We’re thrilled to invite you to the first-ever Microsoft Customer Success Day, a free virtual conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform users on March 16, 2023. This event is open to all community members, customers, partners, and enthusiasts, globally. Microsoft is committed to supporting your success, regardless of your company’s size, industry, or location.   

Microsoft Customer Success Day will include more than 20 sessions and panels across four tracks: implementation, adoption, optimization, and migration. In addition, we will have keynotes from thought leaders, and a lively discussion panel on women in technology. All the content is designed to support you in building your own success journey, driving user adoption, and realizing business value for your organization.  

This year’s event will take place back-to-back with the annual DynamicsCon Virtual event—hosted by Dynamics User Group—which takes place on March 15. Best of all, your registration provides access to both events.

Learn more below and register today for updates leading up to the event—we look forward to connecting with you!

Event details

What: Microsoft Customer Success Day

When: March 16, 2023

Who should attend: Anyone who wants to achieve more with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You’ll join thousands of users, enthusiasts, MVPs, experts, and beginners gathered virtually to achieve greater success and business value with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

What to expect: This learning-packed day features more than 20 sessions and panels presented by more than 30 Microsoft team members, Microsoft MVPs, and community experts, including:

– Keynotes from thought leaders at Microsoft who will provide insight into the future of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

– Specialized sessions across four tracks, each designed to deliver skills and best practices that can be applied right away.

• Implementation: The foundation to driving business outcomes is a well-architected, well-built solution. Sessions on this track will include tips and tricks for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales programs, building apps fast through Microsoft Power Apps, while maintaining control of your environment, and developing a compelling business value story.

• Adoption: The best built solution will not drive business outcomes if people don’t use the tool. This track will help you build your own customer success power team with customers describing how they have succeeded post implementation. We’ll discuss change management strategies, partner selection, and even how to use AI to drive success.

• Optimization: Once your solution is built and adopted, it’s time to expand your solution to drive even more impact. We’ll discuss ways to do this using the software you already own, with sessions on sales and marketing alignment, customer experience and Microsoft Viva Sales.

• Migration: For customers still using our on-premises solutions, we’ll discuss the journey to the cloud. We’ll walk through real-world customer programs and highlight what makes a successful migration with sessions like, “Optimize Your Migration to Business Central.”   

– Live question and answer panels, as well as “ask the expert” breakout sessions—your opportunity to connect directly with experts at Microsoft.

Agenda

Microsoft Customer Success Day, March 16

• Opening keynote: Toby Bowers, General Manager of Product Marketing, Business Applications Go-To-Market, will kick off the conference with a welcome keynote. 
• Featured keynotes:  Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, and Emily He, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Marketing, will deliver featured keynotes. Don’t miss this firsthand look at digital innovations shaping the future of business, across industries and roles and best practices to build a resilient, digital-first business. You’ll learn how to amplify business value across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, as well as explore AI, automation, and low-code tools that are helping organizations streamline business processes, enhance collaboration, and improve customer and employee experiences.
• Track-specific keynote sessions: Keynotes from Microsoft leaders, including Swamy Narayana, General Manager of Dynamics 365 FastTrack Program; Monica Flaherty, Senior Director of Customer Success Marketing, Business Applications Go-To-Market; and Jason Kim, General Manager of Dynamics 365 FastTrack Program.
• Individual event sessions: Sessions that will focus on Microsoft best practices and methodologies, hosted by thought leaders from Microsoft’s engineering and customer success teams. Session speakers include Steve Green, Director of Business Programs, and David Bailey, Director of Value Realization (Business Applications). 
• And more! Additional speakers and panelists, including Microsoft partners and customers, will be announced over the next weeks. View the full agenda for the latest lineup.

A focus on customer success

Microsoft is leading a new era of business productivity with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Through the Microsoft Cloud, we’re creating opportunities for businesses to accelerate innovation and do more with less. We’re empowering people to achieve more, from business users to IT pros, and from citizen developers to pro developers. To achieve the promise of innovation and business value, we need to focus on what happens after you buy the software.

With Microsoft Customer Success Day, we aim to provide a differentiated experience from traditional product-focused technology conferences. While our products and technologies are amazing, in this event, we shift focus to business value realization. Based on your feedback, we know that our customers are seeking more assistance in areas including change management, adoption, best practices, training, and implementation services. Microsoft Customer Success Day will address these topics in ways that empower customers to drive their own success and productivity with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Customer Success Day

Learn how to achieve more with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Register today

The post Join us for Microsoft Customer Success Day—dedicated to realizing business value with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 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.

