What’s New and Planned for Dynamics 365

What’s New and Planned for Dynamics 365

In this update we bring the focus on the latest enhancements Microsoft is introducing in the Wave 2 Release of Dynamics 365. These design developments are key to improving your organisation’s end to end productivity and efficiencies and where the customer experience is central when operating in today’s digital transformation driven business environment.

Microsoft have positioned their Dynamics 365 Copilot enabled by AI technology as one of the key drivers of their Release Wave 2 plans and where Microsoft’s continuing investment in AI Innovation positions it as an industry leader in its field.

Dynamics 365 CRM Customer Engagement

For 13 years in a row, Microsoft has been recognised again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms…

The 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings exciting innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The following outlines some of the key capabilities and features across the D365 CRM CE platform.

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

Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot – will transform how sellers work by continuing to deliver and enhance generative AI capabilities like email thread summarisation, recommended CRM updates, sales email composition, CRM entity summarisation, sales meeting summarisation, and real-time sales tips. Additionally, further enhancements to collaboration spaces will extend beyond the creation of structured teams/channels and deliver sales copilot experiences that support sales teams during deal progression and shorten the time to close for sellers.

Marketing with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Microsoft have recently announced its changes to the Marketing automation Solutions and where they have integrated the D365 Marketing into D365 Customer insights. Microsoft will keep the brand name of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights but have split it out into two D365 Apps as follows:

Customer Insights – Data which is currently branded as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. This solution enables users to build a unified, real time 360-degree view of customers.
Customer Insights – Journeys was formerly known as Dynamics 365 Marketing

For more detailed updates on these changes – check out the Microsoft Blog explaining the transition to real-time marketing with D365 Customer Insights Journey HERE

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

Service with Dynamics 365:

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

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

Project Operations with D365 -investing in enhancements to services procurement scenarios and project contracting and new functionalities and scenarios in pricing models will support the evolving patterns in the service-centric economy. Additionally, improvements to intelligent resource recommendations will provide suggestions based on experience, cost and utilisation across employees and subcontractors.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

The design developments in Business Central will enable your organisation to enhance the end-to-end productivity and efficiencies when operating in today’s digital transformation driven business environment.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot enables professionals to perform their day-to-day work with the assistance of cutting-edge AI by their side. With Copilot in Business Central, your customers can empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort and without needing to become data scientists!

According to a recent Microsoft Survey on business trends “…nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs and to focus on the work that really matters…”

Business Central Release Wave 2 Overview at a glance:

This release takes Microsoft’s investment in Copilot to the next level – providing more capabilities for people to optimise their processes and complete tasks faster with the guidance of Copilot.

Improved the ability to consolidate financial data and engage in intercompany partnerships for multiple companies in multiple Business Central environments.
Reduced the time it takes to onboard new customers. It’s easier to understand why certain errors occur, and the messages suggest ways to resolve the issue and continue working.
Helping organisations to focus on their primary business while staying compliant with various government regulations by automating regulatory tasks. Usability is always a focus, and this release boosts efficiency when working with lines on documents by introducing key tips for faster keyboard access.
Introduced a capability that lets you peek at editable fields for quicker insight into data without having to drill down.
Microsoft are investing in productivity by enabling consultants and developers to launch the Visual Studio Code editor, or a debugger linked to the source code in the GitHub repository, directly from the Business Central web client.

Some other additional updates in 2023 release wave 2 include:

Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform: It’s easier to set up workflows in Business Central – delivering templates that support more scenarios out of the box, so that you can automate more processes to be more productive. Additionally, you can consume business events with the Business Central Power Automate connector.
Application: The intercompany and consolidation features now work across environments, which allows broader use of the multicompany capabilities. The supply chain capabilities in Business Central have been improved with several optimisations and enhancements that let you run your inventory and warehouse processes more efficiently. For example, we’ve improved the picking process, fulfilment suggestions, SKU management, and added granular warehouse configuration for manufacturing and jobs.
Country and regional: We’ve expanded the global availability of the service. Business Central is now available in more than 130 countries and regions.
Development: Moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, where Microsoft continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers. Modernizing processes for testing dependent extensions by making sure that AL GO can handle these tests for customers, VARs, and ISVs who manage dependencies. All required tests run on the latest released versions of ISV apps without manual intervention.
Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of additional self-service features to help administrators manage more granular administrative rights.
Legislation: This release offers new audit formats for digital reporting, such as SAF-T in Denmark and FAC for France, and better support for e-invoicing and local legislation.
Onboarding: Tooltips on fields provide better Learn More links to content that explains values that are too complex to cover in a short text.
Productivity with Microsoft 365: Improving the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams by investing in the capability to unfurl a card without installing the Business Central Teams app.
Reporting and data analysis: Adding powerful capabilities to Analysis mode, enriching reports, and an overview that lets you explore all reports in Business Central.

