As Microsoft have unveiled their planned improvements for October 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 July 29th, 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
- Copilot immersive homepage. Offers real-time sales insights including suggested actions, goal information and assistance in preparing for upcoming sales meetings.
- Copilot account summaries. Get a 360-degree view of an account, built using all the data associated with the account, including a summary of associated opportunities, associated leads and the latest news regarding the account.
- Customised lead qualification process. Assign newly generated opportunities to other sellers, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary and choose to create multiple opportunities from a single lead.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Improved email attachment experience. Add attachments by dragging and dropping, copy attachments between emails, bulk download and deletion of attachments. reminders to add attachments and the ability to add previously-used attachments.
- Real-time queue membership updates. When moving agents between queues during peak support traffic periods, this would usually take 15 minutes for changes to take effect. This process will now occur immediately.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
- New sample reports. New template reports will be made available that can be used as-is or as the basis for your own reports. The new reports are: Trial Balance, Balance Sheet Detailed, Balance sheet Summary, Income Statement Detailed and Income Statement Summary.
- Integrate Field Service with service management. A seamlessly-integrated solution for managing service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions to aid service technicians, service managers, and finance teams.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
- Automation to manage segments and measures. As usage of Dynamics 365 Insights, increases, so does the number of segments and measures. In order to keep the platform running smoothly, automation can be configured to automatically deactivate these based on their usage.
- Generate insights from interactions. Use data collected by Customer Insights – Journeys to create new measures and segments in Customer Insights – Data, including identifying users that have clicked links, not interacted with emails and using the time taken to interact to determine the optimal times for campaigns.
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
- New Power Platform Environment Settings App. Designed to replace the legacy advanced settings pages of Dynamics 365, providing a modern and fluid way of accessing and amending the underlying environment settings.
- Improved grid functionality. Work with your data, right from your record lists, with grouping and aggregation, easy column reordering and improved styling to ensure important fields are made more prominent.
- Choose the columns downloaded on mobile devices. You will be able to select the columns of tables that are downloaded on mobile devices for offline use; the fewer columns selected, the quicker the data downloads and the less mobile data is consumed.
Power Automate
- AI Flows. Rather than creating a flow using the well-established Cloud Flow or Desktop Flow methods, an AI Flow is built simply by providing a description of what you want to achieve. AI is then used to automatically develop an action plan, which can then be reviewed, including inputs and outputs amended, before deployment.
- Create Cloud Flows from within Excel. From the Automate tab in Excel, ready-made Cloud Flow templates will be made available, enabling users to quickly build automations without having to leave Excel.
- Enable a Cloud Flow to run beyond 30 days. Traditionally, a Cloud Flow would run for up to 30 days before timing out. Previously, this could be worked around by breaking a process up into multiple elements, but now, extending a process beyond the 30-day limit will be made easier.
Copilot Studio
- Suggested prompts. When a Copilot maker is authoring their extension, they can add suggested prompts that the copilot will support.
- Copilot analytics. Custom makers can use analytics in Copilot Studio to monitor copilot performance, view top themes of questions asked, get detailed insights on user satisfaction and get visibility into how Microsoft moderates and blocks toxic queries.
AI Builder
- Improved access control. Admins will be able to control who has access to AI capabilities across their tenant via the Power Platform Admin Center.
- Use AI Builder within Developer Environments. Try out AI Builder capabilities on developer environments before committing to AI capacity. 20,000 credits are available every month that can be used within the developer environment.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Power Platform Catalog enhancements. Organisations can publish and acquire more useful and specific templates from the catalogue beyond just Power Apps and Power Automate, with embedded experiences in Copilot Studio as well as Power Pages.
- Bypass business logic on data imports. For organisations looking to import data in bulk without triggering plugins, new configuration options on API headers will be made available to avoid workflow execution.
Summary
The 2024 Wave 2 release looks to be more about refining existing functionality rather than implement large-scale new features and, as expected, there is a heavy influence of AI-driven technologies. 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 29th, 2024 – Early Access available
- October 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 2 preview, please get in touch.