Learn more

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.

It’s a simple truth of business: economic growth is cyclical. As companies across industries navigate a period of uncertainty, investments in people and technology should be strategic and decisive to help people do more with less—less time, less cost, and less complexity.

While reducing cost and complexity is often a primary factor when investing in business technology, doing more with less should be a step forward, not two steps back—an opportunity to build a more resilient, agile business. 

In this first of a series of blog posts, we will explore how your teams can push forward in the headwinds of uncertainty and constant change. We’ll answer how doing more with less can empower—rather than restrict—business agility and growth.

How Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help shore up your business to do more with less

To get started, let’s explore a few ways that Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform can reduce costs and complexity while empowering everyone in the organization to focus on superior customer experiences and operational excellence.

Lower your total cost of ownership

In times of uncertainty, the path forward is continued and accelerated innovation, especially for companies that run operations on a patchwork of on-premises technology solutions and services that are often redundant, siloed, duplicative, and costly to maintain. The migration from legacy systems to the cloud is now imperative, especially in a business environment that depends on speed, innovation, and accelerated business outcomes. A 2020 study conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Microsoft, revealed that a composite organization comprising interviewed customers realized an ROI of 109 percent over three years, fueled by savings on infrastructure refreshes, redundant enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, and consolidating support costs.¹

Our customers can realize significant operations efficiency and customer relationship management (CRM) savings with our unified platform, allowing them to do more with less—less time, cost, and complexity; while enabling more agility and innovation. In fact, organizations that adopt Dynamics 365 for CRM processes can save up to 50 percent relative to Salesforce.² With Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can further accelerate innovation and save up to 80 percent compared to other low-code development platforms.³

Reduce cost while improving efficiency on a unified business cloud

Dynamics 365 unifies customers and business data, relationships, and workflows in a single cohesive business cloud. This reduces complexity and brings new levels of efficiency, cross-functional engagement, and breakthrough customer experiences. Microsoft Power Platform works in tandem with Dynamics 365, or on its own, enabling everyone to build low-code solutions that contribute to the development process, multiplying their technical capacity and helping build amazing technical abilities across organizations.

A great example of these efficiencies in action is MVP Health Care. The nationally-recognized, regional not-for-profit health insurer replaced a makeshift CRM environment with Dynamics 365 to build a centralized member engagement platform, as well as adopted Microsoft Power Platform to optimize business processes, streamline workflows, and complete tasks. It expects to save USD6 million a year while standardizing processes, driving more member value, and promoting healthier communities.

Empower employees to drive agility and innovation

In challenging times, doing more with less doesn’t mean working harder or longer. It’s about having technology that amplifies what employees do best, so the organization can achieve more.

We’re integrating the digital tools people need to drive impact right within business applications for every function, from marketing, sales, and service to supply chain, finance, and operations. By connecting people, data, and streamlined business processes across the organization in the cloud, the workforce can truly do more with less.  

Unify data and use AI for proactive insights and automation 

We’ve invested heavily in AI to empower employees to be catalysts for impact, across every function, from marketing, sales, and service to supply chain, finance, and operations. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform empower employees to perform with clarity and focus thanks to predictive insights and guided workflows that help them act decisively—all fueled by centralized data, predictive analytics, and AI.

Microsoft Power BI delivers self-service analytics at enterprise scale, reducing the added cost complexity and security risks of multiple solutions.  

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales empowers sellers with sales intelligence that helps them deeply understand their customers for faster deal closure, including conversation intelligence that provides real-time selling guidance during sales calls. A recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that for a composite organization, using Dynamics 365 Sales boosted seller productivity by 15 percent, resulting in $13.3 million in savings over three years.⁴

Westpac New Zealand—one of the country’s largest banks— transitioned to Dynamics 365 to create an enhanced customer experience and unlock innovation. As a result, thousands of its Dynamics 365 users are saving as many as 3,850 hours per week in process automation. The migration also improved data quality across the organization, further increasing efficiency.

In addition, sales teams can reduce errors and time spent manually entering data into a CRM, which can lead to inaccuracies and reporting errors. Microsoft Viva Sales automates the capture of customer data into the CRM and then delivers insights from that data to help guide the next best actions.

Within the supply chain, AI can monitor complex systems around-the-clock to help identify and predict issues across the supply chain before they create disruptions. Specialty coffee roaster and retailer, Peet’s Coffee, is one market leader benefiting from greater visibility across the supply chain. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales rapidly shifted from retail stores to Peet’s online store. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management empowered the team at Peet’s Coffee with reliable, real-time data and insights enabling it to maintain a 98 percent fill rate on its growing e-commerce business.

