What's new in Unified Service Desk

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Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2013, Dynamics CRM 2015, Dynamics CRM 2016

This topic contains information about changes in Unified Service Desk for system customizers and developers. For information about new features in Unified Service Desk for administrators, see TechNet: What’s New in Unified Service Desk for administrators.

In This Topic

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.2.1

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.2

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.1

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.0.1

What’s new in Unified Service Desk 2.0

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.2.1

System customizers and developers will be able to leverage the following enhancements in this release.

Enhanced exception handling for custom hosted controls

Introducing SafeDispatcher that provides a powerful and informative exception handling mechanism for custom hosted controls in Unified Service Desk by providing out-of-box logging for unhandled exceptions with detailed information about the source and cause of the exception. This also prevents Unified Service Desk client from freezing or becoming unresponsive as the unhandled exceptions in custom hosted control code is appropriately handled by Unified Service Desk, and ensures that you can continue working on other areas in Unified Service Desk client. More information: Use SafeDispatcher for custom hosted controls in Unified Service Desk

Enhanced diagnostic logging for custom hosted controls

Introducing LogException Method that enables you to log rich diagnostic information for exceptions occurring in your custom hosted control, which makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot issues. More information: Configure enhanced diagnostic logging for custom hosted controls

Keyboard shortcuts for panels

Unified Service Desk now provides a single keyboard shortcut to traverse through all active panels in a recurrent manner. Further, you can also define keyboard shortcuts for individual panels in your panel layout so that customer service agents can directly navigate to a panel in the client application using the keyboard. More information: Keyboard shortcuts for panels

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.2

System customizers and developers will be able to leverage the following enhancements in this release.

Display notifications to your agents in Unified Service Desk

Configure and display notifications to your customer service agents in the Unified Service Desk client to alert them about an action that they should perform or to guide them in their customer interaction process. The notification content is defined using a Unified Service Desk Form instance where you use XAML to define the notification content, and then use an instance of the new hosted control type called Popup Notification to define when and where to show and hide the notification.

More information: Configure notifications in Unified Service Desk

Use the enhanced Debugger capabilities for better debugging and troubleshooting

The Debugger hosted control in Unified Service Desk has been enhanced to support the following capabilities for developers and customizers:

  • Copy data in the Action Calls tab of the Debugger control to the clipboard so that you can easily review the data by pasting it in another application (say Microsoft Word or Notepad) or share it with others using email for troubleshooting.

  • Refresh the Unified Service Desk client to use the latest configuration changes on the server without having to restart it.

More information: Action Calls tab

Customize the login and splash screen for custom branding

Developers and customizers can now modify the application name on the login screen and change the font, style, and color scheme of all the elements on the splash screen to change the branding to align with your corporate branding guidelines.

More information: Customize login and splash screens in Unified Service Desk

Accessibility: Support for high-contrast mode in the Unified Service Desk client

The Air theme in the Unified Service Desk client now automatically switches to the high contrast mode when you switch to the high-contrast mode in Windows on your computer to support visually challenged users with better visibility of the interface. The remaining two themes, Blue and Style, are deprecated as announced earlier, and do not support the high-contrast mode.

If you are creating custom themes for Unified Service Desk, you must follow certain guidelines to enable support for high-contrast mode in your custom themes. More information: High-contrast mode support for custom themes

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.1

System customizers and developers will be able to leverage the following enhancement in this release.

Integrate the interactive service hub with Unified Service Desk

Use the new Interactive Service Hub Page type of hosted control to host the interactive service hub application within Unified Service Desk. This enables you to provide an integrated customer service experience for your users by combining the capabilities of both applications into a single interface. More information:Interactive Service Hub Page (Hosted Control)

What's new in Unified Service Desk 2.0.1

System customizers and developers will be able to leverage the following enhancement in this release.

Multi-monitor support

Display your hosted controls in Unified Service Desk on multiple-monitors to increase your screen real estate, and have ready access to your customers and their case information. This helps customer service reps interact effectively with customers by simultaneously viewing related information for a customer on multiple monitors rather than having to switch tabs in Unified Service Desk on a single monitor. The multi-monitor feature in Unified Service Desk supports displaying hosted controls on up to two monitors.

Use the new RealignWindow action on a hosted control in Unified Service Desk to specify the location on a monitor where a hosted control should be displayed. The new RealignWindow action applies only for hosted control instances that are configured to be placed on a USDFloatingPanel or USDFloatingToolPanel panel type. Also, this new action is available for all predefined hosted control types except Connection Manager (Hosted Control) and CCA Hosted Application (Hosted Control). For information about predefined hosted control types, see Hosted control types and action/event reference.

