Announcing the public preview of the ‘Edge Process for Unified Service Desk’ to provide more reliable, performant and secure experience to the customers. 

Why Microsoft Edge? 

A few years ago, Microsoft launched its next generation browser “Edge” and relegated ‘Internet Explorer’ to the legacy browser status for opening web applications. Edge continued to evolve both in terms of functionality and user base over the last few years. Here are the key benefits of Edge over Internet Explorer that impact Unified Service Desk customers 

• Performance Improvement 

Microsoft Edge is known to be faster than Internet Explorer. Our tests show good improvements in load times for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement app pages (both web client and Unified Interface) when opened in Unified Service Desk using Edge Process as compared to IE Process. In contact center Industry, this performance gain directly results in lower Average Handling Time (AHT) and higher Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) 

• Outlook 

With the relegation of Internet Explorer to legacy browser status, Unified Service Desk needs to reduce its dependence on Internet Explorer for rendering web applications. Using Edge process for the same is a step towards the browser agnostic Unified Service Desk offering. 

• Easy configuration to host the applications 

For Unified Service Desk to work well with Internet Explorer, we needed to ensure that some Internet Explorer settings are correctly configured. Otherwise, this leads to poor user experience. Edge does not need any such settings thus aiding the faster deployment. 

More Information: Unified Service Desk Administrator  

• Support and Reliability 

Edge is the default browser for Microsoft. It has a better process and memory management, and the Edge WebView control is sandboxed to ensure that issues in web applications are contained. There is an increased focus on Edge’s reliability and support, in case there are issues. 

• Debugging made easy 

With Edge Process, you can use the Microsoft Edge DevTools Preview tool as a JavaScript debugger that helps you debug the webpage locally or remotely. 

More Information: Microsoft Edge DevTools Preview  

 Learn More 

To learn more about the Edge Process for Unified Service Desk, see the Edge Process documentation. 

Note: In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced that "we will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop." The blog also clarifies that the technology changes will be "under the hood", gradually over time and thus customers using Microsoft Edge in Unified Service Desk will not be impacted from either admin or agent experience perspective. It also outlines the roadmap of Microsoft Edge to gradually be available on other versions of Windows and non-Windows operating systems in the future. This helps Unified Service Desk customers having a deployment with a mix of operating systems to achieve the same experience. 

 Call to action 

You are encouraged to be part of the Unified Service Desk 4.1 Preview program to test and validate the feature and provide your valuable feedback.

Unified Service Desk with Edge process is supported only on latest Windows 10 Operation system (version 1809). 

How to access the public preview: 

1. You must be a Dynamics Insider to access the public preview. If you are not, please register yourself at the insider portal ( https://experience.dynamics.com/insider ) 
2. Once you login to insider portal (https://experience.dynamics.com/insider) and you will see the preview details for ‘Unified Service Desk preview’ lighting up for you.  
3. Navigate to download section and download files to install 
4. You can report issues in the forum at the insider portal 

(This blog has been authored by Karthik Balasubramanian and Deepa Patel with the inputs from Kumar Ashutosh, Sankar Venkataraman and Unified Service Desk feature team)