Collaboration in model-driven apps

Posted by: Dian Taylor | on December 7, 2021

It’s time for another article on a preview feature! I am very excited about this one because this feature brings functionality that we are already familiar with from other Microsoft applications to model-driven PowerApps! This means we can take advantage of this in Dynamics 365 as well! Awesome! Great! So what is it!!!?
I’m sure you might have worked in a document in Microsoft 365, maybe an excel sheet or a word document? You might have worked on a few of those documents with one or more coworkers at the same time, and you probably noticed that you were able to see all the folks that were collaborating on the document simultaneously with you. This collaboration functionality also exists when you are working and collaborating on a document in Microsoft Teams, and as I mentioned before, this preview feature will allow for this type of functionality now to be added to model-driven apps. Collaboration is instrumental to organizations and the ability to view the participants and to quickly share a link to the record in Dynamics 365 will increase productivity.

*Image: Collaboration in Microsoft Excel by using Microsoft Teams.*

In order to take advantage of this functionality, you’ll need to enable this in the environment. You can do this by navigating to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com. You’ll need to click on the environment you want to enable this functionality for. From within the environment, you’ll need to click on ‘Settings’ on the command bar, which is located on the top of the screen. From here you’ll expand the ‘Product’ section and you’ll open the ‘Features’ section. Below ‘Communications’ you’ll notice the ‘Collaboration’ section on the left side of the screen. NOTE: Keep in mind if you don’t see this option in your environment then you’ll have to wait until it becomes available in your region.

Here you can turn on the preview feature by setting the collaboration slider to ‘On’. You also notice that you have the ability to define the co-presence indicator refresh time from here. By default it’s set to 60 seconds, but if needed this can be changed. You’ll have to refresh your screen after this has been enabled. Another thing to keep in mind is that during the preview period this functionality will not be enabled for all tables in Dynamics 365. The only tables that ware impacted by turning this feature on are the Account, Contact, Opportunity and Case tables that are in the Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service or stand-alone PowerApps. If users are working on any records from other tables, they will not be able to see who else is working on or viewing the same record.
When others are working on the same record of the enabled tables, users will be able to see the other users’ picture (this is the image that is uploaded into the users’ Microsoft Teams app) and their current status (representing the status in Microsoft Teams). I am very happy to let you know that the presence capability inside Model-Driven apps I just mentioned will be extended to also show in user lookups and in views that have the user column showing in a grid. When a user clicks on the image of any of the collaborating users a mini-window will open showing several actions which can be performed.

The actions available are:

Option 1: Sending the collaborating user an email – clicking on this action will launch a new email window with the collaborating users’ email address populated in the ‘To’ field of the email.
Option 2 is to start a teams chat. When clicking on this link a chat to this collaborating user will open in the browser, allowing the user to switch to the Microsoft Teams app or to use the Microsoft Teams web app instead. A link to the record will be entered which can be overwritten or sent to the collaborating user.
Option 3 is to open their contact card. The contact card is actually the profile card from Microsoft 365. If you want to learn more about profile cards in Microsoft 365 you can do that here.

When enabling this preview, you’ll notice that the share button now has been moved to the right side of the collaborating users on the record, and there are now two options associated to the ‘Share’ button. The user will see two buttons they can click on: The first button shows ‘Email Link’. As the name suggests, this button will allow users to quickly send an email with the record link out. The second button shows as ‘Manage Access’ which allows users to share the record with other users. Once a record is shared, the user can determine the sharing permissions;