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:
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 😊
