What’s the Benefit?
One of the most common things I see as a Dynamics Consultant is how companies can acquire databases and store them in a non-collaborative fashion. Don’t get me wrong, Excel is a great tool, however version management and ease of access are always an area for concern. Enter Dynamics 365, you can share your database with all your Users – Its easy to access, easy to keep up to date and has a raft of workflow and functionality that can drive your business forward.
When you combine the above ethos of collaboration, with our DocDrive365 product (linking Dynamics and SharePoint together), you can not only share your database, but now your documents as well.
So we have the product, but how do we use this to aid productivity even more?
We don’t have to look far into the Microsoft stack to see the untapped potential of Teams – Desk phones are a thing of the past. International video conferencing – No problem. Revolutionizing your business communication during a global pandemic is taken care of. And that just covers the basic functionality of what Teams can do.
So as CRMCS that got us thinking, with Teams being so adept at instant messaging on both desktop and mobile, could with tap into this potential and increase the functionality of DocDrive365?
Case Study
Take a property sale in the UK – this can be quite a tedious process and a lot of waiting around for paperwork. We have designed Portals where estate agents, solicitors, contactors can download and upload important documentation to speed up this process. All the documents are then upload into SharePoint and made visible inside Dynamics CRM with DocDrive365. This allows less reliance on sending sensitive info via email, only then for it to be sat in the recipients inbox.
So in a scenario where we are waiting for a key document before the next stage of a process, a notification to stakeholders once the document is received would be crucial – So we have built a link between DocDrive365 and the Teams instant messenger
How does it work?
Users can set up DocDrive365 rules that when a document is uploaded to a record in Dynamics, and individuals or groups can be sent a notification on Teams to confirm the document has been uploaded
- Adding a User to receive a notification in Teams
- Here the below screenshot shows a file being uploaded into DocDrive
- Once uploaded the Users or Teams added to the Access group will receive a notification in Teams
A Look At the Techie Bit
Below shows a more technical view of how Dynamics is set up on the DocDrive Config Record in order for my above example to work. Here the rule is set up to work for the Case Entity and for all document types uploaded into DocDrive. It also shows how we can then build the message that is displayed in Teams.
