Managing tasks, scheduling meetings, and monitoring your employees’ schedules can be really tricky at times. You may wonder what can go wrong with these activities if you have a CRM like Dynamics 365 in place. Although Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Calendar offers useful features to improve team collaboration and task management, it still has a few limitations.
Especially for IT companies where you have to manage every team member and ensure their productivity, Dynamics 365’s existing features can become a problem.
What you need is a single plugin that makes internal and external collaborations seamless. Thanks to Calendar 365, a Dynamic 365 plugin that offers:
- Activity progress monitoring
- Collision-free appointment scheduling
- Managing resource schedules
- Task assignment
- Easy data visualization
- Event booking
Simply put, if you want to encourage seamless collaboration of teams and clients, Calendar 365 is for you.
Let’s explore some of the core regions where this advanced Dynamics 365 Calendar can help you better manage your IT company, regardless of its size.
What is Dynamics 365 Calendar?
Calendar 365 is an online appointment scheduling tool that integrates seamlessly with Dynamics CRM. The plugin allows CRM users to easily book meetings, track project progress, monitor daily, weekly, and monthly schedules, and more.
Put simply, it’s an all-inclusive calendar that syncs with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM to make scheduling a breeze for businesses. Integrating this single plugin eliminates the need for other third-party extensions or standalone apps for scheduling, visualizing data, or managing different activities!
What Can You Do with Dynamics 365 Calendar?
Resource Scheduling
IT companies usually struggle with managing and scheduling resources, which involves several steps. For instance, when scheduling resources, you need to:
- Identify the resources, such as employees, and set them up in the Dynamics CRM.
- Set the calendar specifying working hours or time constraints for these resources.
- Create required activities
- Checking availability and assigning tasks
- Manage conflicts like double meetings, missed out appointments, etc.
Well, the list is long! However, with Calendar 365 for Dynamics, you can easily streamline the resource scheduling tasks. Suppose you want to add working hours and custom services for your Sales team. Now, with Calendar 365, you can set these hours adjacent to the resource’s names and see their availability.
Additionally, you can create custom services, such as 60-minute demo presentations or 15-minute introductory calls. Another Dynamics 365 Calendar feature lets you set resources for an unscheduled appointment or activity. Once the resource is set, the activity will automatically appear in their calendar.
Appointment Management
Dynamics 365 Calendar lets your resources book and manage appointments with clients or other team members. The Dynamics plugin also ensures timely reminders to the concerned parties.
If client satisfaction is your priority, this online appointment scheduling tool is necessary! With Calendar 365, you can also ensure reduced conflicts and appointment overlaps as it provides a two-way sync with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook!
Furthermore, if your IT company offers customer support services, you need an easy and quick appointment scheduling process. Calendar 365 comes in handy here with its features like global events, where resources can set 1:1 meetings with clients or partners.
You can also create follow-up meeting tabs on the Dynamics 365 Calendar if you want to have further discussions on the same matter! Other features of Calendar 365 that make appointment management a breeze include:
- Sharing appointment activity with other team members with a click.
- Setting an all-day event for a selected appointment.
- Setting a recurring appointment on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis.
Team Collaboration
In an IT company, multiple teams collaborate on a single project. For instance, developers, marketers, QA experts, project managers, etc., need to work together to build market software. Collaborating with people from different departments within working hours is daunting, especially when holding meetings or brainstorming sessions.
Therefore, to ensure collaboration and synergy among the teams, Calendar 365 can be a real groundbreaker. Some of the core features that can instantly boost your team’s collaboration include:
- Shareable Calendar: The feature allows sharing calendars with managers and other team members. Such visibility of other’s schedules makes task allocation, scheduling meetings, and collaboration easier. Since everyone knows what the other team member is working on and when they have a meeting, tasks, and appointments can be planned accordingly.
- Group Events: The Dynamics 365 Calendar checks when each member has a mutually available time slot and displays it on the CRM. In simpler words, this feature makes team collaboration seamless.
- Real-time Reminders: People might forget about a meeting or a scheduled appointment. Therefore, Calendar 365 sends real-time pop-ups or notification reminders to team members.
The feature also ensures that team members get email notifications with all the appointment details.
Project Timelines
IT companies need a proper system to help them manage project timelines. Failing to have such a system can result in missing deadlines, messy resource allocations, ignoring prioritizing tasks, and so on.
Using Calendar 365, users can see set project milestones and deadlines. Moreover, for efficient project management, they can see all the activities in different views, such as:
- Day view: all the project activities of the day can be seen in a timeline view.
- Day-span view: Users can see the calendar and project activities from the default day to the required number of days. For example, you can see two-day activities in the day-span calendar view.
- Week view: Users can see the project activities in a week view.
- Month view: all the project activities planned for the month can be viewed together in this view.
Useful Features You Get with Dynamics 365 Calendar Plugin
Save Calendar Settings
This setting allows users to create a custom view of the Dynamics 365 Calendar. After customizing the calendar’s layout, users can use the ‘Save as Template’ option.
Not just one, but you can save multiple calendar views as templates and share them with other team members. Customizing the calendar to save time and organize all the data you need in one place!
Multi-language Support
The Calendar 365 feature is useful when diverse team members work together on one project. Providing multilingual support is important to ensure efficient project activities and task management.
For example, if you are an IT company based in France, French may be the most commonly used language around your workplace. However, for a team member working from Indonesia who understands only English and Malay, using the calendar available only in French can be a hassle.
Color-coding the Calendar
You can also color-code users to see their activities in a specific color. Moreover, once the color code is selected, the calendar will showcase the activities based on the owner’s color!
Furthermore, project activities can be color-coded so that admins or managers can easily identify and see them on the timeline.
Change Activity Status across CRM
Calendar 365 and Dynamics CRM are synced. Therefore, it is possible to change the status of activities in the calendar itself. For instance, if you want to mark a task as completed, you can do it from the calendar, and it will be updated across the CRM, saving you from all the back-and-forth!
In addition, you can also filter the activities based on their status on the calendar. You can choose to see all the opened, completed, or in-progress tasks together!
Enhanced Appointment Allocation
Round Robin Events is one of the best features on the Dynamics 365 Calendar. The feature evenly distributes the meetings among the team members and ensures that each receives an equal share of the workload!
Furthermore, the app ensures client satisfaction. The process follows a round-rotation system where everyone gets a fair opportunity to receive the calls and share the workload.
Summing Up
Dynamics 365 Calendar is an asset for IT companies that want to make their businesses thrive! The plugin has several useful features that make it easier for them to visualize content, plan and manage project timelines, and more. Calendar 365 is a must-have tool for IT firms that want to save time, keep things organized, and enhance their team’s productivity.
This app saves time and all the efforts involved in task allocation, appointment booking, and seamless team collaborations.
Connect with us for more details on how Calendar 365 can help your teams!
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