How to setup Location Tracking in new Dynamics 365 Field Service App

One of the eagerly-waited features in new Dynamics 365 Field Service app was the ability to track the location of bookable resources (aka technicians) from the field. The feature was not only required from a compliance perspective in many industries but also has practical benefits such as informing customer while a technician is on the way, ensuring ‘access’ is ready before technicians reach the site, ensuring Covid-19 check-in on arrival etc. It was therefore very exciting to review this new feature which has just arrived as part of Release Wave 2. There are two major takeaways from my testing:

1. It is different from the old Xamarin (Resco) app
2. It is much easier and quicker to setup

With this teaser out of the way, let’s go for a test drive:

1. Go to Field Service → Settings → Geolocation Settings
2. Open the record ‘Geolocation Setting’

3. Set Enable Location Tracking to Yes and leave Refresh Interval to 60 seconds (default). Next, we need to setup Tracking Times. Tracking Times tells the system on which tracking days and times the location auditing function should be working. Remember this is not technician-specific so these times should be set across entire field service organisation. In my example, I am assuming technicians work all weekdays, partially on Saturday and then do not work on Sundays.

4. That’s it. This is all is required to set up in Field Service Settings. Next to test the function, open the new Dynamics 365 Field Service app. It may prompt for allowing the location access to the app. In iPhone, that means making a change in ‘Settings’. Once done, open any booking and make any changes (eg change status).

5. Come back to Schedule Board and click on Map View. It will show a nice little truck on the map to show the technician’s location:

6. The same location is also visible in Filter map area (which could be used for finding technicians by proximity):

7. Behind the scenes, Dynamics 365 Field Service creates a Geolocation Tracking record per each location information received from the app. A typical record looks like below. Note this table doesn’t have a relationship with Work Order, Bookable Resource Booking etc. so establishing the location audit information with Work Orders etc. is not out of the box for now.

Hope this was useful. Please also refer excellent source of official documentation here.

Thanks for reading!