During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation

Microsoft Industry Clouds

Check out the latest innovations.

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• Microsoft Cloud for Retail
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

During this wave, we continue to invest in generative AI and copilot solutions—these solutions include customer and partner feedback across industries. Our global partner ecosystem builds and extends our first-party offerings, enabling high-value scenarios for our customers. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources. 

Microsoft Industry Clouds

Discover new release plans for capabilities, products, and services

Explore updates

Microsoft Cloud for Retail  

The power of generative AI is transforming the way retailers are managing their businesses, engaging customers, and how they empower frontline workers to work more effectively. Microsoft Cloud for Retail 2024 release wave 1 includes additional capabilities for our retail customers along with considerable improvements to existing in-market solutions.  

The copilot template for personalized shopping on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) enables retailers to build tailored shopping experiences that allow consumers to shop using natural language. Using a retailer’s current systems and data, this copilot template can be embedded into existing experiences—such as a website or app—making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase the products they want. With the copilot template, retailers can offer customers personalized expert advice as well as guide the shopper to find unexpected items and learn more about the retailer. 

Copilot template for store operations on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) has been updated to drive more synergy and integration with modern work frontline worker applications and address customer feedback and requests. This AI-powered copilot template offers store associates on-demand access to store operational policies and tools to learn from customer behavior. Using key data points, employees can quickly and easily make adjustments that improve shopping experiences and drive revenue. 

Lastly, with Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, retailers can plan, architect, and design data solutions for retail data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. With Sitecore OrderCloud connector, retailers can bring commerce data from the connector into a standardize format and draw actionable insights. And with frequently bought together functionality, organizations can leverage insights and analytics to improve product upselling, shelf optimization, and drive operational efficiencies. 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture 

The agriculture industry is at the heart of human civilization, and as the world’s population increases, so do the demands on farmers across the globe. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture empowers customers and partners to innovate using high-quality data that is no longer siloed, providing industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to unify farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. With new large language model (LLM) APIs, others can develop copilots that turn data into insights on yield, labor needs, harvest windows and more—bringing generative AI to life in agriculture. The 2024 release wave 1 will provide key enhancements for analytics scenarios to align with leading industry standards. Enhanced ability for data set curation, compatibility with industry leading analytics services, more powerful geospatial scenario support, and repeatable data transformation workflows all work together to provide rich new analytics and AI capabilities. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services  

Built on a foundation of intelligence, security, and compliance, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services provides a powerful and flexible platform that helps unlock business value and deepen customer relationships. Financial services organizations can rely on the broad capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud as well as industry-specific solutions from our global partners to achieve impactful business outcomes quickly. Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services optimizes internal and external business processes through integrated collaboration and omnichannel communications capabilities. It enhances the customer experience through comprehensive customer insights and personalized, intelligence-driven interactions and helps accelerate products to market, removing data silos to turn insights into action, while defending against financial crime and supporting compliance needs. The 2024 release wave 1 plans include release of Meeting Prep for Financial Services—easing the burden of data discovery and curation for investment bankers in managing customer meeting preparations.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers customers and global partners to reach their sustainability goals by providing a digital structure to help enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence, deliver sustainable information technology (IT) systems, improve ESG performance, unlock operational efficiencies, and unlock sustainable growth. We provide a digital structure to help enable ESG data intelligence, deliver sustainable IT systems, improve ESG performance, and unlock sustainable growth. This wave 1 release reflects our commitment to expanding the depth and breadth of our offering with new and enhanced features in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, including large language model (LLM) based Q&A and qualitative summary for ESG reporting. LLMs provide efficiencies by comprehending intricate queries, extracting relevant data, and offering meaningful, actionable information. Product carbon footprint data exchange, discovery, customization and testing of custom models and factor libraries, and AI-based suggestive labelling on waste data will help organizations measure their carbon or waste to take steps on report and reduce their environmental impact. 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides capabilities to manage health data at scale and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to improve the patient experience, coordinate care, and drive operational efficiency. For the next release wave, our investments are in continuing to improve our data model, supporting additional fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) in Virtual health data tables, and updates to healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.  

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit 

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit Community Training became generally available globally in December 2023. Community Training, an Azure-powered platform, enables organizations to build equity in skilling and deliver training to communities of any size, anywhere in the world through its mobile-optimized and customizable, white-label style platform. Community Training can be used by nonprofits and community programs to empower facilitators, train communities and volunteers, and to deliver education, health, or volunteer services in the field utilizing organizational-created content, with learner tracking and assessments, all while supporting low-bandwidth functionality for offline learning. This solution is part of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, in our “deliver programs in time and at scale” narrative and will be available in both a nonprofit and a commercial version for other sectors. Additionally, Microsoft released new functionality in Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, specifically an AI-powered model called Likelihood, to donate built into Fundraising and Engagement. The AI model utilizes an organization’s donor information to support a nonprofit’s understanding of who is most likely to give to programmatic initiatives based on an array of donor characteristics—including past donations, event interactions, and more. Utilizing the model can support the development of donor segments, helping nonprofits target interactions based on their needs and donor giving patterns currently and into the future. Finally, we will be releasing the French localized version of Fundraising and Engagement allowing for greater functionality and global use. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is now generally available across all Azure regions, we’re also announcing new capabilities moving into preview. These solutions underscore our continued investment in a rapid pace of innovation to advance sovereignty in the hyperscale cloud: 

• Drift analysis capabilities: Ongoing administration and maintenance can potentially introduce changes that don’t comply with policies, resulting in the deployment beginning to drift out of compliance over time. The new drift analysis tool inspects your deployment and generates a list of non-compliant settings, as well as a severity rating, making it easier to identify any discrepancies to remediate and verify the compliance of specific environments.  
• Transparency logs: Gives eligible customers visibility into the instances where Microsoft engineers have accessed customer resources through just-in-time (JIT) access, most commonly in response to a customer support request. With this update, customers can now request access to the preview feature through the Azure portal.  
• New configuration tools in the Azure portal: Allow customers to create a new sovereign landing zone in two simple steps using a guided experience. 

