D365 Field Service: Technician Locator

This is another feature of 2021 release wave 1 which is currently in preview. There is a little bit of setup for this one so instead of adding this to my previous article 2021 Release Wave 1 | Part 3, I wanted to write a separate article to go over the setup and talk about how it works in the application. The technician locator allows Field Service organizations to send notifications to their customers (either via SMS or email).
The notification message will contain a link to the portal where a customer will be able to view more details. Customers can access the portal by mobile device, desktop or tablet.
Keep in mind that these notifications will be sent to the primary contact of the service account, and not the contact on the work order. UPDATE: There is now a ‘send messages to’ field that allows admins to choose who to send the notifications to: The primary contact of the service account, the ‘Reported by Contact’ on the work order, or the ‘Supported by Contact’ on the work order. In order to get access to the preview you’ll need to install the Field Service Portal. Keep in mind there are a few prerequisites before you can do this:

Prerequisites:

• Your organization needs to be on Field Service version (8.8.30.103+)
• Technician location sharing must be enabled in Field Service
• You need to use the Field Service mobile model driven app, not the Xamaran app
• Technician location sharing needs to be enabled in the Field Service mobile app
• If you want to send SMS messages: you need a SMS provider that has a Microsoft Power Automate connector for mobile SMS communications
• You need an Office 365 Exchange account for email messages

Install the Field Service Portal

You can have multiple portals installed, but there can only be 1 Field Service Portal per environment. Since at this point this portal can’t be integrated in any existing portals you’ll have to do a separate installation for this. You can install the Field Service Portal(preview) by logging into make.powerapps.com.
MAKE SURE YOU ARE IN THE CORRECT ENVIRONMENT WHEN YOU DO THIS! Once you are logged in and selected the correct environment, click on the ‘+ Create’ button on the right side of the screen. When you scroll down you see a list of templates you can pick from. Search for the ‘Field Service Portal(preview) and click on it. This is pretty easy, all you have to do is select a name for the portal, a URL and a language. At the time I did this English and French were the available languages. Once you’ve filled this out you can click ‘Create’. This will also install several solutions in your environment.

Notifications

There are a few different types of notifications that can be sent through the Field Service portal:

• Service Reminders – Notification regarding scheduled bookings
• Technician location and ETA – This notification triggers when the technician changes the booking status to ‘traveling’. When the customer clicks the link in the notification it will show a map with the technician’s current location near real time and their ETA.
• Service Changes (cancellations and reschedule information) these are only sent if the booking time difference is more than 10 minutes (I.E if a booking was changed from 3:00PM to 3:08PM no notification will be sent)
• Work Order Completion

Completion, reminder and travel notification messages will also have a link to the power app portal that will show booking details and a map. Customers can access the portal (no need to log in) from a mobile device, tablet or personal computer.
With the travel notifications customers will be able to follow (in near real-time) the location of the technician as they drive to the work site. Keep in mind this only works if location sharing is enabled in Field Service and in the Field Service mobile app. Below is an image that gives you an idea of what that would look like from the customers perspective.

Service reminders are sent out based on the reoccurrence that is configured in the portal settings in Dynamics 365 Field Service. You’ll need to navigate to Field Service > Settings > Customer Portal and open the customer portal settings. The options available are for the reminder timing is none and 1-7 days. This means that notifications will go out for all bookings that have been scheduled 1-7 days in advance.
NOTE: If you set this field to ‘none’ the reminder notifications will no longer go out, but other notifications will be sent.
This is also the place where you can enable/disable notifications, set the communication types (email, SMS or both) and decide if you want to enable the map and show resource details. Resource details are a picture of the resource and their name. If you scroll down you’ll also see an excluded list. This allows you to exclude specific accounts or work order types from notifications. We could probably use a flow to auto populate these records when an account ops out of receiving notifications.

Power Automate Flows

There are a total of three Power Automate Flows that come with this solution, which you can find when you log into flow.microsoft.com. You’ll have to navigate to solutions and look for the ‘Dynamics 365 Field Service PowerApps Portal – Flow solution’. When you open the solution you’ll see the tree Power Automate Flows.
Two of those flows handle the notifications. There is one for SMS messages and one for email messages, which (one or both) need to be configured after installing the solution.

The third flow is called ‘Create notification items for bookings‘. This flow handles the creation of ‘notification queue’ items for bookings. This means a ‘notification queue’ record will be created, which in turn will trigger the message flow(s). Keep in mind that this it a scheduled flow, which means it will not immediately be triggered when a booking is created. You can edit the flow’s timer to make it run when is appropriate for your organization. NOTE: the time is in UTC time. You also have to make sure this flow is turned on in order to receive notifications. If you want to test this after you created a booking, you can manually run the flow by clicking the ‘run’ button on the command bar. After the notification is sent, the notification queue item will be deleted by one of the flows that sends the customer notification. Nice!

All sent notifications that were sent to customers can be viewed by navigating to Field Service > Settings > Notifications (Under Customer Portal). These messages are read-only you can still see a list of all messages that went out, what type of message it was, what the notification was for (upcoming booking, booking completed, travel, etc.) and the status of the message. You’ll notice each message has a notification code. The notification code allows you to block, extend or expire access to the portal link that has been shared with a customer.

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