Not able to see Requirement groups on the schedule board – Dynamics 365 Field service

If you are working with Requirement groups and want to schedule them using the schedule board and not able to find them on the board, you are at the right place.

Resource requirements don’t appear on the Schedule board by default, it has to be configured from the Schedule board settings area.

Let’s see how to do it:

If you see the default Schedule board, there’s no view configured for Requirement groups. Click on the Schedule board settings icon:

Go to Requirement Panels settings area:

Add a view by selecting View type = Requirement Group

You should now see another view for scheduling Resource Requirements

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Restricting resources for customers in Dynamics 365 Field service

I have used Preferred Resource for Accounts in Field services a lot many times, which basically means that you can configure if the customer has some preferred resources and it helps the dispatcher to schedule those resources (if available) for a better customer experience.

Recently I came across how to configure if the customer doesn’t want a Resource to be allocated for their work orders.

How we do it is using the same Resource Preferences records but instead of choosing “Preferred ” preference type we use “Restricted”.

Adding Resource preferences:

Create a Resource preference of type “Restricted”

On schedule assistant, the restricted preferences will be applied and the resources would be filtered on the scheduled board if they are Restricted for a customer.

Benefits of the new UCI (Unified client interface) based Dynamics 365 Field Service App

As you might know starting Field service V7.5.5.x, the Field service related entities are just available from the UCI app not the standard UI.

During the initial usage of the new interfaces, I have jotted down few of the benefits I see from usage perspective which I am going to document here in this article:

Behaviour of the app when there’s an issue with Internet

I haven’t seen anybody talking about this as a feature but I as a user felt really good when the UI tells me that there is issue with Network rather than just not showing anything :-), a more app like behaviour.

Streamlined Navigation – Just seeing entities which are relevant to the User

As the app focuses on just one thing so there’s less clutter and less questions raised by Users on what do you mean by this when all they are using is Field services

Will add more findings here as I see more happy faces using UCI 🙂

How to restrict bookings in Dynamics 365 Field service to only be scheduled at start of an hour

One of our customers had a requirement where they want a booking to be scheduled only at the start of an hour i.e. a booking can be scheduled at 2PM or 3PM but not at 2:30 PM.

On searching for a solution, we found out a very easy OOB solution which is called Time resolution.

It’s a setting on the schedule board which allows the booking to be created in an interval of minutes (1 to 60). Once we set this to 60, the User would just see 1PM, 2PM etc while dragging and dropping the Resource requirement on the schedule board.

Now this is going to just restrict the booking when dragged and dropped on the schedule board.

We also created booking rules to put some additional checks which work on the schedule board and finally a plugin on create of a booking which takes care if booking is created manually.

Cannot find Scheduling settings for Field Service in the new UCI app

I recently installed Field service in a new Trial instance to play with the new UCI interface and the Microsoft Field Service Mobile app.

There’s definitely a learning curve moving from standard UI which has Field services related menu items in the same sitemap but with the new Field service version, Field service related entities can only be accessed from the UCI app. See below screenshot on how to access the APP:

Now, once you click on the app, you can change the area from the bottom in order to configure FS (the Settings area)

I think it’s more confusing if you have used Field service 7.x with standard UI. Once you browse the settings area, you will quickly realize that the Scheduling settings like Scheduling parameters (to enable maps) are missing. The FS settings area looks like this:

In order to access scheduling related configuration settings, there’s another App called (Universal Resource Scheduling) which now sits outside Field services and can be accessed in the following manner:

Once you are in the Universal Resource Scheduling app, you can access the Settings area from the “change Area” dropdown at the bottom and then you will see all Scheduling related configuration settings.

Hope it helped 🙂

How to upgrade your Tenant from Field service 7.x to 8.x (UCI Client)

I recently tried upgrading FS for one of my customer’s tenant but couldn’t see an option to upgrade to the latest 8.x from the administrative portal.

Asked the same question to the product team and gladly they shared the process customers can follow to do this.

To Opt-in please perform the following steps:

1. Access the Dynamics Insider Portal here: http://experience.dynamics.com/insider
2. Log in with your Insider credentials.
3. On the Insider home page, search for a program with the name “Opt-in to Upgrade Project and Field Service – Unified Interface.”
4. Click that program link in the search results and choose to “Join Now” in the page that opens. This will add you as a participant to the program.
5. On the program page, access the link provided to sign up:  “Signup Link to opt-in for the latest Field & Project Service UCI Release (GA)”
6. The link will open a simple questionnaire and one of the questions is the instance URL; please provide the URL of the instance.
7. Microsoft will receive the details you provide and, within a few days, will enable the install or upgrade of the latest versions of Field and Project Service on the instance that you provided. Once enabled, you will receive a confirmation email from Microsoft.
8. Once you receive the email, you can access your Dynamics 365 Admin portal to install or upgrade Field Service and/or Project Service Automation on the enabled instance.
9. For any questions and discussion on the functionality, please use the Forum on the program page. Use the Microsoft Support process to log any issues/bugs.
10. If the identified instance has both Field and Project Service installed, please plan to upgrade both solutions before resuming normal use of the instance.
11. For a smooth install experience, please make sure that the identified instance meets all the prerequisites listed on the Insider Program page.
12. These releases of Field and Project Service will only be available for install or upgrade on the identified instances. They will not show up for any other orgs, even if they are on the same tenant.

Not able to install windows service using InstallUtil.exe command

We recently faced an issue where we had a few windows services interacting with Dynamics 365 CE instance on prem.

We were using the InstallUtil utility in windows to install the service in all environments and never faced issue with installation, but the service failed to install in Prod.

Here is the InstallUtil command we were using:

InstallUtil "C:\xyz\abc.exe"

The problem was after executing the utility there was no error in console and no error in event logs but we couldn’t see the service in windows services explorer.

Also we checked the count of services before and after running the InstallUti utility and the result was the same

powershell   (Get-Service | Measure-Object).Count

We ended up using the SC CREATE command to install the service and it worked just fine for us.

SC CREATE "abc.exe" binpath="C:\xyz\abc.exe" displayname="abc.exe"