Nicholas Plant Medical Biotechnology Director

A device license for the Chat for Dynamics 365 subscription is absolutly essential so that staff whose main role may not be customer facing CX can flexibly "fill in" to cover staff absence demand surge etc. Those doing this "fill in" work might only use the Chat for Dynamics very occasionally and intermittently but it is VITAL for an organisation to be able to have the flexibility to easily cover the customer facing role. If no device license is made available then it is a certainty that in many organisations, faced with this problem the work around will be login sharing - which is bad for everybody. It makes no sense at all for there to be a device license for Customer Service but not Chat for D365. I am at a loss to understand why there isn't a device license available at launch. (I have checked and the answer is - No not available).

The D365 Omni Channel Engagement Hib has a concept of application tabs. These preserve the context across multiple customer interaction sessions. The application tabs permit a "single pane of glass" style approach to all the applications that a customer service agent might need while interacting with a customer. The details can be found here. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365/omnichannel/administrator/application-tab-templates However, when I tried to add Business Central as an application tab using the Website URL application tab type it reports that Business Central is not "iFramable". The ultimate objective is to make it possible to surface Business Central as an application tab within the Omni Channel Hub either by making BC "IFramable" in such a way that it can be added as a website URL application type or, possibly to surface it using a different application type. It doesn't matter how it is done as long as it is possible to add Business Central as an application tab within that "single pane of glass" that the CX agent is using to service the customer while preserving the session context at the session tab level and allowing the CX agent to switch between sessions.

The concept of business unit is brought into sharp focus by the fact that Dual Write for Dynamics Finance and Operations (and I believe soon Business Central as well) brings the concept of multiple legal entities into the Customer Engagement applications using new entities which are similar (but not identical) to a Business Unit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/april19/cdm-data-integration/dual-write-link-common-data-service-apps Previously Business unit was really an administrative boundary - with the prospect of multiple legal entities being linked to a CDS instance it morphs into a harder legal boundary. The point being that if I have one instance of CDS and the concept of multiple legal entities represented in it (customer’s belong to a legal entity) I need that same concept inside Omni Channel. Users (at both agent and supervisor level) should only see queues, agents and conversations that belong to their “business unit”. It should not be possible for agent A who works for legal entity X to transfer a conversation (or indeed see in the agents list) to agent B who works for legal entity Y. The same is true for queues. It should not be possible for agent A who works in legal entity X to transfer (or indeed see in the queue list) a queue related to items for legal entity Y. That also obviously raises the issue of multiple workstreams / default queues – one for each related legal entity / “business unit”. Obviously you could have some users which work on cases for more than one legal entity and also you could have queues that are “owned” by more than one legal entity so there is some complexity to think through.

The Teams Presence API is now available (at least in Beta). https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/{ad_user_guid}/presence Allow (by configuration option) the bi-directional flow of presence status between the Omni Channel Hub user persona and their Teams Persona. Ideally Teams should also get a new presence status which reflects "contactable if necessary but focussing on First Line activities" i.e. a sort of soft do not disturb unless really necessary status. The Omni Channel "busy but has spare capacity" status would map to that status in Teams.

The Omni Channel applications tabs requires that the application under the tab be "iFramable". I have tried it and as of 17/12/2019 you cannot add Business Central under an application tab. Clearly all the D365 suite of applications really ought to be able to work under an omni channel application tab.

There is no proper category in Appsource for Dynamice 365 Marketing. This makes it difficult to see whether various Apps that are in some way Marketing related are custom channels for the marketing app or whether they are really add-ons to the Sales app. If the Marketing app is a tier 1 app in Dynamics (which I think it should be) then it really needs its own category in Appsource.