Resco Inspections for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Start building your first questionnaire

Whether you deal with sales or field service, inspections and data collection come into play in lots of different scenarios. From staff reviewing a store’s inventory, construction safety supervisors, sales reps gathering customer feedback to agents documenting insurance claims or technicians going through checks of complex machinery.
And if your organization already utilizes Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM you might have considered using it to handle your inspection process.

At Resco, we’ve recently launched Resco Inspections, which can be fully integrated with Dynamics 365/CRM. It enables organizations to create even comprehensive questionnaire forms with entirely customized design and business logic to drive each inspection. It also makes inspections more effective for the field staff, guiding them through questionnaires step-by-step. And allows to analyze collected data immediately.

The easiest way to explore Resco Inspections’ capabilities is to run our free trial with demo data.

However, if you’d like to try Resco Inspections with your Dynamics 365/CRM, today we’ll take a closer look at how you can integrate Inspections with your organization, give your mobile workforce a powerful app to effectively collect data in the field, and start building new questionnaires straightaway.

Prerequisites

To create new Resco Inspections mobile projects and set up new questionnaires from Dynamics 365/CRM you first need to download the App Configurator configurator and integrate it into your system.
If you haven’t used it before, you can find the detailed guide on how to download and import App Configurator into your Dynamics 365/CRM here.

Enable Resco Inspections mobile projects and design your own questionnaires

1. In your Dynamics 365/CRM open the Settings tab and select App Configurator from the Mobile CRM section.

2. Run the new HTML5-based version of the App Configurator configurator.

3. In the Mobile Project section create a new project. Choose “Standard User” for your project type and “Default” for the project template. Name your project and set its Priority value (in case you have multiple mobile projects, the project with the highest priority will be displayed when you synchronize the app). Choose security roles which should be allowed access the project and then click “Save”.

4. Open this new project with a double-click from the App Configurator’s Mobile Project section.

5. What you’ll see is the default Resco mobile project. You can customize it in App Configurator like any other mobile project. The first thing you need to do is to enable the Resco Inspections feature. Navigate to the Inspections section and make sure to check the Enable Inspections checkbox. If you’re unsure whether you have the appropriate license for Resco Inspections please contact [email protected] or click “More info”. If you have a Resco Inspections license, simply hit confirm and save the project.

6. To make the Resco Inspections questionnaires visible in the Resco mobile app, simply add the Questionnaire entity to the Home screen. In App Configurator navigate to the Home section of your mobile project. Select the Questionnaire item from the Available Items list and drag-and-drop it to the Home list (alternatively you can use the double-click or Add button). Save your changes and then publish the mobile project.

7. If the Project validation warning “Cell Field not found:statuscode” appears during the publishing, navigate to the Questionnaire entity in App Configurator, enable the Status Reason field by checking the corresponding checkbox, save the change and publish the mobile project.

8. In order to create your very own Questionnaire template, go back to Dynamics 365. In the top menu navigate to the Settings and select Inspections from the MobileCRM section and then launch the Designer.

9. At the Designer’s home screen you can see your existing questionnaires – all in one place, or sorted into categories (Recent, Drafts, Published, Deactivated). To create a new questionnaire, click the “New Form” button.

10. Give your new questionnaire a name and add a description. Choose from various question types in the Components panel – inspectors can be asked to fill out checkboxes, select from picklists, scan barcodes, take and edit photos, and much more. You can also incorporate custom logic using the Designers “Rules” section. Or tailor the questionnaire’s looks with the “Styles” editor. For our example we have created a simple Ice cream survey with just 2 basic questions. When finished, don’t forget to save the questionnaire.

11. You can see the new questionnaire at the Designer’s home screen, under “All items”, as well as the “Draft” tab. To push it to the app, simply click on the the questionnaire tile and hit the “Publish” button.

12. Now download the Resco Mobile CRM app from your appstore, on the Welcome screen select Internal User and enter your Dynamics 365/CRM login credentials (URL, user name, password) in order to synchronize the mobile app with your Dynamics 365/CRM server.

13. After the synchronization, you will see the mobile project you just created in the app. You can check your newly created Questionnaire template: navigate to the Questionnaires section and tap on the template you’ve created and published in previous steps.
   

These are the initial steps of integrating Resco Inspections functionality with your Dynamics 365/CRM.

For more information and detailed overview of our dedicated Resco Inspections app, stay tuned for the second part of this blog or ask us through Resco Support portal.