On January 25, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2024 and September 2024. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and improvements, showcasing our ongoing commitment to fueling digital transformation for both our customers and partners.

This release reinforces our dedication to developing applications and experiences that contribute value to roles by dismantling barriers between data, insights, and individuals. This wave introduces diverse enhancements across various business applications, emphasizing improved user experiences, productivity, innovative app development and automation, and advanced AI capabilities. Watch a summary of the release highlights.

Explore a heightened level of convenience when examining Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans using the release planner. Enjoy unmatched flexibility as you customize, filter, and sort plans to align with your preferences, effortlessly sharing them. Maintain organization, stay informed, and remain in control while smoothly navigating through various active waves of plans. For more information, visit the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 release wave

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enhances customer understanding and boosts sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. The 2024 release wave 1 focuses on providing sellers timely customer information, expediting deals with actionable insights, improving productivity, and empowering organizations through open configurability and expanded generative AI leadership. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching the Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales specific skills, data, and actions. Additionally, the team will focus on assisting sellers on the go within the Outlook and Microsoft Teams mobile apps.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot, filtering response verification, diagnostic tools for admins and agents, and usability improvements to multi-session apps. Additionally, we’re making enhancements to the voice channel, and improving unified routing assignment accuracy and prioritization. Watch this video about the exciting new features in Customer Service.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is a field service management application that allows companies to transform their service operations with processes and experiences to manage, schedule, and perform. In the 2024 release wave 1, we’re introducing the next generation of Copilot capabilities, modern experiences, Microsoft 365 integrations, vendor management, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations integration.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues on its journey of autonomous finance, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process, to increase user productivity and business agility. This release focuses on enhancing business performance planning and analytics, adding AI powered experiences, easing setup of financial dimension defaulting with AI rules guidance, increasing automation in bank reconciliation, netting, expanding country coverage, tax automation, and scalability. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Finance can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances business processes for increased insight and agility. Copilot skills improve user experiences, while demand planning transforms the forecast process, and warehouse processes are optimized for greater efficiency and accuracy. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on core functionality improvements, including support for discounts and fees, enhanced resource reconciliation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Project Operations can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including supporting high-detail 3D model support through Microsoft Azure Remote Rendering and greatly improved web content support that enable customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data. Additionally, support for Guides content on mobile will be generally available in the coming wave through a seamless integration with the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile application.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources will continue to improve recruiting experiences with functionality to integrate with external job portals and talent pools and offer management. We will continue to expand our human capital management ecosystem to include additional payroll partners and build better together experiences that span the gamut of what Microsoft can offer to improve employee experiences in corporations of any size and scale across the globe. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Human Resources can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in omnichannel retail experiences through advancements in mobile point of sale experiences like Tap to Pay for iOS and offline capabilities for Store Commerce on Android. The business-to-business buying experience is enhanced with new capabilities, and a streamlined order management solution for buyers who work across multiple organizations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is delivering substantial enhancements, with a central emphasis on harnessing the power of Copilot. Available in more than 160 countries, the team is focused on Copilot-driven capabilities to streamline and enhance productivity through enhanced reporting and data analysis capabilities, elevated project and financial management, and simplified workflow automation. We have also upgraded our development and governance tools and introduced improvements in managing data privacy and compliance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. With this release, we’re making it easier and faster to ingest and manage your data. AI enables quick insights and democratized access to analytics. Real-time data ingestion, creation, and updates further enable the optimization of experiences in the moments that matter. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to revolutionize how marketers work, enabling businesses to optimize interactions with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, we empower marketers with a deeper customer understanding, we enable them to create new experiences within minutes, reach customers in more ways, and continuously optimize results. Thanks to granular lead qualification, we continue to boost the synergy between sales and marketing to achieve superior business outcomes. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

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Watch this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave in Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Apps focuses on integrating Copilot to accelerate app development with AI and natural language, enhancing user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. The team is also simplifying the creation of modern apps through contemporary controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. Additionally, they’re facilitating enterprise-scale development, enabling makers and admins to expand apps across the organization with improved guardrails and quality assurance tools.

Microsoft Power Pages interactive Copilot now supports every step of site building to create intelligent websites—design, page layouts, content editing, data binding, learning, chatbot, accessibility checking, and securing the site. Connect to data anywhere with the out-of-the-box control library and secure the website with more insights at your fingertips.

Microsoft Power Automate is bringing Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining. This will allow customers to use natural language to discover optimization opportunities, build automations, quickly troubleshoot any issues, and provide a delightful experience in managing the automation estate. For enterprise-scale solutions, maintenance is made easier with improved notifications on product capabilities.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilot, general availability for generative actions, and geo-expansions to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa. We’re also introducing rich capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPT models, along with new channels such as WhatsApp, and software lifecycle capabilities such as topic level import/export and role-based access control.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to make investments focusing on enhancing maker experience by improving app building productivity infused with Copilot experiences, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and AI-powered enterprise copilot for Microsoft 365.

AI Builder invests in three key areas: prompt builder for GPT prompts, intelligent document processing with new features and models, and AI governance improvements, including enhanced capacity management and data policies. These initiatives aim to empower users with advanced generative AI, streamline document processing, and strengthen governance across AI models within Power Apps.

Early access period 

Starting February 5, 2024, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2024. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 plan, and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.

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On July 18, 2023, we published the 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between October 2023 and March 2024. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features, including AI capabilities and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

This release wave builds on our commitment to create applications and experiences that add value to every role by breaking down silos between data, insights, and people. New capabilities empower new ways to make informed decisions with AI-guided insights and suggested actions, easier ways to automate tasks and processes, and collaboration seamlessly integrated into the flow of work, plus, new low-code ways for anyone to build solutions.

Discover a whole new level of convenience in reviewing release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform with the release planner. Experience unparalleled flexibility as you personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences. Stay organized, stay informed, and stay in control as you effortlessly navigate through multiple active waves of plans. For more information, visit releaseplans.microsoft.com.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Marketing will bring enhancements to Copilot features empowering marketers to quickly create new experiences and will bring unprecedented levels of personalization to email content, images, and layouts. Additionally, business-to-business (B2B) dashboards and directly assigning leads to the right sales rep will align marketers and sellers, enabling them to act as a unified team across the buying journey.

Dynamics 365 Sales will focus on enabling sales organizations to prioritize and manage digital sales processes through enhanced sequence capabilities. We will allow users to assign and monitor lead assignment status with enhanced lead assignment capabilities by providing recommendations, summarizing data, retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within flow of work.

Viva Sales is reimagining how sellers work by delivering advanced AI capabilities like email summarization, CRM recommendations, sales email composition, meeting summarization, and real-time sales tips. Additionally, we are making further investments to collaboration spaces in Microsoft Teams and will deliver new sales Copilot experiences that accelerate deal progression and close sales faster.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot capabilities, Join me On Teams, and visual enhancements to the agent workspace, ability to see live chats and voice calls in Inbox and personalizing size of conversational control. Additionally, we are making enhancements to the voice channel, call dialer improvements, and routing calls to agents with longest idle time.

Dynamics 365 Field Service updates will include new capabilities for frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers. We are delivering several top requests such as converting quotes to work orders, enhancing inspections, and evolving our resource scheduling capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Finance is focused on enhancing organizations’ visibility into their data, continued enhancements for accounts payable and bank statement automation, and expanding out-of-the-box country coverage in Latin America. Additionally, the team will deliver further automation of complex tax scenarios and e-invoicing requirements for new countries and provide organizations ability for business model expansion and agility.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to improve and optimize business processes to deliver the agility and resilience needed for businesses to thrive in an increasingly complex business environment. The sales and procurement processes will be further enhanced, manufacturers will enjoy greater flexibility, and warehouse processes related to counting, customer returns, and product receipts will be improved.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is investing in enhancements to services procurement scenarios and project contracting and new functionalities and scenarios in pricing models will support the evolving patterns in the service-centric economy. Additionally, improvements to intelligent resource recommendations will provide suggestions based on experience, cost, and utilization across employees and subcontractors.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will be improving recruiting experiences with functionally rich and intuitive experiences that target recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers. We will expand the human capital management ecosystem to include learning management system integration through public APIs using Microsoft Dataverse along with expanding our payroll partner network.

Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including Object Anchors, Azure Remote Rendering, and availability on Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High. Additionally, we are focusing on features allowing seamless integration with systems of record allowing customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data.

Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to enable the effortless creation of engaging product content for digital commerce sites. New B2B investments allow distributors to view, accept, and reject orders from a centralized dashboard that enables B2B sellers, distributors, and buyers to all work in the same place.

Dynamics 365 Business Central will focus on core functionality to help companies manage their intercompany and consolidations across environments. We will continue to enhance our Copilot capabilities and will further improve our warehouse capabilities, create more Power Automate templates, and provide developers with more capabilities for automating testing of dependent apps.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is enhancing our Copilot features to allow you to ask questions in simple words, to quickly receive insights, and action these immediately. New capabilities in real-time data management will provide the latest view of your customers and easy access to insights within Dynamics 365 apps will allow your team to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across the customer’s lifecycle.

Microsoft Supply Chain Center is enabling resilient supply chain with enhancements in key areas such as Intelligent Order Management for purchase order orchestration, seamless collaboration with external partners via Supplier portal, and Copilot. Additionally, the team will be bringing Advanced Data Analytics to enable Insights to Action as well as new Network Inventory Optimization capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI is improving the creation experience for individuals by improving and aligning our experiences with Microsoft 365, bringing more parity on the web, and bringing the Power Query diagram view into Power BI Desktop. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to meetings and multitasking. For organizations, we are enabling Git and source control integration to help developers maintain and collaborate on their business intelligence solutions.

Power Apps is expanding the use of Copilot to bring AI-assisted experiences to increase developer productivity, bring natural language to all users, and give insights to admins. We will bring modern controls and rich collaborative experiences to users, as well as improved deployment and governance support to ensure low-code can be enabled organization wide.

Power Pages continues to make strides in the Copilot maker experience to enable building a site. Managed environments will include Power Pages capabilities for maker usage and onboarding. For data, you can connect easily to data where it exists today. Low-code makers can collaborate and detect co-presence.

Power Automate will continue to make it easier to get started building new flows by using natural language across cloud flows and desktop flows, and by improving process mining to jumpstart creation of automation and authoring experiences. Additionally, we’re making it easier to manage work at scale by introducing unified activity view and deeper notifications on capabilities across the product. 

Power Virtual Agents will bring general availability for capabilities including Multi-Lingual bot support, Generative Answers and Actions, Standalone interactive voice response (IVR) and IVR integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and our integration with the Conversational Language Understanding service. Additionally, we will continue to enhance our offering for customers by delivering on new Enterprise Trust capabilities.

AI Builder will allow makers to easily process structured and unstructured documents. Using the power of GPT, responses to customer requests can be pre-generated according to enterprise guidelines and will be available in a human validation station allowing makers to easily review and enhance content that is automatically generated from intelligent copilots.

2023 release wave 2 early access period

Starting July 31, 2023, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2023. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2023 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, or visit the early access FAQ page. 

Release planner

Personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences.

View the release planner

The post 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On January 25, 2023, we published the 2023 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2023 and September 2023. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners. 

This release wave builds on our commitment to create applications and experiences that add value to every role by breaking down silos between data, insights, and people. New capabilities empower new ways to make informed decisions with AI-guided insights and suggested actions, easier ways to automate tasks and processes, and collaboration seamlessly integrated into the flow of work, plus, new low-code ways for anyone to build solutions.

As part of our commitment to creating great customer experiences, we have introduced a new way to interact with release plans. The release planner for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform enables users to view and manage release plans across all active waves in a unified and interactive interface while giving them the option to personalize, filter, sort, and share these plans.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 Marketing delivers connected sales and marketing capabilities to enable marketers and sellers to act as a unified team and accelerate their pipelines. New features such as a new business-to-business (B2B) analytics dashboard, frequency capping, multiple email recipient activation, emails timeline, customizable preference centers, and Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) marketing tagging will be released in this wave to allow businesses to increase their output, organizational efficiency, and analyze the impact of their campaigns to reach higher levels of marketing maturity.

Dynamics 365 Sales brings new features such as enhanced sequence capabilities supporting personalized and account-based engagement, actionable AI-powered suggestions within the seller workflow, an updated form layout, and new opportunity management workspace. Additionally, enhanced email templates, content suggestions and text message capabilities, as well as various new abilities to create, loop, and optimize sales sequences will be released during this wave.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to work more efficiently with enhancements to voice features, unified routing, embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration, and elements of the agent workspace such as the case form, timeline, and conversation control. Throughout this wave, we will continue to invest in AI across the contact center with intelligent-suggested replies and robust real-time analytics with customization.

Dynamics 365 Field Service is continuing to improve the new schedule board for dispatchers this wave. We are also supporting our frontline workers by allowing them to see their appointments in Outlook, find information faster through improved global search, and recognize improvements in performance and reliability on the mobile app.

Dynamics 365 Finance is focused on enhancing organizations’ visibility into their data, continuing finance automation, and expanding out-of-the-box country coverage in Latin America. Other enhancements such as further automation of complex tax scenarios, full end-to-end automation of accounts payable and ledger settlements to expedite the close and enable talented finance users to spend more time focusing on value-added activities will also be released.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to deliver increased agility and resilience across the supply chain with enhancements to omnichannel sales strategies with improved ways of managing attribute-based pricing, integrated soft reservations, and optimized end-to-end process integration across Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management. Investments to improve agility and increase efficiency for discrete manufacturers, maintenance workers, and warehouse workers will also be a focus for this wave.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is continuing to invest in capabilities to empower project managers and project teams with new features like expanding the project budgeting and time-phased forecasting to resource/non-stocked deployment modes and completely lighting up the core experiences for expense management on the web and mobile form factors. Across-the-board investments in performance and usability with an uptake of modern and fluent controls in sales, billing and pricing, and subcontracting experiences are also targeted for this release wave.

Dynamics 365 Guides will continue investing in capabilities to improve collaboration experiences for users on HoloLens 2. Key updates include improvements in handling incoming calls, join settings, and more accurate mixed reality annotations will also be coming in this wave. We will also be adding new holographic workflows and features like the ability to manipulate a hologram as an operator and taking a photo while in a guide.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will continue to expand the human capital management (HCM) ecosystem and further investment in expanding our payroll partner network to provide broader coverage for global organizations. We will also be providing better experiences to resource managers in Project Operations by integrating employee skill, compensation, and leave information while helping employees grow their careers by bringing project and experience information back into employee profiles.  

Dynamics 365 Commerce is enabling new and updated B2B experiences, including the modeling of distributers as sellers, introducing a distributer fulfillment dashboard, and improving the out-of-the-box B2B user sign-up flow. We are revising and improving our payment flows and enabling network health checks to diagnose network-related issues that can impact point of sale (POS) uptime for POS and Store Commerce users. We will also be investing in asynchronous payment capabilities to provide support for Klarna and other “buy now, pay later” methods and ACH real-time banking.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is introducing Assessments API in 2023 release wave 1 that will allow customers to define their own fraud event (in addition to the default events covered by Fraud Protection such as Purchase Protection and Account Protection). This functionality will allow customers to configure Fraud Protection to protect against fraud events specific to their businesses.

