Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 now contains a new type of host control called “Interactive Service Hub Page”. I have started to look at the capabilities of these by creating a hosted control to display my Tier 1 Dashboard from the interactive service hub.

The interactive service hub is designed to simplify your day-to-day job, and is specifically optimized for customer service. It shows you all your vital information in one place, and lets you focus on things that require your attention. The Tier 1 dashboard plays an important role in showing first line agents key information about active cases. Hence why I started with this component. Below you can see a screen shot of my USD interface containing a Tier 1 Dashboard.

NOTE: This change requires CRM 2016 Update 1 and USD 2.1 as a minimum. If you aren’t using these versions (or higher) it will not work!

Creating this was pretty simple, I followed these steps;

1. Create a hosted control.
2. Create a navigate action.
3. Add action to a toolbar.

First of all, a note about protected mode in Internet explorer!

When you first start to use the interactive service hub pages within USD you may see blank windows opening that are looking for http://event. If you happen to see this the reason will be your protected mode in Internet Explorer. Protected mode needs to be turned off or certain urls included in your restricted zone. (http://event, http://close, http://uii) See the Microsoft post on this subject below.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/usd/2016/01/26/ie-process-mode-gives-httpevent-popup/

Step One – Create a hosted control

As is often the case with a USD change I started by creating a hosted control. This control would hold my dashboard and would be for the new type, “Interactive Service Hub Page”. The details were as follows;

Step Two – Create an Action

Next I needed an action to navigate to my dashboard, this is made possible by a simple navigate action. Mine had the following details;

A quick note about the url I used might be helpful at this point!

url=&pagetype=interactioncentricdashboard&id=D201A642-6283-4F1D-81B7-DA4B1685E698

This url is going to navigate to my dashboard but several out of the box interactive service hub dashboards exist and additional ones could be created. So how did I work out the “id” for the dashboard I wanted to display? First of all I went to customizations in CRM and opened the dashboards option. Next I opened the Tier 1 dashboard. The GUID of the required dashboard will be in the url displayed.

TIP:
Use the Edge browser when doing this!

Step Three – Add an action to a toolbar

Now I simply needed to add my action to a toolbar. I already had a suitable toolbar so I simply created a new button. My button looked like this;

Following these steps should have helped you create your first interactive service hub hosted control.

Now you have it working CRM entities / forms will all load within this one tab. As that is the way the service hub is designed. At least by default.

We can however use this new hosted control type to start to add additional hosted controls and window navigation rules. These will then allow us to create sessions and open tabs as would normally be done with standard CRM pages.

I will expand on these concepts in a future post. J