James Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence Group

Jujhar Singh, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Last month we unveiled and provided a first look at Dynamics 365, showing off the capabilities our customers can expect from our latest generation of intelligent business applications. Today, we are excited to announce that Dynamics 365 is generally available.

The first thing users will see with Dynamics 365 is that we are bringing our business applications closer together in how they look, feel and integrate with each other. To better enable end-to-end business processes, we have unified the navigation and core user experience across each of the Dynamics 365 applications. It remains clean, beautiful, and familiar and it gives you the ability to seamlessly move from one application to another without switching windows.

And when a user logs into Dynamics 365, the home-screen will show you all the Business Apps and information relevant to you or your role. With one click, users can connect to Microsoft AppSource, quickly and easily locating the most relevant capabilities from hundreds of precisely curated additional business apps enabled by our partners.

Simple, consistent navigation is only the beginning. Dynamics 365 delivers significant new capabilities across all application areas, moving our proven industry leading in-market solutions to the next level:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales adds new social selling capabilities enabling people to share knowledge and participate in social conversations, find and connect with new companies and people to generate new leads. In addition, gamification is moving from preview to global general availability. It will expand beyond sales scenarios to help teams across the entire organization collaborate and compete in fun, engaging contests. With highly visible contest results, users are motivated to perform their best for themselves and their teams, leading to increased performance, productivity, and adoption.
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, helps agents use relevance search to quickly find related content and use faceting to filter to the right record. Agents are now able to edit records directly in a grid while respecting the business rules for the entity.
• Dynamics 365 for Field Service, helps organizations improve resource productivity by enabling service organizations to fit in more appointments each day by automatically optimizing technician schedules to minimize driving distance between appointments. Connectivity with IoT is now seamlessly integrated at the platform level enabling connected device signals received to initiate many business processes, such as automatically dispatching a technician for preventative maintenance, as well as the ability to send back commands directly from within the application, for example resetting a sensor.
• Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation, enables unified resource scheduling and service billing experiences, allowing organizations to leverage scarce resources and skillsets not only across field and project-based services, but any source of resource demand.
• Dynamics 365 for Operations, the evolution of Dynamics AX on Azure, is our complete business management solution with industry capabilities around Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing, Public Sector and Service industries, across the spectrum of backend operations into Financials for upper mid-market and larger customers. With this update, Dynamics 365 for Operations will add country specific versions of the app for 18 new markets.  Also, as announced last month, we will provide a Cloud Connected on-premises deployment option (available in first half of 2017), with all the inherent benefits of the cloud. The Fall update adds a Vendor Collaboration portal to streamline key processes including Invoicing, a reimagined approach to Cost Accounting, enhanced deployment options for Retail store environments, out of the box support for US Payroll, including Affordable Care Act Reporting, and myriad additional functional enhancements across the product.
• Dynamics 365 for Financials, our comprehensive business management solution for small- to midsize- businesses (SMBs), that has generated tremendous excitement through its public preview program as Project “Madeira” is now also generally available, delivering everything SMBs that have outgrown their basic accounting software require, powered by the Microsoft cloud.

Productivity, remains the cornerstone of Dynamics 365.
Letting users seamlessly harness the power of their
business solutions on the devices they choose and in the context of the Office 365 apps that power their productivity is essential. Across Dynamics 365, this Fall update delivers new breakthrough mobile capability and interoperability with Office 365 apps including Outlook, Excel, Word. A customer using Dynamics 365 for Financials for example, can create an invoice and mail it right within Outlook. Mobility experiences are delivered across Windows, iOS and Android devices. With the Fall update, productivity has been a core focus of development:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales, introduces a new Add-in for the Outlook app. Sales users can now get rich sales related information about their prospects right in the native Outlook app experience. Companies can now also use the Dynamics 365 Add-in with the Outlook client to get a quick overview of their contacts, and track the email, appointment, or contact in Dynamics 365 using the Add-in. The Add-in supports access to templates and knowledge in Dynamics 365 to quickly draft emails.
• Dynamics 365 for Operations, delivers a variety of mobile experiences for consumers, warehouse workers…in fact, for all application users. A mobile shopping application that will enable retail consumers to browse, search, and complete their shopping experience on a mobile device. Warehouse inventory apps enable pick, pack and ship scenarios. We are excited to introduce the capability to mobile-enable any existing Dynamics 365 for Operations process for the iOS, Android and Windows Phone platforms using a point-and-click designer. We have enhanced Office 365 capabilities including Excel experiences with improved designers, Skype for Business presence support, an external feed control including SDK support for integration with Yammer, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Email. A new built-in ad-hoc reporting capability delivers modern, formatted reports in Microsoft Word. A built-in user training mode rapidly enhances the productivity of new users and the understanding of new processes.
• Dynamics 365 for Financials, empowers SMB user productivity, bringing the full power of the application into the Office 365 experience. Receive an email from a customer, see the information about that customer right in Outlook, generate the quote they’ve requested without changing context, and return a beautifully formatted Word document for the quote as a PDF with just a few clicks.  The current update of Dynamics 365 for Financials includes Outlook calendar interoperability for streamlined productivity when billing for projects.

