What I mean here by “Resource Pool” is a Bookable Resource of the Resource Type: Pool.
Create a new Resource with Resource Type: Pool
optional: add members to the Pool as Child Resources (entity: Bookable Resource Group)
set the capacity of the Pool either a) manually or b) let it be calculated based on the member’s aggregated capacity by setting Derive Capacity From Group Members to Yes
Tip: When creating new Resource Pools and setting the field Derive Capacity From Group Members to Yes and only than start adding Child Resources to the Resource Pool, the system triggers a comprehensive and time consuming Recalculation of the Aggregation, each time after you add a new member to the Pool. So my recommendation when configuring the Resource Pool with this flag set to Yes is, to first add all the Resource Children (Pool Members) and than in a 2nd step turn the flag to Yes.
You now should be able to see the aggregated capacity of your Pool Resource. Click on Show Work Hours on the Pool Resource’s from:
When opening one of the days for which more than one Pool members were defined, you can see the available capacity here.
Also in schedule Board you’re able to see the Pool resource this way:
The Pool Resource Cell contains the number of Pool members
If you have Resource only temporarily joining the Pool, you also see this reflected in the counter for the number of available Resources on the Pool’s Resource Cell. This counter gets recalculated each time you change the displayed date range.
Resource Pool functionalities
you can have Pools consisting of these three Resource Type groupings, called Pool Type: – Equipments – Facilitiies – Combination of [Accounts, Contacts and Users]
the capacity can be automatically aggregated by setting the two option set ‘Bookalble Resource’.’ Derive Capacity From Group Members‘ to Yes.
the skills are not automatically aggregated to the Pool level
you can add skills (manually of by Flow etc to the Pool Resource (parent of the Pool members)
if you book a Work Order to one of the Pool members directly, the available capacity of the Pool doesn’t get reduced for the duration of the Work Order
Microsoft has announced the deprecation of the current Resco based Field Service Mobile App by June 2022.
From June 2021 on new Field Service setups have to use the new Field Service Mobile App which is fully made by Microsoft and in fact is a Model Driven App as we know it today.
The new App can be tested from Field Service Version 8.8.22.x onwards. In mobile App Stores (i.e. Google Playstore) the new app is called “Field Service Mobile (2020)” as of today.
There are some offline capabilities including sync filters already but it looks like offline logic implementation is not as easy and comprehensively possible as is it with the Resco based Field Service app. Also many other functionalities are currently missing, but Microsoft promises to catch up.
Some things that are still missing are: Push notifications, Geofencing and Location Auditing, Reporting, IoT Alerts, Remote Assist and MS Intune.
Interesting is also a new control called “Form Component Control”, which can be used to embed a Work Order form into a Booking form:
Will this be a general new feature which can be used for all other forms as well? – It looks like!
Resco will continue to evolve its Mobile Application Development Framework and will also continuously provide new features and mobile solutions. Resco already offers different mobile solutions and templates (i.e. an advanced Field Service template, Sales template, Route Planning, Inspections) that are working perfectly together with Dynamics 365 and will continue to do so after June 2022. That means by the time Microsoft catches up with current Resco technology there will be new functionality available for Users that stay with Resco as well. On the other hand also Microsoft is rapidly growing its Power Apps capabilities.
For now the direction to go would be for more sophisticated requirements and larger implementation projects Resco will probably be the better fit. For more simple / standard requirements Microsoft’s model drivel app could be worth to consider.
To sum that up – it will not be end of development for the excellent Resco Field Service mobile technology – it will rather be a separation between the Microsoft FS Mobile App and the Resco FS Mobile App. Of course we’ll eventually have to pay Resco separately if we want to use their enhanced solutions. But competition is generally good for the market and customer segmentation has always made sense.
Just had a migration where I was blocked by not having the msdyn_FSMNotifications solution installed in my target environment.
The secret behind it: this solution can only be installed on top of Woodford.
So after you have installed Woodford you’ll need to go to the Instance Picker and click on Install (or Upgrade if available) for Field Service, even if it is already installed. This way only some additional solutions will be installed. There you go!
There you can click “Reset” to get the below shown dialog window.
In this window you have the possibility to select an Office Security Group. This field is even pre-populated with the assigned Security Group of the currently selected Instance.
So what you are expecting is that while filling in this form you can use the field “Edit Security group” to assign a Security Group to your reset Instance by choosing the Security Group in this field.