A Forrester study identified several impact areas enabled by Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, including increased production volume, reduced downtime, improved quality, reduced infrastructure cost, and increased developer productivity. For example, a composite organization based on interviewed customers consolidated its footprint saving $11 million over a three-year time horizon. The organization also increased production throughput, resulting in $24.3 million in savings and reduced downtime of business-critical production equipment—a value of more than $1.5 million over the same time period.⁵

Boost collaboration to amplify business outcomes

As many workplaces become more decentralized, it’s both critical and more challenging to foster a culture of collaboration. The most recent Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report revealed that, since February 2020, the average Microsoft Teams user saw a 252 percent increase in their weekly meeting time and the number of weekly meetings has increased 153 percent.

Collaboration is seamlessly integrated with business workflows across Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365—including Teams—so people can collaborate more effectively with anyone, on any business or customer record, within the tools used to manage workflows.

A sales team can close deals faster by understanding signals from the marketing department around demand generation. Service agents on complex cases can view a list of AI-matched experts and “swarm” this issue together—rapidly troubleshooting the issue and compiling steps to resolve it.

Gibson Brands, the most iconic guitar brand, brought together cross-functional teams with Dynamics 365 and Teams, helping the company to simplify internal processes and create more immersive customer experiences across retail, direct sales, and dealer networks.

Democratize cloud-scale innovation

Finally, Microsoft Power Platform enables anyone, from pro to citizen developers, to create digital solutions to solve problems, reducing the cost and burden on IT teams to develop solutions. A Forrester Consulting study revealed that a composite organization based on surveyed Microsoft customers can realize an additional ROI of 140 percent over three years with Microsoft Power Platform’s premium capabilities.⁶

During the pandemic, the City of Ottawa streamlined the delivery of news and information to citizens by deploying a chatbot solution using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, hosted on the Ottawa Public Health (OPH) website. In just six months, the bot recorded more than 50,000 conversations, saving the call center an estimated 4,000 hours of phone time. The numbers translate to a savings of about CA$240,000, or the redeployment of 2.5 full-time city employees to more mission-critical tasks at OPH.

We’re committed to your success

Whether you’re planning to migrate, optimizing your current investments, or exploring ways to innovate with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, we’re here to help you.

In future installments of this blog series, we’ll dig deeper into opportunities to streamline across your four primary functional areas: customer experience (sales and marketing), service, finance, and supply chain.

Do more with less with Dynamics 365

Learn how you can reduce organizational costs and complexity.

Start today

End notes

¹ Total Economic Impact™ of Migrating from Microsoft Dynamics AX to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the Cloud (July 2020), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers. Examples shown are based on various customer outcomes and will vary depending on your specific scenario.

² Savings estimated based on US pricing for Salesforce and Microsoft offerings as published on their websites. Microsoft internal research, September 2022.

³ Savings estimated based on publicly available Power BI and Power Apps US pricing for 250 representative user licenses compared with major competitor offerings.

⁴ The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales (March 2022), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

⁵ The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (August 2021), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

⁶ The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Power Platform Premium Capabilities (August 2022), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

The post Essential ways Dynamics 365 and Power Platform help you do more with less appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In October, we launched the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2. This is our second release wave of the year and it includes hundreds of new capabilities and features.

This release wave is a big one, and it comes at a critical time for many organizations. We are committed to continually innovate and help your business grow, no matter what challenges or headwinds you face. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help strengthen your technology ecosystem by seamlessly providing visibility into every area of your business, empowering employees to focus on what they do best, and enabling your teams to create world-class customer experiences.

To help you quickly get up to speed on highlights from this release wave, as well as provide context into what’s possible, we’ve created a set of demo videos dedicated to key areas of business. As introduced in the special Business Applications release launch session at Microsoft Ignite, each video showcases how real-world organizations are taking full advantage of the new capabilities to achieve new levels of efficiency, cross-functional engagement, and breakthrough customer experiences.

To get started, watch the overview below of some of the highlights from the 2022 release wave 2.

Do more with less to empower growth and agility

You’ll hear a common theme across these videos: do more with less by becoming more agile and efficient with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. The 2022 release wave 2 unlocks durable growth by unifying business data, relationships, and workflows with a single, cohesive business cloud.

Watch the video below to learn how—even in times of uncertainty and disruption—Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help reduce costs and complexity while empowering teams to focus on superior customer experiences and operational excellence.