What’s new in Unified Service Desk 2.0

System customizers and developers will be able to leverage the following enhancements and new capabilities in this release:

  • Custom listeners for auditing, diagnostics, and traces

  • Easily deploy and update custom components

  • Entity search as a service

  • Invoke Unified Service Desk and custom APIs from your hosted webpage's JavaScript code

  • Suppress script errors

  • Use native CRM knowledge base

  • OAuth support

  • HAT Software Factory support for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015

  • Enhanced browser control for improved stability and performance of hosted web pages

Custom listeners for auditing, diagnostics, and traces

Use the auditing and diagnostic settings area in Unified Service Desk (Settings > Unified Service Desk > Audit & Diagnostics Settings) to specify custom listeners for writing the auditing (activity tracking), diagnostics, and trace logs to a custom location. To specify the custom trace source, use the new Listener Hosted Control that contains a reference to your custom code for implementing the custom listener, and then add the hosted control instance to the Audit & Diagnostic Settings record. More information:Create custom listeners for auditing, diagnostics and traces

Easily deploy and update custom components

Developers can extend the core functionality offered by Unified Service Desk by creating custom hosted controls and functionality as per their business requirement. However, until now, deploying custom components involved copying the files required for the custom functionality on each client computer either manually or through some other automated way, such as a custom MSI package installer.

Unified Service Desk now provides out-of-box support for easily deploying and updating custom components. Use the new Customization Files entity to upload your custom files to the CRM server as a compressed (.zip) file. The .zip file contains files required for the custom functionality along with a [Content_Types].xml file that provides MIME type information of the file type extensions that are included in the .zip file. The Customization Files record can then be attached to a Configuration record in Unified Service Desk so that when any user who is part of the configuration record uses Unified Service Desk client to connect to CRM, the .zip file attached to the Customization Files record is automatically downloaded and contents are unpacked on the client user’s computers to render the custom functionality in their client application. This eliminates the need for administrators to have to manually copy the custom files to the client computers.

When there is an update to the custom components, developers provide the latest .zip file with the updated custom component files to the administrator. The administrator replaces the .zip file in the Customization Files entity record on the CRM server, and updates the client caching number to push the update to all the clients. More information:TechNet: Push an update to clients

More information:Prepare for distribution of your sample code and TechNet: Distribute custom hosted controls using Customization Files

Entity search as a service

Developers can now reuse the existing entity search definitions in their custom controls. This enables administrators and customizers to update the FetchXML query in an entity search record without having to change the custom control code, recompile, and redistribute it on the client computers. Use the new EntitySearchService.GetEntitySearchResults method to reuse an existing entity search record from your custom control. More information:Reuse Entity Search definition in your custom code

Invoke Unified Service Desk and custom APIs from your hosted webpage's JavaScript code

Use the new WpfBrowser.UsdObjectForScripting property to enable communication between the public classes and methods of Unified Service Desk or your custom code and JavaScript in the webpage hosted in Unified Service Desk. The object specified for the WpfBrowser.UsdObjectForScripting property becomes available to the hosted webpage script as the window.external object, which is a built-in DOM object provided for host access. More information:WpfBrowser.UsdObjectForScripting

Suppress script errors

Use the new ShowScriptErrors option to specify whether to display or suppress script errors in webpages displayed in Unified Service Desk. More information:TechNet: Manage Options for Unified Service Desk

Use native CRM knowledge base

Microsoft Dynamics CRM now provides powerful knowledge management capabilities natively. You can now use the updated KM Control hosted control in Unified Service Desk to configure a knowledge base article search pane in your agent application that lets you search for and use relevant knowledge stored in either Dynamics 365 or Parature. More information:Use Dynamics 365 or Parature knowledge for effective customer engagement

OAuth support

With the underlying XRM tooling APIs now supporting OAuth authentication, Unified Service Desk clients can use the OAuth protocol to connect to a CRM Online, Internet-facing deployment (IFD), or OAuth-enabled on-premises instance. More information:TechNet: Connect to a CRM instance using the Unified Service Desk client

For information about OAuth support in XRM tooling, see Build Windows client applications using the XRM tools.

HAT Software Factory support for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015

The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) Software Factory now supports Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015, in addition to Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012. More information:UII Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT)

Enhanced browser control for improved stability and performance of hosted web pages

The IE Process browser control has been redeveloped to facilitate better memory management and improved stability and performance of webpages hosted in Unified Service Desk. A new monitoring process service, Unified Service Desk Monitoring Process (usdmp.exe), is also introduced to monitor the health of Unified Service Desk, and terminate any browser process instances that are unresponsive and that cause Unified Service Desk to freeze or stop responding. If a browser process instance isn’t responding, but Unified Service Desk is responsive, the browser process instance won’t be terminated. More information:Select a hosting method for your controls

See Also

TechNet: What’s New in Unified Service Desk for administrators
What’s New in CRM for developers

Unified Service Desk 2.0

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