Dynamics 365- Fixes to Universal Scheduling in Field Service and Project Management

Posted on: April 23, 2018 | By: Craig Thompson | Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Authored by: Don Surma

Microsoft posted a blog on April 2nd that announced some major enhancements to the Universal Scheduling module used by both Field Service and Project service in Dynamics 365. If you are currently using Field Service or Project Service, this update patch is highly recommended.

While Microsoft solicits feature enhancements from users of its products, we often wonder what happens to these ideas. Microsoft recently spent time with some customers to actually view how they use the Universal Resource Scheduling (Booking) functions and have rolled out the following enhancements:

The first item above, Book based on estimated time of arrival is a big welcome! From our experience, this is both a bug fix and enhancement. Occasionally you would get a red box on the booking times that indicated an error. This was very annoying. What Microsoft finally determined is that arrival time is the method that many companies use and require when booking resources. For example, most appointments would start on the hour or ½ hour. Under the previous method using start time, it would figure in drive time and might give you a start time of 22 minutes after the hour or something like that. You could then go in and manually adjust this. Occasionally you would get a red box on the booking times that indicated an error. This was very annoying.  Now you have an option to set arrival time as the default and let the system figure estimated start. Way less clicks!

There are many bug fixes in this release. One item that was particularly exasperating and took quite some time for Microsoft to identify and fix. Essentially it prevented certain Accounts or Contacts from suddenly being booked, even though they might have been previously booked. We identified this with one of our clients last August of 2017.  It turned out to be a geo-coding issue. This appears to now be fixed.

We applaud Microsoft for visiting customers and seeing how they use the software in real world scenarios. And keep these enhancements coming!

If you have any questions on installing updates mentioned in this article, or are interested in learning more about Field Service or Project Service for Dynamics 365, please contact Logan Consulting, your Microsoft Dynamics CRM/ 365 Partner of Chicago to schedule an appointment today!



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