In previous months, Microsoft updated the email designer and included some additional features some as allowing us to include images, not only by using a Url, but also by uploading a file or using drag and drop functionality and dropping an image file into the editor directly.

Email Attachments

Now with the Release Wave 2 plan, attachments have received a minor uplift. This is probably the first of many, but it is a starting point. After you add a new attachment, you now have the option to Preview, Download or Delete the attachment by using the More Actions Menu in the Attachment subgrid.

If you click on the Preview in the More Items menu, a modal window will open displaying the image or pdf of the file that you uploaded to be included in the email message (as shown in the image below). This works for image file types and portable document format (pdf), but not for Office documents at this point in time. The Preview option does not appear in the More Items menu for document types where preview is not supported.

Email Templates

If you navigate to Power Apps Admin Center (https://aka.ms/ppac), and go to Settings -> Templates and select Email Templates, that link will still redirect you (at the time of writing this article) to the classic interface where you can modify the email templates. If you go to your maker portal and open the Customer Service Hub, you will notice that in the Service area under the Templates group, there is an Email Templates subarea.

If you open a new or existing email template, you will notice that the same designer that is available for the email message, is also available here, hence a new design experience for email templates. You can add attachments to the email template as before and also insert dynamic text using the new designer.

On the command bar, you will see a button for Insert dynamic text. Clicking on the button will open a panel on the right hand side, which will enable you to select the entity, the field and the custom text for the field that you want to embed in your email template (as shown below). Dynamic text fields show up in the email message in light blue (as shown in the previous image)

The New Email form also has some additional capabilities. When you click on the Insert Template button, the system will ask you to select that template (once you have selected the recipients), however, if you click on the drop down next to the email template, you get the option to convert your current email message into an email template, directly from the New Email form.

I am hopeful that this enhancements to emails and email templates will provide an improved experience to Dynamics 365 users.

The post Email enhancements in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

The new multisession app for Customer Service allows agent to handle customer cases efficiently with the help of the following features:

• Management of multiple cases simultaneously
• Management of email and other case-related activities without losing context of the parent case
• Productivity pane for AI-based suggestions of knowledge articles, similar cases and other productivity tools

The original document can be viewed on Microsoft docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave2/service/dynamics365-customer-service/customer-service-new-multi-session-app

Enabling 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan updates

To enable the updates for the 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan, navigate to the Power Platform admin center (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com), and click on the environment that you want to enable the updates for. In the Update section it will show you whether the Updates have been enabled for your environment (as shown below):

If your updates are marked as Off, click on Manage, and then click on the Update now button. Note that once you enable the updates this process cannot be undone, and you will experience some performance degradation during the update. The update can take several hours and once your can come back to the same page to check status.

If you receive any failures after the update has been completed, in particular with Field Service (in particular in the North America region), you can click on the Retry button and let the process attempt to fix the installation issues, or wait for Microsoft to fix any deployment issues. Remember that these are preview bits, so do not you use this in a trial or test environment.

Accessing the new App

After you enable the 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan, and you navigate to make.powerapps.com, and click on Apps, you will notice that there is a new App called Customer Service workspace (Preview), which was provisioned on August 3^rd (or later), based on when you enabled the release plan preview features. The image below shows you how to access it.

Once you open the app, you will notice that the Site Map is empty, and only contains the Home navigation link. You will be sent to the Customer Service Agent dashboard page, but will see that above the Command Bar there is a tab that shows you the current open session that you are working on.

On the right of the current open session tab, you will see the + sign which will allow you to open additional sessions. The list of entities that are available for opening additional sessions are based on the Site Map of the Customer Services workspace app. You can modify that site map, which should allow you to see additional entities.

You will notice at the bottom of the list the note that says you can open a link in a new tab by pressing CTRL + Click. An example would be that while on the Cases view, clicking CTRL+TAB will open an additional tab instead of loading the data on the current tab. You would be able to open multiple tabs simultaneously, as shown below):

When you have multiple sessions open, they will all appear on the left navigation under the Home Page link. In order to open an additional session, you click on the link of the Case (or other entity) that you want to open, but using the SHIFT + Click combination. The image below shows how multiple sessions appear.

When using the SHIFT + Click combination, not only will you open the new session, but you will enable the Smart assist pane within you Case entity. The Smart assist pane is a new solution that is installed in the 2020 Wave 2 Release plan, and will display a pane that will provide suggestions on similar cases or knowledge articles. The smart assist AI functionality is not enabled by default. You will need to enable it via the Customer Service Hub App. This will be under the Service Management area in Analytics and Insights. To learn more about how to enable it, follow the link below in Microsoft Docs.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/csw-enable-ai-suggested-cases-knowledge-articles#enable-ai-suggestions-for-similar-cases

The following image shows you the Smart assist pane when no suggestions are available.

To see screenshots of smart assist and the full article on Microsoft Docs for the Customer Service workspace and an overview of the productivity/smart assist pane, click on the links below:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/csw-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/csw-productivity-pane

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/csw-view-ai-suggested-cases-knowledge-articles

The post Customer Service Workspace (Preview) in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

WIth the announcement of the October 2018 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 (version number yet to be determined), which includes a mass number of features, one of the features that was included was management of SharePoint documents inside Dynamics portals.

This feature extends the document management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to portals, providing a consistent experience and allowing users to leverage their investment in SharePoint with Dynamics 365 for document management. Documents that are associated with entity records can be managed by portal users and stored in the SharePoint document library, providing seamless collaboration capabilities offered natively by SharePoint. SharePoint document libraries configured with entities in Dynamics 365 can be surfaced via the portal entity and web forms.

The additional of SharePoint documents for portals provides the following features:

• Adding documents to a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Viewing and downloading documents in a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Creating folders in a SharePoint Library via Portals
• Deleting documents in a SharePoint Library via Portals

The screenshot below shows adding a new file to the document library, a much cleaner interface than the existing Azure blob (notes) option.

Enjoy reading the new features that are available in the October 2018 release of Dynamics 365 available here. You can also download the 236 page pdf which contains the contents of the link and the features in this release.

The post SharePoint Documents are back in Dynamics Portals October 2018 Release appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.