There are good days and then there are very good days in the life of consultants. Probably arrival of Self-Service Scheduling Portal (albeit in preview) falls in the later such events. The reasons are many but top of all is the fact: this was among the top of most requested features in Dynamics 365 Field Service. I have seen with many implementations, once customers see, feel and touch the value that Dynamics 365 product in resource scheduling, mobile app, auto-generate work orders and bookings etc., the next thing they look for is to let the customer do the scheduling itself. It is akin to the trend in customer service: from capturing customer cases to self-service. With this quick intro, my today’s article is about my experience of setting the new Field Service portal, enabling the new self-scheduling feature, setting up pre-requisites and unpacking how it works. Let’s get started!
Step 1:
Go to Power Apps Maker Portal (https://make.powerapps.com). Select the correct environment, click on Create, scroll down to find and click on ‘Field Service.
Step 2:
Select Portal name and URL. Click ‘Create’
Step 3:
It may take a few minutes for the portal to be up and running. Time for some Netflix! (Nah just kidding, it won’t take that long 😊).
Step 4:
You’ll see portal appearing in the list of apps shortly.
Step 5:
Click on the portal to see blank page.
Step 6:
Viola! that was good. Go to Field Service app, click on Settings and you will see a new Customer Portal sub-menu option. Click on that to see our new customer portal (very similar to other Power Apps portal configurations).
Step 7:
Click to open the record. You will see options to:
- setup Track My Technician
- setup Self Scheduling
We’ll focus on the later today.
Step 8:
Go to the next tab to see Display Settings. This is where you can configure the UX part of the portal. Color, fonts, specific pages, logo etc. – all is configurable.
Step 9:
You can also click on the ‘Display Configuration’ link to configure text on home page and other elements of the portal.
Step 10:
Click ‘Save’ and refresh the portal a few times (since portal configuration are cached, it may take a little while to see changes happening on the portal).
Step 11:
Go to the new ‘Self Scheduling’ tab and you will see a bunch of settings related to this new function. I particularly liked the fact that ‘asset selection’ and ‘resource radius’ factors are configurable.
Step 12:
At this stage, if you click on ‘Book Service’ button on the portal, you will see an equivalent of BSOD (Blue Screen of Death):
Step 13:
We need to set a couple pre-requisites at this stage. First assign a role to your portal user.
Step 14:
Secondly, configure at least one ‘Incident Type’ with ‘Enable for C2’ selected. I am sure this field label will get changed as this feature rolls out from Preview to GA:
Step 15:
That’s it. Click on Self Scheduling option again on portal and you will see the page will appear with the following:
- Service product: this shows a list of products that are associated with the ‘Account’ that the logged-in user is linked with. In other words, these are the products for which you are booking a service
- Service types: a list of incident types
- Date and time selection
- Additional information: this is a configurable option
Step 16:
Click on Book, it may take a few seconds and then shows a confirmation. A little delay seems to indicate that the booking function happens synchronously.
Step 17:
Let’s go back to Dynamics 365 Field Service to see what happened behind the scenes. First a new Work Order is created. Note incidents and bookings are also created.
Step 18:
The selected product (Customer Asset) is also selected on the Work Order record.
Step 19:
What happened to the text that we put under ‘Additional Comment’? Well those are added as a Note under the booking record.
Summary:
I think it is a very neat implementation: it uses the same Power Platform capabilities that we all are familiar with and the process to set it up is quick and easy. In the real world, there will be a lot of requirements for specific fields on the portal, or a change in process to schedule (approvals) etc., and may be those features are in pipeline but I also think the fact that this is all built on Power Apps, makes it super easy for us Dynamics 365-addicts to configure and customize it. If you’d like to learn more, I think the best place to refer is the standard documentation and Dian Taylor’s blog.
Thanks for reading!
Feel free to share your feedback, I’d love to hear your thoughts 😊
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