Highlights from Dynamics 365, Release Wave 1
- 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 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 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 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.
Read the full blog here: 2022 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog
For more information around Dynamics 365, please contact Pamela Beste at PBeste@mailctp.com