Learn more 

• Stay up-to-date on the latest release plans on Microsoft Learn.
• Follow the Microsoft Industry Blog for industry-specific news.
• Read more about what’s upcoming on our Microsoft Industry Clouds documentation page.

Note: Some of the functionalities described in this release plan have not been released. Delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). 

For a list of the countries or regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, go to the International availability guide. For more information about geographic areas and datacenters (regions), go to the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform availability page. 

The post Explore the latest release plans for Microsoft Industry Clouds appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

New capabilities within the 2023 release wave 2—coming available from October 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024. Partners are critical to the success of our Microsoft Industry Clouds. These innovations represent our collaboration with partners across industries who build and extend these solutions, enabling high-value scenarios for our customers. During this wave, we’re offering richer, more data-driven precision, and new personalized experiences for customers and employees to advance decision making for business growth. You can see the full details about what’s new and planned in our release plans on Microsoft Learn. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for the coming months. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers

Read the latest updates

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

More than ever, patients expect to be active participants in their health and wellness. Personalized care management solutions help engage patients in care decisions, improve care outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction, while also improving operational efficiency and the bottom line. With the wave 2 release of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we aim to help healthcare providers deliver a real-time, seamless, and personalized experience to patients. Healthcare organizations will be able to more efficiently deliver customized patient outreach developing journeys—from initial awareness through ongoing care management. By enabling data access with a wider range of sources, organizations have more flexibility to drive patient engagement, both directly and with interoperable partner solutions.  

Care management and collaboration are foundational for quality, patient-centric care. To mitigate fragmented communications, siloed data, and incomplete information that can challenge health teams to see the full picture, this release wave now extends to payors. By expanding care management capabilities, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can help healthcare organizations reduce the administrative burden of staying up to date on member health and care delivery—simplifying workflow management, automating tasks, and expediting new member onboarding. This means better cost control while also improving member satisfaction and quality of care. 

To further simplify compliant data sharing across systems and accelerate innovation, we’re focused on making it easier to build Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources^® (FHIR^®) applications. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solutions are being extended with new functionality for developers at all levels: from low-code, pre-built templates and tooling for citizen developers building Microsoft Power Platform healthcare applications to advanced capabilities unlocking the potential of model-driven applications with data from Microsoft Azure Health Data Services and Virtual Health Data Tables.

Our investment in application integration is further improving virtual health, working with leading independent software vendor (ISV) Teladoc Health to better integrate Microsoft Teams with its virtual health platform, Solo™, for hospitals and health systems, streamlining clinician access to telehealth within existing workflows. We’re making it easy to offer high-quality virtual medical care visits that are compliant with industry standards while having a secure and streamlined platform for seamless communication and collaboration across: chat, video, voice, and even AI health bots and other care management tools. 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail 

Maintaining efficient and resilient store operations is a key part of successful retail. Microsoft Cloud for Retail offers store associates on-demand access to the data, insights, and tools necessary to effectively engage with customers to offer personalized assistance and a seamless shopping experience. Greater information access also means store associates can self-service tasks to stay productive throughout shifts, while allowing district and store managers to direct store operations more effectively.

Improvements to our retail workforce management capabilities within store operations assist can help retailers improve efficiency and their bottom line. Using store operations assist in Microsoft Teams, store associates have a single pane-of-glass experience to manage their day. Store employees can perform inventory checks and act on urgent notifications, such as product recalls. Managers can assign training and learning tasks to employees as well as confidential tasks, such as shift planning and performance reporting. Finally, district leaders can detect anomalies, uncover patterns, and ask questions using natural language AI capabilities to identify root cause and corresponding mitigations to improve store performance.

In the coming months, we’ll further invest in driving data gravity and bringing in rich, new data sources the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform for retailers, bringing in rich, new data sources and applications. We’re also excited to further harness the power of AI and machine learning to help our customers gain a competitive edge, integrating new insights to create a cohesive and efficient experience for retailers. We also continue to work with partners such as AiFi to infuse AI and bring these solutions to market.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions from Microsoft and our global partners help advance ambitious sustainability goals by providing organizations with a digital foundation to help them enable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence, deliver sustainable IT infrastructure, improve ESG performance, and unlock sustainable growth. We know that organizing and integrating the data required to calculate an organization’s environmental footprint can be challenging. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helps companies overcome complexity by enabling a blend of manual and automated data ingestion methods to collect and centralize their data across the business. Upcoming frameworks for third-party connectors will help customers efficiently import data from their partners and vendors into Microsoft Sustainability Manager. In addition, new calculations and data integration for water and waste will help companies extend their progress beyond carbon.

With Project ESG Lake (preview), organizations gain an expansive ESG data model to better manage and prepare data for faster, more holistic analysis using advanced analytics and insights. Greater visibility into activities across the business helps decision makers improve ESG and business performance while empowering innovation for long-term competitiveness. 

For organizations facing new regulatory requirements like those based on the European Union Compliance Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), new reporting templates can help with ESG reporting readiness. And upcoming AI-driven “what-if” scenario analysis and anomaly detection can help generate new insights to inform strategy—for example, allowing customers to quickly model how transitioning to a renewable energy source or a new energy supplier could impact their overall carbon footprint.

Our new ESG value chain solution helps organizations build a richer view of the upstream and downstream impacts that vendors and partners have on their environmental footprint and simplifies Scope 3 calculations. Using the solution, organizations can simplify the collection and reporting of detailed data about the sustainability activities of value chain partners, track data across carbon, water, and waste factors, and feed approved data directly into Sustainability Manager. With a transparent understanding of each other’s positions, our customers can better collaborate to drive efficiency, reduce emissions, and design out waste.

We continue to build solutions with partners such as Ecovadis and Ecolab. We also continue to work with trusted advisers like Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC who are helping organizations everywhere plan, design, and implement strategies and robust solutions to enable transformation.  

The Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability resources have been updated with a focus on data management and Sustainability Manager implementation journey, introducing best practices to build reliable, secure, cost-optimized, operationally excellent, and performance-efficient Sustainability Manager workloads. The new updates are aimed at meeting the persistent demand for implementation guidance from customers and partners using a framework to evaluate important design considerations and their tradeoffs.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Upcoming functionality within Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit can help better position nonprofit organizations to take advantage of data analysis and insights at every level: from lightweight Modern Work templates and dashboards to streamline data management and allow customers to get straight to the insights to advanced data quality assessments that can determine whether the organization is ready to integrate AI and machine learning models—and help with remediation suggestions for the most common data quality issues. With upcoming functionality, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit can help unify data across fundraising, programs, finance, operations, and other disparate sources—in the back-office and on the frontline. With this unified view, organizations can build a better understanding of which supporters are most likely to engage through which channels and use AI to predict which constituents are most likely to donate based on different attributes. This can help outreach and marketing engagement teams work most effectively to support their mission.

Nonprofits will also benefit from faster and more secure donation processing. As we continue to invest in leveraging Microsoft platform capabilities, we’re further redesigning the architecture of fundraising and engagement functions to ensure Microsoft Azure is delivering real-time processing and market-leading transaction security. Nonprofit organizations using Dynamics Customer Insights and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit will see new marketing templates to help with data-driven constituent management, personalized engagement and donation, and award management. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

As governments innovate with technology, addressing the rapidly evolving demands of their citizens while protecting sensitive data and delivering promises of trust and security is needed. Modernization of government services without compromising security, digitization of manual processes, and improved user experiences for both citizens and government employees are all benefits of digital transformation. Governments know that the right technology platforms can create even better opportunities for social and economic growth.

Sovereignty can mean many things in different contexts. Within the context of the Microsoft approach to data sovereignty, we give government customers full control over their data. The control may include data residency within regional boundaries and tools to ensure control of who has access to their data.

Data sovereignty is critical for governments to:

• Protect government data from security breaches and malicious activity.
• Maintain government data confidentiality to protect privacy.
• Protect government data against unauthorized access to data.
• Secure government data to prevent negative business and financial impact.

We recently launched Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty (preview) and will continue to iterate toward general availability during this wave. See the latest and learn more at Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.

More innovation to come across industries

Beyond the new capabilities we’ve just previewed, we continue to invest across key verticals, including making generative AI easier with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, as well as industry-specific cloud solutions like Azure Data Manager for Energy and Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Follow us on Industry Cloud blogs for industry-specific news and read more about what’s upcoming on our documentation pages.

Catch us at Microsoft Ignite, from November 14 to 17, 2023 to see some of these capabilities and connect with our team. 

Note: Some of the functionalities described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy).

For a list of the countries or regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, go to the International availability guide. For more information about geographic areas and datacenters (regions), go to the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform availability page.

The post Innovating with Microsoft Industry Clouds next release wave appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It was great to see industry infused throughout several sessions and news at Microsoft Inspire 2023. Our partner strategy continues to reflect the investments we’re making in our global partner ecosystem. These investments are detailed in our upcoming 2023 wave 2 release plans. 

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 2 plan

Learn about the latest updates for customers.

Read the latest updates

Optimizing for partners 

We continue to invest, build, and expand industry-specific capabilities that accelerate time-to-value for our customers and partners, including lifecycle commitments every wave. In a recent blog, Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Global Industry Marketing discussed in detail, our partner strategy, which aligns to three growth pillars: 

• Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market.

• Quickly scale your go-to-market by helping partners drive. 

• Win new customers with industry solutions.

We believe the industry cloud solutions will provide customers with simplicity and predictability when engaging with Microsoft. Watch on-demand sessions at Microsoft Inspire 2023 to learn more about our industry-specific investments. 

The latest capabilities  

The release notes cover new features for Microsoft Cloud for Industry releasing from October 2023 through March 2024. The latest plans for Microsoft Cloud for Industry bring new innovations that provide organizations with significant capabilities to transform business. The release contains several new features across Microsoft Cloud for Industry applications, including Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Healthcare 

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that make it easier for healthcare organizations to create personalized patient experiences, give health teams connected collaboration tools, and adopt data standards important to healthcare. Together with Nuance, users can access the broadest and deepest set of trusted AI solutions to address some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Organizations can use AI to provide full visibility into data, relieve provider administrative burden, boost clinician productivity, increase workflow automation to improve the quality of care, reduce clinician burnout, and deliver better care faster at a lower cost. 

Key investment areas for wave 2 include: 

Personalized access and outreach  

• Releasing patient journey capabilities in Patient outreach. 

Care management 

• Enabling better support for payor and insurance companies. 

Virtual health  

• Launching virtual consultations both directly from electronic health records (EHRs) and from Teladoc Solo in Microsoft Teams, enabling health systems to maximize their EHR investments while also providing access to virtual care workflows for members of the care team who may not have routine access to the EHR. 

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. 

Retail 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is a comprehensive solution developed to support retailers in using their data, enhancing customer shopping experiences, and empowering store associates to work more efficiently and knowledgeably. In the 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft Cloud for Retail will include investments in retail workforce management, address customer feedback, and improve the Store Operations Assist and Smart Store Analytics features. We will also utilize AI, machine learning, and generative AI models to provide valuable insights into customer engagement, advertising, inventory management, and supply chain management. These insights can seamlessly integrate into relevant applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other Microsoft solutions, enabling retailers to take actionable steps based on the intelligence gained. 

Read the details on retail workforce management planned for this release wave in the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Retail. 

Sustainability 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We are investing in multiple areas to help your sustainability initiatives and reporting. We’re incorporating new features to enable and simplify the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requirements, including adding a CSRD template into Purview Compliance Manager (in preview). We’re expanding on our improved data ingestion experience, including enhancements to data approval management and more third-party connectors. Our new Project ESG Lake will help you aggregate your ESG data in one place and provide rich analysis and insights. We’re also adding features for recording and reporting on water usage and calculating waste intensity. Environmental Credit Service, which was released in preview in November 2022, continues to expand capabilities that are being validated by customers and partners. Finally, we’re bringing our AI capabilities to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to provide what-if analysis scenarios and other important insights. 

During this wave, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability will invest in: 

• Value chain visibility

• Data integration and calculations

• System expansion and enhancement

• Reporting, disclosure, and automated insights

In the 2023 release wave 2, we are also adding more reporting capabilities for the European Union’s CSRD and AI capabilities to provide what-if analyses and other insights. 

