Installing Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 (Trial) – Part I

In order to be able to access Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, it’s necessary to install the Omnichannel Hub solution. There are several prerequisite items that are necessary in order to do this, with several steps.

The requirements for Omnichannel Hub are as follows:

1. The Customer Service Hub needs to be installed on the environment within the tenant
2. There needs to be a PowerBI License assigned to the user/s
3. Data Access Consent needs to be accepted
4. The Omnichannel Hub needs to be installed

Let’s go through the above steps. Due to the length of this, I’m going to be splitting this into two parts. This guide will cover getting Omnichannel up and running in a Trial environment – I’ll be doing a separate entry on getting it in a Paid For environment.

Customer Service Hub

This is actually quite simple. When setting up your trial at https://trials.dynamics.com/ (using the link to set up the trial for development purposes, of course)

You need to select the option below on the scenario screen (you can of course select the ‘All of these’ option as well!)

If creating the environment from admin.powerplatform.com, ensure that you select the option to create a database for the environment, ensure that you select the option to deploy Dynamics 365 apps, and then select the ‘Customer Service’ option (you can select others as well – it won’t affect Omnichannel)

Once it’s installed, you can check that it’s there by going to your Apps within the Dynamics 365 environment, and you should see the Customer Service Hub option there, both on the app menu on the left, as well as on the main screen

PowerBI License

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 requires a PowerBI license assigned to users. They may have this already as part of their assigned license/s. Sometimes the system doesn’t always pick this up – if this happens, it’s possible to get and assign PowerBI Free licenses for users through the Office Admin portal (under Billing/Purchase Services):

When going through the check-out process, you’ll be prompted for a credit card. Thankfully it’s possible to bypass this by selecting the option to invoice, rather then use a credit card (it’s a free license anyhow, so just go through the process and finish). Once the licenses are in the admin centre, assign them to the users who’ll be using Omnichannel.

Data Access Consent

In order to allow Omnichannel for Customer Service to read and write data on behalf of users, Data Access Consent needs to be granted. This has to be performed by a Global Tenant Admin, who needs to use the following link – https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2070932.

Once they access the link, they’ll need to sign in, and they’ll be presented with the following acceptance screen (note how many things are being accessed!):

They should select the ‘Consent’ box, and then click Accept

In the second part of this series (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-ii/ ), I go into the details of how to actually install the Omnichannel Hub!