Let's get this out of the way quick: I don't know what I'm doing.
The whole point of this is to bring you along with me on my journey to learn new things. Today's new thing is Microsoft's Project Service Automation (PSA) which is part of the Dynamics 365 application suite. There are plenty of smart people who can give you the details about the products, the underlying structure, the impressive flexibility, and the many different ways your life will be better if you use them. True story.
Meanwhile, I'll share the things I bump into as I fumble around in the relative dark of someone trying to learn too many things at once.
I always start with the Schedule Board because it just looks so cool!
In this one screen, I can match the needs of various projects or requirements with the respective skill sets (and locations) of my resource pool.
One thing I ran into right away is that even though I have my Dynamics 365 instance set to sync Exchange data on the server, it won't bring the free/busy information of the resource in to the Schedule Board. I'm sure there's a reason for this, but I haven't discovered it yet. I've asked some very smart people if I'm just missing a setting and they all agree it should be doing that, and then devise very complicated ways to accomplish that. Cool.
If I book a resource, I have the ability (as the admin) to have that booking push out to the resource's calendar...but for some reason, I can't read their availability before committing them. As you might imagine, if they have a meeting on their calendar, I won't see it, and probably book a very important design meeting in the middle of their root canal.
Once I've selected the appropriate resource (or only resource) and project/requirement, I can create a booking for that resource that is soft, hard, or proposed...depending on the preference.
On our next adventure, we'll dive into creating a project from a quote and the errors and quirks I discover along the way.