Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform are set to receive a significant upgrade with the 2023 release wave 1 plans. This update will be launched between April and September 2023 and includes hundreds of new features and enhancements. The update demonstrates Microsoft’s continued investment in digital transformation to support customers and partners.
The release wave 1 builds on Microsoft’s commitment to breaking down silos between data, insights, and people and creating applications and experiences that add value to every role. With the new capabilities, there will be easier ways to automate tasks and processes, and collaboration will be seamlessly integrated into the flow of work. Additionally, the update will provide AI-guided insights, suggested actions, and low-code ways for anyone to build solutions.
Microsoft has also introduced a new way to interact with the release plans to enhance the customer experience. The Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release planner enables users to view and manage release plans across all active waves in a unified and interactive interface. The planner also allows for personalizing, filtering, sorting, and sharing of these plans.
New features from Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Marketing is introducing new features such as a B2B analytics dashboard, customizable preference centers, and UTM marketing tagging. These features will help businesses increase their output and analyze the impact of their campaigns for higher levels of marketing maturity.
Automatic UTM Tagging in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Dynamics 365 Sales are introducing enhanced sequence capabilities to support personalized and account-based engagement and actionable AI-powered suggestions within the seller workflow. Other features include updated form layouts, new opportunity management workspaces, and improved email templates and text message capabilities to create, loop, and optimize sales sequences.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to work more efficiently with enhancements to voice features, unified routing and embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration. Additionally, the agent workspace will see improvements in the case form, timeline, and conversation control. AI will also be integrated across the contact center, with intelligent-suggested replies and real-time analytics with customization.
New email template designer in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Field Service continues improving the new schedule board for dispatchers while supporting frontline workers with improved appointment visibility in Outlook and faster access to information through improved global search. Finally, the mobile app will experience improvements in performance and reliability.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is set to receive several upgrades to improve data interoperability and governance features, with increased control over data access, configurations, and actions. Enhancements to application and enterprise lifecycle management will also be included, as well as more activation capabilities through tighter integration with Microsoft Dataverse. Users can also expect navigational guidance, AI-powered suggestions, and task assistance to increase the depth of insights obtained from the product, all while reducing time investment.
Meanwhile, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is investing in improving the overall user experience while fixing architecture evolution and stability issues for survey owners and responders. The platform will introduce new features like the transfer ownership of an orphan project if the owner has left the organization and allow survey responders to record partial survey responses to better address key scenarios for customers.
Overall, the 2023 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform promise to significantly improve these solutions. With enhanced features and capabilities, these solutions will enable organizations to drive digital transformation and improve customer experiences.
New features from Power Platform
Power BI is making strides in empowering individuals, teams, and organizations to create a data culture. Individuals will benefit from enhancements to the creation experience, more parity on the web, and the addition of the Power Query diagram view to Power BI. Teams will enjoy improvements to meetings and multitasking, enabling users to work seamlessly with their data from anywhere.
Power Apps is focused on reducing risk for organizations by introducing advanced governance capabilities that make onboarding and low-code capabilities manageable for scalability. With modern experiences in building apps and managing data and logic, makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive. Additionally, customers will experience the modernization of web and mobile experiences that ensure fast and modern experiences across apps.
Virtual step-by-step wizard in Power Apps
Power Pages are focused on bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support low-code and no-code development and professional developers. In this release, makers can access the design studio’s additional capabilities and solution templates. At the same time, experienced developers can work with code productively using the Microsoft Power Platform CLI tool and Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Administrators will be empowered to manage better and govern their Power Pages sites.
Bi-directional data exchange with Power Pages and Power Automate integration
Power Automate is releasing new capabilities allowing users to describe flows in natural language, simplifying the process of creating new flows. Other experience improvements include introducing work queues, where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together, and providing more superficial connectivity to a machine for desktop flows, eliminating the need for additional installs and password management.
Sequential approvals in Microsoft Teams or Power Automate
Power Virtual Agents offers a new unified authoring canvas: Microsoft’s single conversational AI studio for all bot-building needs. With continuing integration with Microsoft Bot Framework capabilities and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, bot creators of all levels, from subject matter experts to developers, will be empowered to begin building with the public preview. The advanced authoring canvas will generally be available this wave.
AI Builder is introducing document processing improvements that include more prebuilt model capabilities, such as contract processing and the ability to identify the personal information and extract field types from documents. The focus is on facilitating model governance and licensing by improving admin interfaces to make it easier to govern how AI Builder credits are used across environments, apps, and flows.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot
Microsoft has announced the release of its latest AI product updates across its business applications portfolio, which includes the new Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 product range. This release aims to provide interactive, AI-powered assistance to help reduce repetitive tasks in the workplace. According to a recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks. Copilot in Dynamics 365 empowers workers with AI tools built for sales, service, marketing, operations, and supply chain roles to help everyone spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less on mundane tasks.
Traditionally, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have been critical customer and business data sources. Still, they require manual tasks such as data entry, content generation, and note-taking. Dynamics 365 Copilot uses recent advancements in generative AI to automate these tedious tasks and unlock the whole creativity of the workforce. This innovation allows business users to accelerate their pace of innovation and improve business outcomes in every line of business.
Copilot has been designed to work across a range of Dynamics 365 products, including Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights, and Marketing. With Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, sellers can dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to deliver exceptional customer care by drafting contextual answers to queries in both chat and email. Additionally, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing empowers marketers to simplify their workflow in data exploration, audience segmentation, and content creation.
Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing
Generative AI is transforming the next era of business applications. Users will increasingly expect their CRM applications to include AI-powered expertise. Copilot in Dynamics 365 brings the latest AI breakthroughs to every line of business, improving customer experience, employee experience, and operational efficiency. The release builds on recent AI momentum across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform, which includes the next generation of AI capabilities in Microsoft Teams, Viva Sales, and Power Apps. Microsoft is committed to responsible AI by design, ensuring its framework for the safe deployment of AI technologies is at the forefront of its approach to bringing these latest advancements to customers.
So, we are looking forward to the implementation of new functionality from Microsoft! Are you ready to implement innovations? Send your request to sales@smart-it.com.
