Business Card Reader Control For Dynamics 365

With last week’s Dynamics 365 Release wave 2,  a bunch of existing features have been released. The most noticeable or I would call it game changing features are related to inbuilt baked AI capabilities on the Power Platform / CDS via AI Builder capabilities which allows users to define AI models and consume these models via out of the box AI controls. To this offering a plug and play AI control has been offered to be used both as in Power Apps and also Dynamics 365 CE (without need for defining an AI Model)  via Business Card Reader control. Consider a scenario, where leads have to collected from business cards gathered in meetings / trade shows and needs to be captured as lead records in Dynamics 365 CE. This new feature fits right into the market gap where custom 3rd party were needed to purchased to enable data capturing from business cards into leads/contacts fields.

This is a very simple control which can be configured as field on lead/contact forms allowing users to scan a business card and map the scan data into various customer fields.

The steps to configure this control is fairly straight forward as shown below with images :

1. Open the main lead form in form customization window. Here you will observe that business card reader control is already present on the form in a hidden section.So, you need to make it visible on the lead form.

It is interesting to see out of the box the business card field is defined in Dynamics 365 of type multiple lines of text.

2. Next open properties of the business card control field from the lead form and click on ‘controls tab’ and select AI Builder Business Card control and click on ‘add control’ as shown in image below.

3. On choosing AI Builder Business Card control as an input method for business card field, the fields available from this control becomes available to be mapped to customer fields on the lead form. AI Builder Business Card control offers a bunch of customer data related properties as shown in images below.

4. Next you can choose the outputs data fields of the AI Builder Control and map it to a lead form fields. The example below shows mapping ‘Full Name’ property of AI Builder Control to ‘Full Name’ text field of lead record. 

5. The mapping of the remaining properties of the AI Builder Control to Lead records fields can be done as per needed by business requirements.

Now you are good to go to enjoy a powerful AI driven integration for Dynamics 365 CE unified UI and mobile app.