Unified Service Desk Developer Overview

Article
04/24/2015

Unified Service Desk for Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a configurable and extensible framework for quickly building applications for call centers so that agents can get a unified view of the customer data stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and external applications. You can aggregate customer information from different areas in CRM and external applications into an integrated desktop that provides a 360° view of the customer interactions. This gives your customer service agent immediate access to business critical information so they can effectively engage with customers and address queries and issues. More information: TechNet: What makes up Unified Service Desk and TechNet: Call center challenges and how Unified Service Desk can help in the Unified Service Desk Administration Guide.

You can use Unified Service Desk in the following two ways to develop an agent application:

Configure Unified Service Desk entities in CRM: Use Dynamics CRM or CRM for Outlook to configure the Unified Service Desk entities that are created in your CRM instance when you deploy Unified Service Desk. Unified Service Desk provides a highly configurable interface that can be used to dynamically display controls and information based on the context of the active operation, which eventually defines the user interface and functionalities in your agent application. Creating or developing agent applications by configuring the Unified Service Desk entities in CRM doesn’t require you to write code, which reduces the lead time to develop a highly customized agent application per your organization requirements. This is the preferred way if you have to primarily deal with customer data available in CRM.

Target audience: System administrator or system customizer who has experience working with different configurations in CRM, analyzing the results, and improving or changing the configurations in an iterative manner until the desired functionality and user experience is achieved.

To get started with configuring Unified Service Desk, see Core concepts for configuring Unified Service Desk.
Extend Unified Service Desk to integrate with other applications: Unified Service Desk is built using the User Interface Integration (UII) framework, which enables you to build and deploy composite agent applications that can provide unified access to customer information in CRM and external systems. Also, the computer telephony integration (CTI) framework of UII enables organizations to build adapters to connect Unified Service Desk with their existing CTI infrastructure to support customer communication in agent desktops over various channels such as chat, email, or telephone. To integrate with external applications, you’ll have to extend Unified Service Desk by writing code. Unified Service Desk provides you with Microsoft Visual Studio project templates that you can use to create the modules and applications so you can integrate and interact with data in external applications.

Target audience: Software developer who has experience in creating applications/solutions using .NET Framework, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), XAML, and Java.

To get started with extending Unified Service Desk, see Unified Service Desk and the UII framework.

More information: Video Video: Overview of Unified Service Desk (5:00)

Install and deploy Unified Service Desk

Before you start using Unified Service Desk, you must install and deploy it. More information: TechNet: Install and deploy Unified Service Desk in the Unified Service Desk Administration Guide.

Security in Unified Service Desk

Unified Service Desk uses the CRM security model to govern access to the entities and configuration data. Moreover, you can create configurations in Unified Service Desk to group entities, and assign them to users to ensure that they can access only the entities within the assigned configuration. For more information, see Security in Unified Service Desk in the Unified Service Desk Administration Guide.

Important

The administration guide also provides other valuable information about Unified Service Desk such as auditing, caching, and diagnostic logging for troubleshooting. More information: TechNet: Administration Guide for Unified Service Desk for Microsoft Dynamics CRM