D365 Assistant for Teams (Preview)

Most of you have probably heard of the Sales Insights assistant in Dynamics 365 (aka Relationship Assistant) which is part of the free Sales Insights features in Dynamics 365 Sales. The assistant displays action cards through out Dynamics 365 with information about data in Dynamics 365 and Exchange. These action cards give the sales user several different types of insights, for example a reminder about an upcoming meeting or a warning about an opportunity that hasn’t been worked on in awhile. In 2020 Release Wave 1 the Assistant got a bit of a face lift and its looking gorgeous!

When the Dynamics 365 assistant first came out, it was called ‘Relationship Assistant’ and there were only pre-configured system cards that admins could enable or disable, and even slightly configure. (I.E The card mentioned earlier, which shows an opportunity record hasn’t been touched in a while: Admins can configure how much time should have passed before a card gets created.)
However, there was no way to create custom cards with custom triggers. Today, if you have a sales insights license, you can create custom cards using Assistant Studio. The setup and logic for these cards gets created and configured in Power Automate.

In order to use the Sales Insights Assistant, admins will need to turn this functionality on in Dynamics 365. This can be done by accessing the ‘Sales Hub’ app and navigating to the ‘Sales Insights Settings’ area. You need to agree to the terms of service to turn this on. From here you can also turn on other free sales insights features like email engagement and auto-capture.

D365 Assistant with Teams

Now that we all know what the Sales Insights assistant is, lets talk about the Dynamics 365 Assistant in Teams! You can now preview the Dynamics 365 Assistant in Microsoft’s’ team application. (Note: A preview feature is not complete, but this allows you to play around with the new features and provide Microsoft with some feedback.) Keep in mind this is the mobile teams application only. This feature allows users to take advantage of the out of the box integration between Dynamics 365 and the teams application. Users will be able to access the Dynamics 365 Assistant directly from within the mobile Teams app, as part of the existing Dynamics 365 App in Teams. This means that if you didn’t install the Dynamics 365 App in teams yet, you will need to do this first before being able to access Dynamics 365 Assistant through teams. After the Dynamics 365 App is installed, you still need to do some simple configuration before you can start using the assistant. For details on configuration and setup take a look at the video below, where I walk through all the configuration steps for setup.

Features

Action Cards

The cards that the Sales Insights Assistant creates in Dynamics are visible in the Dynamics 365 Assistant in Teams. When a user accesses the Dynamics 365 app they will automatically be taken to the Dynamics 365 Assistant. Insight cards will be visible under “Highlighted Insights”. Insight cards are cards that “warn” the user about records, like a close date that has passed for an opportunity, a record that hasn’t had any activity in a while or a reminder for someone that didn’t reply to an email you sent them.

If you have upcoming meetings, this will be visible under “Highlighted Meetings”. Users will be able to view the attendees, which Dynamics 365 record this meeting is regarding and other related records. What will be accessible depends on the record populated in the regarding field of the appointment. (I.E if the meeting is regarding an opportunity, you’ll also see the account and contact related to the opportunity.)
From the appointment card in the Dynamics 365 Assistant, users can drill directly into these records. If they want to learn more about the meeting attendees, they can drill into each individual record. They can also drill into any other available records, (I.E if the regarding field of the appointment is an opportunity users can drill into the opportunity, the related account and contact.) It doesn’t seem that other activities like phone calls or tasks are being shown in the app, but maybe that’ll get added?

Users will also be able to view appointments from their outlook calendar which have not been tracked to Dynamics 365. Of course there will be less information available to drill into, but users have the ability to track the meeting to Dynamics 365 directly from the Dynamics 365 Assistant App. I also noticed that if any of the meeting participants has a record in Dynamics 365, their related information is accessible in the app.

Business Card Scanner

The Dynamics 365 Assistant in Teams also has a business card scanner. Users can take a picture of a business card by clicking the + button on the top of the screen. This action will populate data from the business card into a form, from which a contact in Dynamics 365 can be created. I was very impressed with how fast it turned the picture in a contact record, but I would’ve liked to be able to choose the record type it creates. (I.E contact or lead record) There is also not a way for me to access the newly created contact record, which was a little frustrating. What if I wanted to add a note or something?

Capture Meeting Notes

Users can take notes directly in the Dynamics 365 Assistant. I was able to add notes to any Dynamics 365 records available through the meeting card, except for the actual meeting itself. I was able to attach my notes to the related opportunity, but it would be nice if we could enter the notes in the meeting invitation. Another cool feature is the ability to take a picture of any handwritten notes. After you do this it takes a few seconds (depending on how long your notes are) for the handwritten notes to be converted into text.

D365 Assistant Bot

This is a very simple chat bot that allows users to ask questions about Dynamics 365 data. The bot is accessible by clicking bot icon in the Dynamics 365 app in teams on the top. The bot has been available in the Dynamics 365 App in the Teams desktop app for awhile, but for people who haven’t seen this its worth taking a look. Users can type specific phrases to get Dynamics Data directly in the chat window. Users can use the following phrases:

Search – This command searches all Dynamics 365 records the user has access to through security. I.E If a user is looking for a specific account they can type ‘Search Datum’. this can return the A. Datum Fabrication account, but also a contact related to that account, or opportunities related to that same account. I am not sure if you need relevance search turned on in your Dynamics 365 application, the search didn’t seem to be impacted when I turned this off in my Dynamics 365 instance.

Show – This command allows users to pull up records in a view. For example if a user types in ‘Show My Open Opportunities’ the bot will show a list of the users’ opportunities in the ‘My Open Opportunities’ view. Users also have the option to open the view in Dynamics 365, which opens a browser where the user will have to log in. I was a little disappointed this doesn’t open the Mobile Dynamics 365 app instead, but I guess not everyone will have that app installed on their mobile device. If a user clicks on an opportunity record from the list, the bot will show a card with some more details on the opportunity. From here, the user also has an option to open the record in Dynamics 365.

Change Environment – When a user types in this command, the bot shows a card with a configure button, which allows the user to connect to a different environment.

Change App – This allows the user to connect to a different Dynamics 365 App

Help – This will take the user to an online help page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/teams-integration/teams-integration

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Check out the video below where I will demo the functionality discussed in this article and I’ll go through the configuration and setup.