What to do before you enable Relevance Search

Relevance search uses Azure to index your CRM data. This means that you are exposing the data to a service external to your CRM instance, so you need to take that into account before you enable Relevance Search. You may have entities and fields that you do NOT want to expose this way because they contain confidential information.

More information can be found in this TechNet article, which says:

We strongly recommend that you configure the entities and entity fields participating in Relevance Search before you enable the search, to prevent sensitive data from being indexed in a service external to Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online). “

On a global basis, Relevance Search is enabled in System Settings. The user selects it in Personal Options -> General -> Search Experience.

Field Security issue copying CRM production instance to sandbox

We recently ran into an issue restoring the a production CRM instance to the corresponding sandbox instance. Although the field security profiles appeared to be copied correctly, the secured fields were not accessible, even with the System Administrator security role.

The workaround is to:

  1. Toggle field security off on the field and save it.
  2. Toggle field security back on and save it.

Do this for each secured field. Then rebuild the Field Security profiles.