Learn more about the new and planned features for Microsoft Industry Clouds, 2023 release wave 2 and watch our sustainability session on demand.

Watch Microsoft Inspire 2023 on demand 

• Microsoft Inspire Keynote 
• Winning customers with industry specific solutions and AI 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty – accelerate government transformation 

The post Empowering your business: The latest from Microsoft Cloud for Industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Updated monthly, the release wave 1 plan details features released from April 1, 2023 through September 30, 2023, and is available online or via download as a PDF file. This plan covers features for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. Read on for a summary of each industry’s release plan and learn about supporting resources

Microsoft Cloud for Industry 2023 release wave 1 plan

Learn about the latest updates to customers as features are prepared for release.

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Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare focuses on customer feedback across various offerings. During this wave, we are expanding the support in enhancing patient experiences with patient journeys. We will also focus on planning tools to empower health teams to provide better care management. Additionally, to improve the time to value, we are releasing capabilities to support for create/read update and delete procedures and performance improvements for Dataverse Healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs). Keep an eye out for more announcements to follow in April 2023.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services will continue to focus on strengthening offerings in banking, cross-vertical experiences, and financial services data models. For the upcoming releases, we are prioritizing providing customers and partners with more flexibility in meeting their specific needs through componentization. The components offer individual deployment and configuration capabilities for customer onboarding, document processing, and in how customer financial information is represented. We will enable flexible adaptation of the UI to different scenarios, offer a wealth of tools for document processing and management using AI, and provide various end points for partner enablement in the process. We plan to improve the retail banking loan onboarding solution with the new document intelligence feature and offer additional flexibility enhancements as requested by our customers and partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail accelerates innovation with industry-specific solutions that help retailers maximize the value of their data by providing an engaging shopping experience for their shoppers, and empowering store associates to be productive and customer focused. With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Retail is continuing its investments in both Store Operations and Smart Store Analytics with customer requested features and additional AI and machine learning based capabilities. With Store Operations Assist, we are enabling features like tablet support, branching logic for survey responses, enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams front line worker apps. For Smart Store Analytics, we are adding additional AI and machine learning based insights around product recommendations and foot traffic analysis. Additionally, we will also enable additional scenarios with Microsoft Could for Retail prioritized partners.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress by bringing together a growing set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners. We continue to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts across our solutions which streamline data ingestion, integration, calculations, reporting and more. Our offering also includes an environmental credit service, bringing efficiency, trust and transparency to voluntary ecological markets. We continue to extend our data story with the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API which allows organization to get emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting. This release wave also extends our scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol, including providing reporting on the following scope 3 categories: Scope 3 category 3: Fuel- and energy-related activities not included in scope 1 or scope 2; Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit in 2023 release wave 1, continues to deliver capabilities that enable nonprofits to operate in a holistic and seamless way and empower partners to extend the capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. In this release we are focusing on accelerating mission outcomes by improving evidence-based decision-making through connected organization data powered by rich data capabilities and machine learning. We also will help nonprofits extend fundraising and engagement more easily. Know your donors and supporters by inputting and processing donor gifts quickly, viewing actionable donor insights, and integrated reporting with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Key dates for the 2023 release wave 1

These release plans describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (go to Microsoft policy for more information).

Here are the key dates for the 2023 release wave 1.

What’s next

Your feedback is used to make improvements to our solutions as well as our documentation. Share your thoughts in the Microsoft Power Platform community forum.

We look forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2023 release wave 1.

The post Check out the latest release plans for Microsoft Industry Clouds appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions bring together the breadth of offerings from across Microsoft, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and uniquely tailor them for specific industries. Built on a foundation of trust, these solutions are composable and can be customized, providing a rich platform to enable our customers and partners to quickly drive time-to-value and digitally transform their organizations.

Data sovereignty and residency

Microsoft works to provide tools and resources to give businesses the ability to maintain customer data in both a designated geographic boundary (data residency) as well as customer data that is subject to national jurisdiction (sovereignty). As we continue to expand our solutions, we are proactively working with our customers and partners to help meet the unique needs of their industries by architecting our solutions with options for data residency, compliance, and language localization in each geography. In May 2022, Microsoft announced the availability of two new sovereign sites, Sweden and Belgium, that will be offering local data residency, and country sovereignty for their cloud services. These new sites also provide improved performance and faster access to the cloud. Learn more about data residency, data sovereignty, and compliance in Microsoft Cloud.

Industry compliance in mind

Compliance is a shared responsibility. While it is essential that organizations understand how Microsoft provides the foundation for compliance, ultimately all data stored in a cloud service requires each organization to secure and protect it. Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions supports regional compliance coverage by simplifying the solution adoption. Microsoft has 100 plus compliance offerings including more than 50 of which are specific to regions and countries such as Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and 26 European countries, known as the Schengen area. Microsoft engages with governments, regulators, standards bodies, and nongovernmental organizations to understand emerging requirements and ensure fast and effective enablement of critical compliance needs. In regions such as Europe, the forthcoming EU Data Boundary will expand on our data residency commitment, ensuring Microsoft not only stores but also processes customer data in the European Union.

To help address customer and partner needs to understand regulatory requirements, our industry solutions, including Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, and Microsoft Cloud for Retail, adhere to well-known globally accepted standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018. In addition, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services conforms to SOC1 and SOC2 standards. Learn more about privacy and compliance at the Microsoft Trust Center.

Native languages built-in

Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions is available in multiple languages to serve our customers and partners with ease of use in their native languages. For countries that require products sold to be localized, Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions helps adhere to local regulations. Explore the industry solutions and supported languages by geography.

Learn more

Explore the Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability and languages supported.

Our next release wave promises even more opportunities for industries to do more with less. Read more about what’s upcoming on our Dynamics 365 and industry clouds documentation pages.

Microsoft Cloud for industries

Learn how to build resilience and drive innovation with Microsoft Cloud industry solutions.

Learn more

The post Explore Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

At this year’s HLTH 2022 conference Microsoft + Nuance will join other industry innovators and thought leaders to consider how organizations are using digital technology to turn the corner in unprecedented times. We’re excited to share our latest release wave for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which helps support organizations navigating this changing environment. The solution showcases new tools to free up critical resources and support consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare.

