Teams and Dynamics 365 Integration Evolves

Microsoft has announced a host of updates to the integration between Teams and Dynamics, bringing together the collaboration platform and the business process layer to enable salespeople, service representatives and operations managers to truly collaborate while simultaneously completing day-top-day work.

These changes primarily affect the Customer Engagement family of applications, however, there are a few new options for the ERP products. We’ve assembled a high-level synopsis of the new Teams/Dynamics integration points. For more detailed information, here’s the Microsoft blog post.

Customer Service and Sales

Teams is now integrated with the Dynamics 365 Customer Service desktop which allows sales or service agents to communicate directly with customers and ultimately solve cases faster by avoiding the complications of having to switch applications to accomplish a single customer service task. Recorded conversations can be displayed next to customer records for added context, and customer service agents can manually link those chats to records. Field agents can take advantage of the same functions.

Microsoft has also integrated Teams voice and video meetings directly into Customer Engagement. This comes with transcriptions from calls; Microsoft’s Conversational Intelligence can detect and provide potential action items that were discussed.

Marketing

The Teams integrations for D365 Marketing are designed to help organizations turn virtual event attendees into customers. By creating a Teams webinar or webcast from Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can require attendees to register. This is new much-needed functionality for Teams webinars to be on par with other event applications. Then you’re able to track user activity during and after the event, create reports and follow up with attendees.

At the recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced that Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 will soon be eligible for six months of Dynamics 365 Marketing for free. Stay tuned for more information on this promotion, and we’ll let you know when it is available. Much of this marketing integration is limited to customers with those respective licenses.

Human Resources

Employees will be able to self-serve and interact with Dynamics 365 Human Resources directly from Teams, asking HR-related questions by typing in a keyword or phrase into a conversation with a chatbot that will respond with pertinent information.

A new Dynamics 365 Human Resources app also allows employees to view their vacation availability and submit time-off requests directly from Teams. Managers can then review and respond to the requests in a few clicks, and employees are notified via a Teams when their requests are approved or denied. This app is now generally available.

Project Operations

Microsoft introduced Project Operations about a year ago to unify the project-based operational workflows connecting sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams within a single application to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability. At that time, MS said it was everything you need to run your operations but now we apparently need Teams as well to collaborate effectively.

Teams provides project teams with an alternative to traditional desktop communication tools to store project files, build a wiki to organize project information, and ensure that project team members have easy access. Our friends at MSDW posted a recent article on how to get started using Teams with Project Operations.

We can Help

To support some of these experiences, you may need to enable features or services and assign licenses and permissions. If you have further questions, just let us know, and we’ll help you sort out the details. And don’t forget to check out last week’s Axtegrity blog where we looked at new Teams features that are being implemented in the Microsoft and Office 365 products.