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ReportUltimate Guide to Unified Interface
Caroline Mayou
The Microsoft Dynamics AX/D365 Support Team at Avantiico is focused on solving our client’s problems, from daily issues to large and more complex problems.
Ultimate Guide to Unified Interface
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- March 20, 2020
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Introduction to Unified Interface
Microsoft’s intention behind the Unified Interface, was to bring a feeling of consistency to their bundle of customer relationship management applications available in of Dynamics 365. These applications, from a licensing point-of-view, were referred to as the Customer Engagement plan or bundle and included Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Project Service Automation. Today, customers can license these applications individually with a ‘per app’ license. Microsoft announced the deprecation of the legacy web version of Dynamics 365, and it’s a good idea for your organization to be planning for this transition. In this post, I’ll provide an all-encompassing rundown of Unified Interface, including the new features and benefits it offers, the applications that come with it, and how to transition your team to the new interface.
What is Unified Interface and why does it matter now?
The Unified Interface is most fundamentally explained as the continuation of what you’ve referred to as the Customer Engagement applications. The Dynamics 365 legacy deprecation that was announced in September of 2019 is Microsoft’s way of pushing people to the cloud. Unified Interface applications that have been released so far include CRM Hub, Sales Hub, which are both Dynamics 365 Sales based applications. Customer Service Hub was also introduced as a child of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Microsoft will continue to introduce applications build with Unified Interface and has announced that this is their future.
The Unified Interface offers a much more user-friendly experience for existing and new Dynamics 365 users. It uses responsive web design to harmonize the way users access data and interfaces with Customer Engagement applications and features. The most important feature of the Unified Interface is that it allows users to access the sales, marketing, customer service and field service applications from anywhere and across all devices.
So why should your organization suddenly be concerned with Unified Interface? As mentioned above, Microsoft deprecated the legacy version of Dynamics 365 CRM in September of last year. Microsoft also announced that companies should be using Unified Interface only before October 1st, 2020. Moving to the Unified Interface will impact businesses that are not prepared with a transition plan. This guide can help your team better understand system requirements, resource planning, time allocation and user-adoption for your transition to Unified Interface.
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Unified Interface and Dynamics 365
Currently, unless you’ve already taken the steps to transition to the Unified Interface, your legacy ‘Dynamics 365-custom’ application will still be visible. You can remove this and show only the new model-driven apps (I.e. Sales Hub, Customer Service Hub, Field Service Hub, Team Member applications, etc.)
Come October 2020, you should have a goal of 100% user-adoption of the new model-driven apps and stop working out of the legacy version application completely.
How to plan for Unified Interface Deployment
Whether you write the plan alone, or with a partner, it’s important to be aware of the different steps needed before deploying a transition to the Unified Interface. I will outline a few of the items Microsoft encourages organizations to consider before beginning a deployment process:
Step 1: Complete Environment Discovery
Having an idea and visual of your organization’s environment is essential to the rest of the activities we will go through. If you already have an understanding the number of users, groups, teams and the business units in your environment, great. If not, work on identifying those data points- specifically the data points or ‘entities’ that you would like to bring into the Model Driven Apps (Sales Hub, Customer Service Hub, etc.) I encourage you to work with your Dynamics 365 partner to identify your current data storage limitations and requirements. At the end of this stage, create a business requirements analysis to go over your expectations for a service level agreement (SLA). Make sure to be specific about your security and privacy policies. An environment discovery should take quite a bit of time if done thoroughly. Understand that this analysis will guide any future steps you take in trasitioning to Unified Interface. Refer to this question set, for a list of considerations during this stage.
Environment Discovery considerations
- Is there enough overlap in between customers and contacts across business units to be able to work in the same data?
- Is the existing security policy in place sufficient?
- Are there any areas of a Model-Driven App that need additional security modifications?
- Can you scale the current security model you have in place if the business were to grow?
Step 2: Review security roles
Unified Interface reflects inside of model-driven apps built on the Microsoft power platform. Though model-driven applications are built in the same environment and using the same CDS, the applications in Dynamics 365 (so not Power Apps) use role-based security. The base-level security room I recommend using and copying is ‘Common Data Service User’. This security role gives the user access to model driven apps, but no sales or customer service related entities, leaving it neutral and open to creating department specific security roles.