Here are a few of the key highlights of Microsoft at HLTH 2022:

1. Microsoft in the arena stage

Join us on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, from 4:20 PM to 5:00 PM PST, for this 40-minute panel conversation with Hadas Bitran, Partner Group Manager, Health AI, Microsoft, panelist alongside Google and Salesforce, to hear her definition of disruption and further, if healthcare is even disrupt-able.

2. Meet with Microsoft

Connect with Microsoft at HLTH 2022. Listen to us on the Tech Talk stage at 10:30 AM and 10:45 AM PST on November 16, 2022. We will also be at Meeting Cube MC-467 (US Health & Life Science) and Meeting Cube MC-966 (Nuance) and would love to schedule time to strategize, share insights and best practices, and answer all your questions. 

3. Microsoft in the newsroom stage

For the first time at HLTH, Nuance will present how the Precision Imaging Network is driving better patient outcomes and business performance across the entire healthcare ecosystem leveraging an open enterprise AI platform. Join us on Monday, November 14, 2022, from 10:10 AM to 10:50 AM PST for a panel discussion led by Peter Durlach, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Nuance.

4. Engage with Partner Programs at HLTH

Patient engagement and experience have become an ever-pressing priority for healthcare stakeholders of all stripes following COVID-19. This event, on Sunday, November 13, 2022, from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM PST, will explore how providers and payers are focusing on patient-centricity in the light of a pandemic that kept many people at home, as well as how they and others are working towards more equitable care for all. This partner-led session moderated by Jack Stockert, Managing Director of Health 2047, and speakers from Zebra Technologies, Nuance Communications, August Artists, and Intermountain Healthcare will discuss how the patient journey can be improved.

5. Meet with Microsoft for Startups

Increasingly, health tech startups are aligning themselves with Microsoft, bringing innovation, diverse perspectives, and digital transformation to the healthcare industry. We are honored that so many of the new generation of innovators trust Microsoft to be their platform partner. And we’re thrilled to offer the opportunity to set up meetings with the following health and life sciences innovators at HLTH: Anjuna, Bayesian Health, Cynerio, Hyro, Pangaea Data, Recuro Health, Sonavi Labs, and Vastmindz. Hear a five-minute quick pitch from each at the October webinar.

If you’re interested in meeting with health tech startup organizations, please email us at mfsgtm@microsoft.com to set up a one-to-one meeting, in Meeting Cube MC-1067.

Next Steps

Join us at HLTH 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada from November 13 to 16, 2022, and use the discount code “Microsoft150” to receive a $150 discount on the prevailing registration cost for the event. We are excited to share our vision for innovation around healthcare and encourage you to learn more at our meeting spaces for the US Health & Life Sciences (MC-467), Microsoft for Startups (MC-1067), and Nuance (MC-966). 

• Learn more about HLTH
• Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Learn more

The post Inspiring digital perseverance at HLTH 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we shared exciting announcements that include new features and updates to our Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions being made available to our customers as part of our recent and upcoming 2022 Wave 1 and Wave 2 releases. You can revisit the wealth of content at the Microsoft Ignite site; included here are some highlights.

Improve customer experiences with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services continues to invest in delivering capabilities to manage financial services data at scale and make it easier for financial services institutions to improve customer experience, coordinate engagement, and drive operational efficiency. Our latest release includes customer feedback reflected in the improvements to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

We are expanding our current retail banking data model with an extension for small business, as well as the addition of wealth management and insurance property and casualty verticals. Financial institutions will also be able to improve their customer engagement by streamlining consultation appointment scheduling and intelligent customer outreach as well as wealth management and customer onboarding scenarios.  

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services intelligent appointments solution delivers better customer experiences through end-to-end virtual or in-person meeting management. The solution allows banks to create an engaging appointment self-service experience that quickly matches customer and advisor availability, relevance, and needed skills with ease. Scheduled meetings are automatically synchronized to participants’ calendars. Customers are also informed about appointments through SMS and email to streamline the process and ensure relevant materials are prepared ahead of time.

Learn more about the full list of capabilities.

The Compliance Program for Microsoft Cloud, now fully included as part of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, provides white glove service for risk, audit, and compliance teams. Organizations can connect with subject matter experts for support in understanding risk to help accelerate cloud adoption. This program has exclusive features such as ask an expert, risk and control mapping, a compliance community, and proactive risk assurance.

Finally, we are proud to announce the preview of unified client profile for wealth management and onboarding application. Unified client profile offers a single pane of glass view for wealth advisors, including an in-depth view of investment portfolios and financial goals. Onboarding application is an extensible framework that can power any onboarding experience. It includes task management and document intelligence automating document review and processing with AI capabilities.

New solutions and offerings from leading systems integrators (SIs) like Accenture/Avanade and PWC and independent software vendors (ISVs) like ArganoArbela, ASC, Bambu, BioCatch, Mambu, Thought Machine, and Wealth Dynamix continue to extend our capabilities.

We are also expanding to Brazil, Hong Kong, and Singapore with the addition of Brazilian Portuguese and traditional Chinese to our list of supported languages. Learn more about our current list of countries and supported languages.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services is helping financial service institutions deliver great customer experiences to better connect people, processes, and systems. Find out more about the latest release.

Facilitate proactive healthcare with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare provides trusted and integrated capabilities that make it easier for organizations to create personalized patient experiences, improve the clinician experience with automated workflows and collaboration tools, and drive clinical and operational efficiency while supporting the security, compliance, and interoperability of health data.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announced the latest wave release update that enables patient-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and helps facilitate proactive healthcare.

The updates include missed appointment AI prediction model in patient trends (preview), which helps organizations assess the likelihood that patients will miss their next appointment and allows providers to take proactive measures to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care.

The model is easily deployable and can be trained within just two hours, leaving the healthcare provider ready to use the solution within just one day. With a user-friendly and familiar interface, missed appointment prediction empowers office staff and clinicians to predict patient no-shows without data science training or staffing. Patients in turn have peace of mind knowing their physician’s office is prioritizing appointments that work best for them, building trust and ensuring better patient-centric care.

