Integrating Teams with Dynamics 365 - Part-II

This is the 2nd part of my blog on Teams and Dynamics 365. In Part-1, I discussed about Teams and Office 365 apps. This blog will show how to integrate Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with Teams.

Teams is integrated with Office 365 Apps. Creating a team also creates a SharePoint team site and also an Office 365 group for the team, which can be accessed from Outlook. As discussed in my earlier blog, Team consists of Channels and all communications and collaboration is done within the Channel. You can add a tab to the channel to show records from other Apps like Dynamics 365 and GitHub.

Teams will be useful for users to form groups to discuss, collaborate, share and do meetings together. It helps the team members to have one go to location for all messaging, documents, notes, design and meetings.

For example I have created a Team called Big Deal Opportunity. Within the team is the Bids and proposal Channel. I want to link my channel with the Dynamics Account - Bob the Builder so I have all the up to date info about the Account and Opportunity in  one place where the team is working together for bidding and proposal development.

1. On the channel select the '+' sign to add a Tab. Search for Dynamics and select Dynamics 365 - preview (Note - The Dynamics 365 integration is in preview and needs to be enabled in Dynamics 365 > Settings > Preview tab)

Add an App to Team

2. Select Org and Entity - If you have multiple environments it will ask you to select the Dynamics Org and also the Unified Interface App.

Select Org and App

Note -
1. Only Dynamics 365 v9 and above will work for Team integration
2. Only Unified Interface Apps will work. Not Web Client.

3. Select Entity and Record - The last step is to select the entity (Account) and the record.

Select entity and record

Once you are done a new tab will be added to the Team channel and it show the record in the Tab itself.

Account Tab in Teams

As you can see now the team can get all the info from the Dynamics 365 Account record (or any other record) on to the Team Tab.

Another good integration for Teams, is with One Note. I added a One Note Tab  on the Channel, which the Team can view and work on as they collaborate.

One Note Tab in Teams

I hope the above help you to integrate Teams with Dynamics 365. Thanks for reading.

Mihir Shah
@mihircrm
365WithoutCode

Teams in Office 365 & Dynamics 365 - Part-1

Dynamics 365 online is part of Office 365 family of productivity and collaboration suite. It is well integrated OOTB with many other Office 365 apps such as SharePoint, One Drive, Yammer, One Note and Teams. This multi-series blog is about Teams and its integration with Office 365 Apps and Dynamics 365. Part-1 of this blog focuses on Teams and Office 365 apps.

Apps in Office 365

One important thing to note is that the apps are very much interconnected. You create an Opportunity team in Teams and this will auto create a Opportunity Group in Office 365 with its own email address that you can access from Outlook. This also create an Opportunity SharePoint team site to store and share files. You can add One note, Power BI, Power Apps, Dynamics 365 etc as tabs to the channels within a Team.

About Teams – Teams according to me is one of the best Office 365 app, that can really helpful in improving collaboration and communication within an organization. The below gives you an overview of setting up a team and linking it with other apps. .

1. Create Teams and Channels -

You can create a public, private or org wide team. A team owner can add members to the team. 

Teams consists of Channels. A general channel is auto created when you create a team. Additional channels can be created as needed. All team users have access to all the Channels within a team. (Channels are not private)

All collaboration takes place within the channels of the team.

In a channel you can start conversations by @mentioning users. Also add attachment files, start audio / video meetings (skype) and more. 

Channel collaboration

2. Chat with other user/s – You can start chat messaging with one or more users. The chats are private to the members in the chat only. 

Team chat

3. Meetings – You can start an instant audio / video meeting from within a channel or chat. The meeting can also be scheduled as shown below. This is a great alternative to having meeting outside Office 365. This also creates a tab for adding meeting notes within the channel. 

Schedule meetings

Hope this blog helps you in getting started with using Teams in Office 365. I will write about the integration with Dynamics 365 and Teams in the Part - II of this blog.

Thanks for reading. Please let me know your experience working with Teams.

Mihir Shah

@mihircrm

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihircrm/

365WithoutCode