As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for October 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 beginning of August, we would recommend familiarising yourself with them ahead of time by enabling the Wave 2 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
- Conversation Intelligence. Get AI-driven tips and suggestions while on calls with customers.
- New Seller Dashboard. Track your progress across contacts, accounts, leads and opportunities you are involved with and view key insights across your activities, relationships, and conversations.
- Improved collaboration when using Teams or Outlook. Improve productivity with tighter Dynamics 365 integrations between Microsoft Teams and Outlook, including tracking Teams Chats against a record’s timeline and collaborating on live data while in an email or chat.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Improved case routing. Route cases based on longest idle time, skills, preferred agents or workload percentages.
- Improved experience for waiting customers. Your customers will now be able to leave voice messages for agents or request callbacks, with the option for them to retain their place in the call queue.
- Real-time workload monitoring and agent insights dashboards. Displays information on the incoming workload and KPIs across all platforms in near real time.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Improved reporting. Power BI will now support Business Central Dimensions and new Excel Report Datasets make it easier to create Excel layouts for selected data.
- Power Automate and Power Apps integration for document attachments. Allows for easy access to document attachments (for instance, an original order request linked as a PDF to a sales order), related record media (for instance, images linked to items) and other data linked to business records.
- Switch companies across environments. For those users who need to manage data for multiple companies across multiple environments, a new experience will be introduced to make switching across companies more intuitive.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Create personalised AI-powered next-best content emails. By analysing your customers’ preferences, interests, and motivations, AI can be used to dynamically switch out text and images in customer emails, ensuring that they see the content that is most relevant to them.
- New Segment builder. Build segments by describing them in natural language or by using the easy drag-and-drop logic builder that doesn’t require specialised knowledge of data structures and logical operators.
- Easily create custom lead capture forms. With the new intuitive forms experience in real-time marketing, you can easily create modern forms with advanced capabilities that validate form data and dynamically display form fields.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power BI
- New options for downloading Power BI reports. Previously, when downloading a report from the Power BI service, you would receive a PBIX file with the report and its data. Additionally, users will now be able to download a PBIT file (the report without the data) or a Live Connected Report, which is the report file but linked to the Power BI Service for its data.
- Quick Create reports across multiple tables. Expanding on the existing Quick Create functionality, it will be possible to automatically generate simple reports across multiple tables.
- Mobile Visual formatting. Optimise your reports for mobile by applying mobile-specific formatting changes to your visuals.
Power Apps
- New data grid control. Building upon the new control previewed as part of Wave 1, the new grid control will also provide the option for Nested Grids, Aggregation and Grouping.
- Connect to external data from Dataverse. Although Virtual Tables can be useful, they do have limitations and can take time to set up. The Wave 2 Power Platform release will allow Dataverse to connect to existing data sources, such as SQL Server, Excel files, or Microsoft Lists and interact with that external data as if it’s part of Dataverse, without the need for a Virtual Table.
Power Automate
- Improved OData editor. Initially available in the Get Items SharePoint connector, the new editor will allow users to construct queries using a visual builder, without requiring the underlying technical syntax knowledge.
- Improved Expression editor. Building upon the preview Editor, it will be easier to construct expressions and choose dynamics values.
Power Virtual Agents
- Use chat bots with telephony. Add the ability to optimise your chatbots for voice interactions and make the bots available over telephony, whether that’s on an existing phone number or a new dedicated telephone number.
- User Adaptive Cards in chat responses. Create actionable and interactive rich media content using intuitive card templates.
AI Builder
- Signature detection. AI Builder’s document processing allows you to detect the presence of a signature, supporting the training of a document processing model to detect if a signature is present at a specific location in the document.
- Document classification. You will be able to train an AI model to classify documents. For example, documents of different types of invoices may arrive to a single file share or shared mailbox.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Optimised APIs for bulk processing. To optimise bulk data operation performance, three new API messages are being introduced: CreateMultiple, UpdateMultiple, and UpsertMultiple to process many records at once, improving performance and reducing the number of required API calls.
- Power FX for Business Rules. Presently, Business Rules provide a no-code option for applying logic to data. This will be expanded to a low-code experience using Power Fx which is the low-code language that will be used across Microsoft Power Platform.
Summary
The 2022 Wave 2 release overviews introduces a 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 2 dates to be aware of:
- August 1st, 2022 – Early Access available
- October, 2022 – General availability
Existing Strategy 365 customers who would like to discuss any of the above changes or need assistance with enabling the Wave 2 preview, please get in touch.
