This article was originally written by Avanade alum Scott LeFante

When it comes to managing field service technician schedules in Microsoft Dynamics 365, I get asked all the time, “Can I see my team's bookings in a calendar format without having to go to the schedule board?”, which means the manager needs access to a different view of the board.

Why? In most cases, the schedule board is not accessible to technicians and a technician’s manager. The schedule board is primarily reserved for those that will manually schedule or reschedule work orders or other record types. As such, managers have a need to see, at a quick glimpse, the work their technicians are scheduled to on a day, week or month basis.

I'm going to show you an easy way to add this functionality to a view for a manager.

1. Go to the solution you're using to make updates to Components within D365 CE.

2. Find and navigate to the Entity: Bookable Resource Booking. Click on "Controls" for the entity

3. Click "Add Control"

4. Add the Calendar Control. You will also need to set the property for Start Date and Description at a minimum. Below I've shown you how I set mine up.

You can also set the default to the Calendar View if you'd like. If you set this to the default, this is the default for all users. If you use the Bookings View primarily as a tool for managers to see bookings, then setting the default to the calendar view may be useful. You can also make the calendar view the default for tablet or web and leave the other view for phone. It all depends on your company / user preferences and what leads to the best user experience. Mine is set for Read-Only Grid. Go ahead and Publish your customizations.

5. Navigate to a Booking View to see your changes and switch to the Calendar View, using Show As.

Now I can see the bookings in calendar format. By default, the name of the Booking is only the Work Order Number for Work Orders and Project Name / Customer Name for Projects. I've created a workflow to update the Booking Name field for Work Order related bookings.

You can get creative and add similar functionality for a report (SSRS or Microsoft PowerBI, etc.) and embed that into a view/dashboard for a manager. Future-ready field service teams can have a complete vview of their technicians’ schedules so that they can be as efficient as possible and provide a better customer experience.

Learn more about schedule optimization and how to create easy-to-use dashboards for your field service managers.