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Teams Overview
In this activity, we will explore the advantages of and possibilities for integrating Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Teams, further enabling and promotin
In this topic, we’re looking at Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. For some people that have embraced Teams, Teams becomes almost as important as the email client that they might use to interact with their ongoing correspondence. Teams allows them to work with a set of people that have come together to work on a specific goal that that team has been set up for. Teams, if you’re not familiar with it, has a concept of channels.
And in this topic, we’re going to look at how you can combine that with Dynamics 365, to see the data from an opportunity or another record that you’re working with in Dynamics 365 shown in the context of the Teams application, allowing users to collaborate on that together in the Teams application. We’ll look at this from two sides, because you can see some of the aspects of Teams showing up in the Dynamics 365 application. You can also see some of the Dynamics 365 model-driven applications showing up in the Teams interface. The first thing that you can do is connect a record to a team channel.
So in this particular example, we’ve connected the opportunity for Mike Mountain Bikes to a particular channel within Kentoso’s organisation. Now, for many of you that have worked with Teams, you’ll know that shows up as a tab conversation. So you’ll notice that there’s a tab that shows up there that is Mountain Bikes. And that shows basically the full record. And effectively, that’s a model driven app. And you’ll notice, when you set this up, you’ll actually configure the model driven app that you want to connect and show in the context of that tab conversation. You’ll also be able to view and associate files.
We’ll talk a little bit more about what that looks like and how they work both from the Teams application side, as well as from the model driven application that you connect it to. You’ll also be able to use the Dynamic 365 bot. This is another way that you can interact with Dynamics 365 from within the context of the Teams application. This is more appropriate where it’s not necessarily a team you’re collaborating with, but you still want to make it easy to access the Dynamics 365 data from the context of the Teams application. Along with that, you can also use My Dashboard to kind of highlight some of the things that you might want to quickly access from within Teams.
And you’ll notice what this is all really about is getting you so that you can spend the time working with the data, regardless of whether you’re in Dynamics 365, you’re in Outlook, you’re in the Teams application. A lot of the integration with Dynamics 365 is specific to allow you to do the work from where you happen to be at that particular point in time. Now, one of the nice things about the Teams application is, in addition to the collaboration you can get from just chatting with other team members that have been added to the team channel, you can also share files easily to kind of have those available, to collaborate on them.
You get all the benefits of the Teams application and SharePoint, which is the backing store behind that. Basically, it allows you to do things like concurrent editing, as well as keeping track of who’s been doing the updates on them. Now, the nice thing is you can see these in the context of the Teams application. But we’ll also notice that you can also now see that same file set, if you go to the related documents on the record that’s connected to that team. You’ll see, just like we saw in the prior topics, where we talked about SharePoint. In this case, though, we’re seeing the Team Channels files surfaced in the context of the documents related to that particular record.
This means that users can work on the documents, whether they’re in the Dynamics 365 model driven application, or they’re in the Teams application. And it’s the same list, same document that they’re collaborating on. This can often be important, because you may have members of the team– for example, the legal team that is giving some legal advice on a particular deal, there isn’t a member of the Dynamics 365 application. They don’t have a licence. They may not even know how to use the application. But they do use Teams, and they can collaborate on the contract or the presentation that you’re going to give, make sure it meets all your legal standards.
And they can do that without having to learn the Dynamics 365 application. So it really brings these disparate sets of users together to be able to work on a collaboration on documents, in either of the applications. Now, let’s talk a little bit more about what you can do with the bot. And then we’ll actually look at using it in a little bit. To start with, you can look up records. So think about this is just like you’re chatting with another co-worker. What you do is you start up a chat with a Dynamics 365 bot. You can do some initial configuration to pointed at the Dynamics 365 instance environment that you want to connect with.
And then you can go ahead and interact with it. You can have it look up a record. You can have it update some key properties. So you’ll notice on here with the opportunity, we’ve got update close date, update amount, create post, and open Dynamics. There’s quick actions that we can take on the record. If I click update the close date, it gives me a date prompt, where I can give the new date. And I can quickly hit Save. And I can do that all from the context, just like I was chatting with a coworker, without having to open the full record. From here, I can also create a post.
This shows up in the timeline in the model driven application on the record that is associated with. And I can also open in Dynamics. So in that scenario, I want to see the actual full record. Interacting with the bot is not giving me enough of the details. And I want to dive into the normal model driven application that’s been configured for this interaction. I can click the Open in Dynamics. And it will open that record up and allow me to interact with it, just like I would normally in the model driven application.
In this activity, we will explore the advantages of and possibilities for integrating Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Teams, further enabling and promoting collaborative work.
Microsoft Teams is a business-oriented messaging system, allowing for instant and varied internal messaging for teams and organisations. Integration with Dynamics 365 can help achieve specific goals that those teams have been set up for.
Connect a record to a team channel
This allows for the record to show up as a tab conversation within Teams, which is a model-driven app.
View and associate files
This allows for concurrent editing as well as tracking who has been accessing and making edits. These documents appear both under the Files tab in teams, and under Related -> Documents in the model-driven app.
This further allows for collaboration on Dynamics 365 related projects without every user needing to have a licence for, or even knowledge, of Dynamics 365
Use the Dynamics 365 bot
This allows for easier access to the Dynamics 365 data from within Teams for individual users. The bot can:
- Lookup records
- Update key properties
- Create posts on the timeline of the record
- Open a record in Dynamics
Use ‘My Dashboard’
The key focus of Dynamics 365 integrations is to allow access to the necessary data in whatever context you are currently working in.
Join the discussion
What platform(s) do you currently employ for ‘inner-loop’ communications? What advantages and disadvantages have you experienced relying on these platforms?Use the discussion section below and let us know your thoughts. Try to respond to at least one other post and once you’re happy with your contribution, click the Mark as complete button to check the step off, then you can move to the next step.
This article is from the online course:
Dynamics 365: Implementing Power Platform Integrations
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Dynamics 365: Implementing Power Platform Integrations
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