Intelligent applications deliver the most value to business users, empowering them by turning the data in Dynamics 365 applications, combined with other company data and data from IoT, the web and social networks, into insights that identify the best actions to drive optimal results. Intelligence capabilities are central to Dynamics 365, powered by the wealth of business intelligence, big data and machine learning investments across Microsoft. Power BI is the embedded business intelligence solution across Dynamics 365. With content targeted at every business role, users have exciting visualization of near real-time data and key performance indicators (KPIs) delivered with in-memory speed right in the application context where they need the information. Beyond visualization, we have invested billions across Microsoft into cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) research to help every person and organization achieve more. Cortana, Bing Predicts and Skype Translator are just a few examples of how we have put these investments to work for our customers. Dynamics 365 brings these investments in intelligence to life to drive business process results. With the Fall update of Dynamics 365, we continue to add even more intelligent capabilities in each application, specifically in:

• Dynamics 365 for Operations, we have added a near real-time entity store enabling operations data to be available for intelligence and analytics without putting load on the main transaction processing store. On this infrastructure, we have added a product recommendations feature that enables retailers to offer personalized product suggestions to shoppers at the point of sale. Powered by machine learning algorithms offered via Microsoft Cognitive Services, suggestions are based on customer’s individual purchase history, items in the wish-list, and what other similar customers are buying.
• Dynamics 365 for Sales, we are adding a new Relationship Insights capability that takes rich signals from Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to automatically determine the relationship health of a customer and deliver contextual insights that assist the seller in building stronger relationships and delivering a more personalized experience to their customers. These capabilities also help sales people automatically capture related data from Office 365 and track email engagement, and provide alerts and suggest contextual actions to help improve engagement with prospects.
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, we are adding advanced analytics and machine learning scenarios to help agents solve cases faster by surfacing relevant knowledge articles and related cases while solving an inquiry, and text analytics bring insights and discovery to reported issues.
• Dynamics 365 for Field Service, helps service organizations improve customer satisfaction using Connected Field Service to detect, troubleshoot, and resolve issues remotely before customers are affected. 
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights, is a completely new solution, in fact, our first finished customer analytics solution that connects and analyzes data from Dynamics 365 – and other widely used business applications, web, social and IoT sources – and applies intelligence to it to create a 360-degree customer view with automatic suggestions to improve customer engagement.  
• Dynamics 365 for Financials, introduces a reinvented cash flow forecasting based on Cortana Intelligence, delivering actionable insights to one of the most critical business processes for SMB customers.

The above are just a few examples of how our deep investments in AI and data visualizations are coming to life within Dynamics 365 applications to help our customers gain insights from data across their organization, and turn those insights into intelligent action.  

Customers can purchase Dynamics 365 applications and plans starting today. For existing customers of Dynamics AX, you will seamlessly transition to Dynamics 365 for Operations when you receive the Fall service update. If you’re using an older release, upgrade and migration paths will be available when you’re ready, along with tools to streamline the path to Dynamics 365. Participants in the Project “Madeira” preview will also enjoy a seamless transition to Dynamics 365 for Financials. Similarly, customers for Dynamics CRM Online will receive Dynamics 365 for Sales, Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, Dynamics 365 for Project Service and Dynamics 365 for Field Service as appropriate with their Fall service update. Learn more about any of the Dynamics 365 applications, or start your own trial here.

