Collaborate throughout the work order lifecycle with embedded Microsoft Teams
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to New and upcoming features in Field Service. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
| Enabled for | Public preview | Early access | General availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users by admins, makers, or analysts | 
Nov 5, 2021 |
- | - |
Business value
Field service organizations are geographically dispersed between dispatch centers, customer service centers, and customer locations. However, collaboration is critical to ensure an optimal outcome for customers. The work order process requires collaboration between customer service agents, dispatchers, asset managers, account representatives, and multiple frontline workers. For example, dispatchers constantly communicate with frontline workers to understand whether they are running on time with their current job so they can adjust the schedule accordingly. Collaboration has traditionally been a source of pain. At best, when organizations have a collaboration application, people need to leave their workspace and open a separate application to communicate with their colleagues, wasting valuable time that could be better spent helping customers. These conversations are not linked to the work order, which means that as new stakeholders are brought in, they are missing critical context about the work order.
In other cases, organizations do not provide a collaboration application, which means people use their own private tools such as SMS and other chat applications. This exposes organizations to security risks and further disconnects conversations from the rest of the team.
By embedding Microsoft Teams within the work order experience, you can easily collaborate with your entire organization. And when enabled, even external contacts such as customers and third-party subcontractors, always keep the correct information in the work order context.
Feature details
With embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration into Field Service, any user involved in the work order process can collaborate using Teams functionality while seeing all the critical contextual conversations to ensure an optimal outcome.
Teams integration includes the following capabilities:
- Chat with colleagues from within the work order form, even if the conversation is not related to the work order, saving you from switching to the Microsoft Teams app whenever you need to chat. View your existing chats, or initiate a new chat.
- Initiate a new chat with one or many colleagues, and optionally link the chat to the work order. When you initiate a new linked chat, you're creating a brand new chat, which means any previous conversations you had with the chat participants will not be brought into the new discussion, keeping the context of the chat all about the work order.
- If a chat is linked to a case, and the case is then converted into a work order, that chat will automatically link to the work order for seamless cross-departmental collaboration.
- Associate conversations to the work order, making it easy for your team members to see a clear picture of the status and history of the work order, right in the context of their workspace. As new people engage to help complete the work order - such as a new frontline worker to help fix a problem - they can easily join the conversation and help deliver exceptional service.
This integration will allow web users to seamlessly launch the full Microsoft Teams app from the chat pane and frontline workers using the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app to collaborate through the Microsoft Teams mobile app.