Microsoft Integrates Teams with Dynamics 365 to Form ‘Hero App’

Microsoft Inspire unveils integration between two platforms to ensure 'seamless' workflow

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Breaking News written on purple background with picture of Dynamics collaboration on Teams over Microsoft Inspire
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Published: July 14, 2021

Marian McHugh

Technology Reporter

Microsoft Teams’ integration with Dynamics 365 makes it one of the vendor’s first “hero collaborative apps”.

The tech giant revealed the integration of Teams with the cloud-based business applications platform at its annual Inspire event. It is also eradicating the tax that has made organisations hesitant of this type of integration to ensure that all Teams users can avail of the experience.

“Today we announced new experiences integrating Dynamics 365 with Teams, making Dynamics 365 one of Microsoft’s first hero collaborative apps,” said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, M365 and Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Industry, Apps, and Data Marketing in a joint statement.

“Together, Teams and Dynamics 365 offer powerful new ways for everyone across an organisation to seamlessly exchange and capture ideas in right in the flow of work.

“We’re also eliminating the tax that has historically held organisations back from this kind of integration, making these experiences available within Teams to any user, at no additional cost. No other technology vendor offers this kind of integration and accessibility across the organisation without the need to pay for multiple underlying software licenses”

The Teams and Dynamics 365 integration allows users to:

View and edit Dynamics 365 records right within their Teams workflow—Dynamics 365 users can now invite anyone in the organisation to view and collaborate on customer records within the flow of a Teams chat or channel, ensuring the right individuals can take the next best action faster and more efficiently without needing to switch context across multiple apps and data sources.

For example, sellers can share information like details on the sales opportunity, customer history, health of the customer relationship, key contacts, and more. For customer service representatives, this could include sharing the customer case record, sourcing troubleshooting steps, and tracking follow-up tasks.

Add a Teams meeting to appointments and capture notes—Dynamics users can now add a Teams meeting when creating an appointment, enabling access to key customer information during a Teams call. Users can also capture notes directly with the Teams call, which is automatically saved in the timeline of the Dynamics 365 record. However, only users with appropriate permissions can access the data, ensuring that the most appropriate employees are viewing, interacting with, and sharing customer records.

Stay up to date on records with automated notifications and connected workflows —Automatic notifications keep stakeholders alerted to updates made by colleagues. Users can select specific chats and channels through which notifications are sent, as well as the frequency of notifications. In addition, specific adaptive cards can be sent based on the notification type, enabling more connected workflows.

The integration of the two platforms is just one example of a collaborative app from Microsoft, with the vendor also announcing an array of new and enhanced collaborative apps from independent software vendors (ISV) partners, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.

ISV partners will soon be able to sell their apps directly in Teams, offering new economic opportunities and providing a simplified experience for Teams IT admins to purchase apps and subscriptions directly from the Teams admin centre on behalf of their organisation.

“With 145 million daily active users—and growing—Microsoft Teams is where people start their day and stay in the flow of work,” continued Sparro and Taylor.

“Over the past 18 months, people have come to rely on Teams to meet, chat, call, collaborate – and, increasingly, to automate business process. In a very real way, Teams has become the new front end for a new world of work. But empowering people for flexible work isn’t easy. Every organisation will need to build a new operating model across people, places, and processes”

The integration of Teams with Dynamics is a part of Microsoft’s strategy to cater to the world of hybrid work with its cloud. It also announced Windows 365, which takes the PC desktop to the cloud, and new partner integrations for its employee experience platform Viva.

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