Delivering an adaptable platform and tools that customers can use to extend their applications, create custom apps and automate processes is essential for businesses to meet customer and market demand and keep up with the fast pace for business. This ability to connect business processes is enabled by our business applications platform tools that include PowerApps and Microsoft Flow powered by the Common Data Service. Using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow our customers can easily build new apps and workflows that work across Dynamics 365 and other systems and data sources, without having to be a professional developer. Business Applications Platform for Dynamics 365 is available for customers today. Read the PowerApps and Microsoft Flow general availability announcement to learn more.

The general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an important milestone. We are incredibly excited to get it into the hands of our partners and customers to enable them to better engage with their customers, empower their employees, optimize their operations and transform their products, services and business. We can’t wait to see how these applications empower you to achieve more. Please let us hear about your success.

To learn more about Dynamics 365 visit http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/home

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

James Phillips, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence Group

Jujhar Singh, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Today is a remarkable day for Microsoft, and more importantly for our partners and customers. As the engineering leaders for our business applications and the application platform innovation Microsoft is delivering, we’re excited about the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Today’s announcements reflect our broader vision for the future of business process apps. 

Business processes are at the core of every business. Across all industries our customers are looking to adapt their customer engagement and business operations processes to the digital era, to secure and expand their businesses. This “digital transformation” requires a degree of business process agility – and a unification across the business – not supported by the traditional “siloed” ERP and CRM approach of the past.

We’re fortunate we get to speak with customers and partners every day. We get the opportunity to hear their perspective on product improvements we must make and learn how our products stack up to others in the industry. From that perspective we worked with our teams to identify some of the top questions we anticipate from you – our customers and partners – and wanted to take a moment to address them in this blog.

We are extremely excited about this next step in business process innovation and look forward to hearing from partners at our Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, and hearing what customers think of AppSource and the launch of Dynamics 365 this Fall.

What will Microsoft Dynamics 365 give me that I don’t already get today?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 will bring together the best of our CRM and ERP cloud offerings into one cloud service with specific, purpose built, apps for each of your key business processes – like Finance, Sales, Customer Service, etc.

Dynamics 365 apps will also provide you with a modern and familiar experience with built in insights, intelligence and workflow. To ensure interoperability and extensibility they also use a common data model and consistent application platform.

The combination of these things gives customers a comprehensive solution for business process innovation that lets them:

• Start with what they need by offering apps that fit roles, industries, businesses – and grow at their pace to run their entire business in the cloud.   
• Enable greater productivity where they need it by connecting structured workflow of business applications (Dynamics 365) and processes with the unstructured work of collaboration and productivity (Office 365) so employees are empowered with productivity tools surfaced in the context of their business processes, and vice versa.
• Gain built-in, actionable, intelligence with business applications that infuse big data, advanced analytics and IoT into processes which proactively guide employees and customers to optimal outcomes. With Dynamics 365, data and insights are transformed into intelligent action right where it’s needed, and without requiring an army of rocket scientists to make it happen.
• Be ready for growth through nimble, adaptable applications, that allow them to compose, modify and extend processes in real-time. Power BI, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow empower business users to change and adapt their processes without requiring IT support. And organizations can reimagine their business model with a consistent, flexible, extensible platform.

Why did you choose the name Microsoft Dynamics 365 and what does it represent?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is our next generation of business apps in the cloud. These apps bring together the full power of Microsoft across productivity, advanced analytics, Power BI and IoT, with the strength of Azure and a new application platform and common data model. As such, the new name reflects the significance of the offering and the coming together of the two worlds structured business processes and unstructured personal productivity so our business customers can achieve more.

How much will Microsoft Dynamics 365 cost?

The business application industry has traditionally presented customers with a range of “siloed” applications.  When Dynamics 365 launches later this year we want to give customers a new choice.  While we’ll support the traditional approach and allow customers to license Dynamics 365 by application (Financials, Operations, Sales, Marketing, etc.) they will also be able to license users by “role.” Our new role based approach will give customers the flexibility they need to support modern, more agile, more diverse employee roles – enabling them to access functionality across all applications within Dynamics 365. We’ll share additional details on pricing closer to availability.

Does this mean that I need to re-implement or migrate my current cloud solutions? 

No.  Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been very specifically and carefully designed to be a seamless transition for those customers using Dynamics CRM online or Dynamics AX online.   

Will Microsoft Dynamics 365 be available on-premises?

No.  Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud service so it will not be available, as is, on premises or in private clouds.

We will continue to innovate in, and support, our great Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, NAV, GP and SL solutions.  We will also offer customers connectors if they want to use a hybrid of on-premises and cloud solutions and a migration path when they are ready to move to the cloud.

