1E Tachyon – Realtime endpoint management review

As a few people may know, some years back I ran an MSP (Managed Service Provider). In essence, small companies would outsource their IT needs to us, whether it was hardware, networking, software licensing or support. It generally proved to be cost-effective to do this, rather than each company needing a full internal IT support desk.

It was quite exciting, and I built up relationships with various vendors & providers. Attending exhibitions & conferences was always great, especially with the free SWAG that could be collected! Although having moved away from working in the MSP space a while back, I do still keep my eye out, attend some exhibitions, etc. It’s always great to see what new offerings are on the market, especially as I’m able to include suggestions for clients in holistic solution projects.

Which brings me on to 1E…

Let me start off by saying that I haven’t previously come across the Tachyon offering from 1E before, but having now watched a webinar around their v8 release, I’m decently impressed.

Having worked in the IT industry (in a number of different capacities across the years) I know that’s it’s vital for any organisation to understand what’s going on. That’s not being just system or application focused, that’s also including the employees & staff.

Especially in today’s world, where so many different things can be happening, it’s absolutely vital that employees are now considered vital & key to practically all decisions that an organisation can make.

Of course, there are a wide number of challenges that todays ‘work from home’ workforce has, which traditionally were never around. From coping with needing to use home broadband connections, to not having IT support easily available for issues, there are modern challenges that not only need to be faced, but need to be worked on pro-actively.

The Tachyon strapline is that it’s not enough to observe a problem (ie be reactive to it), it’s absolutely key to be able to be pro-active with issues, & try to help before they actually cause problems.

With the monitoring capabilities that Tachyon V8 has, it’s clear to see what a differentiator it’s likely to be in the current marketplace.

Some of the key capabilities are:

  • Being able to send announcements out to the workforce, and tailor these for specific groups
  • Giving employees the ability to interact with announcements, providing feedback & other information needed
  • Monitoring employee wellness, such as identifying if employees are working more hours than they should be, and then checking if everything is alright with them
  • Interfacing with existing ITSM software suites, to ensure that IT has the relevant support systems in place

The aim is really to be the platform to manage the digital employee experience, to enable and empower organisations holistically across everything that they’re doing.

Take rolling out new software, for example:

  • IT can engage with users to get their feedback on the proposed system. With this, they can ensure that hardware will be compatible, as well as identify prospective ‘Early Adopters’ as well as ‘Detractors’
  • Entire campaigns can be constructed to target each group with relevant information
  • Initial rollout phases can be offered to those employees who are most interested in the software. This can then be used to gauge effectiveness, and identify any issues
  • Automated installation options for users, directly managed from within Tachyon 8
  • Satisfaction surveys to get feedback on how the process went, find out any issues or bugs, and work out how satisfied users have been with the overall process

With easy to use management dashboards, information is presented clearly & allows IT the capabilities to drill down into the information gathered.

But the product doesn’t offer just the above. There are many other capabilities, such as monitoring network devices to ensure that they’re working properly, and interacting correctly with the network. There are also options to carry out SAAS monitoring, where existing SAAS systems can be checked to ensure that they’re up and running, and not giving any issues.

All in all, Tachyon V8 looks to be a really amazing product, being able to give organisations the ability to focus on seeing what’s going on, understanding the metrics being gathered, and being able to then move forward to action changes on them

Aaron Ralls on The Oops Factor

Finishing up 2021 by chatting to ‘Chief Technical Penguin’ Aaron Ralls about his love of Cajun-inspired cooking (delicious!), & the importance of setting ourselves up for financial security (not just ‘the moment’).


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Clifton Lenne on The Oops Factor

Talking with Clifton about his love of travel, the importance of community with both technical & non-technical matters, and just how vital it is to understand Digital Transformation. Without the correct mindset for this, it’s going to be difficult to succeed!


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Workaround for sharing Canvas Apps

Don’t you find it absolutely frustrating when there’s a canvas app that you want to get access to, or give other users access to, but can’t see it? It’s REALLY annoying, but it’s sort of the way that Microsoft has designed the platform (at least at this point in time).

See, when a user creates a canvas app, only the creator is able to see & launch it. If other users want to get access to it, the creator needs to share it. This can be done by sharing the app directly with another user, or by sharing it with an AAD Security Group (which is sort of best practise).