BUUUUT: nothing of this is the case. This field simply has no functionality here.
Even when you click on the lookup pen symbol next to the field so that a popup shows all of your Office Groups and you can select whatever Group you want: for your new reset Instance you’ll always have NO Security Group at all assigned.
So why has Microsoft decided to put this field on this form if it has absolutely no functionality? – Nobody knows.
Please Microsoft, fix that and don’t let us hang with the common statement “works as designed”. Because the design in this point is really more than bad.
On Resco for Dynamics or Field Service Mobile Client you by default have this (in my opinion unnecessary) Signature field on every Note form.
Note Form with Signature panel
So you might ask yourself why do you need the huge Signature area on each and every Note form. Usually it should be enough to capture Notes only on Work Orders and maybe for some special (custom) forms/processes. It confuses the End User if all he wants is adding an attachment or even only a text Note.
So what you can do is removing the Signature area by a simple On Can Execute rule on the Note form:
On Can Execute Command on Note form
After you have configured this you would not see the Signature panel on a Note form anymore and also not the Signature command from the upper right burger menu of the Note form.
Note Form without Signature panelNote menu without Signature command
You can still configure one or more Signature sections for each of your forms as you already have it OOB on the Work Order form in FS Mobile.
Add Signature Tab to a Form
in Woodford, go to Entity where you want to add the Signature
click “Add Media”
provide Name
Select “Capture Signature” and “Clear”
Optional: Provide “Required for Status”. Example: Status “Approved” only possible with Signature
Subject: Title of the Note
Similarly you can apply this for Photos, Videos, Files, … You could also have one Tab for Signature capturing and another Tab for Photo and/or Video capturing. Or collect multiple Signatures on one form by having different Tabs for that.
Always, when I setup a new Field Service Mobile, there are some steps I go through to ensure, everything is initially working in a comfortable manner.
Surely some of the steps aren’t required but have proven to be my best practice for new instances.
create Resources and ensure that they are enabled for FS Mobile
install Woodford
install the latest Project Template from here and make a derivate out of it in which you perform all following mobile customizations
in Woodford, go to plugins and activate the most important Delete plugins: Work Order, WO Product, WO Service, WO Service Task, …
in your Project Template derivate, go to Configuration and set Save Password to true
6. edit the Sync Filters to also include data from the past (1-2 weeks) for: Work Order, WO Product, WO Service Task, WO Service, WO Incident, Resource Booking.
7. switch the default Booking View Layout from Calendar to List. To do so, go to Home=>Bookable Resource Bookings=>Properties=>Properties=>Initial Control=>switch from Calendar to List
To customize the Schedule Board has some special limitations but also a lot of possibilities.
Requirement Lists
This is one of the most wanted things to customize. You can easily use all different kinds of Views from the Entity Resource Requirement on the Schedule Board.
System views as well as Personal Views (good for advanced Users customizing their own Schedule Board tab) can be displayed.
Tooltips that are defined once across all Schedulable Entities:
Resource Map Pins: Resource Tooltips View
Organizational Unit Map Pins: Organizational Unit Tooltips View
Tooltips individual per Schedulable Entity:
Requirement Map Pins (here also personal view possible): Requirement Map Pin Tooltips View
Booking Map Pin or Booking Tile: Booking Tooltips View
Note: the Booking Tile’s Booking Tooltips View in the Daily/Weekly and Monthly View are not customizable as of now [improve@MS].
Details Pane
Sliding out from the right after selecting an item.
Views that are defined once across all Schedulable Entities:
Resource Map Pin or Resource Card: Resource Details View
Organizational Unit Map Pin: Organizational Unit Details View
Views individual per Schedulable Entity:
Booking Map Pin or Booking Tile: Booking Details View
Requirement Map Pin or Requirement from Requirements List (here also personal view possible): Requirement Details View
Map View filter
Requirement Map Filter View
Determines which Requirements (Requirement Map Pins) are shown on the map.
only the filter, not the columns matter
is independent of the Views on the Requirements Panel /Requirement Lists)
if Apply Territory Filter from Tab parameters (gearwheel symbol) is set to yes, ADDITIONALLY the Territories of the filter fields will be applied to sort out the displayed Requirement Map Pins
Other Adjustments
Increase Booking width (zoom in): slider at the bottom right. This is saved for the Schedule Board Tab (for all users).
remove columns from List View directly: only temporarily/local, not saved.
