Exploring and Setting up ‘Track Technician Location’ in 30 minutes

One of the *biggest* and *flashiest* highlights of the latest release wave (2021 Release Wave 1) is the ability for customers to (a) view arrival times, (b) see a live view of a technician on the way in a map, and (c) receive emails/SMS notifications. All of this further solidifies Dynamics 365 Field Service’s position as the market leader in this space and therefore, I couldn’t hide my excitement when I saw this feature arriving in my Dynamics 365 environment 😋. Following is an account and a quick guide on how to make it work in your environment: 

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Pre-Requisites

1. Having an Outlook 365 based email account

2. Setup ‘Twilio’ account for sending SMS (this could be a trial too)

Setting it up

Setup Portal

Go to PowerApps maker portal and create a new portal based on ‘Field Service’ template (see my previous post on how to set it up).

Configurations

Go to ‘Field Service’ model-driven app -> Settings and click on ‘Customer Portal’ (scroll down):

Turn ‘ON’ Track My Technician feature and other messages. These ‘messages’ helps you decide list of events on which notifications should be sent to customers. For example, you may want to send notification on rescheduling but not on booking cancellations.

Next see those two Power Automate flow on the right? These Power Automate flows are responsible to send emails and SMS. Click on the first one (SMS):

Click on Edit:

Connect your Microsoft Dataverse and Twilio connections:

Leave rest of the Power Automate flow as it is:

Save and turn the flow ON:

Now, click on the other Power Automate flow, setup connections and turn flow ON. Nice and simple, no changes:

Optionally, you can (a) exclude Work Types on which notifications or technician tracking shouldn’t happen, and (b) exclude customers from this feature:

Next go to ‘Track My Technician’ tab and turn all features ON:

Let’s Try It Out 😀

All done – time for now. Let’s create a new Work Order and book a resource:

Oh and one thing – your booked resource should have Start and End Location set as ‘Resource Address’:

Check your email and phone now. You will start receiving notifications for booking reminders and as technician gets on the way:

Summary

For further reading, have a look at Microsoft Docs article. It is also worth exploring how backend of this solution works. Hint: check out Notifications table (I will write about that soon 😁).


Thanks for reading!

Feel free to share your feedback, I’d love to hear your thoughts 😊

Quick Tip: How to enable maps on your Dynamics 365 environment?

You set up a brand new Dynamics 365 environment, create a Bookable Resource and are pumped up to see map and routing work on the mobile app, but then you see the following error on a map – sounds familiar?

Map is disabled for this organization.

This was a story of my life in the last couple of hours – so thought to document resolution steps to save time in future 😊.

Step 1

Go to ‘Resource Scheduling’ app and then Settings. Click on Scheduling Parameters. Click to select ‘Yes’ against Connect to Maps.

Step 2

Go to Power Platform Admin Center, click on your environment and then click on Settings -> Features. Click to check ‘Bing Maps’

The Result

Go back to resource page now and yay! map is working. The map functionality will also get enabled this way on Schedule Board, Accounts, mobile app and other places.


Thanks for reading!

Feel free to share your feedback, I’d love to hear your thoughts 😊