Dynamics 365 Business Central will continue developing enhanced finance capabilities for intercompany transactions as well as several improvements to the warehouse management area to make customers’ processes more efficient. More default setup data will also be provided during this wave to expedite customers’ onboarding procedures. Furthermore, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365, including Teams, capabilities will be improved enabling better reporting, automation, and collaboration opportunities.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will bring enhancements such as improved data interoperability and governance features allowing the ability to control and restrict access to data, configurations, and actions; an increased maturity around application lifecycle management and enterprise lifecycle management; increased activation capabilities through tighter integration with Microsoft Dataverse; and will receive navigational guidance, AI-powered suggestions, and task assistance increasing the depth of insights obtained from the product with less time investment.    

Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces delivers alerts and notifications via Teams or Outlook when business AI-skills detect actionable patterns within a space containing vehicles—stationary or mobile. Throughout this wave, improvements will be released enabling customers to use the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI devices for configuring Connected Spaces to run AI models at the edge in addition to the existing Microsoft Azure Stack Edge devices.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is investing in functionalities to unblock key scenarios for customers and is focusing on improving the overall usage experience along with the architecture evolution and stability fixes for survey owners and responders. We will focus on delivering features such as the transfer ownership of an orphan project in case a project owner has left the organization, as well as allowing survey responders to record partial survey responses.

Microsoft Supply Chain Center delivers improvements to organizations’ management of their supply chain by enhancing their end-to-end visibility of their supply chain, improving AI-based recommendations, and enabling them to seamlessly collaborate with their teams and suppliers on the workflow, resulting in better orchestrated business processes.

Implementation portal

We are launching a new implementation portal to provide contextual guidance and recommended practices for Dynamics 365 implementations, in order to enable greater success once implementations go live. This portal is based on the Success by Design for Dynamics 365 framework put together by the FastTrack for Dynamics 365 team.

2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365

Check out new capabilities for Dynamics 365 with the 2023 release wave 1 plan.

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Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Power BI continues to invest in empowering individuals, teams, and organizations to drive a data culture. For individuals, we’re enhancing the creation experience, bringing more parity on the web, and adding the Power Query diagram view into Power BI. For teams, we’re bringing enhancements to meetings and multitasking to help users seamlessly work with their data wherever they work.

Power Apps is focusing on reducing risk for organizations with advanced governance capabilities—ensuring easy onboarding and using low-code capabilities in a manageable way for the organization to scale. Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive with modern experiences to build apps, manage data, and logic. Customers will benefit from modernization of web and mobile experiences ensuring modern and fast experiences across apps.

Power Pages continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code and no-code development as well as professional developers. New features in this release will allow makers to have additional capabilities and solution templates in the design studio. Professional developers will be able to perform additional actions and work with code productively using the Microsoft Power Platform CLI tool and Microsoft Visual Studio Code, and administrators will be enabled to better manage and govern their Power Pages sites.

Power Automate is releasing new capabilities to simplify creating new flows by describing them in natural language. This, with other experience improvements for creating and authoring flows, means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started. These improvements include introducing work queues where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together as well as providing simpler connectivity to a machine for desktop flows, eliminating the need for additional installs and managing password management.

Power Virtual Agents offers a new unified authoring canvas that is Microsoft’s single conversational AI studio for all bot-building needs. With the continuing integration with Microsoft Bot Framework capabilities and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, bot creators—from subject matter experts to developers—are empowered to begin building today with the public preview. The advanced authoring canvas will be generally available this wave.

AI Builder will bring document processing improvements that will include more prebuilt model capabilities like contract processing, the ability to identify personal information, and the possibility to extract field types from documents. We’re also focusing on facilitating model governance and licensing by improving our admin interfaces to make it easier to govern how AI Builder credits are used across environments, apps, and flows.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 1 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 plan. 

2023 release wave 1 for Microsoft Power Platform

The first release wave of the year offers many new features and enhancements for Microsoft Power Platform.

Learn more

Early access period 

Starting January 30, 2023, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2023. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and effectively plan for your customer rollout. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2023 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page.   

View the latest product updates and release highlights, and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365 or Power Platform. 

The post 2023 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On July 12, 2022, we published the 2022 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between October 2022 and March 2023. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners. 

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

• Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer journey orchestration to enable business-to-business (B2B) brands to hyper-personalize experiences across the entire buying journey and confidently grow their marketing and customer experience programs to target up to 100 million customers with up to 300 million messages and interactions per month. Intuitive lead capture forms, leads nurturing hands-off automation, and a new analytics dashboard enable alignment between sales and marketing teams like never before. Organizations can reach new levels of marketing maturity with AI-powered next best content selection and increased support for business units.  
• Dynamics 365 Sales continues to optimize the seller experience using data and AI to help sellers prioritize their work, blending business and productivity tools to meet sellers where they are and driving in-the-moment collaboration experiences so that every seller can engage with their colleagues and customers efficiently, reclaiming their time and being more productive.  
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering the capabilities that help run contact centers optimally by providing enhancements in unified routing with features such as percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing. Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams will help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration. Organizations can empower their customers with options to leave voicemail, callback, and dial agents directly in the voice channel. The agent experience is modernized with an enhanced conversation timeline, horizontal multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary. Supervisors can view Microsoft Power Virtual Agents analytics within their omnichannel analytics dashboards.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service brings new capabilities that enable organizations to better orchestrate service operations for workers. Organizations can now build and maintain location and assets for large facilities, keep their cost at bay by configuring “not to exceed” limits, and group similar incident types under “trade” for ease of management. We are also bringing optimization improvements on booking lock constraints and introducing a myriad of user experience improvements to the mobile app to continue empowering frontline workers.  
• Dynamics 365 Finance is launching the general availability of vendor invoice optical character recognition (OCR) which automates the reading and recognition of vendor invoices and continues adding additional capabilities for subscription billing use cases. We will integrate tax calculation service with Dynamics 365 Project Operations (preview) and extend electronic invoicing service to support new upcoming e-invoice legislations for France, Poland, and Saudi Arabia. 
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to invest in capabilities that drive agility and resilience across the supply chain. New analytics and support for multiple vendors in planning optimization help organizations optimize their sourcing strategies. Inventory visibility lets organizations track real-time consumption within allocated quantities in support of promotions, special events, and new product introductions. Guided warehouse implementation and configuration experiences enable rapid reconfiguration of supply chains and manufacturers in the process industry can use Planning Optimization for shortening their planning cycles. 
• Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management has continued to expand its ecosystem of providers and built on the continued success of FedEx. We now have 14 providers that span the supply chain lifecycle from order ingestion to last-mile delivery. In the upcoming release, we are adding support for various order types—back orders, subscription orders, manual orders, and purchase orders. We will also provide the ability to simulate fulfillment so that our customers can model and understand the impact of choosing various fulfillment strategies. Finally, we also have contextual collaboration features where an order can be shared with multiple stakeholders using embedded Microsoft Teams. 
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations is continuing to invest in capabilities to empower project managers and project teams in this release wave with project budgeting and time-phased forecasting, baselines and snapshots, and in modernizing application experiences on the web and mobile form factors. For the project accountants and back-office personas, we are lighting up advanced subcontracting and subscription billing capabilities. In addition, across-the-board investments to ease the complexity of interaction patterns and uptake of modern and fluent controls are also targeted for this release wave.
• Dynamics 365 Guides will continue investing in capabilities to improve collaboration experiences for authors and operators on Microsoft HoloLens 2. The application will also be updated to provide more advanced content authoring workflows versioning and publishing of guides in the coming wave. 
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources will bring improved efficiency by enabling human resource business partners to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes where manual decisions and tasks are needed today. Improved efficiency will also be available to managers and employees by providing notifications outside of the application for benefits processes and tasks. We’ll also be providing better experiences across Dynamics 365 applications by integrating employee skill and compensation, and leaving information to resource managers in Dynamics 365 Project Operations.  
• Dynamics 365 Commerce enables new and updated B2B experiences, including sales agreements across channels and customer-specific catalogs. Omnichannel media management features streamline workflows. Key point of sale investments includes Store Commerce app availability for iOS and Android devices. And Apple Pay and Google Pay digital wallet integration, as well as new customer support options through virtual agent and live agent integration will be available for e-commerce.
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will be offering a new transaction acceptance booster (TAB) offering that allows merchants to increase their bank approval rates without having to rip and replace their incumbent fraud provider solution. Having to rip and replace a merchant’s incumbent fraud solution is costly and timely, this enables the merchant to benefit from Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection TAB capabilities with minimal disruption to their business.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to improve the reporting capabilities for customers, including new report datasets for Excel and improvements to the Microsoft Power BI reports which now will support dimensions. The Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate integration also continue to offer new capabilities for low-code development. The application will get several improvements like helping users do reverse entries in the payment reconciliation journal and several improvements to the supply chain functionality. We are taking steps forward in scaling productivity of our partners via more efficient and performant tooling for development and administration.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights continues to invest in accelerating customer understanding by enhancing time to value with quicker out-of-the-box insights, predictions, segments, and measures with limitless extensibility across technology ecosystems. New features will allow you to power personalized experiences with real-time insights, analytics, and activations to deliver industry-leading personalization and moments-based marketing. New features also enable ubiquitous insights that allow an integrated data flow across Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform for seamless workflows.
• Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces now supports alerts and notifications via Teams or Outlook when business AI-skills detect actionable patterns within a physical space. Customers can now use Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces in Germany (besides US and UK) and connect up to 10 cameras for each Azure Stack Edge device maximizing their existing investments in expanding Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces across their physical footprint. Customers can also leverage the Azure Stack Edge Pro 2 device for configuring Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces at the edge in addition to the existing Pro 1 devices.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

• Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. Creation experience is improved by aligning our experiences with Office and enabling datasets authoring on the web. By bringing power query diagram view into Power BI Desktop, creators can use a no code experience to perform extract transform load (ETL) on their data. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to metrics focused on enterprise needs and integration with Microsoft Viva Goals. In addition, big data experience is increased through automatic aggregations, query scale out, data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP), and providing improved visibility into activity to admins. 
• Power Apps will expand governance capabilities to allow organizations to enable, manage, and support citizen development across the entire organization. Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive over Dataverse in a unified studio, with modern experiences to build and manage data and logic, as well as infused intelligence to support development, enrich data, and optimize end-user experiences. In addition to ensuring trust and the ability to leverage rich data experiences, both makers and end-users will benefit from out-of-the-box collaboration capabilities to enable users to be more productive when working together.
• Power Pages continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development as well professional developers. Some of the salient capabilities in this release allow makers to have additional capabilities to work with forms and lists using the design studio and get them started quickly using additional solution templates. There are enhancements for professional developers to do more with the sites using Microsoft Power Platform command line interface (CLI) tool and visual studio (VS) Code as well as for administrators to better administer and govern their Power Pages sites. 
• Power Automate is more accessible than ever before with new experiences to help users of every skill level build out their cloud and desktop flows. Organizations need to automate their deployments of Power Automate, so there are additional enhancements for application lifecycle management (ALM). And, with increased usage of robotic process automation (RPA), we are adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts.
• Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Pages integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Teams, and more. Creating a bot is typically a complex and time-intensive process, requiring long content update cycles and a team of experts. Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user’s questions. 
• AI Builder continues to enable citizen developers to use and customize AI capabilities to build more intelligent apps and workflows. Lifecycle and governance of AI Builder models will be improved with enhanced versioning, deployment, and monitoring capabilities. Makers will also benefit from new features for intelligent document and text processing like the ability to manage human in-the-loop validation, easier integration of large data sets for automated e-mail processing, and the ability to process contracts and multi-page tables in documents.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2 plans. 

Early access period 

Starting August 1, 2022, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2022. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform pages. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page. 

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform product updates and product roadmaps, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform. 

The post 2022 release wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we published the 2022 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2022 and September 2022. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners. Register now for the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on Wednesday, April 6, 2022, from 9:00–10:30 AM Pacific Time.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Dynamics 365 Marketing continues to invest in collaboration by enabling collaborative content creation with Microsoft Teams. Marketers can use content fragments and themes to improve authoring efficiency. Investments in Data and AI enable marketers to also author content with advanced personalization using codeless experiences. Every customer interaction matters, and in this release, we are enabling our customers to continue the conversation with their customers by responding to SMS replies through a personalized experience based on responses using custom keywords that can be added to journeys.
• Dynamics 365 Sales is putting data to work and enabling seamless collaboration to empower sales professionals to be more productive and deliver value in every customer interaction. Business data is now ambient and actionable from within Microsoft 365 interfaces, enabling sellers to quickly establish context and act on data. Using a single workspace in the Sales Hub, sellers can adjust their sales pitch using AI-guided live feedback and suggestions, and managers can track team performance and provide valuable coaching to help boost customer satisfaction.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to invest in delivering capabilities that ensure personalized service across channels, empower agents, and make collaboration easier in an ever-increasing remote world. With the new Customer Service Admin center app, we’re simplifying the setup with guided, task-based experiences making it easier to get up and running quickly. Enhancements to the inbox view allow agents to rapidly work through issues across channels while maintaining a focus on the customer. Investments in collaboration with Microsoft Teams include data integration, AI-suggested contacts, and AI-generated conversation summaries. Lastly, investments in knowledge management include relevance search integration and historical analytics, and unified routing with default queue enhancements and routing diagnostics.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service brings innovative enhancements and usability improvements to the schedule board. The new schedule board is now at functional parity with the previous version, and we are enhancing the user experience of hourly and multi-day views to improve dispatcher productivity. Additionally, the Field Service mobile application includes enhancements to boost technician productivity and is now fully supported on Windows devices. 
• Dynamics 365 Finance is launching the general availability of subscription billing to ensure organizations can thrive in a service-based economy. We are enabling our customers to maximize financial visibility and profitability by bringing intelligent automation around vendor invoicing, financial close through ledger settlements, and year-end close services. In addition, we are releasing to market the preview of Tax Audit and Reporting Service. Lastly, we continue to enhance our globalization offerings in Globalization Studio such as Tax Calculation and Electronic Invoicing. With Globalization Studio, these low-code globalization services and their multi-country content will be available to any first and third-party app and extended with prebuilt ISV connectors.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management investments continue to focus on driving agility and resilience in the supply chain. Enhanced warehouse and manufacturing execution workloads enable businesses to scale mission-critical operations using cloud and edge scale units. Planning Optimization brings new manufacturing scenarios and planning strategies to help businesses, and manufacturers, shorten planning cycles, reduce inventory levels, and improve customer service. The new global inventory accounting functionality allows inventory accounting in multiple representations to simplify operations for businesses working in multiple currencies or facing different local and global accounting standards.
• Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management brings an expanded set of out-of-the-box provider integrations, enabling rapid deployment and connectivity to an ecosystem of solutions in the order capture, logistics, fulfillment, and delivery process flows. Combined with the rich ecosystem of providers, customers will have the ability to achieve advanced order orchestration using the new expanded set of features and optimizations supported in inventory orchestration, order actions, and fulfillment. This release wave brings a brand-new Returns and Exchange management service directly integrated into e-commerce solutions. This service enables customers to orchestrate journeys that minimize operational costs related to getting merchandise back on shelves and drive clear communication with their consumers.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations is investing in enabling capabilities ranging from onboarding, estimating, and using resources from external talent pools helping to boost efficiencies in project planning and delivery. Customers will also be able to upgrade from Project Service Automation to Project Operations using an in-place upgrade experience. In addition, customers can bring their own project management tools through a generic API where task scheduling can happen in the project management tool of choice and then integrate to Project Operations, becoming available to users in a read-only manner. Resource scheduling and booking would remain in Project Operations.
• Dynamics 365 Guides continues to invest in capabilities that improve the collaboration experiences for authors and operators on HoloLens 2. The application will also be updated to support guest access so that customers can share their guides with users outside of their organization.
• Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is investing in B2B service scenarios by bringing one-time calling to general availability and supporting additional calling policies for external users. Additionally, we are updating the Remote Assist mobile app to support improved collaboration through the ability to share screens across iOS and Android.
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources will equip HR professionals with the ability to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes when employees are joining, leaving, and moving within an organization. We will also provide intelligent talent management capabilities to enable companies to understand the gap between the skills needed for the organization and employees to be successful, and the skillset held by the organization’s current workforce. By providing this intelligent talent management capability, Dynamics 365 Human Resources enables companies to ensure the right people are in the right jobs, but also plan for the future.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in key B2B commerce scenarios, including sales agreements, on-behalf-of ordering, and partner-specific product catalogs and pricing. This release also introduces customer segmentation and targeting with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and out-of-box A/B experimentation and analytics tools. The new Store Commerce app streamlines point of sale deployment and servicing while improving performance. New workflows in headquarters, bulk image upload, and manifest-driven upload simplify the management of media assets across channels. Lastly, customer service functionality is easily enabled on your e-commerce site with Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel for Customer Service.
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is delivering multiple new capabilities in this release. Operators of Payment Service Providers will be able to offer fraud protection as a service to their businesses, including those that have multi hierarchy business structure. Deep search capabilities enhancing analytics and policy settings have now been enabled as well as integrated case management for purchase protection. In addition, Fraud Protection now offers support for native mobile applications as well as businesses building their offering on top of Power App portals. Finally, customers will be able to choose to have Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection provisioned within Canada if they have specific data residency needs or latency requirements that would require it.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to simplify the customer onboarding experience by offering a modern Help Pane that gives users guidance and learning content where they need it most, in the context of their work. The Help Pane flattens the learning curve, increasing productivity, and business process adoption. Customers using Microsoft Power Platform can use the new capabilities of our connectors. In this release, we are making it easier to trigger a Power Automate flow directly from Business Central pages, which can save time by automating business processes. Collaborating on Business Central data in Microsoft Teams is smoother because we’ve removed the licensing friction. 
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform, expands the footprint of consent enablement features across more areas within Customer Insights. It enables customers to integrate and harmonize consent data from multiple consent systems and data sources. This will ensure that consent permissions and preferences of your customers are honored during real-time personalization scenarios in Customer Insights. New data enrichment capabilities will enable customers to leverage our safe data collaboration capability to share and enrich their customer data. Safe data collaboration puts you in control of your data with privacy-enabled workflows to join and enrich your data with other datasets.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

• Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. For individuals, we are improving the create experience through the addition of measures using natural language and allowing users to collaborate via OneDrive. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to Goals focused on enterprise needs, integration with PowerPoint, and adding new capabilities to the Power BI integration in Teams. To empower the organization, we are improving our experience with big data through automatic aggregations, data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and providing improved visibility into user activity to admins.
• Power Apps maintains focus on enabling developers of all skill levels to build enterprise-class apps infused with intelligence and collaboration capabilities. Makers will be able to collaborate on the same app to simultaneously work and merge changes to accelerate development and track collaboration. Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive with Dataverse, leveraging intelligence to assist development with natural language to code, powered by advanced AI models such as GPT-3 and PROSE. Most importantly, we are including key updates to ensure organizations can deliver flagship apps across the entire company faster and safer than ever. These include allowing packaging of apps to be deployed on Android and iOS and improvements to ALM and governance capabilities to ensure safe and scalable rollouts.
• Power Apps portals continue to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development as well for professional developers. Some of the salient capabilities for makers include converting portals into cross-platform mobile applications by enabling them as progressive web apps, an option to use Global search powered via Dataverse search integration, and enhancements for professional developers to do more with portals using Microsoft Power Platform PAC CLI tool.
• Power Automate is more accessible than ever, which makes it easier to get started automating tasks no matter where you are in Microsoft 365. We have seen customers of all sizes increase the scale of their robotic process automation (RPA) deployments; therefore, we are adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of users and accounts. Finally, all the features we are building are increasingly automatable by default, adhering to the API-first approach, so that IT departments can manage their Power Automate infrastructure in whatever way they want.
• Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Apps portals integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more.
• AI Builder is adding capabilities around document automation—in particular, the ability to process unstructured documents, such as contracts or e-mails. By extracting insights from the semantic understanding of the text in unstructured documents, customers will be able to extract key information from documents and process them automatically in an end-to-end flow using Power Automate. We are also focusing on building out a Feedback Loop process, enabling improvement of model accuracy by retraining models with data processed in production. Lastly, we are adding capabilities to effectively manage the governance and lifecycle of AI Models.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 1 plans.

Early access period

Starting January 31, 2022, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2022. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform pages. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest product updates and plans, register for the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2022 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On July 14, 2021, we published the 2021 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between October 2021 and March 2022. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Dynamics 365 Marketing is improving experiences and capabilities for creating moments-based and segment-based customer journeys that span all customer touchpoints taking personalization to the next level. Marketers will be able to create segments for leads and custom entities in the new segmentation builder experience using natural language to build segments and target audiences quickly and easily. Quickly generate email content using GPT-3 AI and then optimize with our streamlined AB testing tools.
• Dynamics 365 Sales launches the general availability of Deal Manager, a new, modern workspace for managing your pipeline, as well as enhancements to the integration between Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams, including more collaboration tools and calling capabilities. Seller productivity investments include LinkedIn integration enhancements for easy access to Sales Navigator, forecasting updates, and guided selling improvements with Sales Accelerator. Several new capabilities are also coming to the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile application, now available in the iOS and Android app stores.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service enhances knowledge authoring with AI-suggested keywords and brief descriptions for knowledge articles. The intelligent routing service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. Additionally, we are investing in routing diagnostics for supervisors, machine learning-based rules for classification such as sentiment analysis and effort estimation, and improved historical analytics.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service continues down the path of providing easy customer engagement: a new customer portal will incorporate existing capabilities such as technician locator and new general availability capabilities such as self-scheduling and appointment management to enhance service and customer communication. Additionally, a refreshed work order form will enhance user productivity.
• Dynamics 365 Finance launches the general availability of Finance Insights to focus on data-driven insights empowering customers with out-of-the-box machine learning for their financial operations. To ensure that financial activities close on time, we are enabling our customers to increase productivity when it critically matters the most: we are bringing enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions. We continue to enhance our globalization offering with additional localizations and the general availability of our Tax Calculation service.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management invests in enabling a resilient supply chain with enhancements in key areas such as resource planning, manufacturing, and warehousing. We will enable businesses to optimize their usage of available material and capacity to avoid stockout situations and keep the business flowing. New manufacturing execution scenarios are included to allow integration between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution (MES) solutions, and shop floor automation systems for our customers to be able to adopt and integrate new business models with ease.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers functionally rich experiences to create and manage subcontracts with vendors for projects, as well as task scheduling enhancements.
• Dynamics 365 Guides will be updated to further leverage the hand tracking capabilities available on HoloLens 2, making Dynamics 365 Guides an easier to use and more intuitive application. While users will still be able to operate a guide with hands-free interactions, core application workflows will be simpler and faster with a touch-enabled holographic interface.
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to enhance Benefits management capabilities by investing in a simplified setup and configuration user experience. We are continuing our journey to bring capabilities to employees in their flow of work and enhancing the current capability set as part of our Dynamics 365 Human Resources app for Microsoft Teams. Employees can submit, edit, and cancel their existing leave requests using the Teams app. We are also enhancing the manager’s ability to view more details about their direct reports’ leave balances and have better visibility of the team and company calendar.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce prioritizes customer segmentation and targeting using site builder to target customer segments with specific page layouts and content as well as improved understanding for how end-users interact with pages across sites, including mouse-action recordings, heatmaps, and analytics by integrating with Microsoft Clarity.

• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will have multiple new features that enhance Payment Service Providers (PSPs) ability to offer Fraud Protection as a value-added service to all their merchants. PSPs will be able to integrate Fraud Protection easily into their existing infrastructure to manage PSPs taxonomies that encompass many merchants and multiple hierarchies within each merchant entity.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central delivers new capabilities designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions. Application enhancements expand the integration with Microsoft 365 and add country and regional expansions with over 10 new markets.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Voice focuses this release wave on facilitating actionable insights for survey owners to act on feedback. Survey owners will be able to get feedback insights quickly and use Power Automate to define custom workflows to engage the right person at the right time.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights audience insights capabilities enable every organization to unify and understand their B2C and B2B customer data to harness it for intelligent insights and actions. For this release wave, in the B2B area, in addition to churn predictions for individual customer records, audience insights will predict the likelihood of churn for accounts using the same straightforward guided experience. Data ingestion enhancements in Customer Insights include additional Power Query connectors and improvements to the data ingestion process. Engagement insights (preview) in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enable individual and holistic interactive analytics over web, mobile, and connected products customer journey touchpoints. Engagement insights expand to multichannel analytics over data from other channels for richer customer analytics, downstream actions, and optimizations.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

• Power BI continues to invest in three key areas that drive a data culture: empower every individual with AI-infused insights, empower every team with BI woven into the fabric where teams work, and empower every organization to meet the most demanding enterprise needs. Power BI Pro continues to invest in our creator experiences with new report authoring tools. Consumer experiences continue to evolve, both in the Power BI service and the Power BI mobile applications. This includes improvements to Excel export from table and matrix visuals and easy creation from Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365. Lastly, Power BI integration in Microsoft Teams continues to evolve, deepening the integration in channels, chats, and notifications within Teams. Power BI Premium continues to invest in the following areas: Auto-scale and pay-as-you-go pricing to scale beyond resource capacity without drops in performance. Interactive experiences over big data by making reports highly performant automatically on big data sources such as Azure Synapse Analytics.
• Power Apps brings significant improvements for developers of all skill levels, improving the sophistication and usability of apps that can be created across the web and mobile devices. We are launching the unified, modern Power Apps designer to quickly build modern apps leveraging the best of both canvas and model in a single app. Developers can now take advantage of intelligent authoring, using AI in Power Apps Studio to generate code using natural language for rapid app development. Makers will also be able to configure apps for offline use using a reinvented maker experience. Power Apps portals is focused on enhancements in the areas of portals platform, new capabilities for pro-development, and increased developer productivity. Several new capabilities are being added with a specific focus on pro-development such as the general availability of portals support for Power Apps component framework as well as support for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) using Power Apps command-line interface (CLI)—the first step toward a comprehensive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) story for developers and ISVs.
• Power Automate continues to invest in several areas including Cloud flows with templates for Microsoft Teams and further integrations enabling administrators to push solutions that contain flows across the teams in their organization. Document automation, an end-to-end solution for processing documents at scale for document data extraction, becomes generally available during this release wave. Power Automate Desktop brings more WinAutomation actions to Desktop flows as well as new RPA-enabled scenarios for more Dynamics 365 applications, and it will be possible to use Dataverse and over 475 API connectors directly from Desktop flows.
• Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with topic suggestions from bot sessions, Power Apps Portals integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more. We’re also building on our Power Automate integration with enhanced error handling and new topic trigger management to improve your bot’s triggering capabilities.
• AI Builder will focus on providing new functionalities centered around intelligent document processing experiences. New functionalities will include the ability to extract a broader set of content types in documents such as checkboxes, signatures, typed fields like date and currency, as well as support for more prebuilt models in the Document Automation solution (for example, receipts and invoices). Integration of AI Models will also be supported through the Power Apps formula bar.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 2 plans.

Early access period

Starting August 2, 2021, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2021. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform pages. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.

Learn more

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.

The post 2021 release wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we published the 2021 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2021 and September 2021. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on deeper personalization to engage customers, more channels to reach customers with the right messages, and analytics to improve results and achieve your business goals.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is adding enhancements to save time so sellers can focus on selling, to provide more access to data insights, and to enhance the mobile experience for sellers on-the-go. Look out for updates to automation and sequencing, Conversation Intelligence, and many exciting updates to the mobile app!
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is delivering the all-in-one contact center, now with first-party voice built on Azure Communication Services and intelligent, skill-based, omnichannel routing across channels. In addition, we are enhancing agent productivity capabilities in knowledge management, timeline, email, and agent dashboards.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces a comprehensive experience for customers that will allow them to self-schedule service and rate technicians to ensure the maximum satisfaction. These investments matched with enhanced productivity capabilities for technicians through the new knowledge management module will enable the best technician and customer relationship.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance brings our intelligent cash flow offering to preview with automation based on predictive results. Users will experience out of the box machine learning showing when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting what budget should be, and viewing forecasted cash positions. We continue to expand localizations; this release adds Egypt, extending the number of out-of-the-box countries and regions to 43 and the number of languages to 48. We are also shipping the general availability of Electronic Invoicing Add-on for Dynamics 365—the first configurable globalization microservice that extends existing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations. This will provide better scalability and agility for customers to adapt to changing regulatory requirements.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides a unified real-time view across finance, manufacturing, supply chain, warehouse, inventory, and transportation management in one single application for running a business. The cloud asset management software leverages scale units in the cloud to run mission-critical processes without interruption. Advanced predictive analytics and Power Platform tie-ins have allowed us to optimize and automate asset management, IoT, machine telemetry, planning, warehousing, material sourcing, and logistics. Other notable features for this release are in the areas of rebates, inbound landed cost, and global inventory accounting.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers rich new experiences with the ability to forecast, use, and invoice non-stocked materials on projects and enables the ability to setup contractual commitments like billing methods and chargeability rules by task or a work breakdown schedule element. Customers using Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation will be able to upgrade to Dynamics 365 Project Operations when upgrade scripts become available.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is focusing on intelligent workflows. By taking further advantage of data captured with Microsoft HoloLens as well as AI innovations, users can get to work and confirm their results faster and simpler than ever.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to broaden the Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem through integration APIs and strategic partnerships. The employee experience expands to support additional enhancements for benefits management such as notifications, summary statements, and a consolidated view of employee’s enrollments.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce has released new capabilities that are now available in preview to support B2B operational flows for the e-commerce channel. This B2B offering provides our customers with an integrated B2B and B2C e-commerce offering in a single commerce solution with unified merchandising and site management capabilities enabling a wide range of business models across industries and verticals. Also, generally available in this wave are multiple functional and usability enhancements to the existing buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) processing flows. These new BOPIS enhancements will allow organizations more flexibility to offer their shoppers multiple pick-up delivery options and allows for configuration and selection of pickup timeslots.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection adds behavioral and mobile fingerprinting improving the accuracy of fraud management rules.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central delivers a set of new features designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions. Application enhancements expands the integration with Teams and adds country and regional expansions.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice expands the capabilities to collect feedback with pre-filled answers, file upload support, drill down question type, and customized survey header. Additional capabilities designed to improve survey response rate includes pause and resume survey to enable users to complete the survey on a different device, automated survey reminders for recipients who have not filled the survey, and over-surveyed management to avoid sending too many surveys to the same person within a given period. Finally, creating a follow up action workflow is made easier with Microsoft Power Automate survey response trigger.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights audience insights capabilities enables every organization to unify and understand their customer data. Audience Insights added support for on-premises data ingestion including new Power Query connectors, additional controls for AI-based data unification, new first- and third-party enrichments like Experian, new predictive models for transaction churn, and support for new first- and third-party activation destinations like Marketo. The engagement insights capability (preview) in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organizations to interactively understand how their customers are using their products and services—both individually and holistically—through their website, mobile apps, and connected products touchpoints. Engagement insights expands to multi-channel analytics over data from other channels for richer customer analytics, downstream actions, and optimizations.