Step 3: Find system-adoption leaders
Decide on a group of users in your organization that will help move the migration or transition along. These users should be exemplary feature users, and should know the benefits of the system well. When it comes to user adoption, studies show that indicating key influencers in your industry can help drive ideas forward.
Step 4: Create a Sandbox environment
Note: If you are currently working with a Microsoft partner, please inquire about transitioning to Unified Interface before creating a SandBox environment of your own.
If you currently have an existing test environment, make sure you deploy the Unified Interface inside of it first, before taking it to your production environment. One of you have moved your Sandbox to Unified Interface only, explore the applications and relate the new features to your organization’s day-to-day operations. In this stage, try to identify functional gaps that could block your users from adopting the new interface. For example, you may find that Sales is divided into a ‘Pre Sales’ and ‘Sales’ phase. In one phase, sales representatives are manually entering leads from a tradeshow and qualifying them. Once the lead has been qualified (presales) and becomes a contact, a member of the sales team contacts the individual (the sales phase). You could conclude that in this example, the users in question could benefit from having two separate model-driven applications, for each part of the sales process. The goal here isn’t to over-complicate. Instead, it’s to simplify processes and drive collaboration in the organization.
By testing functionalities in the system, you’ll be able to find error patterns that call for re-working. For example, when transitioning our own environment to the cloud, I found that a work flow running on the case entity was bugging because of a mis-assigned security group. This was disrupting users and not allowing them to assign and/or save records. The sooner you can identify these errors, the sooner you can resolve them and ensure they don’t happen after go-live.
Step 5: Re-work the applications while monitoring use
If you find that users aren’t using areas of an application, remove them. You can also use this time to rework any integrations or compatibility issues across the system. If you have design decisions that date back to the legacy version and you find them to no longer function, make sure to review and update them. You should also make sure to review your application design changes across the different devices used in your organization.
During the environment discovery, we reviewed our organizational goals. Using the metrics that support your goal, look over and try to begin to measure the business impact of the changes you’ve made when transitioning to Unified Interface. For example, if your goal is around user adoption, you could use sessions per user as a metric to monitor. I made a note of our organization goals by defined goal and by metric in an excel sheet. I will be monitoring metrics for each goal at 30-60-90 days and re-evaluate form design from there. The beauty of model-driven apps is the ability to change the application with little time and effort.
Step 6: Release management
In this stage, you’ll decide on how to introduce Unified Interface to your organization and users and build a release plan. During this phase, you may want to consider:
- Releasing Unified Interface by role or department to help with user adoption
- Remove the legacy web client access once each user has been trained. Remember that both the legacy app and Unified Interface applications can run in parallel but it is not an optimal long term solution (in terms of user adoption) After October 20th, 2020, your users will need to be fluent in the use of Unified Interface when the legacy Dynamics 365-custom application disappears.
- Continue providing ongoing updates and testing new features in the sandbox environment
Define Unified Interface system requirements
Unified Interface (model-driven apps), can be accessed using web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, or Apple Safari. Users can also work in model-driven apps through their mobile by using a browser on the mobile device or by using the application ‘Dynamics 365 for phones’. Make sure that your team’s desktop and mobile-device browsers and apps are up-to-date.
You can leverage the capabilities of your favorite Office applications inside of model-driven apps. If your organization is aiming for full Office 365 integration with Dynamics 365, you’ll need the Office 365 Enterprise E3 license or later. PSTN calling and conferencing both require the Office 365 Enterprise E5 license.
Driving Unified Interface user adoption
The key driver to successful user adoption, is how changes are presented to users in an organization. If you’re currently using Dynamics 365, your users currently have access to the Unified Interface. For example, Dynamics 365 Marketing already uses the Unified Interface as its default. However, some applications, like Dynamics 365 Sales, have both the original (legacy) web interface available. New application will always use the Unified Interface, so it’s important to let your users know that this design is the new standard.
Just like Dynamics 365 is built utilizing a Common Data Service, the Unified Interface applications also use a CDS. The applications are model-driven applications built on PowerApps. The applications share a CDS for their data storage. Unified Interface is just the name of the design and interaction across all access points and devices.
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