Sales | How Teleperformance boosts its sellers’ effectiveness with Viva Sales

We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales, a seller experience that enriches Microsoft 365 applications and Microsoft Teams with seller workflows. Your sales team can now automatically capture, access, and register customer data into any customer relationship management (CRM) system, including Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Learn how Teleperformance, a global business process outsourcing and customer experience service provider, eliminated the administrative burden of manual data entry to give sellers more time to focus on selling.

Sales and marketing | Financial services provider Eika orchestrates personalized campaigns to fund sustainable businesses across Norway

Eika, one of the largest financial services providers in Norway, is an alliance of 53 independent banks supporting two Norwegian dialects. It is also focused on being a driving force for sustainability and has launched an initiative to provide loans to businesses that are installing sustainable solutions. Learn how new AI and automation capabilities in Dynamics 365 are helping Eika’s sales and marketing teams seamlessly collaborate on campaigns to provide a personalized customer experience.

Customer service | Baylor Scott & White brings a new level of patient experiences to healthcare

Healthcare organizations today are being evaluated on their ability to deliver preventative services and improve overall health outcomes for the communities they serve. One way they’re meeting this challenge is through personalized omnichannel services. Baylor Scott & White—the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas and one of the largest in the United States—is a leader in overall patient experience in the United States.

Using our Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, Baylor Scott & White is streamlining patient communications through a combination of personalized self-service and an AI-driven contact center. Explore how the new features in the release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can support patient relations teams through enhancements and omnichannel engagement.

Innovation across Dynamics 365 Field Service, Mixed Reality, and Connected Spaces

Field service operations are undergoing rapid changes due to a scarcity of skilled workers and the shift from a cost center to a revenue driver. In addition, technology spurred by the industrial metaverse is enabling new scenarios for mixed and augmented reality, as well as enabling organizations to monitor and optimize spaces—from retail stores to factory floors.

In the video below, explore how 2022 release wave 2 updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces are transforming field service operations.

Operations | Global IT services provider Columbus Global elevates consulting experiences with AI, streamlined processes, and analytics

Columbus Global, a leading IT services and consulting company, acts as a digital trusted advisor for organizations across the globe as they reimagine their businesses. One of its many offerings is subscription consultancy services. Learn how new automation, process support, and analytics capabilities empower teams across finance, project operations, and HR to seamlessly build quotes, onboard customers, and track progress on time and on budget.

Supply chain | Improve inventory visibility, and planning and agility of your warehouses

Supply chain disruptions over the last few years have exposed supplier vulnerabilities and fragility across industries and countries. Enhancements to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help organizations exceed customer expectations, mitigate financial risks, and deliver on time.

In the next video, learn how Dynamics 365 can help digitally transform your supply chain without replacing existing systems and turn supply chains into a competitive advantage.

Scale low-code across the organization to do more with less

With new enhancements to Microsoft Power Platform in 2022 release wave 2, we’re continuing to empower users to rapidly build solutions and transform their businesses with a comprehensive set of low-code development tools. Two big announcements are that Microsoft Power Pages and Managed Environments are now generally available! Additionally, with the new AI copilot in Microsoft Power Automate, you can create a flow in seconds simply by describing what you want to automate in a sentence.  

Watch the video below to learn how organizations like Degrees of Change and Rabobank are using capabilities across the entire Microsoft Power Platform to streamline and automate their business processes.

Learn more about the 2022 release wave 2

The updates featured in these videos are just a handful of the new and updated capabilities in the 2022 release wave 2. To learn more, check out our roadmap for detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. 

The post 2022 release wave 2 in action: Bringing innovation into focus across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 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.

Thousands of new relationships, one big community—thank you

To all communities, we’d like to say thank you. Over the last 12 months, whether you participated, helped, or cheered us on our amazing, community-owned, Microsoft-empowered user group experience, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Communities celebrates a year of new connections and collaboration.

As social beings, it’s important for each of us to have the opportunity to connect emotionally with each other—even when we’re working with such impersonal-feeling things as databases, software apps, or business goals. In the big picture, it’s all about the people. That’s why we’re a community. We need each other to feel empowered, to achieve more, and to be part of something bigger. So beyond getting an additional place to turn when you’re looking for answers or help with challenges, you have a world of support for when you feel overwhelmed, or want to commiserate about the work you’re doing.

There are many user group experiences available to you, but no other gives you such direct connection to the heart of Microsoft and to fellow members of the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Communities. You’re key to making those connections happen and we really appreciate you for participating in this place to create, nurture, and grow your user groups with Microsoft.