Industry accelerators

• Dynamics 365 education accelerator adds a marketing and communications feature which will allow districts and ministries of education to effectively take a proactive communication approach with various stakeholders such as educators, community members, and parents.
• Dynamics 365 media and communications accelerator further expands on the “fan engagement” theme adding additional support for virtual events and health and hygiene at physical venues. This release includes features to aid in registering and participating in virtual sessions and Teams-based events as well as additions for importing content metadata enabling search personalization and other key enhancements.

Highlights from Power Platform

• Microsoft Power BI continues to invest in three key areas that drive a data culture: amazing data experiences, integrations where teams work, and modern enterprise BI.
  • Power BI Pro delivers AI infused insights to help everyone easily discover insights. We will also continue to make authoring Power BI content easier than ever through the new Quick Create experiences while continuing to evolve our advanced capabilities like small multiples and composite models. Power BI will further expand the integration with Teams with new experiences in Teams channels, meetings, and chat.
  • Power BI Premium continues to deliver features that help organizations accelerate the delivery of insights at scale, meeting the most demanding needs of an enterprise. This release adds flexible licensing models for organizations to choose between per user and per capacity licensing options.
  • Power BI Embedded delivers a new generation of the product helping customers increase their ROI, scale rapidly, and get up to 16x faster performance. Customers will also get visibility into utilization at the workspace level, enabling consistent utilization analysis and cost management. In addition, Embedded Generation 2 introduces a lower entry level for paginated reports and AI workloads—start with an A1 SKU and grow as you need!
• Microsoft Power Apps combines the flexibility of a blank canvas that can connect to any data source with the power of rich forms, views, and dashboards modeled over data in Microsoft Dataverse. This release adds Monitor for end-user app debugging capabilities, printing support (one top ask from our maker community), and mixed reality capabilities for canvas apps. We are also enhancing the global relevance search experience and adding in-app notifications for model-driven apps. Power Apps portals enhances Power BI integration to support Microsoft Azure Analysis Services live connections and enables the ability to send custom data objects, which provide additional context for personalizing reports and dashboards for end users. On the Dataverse for Teams front, we added the ability to share apps with colleagues outside a team and enabled editing of table data in excel.
• Microsoft Power Automate enhances cloud flow integration with other Microsoft products. For example, there is a new trigger when an action is performed in Microsoft Dataverse. This feature improves working with the common events model and provides better integration with Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations. Power Automate Desktop was released to general availability in December 2020, and it enables makers to automate the diversity of applications on their desktops. Going forward, we will provide migration for existing Softomotive and UI flows customers, secure credential management, and much more. Finally, there are improved experiences in Process advisor, a process mining capability in Power Automate that reveals insights into how people work, provides rich visualizations where users can identify repetitive, time-consuming processes best suited for automation.
• Microsoft Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with topic suggestions from bot sessions, image and video support, and new topic trigger management to improve your bot’s triggering capabilities. For Power Virtual Agents (PVA) bots authored in Teams we are adding the “@mention” capability, and the ability to share your bot with a security group. We are also building on our Power Automate integration with better error handling. Finally, we will acquire PCI and HITRUST certifications and support for the government cloud.
• AI Builder, a Power Platform capability, will introduce new AI functionalities in preview as well as form processing improvements. New capabilities include new region availability and signature detection in form processing in order to detect if a signature is present at a specific location in a document.

For a complete list of new capabilities, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 plans.

Early access period

Starting February 1, 2021, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2021. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform pages. For questions, visit the Early Access FAQ page.

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.

The post 2021 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we published the 2020 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that will be released between October 2020 and March 2021. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Dynamics 365 Sales includes updates for more simplified experiences; including collaboration tools, a new mobile experience for quick access to customer information, and new enhancements to forecasting to natively create and manage bottom-up sales forecast processes.
• Dynamics 365 Sales Insights continues investments in digital selling across multiple areas: sales acceleration, conversation intelligence, relationship intelligence, and advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence with predictive lead and opportunity scorings to help sales teams uncover top deals.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands agent productivity capabilities enabling agents to engage in multiple sessions simultaneously. Omnichannel for Customer Service is enhanced with additional extensibility options to enable integration with mobile applications, Microsoft bot framework, and outbound messaging channels.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights adds new capabilities to help agents using similar case suggestions to resolve customer issues quickly and easily. A new analytical view for customer service managers helps them focus on key support areas that need attention. These highlights will also be included directly in the core Customer Service Hub app so that users can get insights in context without having to switch between applications.
• Dynamics 365 Remote Assist expands its range of scenarios beyond calls, allowing technicians to perform activities such as capture service and repairs data, perform surveys and walk-throughs independently, and derive service insights from their service operations. Availability to non-AR enabled devices with modified functionality further empowers technicians to solve problems faster the first time in more environments.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service continues to add intelligence capabilities including a new Field Service dashboard for monitoring key KPIs and work order completion metrics. There are many user experience enhancements to enable proactive service delivery. The Field Service mobile app is enhanced with capabilities such as push notifications and real-time location sharing. This release wave also includes scheduling enhancements such as multi-day manual scheduling and enhanced skill-based matching.
• Dynamics 365 Marketing improves the customer journey design experience, for example layout options, zoom, and performance improvements. Integration with Microsoft Teams live events and meetings allows users to create and host live events as a webinar provider. Segmentation is enhanced with a new natural language experience to create and consume customer segments, helping eliminate the specialized skills needed to build complex segments.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights continues to enhance data ingestion and unification, segmentation, and extensibility capabilities using Microsoft Power Platform to enable and extend line-of-business experiences. For example, users can gain deeper customer insights with Microsoft Power BI, build custom apps with Microsoft Power Apps, and trigger workflows based on insights and signals using Microsoft Power Automate.
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources expands leave and absence, and benefits management capabilities to transform the employee experience. Employees and managers will be able to manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams. We continue to build an HCM ecosystem enabling integrations to recruiting and payroll partners.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to expand capabilities enabling marketers and non-developers to easily create and manage e-commerce sites with built-in experimentation capabilities. We are improving in-store and curbside pickup scenarios to help customers thrive in the face of the COVID impact. In addition, we are making it easier to increase engagement and conversions online and in-store with AI-powered “shop similar looks” recommendations and intelligent search experiences through Bing for Commerce.
• Dynamics 365 Connected Store adds a number of new capabilities such as integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce, front-line worker task assignment and tracing with Microsoft Teams, integrated workflows with Power Platform, intelligent command center, store analytics, and store insights solutions such as anomaly detection, inventory recommendations, and shift management recommendations.
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection adds integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce and a new “manual review” capability that allows customers to use the Fraud Protection rules experience to flag transactions for review, and then allow expert human agents to consume and adjudicate those transactions.
• Dynamics 365 Finance continues to focus on automating common tasks to reduce the number of processes that finance users complete manually. We are introducing Asset leasing to enhance the core capabilities of Finance and continue to expand our global coverage delivering localizations for five additional countries/regions (Bahrain, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar) extending the number of supported countries/regions to 42.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management expands planning optimization for manufacturing to perform supply and production planning in near real-time with in-memory services. Enhancements to Product Information Management include engineering change management and production versioning capabilities. Cost Management includes new features that will enable global companies maintain multiple cost accounting ledgers by allowing dual currency and dual valuation. Enhancements to the job card device include a new user experience and a new feature to enable reporting serial numbers.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations unifies operational workflows to provide the visibility, collaboration, and insights needed to drive success across teams from sales to finance. Project Operations connects your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams within a single application to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability.
• Dynamics 365 Guides prioritizes updates in this release wave on intelligent workflows. By taking advantage of data and AI innovations, work instructions can be configured to adjust on the fly based on operator inputs. In addition, insights will make it easier to use time-tracking data and connect that data to your business.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central investments for this release wave include service enhancements to meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base, improved performance, handling of file storage, geographic expansion together with support for Group VAT, top customer requested features, and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams.

