Online events are pretty hot right now. It’s times like this you really wish you had invested some shares into webinar platforms and online streaming right? Microsoft has partnered with a webinar provider called On24, which is the only provider currently supported for use with Dynamics 365 Marketing. So I decided what a great reason to dig into the good, the bad and the ugly of how ON24 and Dynamics Marketing work together in real life.

In this first article (Part One) I will share some lesson learnt from my experience of integrating the systems, then focus on setting up from the Dynamics Marketing side and figuring out the synchronisation between ON24 & Dynamics Marketing. In my next article (Part Two) I will cover experiences in ON24 setting up the registration & webinar, then running live webinar events for Dynamics Marketing in ON24.

The second part of this article can be found here

Dynamics Marketing

Set up

Detailed steps on this configuration can mostly be found on the Microsoft Docs site [1] but you might struggle to find these bits of information along the way:

• Sign up for ON24 free 30 day trial https://www.on24.com/free-trial/

• Obtain your ON24 Client ID, Access token key, and Access token secret -> http://apidoc.on24.com/obtain-api-access-tokens

Create a webinar event

Once you have completed your setup you are ready to create your first webinar event record in Dynamics. Simply create an event and select the ‘Format’ as “Webinar”. You will then need to enter your Webinar Configuration, Type and Language. Once saved it gives some really nice feedback to the user that something is happening to create the webinar in the background.

Webinar Types

These are automatically created in Dynamics when you complete the webinar set up - but what on earth do these mean? I haven’t had the inclination to try out each one of these but one assumes that the functionality in ON24 varies depending on which type you select. After some digging I found out this explanation of ‘what is what’ and then concluded with my own non ‘schpiel’ version:

• Live Audio (no Screen Share) = a dial in call ‘bridge’

• Live Audio and Video (with Screen Share) = typical webinar structure, dial in or join by browser, share slides and content etc.

• On Demand Recording = a pre-recorded webinar with no audience interaction - self explanatory

• Sim-2-live - a pre-recorded session then live comments and questions afterwards

• Simu-live - a pre-recorded sessions with live Q&A throughout

Which URL?

Then some URLs are generated in Dynamics, and also some in ON24 - it can be a little confusing to know which is which.

In Dynamics:

• Event URL - link for attendee registration

• Presentation Manager URL - administrator type link which allows users to log in as a privileged user (Producer, Presenter or Q&A)

Then in ON24 there are four more URLS:

• Audience - See ‘Event URL’ above

• Reports - access online reports associated with the event

• Preview - access the webcast console to test layout and functionality before the webcast is made public

• Present - See ‘Presentation Manager URL ‘ above

Single event or multiple sessions?

As soon as you create an event of type ‘Webinar’ it goes and creates a session in ON24 but then when you add a session to the event - removes the link from the ‘Event’ level and moves the webinar config to Session level. This makes sense but a little disconcerting in Dynamics when your ‘Event URL’ is blank. In ON24 its not simple either, as there is no way to see which even the session is for. There is a high risk of orphan records at this stage. if you do not set the date/time of the event on create to be more than two hours away (see sync rules)

Duplicate events in ON24

This confused me - if you set up an event template from a webinar it is essentially still an ‘Event’ record with a type of template so it still creates the ON24 sessions regardless, this is a very confusing user experience in ON24

Synchronisation

Optimise for synchronisation status

Whilst playing around with this I ended up with some strange orphan records in ON24 a few times and also some events in Dynamics without Webinar URLs being generated but no kind of notification or error showing on the form. Plus when you look at the event in ON24 - there is no clear link between it and Dynamics Marketing.

Further investigation uncovered some really handy fields which are not shown on the event form by default which track the integration status and unique ON24 ID. I added these to the form/view an recommend you do the same

Synchronisation of create, update and delete activity

It turns out there are some strange rules in the synchronisation and limited documentation of what should and should not synchronise. Based on my experiments I have identified the following abilities and limitations however I would not be surprised to find there are more:

Create

• Create event of type webinar in Dynamics -> Event automatically creates an ON24 session even when its status is ‘Draft’

Update

• Update event name or start/end time in Dynamics -> updates in ON24

• Update webinar type in Dynamics -> no update in ON24, gets stuck at processing and blocks any concurrent updates

• Update event in ON24 -> no update in Dynamics Marketing, no prevention or warning measures in place

• Events cannot be modified is less than 2 hours before the event start time

• Duration limit ‘configured’ to 480 minutes (8 hours) - no clear way of how to reconfigure this and lets you save the record anyway

• Only one update can be processed from Dynamics Event to ON24 at a time, concurrent changes get a Business Process Flow error and no changes can be saved

Delete

• Delete event of type webinar in Dynamics -> deletes in ON24

• Delete event in ON24 -> leaves a record in Dynamics with broken links, no warning measures in place about this being associated to Dynamics (rather than a webinar created directly in ON24)

The gallery below shows a selection of notification/errors I capture in my experimentation’s documented above

Synchronisation of webinar interaction data

As registration for the webinar event happens in ON24 registration forms (see part two for more about this), I was worried that webinar sign up and attendance was going to be lost along the way, fortunately the integration has got this covered to some extent:

• Registrations in ON24 before event end -> Created as a ‘Contact’ (first name, last name and email only) and ‘Event Registration’ in Dynamics

• Registrations in ON24 after event end (i.e. listening to recording on demand) -> no synchronisation to Dynamics Marketing

• Registrations in Dynamics Marketing -> Synced to ON24

• Attendees in ON24 -> Created as an ‘Event Check-In’ in Dynamics

However, there is heaps of valuable data captured during the webinar which does not make it back to Dynamics at all, including:

• Attendee specific: custom fields responses, engagement levels, time spent on the session, interactions they made during the webinar, poll responses etc.

• Webinar session specific: poll results, Q&A, event duration, attendance levels over time etc.

Webinar recordings

Webinar sessions by default are available on demand afterwards forever, they can be configured to a set time period anywhere form 1 month to 3 years, or you can set the record as unavailable, then it will be deleted after 45 consecutive days. Session recordings are stored in ON24, they can be exported as MP4, WMV & FLV formats manually but no pre-built integration to store these elsewhere.

Documentation & APIs

After numerous conversations with Microsoft and ON24 chasing my own tail and being passed around like a hot potato the best documentation I was able to source was as follows:

• A half one page PDF from ON24 and a link to the Microsoft docs site - helpful… [1]

• A brief ‘overview’ of the integration from ON24 which reaffirms my discoveries above but much less detail [2]

• A reasonably well documented RESTFul API from ON24 which could likely be used with Power Automate to fill some gaps (this is where the ABC consultant abandons ship for now) [3]

To be continued…

That brings part one of exploring Webinars with Dynamics Marketing to a close. The integration is very easy to set up and doesn’t require a computer science degree to figure it out. On the surface it is relatively seamless for the simple regular/occasional webinar hosting customer. However, I worry that the wheels might start to fall off the wagon for a heavy webinar delivery focused customer. The synchronisation is ‘good’ but feels incomplete in places (custom fields & templates) - not quite the ‘seamless’ experience I was hoping for.

In Part Two we will look in more detail at the ON24 side of things setting up the registration & webinar, then running live webinar events for Dynamics Marketing. E-See you soon!

The second part of this article can be found here

[1] Configure Dynamics Marketing for ON24 webinar integration: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/dynamics365/marketing/events-settings

[2] ON24 overview of the integration: https://on24-prod.mindtouch.us/ON24_Connect/DataIntegration/Dynamics_365_for_Marketing

[3] ON24 API documentation: https://apidoc.on24.com