Organizations with essential frontline employees in the field are facing a unique set of challenges responding to the COVID-19 crisis. With travel restrictions and many technicians working remotely, the challenge is to keep employees safe and healthy while maintaining business-critical functions and continuing to support your customers.

• Getting the help needed: Some frontline employees must continue to work onsite and may require critical information or expertise from those located elsewhere
• Repairing what’s critical: Many companies are working to balance travel restrictions with business continuity including critical repairs, maintenance, or training
• Enabling collaboration: Organizations are seeking solutions to train employees and provide coaching and expertise to employees working onsite or in the field

Keep experts connected from anywhere with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist uses mixed reality to enable frontline workers across industries including healthcare, retail, and manufacturing to work together from different locations—accessing information and experts from anywhere, hands-free on Microsoft HoloLens, Android, or iOS devices, enabling:

• Collaborative maintenance and repairs: Complete critical repairs and maintenance by allowing an onsite worker to share real-time views of a job site or equipment with experts working remotely, helping to solve issues faster and eliminate travel.
• Knowledge sharing: Enable clinicians who are self-isolating to continue to share valuable expertise by directing, coaching, and educating healthcare workers who are onsite.
• Remote inspections and audits: Empower onsite inspectors and auditors to collaborate with remote inspectors to evaluate and document asset quality.

New capabilities expand integration and enable new support scenarios

For the 2020 release wave 1, we’re focused on the following areas:

• Enabling features that support break or fix scenarios, such as video recording or file sharing
• Expanding integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service by allowing richer information to flow into work orders

Share files between collaborators to speed up resolution

Remote collaboration in the field is a unique challenge. Solving an issue often requires providing experts located offsite with visuals, measurements, and views of the tasks at hand. In addition to getting the expert’s help directly, technicians can solve issues faster if they can receive instructions, diagrams, or photos from the collaborator.

In this release, we’re enabling collaborators to share files including instructions, diagrams, photos, and other media with remote workers through text chat as conversation attachments. They also can post call artifacts (files, etc.) to a Dynamics 365 Field Service work order to continue solving the problem and get the right person for the job.

Capture session history through call recordings

For companies working to resolve incidents, it’s important to keep a record of what happened. Oftentimes, these records are kept through paper trails or text-based collateral. Taking advantage of the information captured through video in a Dynamics 365 Remote Assist session will allow operations managers, technicians, and clinicians to refer back to sessions later and create a knowledge base of calls for others.

In this release, we’re enabling employees using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to document their processes and service calls through video recordings between users to keep track of what was done and the next steps to resolve.