Now, of course there’s the Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence solution, which includes a very handy app to assign permissions for canvas apps. After all, if a user is on holiday, sick leave, or has left the company, there needs to be some way of assigning permissions for other users to gain access to it. It’s really helpful, but of course needs the CoE solution installed.

Let’s think of another scenario. What about if we have some canvas apps as part of a solution, that’s deployed through (proper) ALM – such as using Azure DevOps with automated pipelines. Best practise for this is to use service principals (ie non-interactive user logins). This is great, but then the canvas app/s will be owned by this user. So without the use of the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app, we’re sort of stuck, as we can’t gain access to the app.

Or can we…..?

So this is a scenario that I’ve been dealing with recently, and I’ve found a really cool workaround that doesn’t need the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app to be able to handle the situation.

The example below (amusingly, in my opinion) is actually using the Microsoft CoE solution as an example, but this works with any canvas apps that are held within a solution (against, this heavily supports using solutions for ALL development items!).

So, this is what the actual installed apps look like in this environment:

As we can see, there are a lot of them! But what happens if I’m logged in as my regular user? What do I see if I go to the list of apps? Well, I’ll see the following:

Now, as we can see, I’m able to see the model-driven app (as these aren’t hidden at all). But I’m not able to see ANY of the canvas app! So how can I get access to it, or share it with other users?

Well, if I take a look at the solution itself, I can see the following when browsing to the list of apps (I’m really loving the new Solution Explorer layout, I’ll freely admit!):

I can try to play the canvas app (in this case, the ‘Set App Permissions’ app) directly from the solution. But when I try to do this, I’ll get the following error message:

Now, this is of course happening because I’m not the owner of the app, & the app hasn’t been shared with me at all. So really I was expecting this error to happen.

However, if I take a look at the menu options displayed for me, I can see that the ‘Share’ option isn’t greyed out. I wonder what happens if I click it…

Now this is EXCITING! When clicking the ‘Share’ option on the menu, I’m given the regular sharing screen, where I’m able to set app permissions. So it looks like I’m able to do something here. OK – let’s go ahead & try to share the app with my own user:

So I’ve looked up my own user, and then clicked ‘Share’. This is what happens next…

Exciting moment – will this work?

Waiting with bated breath, and then…

It’s worked! The app sharing has been successful with my user.

Note: The example that I’m using here is with my own user account. However it doesn’t need to be – I can select any user account or AAD Security Group, and share accordingly.

Going to my list of apps, I can now see that the app is showing up for me:

Clicking the app to launch it presents me with the permissions dialogue, and having confirmed permissions, then launches it properly:

So this is indeed a way in which it’s possible to share canvas apps with users and/or AAD security groups, even when a user isn’t the owner of the canvas app.

It is important to note that the user carrying this out does need to have one of the following permissions in the environment:

  • System Customiser
  • System Administrator

Without having one of these roles, it’s not going to be possible to carry out the above (mostly because it’s not possible to see solutions & dig down into them).

This is a handy little trick that hopefully will help clear up one of the headaches when trying to share canvas apps! Of course it’s possible to use the Microsoft CoE tool to set app permissions, but if a customer doesn’t have it installed, then this would be another way to approach things.

Have you ever had this issue? How did you go about solving it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below…

Patrick Wright on The Oops Factor

Discovering Patrick’s love of classics (you’ll never guess how he got into it to begin with), what he does for light reading, and what happens when system security might not be kept quite up to scratch.


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Elaiza Benitez on The Oops Factor

Finding out from Elaiza how she decided to start a side-line in veggie gardening at home, the wonderful produce that she’s grown so far, and her vision for expanding on it!. Also covering personal & professional lifestyles, tips & tricks for starting a new position in a different country, and professional development advice.


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Mike Hauck on The Oops Factor

Chatting to Mike about some interesting cars, Batman, & what exactly the word ‘NASA’ means to him. Also covering items such as the joys of printing, data synchronisation, and Mike’s Top Three tips for consultants entering the technology space.


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Daniel Christian on The Oops Factor

Talking to Daniel about WHY his brain is smaller than yours, his path in life to become a technologist, and the underlying reasons behind all of it. Discussing his love of automation, and the seasonal show that he & his family provide not just the neighbourhood, but all local visitors!


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Omnichannel vs Customer Service Workspace

This is a question that I’m being asked on a semi-regular basis at the moment, so I thought it would be helpful to do a writeup around things. It’s definitely not clear from the outset based on existing documentation. However, being able to speak to wonderful people such as Tricia Sinclair has been amazing in being able to figure out the differences between the two applications.

