Viva Sales: Administrator Settings

I wrote two articles about Viva Sales back in August of last year, when it first became available in preview. If you haven’t read those articles, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Viva Sales has been generally available since October of 2022. Since the release, there have been some enhancements to Viva Sales. Last week I wrote an article about the new suggested email replies capabilities, which helps sellers save time when responding to common scenarios in emails from your CRM contacts. With input from the Microsoft Graph and the connected CRM (either Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce), Viva Sales uses GPT to generate a personalized email response. This means you don’t have to spend time writing a reply from scratch – Viva Sales does it for you. You can read the article here. This week I am writing about the (new) administrator settings in Viva Sales, which will allow you to turn on the new suggested email replies and allow admins to configure/customize CRM information that is displayed in Viva Sales across Microsoft Outlook and Teams!

Configuration Options

OK well what does that mean? There are several things admins can configure in Viva Sales besides the ability to configure the columns (fields) that show on each form! NOTE: Dynamics 365 users with the System Administrator or System Customizer security role can configure these settings in Viva Sales.
Editing of rows: Admins can manage which rows and columns can be edited from the Viva Sales App
New contact creation: Admins can manage the ability for sellers to create new contacts and edit existing contacts in Viva Sales
Detailed view: This are the forms where CRM data is displayed in Viva Sales, where as I mentioned above, we can configure to show the fields we want. We can also remove fields from the forms and reorder them on the forms. Keep in mind there can be up to 40 fields on a Viva Sales form. Admins can’t change field names or record names, and required fields are shown as they are configured in CRM.
Mini view: With Viva Sales, each type of record has a mini view that shows only 2 CRM fields when it’s collapsed or displayed in a list. You can find the mini view in various parts of the Viva Sales pane, like the quick view on the CRM tab. This view only shows two fields from a CRM row. The fields displayed can be configured.

Viva Sales need to be installed before you can do any of this! Information on how to install Viva Sales can be found here. NOTE: If you don’t have Microsoft Teams at all, then unfortunately you will not be able to access the Viva Sales Settings. A second prerequisite is that the Viva Sales App needs to be added to Microsoft Teams, and you must have the most recent version of the Viva Sales App. You can install the app by opening Teams and clicking on Apps on the left hand side. Look for the Viva Sales app and click install.

Configure Viva Sales

In order to access the Viva Sales settings, you’ll need to open the Viva Sales App in teams. You can do this by opening Teams and clicking on Apps on the left hand side. Look for the Viva Sales app and click on it to view details of the app. Click the ‘Open’ button to open the app. This will take you to the home tab, where you can find more information on Viva Sales. The ‘learn more’ links will take you to the Viva Sales help center. The admin settings can be accessed by (you guessed it!) clicking on the ‘Settings’ tab on the top of the page. Here you’ll notice two categories for admin settings: ‘Forms’ and ‘Email’.

The ’email’ admin settings is where you can enable the Suggested email replies (preview) functionality, which I wrote about last week. The ‘Forms’ section is where we will be able to do our configurations. You’ll notice there are three table names listed under the ‘record type’ in the administration pane. These are the tables we can configure in Viva Sales. Unfortunately we can’t add any tables, only those three tables can be used. When you click ‘edit’ next to any of the tables, this will take you to a screen where you can configure the table. When the screen opens for the table, you’ll notice an ‘allow editing’ switch on the top of the screen. If you turn this on, seller will be update to update CRM fields for this table from within Viva Sales. Keep in mind this will not allow sellers to update ALL FIELDS in Viva Sales, you can still decide which fields are editable and which are not, as there is now an ‘Allow Editing’ switch next to the fields listed under ‘Manage Fields’! If you edit the contacts table, you’ll notice we have an extra option here to allow sellers to create new CRM contacts from within Viva Sales. NOTE: If this option is turned off, sellers will have to create new contacts in their CRM system.

The ‘Manage Fields’ section allows you to configure the fields that will be available in Viva Sales, and (as I mentioned above,) we can also configure which fields are editable and which are not, IF we allow sellers to edit fields from Viva Sales. NOTE: When testing this I noticed sellers can only edit records from Viva Sales for Outlook, and not in the adaptive cards in Viva Sales for Microsoft Teams. Sellers can still click on ‘Details’ from within the adaptive card to update information in the CRM system.
You can add one or multiple fields (out of the box or custom fields) to the Viva Sales form by clicking on the ‘+Add fields’ button and selecting the fields you want to add. NOTE: If not all the CRM fields show up when editing, go back to the ‘Forms’ page and click ‘refresh’. This will pull and updates into Viva Sales. When you hover your mouse over a field that is listed below the ‘Manage Fields’ section, you’ll notice a trash can showing up. When you click on the trash can, the field will be removed from the form. You can use the 6 dots on the left side of the fields to set the position of the field on the form.

Mini View configuration

When you scroll all the way down passed all the fields, you’ll notice a section called ‘Key Fields’. These are the two fields that are shown on the mini view mentioned earlier. Keep in mind that the settings for the mini view can impact how search results appear for sellers who are looking for related records in Dynamics 365. In Dynamics 365, the way related records are searched depends on the quick find view. To ensure that the fields you choose for the mini view are visible in the search results list, make sure they also exist in the quick find view. For Salesforce, the search is based on the name and any additional fields that are included in the mini view.
When you’re done with your configurations, don’t forget to click the ‘Publish’ button on the bottom of the screen! I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!