New Timer Control for SLA’s

We had the timer control for cases for quite some time and if you’re not familiar with what this is or what this does, let me explain it to you. The timer control can be added to forms of tables that have been enabled for SLA’s. Cases are enabled for SLA’s out of the box which means we can immediately add the control to a case form. When a SLA related to a case is triggered, SLA KPI Instance records will be created for each SLA item that is associated with the SLA. Each of these SLA items have the failure and warning time of the SLA item.
What does that mean? Lets say you have an SLA with two SLA Items. One of them is a first response, which means that agents will have and x amount of time to send a first response to the customer. Let’s say the agent has 2 hours to complete this task, and if the task hasn’t been completed within 1,5 hours, a warning action will happen (this is all configured in the SLA itself). If the SLA on the case is triggered at 9AM, the failure time would be 10AM and the warning time would be 10:30AM. The second SLA item could be a resolution SLA, meaning the agent has an x amount of time to resolve the case. In the SLA you would configure how much time an agent should have to resolve the case and if or when a warning action should happen or not.

Both timer controls looks at the SLA item(s) that are related to the record, which in this scenario is a case. When the SLA is triggered, the timer control will show a count down to the failure time of the associated SLA KPI Instance(s). (You will be able to see the SLA KPI Instance records containing the warning time and failure time of the SLA when you navigate to the ‘Enhanced SLA details’ tab on the case form.) If we keep using the above example, we would have two SLA KPI Instances meaning we would be able to see two timers counting down to the failure time.

Legacy Timer Control

The timer control was available in the legacy interface and you were able to add it to a form using the legacy configuration experience. You can add the legacy timer control by opening the legacy form designer, clicking on insert and then clicking on ‘Timer’. This will open a screen where you can define the different fields for the timer.

The problem with this approach is that you would have to configure a timer control for each SLA KPI, which can make the form look really crowded. Also if you would add SLA KPI’s, you would need to add another form control! Besides using the legacy timer control on a form, you could also add a quick view form to the case form, which would give you the same results. It is just a little easier to setup. Below you can see an image that shows you the different way the legacy and new timer controls look on the form. The legacy timer controls hadn’t been updated for quite some time, until now!

New Timer Control

The new control is actually a control that sits on a grid on the case form. It looks a lot fresher than the legacy control and you don’t have to keep adding different controls for each SLA KPI item because all of those records will be in the sub grid. As the SLA KPI Items go through the different stages (Succeeded, Nearing Non-Compliance, Non-Compliant, etc.) you’ll notice that the timer icon(s) for the related KPI changes depending on what stage they are in. In order to configure the new time control on a form you need to add a sub grid to the form and configure it to point to SLA KPI Instances. You can do this by navigating to make.powerapps.com, selecting the correct environment and expanding the data tab on the right side. Click on tables and search for the case table. Open the case table and navigate to the form you want to add the control to.

On the form, add a section to the form by clicking on ‘Components’ or ‘+Add Component’ from the ribbon. Drag the section on the form and place your mouse inside the section. Scroll down in the components section on the right and click on sub grid. Check the box that reads ‘Show related records’, then select the ‘SLA KPI Instances’ table and the ‘All SLA KPI Instances’ view as the default view. Save your changes. Unfortunately we can’t yet add the control to the view in the new experience, so we have to do this in the classic form designer. Click on the ‘Switch to classic’ button on the ribbon to go to the legacy form designer.

Once the legacy form designer opens, double click on the grid you just added and click on the ‘controls’ tab in the ‘Set Properties’ window. Click on ‘Add Control’ and add the ‘SLA Timer’ Control. In the properties section of the control you can set the update frequency of the control. This is how often the timer will be refreshed. The default setting for this is 30 minutes, but you can change this. Keep in mind that shorter interval times could have some impact on performance. Click ‘Ok’ and save and publish your changes.

Things to note

Keep in mind though that the new control only works for SLA’s that are created in the Unified Interface. If you have ‘old’ SLA’s that were created in the legacy interface, you can migrate them to the Unified Interface by using the ARC & SLA Migration Tool in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. To learn more about migrating SLA’s and Automatic Record Creation rules click here.

I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post! Take a look at the video below where I will talk through the setup process for the new SLA timer.