6 Advantages of Integrating Calendar With Dynamics 365

Everyone uses calendars in one or the other way to manage their day! Most people like to use a digital calendar, while some are still attached to diary planners. Professionally, calendars are extensively used for scheduling appointments and daily task management. However, employees mostly use calendars for scheduling meetings or receiving calendar invites and less for task management.

The reason behind this is that it is a time-consuming process. Here is an example that explains why it is time-consuming. A company has all the projects listed in a CRM, and employees make tasks within it. Let’s say it takes them 5 minutes to complete one task. If they have 3 tasks per day, it would take 15 mins to create and add tasks in a CRM. Now, if they want to manage the same in a calendar, they have to add all the details on the calendar as well, taking 10 to 15 mins more.

Thus, they have to spend almost half an hour just creating tasks. Once a task is complete, they must update the status at both places. Hence, this refrains users from using calendars for task management.

Here, the issue is that the calendar and CRM are two different tools. But if we integrate the two, we can minimize time and repetitive work. First, let’s understand what a Dynamics 365 calendar plugin is and how it works.

Calendar Plugin for Dynamics 365

The calendar plugin integrates with the Dynamics 365 CRM. Users can schedule meetings and create and manage tasks from the calendar. All the CRM entities can be used while creating a task or scheduling a meeting.

It is a plugin that simplifies daily tasks and time management for Dynamics users. It saves users’ time as they do not have to manage tasks at two different places because the calendar and CRM are integrated. Update in one updates both!

Here are some advantages of this calendar integration:

Easy Management of CRM Tasks

Employees usually work on multiple tasks every day. Now, it is obvious that all tasks are not the same. Some finish in a day, while some take days to wrap up. Managing multiple tasks with distinct deadlines can easily mess up their schedule, especially when you do not have any particular tool to track timings.

From an organization’s point of view, it becomes difficult to keep track of their productivity. Whether your employees have enough work, or are they exhausted? It is important to manage employees’ workload, considering their mental health and your work requirement. Also, workload imbalance can affect employees’ productivity and the overall performance of an organization.

From an employee’s point of view, they lose track of time while working on one task with no proper way to manage time. Other tasks get overdue, building pressure on them. Sometimes, high-priority tasks are left behind. All this affects their performance and productivity.

However, you can overcome all these challenges once you integrate the calendar plugin with your Dynamics 365. 

Here’s how. 

The calendar fetches all the entities from the CRM. Managers can assign tasks to their teams by selecting the projects and adding the concerned person. Users can easily change the task status from the calendar itself. And once they update the status in the calendar, it will also be automatically updated in the CRM records.

So, there are multiple benefits of task management in the calendar:

• Clear visualization of employee’s tasks and productivity
• Improve time and task management for employees
• Save time from creating and updating task status

Improved Team Productivity

Remote working is the new trend. Teams that earlier worked under one roof are now dispersed all over the globe. Working from the comfort of home has helped employees improve stability and performance. But, one major challenge the organization faced was bringing all the project members on one page.

Making everyone work collaboratively is a major challenge. Huge projects have multiple teams working on the same update. When new members were added to the team, they found it difficult to communicate with other members as they had no idea who was working on what. Even the existing team members felt they were unaware of their team’s work and whether they had completed their task.

But these problems can be easily resolved by integrating a calendar with the CRM. So, everyone in the team or organization can share their calendars to see each other’s schedules. They will know what their colleagues are working on and the status of the tasks they are assigned. 

The other advantage of a shareable calendar is when scheduling meetings.  It is a tedious task to schedule a meeting keeping in mind all the attendees’ availability; any error, and it will have to be rescheduled multiple times, or some attendees will miss it. Rather than spending so much time rescheduling meetings, managers can view their team’s schedule and schedule a meeting accordingly.

Using Entities as Per Your Requirement

An organization has different departments, which means different requirements. Your sales team might require different entities than the development team! This means that the calendar must be configured differently based on the type of user, or it would not be helpful. 

The calendar plugin allows you to configure the calendar based on the entities you want. Sales teams can have all the attributes of leads and clients, whereas developers can have entities they require for development, testing, designing, etc. You can also have multiple saved calendars with different entities. Thus, the calendar is flexible and can be molded how users want.

Create and Save Multiple Calendars

For an organization, the purpose of using a calendar is to have clarity in the schedule and to measure productivity. But what if your employees’ schedule also has a schedule of trainees and clients? Managers might have new trainees joining. They would have to plan the day for them. Or there is a client visiting your office. They would design all the activities for them as well. 

Adding all the other tasks apart from their own would mess up their own schedule. Neither they nor the organization would have clarity on performance and task completion. It can give unfair results. So to avoid that, calendar plugins allow users to create multiple calendars and save them.

Your manager can now have one calendar of their own, one for the trainees and one for the clients. Thus, they will know their tasks and look at their performance and task completion list with clear results.

Real-time Reminders

This is the most basic but important feature of a calendar. It is obvious to forget meetings when you are busy with your work. Reaching meetings late or after someone calls is embarrassing for everyone there. 

Thus, it becomes important to send reminders to users before the meeting, so they don’t miss out on any. They can set the reminder time at their convenience to prepare themselves for the meeting and reach on time. You can have email and push notifications to notify users about upcoming meetings. 

Additionally, they have different views for the calendar, making it easy to view all the tasks added to it. You can configure different colors for different tasks for better visualization. Also, when you hover over the date, it shows other details of the tasks. 

Language is Not a Barrier

For an organization having employees from all over the globe, it is important to consider the preferred language of all employees. Not everyone might be comfortable with the language you have to offer.

This inconvenience can restrict them from using the calendar with all its functionalities. There are many features the calendar has to offer, but if the users struggle while using it, it would definitely not simplify their schedule!

So, most calendar plugins support multiple languages. Thus, the users can choose the language of their choice and plan their day freely. Also, it builds a positive image of the company for considering employee convenience.

Wrapping Up

Since employees are a company’s assets, it is important to ensure that their time and tasks are wisely managed. A company’s progress depends on its employees’ productivity. If your employees find it difficult to manage their schedule, it is high time to take action. 

You just have to find a development company that offers a feature full Dynamics 365 calendar plugin. The price varies depending on the number of users. They usually have monthly/yearly plans, which you can subscribe to. You can ask for a demo and see whether it has all the features you want. If it doesn’t, you can ask for customization as well. 

Once you find the plugin that works for you, subscribe to their plan and get it integrated with your CRM. They help with the integration process ensuring all the data is smoothly merged. They also offer support for a few days to help you understand the product better! They usually have free lifetime updates for their subscribers.

The post 6 Advantages of Integrating Calendar With Dynamics 365 appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.