Additional updates include care plan improvements (October 2022 update), pre-built Patient Journey templates with new out-of-the-box patient outreach campaigns (preview coming soon), and a full feature release of Dataverse Healthcare API (generally available) to support bi-directional write-back capabilities to electric health record (EHR) and other clinical systems.

Finally, Teladoc Health recently shared Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health’s Solo™ will simplify the way healthcare organizations and clinicians work by streamlining the technology and administrative processes associated with providing virtual care. Clinicians can securely access clinical data included within their electronic health record (EHR) system via Teladoc Health Solo without having to leave the Teams environment.

Learn more about our current and upcoming Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare release.

Expand emissions calculation models with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, made generally available in June 2022, is expanding Sustainability Manager with new Scope 3 emissions calculation models. Scope 3 emissions, which are indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain, offer the largest opportunity for an organization to reduce its overall emissions.¹ Our solution includes prebuilt calculation methodologies for Scopes 1 and 2 and more than half of the 15 categories of Scope 3. The latest calculation models added include:

• Category 5: Waste generated in operations.
• Category 8: Upstream leased assets.
• Category 13: Downstream leased assets.

Customers such as Grupo Bimbo and Ingredion are using Sustainability Manager to build innovation and capture information on their emissions data.

“By collecting and assessing our Scope 3 emissions data, we can help our suppliers make progress toward their own sustainability goals. We need to work together to create the regenerative supply chain we are aiming for—this isn’t something we can do alone.”—Alejandra Vazquez, Global Sustainability Vice President, Grupo Bimbo.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is also expanding the sustainability data model to ingest water data (in preview), providing the schema required for storing and linking water quality, quantity measurement data, and water sustainability reference data. Through the data model, organizations will be able to unify water measurement data from sites across their organization for use cases such as water sustainability disclosures and regulatory water quality reporting.

Learn more about the Cloud for Sustainability water data model.

The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model can be easily extended using Dataverse to help expand the capabilities for data collection and ingestion. First and third-party applications may be integrated with Sustainability Manager to help organizations increase the capture of organizational, operational, and emissions data and improve their sustainability accounting. For example, using the data model, organizations can gain visibility into the association of purchased electricity with items they produce or the fugitive emissions associated with a laboratory or leased asset.

The Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365 is also generally available, enabling customers to track emissions associated with their use of Microsoft 365 cloud services. To improve reliability for environmental claims and credits, Microsoft is introducing Environmental Credit Service, a managed service that improves transparency, time to market, and scalability for environmental assets. We are delivering new sustainability training including technical guidance to help customers optimize their Microsoft Azure workloads.

Our growing, global ecosystem of partners is also helping customers unlock new value by extending Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability with dedicated solutions, like those just announced by McKinsey. They announced the creation of an integrated solution that combines sustainability data intelligence from Microsoft Sustainability Manager with decarbonization planning and an execution engine using McKinsey Sustainability’s Catalyst Zero. This technological collaboration will enhance companies’ sustainability transformations by integrating their data from activities that produce emissions with initiatives to abate them.

Read the latest from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Unlock data insights with Microsoft Energy Data Services

Launching the preview of Microsoft Energy Data Services, developed in collaboration with Schlumberger, is another exciting development in our industry solutions. Energy businesses can benefit from an enterprise-grade cloud-based data platform, aligned with the OSDU™ Technical Standard, which can help minimize the time, risk, and costs of ownership associated with energy exploration. Microsoft Energy Data Services is designed to help organizations get more value from their data by scaling ingestion and data enrichment, easy interoperability, and unlocking self-serve data analytics capabilities. With this solution, businesses can unlock data to work across multiple applications.

With Microsoft Energy Data Services, energy companies can be up and running an OSDU Data Platform within hours. Customers can migrate their largest datasets and workloads to the cloud while continuing to use the familiar domain applications that they depend on to achieve data insights. Enabling these workflows on the platform will help drive improved operational efficiency and open connectivity to a range of cloud services.

Over twenty partners are actively engaged to serve Energy customers with tailored solutions. Trusted advisors Accenture, Cegal, EPAM, Infosys, and Wipro provide foundational support for a fully managed OSDU Data Platform to help energy companies migrate to the cloud, drive better decision-making, and optimize workflows. Partners such as Interica and RoQC are ready for deployment for data ingestion and quality assurance and control. While AspenTech, Halliburton-Landmark, Bluware, INT, and Schlumberger have solutions available which provide more optimal data management capabilities and higher productivity.

Read about how Microsoft Energy Data Services is empowering energy companies to do more with data in the cloud.

Learn more

Microsoft Cloud for industries continues to expand our offerings in the industry space. We continue to invest in clouds such as Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, and Microsoft Cloud for Retail while bringing new cloud solutions through offerings such as Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.

Our next release wave promises even more opportunities for industries to do more with less. To improve productivity without compromising work-life balance and respond to challenges with industry-tailored solutions.

Follow us on Industry Cloud blogs for industry-specific news and read more about what’s upcoming on our documentation pages.

The post Deliver breakthrough value with Microsoft Cloud for industries: Latest release appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft’s deep commitment to industry is not new, but in the face of so many changes our commitment has taken on a new urgency. We are committed to helping every organization use technology and tools to accelerate their transformation. That’s why Microsoft Cloud for industries offers powerful, integrated, and uniquely tailored industry solutions and workflows allowing organizations to realize breakthrough value and more easily achieve success; enabling them to unleash value quickly, build for the future, and exceed expectations.  

Industry at Microsoft Ignite 

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, you will learn more about exciting announcements that include new features and updates to our Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions.  