What is the "common data model" and what role does it play with Microsoft Dynamics 365?

The common data model is a cloud-resident business database, built on years of experience with our enterprise customers. It will come with hundreds of standard business entities spanning both business process (Dynamics 365) and productivity (Office 365). The standardization and consistency of schema enables partners to build innovative applications and to automate business processes spanning the entire business process spectrum with confidence their solutions can be easily deployed and used across Microsoft’s entire customer base.

What platform should partners use to build solutions today?
Partners should use Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Azure to create composite business applications spanning Dynamics 365, Office 365 and, via a large and growing family of connectors, third-party databases and applications.

To extend the functionality of individual Dynamics 365 apps, partners may continue to use native application extensibility frameworks built-in to the CRM and the AX platforms.

Will partners continue to sell business apps from Microsoft?

Absolutely. Partners are a key part of our strategy and have always been a key part of how our customers get the most from their technology investments. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners will have even more opportunity to focus on specific customer needs, build apps to differentiate themselves in the market and take advantage of new opportunities and revenue streams. Microsoft AppSource provides a modern discovery and provisioning system for these solutions.

What are the benefits for customers and for ISVs listing on Microsoft AppSource? 

For customers, Microsoft AppSource is your destination to easily find and evaluate the apps from Microsoft and our partners that drive your business.

For ISVs, Microsoft AppSource is your destination to market line-of-business (LoB) SaaS apps to business users. Drive discoverability and usage of your apps within an existing global network of business customers through co-marketing opportunities, lead generation and the support of Microsoft’s worldwide ecosystem and sales force. Harness Azure’s leading, secure and intelligent cloud services platform and tools to deliver differentiated apps to customers. 

The post Insights from the Engineering Leaders behind Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today in India we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online served from new datacenter regions in Pune and Chennai, joining Microsoft Azure and Office 365 in providing the trusted Microsoft Cloud in India.

Built on foundational principles of security, privacy & control, compliance, and transparency, the Microsoft Cloud delivers trusted cloud services to enable people and organizations to achieve more. With flexible platform and productivity solutions Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and now Dynamics CRM Online, the local Microsoft Cloud is designed to fuel innovation and accelerate India’s digital transformation.

Deepak Padaki, Senior Vice President Strategy & Chief Risk Officer, Infosys Limited, reports: “The launch of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online in India is fantastic news! India is a hub to the operations of global companies like ours. And of course, India is fast emerging as a market for next generation companies. The availability of in-country storage and processing infrastructure will offer better performance, redundancy, security, and compliance. This will spur greater adoption of cloud based services across the enterprise software landscape that is shaping the new Digital India – enabling businesses to offer differentiated user experiences and new opportunities for growth at optimal cost.”

The new regions, Central India (Pune) and South India (Chennai), enable data residency for CRM customers in India, bringing enterprise-grade reliability and performance to regulated industries and other businesses. This includes data replication in multiple regions within India for business continuity, reduced network distance, and the option of a private connection to the cloud with Azure ExpressRoute. The Microsoft Cloud in India comes with the same deep commitment to high availability as our other regions, including a financially-backed service level agreement of 99.9%.

“Especially for us at Cloud Nine, with clinical and non-clinical information residing as part of the CRM across landscapes, data residency and replication and the speed of fetch will greatly improve the user experience and further enable a drive towards greater engagement,” says Mr. Rohit, Managing Director at Cloud Nine Hospitals. “From an end user perspective, speed, efficiency, accuracy and security are a critical component to acceptance and longevity of the product and its capabilities.”

One of the largest cloud operators in the world, Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion in building a resilient cloud infrastructure and cloud services that deliver high availability and security while lowering overall costs. With Dynamics CRM Online now available for purchase in 130 markets, today’s announcement is further evidence of Microsoft's commitment to expanding its trusted cloud infrastructure around the world.

Mr. G.V. Gopalakrishnan, Chief Operating Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Services states: “Data security, compliance and regulatory requirements are challenges faced by businesses operating in banking and financial sector. How do we take advantage of changes in technology landscape and various options available, without compromising on data security, compliance and regulatory requirements? Cloud Computing is one way of achieving this but there is always a fear. Availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions from the datacenters in India are perfectly timed to help organizations overcome the fear and embark on their digital transformation journey. This is particularly true for regulated industries such as BFSI, government departments and state-owned enterprises that have had concerns around data residency, latency, and security. Assurance of local data residency and increased privacy measures are bound to accelerate public and hybrid cloud adoption by businesses and governments in India, crucial to make ‘Digital India’ a reality.” 

