As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for October 2023, 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 July, 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
- AI-generated proposals. With the aid of Copilot, create the first draft of a proposal, based on existing data, thus making it contextual and relevant. The proposal generated is consistent in terms of format, style, and content.
- AI-generated summaries. Again powered by Copilot, sellers can now access a consolidated summary of vital customer data, including buying behaviour, cases, and the latest news about an account or opportunity.
- Notifications on reassignment of Leads and Opportunities. Previously, this functionality would have to be built manually upon request, but with simple new configuration options, these notifications can now be system-generated.
- Lead support in Viva Sales. Viva Sales will be able to match incoming and outgoing emails to leads in the organisation’s CRM system, showing field-level context and existing relationships to other tables.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Overflow handling. When call volumes spike, it can be useful to reroute customers whose wait times have become excessive. This will now be possible via new configuration options.
- AI-generated summaries. Copilot will be able to automatically generate summaries for Cases and Conversations removing the need for agents to sift through lengthy transcripts, enabling them to deliver exceptional customer service in less time.
- Copilot generated statistics. Using generative AI to create an statistics across various customer service tasks, including completing customer conversations, triaging and closing cases, and drafting and sending email.
- Draft new responses automatically. Copilot will be able to draft new contextual email and message responses based on your company data.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Intercompany transactions across environments – Send and receive transactions between companies in multiple Business Central tenant environments.
- Real-time warehouse data. Access real-time information about warehouse quantities, including inventory levels, locations within the warehouse, processing stage, and more.
- Improved performance. Speed gains have been made in multiple scenarios, including web service integrations, background jobs, and interactive sessions. In addition, the application is more responsive and pages load faster in the client.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Styling with Copilot. Easily style your emails, forms and event registrations pages using AI to quickly interpret styles from a website and applying them to your content.
- Increased limits. Reach up to 100 million marketing contacts (up from 30 million), deliver up to 300 million monthly interactions through email messages, SMS, push, or custom channels (up from 100 million) and create segments of up to 100 million marketing contacts.
- Create complex lead qualification/disqualification rules. You will be able to create more flexible, granular lead qualification criteria based not only on scores but also on other signals that indicate a prospect’s likelihood to buy, such as their fit with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), their intent to buy, ‘recency’ and engagement.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power BI
- Embed Power BI charts in Microsoft 365 documents. Simply by copying and pasting, you can bring your Power BI visuals into Microsoft 365 After you paste the chart into a Word or PowerPoint document, the chart is still fully interactive, allowing your users to easily slice and dice the data.
- Save and share Power BI files in OneDrive and SharePoint. Users can now save, share, and view files using OneDrive and SharePoint by default, without explicitly publishing files to the Power BI service.
Power Apps
- Screen layout templates. Swiftly create new canvas apps with a range predefined and mobile-friendly layouts.
- Use Copilot to build and edit apps. Make use of natural language to carry out tasks such as adding screens and controls, modifying properties, and linking to data.
Power Automate
- Manage bulk abandoned cloud flows. When users leave an organisation, being aware of processes owned by that user and managing their reassignment has always been a problem. Admins will now be able to view information like the name of the last owner and number of days since the flow last ran from the Power Platform admin center. They can then perform maintenance operations like bulk reassignment or disabling these flows.
Power Virtual Agents
- Use SharePoint and Dataverse for AI-generated answers. When a bot maker connects an internal SharePoint knowledge source or Dataverse environment to a bot, the bot can retrieve information from these sources and automatically use the content in conversations with users.
AI Builder
- Transcribe text to speech. Quickly and accurately transcribe audio to text in more than 100 languages and variants.
- Detect personally identifiable information. AI Builder allows you to identify and remove personally identifiable information from text as part of the document processing workflow.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Low-code plugins. Create reusable, server-side real-time business logic workflows that allow you to execute a set of specific commands in Microsoft Dataverse using Power Fx.
- Enhanced formula columns. As formula columns are intended to ultimately replace the calculated columns, further functionality will be added to bring them on par with them, including the creation of currency columns, support for date and time with user local and time zone, choice columns and the ability to set precisions for decimals.
Summary
The 2023 Wave 2 release overviews introduce a range of enhancements and refinements, but also some interesting new innovations. 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:
- July 31st, 2023 – Early Access available
- October 1st, 2023 – 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.
