Continuing the review of Release Wave 2, this is the second post in this series. As I am going through 2021 Release Wave 2 documents (Dynamics 365 and Power Platform), it is great to see so many amazing features are on the way. It is evident that innovation and product enhancements are underway in all three areas – propelling the entire platform’s growth: Let’s jump on to few more ‘Top 5’ features: Thanks for reading!…
The plan for Release Wave 2 is out last week and it is time to check out the exciting list of all the amazing features arriving later this year. Since this is a long document (in addition to a similar plan for Power Apps), this post will be an-going series as I read, rank and share top 5 features per product/app. Are you ready? 😀 More to come later.. watch this space. Thanks for reading!…
Counting the number of people in a photo or video feed is one of the interesting problems in the world of AI, and for a good reason because “number of people/given area” is a useful metric for number of practice purposes. For example: Also worth mentioning, like any other use of AI models, this is an area where functioning under the theme of AI for good is very important. Data and tool To experiment how…
The Wave 1 Release Plans 2020 for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are out and my first impression is; it is going to be a very very exciting year. Dynamics 365 Field Service is getting more tightly integrated with Azure and Power Apps and that push is leading to a lot of new features and functionality improvements. The early peek view will available from 3rd Feb and will be GA from April this year. Following…
The Schedule Board shows working and non-working hours in different colours (non-working hours are greyed) to help planners in creating bookings for resources per their roster. In this article, we will have a look at the steps to set up a roster for individual / multiple resources, and will also look at a Pro Tip in the end. For setting up work hours for a single resource, follow these steps: Easy, isn’t it. Next for…
The question which led to this article was: We respect customer’s preferences in terms of who is coming over to their houses (this was in maid and cleaning services business), so if a customer was happy with a certain staff member, we try our best to assign the same staff member for next service. How can I do that in the new system (Dynamics Field Service)? This, admittedly, led to some head-scratching but the solution…
The fascinating thing about Schedule Board is, it is as much a planning tool, as it is for monitoring. Talking to one of our customers, we noticed ‘planners’ had opened an additional tab on browsers in addition to Schedule Board. It turned out, since the field technicians, go to different cities and towns (long distances), and the work and equipment involved were impacted by weather conditions (rains, dust storms etc.), the weather was a significant…
I was reminded of this gem from XKCD today: The context is a customer call who found this annoying error on the creation of a work order in Dynamics 365 Field Service: The error message is a bit cryptic but what it means is simple: currency should be consistent on a work order AND records mentioned in work order. Three currency fields are at play here: Currency in the price list of a selected Billing…
Work Orders can be automatically generated and bookings can be auto-generated by Dynamics 365 Field Service, thanks to the Agreements functionality in the system. Agreements are used for setting up preventative maintenance schedule, audits, equipments/fleet service schedule etc. in the system, which then generates work orders and booking automatically – resulting in obvious productivity gains. One of the key steps in setting up agreements is to setup recurrence of the work orders (and subsequently but…
We have discussed Work and Resources before this article, now Scheduling is where the fun begins. Put simply, scheduling lets ‘resources’ to be ‘booked’ against ‘requirements’ of ‘work’. A keyword in the above sentence is ‘booked’. Traditionally in Power Apps model-driven app, every record has an owner. If you want to change an owner, you ‘assign’ record to a new owner (user). A ‘booking’ is a bit similar to ‘assignment’ in the sense that it…