Microsoft’s Unified Service Desk (USD) is a great tool for your agents but occasionally they might want to work with the Dynamics 365 full web client or in the Interactive Service Hub outside of USD. In this post I will show you how to create a button to allow agents to quickly jump from USD into Dynamics 365.

In my USD solution I have implemented a simple but effective button to allow the agents to quickly load Dynamics 365. Below you can see that I have added a Dynamics icon to my status panel. Clicking the icon will open Dynamics 365 web client in Internet Explorer outside of USD. Or opening the menu gives them the option to pick between the web client and the interactive service hub.

Note: I could have opted for other locations in my USD interface. But using the status panel was useful for several reasons. Firstly I liked the position! But more importantly the window navigation rules we will create are unlikely to clash with any existing rules.

In this post I will show you the steps involved in this simple but useful change.

1. Upload a web resource (the icon)
2. Create a toolbar hosted control that will display in your status panel.
3. Create two pop up actions.
4. Create your toolbar and buttons.
5. Create two window navigation rules.

Tip: Obviously, you might not use the ISH. If not then adjust this logic by simple missing the actions / toolbar buttons for that out! Also, keep in mind that ISH will load in IE. I don’t know about you but I prefer to use ISH in Chrome! Again that might mean you want to skip the ISH parts of this change.

Step One – Upload a web resource (the icon)

You will first need to find and upload a suitable icon. I used this one …

Simply use customizations in Dynamics 365 to upload your icon as a web resource. (Don’t forget to publish it!)

I called mine “neil_Dynamics365_32x32_grey” you will obviously use another name!!

Step Two – Create a toolbar hosted control

Next we will want a hosted control. This is a toolbar that we are going to display in the status panel. Mine is shown below.

Once you have saved this hosted control we are going to want to add a new action. So navigation to actions and click new. Simply enter a name for your action as “Popup”. Then save it. You’ll end up with a list of UII Actions that look like this.

Step Three – Create two pop up actions

Now we need a couple of actions to load either the web client or ISH.

My first action looked like this;

My second action looked like this;

Step Four – Create your toolbar and buttons

You are now ready to build your toolbar.

In the toolbars area of USD, click new. Create your toolbar. I called mine StatusPanel Toolbar.

Having saved your toolbar you will need to navigate to hosted controls and add the hosted control we created earlier.

Now you are ready to toolbar buttons. Use the “+” to add your button.

My main button look like this. Notice that I have added the name of the image we imported in step one. (Your name will be different!)

And also, once saved, I have added the action to pop up Dynamics 365. Doing this will mean if someone clicks the icon with opening the toolbar menu then Dynamics will load in the web client.

If you don’t want to implement the ISH part of this change, you can skip to the next step! If you do then navigate to the tool bar buttons option on the button you’ve just created.

Here you now add two toolbar buttons.

My first button looked like this …. Notice that it has an order 10 and included the action to load the web client version of Dynamics 365.

My second button looked like this …. Notice that it has an order 20 and included the action to load the ISD version of Dynamics 365.

Step Five – Create two window navigation rules

The final step in this change is to create window navigation rules to force these pop ups to load outside of USD. Meaning they load in the full IE browser and are not connected to USD in any way. My first rule looked like this….

If you are implementing ISH then a second navigation rule maybe needed. (Or use “*” for your url!) My second rule looked like this. It is essentially the same! Except the url is “nga/engagementhub.aspx”.

I hope you think this is a simple change but one you users might like.