This entry is part of our Feature Review Series. These short, to the point blogs, strive to provide a quick snapshot of information to a user looking for a quick overview of a feature, how it's managed or configured, some insight into how a business/organization would use it, and provide links to resources or tutorials for a deeper dive.
Collaboration is a critical component of most organizations in our decentralized, remote workplaces. The integrations of Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 gives users a new level of flexibility and power to do their jobs more efficiently by leveraging these powerful features.
In our previous entries, we covered the Teams Chat and Teams Basic integration, showing how each are configured and set-up. In this article, we focus on the "Enhanced" Teams integration feature.
How to Enable D365 Record Integration
To enable this feature, navigate to the admin portal (admin.powerplatform.com) and select the D365 environment you wish to enable Teams integration within.
Once in, expand the Integration section and click Teams Integration Settings.
Clicking this will load a new tab in your browser and provide several options to choose from, as shown below.
There are several options available.
Turn on the linking of Dynamics 365 records to Microsoft Teams channels. This feature permits the pinning of records or views only from within Microsoft Teams.
Turn on Enhanced Microsoft Teams Integration. This extends the functionality to pin records or views from Dynamics 365 as well.
Turn on Confidential Labels. This option is only available when the enhanced integration is turned on, and allows for the creation/use of private Teams and the addition of sensitivity/confidentiality labels. Clicking this will ask the administrator to sign in and approve the use of several features.
How to Set Up Enhanced Microsoft Teams Integration
In order for the enhanced integration to work, the basic integration must be set-up. For details on that, review our Basic Integration article.
First, toggle the Turn on Enhanced Microsoft Teams Integration to Yes.
When this has been done, users will see the Collaborate button in the command bar on views and records. The image below shows the button on a view.
The button acts as a navigational button, allowing the user to navigate to the location in Teams where this view or record has been linked. When clicked, the user will be presented with a Collaborate with Microsoft Teams window with a Get Started button.
Clicking Get Started presents the user with a window asking where they'd like to navigate. If the record has only been placed in on spot within Teams, they will only see one option. If there are more than one, they can select from the list.
In this example, we see the view has been aligned with the Sales Collaboration tab of the Sales Team.
The user selects the Team and clicks Start Collaboration which will navigate them to Microsoft Teams and display the location they selected. In the image below, we see the view being displayed in Teams.
Below, we see what it will look like if a specific record is embedded within the Team.
Note that in the event a view or record has not been embedded within a channel, the user will see an error message as shown below. The error is rather vague, and it took us some time to resolve what was happening.
To prevent this, the view or record needs to be added to a Team.
The "enhanced" feature makes it easy for a user to navigate from D365 into the location of Teams where the record is synced, enabling their ability to collaborate with other users from within the Teams application. Pretty helpful, huh?
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