The post India Datacenters Open for Business: Now Serving India CRM Online Customers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

New Release Delivers ground-breaking service capabilities, portal solutions and even more intelligence 

It is my honor to announce today that our spring wave of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 will be available to our online customers in Q2 of this calendar year.  This release is focused on the integration of two of our recent acquisitions (FieldOne and Adxstudio), providing our customers with market leading capabilities for field service and portal solutions for community engagement.  We are also taking this opportunity to further extend our service capabilities with the introduction of project service.  Together, our field and project service solutions take the definition of service to a new level in the industry.  With our full range of service solutions for self-service, agent-assisted service and onsite service, we are helping our customers transform customer service. 

Our new approach to service enables a fundamental transition that we’re seeing to the everything-as-a-service model.  Companies are moving away from old models of selling separate products and services as single transactions to more comprehensive solutions that include service for those products.  Companies are now able to access not only their internal resources to perform service, but, increasingly, they can also leverage the skills and availability of third party resources.  With IoT technology there is a whole new opportunity to monitor device data, detect anomalies and proactively identify next best actions for maintenance and repairs.  The new model of everything-as-a service enables managed service offerings, including product installation, ongoing and preventative maintenance, upgrades, overhauls and ongoing billing.

With the new capabilities we’re introducing in our Spring  wave to support field and project service, organizations will have the ability to schedule, manage and deliver onsite service, whether it be their field technician who is supporting multiple customers on a single day, or complex, multi-day projects.  Field service matches the requirements for service calls with the available resources and end-to-end processes span from case management through to work order completion.  Project service enables complex, multi-day engagements and optimizes resourcing with intelligent, skills-based assignments. Through our service delivery foundation, we bring project service and field service together within the core CRM solution to help companies manage resources across all sources of demand – no other vendor in the market is doing this and these new capabilities make Dynamics CRM uniquely positioned to support the breadth of self, assisted and on-site service.     

The CRM Spring 2016 wave also introduces community engagement through portal solutions.  Our portal capabilities enable organizations to better connect with customers, partners and employees, and provide these groups with a streamlined way to access information, obtain assistance and perform tasks.  We are taking a unique approach where portals for these communities are powered with the same data and processes accesses by traditional CRM users.  Organizations can easily configure the amount of information accessed by their communities, enabling more coordinated communications among different teams and facilitating a single, consistent voice.

To bring more intelligence and productivity to CRM, the spring wave introduces new guided navigation capabilities that provide application users with guided tasks and support, personalized to the user.  These new capabilities are role-based and contextual, making onboarding new application users quick and easy, helping to drive business user productivity. 

We are also enhancing the intelligence capabilities of our solutions with the introduction of two new machine learning scenarios for Microsoft Social Engagement – adaptive learning and automated triage.  Adaptive learning, powered by Azure Machine Learning, enables users to customize sentiment scoring models and the system will learn from it to reach higher sentiment precision. For example, a ski or snowboard manufacturer receiving posts with slang expressions such as "crazy" or "sweet" can adjust the model to reflect language commonly used by their communities.  Going forward, sentiment analysis will understand these expressions reflect a positive comment.  With automated triage, Microsoft Social Engagement will automatically detect intention in social posts and, using machine learning, route them as cases or leads into CRM – boosting sales performance and organizational efficiency. 

I encourage you to see for yourself these great capabilities in action by watching our video of the CRM spring wave features including demonstrations of field and project service, portals, guided navigation and intelligent social. I am also pleased to announce the launch of a new CRM Roadmap site powered by Dynamics CRM Online 2016 and our new portal capabilities. This publically accessible site will enable a real time view into our available and planned product capabilities.   

It’s an exciting time to lead the CRM business at Microsoft. I couldn’t be more optimistic about the future of our product and of our customers.  Advances in the cloud and intelligence are making possible new capabilities and scenarios that not only help companies adapt their customer engagement to the digital era, but also use that engagement to secure and expand their business.  In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see me elaborate on these topics as well as share stories of how our customers are transforming their business through intelligent customer engagement.  And we will of course keep you posted as we get close to general availability of the spring wave. 

The post Announcing Dynamics CRM Spring 2016 Wave appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.