCS.

Update

(December 07, 2017)

All global and corporate level frameworks have been reset. We expect this re-indexing to be complete by December 15th. In an effort to reduce downtime, private level frameworks will be re-indexed in batches of 1000. Each batch will take 2-3 days to re-index. When a library of yours is within the batch being re-indexed you will lose search functionality for 2-3 days. Prioritization requests may be sent to customer support at any time.

Update

(December 05, 2017)

As of Monday, December 4th, all global frameworks were reset. This was our first priority because the frameworks are used by a majority of customers. Starting Wednesday, December 6th, all libraries will be reset which will result in a complete loss of search functionality.

To request prioritized re-indexing of specific libraries, contact support and provide the library ID (shown in the URL) by Thursday, December 7th. Only Production environments will be marked as a priority. At this time, Development environments are nor marked as priority.

The re-indexing process will take between six and eight weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience throughout this process.

 

Update

(November 28, 2017)

Thank you for your continued patience regarding the ongoing BPM and task guide search issues. Our research into the issues have led us to decide to completely rewrite our indexing implementation. This feature is a top priority. Our goal is to roll out a new indexing system in the first week of December.

We will need to reindex the entire catalog of BPM libraries, which contain about 60 million documents, which will take some time.

Therefore, after our new indexing implementation goes live, we plan to prioritize indexing libraries for customers who are actively using the feature.

If you find an issue with search in your BPM library after we have released the new indexing system,  we will move your library to the front of the queue. You’ll need to provide us with the library ID to index. We are also looking into developing intelligent ordering for indexing frameworks in the future, so that we can automatically prioritize indexing libraries that are actively being used.

For now, if you need to provide a task guide to a customer, we recommend that you save the task guide file locally from Finance and Operations, and share it with them. They will then need to open the task guide file from within Finance and Operations, and open and run it.

To save a task guide locally:

  1. In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, open the Task recorder (Options > Task recorder).
  2. Find the library that contains your business processes.
  3. Select the business process that contains the task guide, and load it.
  4. Edit the task guide, and then save the AXTR file locally.

To open a local task guide:

  1. In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, open the Task recorder (Options > Task recorder).
  2. Click Play a recording as a task guide.
  3. Click Select local file, and open the recording.

Note: We do not have a way to provide downloaded task guides in bulk.

If your customers would prefer to read the content instead of playing it, you can use the screenshot extension to create Word documents, or tell them how to browse to the section of the BPM library that contains the task guides you have created.

Update

(November 9th, 2017)

Because of the large backlog of BPM libraries that needed re-indexing and the volume of new libraries created each day, the re-indexing process has taken longer than expected. To work around this, we have scaled the rate of re-indexing as much as possible. With this scaling, we expect that libraries created before mid-October will be successfully re-indexed by November 16, 2017. Libraries created after mid-October should be re-indexed by the following week.

If you created your library before October 15th, 2017 and Search is still not working on November 17, 2017, contact support with the library ID.

BPM Search and Task guide help broken

We’ve been investigating reports that BPM search and Task guide help are broken.

The root cause is that our task guide search indexing mechanism at times will delete some entries from an index during index maintenance. This had been known to happen very intermittently, and we had been mitigating this by re-indexing individual task guide libraries. Recently after some scale out work to improve search performance, however, this has gotten much worse.  As of last week, search against our global task guide libraries had stopped working altogether, both in the LCS client as well as from the Help pane in the web client.

We hope to have an initial fix that stops the index process from deleting entries available to deploy to LCS by early next week. In the meantime, we plan to re-index the global task guide libraries today to reenable search of those libraries.  Additionally, we are actively working on longer term fixes to avoid the indexing problems in the future.

Nahva Tecklu (Microsoft)

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