Customization Tips
make default schedule board not editable per Security Role
if the setting for a Schedule Board Tab from 2nd gearwheel, upper right corner, should be saved, the User needs update privileges for this Schedule Board Settings entity record. Changes would be visible for all other Users of this tab as well than. More information: Shared vs. personal Schedule Board (by Microsoft).
Custom Javascripts, CSS, and label localization on the Schedule Board
Create a new Client Extension record and associate it to the Schedule Board Setting record that contains your Schedule Board Tab or leave the Schedule Board Setting id field empty to have it affecting all Schedule Board Tabs .
Here is a nice article by Thomas Dayman that gives a short overview of how to embed a Survey Questionnaire created with the new Microsoft Forms Pro into the Field Service Mobile app. The approach is to create an Offline HTML file where Thomas provides a sample code snippet for, and embed that via iFrame into a Form in Woodford.
Compared to Resco’s new Inspections the Forms Pro integration doesn’t support offline scenarios. Resco Inspections comes with additional licence cost whereas for Forms Pro it is still not clear how the licencing will look like.
If you have too many Customer Assets in your Dynamics 365 database and you don’t want to have all of them offline available in your Field Service Mobile client you can set up a Sync Filter to do that.
Open Woodford=>Customer Asset and click on Sync Filter. Than set it up like this:
After saving the filter don’t forget to set the Incremental Linked SyncFilter (on top of the field list) to Enable:
If you try to copy the OOB Bookable Resource form you might experience that some client side scripting doesn’t seem to be applied to your copied form anymore. Even when you haven’t done ANY other customizations except of copying it.
In this case the Facility/Equipment lookup isn’t hidden anymore when choosing the Resource Type Contact. On the uncustomized form this would have been hidden.
Strange as this usually doesn’t happen, right? If you have JS references you should have copied these references as well to your new form, right?
So when you dig deeper you’re finding that there now are business rules activated for the Bookable Resource form. I think this is rather new that MS delivers Business Rules out of the box. Fine for non-coders!!
The problem seems to be that the Business Rules here are set to scope “Information” which is only the one original OOB form, so your copy of it doesn’t inherit these Business Rules.
Another fascinating thing is that when you go into the Default Solution via old Solution explorer, you’ll see three business rules (above). When using Level Up (Browser Plugin), you’ll find 6 Business Rules taking effect here:
So you would need to go to the new maker experience to find / customize all 6 of them:
Next obstacle is: you can’t just change the scope of these Business Rules (I wouldn’t even know if this would be supported or not) as at least one of them has the Managed Property “Customizable” set to Flase:
Note: trying to customize from Business Rule “Show Enabled for Field Service Mobile field if Resource Type is User]” from within the new maker experience caused for me a state of no return, at least from make.powerapps.com: the BR got Deactivated and I could neither change it nor reactivate it anymore [improve@MS]. A resolution has luckily been to reactivate it from the old solution explorer (upper screenshot).
So what are you going to do to get the same behavior as on your OOB form also for your custom Resource form?
You need to copy the Business Rules delivered by Microsoft, than edit the Scope to your custom Form and activate the copies. In the end you would have it like this:
Now I’m going to show you how these can be leveraged when using Work Orders.
Configure the Incident Type
create a Requirement Group Template as explained in above mentioned article
create a new Incident Type: Field Service=>Settings=>Incident Types=>”+ New”
Give the new Incident Type a name (my recommendation: provide a hint in the name that helps you later on to remember that this Incident Type is based on a Requirement Group):
4. On the Incident Type form, go to Related=>Requirement Groups 5. create a new Incident Type Requirement Group:
6. associate the formerly created Requirement Group Template to it via the lookup field 7. provide a name to the record and save it.
So you should finally get something like this:
Test it with a Work Order
Now its up to you to test the whole setup. For doing this you just need to create a new Work Order and fill in our new Incident Type into the field Primary Incident Type on the Work Order form:
Note: With a standard Field Service setup you necessarily need to provide the group based Incident Type in the field Primary Incident Type BEFORE you save the Work Order the first time. Otherwise you’ll get an error saying “You can’t add an incident that is related to a requirement group template to a work order if there is already a requirement related to this work order.”
