As part of the July update there were some great enhancements to the Unified Service Desk (USD) with the focus being on three things: accessibility, reliability, and diagnostics.

In order to align with Microsoft's corporate commitment to accessibility there were two main items added that allow for greater agent productivity for users of all abilities.

• Full keyboard accessibility
  • Navigation through tabs in a streamlined fashion
  • Keyboard shortcuts for different toolbar buttons
  • Shortcuts to control UI
    • Expanding panels
    • Collapsing panels
    • Jumping to specific panel or tab
    • Support for JAWS Screen Reader

In addition to the accessibility enhancements, increased focus was put on reliability, performance, and diagnostics.

•  Reliability
  • Internal WPF Browser - Isolated browser instance to avoid hangs and freezes due to other long running scripts on the pages or due to memory constraints
  • Added USD monitoring process to the WPF mode - which was previously only available in the IE process
  • Added new Safe Dispatcher API that safeguards USD from errors and crashes in your own custom controls (Allows the ability to control what happens when there is an unexpected crash)

• Performance
  • Prefetch CRM Page Data - Allows you to retrieve page data asynch even before the page gets loaded, thus eliminating delay due to waiting for the CRM pages to load
  • Asynchronous data creation - Create Entity action is modified to allow Asynch creation of data. All you have to do is add a new parameter (runasynchronous=true) to the Create Entity Action call. This eliminates freezing of the UI if the save takes longer than expected!

•  Diagnostics
  • Enhanced Debugger
    • Able to edit and run the action calls on the fly
    • Replay the different events in the debugger
    • Manage the actions and events by sorting and filtering them
    • Also added the ability to Add/Edit/Copy Paste Parameters
  • Runtime diagnostics data
    • Added improved crash management capabilities - collect full memory dump on a crash
    • Provided the ability to generate an on-demand memory dump by using a keyboard shortcut
    • Auto restart on crashes to save additional keystrokes by the agents

With all of Microsoft’s enhancements to Unified Service Desk, the reliability of the product should be increased and the amount of time used to debug issues should be reduced, all of which will result in increased performance.

To learn more about Dynamics 365 July Updates, check out our Update Webinar Series On-Demand!

Happy Dynamics 365’ing!

Please note: All content and information is presented on preview versions and not the launched product. Product is subject to changes per Microsoft’s discretion.