So, where to start. Well, let’s first of all understand the similarities between the two applications.

Firstly, they are both multi-session apps. To put this in context (as mentioned elsewhere previously) – traditionally Dynamics 365 applications have been ‘single session’ applications. This means that users would navigate around, open/close records, create or edit as necessary. If users wanted to have multiple records open, they’d need to have multiple tabs open, or even multiple windows (yes, I still remember the days before browsers had tab functionality!).

What multi-session means in this context is that users are able to open up multiple records, and switch between them in the same tab. Open records pop into the left-hand navigation bar, and users can easily click between them. Not only that – users are also able to open further tabs within the same record pane, to access further information. These stay open whilst users switch to other records, which is really quite helpful!

So for example, a user could open a case record, then open the contact associated to the case, as well as the account related to the case. They could then further open the knowledge base to search for articles, and so on and so forth. All of these stay open.

Both apps are also web applications – they run in a browser, rather than needing to have a specific software application installed for them (unlike Unified Service Desk).

So, where do they actually differ? Well, this was a bit difficult for me to understand in the first instance, though that turned out to be because I had both Customer Service Workspace as well as Omnichannel configured within the same environment! Turns out that this wasn’t the best approach to take to compare the two, & understand their capabilities. Easily fixed though with quickly spinning up a new trial to install one in.

So with knowing how Omnichannel works (after all, I’ve written quite extensively around it), let’s take a look at the Customer Service Workspace app:

Customer Service workspace overview
  1. The session pane lists all the sessions that you are actively working on. Select the tabs to navigate among sessions.
  2. The Home session returns you to the Customer Service Agent Dashboard view.
  3. Each session has a tab in the session panel. Select a tab to navigate to the session you want to work on.
  4. Select a case to open a new session. A single click on a case replaces your view with the case form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to get back to your previous view.
  5. Select the tabs to navigate to your open activities, cases, forms and views.
  6. Select the + icon to expand the menu to view a list of forms, views, and activities. Select the one you want to open in a new tab.
  7. Select the drop-down selector to filter cases in queues you can choose to work on.
  8. Select Shift + mouse click to open a new session for an activity. A single click replaces your view with the activity form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to go back to your previous vie

Now, without Omnichannel installed in the same environment (& obviously licensed for users), it’s not possible to have native Dynamics 365 channels such as Chat, WhatsApp, etc. Conversations will not appear for customer service agents who are using the Customer Service Workspace.

Note: If you DO have Omnichannel installed in the same environment, and users are licensed to use it, then conversations will show up within the Customer Service Workspace app for them. They’ll have notifications pop up on the screen for incoming customer sessions.

That’s not to say that it’s not possible to have channels available within Customer Service Workspace. So how do they actually come in?

Well, as it turns out, channels within Customer Service Workspace need to be third party channels. There are a plethora of 3rd party add-ons for Dynamics 365, that offer different communication capabilities. Some of these do date back a while (to before any native Microsoft capabilities).

For example, there are ISV add-ons for Customer Service that can embed a call dialler into the experience, so that customer service agents can call directly from a record. Or alternatively an add-on such as a 3rd party web chat application, that can then surface these within the Customer Service Workspace. Each of these obviously would need to be purchased, licensed & integrated appropriately with your Dynamics 365 solution as necessary too.

Now both applications also have other similar functionality, such as the Productivity Pane, Agent Scripts, Smart Assist & Knowledge Search. However there can be differences between them. For more information, I’d suggest taking a look at Tricia’s blog article that goes into depth on this.

So to summarise, Omnichannel is for the native Microsoft channels, giving customer service agents the ability to service customers using them. Licensing (currently) is with Customer Service Enterprise, and then either the Digital Chat or Digital Messaging add-on SKU’s.

Customer Service Workspace, on the other hand, allows customer service agents to be able to have a multi-session application for their work, as well as allowing communications through third-party channels. Licensing is as per the different Customer Service SKU’s, with any 3rd party add-on being licensed appropriately.

Hopefully this helps clarify the different between these two, and make them less confusing. If you have any further questions around this, please drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to respond!

Ryan Cunningham on The Oops Factor

Finding out from Ryan how he became a ‘Maker’ in the first place, his professional journey, and how he actually ended up at Microsoft! Also touching on the importance of community


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