Microsoft aims to make mixed reality accessible and intuitive for frontline workers everywhere. With Dynamics 365 Guides, deskless workers use step-by-step holographic instructions to ensure process compliance, improve efficiency, and learn on the job.
In 2022 Teams capabilities were integrated into Guides, allowing users to collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world seamlessly. This enabled calling through the HoloLens 2 – allowing the remote participant (or participants, if on a group call) to “see-what-I-see” through the HoloLens user’s eyes. They can see what is happening in real-time, annotate in their colleagues’ 3-dimensional space, and share relevant files easily.
We’ve just released another set of features in Guides to make this new experience even more intuitive and reliable.
Draw anywhere with better annotations!
Imagine being able to point anywhere in your plant or facility and draw on any object, any surface, or anywhere in space to instantly show someone not only where to look but also how a physical object might look in that space. The possibilities for this feature don’t stop there.
On Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist, an expert (working on a PC or mobile device) can draw in your world in 3D. As the frontline worker wearing the HoloLens, you can also draw on your space in digital ink. Traditionally, the HoloLens user could draw on a flat or semi-flat surface some ways off in the distance. With our recent annotation improvements, the HoloLens user can now draw anywhere in space in 3D. These drawings stick where they are added in the space and remain still. Users can walk around them and view them from different angles. We’ve brought similar improvements to annotating on surfaces so that the ink stays where intended, regardless of whether the user changes location or position. This means that for the HoloLens user, your entire world is now inkable, allowing you to annotate and share in real time.
Mixed Reality Teams calls
With Dynamics 365 Guides, the HoloLens user now has more pre-join settings when joining a Teams call. Before entering the call, the user can opt to toggle on/off video and can choose whether to mute themselves. As before, users can also toggle these settings once they are in the meeting. In spaces where confidentiality is core, this allows the frontline worker to use the HoloLens as their main calling device – without compromising on security.
We’ve also recently added restricted mode features, which enable your admin to restrict who can log on to the device and make calls, further driving our efforts to help you keep your company and your information secure.
Linking to Guides from within a Guide
Navigating through the steps of a guide is as intuitive as paging through a document or scrolling through a file, but what about links to jump from one file to another? We’ve added the ability to link directly from one guide to another by linking the new guide in an action step. This makes navigating between different sets of training materials or guides as easy as jumping to a new web page from a hyperlink. Learn the details of all our recent additions in Guides release notes.
What’s Next?
Stay tuned for more updates coming soon as we continue to build on the intuitive and frontline worker-focused features for Dynamics 365 Guides!