Intelligent housing repair software made simple.

This blog post originally appeared as an article in the November 2019 edition of Housing Technology about MS dynamics integration.

Housing Technology Article

© Copyright 2019 The Intelligent Business Company, publisher of Housing Technology magazine.

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Click the image to see the original Dynamics & 3^rd Party integration article.

The Winds of Change

Omfax Systems and Touch-Base have been working together to provide social housing customers with Repairs Diagnostics software for over twenty years. The two companies became one in summer 2019, and the first thing we did was to address a slight change in the market that we’ve been noticing over the past two years.

Keyfax as a Repairs Diagnostic and General Enquiries pop-up has been integrated with all of the major Housing Management Systems, to date over fourteen, including many flavours of online portals for customer self-service. But an increasing number of our customers have been looking at Keyfax integrated with MS Dynamics CRM.

The first two customers who asked about Dynamics integration were working with third party Dynamics consultants who built their integrations using Keyfax Web Services. As part of any integration project we ask for documentation: What is the data that gets passed to launch Keyfax, what gets passed back, and what CRM fields are they mapped back into? We are still waiting for the documentation, and the consultants are long gone.

Why MS Dynamics CRM?

Whether Dynamics is seen as a more ‘standard’ offering than the major Housing Management Systems, or offers cost savings in some areas, is not clear. What is clear is that some customers have plans to migrate their Housing Systems to Dynamics. There seem to be more MS Dynamics suppliers establishing their positions in the Social Housing market too – just try googling ‘Dynamics for social housing’.

So the market seems to be changing; about 9% of our customer base have migrated to Dynamics, or are in the process of migrating. Two of them are recently merged Groups, incorporating several Housing Associations, so a large number of users.

Why not let the Suppliers integrate?

When we work with 3rd party consultants, often we find their approach is to produce a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or even a proof of concept. The MVP rarely harnesses the real power of Keyfax, and the proof of concept is often used as is, without really looking to expand what the integration could do. When technical support calls come in, to resolve an issue between the systems, often the Omfax support team has little to go on, without the requested documentation.

But all this disappears now that we have a standard integration for MS Dynamics that is fully documented. This means that we don’t have to understand and support different integrations from multiple suppliers.

With this new integration, because it is our own development, if we meet any issues, they are ours to fix, and will always be our highest priority. And since we deeply understand Keyfax, this development goes well beyond MVP to give users the power to make their own changes.

For existing integrations with the big Housing Management Systems if a customer wants to change what data is sent into or out of Keyfax, they have to talk to their HMS provider and to Omfax, agree what is needed, and then book time and spend money getting small changes done at each end. But with this Dynamics integration customers can:

• Alter data into or out of Keyfax on launch and completion
• Choose which version of Keyfax to launch: Keyfax for staff, or Keyfax Online
• Instantly adjust how data is mapped back into MS Dynamics CRM

Dynamics launching Keyfax

The Dynamics integration to Keyfax currently supports Web Legacy and Unified Interface modes, and will shortly support Dynamics Unified Interface within the Dynamics 365 App.

Using Plugin technology, a Keyfax ‘Launch’ button can be easily added to any Dynamics Form.

Imagine a Contact Centre User has identified an individual tenant in Dynamics. The CC user chooses a new repair and then hits “Launch Keyfax Scripts” which pops up the  Keyfax browser window over the top of Dynamics:

Keyfax is passed the name and address details, but can also be configured to receive any other data held in Dynamics.

When the script completes, data elements are mapped from the Keyfax ‘export’ data back into the individual fields of the Dynamics Form, as shown in the Repair summary:

All basic Dynamics data types are supported along with Lookups, Option Sets, and Option Pairs etc. You can set default values to be used where data elements are missing, and these can be set in the Mappings.

Logging & Mapping

For general troubleshooting and to help with building Mappings a ‘Logging’ mechanism is provided. This shows all data sent and received from Keyfax.

The Mappings define which data elements are sent to Keyfax on start-up. These mapped data elements are available to Keyfax scripts and greatly enhance the script’s power and capabilities, often reducing the number of question and answer steps required.

If you need more data to use in your Keyfax scripts, like the Housing officer for this tenant, or their heating type, then you can simply include that in the start-up data.

For the real tech savvy, within Dynamics, FetchXML can also be used to construct a query to provide any additional data elements, e.g. parental Account/Contact details.

With the configurability that the Dynamics/Keyfax integration provides, the possibilities of harnessing the power of Keyfax scripts by a variety of Dynamics business areas is now something that customers can control and further develop themselves. With an increasing proportion of the Social Housing Market looking at Dynamics as their next Housing CRM System, we’re pleased to offer a standard integration which puts integration changes and mappings where they belong, back in the customer’s hands.