Microsoft recently published Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2022 Release with some exciting enhancements and new advanced features focusing on team-based collaboration, customer experience, mobile capabilities, talent management and ease in financial transactions.
The first wave of the 2022 release will run from April to September, with regional deployments starting on April 2. These release plans, as we all know, can be a lot to take in all at once. So, we have summarised some noteworthy updates across the different modules– click below to jump to the relevant sections:
MARKETING
‘Deeply personalised tools’ and ‘collaboration features’ are two of the most intriguing additions to the marketing module in the 2022 release. The interesting developments include:Personalise experience with unified view
Previously, you had to go to the insights page to get the emails, notes, and tasks displayed in the sales apps. You can now observe real-time and outbound marketing initiatives in the unified activity timeline. This allows you to get a consolidated picture of customer behavior across Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sale and Customer Service. With this feature, you can:
- View both real-time and outbound marketing activities in the Dynamics 365 unified timeline.
- Search and filter Marketing-only activities such as “All emails opened by Contact ‘X’.”
This feature allows you to effortlessly collaborate with your team using Microsoft Teams chat without leaving the journey canvas or email editing experience. For example, you can tag someone to review your content as you create an email. You can also check feedback over time and refer to comments people made.
SALES
With this release, sellers can harness the power of data and intelligence that will help them before, during, and after each interaction. In addition, sellers can focus on the highest priority activities and collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline. These enhancements will enable your salespeople to close more deals faster while being as productive as possible.Dynamics 365 Sales powerpacks cool new updates. Some of the most interesting features of our watch are:
Conversational Intelligence
Conversation intelligence has now added coaching dashboards from Sales Insights, making it accessible through a separate portal. This assists the seller in getting the right insight, at the right time, in the right place, especially in the seller’s workflow where they are most engaged — all in the app when needed. It will also send out in-app notifications and emails to ensure that insights are reviewed in real time.
Reduce friction by streamlining captured data in your phones with the Sales module
Sellers can now connect mobile users’ contacts and call clients directly from their phones using the information logged into Dynamics 365 Sales. With this feature, you will see improvement in the user experience and it also makes the data captured in Dynamics 365 Sales more valuable.
Similarly, other essential highlights are improved forecast and pipeline intelligence enhancement, relationship intelligence and process automation.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
The most interesting enhancements to the Customer Service module for the initial version of 2022 release is improved email templates. The improved feature will enable you to have a:- New template gallery with numerous views and search possibilities based on title, subject, and content in the new insert template experience.
- Customisable set of filters which can be saved as a new query that users can use to select templates in the future.
What’s more?
- Agents can use auto-generated summaries to explain the context of their service conversations
- A structure in a summary format that offers information on the customer’s problem and any remedies that the agent tried
- Edit the auto-generated summary
BUSINESS CENTRAL
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has brought a lot of exciting features, including Bank Reconciliation and Consolidation of Customer and Vendor Balance.- With the enhanced Bank Reconciliation feature, you can get a more detailed snapshot of the bank information than before. The platform has added details like G/L Balance, Outstanding Payments and Check Field. And now, it is easier to validate and audit.
- The companies that you do business with might be both a customer and a vendor. In that case, you can now consolidate the customer and vendor balances so that you can avoid making unnecessary payments or receipts and save on transaction fees. You can turn a contact company into a customer or vendor by using the Create as Customer or Create as Vendor actions on the Contact Card page.
Furthermore, Business Central is expanding the ‘Help pane’ capabilities and making it the go-to resource for helping new and existing business central users. In addition, to improve your productivity, you can see enhancements in reporting capabilities with Excel layouts. Likewise, Business Central is also generally available in more countries and regions.
HUMAN RESOURCES
The major area in the latest Microsoft release in the HR module is Improved business automation for active employees, employees joining, and employees leaving.The feature will equip HR professionals with the ability to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes. Focus areas are:
- Automatic assignment of onboarding and offboarding guides based on role
- End terms of employment upon employee exit
- Auto-approval for information such as skills and certification entered by HR
Another update from this release is that Dynamics 365 Human Resource app has been incorporated back into Finance and Operations from January 2022. With this, customers who use standalone Human Resources customers and Finance and Human Resources must migrate to the new infrastructure.
