As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for April 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 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
- In-app SMS conversations. Without leaving the Dynamics 365 Sales app, sellers can now engage with their customers via an SMS sidebar and receive real-time notifications of responses.
- New Opportunity Pipeline view. Get an overview of your pipeline and manage opportunities more easily and intuitively than ever before.
- AI-driven upsell/cross-sell functionality. By analysing historically successful deals, automatic product upsell and cross-sell opportunities are presented to sellers.
- Automatic creation of follow-up tasks. Follow-up tasks can now be automatically created based on emails, Teams messages, and calls. These can then be seen in the the ‘Up Next’ widget.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- AI-suggested replies and conversation summaries. Suggested replies, powered by the state-of-the-art natural language processing technology, provide agents with the tools needed to provide an improved and consistent service to customers. Once a conversation has been completed, an automatic summary can then be automatically generated.
- New email template designer. Provides an advanced, digital content designer for creating and styling templates, using familiar drag-and-drop technology.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Improved Microsoft 365 integration. Seamless integration with Outlook, Excel, Word, Teams and OneDrive for Business make it easier to share and collaborate.
- Trigger actions on business events. Leveraging Power Automate functionality, it is now possible to build flows that trigger when specific actions occur in Business Central, making it easier to integrate with external systems.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Automatic UTM tagging. Dynamic 365 Marketing now automatically tags all your messages with UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters, following a consistent taxonomy.
- New lead-scoring builder. Use the easy-to-use lead score builder to prioritise the most engaged leads from companies that match your ideal customer profile
- Message limiting. To help to avoid unsubscribes and customer fatigue, it is now possible to limit the number of messages a customer can receive within defined periods.
Power Platform Key Changes
Power BI
- Azure Maps unified mapping visual. Get the best of all mapping visuals in a single visual, including the use of shapes, points, shading, and more data points than the current default map visual.
- Create paginated reports online. Using a straightforward drag-and-drop experience, you can now create invoices, financial statements and other operational reports directly in the Power BI service.
Power Apps
- New look and feel for model-driven and canvas apps. Microsoft have implemented their Fluent Design System to both model-driven and canvas app, meaning a cleaner, more modern user interface, including improved use of layouts, fonts and colours.
- Add table columns to forms and views automatically. App editors will now be able to add table columns to selected forms and views at once, via a new ‘Update forms and views button’.
- Drag-and-drop layout editor for Canvas apps. The introduction of responsive layout containers gave the ability to create one app for multiple form factors. With this update, responsive layout containers are even easier to construct, with the use of a new drag-and-drop interface.
Power Automate
- Multi-level Approvals. With this feature, multiple levels/stages in a sequential approval flow can now be defined. Approvers can see the history of the approvals at each stage and their outcome.
- Store Flow execution history data in Dataverse. For organisations looking to store more than 30 days of Power Automation Flow execution history or for those looking to report on this data, Microsoft have introduced the ability to store this data in Dataverse.
- Native integration for flows in Excel. Enables users to create and execute flows directly from within Microsoft Excel, making it easier to work with Excel-related automation.
Power Virtual Agents
- Use Power Fx expressions in the authoring canvas. To be able to implement more sophisticated logic, such as data validation and looping, Power Fx formulas can now be used in the Power Virtual Agents authoring canvas.
- Adaptive Card support. Bot authors can create actionable and interactive rich media content using Adaptive Cards.
AI Builder
- Improved document processing. Custom train (and retrain if required) AI models to classify documents to enable a range of differing documents arriving at a single source to be processed appropriately.
- Process complex documents with the document splitter. Using the Azure Cognitive Services new ‘document splitter’ functionality, you can automatically detect when multiple documents are contained within a document.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Simpler Personal Environment creation. Formerly called Developer environments, Personal Environments allow you to experience all the Dataverse capabilities, including connecting data, building and running apps. This environment doesn’t take capacity against your tenant capacity and is limited to 2GB storage per environment.
Summary
The 2023 Wave 1 release overviews introduce 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 1 dates to be aware of:
- January 30th, 2023 – Early Access available
- April 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 1 preview, please get in touch.
