General Availability: Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework – Bring your own channel provider with ease

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework.

Channel Integration Framework is a cloud-to-cloud extensible framework to integrate third-party channel providers with Dynamics 365 Unified Interface Apps using a browser-based JavaScript API library. With this framework, you can integrate any third-party channel provider or channel aggregators into Unified Interface Apps. Technically, Channel Integration Framework is a set of APIs (methods, events, and protocols) that enable developers and partners to build immersive communication experiences such that third party communication widgets running on channel provider cloud can interact with Dynamics 365.

Why Channel Integration Framework?

The customer service industry is striving with a laser focus to transform and enhance customer satisfaction. It is paramount to enable the organizations to communicate with the customers in the channels of their choice. This, in turn, minimizes the effort, maximizes productivity and helps to deliver best-in-class customer service.

Before the Channel Integration Framework (CIF), partner developers invested in unsupported customizations and manipulations to embed their channel widgets in Dynamics 365.

Read more about challenges of current channel provider integrations

Benefits of Channel Integration Framework

Channel Integration Framework provides an immersive communication experience with the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps (Unified Interface apps). The integration of channel provider and Dynamics 365 enables the users to see the communication and the customer relationship information in a single view. The customer interactions are captured and help to derive deep insights. In addition, Channel Integration Framework addresses the core problems of supportability and upgrade that are mentioned above.

The framework is channel agnostic, allowing room for new channel types. Customers can now easily bring in a new provider, pilot them, and change the provider with minimal effort.

The integrations are available via Microsoft AppSource, aiding discovery and faster go-lives. The developer community is provided with detailed API documentation and ready to run sample code to enable top scenarios. The integrations built using Channel Integration Framework are zero foot print. That is, they are browser and platform independent, and no downloads are needed on agent desktops to enable the immersive experience across Dynamics 365 and channel widget.

Read more on the Benefits of Channel Integration Framework.

Call to action

As Channel Integration Framework becomes generally available, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to our private preview and public preview partners for providing great feedback during this journey. Let us move towards the next milestone in our next-generation agent experiences for customer care.

This blog has been authored by Kumar Ashutosh ( Twitter, LinkedIn) , who manages the agent experiences charter for D365 Customer care apps, Sushant Sikka (LinkedIn) and Karthik Balasubramanian (Twitter, LinkedIn).