Than you can check if your Requirements have correctly been associated with the Work Order. For doing so you need to go to: Related=>Requirements=> change the View to “Unsubmitted“:
Customized Work Order form and Requirements view
Customization recommendation (especially if you more often have group based Requirements): create your own Resource Requirement view for the Work Order form.
And now the big moment comes: hit the Book button on top of the Work Order form:
You should now get search results according to the available Resources, the distance to the Service Location and the other parameters like Work Location, Organizational Unit, Resource Type and so forth:
Note: if you are going to use the same or a similar combination of Resources more often, it makes sense to create Requirement Group Templates whereas if you need a certain combination of Resources/Skills only one time it would theoretically be enough to create a Requirement Group without a Template. However it seems like if go down that road, you will not be able to associate your Requirement Group to a Work Order anymore later on. At least I couldn’t find a way to do that. That means that if you want your Users to be able to click the Book button on a Work Order and have the fancy algorithm execute its sophisticated multi-resource query, you will always need to create an Incident Type for it first and associate a Requirement Group Template to it.
What you can do is going back from a created Work Order that has a Requirement Group associated via =>Resource Requirement=>Requirement Group (or simply from the Field Service menu: Requirement Groups) and there editing the instance of the Requirement Group that is responsible for your Work Order. This method allows you to create a kind of a standard Incident Type Requirement Group and Template which you always use for creating a new Work Order when you want to leverage the Group functionality.
Cascading & sync of attributes within the Requirement Group
a) Cascading attribute changes from Work Order to Requirements
(as of Sept. 2019)
gets initially populated and auto-updated for the Resource Requirement with flag “Is Primary“ only:
Time From Promised/Time To Promised
Time Window Start/Time Window End
Service Territory (remove)
gets initially populated and auto-updated for all associated Resource Requirements:
Duration
Date Window Start/Date Window Start End (into fields From Date / To Date )
Latitude/Longitude
Work Location
Service Territory (Create, Change)
b) Attributes kept in sync between Resource Requirements
Duration, From/To Date, <long/Lat, Work Location are always kept in sync within the Requirement Group, even when changed on a non-primary Requirement.
Service Territory however is only kept in sync, when it was changed from the Work Order AND the change was not a removal of the field content. So you can open the non-primary Requirements and assign different Territories to each.
As an example you might end up having Requirements like this in the end:
– Time Promised From/To and Time Window Start/End is only populated to the primary Requirement – Territory has been removed from the Work Order after initial creation: this removal is cascading only to the primary Requirement (whereas an UPDATE/CREATE of the Territory would have been cascaded to all Requirements)
When asking yourself why is there a difference of cascading between Time Promised/Time Window vs. Date Window you can come to the assumption that it has to do with the Requirement Group functionality. If we check the UI (screen below) we can easily see that there are only the From Date / To Date fields (which are the counterparts to Date Window From /To from the Work Order). So Microsoft only takes care for a synchronization of these fields within a Requirement Group but not for the other Date/Time fields.
I was asking myself how can you have differing values in the Time Promised fields for Requirements of the same Requirement Group? As soon as you are scheduling or re-scheduling them, all of the Bookings based on these Requirements get moved simultaneously. However it could make sense if you have a scenario where a team gets a Booking for a longer period of time (i.e. traveling on site together) but the actual “ToDo” of a Resource would only be for a shorter time frame and you want to keep this information somewhere. If you are going to use it this way you should surely not create a hard booking restriction – for example with a Real Time Workflow – which forces you to not book outside of time promised from/to.
Also note that a Time From/To Promised on one of the non-primary Requirements will be ignored completely by the Schedule Assistant. However a Time From/To Promised on the Primary Requirement is a hard selection criteria for the Schedule Assistant, even if it doesn’t show these fields in the Filter panel, when scheduling a Requirement Group [improve@MS].
Non-matching members of a Crew that are going to be occupied as well by booking a Requirement Group are shown in Schedule Assistant in a separate grouping titled “Non matching”:
This provides a great overview of those capacity laying idle when scheduling the proposed booking.
Let’s assume you have this setup of a Requirement Group Template:
Because in the Schedule Assistant default value for Sort result by is always Fewest Resources First, you should maybe keep time between Search Start and Search End rather small.
Because only than you are able to see all possible combinations on one screen.
See here that even when Results per Interval was set to 7, in your result list you first get 4 results for an intervall and than only further down in the list you will get the remaining 3 results for the same interval.
This could especially be helpful if you prefer to send 3 Juniors instead of 2 Seniors to a job.
