How Microsoft Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365 CRM Work Together to Improve Service Responsiveness
An upset customer calls. My system is down! This feature doesn’t work! While many issues are open and closed cases (or are the result of user error), there may be bugs that need to be addressed by the development team. Having a centralized place for your customer information is just one CRM function. Your CRM can also reduce inefficiencies in application support and management, especially when effectively connected to other systems. Integrating applications such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM with Azure DevOps services amplifies case management capabilities for your development and support teams to escalate support cases and create work items to get problems resolved faster.
Outside of tech support’s ability to keep their cool when faced with high-stress situations, they must also act quickly. The more complicated the process and more systems involved, the longer it takes to get the ticket assigned to the right person or team. To help meet troubleshooting service goals, you need an open flow of communication right back to the source — the software development team.
Azure DevOps covers every step in the application lifecycle from planning, collaborating and testing, deployment, and beyond. If your business develops and/or hosts web or mobile apps, Azure DevOps services, integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM, can provide the full visibility across projects that your software development and tech support teams need.
Azure DevOps Services
that provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) pipelines enable your software development teams to get a constant flow of updates — new features, configurations, bug fixes — into production and delivered to your customers quickly and safely.
Microsoft Azure DevOps services allow you to build, test, deploy and manage applications and services. Your software development teams can use all these DevOps services together, or mix and match to use only what you need as part of your existing workflows.
- Azure Boards: Agile tools, Kanban boards, , built-in scrum boards and more — Azure Boards is where your team will plan, track and discuss projects at every stage in the lifecycle. Backlog tracking and powerful analytics give insight into project status. With visualizations and tracking tools, your team can easily track any code changes that are linked directly to work items.
- Azure Pipelines: comprise the whole end-to-end story of how you write code and get it into production. An integrated set of features allow you to automatically build and test your web, desktop and mobile applications and deploy to any cloud or on-premises. It works with just about any language or project type including Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android and iOS apps, as well as support for YAML so you can have pipelines versioned with your code.
- Azure Test Plans: A browser-based test management solution, Azure Test Plans provides all the capabilities to test with confidence before deployment. This includes planned manual testing, user acceptance testing, exploratory testing, and gathering feedback from stakeholders. You can test across desktop and web apps, as well as capture data as tests are executed.
- Azure Artifacts: Package management with Azure Artifacts simplifies complex build jobs and allows your teams to create and share Maven, npm, NuGet, and Python package feeds. Artifacts provide a place to push your packages so that they can be consumed by the rest of the team or partners. Sources can be public and private.
- Azure Repos: This is where your source control is stored that gets published to the artifacts. Unlimited, cloud-hosted Git repos allow developers to collaborate on code.
Before deploying for your software development teams, it is wise to pre-plan how you will support and operate services in the cloud. To learn more about some of the key questions to ask before moving forward,
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Article by: Dave Bollard – Chief Marketing Officer
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