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Configure support for single and multiple channel providers

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With Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework 2.0, organizations can configure single and multiple channel providers (first-party chat and third-party telephony providers) in the Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service app. This enables agents to simultaneously work on multiple sessions catering to different customers on different channels where each of these sessions belongs to a different provider. Agents can switch across these sessions as needed. Omnichannel for Customer Service brings one provisioned channel provider configuration, however, you can add other channel provider records and configure them.

Considerations

Here are a few things to note when you create or start sessions when you have multiple channel providers in your organization:

  • Sessions that are started by using Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework 2.0 APIs are associated with the channel provider. Providers are notified about events for the session started by them.

  • Providers can open new tabs only in the sessions they have started.

  • Providers can't programmatically switch sessions or close sessions.

  • Agents can manually switch and close sessions. As a best practice, we recommended that sessions are started after taking agent consent using a toast notification.

  • If a provider session is not in focus, and there's a new event in that session such as a new unread message from a customer, then you can use the requestFocusSession API to show the agent that the session that's not in focus requires attention.

Start a home (default) session when your organization uses a single channel provider

If your organization uses a single channel provider, then you can use the setMode method to start a home session.

Call the Microsoft.CIFramework.setMode(1) method from your provider code to make the communication panel visible. You can add the method at the end of your initialization code, so that the widget is visible right from the time the channel provider is loaded.

You can also listen for the onSessionClosed event to show the communication widget when the last session is closed. This way you can make sure that the communication widget is visible all the time whether a session is open or not.

Start a home (default) session when your organization uses multiple channel providers

When you have multiple channel providers in your organization, the communication widget won't be visible in the home session, as the home session isn't associated with any specific channel provider. Also, the setMode method isn't supported in the home page. So, you must create a default session to show a dialer experience in the widget, conversation dashboards in application tab, and so on.

To create a default session, do the following:

  1. Use the createSession method to create a session with relevant application tabs and load them together with the widget.
  2. Use the Microsoft.CIFramework.setMode(1) method in your provider code, at the end of the initialization section. This ensures that the widget is visible right from the time the channel provider is loaded.

See also

What's new in Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework
Configure channel providers in Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework 1.0
Bring your own custom messaging channel