As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for April 2022, we take a look at the key innovations and changes.
The release plans, as before, have been divided up into Dynamics 365 and The Power Platform, such is the scale of the changes. As some of the changes are available in preview at the end of January, we would recommend familiarising yourself with them ahead of time by enabling the Wave 1 Preview in a sandbox environment. If you are an existing Strategy 365 customer and need assistance with this, please get in touch.
Dynamics 365 Key Changes
Dynamics 365 Sales
- Capture mobile phone contacts and calls. Many organisations will have staff member using their mobile phones to contact prospects and potential customers. These users will be able to create Dynamics 365 contacts from their mobile phone contacts and log calls based on recent mobile calls.
- Sales Accelerator, Conversation Intelligence, and Predictive Scoring added to Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licence. For users with a full Dynamics 365 Sales licence, they will now be granted three hours per month of conversation intelligence, 1,500 records connected to any defined Sales Accelerator sequence per environment per month and view up to predictively-scored 1,500 leads/opportunity records scored per environment per month.
- Yearly forecasts. Previously, forecasts could only be configured on a monthly or quarterly basis. A new yearly forecast option will now be added for those organisations who track their sales objectives on an annual basis.
- Sales Accelerator enhancements. In addition to an improved setup experience, your sellers can now be notified of customer interactions such as opened, read, or forwarded emails and their responses, plus attachment downloads and link clicks.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Improved email template experience. A new advanced template designer that allows for the straightforward creation of responsive email templates will be available to users, along with an enhanced experience for choosing from the range of available templates when drafting an email.
- Relevance Search added to Portals. The existing search functionality within Portals will be replaced with the far more powerful and flexible Relevance Search, making it far easier for portal users to search for knowledge base articles and other content.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- New desktop app. For those users that prefer to access Business Central via a dedicated app rather than a web browser, a new modern app replaces the existing app which was based on old technology. It will be discoverable in the Microsoft Store and works with online and on-premises deployments.
- Synchronise quotes and orders with Dynamics 365 Sales in both directions. A new mapping page, where full synchronisation or match-based coupling can be selected, enables your sales quotes and order headers/lines to be synchronised in either direction when values are changed.
- Dataverse change events. With the Business Central virtual tables solution for Dataverse, the Business Central API is exposed as tables in Dataverse. This way, makers can build apps and Power Automate flows that leverage the virtual tables as if they were native Dataverse tables.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Call a Journey or Power Automate flow from within a Journey. For real-time marketing, when a customer reaches a new Custom Event Trigger, a new Journey can be automatically started or details of the current Customer/Journey can be passed to a Power Automate flow.
- Use Dataverse actions to trigger Journeys. When common interactions occur within Dynamics Apps, such as the adding of a new row or the update of specific fields, a Journey can now be triggered from this change.
- Content Fragments. Create reusable content blocks, containing text, images and personalisation, for use in email messages.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power BI
- Quickly create a report from an Excel spreadsheet. A new option from within Excel will allow spreadsheets saved within OneDrive/SharePoint to be used to create a Dataset within the Power BI service which can then be used for reporting.
- Easily create reports with additional data sources, directly in the Power BI service. Many Power BI reports start life in the Power BI Desktop application, but additional data sources will be added to the Power BI service to allow for the creation of reports from common file data sources such as Excel, CSV, and SharePoint, as well as from popular online services and databases.
- Accessibility improvements. Many of the Power BI visuals will have improved keyboard navigation and assistive technology support.
Power Apps
- Improved record grid functionality. Lists of records can now be infinitely scrolled, rather than having to page through data. The records can also be edited directly from the grid or subgrid.
- Modern Advanced Find. Replacing the legacy Advanced Find experience, Modern Advanced Find will help you to find your dataverse data quicker in a model-driven app with the aid of column filters and extra view customisation options.
- Create Teams Meetings from Appointments. With a single click, easily add a Microsoft Teams meeting to an appointment in your model-driven app. You can also join a Teams meeting with a single click from the appointment or the timeline control.
- New Power Apps for Windows app. Run both model-driven apps and canvas apps with full support for offline mode and leveraging device capabilities such as camera, microphone, file picker, geolocation, and barcode scanner.
Power Automate
- Resubmit multiple failed flow runs at once. Currently, failed flows can only be submitted on an individual basis. New functionality will be introduced to allow for bulk selection and resubmission of flows.
- Undo/Redo. When building a cloud flow, actions can now be undone or redone with a simple click of new Undo and Redo buttons.
- SharePoint connector in Power Automate for desktop. Embed SharePoint cloud actions within desktop automations.
Power Virtual Agents
- Proactive triggers. Rather than wait for a trigger question from a user, a bot conversation can be triggered by other actions such as page navigation or button clicks.
- Use Power Platform Connectors directly in Topics. Rather than handing off some types of requests to Power Automate, actions can be constructed directly in the PVA builder, directly referencing Power Platform Connectors.
AI Builder
- Support for unstructured documents. You can now train your AI models to extract entities like amounts, dates, names, and terms and conditions from documents where the structure of each document is different.
- Customise prebuilt models. Rather than having to create and train AI models from scratch, existing models can be customised to include additional fields.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Display Dataverse results in Microsoft Search. Users will be able to see search results from Microsoft Dataverse in Microsoft 365 (Bing.com, Office.com, Sharepoint.com).
Summary
The 2022 Wave 1 release overviews introduces a wide range of enhancements and refinements, but also some interesting new features. We look forward to seeing and testing the new functionality when the preview and general releases are launched. As a reminder, these are the upcoming Wave 1 dates to be aware of:
- January 31st, 2022 – Early Access available
- April 1st, 2022 – General availability
Existing Strategy 365 customers who would like to discuss any of the above changes or need assistance with enabling the Wave 1 preview, please get in touch.
