One of the most useful features in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Workspace (CSW) application is the ability to search knowledge articles that exist within the Dataverse. This allows end-users to query and search through an organization’s knowledge articles directly within the CSW application using the Smart Assist and AI recommendation capabilities.
This is fine if your internal knowledge base is already set-up within your organization’s Dataverse, but what if you want to pull in articles from another source (such as an external-facing website or Knowledge Base) and make them available within CSW? Previously your options were limited, as you would be expected to conduct a data migration of these external articles to get them into Dataverse. This can be a time-consuming (and costly) exercise however.
Fortunately, with integrated search providers in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you can configure third-party sources, such as enterprise websites, which are based on the site map protocol. Articles are then ingested into Dataverse and refreshed on the schedule you specify. This no-code solution is elegant and allows citizen developers and administrators to configure the capability within Customer Service with just a few clicks.
In this blog we will discuss how to configure the integrated search provider capability within Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and how to use the resulting information effectively within the application.
Firstly, if this is your first time working with integrated search providers you will need to enable the Integrated Search API trigger flow. Go to Solutions > Default Solution > Cloud Flows and turn on Integrated Search API trigger flow as shown in the screenshot below.
After the Cloud Flow has been activated, we can get down to business by configuring the integrated search providers within Dynamics 365.
We then need to determine what the URL is for your Sitemap. If you do not know what the URL is, that is no problem. Simply navigate to HTTPS://<YOUR URL>/robots.txt. To get the required site map collection from the robots.txt file, and make sure that the site map link that you select has sitemapindex included, for example: “https://contoso.com/_sitemaps/sitemapindex.xml”.
In the Dynamics 365 Customer Service admin center or Contact Center admin center, under Experiences, select Knowledge.
On the Knowledge page, in the Integrated Search Providers section, select Manage and then select New.
In the Provider info section:
Search provider name: Enter the name of the search provider.
Description: Enter the description of the search provider.
Select Next.
In the Authentication and Testing section, verify and enter the following:
Root URL: Enter the root URL of the search provider website, including the protocol. For example, in https://contoso.com/about, the root URL is: https://contoso.com/.
Site Map URL: This is the Site Map URL we extracted from the robots.txt file earlier in this blog post.
In the Configure Knowledge Article Schema section, either choose manual field mapping or via a JSON schema. In our example we will use field mapping via an HTML file from our Help website. After uploading our HTML file, we will choose which Meta Tags to include in our field mapping.
Once that we have selected the Meta Tags to include in our field mapping, we now need to conduct a field mapping exercise. This is as simple as using the drop-down menus to map the Dynamics Knowledge Article attributes to the Source Property. After populating all the values and clicking the Validate Mapping button, we should see a green bar across the top of the screen indicating that the field mapping was successful.
Next, we need to specify the refresh frequency for our integrated search provider. This specifies how often the provider will check the source for new Knowledge Articles or for updates to existing Knowledge Articles.
After that, our Integrated Search Provider should be ready for us to use. Click the Save and Close button to go back to the main Integrated Search Provider area. We are almost ready to activate our search provider, but before we do that, we should run a trial ingestion first to ensure that the articles are coming over as we expect. Running this test is a good idea as you do not want to dirty up your knowledge article area with potentially incorrect information. To run a trial ingestion, click to select the search provider from the view and click Run Ingestion on the main tool bar.
After clicking Run Ingestion a page will display asking us how many records we would like to import as part of our trial. I recommend only ingesting ten records as part of the test before clicking Run Ingestion to start the process.
The trial ingestion will now run in the background, but to check on the progress we can double-click our Integrated Search Provider from the view and check the Insights tab. This will let us know the status of our trial ingestion and alert us if we had any failures.
Once the articles have been ingested into Dataverse, let us look at the articles and see what was ingested. As you can see from the screenshot below, our KB articles from our external site are now living within Dynamics 365. We can also take advantage of the Agent Copilot assisted AI suggestions when working with a Case, all within Dynamics 365, without having to log into another knowledge source.
The integration of external knowledge articles into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service through Integrated Search Provides can significantly enhance the functionality of the CSW by allowing seamless access to diverse information sources without the need for extensive data migration. This no-code solution empowers administrators to efficiently configure and manage knowledge articles, thereby improving overall user experience and operational efficiency.
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