Microsoft Teams calls in D365 Sales(Preview)

I was pleasantly surprised last week when I noticed a new section when I navigated to the app settings area in Dynamics 365 Sales. I noticed there is now an item on the sitemap under the General Settings section called ‘Teams calls (preview)’. I was very curious what this was so I started to dig a little and found that this setting allows us to embed the Microsoft Teams dialer directly within a model-driven app! NOTE: Keep in mind that this is a preview feature. A preview feature is a feature that is not complete, but is made available before it’s officially in a release so customers can get early access and provide feedback. Preview features aren’t meant for production use and may have limited or restricted functionality. If you’re going to try this out, make sure you do this in a sandbox environment, and not in production because as stated above, this feature is not completely built out as of yet and it’s also not supported by Microsoft at this point.

Prerequisites

There are some prerequisites that you need to consider before enabling this feature:

• First of all you need to have a Microsoft Teams license. ANY Team license will work.
• You need to have a system administrator security role in your Dynamics 365 instance
• Lastly you’ll need to have a Phone System with a valid license installed. You can find more information on the steps to setup the phone system in your organization here.
• Calls to teams users are free, but if your users need to call someone that’s not on teams you’ll need to purchase ‘Calling plan’ licenses as well as part of the phone system setup. You’ll also need to assign phone numbers to users. More info on that here.

I did want to mention that the Microsoft Teams dialer seems to work hand in hand with Conversation Intelligence. If you navigate to the ‘Sales Insights Settings’ area in Dynamics 365 Sales you’ll notice ‘Conversation Intelligence’ on the sitemap right below the Productivity section. When you click on ‘Conversation Intelligence’ you’ll also notice that the Microsoft Teams call recording can be set up here. (Keep in mind this feature is also under preview.) Yes you will need a Dynamics 365 Sales Insights or Dynamics 365 Sales Premium license in order to get access to Conversation Intelligence.

For anyone who is not familiar with conversation intelligence, this is a standalone application that uses data science and analytics to get data from call recordings and Dynamics 365 Sales. Simply said this means that we can have Dynamics 365 Sales users record their phone calls and have conversation intelligence use those recordings to gather data from these calls. If you want to take a look at this, you can access the app with sample data here.

Enable feature

Ok let’s get back to the setup for the Microsoft Teams dialer in Dynamics 365. There is not a lot you have to do here. As mentioned before, you’ll need to go to the App Settings area and then click on ‘Teams calls (preview)’ on the sitemap. This will show you a page where there are some settings that you’ll need to check before you can move the slider on the top that reads ‘preview disabled’. You’ll notice that there has to be a ‘phone system’ license and a ‘Team’ license, which in my case as you can see on the screenshot below are both there. If the validation of those licenses fails, unfortunately you can’t move on with the setup of this feature and you would need to contact your system administrator to enable Phone System and/or Teams in the org. Once this is done you can re-run the validation by clicking on the ‘Check Status’ icon below ‘Teams license’. I like the fact that there are some links on the screen that will take you to the Microsoft doc site where you can find more information on the topic(s).

When the validations have a ‘success’ status, you can move the top slider to enable the preview! Once you do this there are some additional setting for the teams dialer. If you don’t want everyone in the organization to have access to the dialer, you can enable security roles. If you want to give access to everyone, then you can just select ‘All security roles’, otherwise you can pick the security roles that would get access to the dialer.
Another option that becomes available after you enable this functionality, is to add the Teams dialer to additional Dynamics 365 Model Driven apps! If your organization also uses Customer Service Hub, Field Service or other apps, this is where you can very easily add the dialer to those apps. Did you build your own custom app and do you want to add it there? No problem! I also tried adding it to one of my custom apps and there was no issue. I LIKE IT!!!

Now that we have turned on and configured the dialer, let’s see what it actually looks like in Dynamics 365! I was under the impression it would load on a form only, but that it not the case! If you open any area in Dynamics 365, you’ll notice the Teams dialer sitting in a separate pane on the right hand side of the screen. It doesn’t matter where you are, in a record, a view or even when you are reviewing dashboards! You do have the ability to collapse or expand the pane which is great. No need to take up space on my screen if I’m not on a call right? You’ll also notice below the dialer is where you can enable Conversation Intelligence. (Probably because I have a Sales Insights license in my instance).
When you are on a record that has phone fields on them you can click on the phone icon on the field to dial the number.

I did want to let you all know that I DO NOT have a Call Plan in this instance but I was still able to set this up. Obviously I can’t receive or make any calls, but I was able to turn this on just to see what it looks like to have the Teams dialer inside of the Dynamics 365 application.
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