We launched this cooperative global effort in April of 2021 to give all those who work with Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 a place to connect with each other and to connect directly with Microsoft. After all, as the biggest fans of the products, you deserve a great experience.

The connections you’ve made

Why did we launch these communities? There are almost as many reasons as there are members of the community itself. But it boils down to connections. Each of us needs different kinds of links to each other. The Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Communities provides a free platform for bringing community members closer, as well as supporting independent user groups and users worldwide. We also provide advocacy across the globe for our leaders, members, and users. The community imparts a sense of continuity and a seamless experience across all the Microsoft community sites.

It’s been quite a year. Since launching we’ve grown to welcome and include:

• Over 400 User Groups worldwide.
• Groups in 90 different countries.
• Representation from over 300 cities.

Most of the credit for all this growth goes to you, the members of our lively and supportive community. People are finding what they need in the groups, the connection to Microsoft and—most delightfully—to other community members.

Making connections with Microsoft—and each other

Our community is a great way for both leaders and group members to connect to the vast wealth of Microsoft resources, guidance, and information. Leaders can grow and manage user groups with easy-to-use tools. Through your groups you can also connect with the Microsoft product team for support with products, on Microsoft community sites, and at Microsoft events, and team speakers as well as connecting directly with Microsoft.

Matt Collins-Jones has gone from individual assistance to global connections with user groups. He started back when Dynamics 365 was called Dynamics CRM. Now he’s working with the entire Microsoft Power Platform stack. But he started by assisting others through help desk. By starting a small firm consulting on customer relationship management (CRM), he quickly jumped into managing and maintaining systems on a global scale for a multinational organization. And now, he works with TSG, a Microsoft partner in the United Kingdom, as a solution architect for their Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 team building the solutions on which he started with the help desk.

Matt now makes thousands of connections through his YouTube channel. With over 3,000 subscribers, it’s a great source of connection through technical assistance. Building on the community he’s found through his channel, Matt has become a leader in the UK Power Platform User Group. His philosophy? “I try and inspire and help those people become the next user group members and user group leaders. That’s really what this is all about. You just have to have a passion for it.” 

More than personalized—our community is personal

Community connections may only begin as technical support or looking for guidance from Microsoft. From there, they often take it further. That personal experience of support can naturally transform into lasting relationships with a worldwide group of like-minded people. It’s a great recipe for building friendships that go beyond professional connections.

Like many of our community members, Malin Martnes was looking for more than technical support. She found a community that welcomed her and helped her feel that she fit in. Originally from a small town in Norway, Malin grew up feeling alone and isolated. From the beginning, an online community has helped her find herself and realize she’s not different or alone because of her taste in music or interest in tech. Now as a single mom, she has found encouragement and strength from the user group community, in everything from COVID-19 to her personal life. She is a Microsoft MVP and a sought-after expert for other groups, conferences, and more.

“No matter who you are,” she says, “what gender you are, what type of color you are, what your ideas are; if you are a good person and you want to share your knowledge and you want to help other people, then you are welcome and included in the community. And that is just what I absolutely love about the community and why I do everything that I do.”

Success at work is great—making friends can be life-changing

When you build your network and community recognition in a diverse and inclusive environment you’re so much more likely to succeed and do more at work. And beyond that. Through the supportive network of peers in the community you can learn from experts and leaders, build your own community status, and as we’ve seen, make lifelong friendships you’ll value forever.

When Andrew Rogers of Queensland, Australia moved from working with Office 365 support to consulting on Office, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365, he discovered that he needed more assistance to be able to help more of his colleagues. This led him to seek out like-minded people who could help him grow professionally. He found they offered more than professional guidance. “I found [a group] here in Queensland with a number of people that I already had so much to do with, and I was welcomed very easily into that space.”

User Groups became a place where he could not only benefit himself professionally, but he could share that insight and what he learned with others. “People are more open to personal relationships, to sharing more than just talking about Microsoft products that we all love using and building for others,” says Andrew about the way User Groups have grown beyond just a professional networking tool. 

He smiles when he talks about the User Group. “I really love doing this and I really love helping people connect to what they need.” He loves the satisfaction he finds in helping people find these connections. “Just seeing the joy on their faces or getting an email that says thanks so much. This makes my day.”

Introducing Project Connect: Your local Microsoft contact for your community

Project Connect is a new program that supports leaders and members who participate in our Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 community user group experience. It’s comprised of dedicated Microsoft volunteers, called Community Citizens, who engage directly with their local user group. 