• With our latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, we’ve delivered marketing insights capabilities, resource guides for fundraising and engagement and volunteer management, redesigned donation import functionality, a new first-party installation service to automate deployment of fundraising and engagement, and much more. We want to equip the nonprofit sector with affordable, accessible, and secure technology to meet evolving trends head-on. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit harnesses the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and LinkedIn all brought together by the Nonprofit Common Data Model and built on a platform that provides best-in-class security and compliance. 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is expanding Sustainability Manager with new Scope 3 emissions calculation models and expanding the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model to ingest water data (in preview). We are releasing Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft 365 to general availability, enabling customers to track emissions associated with their use of Microsoft 365 cloud services. To improve reliability for environmental claims and credits, Microsoft is introducing Environmental Credit Service, a managed service that increases transparency, time to market, and scalability for environmental assets. We are delivering new sustainability training including technical guidance to help customers optimize their Azure workloads. And our growing, global ecosystem of partners is helping customers unlock new value by extending Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability with dedicated solutions, like those just announced by McKinsey. They announced the creation of an integrated solution that combines sustainability data intelligence from Microsoft Sustainability Manager with decarbonization planning and an execution engine using McKinsey Sustainability’s Catalyst Zero. This technological collaboration will enhance companies’ sustainability transformations by integrating their data from activities that produce emissions with initiatives to abate them. Learn more in our recent blog, Driving innovation for ESG progress with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services announces the general availability of intelligent appointments, which delivers better customer experiences through end-to-end virtual or in-person meeting management; the general availability of Compliance Program for Microsoft Cloud, which provides white glove service for risk, audit, and compliance teams; preview of unified client profile for wealth management and onboarding application; and preview of new data models for insurance, wealth management, and retail banking SMB. Find out more about the latest release. 
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare announces the latest release wave update that enables consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life. The updates include missed appointment AI prediction model in Patient Trends (preview), which helps organizations assess the likelihood that patients will miss their next appointment and allows providers to take proactive measures to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care. Additional updates include improved care plan templates (October update), pre-built Patient Journey templates with new out-of-the-box patient outreach campaigns (preview), and a full feature release of Dataverse Healthcare API (generally available) to support bi-directional writeback capabilities to electronic health record (EHR) and other clinical systems. Learn more in our recent blog, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Ease provider burden and help create customers for life.

Additionally, energy businesses alongside our ecosystem partner companies can benefit from an enterprise-grade cloud-based data platform aligned with the OSDU Technical Standard can help minimize the time, risk, and costs of ownership associated with energy exploration and production. Read about how energy companies can enable its data to do more in the cloud. 

Further, to empower the more than 2 billion people in the frontline workforce spanning industries such as retail and healthcare, we are announcing new partnerships with Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) and Honeywell to increase operational efficiency and enhance communications and collaboration. These new integrated solutions will help with digitizing manual processes and enable easier instant communication.

Make the most of your Microsoft Ignite journey  

As you get ready to engage at the event, it’s worth considering what sessions will benefit you on your industry cloud journey. Spanning multiple industries and a broad array of subjects, this Microsoft Ignite event has something for everyone. Here are some key experiences that will provide a deeper view into how industry clouds enable organizations to drive business outcomes. 

• Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Industry clouds—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 1:00 PM to 1:30 PM PT. Join Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Industry, Apps and Data Marketing, as well as Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion Team, for a panel discussion and gain key insights into why industry matters to Microsoft and how it enables organizations to unleash value quickly, build for the future, and exceed expectations. You will also learn ways you can get started on your industry cloud journey. 
• The Industrial Metaverse—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 10:25 AM to 10:45 AM PT. Businesses and technologists around the world are struggling to define the Metaverse and what their role will be in it. In this keynote, Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, will distinguish how Microsoft is thinking about the phenomenon for consumers, businesses, and industries. He will share our vision for the Industrial Metaverse, making the construct real and bringing it to life with customer stories. 

Breakout sessions 

• Healthcare—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:35 PM PT. The Experience Transformation: Free up time to focus on the things that matter with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare​ 
• Financial Services—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:25 PM PT. Unlock innovation and reduce risk with the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Retail—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:35 PM PT.​ Optimize your customer shopping experience with Microsoft Cloud for Retail ​ 
• Nonprofit—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 10:00 AM to 10:35 AM PT. Utilize Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit and other new solutions to enhance the impact of nonprofit and international development orgs​ 
• Manufacturing—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 1:00 PM to 1:20 PM PT.​ Improve factory visibility and decision-making with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing    
• Sustainability—Wednesday, October 12, 2022, from 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM PT. Accelerate your sustainability progress and business growth with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability​ 
• Industrial Metaverse—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM PT. Jumpstart your physical operations transformation with technologies built for the Industrial Metaverse 
• Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty—Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM PT. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and the Expansion of Azure Confidential Computing

On-demand sessions 

• Energy​: Transform the energy industry with innovative partnerships and technology solutions for a sustainable future 
• Defense and Intelligence: Digital Engineering for defense and intelligence mission success  
• Government​: Accelerating security innovation for governments with the intelligent cloud​ 
• Sustainability: How to tailor Microsoft Sustainability Manager to fit your business needs

Start your journey

Along with each session, participants can learn more about how to get started on their unique Microsoft Cloud for industries journey. Microsoft Ignite 2022 is both virtual and in-person, offering many opportunities to network with peers or just see old friends. Start now with our Connection Zone to build your profile and make a contact list. 

We at Microsoft are continuously innovating and evolving our industry cloud solutions to meet the needs of our customers and are very excited to showcase the power of having an industry-focused approach at Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft Ignite 2022 is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to serving our customers across all industries and demonstrate our commitment to equipping them with the most innovative tools and technologies in the industry.  

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for industries.

The post Industry at Microsoft Ignite 2022—Accelerate growth with Microsoft Cloud for industries appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re excited to share our latest release wave for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which helps support organizations navigating this changing environment. The solution showcases new tools to free up critical resources and support consumer-centric operating models that ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare, creating “customers” for life.

Enhance patient engagement

The economic case for consumer-driven healthcare is clear. Enhancing patient experience so that it is convenient, transparent, and personalized can drive greater patient satisfaction and reduce care costs. A recent McKinsey survey shows that satisfied patients who receive a more personalized, engaged experience report having 36 percent fewer visits and are 28 percent less likely to switch providers. These patients are also five to six times more likely to use other services from the same provider.¹ While patients may generally be more involved in their healthcare, satisfied patients feel more empowered to engage in their own health and feel as though they are getting better care, leading to improved outcomes overall. 

