As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for April 2024, 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. As some of the improvements will become available in early access from February 5th, 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
- Further Copilot for Sales enhancements. A raft of improvements for Copilot’s integration with Dynamics 365 Sales were announced, including:
– Suggested updates to an opportunity are displayed based on emails or conversations you had with customers.
– Customer asks and issues are automatically detected from emails and conversations you had with your customers and helpful responses are suggested based on analysis on internal sources such as CRM and SharePoint.
– Generating concise profiles of key stakeholders in customer activities based on public and internal data sources.
– Meeting and email summaries highlight budget, stakeholders, customer needs, and timeline mentioned by your customer and provide relevant next steps. - Copilot Sales Homepage. With AI-assisted insights, get pertinent sales-related information in one location, including:
– stay on top of changes with real-time insights across different tables.
– discover follow-up activities from emails.
– notifications on upcoming meetings.
– staying on top of your sales pipeline
– read the latest news about your accounts.
– chat with Copilot in an immersive widescreen experience. - Sequences improvements. Multiple Sales sequences can now be applied to a record and previews of sequences are available to see who has been and will be working on a record and when those actions took place or are due to take place.
- Customised Lead qualification process. Traditionally, a Lead is qualified into an Account, Contact and Opportunity; for businesses that need a more bespoke approach, this process can now be easily customised and additional fields from the Lead can be selected to be used to prepopulate fields on the subsequent records.
- Use Copilot for Sales within Outlook. Generate email content using sales information from your CRM system and considering the specific sales situation that was detected.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Case volume forecasting. Visualise predicted case volumes in 15-minute intervals for daily, weekly and monthly forecasts, up to six months ahead, with the ability to slice by channel and queue and automatic detection of seasonal variations.
- Improved attachment experience. Among a range of improvements, agents will be able to drag and drop attachments into emails, receive reminders of missing attachments prior to sending and have the ability to copy attachments from one email to another.
- Overflow handling. Set a clear and reasonable wait time limit for work items before they are marked for overflow and define a contingency plan for work items that exceed the wait time limit, such as transferring them to other queues.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Virtual Table support. Remove the boundaries between Dynamics 365 apps and make your data accessible to users in their preferred app.
- Copilot and AI enhancements. A range of improvements using AI were announced, including:
– Process unmatched transactions using AI to complement the existing rule-based matching and reconcile data much more quickly.
– Copilot can suggest and assist with the creation of sales lines on sales documents like Sales Quote, Sales Order, and Sales Invoice based on structured input or natural language.
– Copilot can help to create item-related information based on similar items, by comparing Variants, Units of Measure, Substitutions and Dimensions.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing)
- Real-time segments. Customer Insights will keep your segments up to date based on defined criteria as soon as something changes in the profile or when a customer performs an activity, enabling you to confidently engage with them as they enter the next stages of their journey.
- Real-time web tracking. With the addition of a website script, immediately capture customer interactions with your website content.
- Branded links. Customise links to show your company name, increasing customer trust and improving brand recognition and campaign performance.
- Integration with third party web forms. Capture form submissions from any external form and use them to create new leads or contacts in Customer Insights – Journeys.
- Double Opt-In. Ensure a high-quality, engaged subscriber base by requiring users to confirm their subscription through a follow-up email, reducing spam complaints and bounce rates while also enhancing sender reputation and improving compliance.
- Send scheduling. Ensure that your messages reach your customers when they’re most likely to take action by easily scheduling messages to be sent only during specific time windows in a day or specific days of the week to increase their impact.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power BI
Traditionally, Power BI changes have been covered under the Power Platform release plan, but as it now sits under Microsoft Fabric, it now has a separate release plan.
Power Apps
- Define sync settings on mobile devices. Two new settings will be available in the Device status page:
– Wi-Fi only – Lets users choose if their automatic sync happens on mobile and Wi-Fi networks or only when connected via Wi-Fi.
– Auto sync – Adjust the sync interval to sync more or less frequently depending on individual needs. - Modern Screen Templates. Quickly add modern, responsive screen templates to your canvas apps with just a couple clicks.
Power Automate
- Microsoft Excel integration. Superseding the ‘Automate a Task’ functionality, a new ‘Automate Work’ feature provides access to prebuilt templates and allows users to build workflows quickly and easily using a native automation capability in Excel desktop on Windows and Mac.
- Power Fx integration. You can now create automation flows through scripting with Power Fx, the low-code language behind canvas apps.
Copilot Studio (formerly Power Virtual Agents)
- Generative actions. Allows you to replace the traditional natural language-based approach for topic triggering with GPT to select one or more topics or plugin actions to respond to a user’s query.
- Whatsapp support. In conjunction with the Azure Communication Services, Copilot Studio is introducing support for WhatsApp and also SMS through Communication Services, and Communication Services Chat.
- Export & Import. Copilot Studio enables customers to export and import topics across Copilots and environments to enable the reuse of content and speed up deployment.
AI Builder
- Application Lifecycle Management support. Makers will be able to move models across environments and retrain them in the target environment.
- Process and generate documents. Interact with documents directly from Copilot, giving the ability to quickly extract key learning points from documents. It also generates new document templates to enhance productivity.
- Access prebuilt GPT prompts. Get started using GPT capabilities easily with preconfigured prompts, including prompts like summarisation, classification, or extraction.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Improved delegation. Canvas app builders will be aware of the occasional limitations when trying to retrieve large datasets within an app, having to work around the 500-2000 record limitations. With the improved delegation functionality, queries sends the processing of the query to the source rather than handing all the data in-app.
Summary
The 2024 Wave 1 release overviews introduce a range of enhancements and refinements, but also some interesting new features, with a heavy influence of AI and Copilot. 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:
- February 5th, 2024 – Early Access available
- April 1st, 2024 – 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.