Community citizens participate in these ways:

• Support virtual and in-person user group meetings.
• Explore customer needs, challenges, and aspirations.
• Become the local face of our group and our products.

If you are part of the Microsoft experience, this is an added benefit for group leaders and members. To learn more and find out who your local Microsoft contact is, drop us a line at projconnect1@microsoft.com.

And again, whether you’re an active user group member, a leader, or just an outside supporter who sees the value of these deeper connections, thank you for helping, motivating, and inspiring us through this exciting first year of growth. We look forward to many more.

Join the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Communities today.

The post A year of new connections—thank you Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Communities 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.

Data is everywhere, data is decision making power

The emergence of data is changing the way organizations do business. From our mobile devices to our machinery, everyday activities and interactions create trillions of data points generated by inanimate objects. Unfortunately, data is often stored across disparate systems depriving organizations of access to valuable information and connected insights. To keep up with today’s fast-paced data hierarchy, organizations must rely on solutions that effectively integrate data to derive important business insights, empower frontline workers to make data-driven decisions, and streamline operational efficiency.

Break down information siloes with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, HoloLens 2, and Power Apps

Infusing Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Guides and HoloLens 2 has enabled organizations to give their frontline workers step-by-step holographic instructions while also bringing critical, connected data into view. Using Power Apps, you can connect to your business data stored in on-premises data sources and rapidly build customizable workflows for your unique operational processes.

With Power Apps, you can embed your apps directly into Dynamics 365 Guides, displayed on HoloLens 2. Embedding Power Apps apps into Dynamics 365 Guides enables you to:

• Create and trigger automated workflows based on captured asset data to simplify business processes seamlessly.
• Develop issue reports, incorporated into your existing workflow within Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Report issues directly within the workflow in a non-disruptive and efficient way.
• Understand historical data and relevant insights.

An example of Issue Reporting integrated into Dynamics 365 Guides using Power Apps

Additionally, using Dynamics 365 Guides PC authoring, you can add a website link or directly link to Power Apps apps in your guides, making the opportunities endless for content linking and quick access to resources such as reference manuals, interactive quizzes, or parts re-ordering systems, or an app that provides the latest status of IoT sensors. This feature enables authors to create a seamless workflow for operators so that there is no need to switch from the workflow to access outside documentation as the information is displayed seamlessly in the line of sight.

It doesn’t end there. By integrating Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, you can ensure your operators are connected to apps when performing tasks on the go. Simply connect to Power Apps via your Microsoft Edge browser to access Remote Assist Helper to manage your tasks, apps, and documentation with a remote expert.

An example of adding in Website link using the Step Editor pane.

To view, edit, or delete the link, right-click the Website link button in the Step Editor pane and then select the appropriate command.

Auger Groupe Conseil uses Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Guides

Auger Groupe Conseil is a firm specializing in industrial process engineering, with a focus on helping organizations accomplish “Industry 4.0” procedural updates. On a recent client visit at Kruger Paper Inc., Auger Groupe Conseil recognized the opportunity to unify vast amounts of unused data stored across disparate sources with Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Guides.

Using the Power Apps connector in Dynamics 365 Guides, Auger Groupe Conseil was able to bring all of this unused data to their employees in real-time on the shop floor. With the Power Apps connector, the organization was able to take the Dynamics 365 Guides solution a step further by customizing workflows, submitting issue reports, and making optimal adjustments live in their real work environment. The customizable workflows let them create what they need within a workflow, for example, an alert or a report. Overall, this low-code, versatile solution has enabled their organization to effectively maximize their operations and employee performance.

“We realized that all these companies have an enormous amount of data sources and the best way to bring all this data to the employee is to use Power Apps in Guides. Power Apps allows you to customize any workflow.”— Alan Marchand, IT Director at Auger Groupe Conseil, in charge of solutions architecture.

Get started

• Want to learn more? Learn how Kruger boosts employee productivity in factories using HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365. Watch the “How Kruger uses Dynamics 365 Guides and HoloLens 2 to transform their operations” video.
• Ready to empower your frontline employees? Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Try the 30-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Take the Work with Dynamics 365 Guides learning path.

The post Power Apps and Dynamics 365 Guides brings data to frontline workers 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.

Microsoft Build is just around the corner! To help you make the most of the three-day digital event, we’ve rounded up some must-see sessions and speakers—more than two dozen technical sessions to help developers across roles and skill levels create amazing experiences with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The post Your guide to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform at Microsoft Build appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.