Microsoft Social Engagement - New UI and Functionality, Changes to Administration and Licensing
As part of the Spring Release for the Dynamics product family, Microsoft Social Listening (now Social Engagement) received some exciting new features. In this blog we will discuss the new user interface,features as well as changes to user administration and licensing.
New User Interface
The new UI for Social Engagement is very much similar to the new Microsoft Azure Portal. Gives the user a very rich experience as they navigate through the system. As you can see I have the "Microsoft Hololens" as my selected Search Topic and I have the Overview, Conversations, Sentiment, Location and Sources tab's below it.
Each of these tabs shows relevant data as it relates to your selected search topic. Sentiments and Location views are below as examples.
Sentiments
Location
Now before we jump onto locations, what if I change the theme for the layout, Settings --> My Preferences
Now this is how my locations look, amazing...
New Functionality
Let's highlight some of the new functionality that are introduced in this release, these include the Social Center and Social Profiles. In a nutshell Social Center allows you have a stream of your feeds that you can interact with and Social Profiles allow you to respond to those Social Center streams for tweets and or Facebook posts.
Social Profiles
We can set this up for Facebook or Twitter. Let's setup a Twitter account so we can respond to these streams using our twitter handle. (If this is not setup, then you need to have twitter open on another window to perform the retweet and replies etc.)
And now we can see we are ready to tweet, reply to tweets from the social center in MSE with the twitter account we setup in Social Profiles.
Social Center
Navigate to the Social Center part of the application and create your own streams (these are personal streams, that you can share with others if you are an enterprise licensed user). These streams are search topics you have setup in MSE that you can further filter if needed.
Here you can see I setup 2 Streams, the first one where I am filtering my results by US Only and the next stream the entire Microsoft Hololens search topic.
And the result shows up as below.
Now we are ready to tweet, reply from the profile we setup on the Social Profiles.
Assigning and Labeling Posts
Assigning: You may assign posts the posts to other MSE users and this will show up on the assigned users Inbox Stream. Keep in mind to use this functionality you need the MSE Enterprise License, more details on the Licensing section below.
Labeling: You may label posts (Labels created under Solutions--> Default Solutions --> Status Labels. The idea is being able to filter these posts by labels on streams, views, so you can perform necessary actions with them.
User Administration
Previously with Microsoft Social Listening (MSL) a user had a few configuration roles we could set, with MSE there are some more roles (named as Interaction Roles) that additionally defines what a user can do. So what a user can do in MSE is based on the Configuration Roles and Interaction Roles. The new interaction roles rule matrix is below and more info on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/social-engagement-help-and-training/understand-user-roles.aspx
Permissions |
Reader |
Responder |
Manager |
|---|---|---|---|
View streams |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Manage social profiles |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Edit labels on posts |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Edit post assignments |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Manage streams |
No |
No |
Yes |
Engage on a post |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Licensing
Microsoft Social Engagement has two licensing model namely Social Engagement Professional and Enterprise. Pricing and more details on https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-social-purchase.aspx
Below I will summarize the feature differences (if applicable) between these 2 licensing.
| Feature | Included in Professional | Included in Enterprise |
| Social Profiles | Yes | Yes |
| Social Center / Streams | Yes, 2 Streams Limitation. Enterprise users can share unlimited streams with Professional users |
Yes, Unlimited |
| Assign Posts | No | Yes |
| Integrate with CRM through Social Insights Widgets | Yes | Yes |
| Integrate Social Engagements Posts with CRM Records | No | Yes |
More to come during Summer 2015 timeframe when we have the Integration with MSE Posts with CRM at the record level. Delivering Social CRM.
Comments
Anonymous
August 06, 2015
Can you access MSE from my custom Mobile application ?Anonymous
February 14, 2016
Thank you for this clear presentation. Thomas, would know if there is a minimum amount of CRM Pro licenses for a MS dynamics CRM to access Social Engagement Professional?- Anonymous
April 21, 2016
There is no minimum CRM license requirements to access CRM Online from MSE. You do get Social Engagement as part of the CRM Online subscription if you have 25 or more CRM professional users.
- Anonymous