After we have taken a look into Resource Crews let’s now explore what Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement can offer with Requirement Groups.
create three Resources, each with differing skills: Go to Field Service=>Resources=>”+ New” and create a) One User with Skills: Flow, Hololens Know How. b) One Contact with Skill: Data Integration c) One Equipment with Skill: Hydraulic Lift
2. create a Requirement Group Template. Go to Field Service=>Resources=>Requirement Group Templates=>”+ New” a) provide a Name, save b) click into the first row from the subgrid and click “+ Requirement“ c) now add three requirements for getting back proposals for a team of three people and add corresponding skills d) at the Truck Resource click on Open Form to determine which Resource Type (Equipment in this case) you are expecting
Difference between Requirement Group and Requirement Group Template
A bit confusing is, that as soon as you open a Requirement Group Template form, the menu on the left jumps back as if you would have opened a Requirement Group instead of a Requirement Group Template. [improve@MS] Reason: technically Requirement Group and Requirement Group Template are the same entity msdyn_requirementgroup where only the records are differentiated by a flag called “Is Template”.
The title of the new-form “New Template: …” gives you the indicator that you’re creating a new template. But if you’re going to edit an existing Requirement Group Template you feel like editing a Requirement Group instead. I would therefore recommend to make the flag “Is Template” visible but read-only on the form.
If you pay close attention you recognize another difference: the lookup field Requirement Group Template is only visible on the Requirement Group form:
The field Requirement Group Template is read only for saved records.
That brings us to the interoperability of the two: if you create a new Requirement Group the above mentioned field gets unlocked so you can choose a Requirement Group Template to start from.
Book a Requirement Group
If done with editing the requirements you can click the Book button directly from the Requirement Group ribbon:
This will open the Schedule Assistant with a list of appropriate Resource combinations. In our example the three Resources we have configured in step 1:
On the result list you than can
open each result row’s group to see its members
see which of the Requirements are going to be fulfilled by which of the found resources (last column)
adjust filter criteria and repeat search execution
book one of the groups by clicking on it => Book & Exit on the right flyout
If you’re not getting any results you should
probably need to adjust your search criteria
check if you have appropriate Resources in the system at all
check whether your Requirements do have a Service Territory associated but your Resources haven’t
Requirement Group in Schedule Board
If you now open the Schedule Board you could find something like this (too many Resources to have an easy overview):
Hovering over the booking panel (screenshot above) tells you that you have a Grouped Booking. So maybe you want to do a right click at the booking and choose Split View:
Shows you all bookings from this group (only those Resources which are on the same page of results, so you might want to increase the number of Resources per Page in Schedule Board tab settings and/or adjust your Resource filter to see all group members).
If you now drag and drop one of the bookings to a different starting time, all other bookings of this group will be shifted automatically too. Cool! That is what our customer wants! However compared to the same procedure with a Resource Crew you don’t see the shifting immediately happening on the board, instead you need to hit the refresh-button at the top of the Schedule Board tab once to see your bookings being shifted [improve@MS].
In Dynamics 365 Field Service you are able to create these types of Resources:
User
Contact
Account
Equipment
Crew
Facility
Pool
Resource Type: Equipment
Facility Equipment lookup appears and becomes mandatory after this Resource Type has been chosen.
Organizational Unit lookup becomes read only after this Resource Type has been chosen . Gets pulled from ‘Facility/Equipment’.’Organizational Unit’ or, if this is empty, than from ‘Project Parameters’.’Default Organizational Unit’.
Enabled for Field Service Mobile two option set disappears
in previous versions it was called Company Asset
makes sense to be used in a Resource Crew
for example: Truck, Excavator, Beamer, Hololens
Start Location & End Location cannot be set to Resource Address
Resource Type: Crew
Also see here for further details on how to set up a Crew.
Customizations
After I have created a copy of an existing form I faced issues that some of the scripting provided by Microsoft didn’t work anymore. As long as I don’t get further insights into this I would recommend to be careful when taking this road. Better maybe to customize the existing form instead of creating a copy of it for customizations. This, by the way, is also a way that has proved to be more stable when it comes to upgrading your org with latest MS solution versions. We faced lots of scripting errors on forms that we previously have copied. It turned out that MS replaced the JS libraries for the original forms but not for your form copies during the last larger upgrade cycle.
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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Stuff – lots of Field Service
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