Is the “Rich Text” on the appointment form not working?  

We have all sent a meeting invitation with a meeting agenda before. That area of the meeting invite where the agenda goes is called the body of the appointment, shown in the green box below. 

Within this area you can use what is called “plain text,” which only consists of plain characters without any formatting or Rich Text. “Rich Text” refers to a type of computer text formatting that allows for the inclusion of various text styles and formatting options. Examples: bold, italic, underline, different fonts, colors, and sizes. It enables the user to create visually appealing emails, or other forms of text-based content.  

Why do we want to use Rich Text? 

A Dynamics 365 user creates an appointment in Outlook and saves it (more on this in a future post – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/outlook-app/overview) in Dynamics 365 with Rich Text in the body of the appointment.  When the user opens the appointment in Dynamics 365 they will see something like this: 

Can you read this HTML? Which is, HyperText Markup Language, the standard markup language used for creating and structuring web pages and applications and in our case the Rich Text of the body of an appointment. HTML is the foundation for creating and presenting content on the web, providing structure, and serving as a basis for other technologies to enhance the user experience. 

What the user is expecting to see is:  

Side Note: In Dynamics 365 trials you will see the word Meeting vs appointment (they are the same table/entity), Microsoft just changed the display name of the table.  

How can an administrator enable Rich Text?  

There are two solutions to address this problem: 

1. Organization Settings Editor  

2. Environment settings in the admin center 

I would check both as depending on your Dynamics 365 environment both issues could exist.  

The first Solution: 

Do you have the Organization setting for “appointmentricheditorexperience” set to true? What is and how do I get to the organization settings for Dynamics 365? Microsoft documentation on Organization settings can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/orgdborgsettings-tool-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-20a10f46-2a24-a156-7144-365d49b842ba 

There is a community tool put out by Sean McNellis, called OrgDbOrgSettings, found on his GitHub – https://github.com/seanmcne/OrgDbOrgSettings.  The most current release of the solution is found https://github.com/seanmcne/OrgDbOrgSettings/releases.  

This utility is designed for administrators who work with Dataverse in Power Platform and Dynamics 365, including applications like Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, Field Service (FS), Project Service (PS), and all Model-driven apps. It provides a user-friendly way to adjust settings without needing to use command line tools, as described in the “OrgDBOrgSettings” Knowledge Base article. 

1. Open  https://make.powerapps.com/
2. Select your environment from the top right
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3. Select Import solution
4. Click Browse and select the OrganizationSettingsEditor zip file
   • 
5. On the next screen click import
   • 
6. You will now see a gray bar at the top showing you that the solution is being imported
   • 
7. Once the solution has successfully imported, the bar will turn green
   • 

Now you have successful imported the OrganizationSetttingsEditor solution. Next, let us open it up and see what the current settings are for appointmentricheditorexperience.

1. Open your Model driven app “Sales Hub”
2. Click the gear box top right
   • 
3. Click advanced settings
4. Under settings carrot click on Solutions
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5. The solution at the top should be OrganizationSettingsEditor
   • Double click it
6. A new window with the solution configuration page showing opens
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7. Look for
   • appointmentricheditorexperience
   • 
   • You see above where the default value is false, and the current value is false
     • 
   • We want to change those values
8. Click on Edit for that line
   • 
9. Then change False to True
   • 
10. Click on update
11. You will see the update in the main window
    • 

When you open an appointment in Dynamics 365 you should see the Rich Text “Editor” better known as WYSIWUG, “What You See Is What You Get.” This is the Control added when you have Rich Text enabled for appointments. This is the same control used for the Notes table.  

Since this solution might not work for everyone, let me explain the second solution on how to enable Rich Text for Dynamics 365 appointments. 

The last Solution:  

If you have the DB Org setting turned on and you still do not see the Rich Text on the appointment (meeting) table, I recommend trying the steps below. More recently Microsoft has been Connecting Microsoft Teams with Dynamics 365. Part of that work required that Rich Text be turned on due to being able to schedule Teams meetings directly from within Dynamics 365. The content of the team meeting needed to be Rich Text. I was unable to find any Microsoft documentation on this, but I was able to confirm this with a Microsoft support ticket. 

1. Navigate to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments
2. Select your environment
   • 
3. Then select “Settings”
   • 
4. On the settings screen Select Collaboration
5. Within the collaboration area you will see “End User experiences”
   • Look for the Model-driven apps section
   • Find “End users can add and join Teams meetings from appointments in model-driven apps.”
   • 
6. Turn that setting to “On”
   • 
7. Open an appointment in Dynamics 365 and you should now have Rich Text enabled
   • If you do not see the Rich Text, do a hard refresh by pressing down on Control andF5 buttons at the same time.