Highlights from Power Platform

• Power Apps includes significant improvements for Power Apps developers of all skill levels, improving the sophistication and usability of apps that are created across the web and mobile devices. Makers will be able to create Power Apps directly within Microsoft Teams in order to easily customize the Teams experience. Makers will also be able to add custom pages to model-driven apps using the app designer, bringing together the best of canvas and model capabilities, including creating custom layouts and components. Power Apps portals adds Microsoft Power Virtual Agents as a component in the Power Apps portals studio, as well as support for code components created using Power Apps component framework. AI Builder introduces new AI scenarios for receipt scanning and translation, and improvements to connect to remote training data. The AI builder home page and model details page are updated to improve discoverability and integration with Power Apps and Power Automate.
• Power BI is investing in three key areas that drive a data culture: amazing data experiences, modern enterprise BI, and insights where decisions are made. Power BI Desktop includes many new capabilities for users to create content quickly and easily, enabling authors to empower their users, enterprise grade content creation, and AI-infused authoring experiences. Power BI Mobile adds split view support for iPad and Power BI Service integrates with Azure Synapse to automatically create and manage materialized views on larger Power BI models as well as enhanced integration with SharePoint lists to build additional custom reports. We continue to enhance our Data protection capabilities enabling customers to classify and label sensitive data.
• Power Automate enhancements will combine the best of WinAutomation with the cloud-based AI builder and connector-based capabilities in automated flows. This new version will offer customers a way to automate everything from Office apps to legacy terminal applications that haven’t been updated in decades. In addition, enhancements to automated flows running in the cloud will include richer automation and approval experiences.
• Power Virtual Agents brings expanded capabilities in the authoring experience including tools to create richer content, Adaptive Cards capabilities, topic suggestions from documents, improved Power Automate integration, voice integration with smart speakers, theming to customize the look and feel of the bot, and much more.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 release wave 2 plans.

Early access period

Starting August 3, 2020, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2020. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform pages. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.

The post 2020 release wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Key dates for the upcoming release wave

Business conditions are in constant flux. To help you rapidly adjust to change and drive strong business outcomes, we deliver new capabilities in two six-month release waves. Each release wave comprises hundreds of new and updated capabilities for products across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Stay up to date on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product updates for the latest release wave details.

Today, we are announcing the key dates for the second release wave of updates planned for 2020, starting October 2020. We encourage our customers and partners to reference these dates to plan and prepare for the upcoming release wave with confidence.

• July 8, 2020: Release plans available
  Learn about the new upcoming capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
• August 3, 2020: Early access available
  Try the new features and capabilities that will be part of the October update of the 2020 release wave 2 before they are enabled automatically.
• October 1, 2020: General availability
  This is when the production deployment for the 2020 release wave 2 begins. Regional deployments will commence October 2, 2020.

Planning for the next release wave

On July 8, 2020, we plan to publish the release plans for the 2020 release wave 2 with the initial list of features for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform that will be delivered during the release wave. The release plans provide our customers and partners with early visibility to get ready for the updates planned from October 2020 to March 2021.

Starting on August 3, we will enable early access to new features and capabilities, enabling customers and partners to validate them in a sandbox instance before being rolled out automatically in October.

Current release wave updates

2020 release wave 1 (April – September 2020)

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we understand that many of our customers and partners have moved to the minimum staff or business continuity model. To support this situation, we extended the early access opt-in period, which gave our customers and partners additional time to test and validate the new capabilities.

To date, 70 percent of the hundreds of features in the wave 1 release have shipped, with the remaining features slated to ship by September 2020, as indicated in the release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

To keep pace with our releases, we encourage our customer, partners, and application administrators to watch the release overview videos. We have multiple assets available for you to watch at your own pace to explore some of the highlights in the release, by application.

2020 release wave 1 overview videos:

Dynamics 365

• Sales
• Sales Insights
• Customer Service
• Field Service
• Human Resources
• Commerce
• Finance
• Finance Insights
• Marketing
• Business Central
• Customer Insights

Power Platform

• Power Apps
• Power Apps portals
• AI Builder
• Power Automate
• Power BI
• Power Virtual Agents

Keeping pace with our release waves

Make sure to continue to check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product updates page for the latest release wave details including release plans, timelines, and overview guides and videos.

If you have any questions or feedback, join the discussion in the Release Readiness forum in the Dynamics community.

The post 2020 release wave 2 timeline for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we published the 2020 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that will be released between April and September 2020. The new features and enhancements demonstrate our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

Dynamics 365

The first release wave of the year contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, and Business Central, our comprehensive business management solution designed for small to medium-sized businesses.

Highlights from Customer Engagement applications include:

• Dynamics 365 Sales continues to focus on user experience and sellers productivity improvements. New features include a new Kanban board to quickly manage activities and opportunities and a new forecasting experience allowing organizations to drive more accountability and success in their sales teams.
• Dynamics 365 Sales Insights expands focus to include inside sales scenarios and enhances conversation intelligence capabilities. New features include deeper conversation analysis with emotion detection to enable sellers with the information they need, when they need it.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands agent productivity tooling to help organizations evolve a proactive and predictive service model.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights optimizes the customer service experience through AI with new capabilities including richer integration with Power Virtual Agents and access to the insights data for in-depth analytics.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service improves effectiveness through a new resource scheduling dashboard, integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and technician time entries.
• Dynamics 365 Marketing remains focused on enabling marketers by enhancing product usability, personalized marketing capabilities with dynamic content for contacts, and integration scenarios with third-party content management systems and Microsoft Forms Pro.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enhances data profiling enrichment and segmentation capabilities, helping organizations better understand their customer data and derive actionable insights to drive business processes.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 Operations, Finance, Commerce, and HR applications include:

• Dynamics 365 Human Resources expands capabilities for human resources professionals, employees, and managers in leave and absence and benefits management programs.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce strengthens the personalized, omnichannel experience for consumers by adding e-commerce, providing smart product recommendations, and enhancing clienteling.
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps merchants increase revenue and reduce fraud losses and costs while improving the consumer’s online check-out experience by releasing two new services, account protection and loss prevention.
• Dynamics 365 Finance releases enhancements to country-specific tax, invoicing, payment formats, and regulatory reporting capabilities to help global organizations stay compliant with newly introduced local regulations.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps organizations reduce operational costs by introducing customer self-service experiences, enhancements to asset management, and the new on-hand inventory service for inventory visibility across Dynamics 365 and other legacy systems.

Power Platform

New Power Platform capabilities combine Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and the Common Data Service into an unmatched palette of tools to analyze data, build solutions, and automate processes. This release includes robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in Power Automate, to automate rule-based tasks with point-and-click simplicity supporting on-premises or cloud-based apps. Power Apps gains significant improvements for developers of all skill levels, improving the sophistication and usability of apps that are created across the web and mobile devices. Microsoft business intelligence simplifies how organizations derive insights from transactional and observational data. It helps organizations create a data culture where employees can make decisions based on facts, not opinions. In this release wave, Power BI invests in four key areas including intuitive experiences, a unified BI platform, big data analytics, and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI).

For a complete list of new capabilities, please checkout the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2020 release wave 1 plans.

Lastly, we continue to enhance our industry accelerators to enable organizations and partners to quickly accelerate application development within a vertical industry.

Early access period for 2020 release wave 1

Starting February 3, 2020, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2020. There are many features available for early access across Dynamics 365 applications and the Power Platform. We encourage application administrators to review these changes to understand the impact and determine if change management for new features is required.

Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence.  For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.

We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.

The post 2020 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.