In this latest release, we continue to improve patient insights to provide a more enriched 360-degree patient view that is at the center of many healthcare processes. Now, care teams see relevant information faster through the Patient snapshot (generally available) in the Unified patient view. It enables an organization to customize their own end-to-end scenarios leveraging low-code and no-code tools like Microsoft Power Apps to optimize the patient view summary. Now, organizations can create unique snapshots that meet the most relevant use cases and help support faster and better care management. 

We’ve also extended the Unified patient view with a Patient trends (preview) feature to share patient indicators based on computed measures and insights about patient activities, for example, the number of days since the last appointment or the number of hospitalizations in the last year. This feature can be customized once installed to help measure relevant activities for each organization. 

Missed appointments can have a significant cost for healthcare organizations through wasted time and resources. They not only lead to a decline in patients’ health, but the economic effects of patient no shows significantly affect clinic operations and fixed cost calculations, resulting in overstaffing and unscheduled downtime—ultimately leaving healthcare providers struggling with everyday operations. Additionally, research has also shown that patients are significantly more likely to miss an appointment if they have missed appointments in the past.² The new Missed appointment prediction (preview) is a fully integrated AI solution that enables organizations to use AI to assess the likelihood that a patient will miss their next appointment. It also provides users with an explanation of the factors that influenced the prediction. Now, organizations can use these predictions to improve the decision-making process and take proactive measures, like care coordinators reaching out to the patient ahead of time, to help ensure patients will attend their next appointment and maintain continuity of care. Patients in turn have peace of mind knowing their physician’s office is prioritizing appointments that work best for them, building trust, and ensuring better patient-centric care.

Empower health team collaboration

Care plans are critical for healthcare organizations switching to value-based care to improve the quality and cost of care. With this new update for Care plan management (generally available), we have improved usability for care providers, making it easier to create and customize care plans to meet existing workflows and view a patient’s goals, interactions, and activities throughout their care journey. Organizations that leverage our Patient Access solution can now empower patients to update their activity progress in their care plan through the patient portal. Patients can view care plans, view upcoming, completed, overdue activities, and modify the status of an activity. Patients engaged in their own health and wellness are more likely to follow through with ongoing treatment and activity recommendations.

Patient journeys follow a series of interconnected events from being introduced, admitted, cared for, discharged, and possibly repeating a cycle as a retained patient. Later this year, we’ll release new Patient journey templates (preview) and tools to help organizations automate workflows across care management, and surface tasks and notifications to improve the quality of the patient journey. This capability will help save valuable time and create even more efficiency for care managers and administrative users who interact with the patients. It also includes out-of-the-box patient scenario templates for patient discharge, maternity care, diabetes management, and care plan off-track journeys.

During Microsoft Ignite 2022, we will also be joined by our partner Teladoc Health, who will share how the combination of communications, collaboration, and workflows in Microsoft Teams with Teladoc Health’s Solo™ will simplify the way healthcare organizations and clinicians work by streamlining the technology and administrative processes associated with providing virtual care.  

Working with Microsoft enables Teladoc Health to integrate with Teams, further strengthening care team communication and collaboration. Clinicians can securely access clinical data included within their electronic health record (EHR) system via Teladoc Health Solo without having to leave the Teams environment.

Data management

If there’s one thing 2022 has taught us is that data is truly a strategic asset for businesses today. The benefits of getting this right are significant. Harvard Business Review found that organizations that embrace data to drive transformations can experience a 54 percent growth in revenue and profits, 62 percent enhancement to customer satisfaction, and 44 percent faster time to market.³

As part of the ongoing strategy for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we are intentionally innovating with data at the center of all that we do and striving to make it easier for customers to manage, connect, and leverage their entire data estate. With the new Data integration toolkit, we have provided IT administrators and integration specialists with a single pane of capabilities and tools to set up, configure, and manage their data integration components. This will make it easier to enable health data exchange within an organization’s existing landscape.

We’re also excited to announce the full feature release of Dataverse healthcare APIs to support the bi-directional integration capabilities of Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data. These APIs provide a new, improved way to integrate and exchange FHIR data between Microsoft Dataverse and FHIR endpoints like Microsoft Azure Health Data Services or EHR systems.

We continue to invest in health industry data models. With Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we’re using FHIR R4 inspired data models to bring multiple systems and applications together by providing a “shared data model” for applications. This month, we’re releasing an updated Provider data model with an updated set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities commonly used by customers and partners to build or extend their own healthcare apps leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Later this year, we’ll release a Payor data model that contains the set of HL7® FHIR® R4 entities for health insurers and payors. Health data models simplify data management and app development by unifying data into common data model shapes and applying consistency across multiple apps and deployments. This leads to faster innovation and easier data interoperability across various health data systems.

Organizations today can spend a lot of time defining a harmonized and consistent plan for their enterprise data warehousing, clinical and operational analytics, or lake house initiatives. Our industry-specific health database templates in Azure Synapse are data models that act as blueprints and enable organizations to quickly jumpstart their analytics-based industry use cases. Customers and partners can customize and extend these standard templates using the database editor in Azure Synapse. Our latest release includes templates for providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, retail pharmacies, and genomics.

Our deep commitment to supporting healthcare organizations remains steadfast. Partnering in this evolving healthcare environment requires rapid response, predictive capabilities, and continued innovation to help realize value faster and strengthen the resilience of organizations moving forward.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite 2022

Microsoft Ignite 2022 is a chance for us to reaffirm our commitment to serving our healthcare customers and demonstrate our commitment to equipping them with the most innovative healthcare tools, partners, and technologies in the industry. On October 12, 2022, I encourage you all to attend the online Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare session and see a demo of the latest feature release. You can also interact with us at Microsoft Ignite 2022 by joining our hybrid Ask the Experts session with Teladoc and Nuance, or if you’re joining us live in Seattle, you can attend our in-person Expert Meet-up session, and you can also take the opportunity to hear from Nuance at our live Ask the Experts session.  

1 The-next-frontier-of-healthcare-delivery.pdf (mckinsey.com)

2 Evaluating the Impact of Patient No-Shows on Service Quality – PMC (nih.gov)

3 How to lead a data-driven digital transformation by Harvard Business Review

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