Targeting customer centers and empowering customer center agents, Microsoft has come up with the concept – Unified Service Desk aka USD. It provides agents with immediate and unified access to all customer information from within CRM or from external applications. Access to all such information for the agents to have an effective customer interactions, which will result in great customer satisfaction, business impact and profitability.
In this article, I am trying to walk you through the steps to access a USD system, from the very first step of installing USD client to our local system and then deploying USD to CRM server. As a prerequisite, we need to have a running CRM system. For our case, I am using a CRM trial version.
As a first step we will first install USD in our local machine. Download the executable from this site. Click the executable file to start the installation.As any other installations it will look for the prerequisites to be installed and if not already installed it will install them along with this package. In this case we need .NET Framework and Windows Identity Foundation. Mandatory components which gets installed along with this is Unified Service Desk. We will also get an option whether to create a short cut for USD or not its our personal preference whether to select that or not. Select the next option to keep USD up-to date with windows. This will make sure all new patches are getting installed to the machine along with other windows update. Click Next button and our installation starts.
In case, if your machine has already have a previous version of USD, installer will prompt for an upgrade. Choose the option which you want and click next, the system will get the latest version installed to your machine.
Now we are ready with USD installed in our machine. Next step is to get this deployed to our CRM. Extract the files out of package deployer executable to a folder. Ideally once we extract the files deployer package will initiate the installation process by default. If it didn’t start by its own, we can start it manually by navigating to the folder where we extracted the files and clicking PackageDeployer.exe file.
Click Continue button to get the next screen where we have to give our CRM credentials to connect to CRM system.
Enter your credentials here and click on Login Button to get connected to the system. Once connected to the system, we will get the option to select which package needs to be installed in our CRM. They are almost self explanatory ones with details on each package.
Select the package which we need to install and click next button to move further. Next screen gives us the details on USD, prerequisites and other information. Click next button here as well to confirm the organization and move to next step. On click of next button installer will locate all related files from our local folder where we extracted the files through the executable. Once all steps are successfully completed, click Next button.
This will take us to a screen where we have to select a folder where the related files and libraries will get extracted. We can give any location here but make sure that the location is noted down as we may need these files to be copied to the location where we have installed USD or in some cases we may have to share these files with other agents using the same CRM system. After giving a location name click on next button to start the package deployment. This will take a while to complete. Behind the scenes this step is importing three solutions to our CRM system along with some of the sample data which will help us get started.
Once the deployment is completed we can navigate to CRM solutions and see that below solutions got imported to our CRM system (For all your reference, I have deployed the USD package with updates).
Now we are ready on both sides, our local machine and CRM. To confirm that, we can launch USD and see whether all are good or not.
Enter your credentials to CRM system here and click on Login button to launch USD system. Once you successfully logged into your system, you should see something as below.
In case in your browser, if you are logged into any other CRM system, you may get an error message that you are not part of that CRM system. What you have to do is sign out using the available link in the application, close the Dashboard tab and relaunch the Dashboard tab using the button available in the tool bar in upper portion of USD application.
What we are seeing not is the default sample agent application which Microsoft gives us with USD installation. In production environment, we may not use this but this is a good reference tool to understand how each of this works. We will discuss them in future articles.
Hope this helped you. Thanks for reading. Appreciate your feedback.
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