Integrated Teams Chat comes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales & Service

The main aim of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales & Service is to allow for collaboration between various departments and areas of the business.  

We’ve had tight integration with products like Exchange for years, but the way people work has evolved massively, especially over the last 2 years when businesses have had to adapt to a new way of working.  

This new way of working means that Teams has now been brought front and centre to the way organisations operate.  

Within the scope of Microsoft Dynamics 365, we have had the ability to link a record to a Team for quite a while now, so that the team can work in the scope of the record.

But now, we also have the ability to collaborate with each other, via teams, either from within Teams or directly within CRM itself.

Say you are working on a case or an opportunity and you need to ask someone a question about it. Previously, this meant emailing them with a link to the record or explaining the situation via a Teams chat. Now you can bring the context with you into the chat.

Simply Create a “New linked chat”.

Add in some participants and decide whether or not to send an introduction message, which will include a link to the record.

Then carry on chatting like you would if you were in teams,

And your colleagues can pick up the message either through CRM if they are also working within it, or through their Teams application. The system also automatically changes the chat title so that it is relevant to the context it is in.

The great thing about this is that by utilizing the instant messaging function of teams, if your colleagues are available and can help straight away then this increases the efficiency of the collaboration, but the other great thing about this Teams messaging integration is that if they aren’t available to assist straight away, or they need to go and do some checking themselves, you can minimise the window, go and work on something else, minimising the chat windows until they can come back to you.

 This functionality can be accessed throughout the system (Some tables may need to be manually enabled), so you can collaborate on any record as is useful to your organisation or even just access your normal Teams chats whilst working within CRM without switching applications.

And the really exciting thing about this, is that this is just the beginning for Dynamics 365 and Teams. There are further integration features that will enable your organisation to take the intuitive collaborative abilities of Teams to the next level. They are being released for Public Preview in February and March, so watch this space!

If you would like to enable the preview of the Teams integration for your Sandbox Environment, then navigate to https://admin.powerplatform.com select your Sandbox environment and then ensure the Wave 2 2021 Updates are enabled.

If they are not, then enable them and the database will run an update.

(You can also see what other great new features have come out by clicking on the “See what’s new in this release” link)

Once your database is updated, then go to either the Sales Hub or the Customer Service, go to the Settings/Service Management Area and click on Collaboration and enable the Teams services you want to try out.

*Note: This functionality is still in preview and so may not be exactly as described at General Availability; And as with all preview features, should not be enabled in a production environment, no matter how excited you are!