Schedule board split view

There are scenarios where you may want to drill into information on the schedule board without needing to load new screens or lose context of where you are:

• Drill into a specific crew and manage the crew on its own.
• Local resource managers may want to focus on a specific pool of resources as they assign bookings at a more granular level.
• A dispatcher may quickly want to see all the resources assigned to a requirement group at once, without losing context of where they are on the board.

All three of these scenarios are covered with the schedule board split view.

Split the schedule board in two. The bottom half can be dedicated to display a crew and all of its members, a pool and its members, or a set of resources that are assigned to work on the same job.

Schedule board with crew in split schedule board

Split schedule board with resources working on same requirement group

Extensible resource availability

As part of the Schedule Assistant search, customers can now decide if they want to override the availability of a resource before the search results are returned. For example, customers with different business closures for different organizational units can query a table that contains organizational units and the days they are closed, subsequently removing resource availability during the hours of business closure.

In-form scheduling

Today we have a compelling capability around searching for and creating bookings with a flexible UI. However, in some cases, the full power of resource scheduling may not be needed for a casual user who is not a dispatcher or resource manager. A customer service representative on the phone with a customer may simply want a list of the top three bookings to choose from, while remaining in the context of their flow, instead of having to pop out a schedule board. In-form scheduling includes a lightweight widget where the user can select from the top options in a simple list or calendar view.

Wireframe of calendar in-form booking control using OWA UI

PowerApps sample app

We are providing an out-of-the-box PowerApps sample app for URS that can interact with the resource availability search API and pass back information to create a booking.

Customers are looking to build all sorts of scheduling apps such as customer self-scheduling apps and “greeter apps.” Offering a URS PowerApps sample app will allow Dynamics 365 CE customers to remain in the Dynamics ecosystem while using URS as their scheduling solution, instead of having to explore other scheduling options. It allows a way to query real-time availability based on all the customers’ requirements and then pass back in the booking information when a booking is created. This sample app is targeted toward our customers who want to schedule resources with an interface outside of Dynamics 365 CE.

Self-service scheduling APIs

Universal Resource Scheduling’s self-service scheduling APIs ultimately allow organizations to embed a scheduling widget on their own web application, enabling their customers to search for availability and book appointments. While we have goals of building the widget itself, the primary focus is to unleash the APIs to our partner and customer ecosystems, allowing them to build their own visuals.

URS customer-driven product enhancements

• Additional extensibility on the schedule board to support a simpler resource request flow for the Project Service application.
• When inserting a booking between two bookings or reassigning a booking to another resource, the travel time of all associated bookings will be recalculated properly.
• Multi-resource scheduling, crew scheduling, and pool scheduling are major new feature sets being introduced. We will address market feedback and scenario completion after these features ship.