Microsoft Investment areas

User experiences – Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces that enable our customers to work with their data from anywhere, and on any device. User interfaces include an installable desktop app, a browser-based web app, and mobile apps. Whether you need to enter data at high speed, casually update entries, or analyse relational data, Business Central offers numerous features that are easy to get started with and powerful when needed.

Every release includes enhancements to usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability. In 2023 release wave 2, we’re boosting efficiency when you’re working with actions across selections in lists of records and viewing summarized data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.

Development – To empower AL developers and increase their productivity, we’ve laid the foundation for introducing namespace support in the platform and application. Namespace support makes it easier to structure apps, create better object names, and avoid identifier clashes. As apps mature, the need to refactor is inevitable, so we’ve added the ability to move ownership of a table and its data between extensions. Additionally, developers can hide specific variable data so that other parties can’t access it during debugging, which protects internal data.

When it comes to data analysis and reporting, developers have more control. For example, you can turn off Analysis Mode on pages and specify how to embed content from Power BI.

Consultants and developers can easily open Visual Studio Code for a production or sandbox environment to investigate and understand objects across installed extensions, view code for owned extensions, and perform troubleshooting—all without having to set up Visual Studio Code manually. Similarly, we’ve improved profiling from the client and Visual Studio Code so it’s easier to find database-related performance issues.

Application – In 2023 release wave 2 we’ve continued to improve areas we started working on in 2023 release wave 1.

This release introduces several new supply chain features that add efficiency, agility, and accuracy to the way you handle items in your warehouse.

There are several new features related to intercompany transactions, financial data consolidations, approval workflows, and automatic general ledger allocations. For intercompany postings, you can perform accounting tasks for multiple companies across multiple Business Central tenant environments, which eliminates the need to manage files. You can also consolidate financial data for companies in different Business Central environments without handling files. Additionally, the new approval workflow for intercompany general journals increases control and eliminates errors. Finally, to make data entry efficient and reduce errors, you can use custom allocation keys to automate the distribution of revenue or cost transactions across different accounts or dimensions.

Country and regional – Expansion to more countries and regions happens through partner-led localization. Our partners create relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more than 140 countries and regions worldwide. Additionally, in the countries where Microsoft is responsible for the localization, we provide all regulatory feature updates.

Reporting and data analysis – Our investments in report discoverability give you fast access to valuable insights into your business performance. The Power BI experience has new and improved Power BI reports, and more capabilities for Analysis mode help you do on-the-fly embedded analysis of their data. You’ll be more productive if you don’t have to switch to another app to get the information you need.

Governance and administration – We’re giving Business Central administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. The goal is for administrators to be self-sufficient, able to solve their customer needs, and handle a wide variety of administrative scenarios.

More granular administrator roles to give more control over the access granted to (delegated) administrators.
Improved processes for minor update releases.
The ability to link Business Central and Power Platform environments to set up integrations consistently and to apply Power Platform environment settings to Business Central.
The ability to cancel Cloud Migration replication runs.

Service and platform – Users have fewer interruptions, Business Central generally feels faster, and web services and certain scenarios are noticeably so. We’re continuing to invest in the fundamentals of our service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance. This focus lets Business Central continue to grow in scale along with our customers’ needs.

To enhance the overall experience, sign-ins for interactive users are more stable and users experience fewer interruptions in their sessions. We’re optimizing our language (AL) runtime to minimize database locking and the effect of table extensions on performance.

Additionally, we’re fine-tuning several application scenarios that our customers frequently use.

Adapt faster with Power Platform – In 2023 release wave 2, we’re further improving the way that Business Central integrates with Power Platform. We’re focusing on two main areas:

How users and decision makers experience Power Automate approval workflows. We’re adding more actions to the connector, support for external business events, and additional templates for automated flows using Teams.
The Power BI embed experience. We’re delivering additional control capabilities for end users who are exploring the BI capabilities we’ve built into Business Central, and for partners who offer in-context dashboards and reports.

Additionally, based on feedback from our partners, we’re improving the dynamic capabilities for integrating Power Platform with Business Central in the online world.

Copilot and AI innovation – According to our recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. But until recently, AI has been a commodity that few SMBs could truly invest in.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot enables professionals to perform their day-to-day work with the assistance of cutting-edge AI by their side. With Copilot in Business Central, our customers empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort, without needing to become data scientists.

This wave expands on our first Copilot capability, marketing text suggestions, by boosting productivity for a broader set of SMB roles.

Onboarding – Partners can set an initial role for users when they sign up to provide a faster onboarding experience, especially when they’re also using the sign-up context and customer profiling features.

Give new users a warm welcome experience by showing personalized greetings in the welcome banner. Dynamically customize the message in the banner to suit your customers’ type of company or industry.

Dynamics 365 Release Plans Useful Resources:

The plan for 2023 release wave 2 covers new features for Dynamics 365 releasing from October 2023 through March 2024.

The Microsoft Power Platform features coming in the 2023 release wave 2 have been summarised in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central – HERE

Have any questions? need assistance? or want to hear how we are helping our Customer Success Stories with D365 ERP & CRM solutions – why not contact us now, we’re here to help!

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