DYNAMICS 365 FINANCE & OPERATIONS
The most noteworthy feature for the 2022 release of this module is the enhanced tax calculation process. The billing practices and pricing are often tedious tasks in companies. The good news is, the new feature ‘Subscription: Recurring contract billing’ automates renewal, provides regular monthly reports, generates an invoice based on consumption, meter reading or usage. With this update, you will be able to provide customers with complete and accurate invoices in multiple billing schedules and support each of your business processes.Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
The major highlight in Supply Chain Management is the Global Inventory Accounting Add-in. At a time when international organisations are under increasing pressure from authorities to comply with local and global accounting standards, this feature comes as a comprehensive solution where we can configure each ledger with a specific set of accounting policies. The functionality supports inventory accounting in dual currencies and dual valuations.
COMMERCE
The major updates we are excited about in Dynamics 365 Commerce for the 2022 release are:Integrated experimentation in Dynamics 365 Commerce
The functionality enables you to conduct controlled experiments such as A/B tests natively in Dynamics 365 Commerce e-commerce sites. With this, you can validate hypotheses about the effectiveness of your B2B and B2C e-commerce pages and make decisions with data-driven confidence, which helps in driving increased customer engagement and conversion rates.
Omnichannel for Customer Service and Power Virtual Agents Customers know about your product through multiple commerce touchpoints today and expect to get personalised support from all the platforms. With customer service functionality being part of Dynamics 365 Commerce, Customer service agents will be able to better serve customers by using a unified profile view, giving them access to real-time customer profile, order, and purchasing data.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
This year, three distinctive enhancements for Customer Insights on our watch list are:- Accelerate sales through intent data and account prospecting: This tool relies on third-party data providers to purchase intent data and personalise your message to the correct people at the right time. If a relationship between contacts and accounts does not already exist, it provides a way to match them.
- Enriching customer data with safe data sharing- Similarly, you can now protect your customer data by exchanging it with your enrichment data supplier in a privacy-safe and secure manner.
- Similarly, an out-of-the-box transaction churn AI model will provide proactive and automated business insights. After you’ve imported your data, you’ll be able to use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights right away using this functionality.
POWER PLATFORM
The Power Platform 2022 first release update contains new features and capabilities that will roll out from April 2022 through September 2022.POWER BI
An interesting feature for this release is that Power BI will fully integrate with Outlook and Office hub. With this update, the customers can discover and consume data and insights in a context very quickly and easily. This feature helps to drive an organisational data culture.
Another exciting update is the improved Power BI experience in Teams. Power BI is strengthening its interaction with Microsoft Teams, including enabling multitasking support for the Power BI personal app in Teams and improving how Power BI content is added to Teams channels to accommodate all content types.
POWER APPS
The most compelling update for us in Power Apps is the UI improvement for business process flows. This feature updates the colour contrast in the path-line between each stage in the business process flow to a darker shade. The part will help users quickly identify and follow each step when working with data on a form in a model-driven app.
Another fantastic feature is the ability to create independent, native mobile apps. With this release, you can now publish canva apps as standalone, native mobile apps.
POWER VIRTUAL AGENTS
Lots of remarkable stuff is happening in Power Virtual Agents in this release, such as:
- Remove the need for your customers to sign in multiple times with single sign-in features in chat authentication settings to enhance the customer experience.
- Proactive triggers help make your bots more relevant to your customers’ actual needs, reducing their frustration and deflecting support calls.
- Expansion of the datacenters list to Germany and United Arab Emirates (UAE).
POWER AUTOMATE
The most compelling update for us in Power Automate is Improved home page experience. You can see several improvements to the home page for Power Automate. This will make it easier for users to learn how to build a flow and discover more about Power Automate capabilities.
What’s Next?
We have highlighted some impressive and anticipated features of the 2022 First Release Plan in this blog post, but there are a lot more. Stay tuned as we bring you the details in upcoming posts. Want to find out how you can take advantage of the latest updates within your organisation? Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation on 01296 328 689. Or email us at info@dogmagroup.co.uk