Getting Started with Unified Service Desk

Roshan Mehta, 07 December 2014

In my previous post, we looked at how to download and install the Unified Service Desk CRM components and the desktop client. The next step on the USD journey is to configure USD inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 to give your agents the best experience while working with the application. In this post, we’ll start by looking at USD out of the box, and then see which components are required to launch USD without any errors.

When you launch USD for the first time, you will be greeted with a screen asking you which CRM deployment you wish to connect to. You can choose to connect to an on-premise, hosted, or online deployment. Make sure you select Display list of available organizations so you can choose a specific CRM organization to connect to. Note that the USD components (i.e. entities and security roles) must be installed on the selected organization for the desktop client to function correctly.

The next screen displays the CRM organizations in your deployment.

Select an organization and then click on Login. The desktop application will read the configuration from the selected CRM organization and display the components on screen accordingly. Notice how we have toolbars, buttons, and tabs all set up for us.

To properly understand how USD works, I am going to delete all of the configuration settings from CRM (under Settings) and then take you through the minimum components that need to be setup. This includes deleting records for the following entities:

•  Action Calls
•  Agent Scripts
•  Entity Searches
•  Events
•  Hosted Controls
•  Options
•  Window Navigation Rules
•  Scriptlets
•  Session Lines
•  Toolbars

Now when we open up the USD desktop client, we’ll see an error.

To fix this, go into Settings -> Hosted Controls and create two Hosted Controls – a Global Manager and a Connection Manager.

Now when we try to launch the USD desktop client, we will see that it loads without any errors. However, because we have no other configuration specified in CRM, the application will display a blank screen using the default panel layout and the default Unified Service Desk logo.

In my next post, we’ll look at how we can change the default logo image to apply our own branding to the Unified Service Desk desktop application.