Microsoft Teams & Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement - And some other ideas :)

Microsoft Teams & Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – And some other interesting ideas J

There are so many discussions about Microsoft Teams, how they are being used and how they will work with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. If you think about what exactly Microsoft Teams really does it starts to make perfect sense.

GOOGLE TOLD ME THIS: “Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that is part of the Office 365 suite of services. Teams enables local and remote co-workers to work together in real and near-real time.”

AWESOME, sounds very useful, but don’t we have Office 365 groups and Yammer for that? Recently a few enthusiasts and I (One of them being Ken) had a discussion about what works where and how. Rather interesting because the results were quite different. I’m also almost 108.65% certain that various people were asking the same thing when O365 groups were released. “Why can’t we just use Yammer?”….???? Well I’m DEFINITELY not answering that question with this blog post and if you need more information Please look HERE… A really rock solid article that talks about some of the stuff that’s going on. I will take it on properly at some point.

What I am going to answer is how deeply MS Teams works with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. At the moment my personal preference is towards MS Teams because I feel as if a lot of the existing O365 collaborative functionality is going to get absorbed by MS Teams. (Personal Opinion).

MS Teams actually has an existing “Integration” (More of a connection) with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and will let you surface certain information within a MS Team as well as track certain activities and changes. It’s really simple… Simply follow the instructions below and you are off to a good start:

Get a team up and running and create a channel of your preference.

Once you have done that… jump into the menu and hit connectors.

Filter the connectors menu and select Dynamics 365.

Select the correct instance of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Looks like you need to select an instance within your O365 tenant.

From there select a record you would like to connect with. I only saw the ability to connect with “Accounts”, “Opportunities” and “Leads”. I have a workaround for other records explained at the end of the post for other record (Entity) types.

Once you’ve connected to a record (It seems as if you can only select one at a time), you will see the “1 Configured” link under the Configuration button.

If you select the link you only have the option to remove the record. Nothing else. (YET!!!)

After you have decided not to remove the D365 Customer Engagement records because of its vital importance to your team, you will see an update on your team channel with the records addition details.

I can go into D365 Customer Engagement, search for the record, make my updates and then these will be posted to the Team Channel.

Obvs' you can then click through the Team link through to the Dynamics 365 instance record to review and interact with the record as required.

NOW… That’s the easy part done… Here’s the hard part. There is a lot I / we don’t know. In honesty format here we go:

1.     There are only certain entity types you can connect to out the box.

2.     There are only certain fields and activities that sync through to the Teams channel from the record.

3.     The information displayed is okay, but may not be enough to inform the right team members.

The solution:

I created an MS flow to interact with Teams and D365 Customer Engagement. It solves a lot of the problems that you would generally perceive with the MS Teams and D365 connector. IE… It doesn’t only look at Accounts, Leads and Opportunities. Because flows are pretty easy to create. I reckon this solves a lot of thaw current connector gaps.

Probably another blog post for another time…

If you are serious about using teams, in my opinion, that’s the right route! Have fun and shout if you need help!