Microsoft previews integrated experience for Teams and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Microsoft is in the midst of a private preview of a comprehensive integration between Teams and Dynamics 365 for Sales that, when launched, would establish new default approaches to file storage and collaboration between application users and would provide a new model for involving non-D365 users in sales processes.

Microsoft program managers Welly Lee and Ankit Sachdeva explained the interaction between systems that expose many features between systems, to the point that written description becomes challenging. Teams features will be accessible from the D365CE interface and D365CE features will become accessible from the Teams interface, with limitations based on access control and the objectives of different use cases.

Microsoft envisions three default scenarios and configurations for connecting Teams to D365 for Sales. Use of these scenarios out of the box would drive both the structure of Teams and the people who get added to teams and channels:

1. When the business structures sales around account teams: Teams represent D365 accounts, and Teams channels represent D365 opportunities

2. Working on sales teams that are geographically based: Each geography will have its own team, with channels defined by accounts, not opportunities. For example a North America team might support 50 accounts and teams collaborate around accounts

3. For companies that pursue complex, long duration opportunities, a dedicated Teams team represents an opportunity - presumably with channels on the team used to discuss various elements of the opportunity as it moves ahead

Users will be able to set up other approaches to map and govern how Teams represents D365CE entities, Microsoft representatives advised, and the integration will eventually allow for the use of D365 custom entities, too.

For any of the configuration ...