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24 April 2023
By: Joost van Lagen

Personalizing Dynamics 365 with Side Panes and Recommendations

Personalizing Dynamics 365 with Side Panes and Recommendations

In the modern business world, organizations often face complex processes that can be difficult to manage and streamline. One such challenge is providing personalized and relevant content to employees. Our solution in Dynamics 365 addresses this with the use of side panes and recommendations. This combination allows organizations to simplify the process of providing employees with the information they need, while also increasing relevance, satisfaction and improving the UX. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of combining recommendation functions with side panes in Dynamics 365 and how it can simplify complex processes for organizations.

 

What are Recommendation Functions?

Recommendations functions are a standardized options within a business rule. But these aren’t scalable and require maintenance every time something is edited. Our solution is a custom entity that matches recommendations based on the field name! This makes this function scalable for all the fields on the form.

What are Side panes in Dynamics 365?

Side panes in Dynamics 365 are custom-designed interfaces that can be used to display relevant information and content. Side panes are typically used to provide employees easy access to records, information about products or services, and other relevant content. Side panes can be customized to meet the specific needs of an organization and can be integrated into a variety of different applications, entities and views.

 

What makes the combination of Side panes and recommendation so strong in Dynamics 365?

By combining recommendation functions and side panes in Dynamics 365, organizations can provide their employees with personalized, relevant content in real-time and on request. The visual solution as shown below will give more information about a subject when clicking on the lightbulb icon. Instead of showing it directly on the form. This has the added UX-benefit of not cluttering information, while still allowing less experienced employees to access more information through the form. More intelligent forms can be created with suggestions and recommendations.

  1. In the first place, we added webresources to the form to display the explanations for the employees.
  2. In our solution we used the recommendation function to trigger opening the side pane.
  3. The side panes consist of a custom entity with a form that displays the explanation.

A real-world example is when an accountancy firm uses recommendations functions along with side panes to provide employees with relevant information per question and guide new employees through the process to get up to speed faster.

Another example of how the combination of side panes and recommendation functions can be used is in the field of e-commerce. By using side panes to display additional product recommendations based on a earlier requests or purchase behaviour, companies can increase the likelihood of customers making additional purchases. The recommendation functions can also suggest related products that the customer may be interested in.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the use of recommendation functions in combination with side panes in Dynamics 365 can greatly improve the customer experience and help organizations achieve their business goals. By providing employees with personalized and relevant content, organizations can increase employee engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates. If you are looking to improve your customer experience and drive business success, consider incorporating recommendation functions and side panes into your Dynamics 365 implementation.