What is new in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Part 2
Posted December 22, 2021
in News
Written by John Shea III, Xpanxion Technical Writer
Wave 2 Release Brings Even More Features to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 User
In this article, we’ll cover the Microsoft Dynamics 365 14 main applications and 11 sub-applications in the Wave 2 release. We’ve listed these below and will tell you what’s new in each.
The general availability for Wave 2 is from October 1, 2021 through March 2022. This release Wave also includes Industry Clouds. It has hundreds of new features across the applications that make up Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Service
Customer Service
Better knowledge authoring with AI-suggested keywords and brief descriptions for knowledge articles. This helps customer agents be more productive so they can handle multiple channels of support to route diagnostics for supervisors in contact centers. Machine learning-based rules classify sentimental analysis, estimating effort and analyzing sales history. Let the machines help you out.
Field Service
There is a new Field Service customer portal with self-scheduling and appointment management for better service and customer communication. Also included is a new work order release for a better one view for all and a work order summary so personnel can be more productive.
Finance and Operations
Finance
Invest in data insight as part of the Finance Insights with smart cash flow and use machine learning to improve financial operations. Modernize and automate the services customers use daily with better ease-of use and performance around fixed assets, year-end-close, and financial activities. There are even global offerings with localization and general availability of Microsoft’s Tax Calculation service.
Supply Chain Management
Invest in resource planning, manufacturing, asset management, planning, and inventory management. There are new manufacturing run examples included to help integrate between Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution solutions (MES), and shop floor automation systems which customers can easily adopt and integrate into new ways of doing business.
Project Operations
In one application, you can connect sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams. You can win more deals, accelerate delivery, give employees empowerment, and maximize profits through better task scheduling and managing of vendor subcontracts.
Finance and Operations with cross-app capabilities
Use the Microsoft Power Platform governance features for environment provisions, authorizations and authentication, run-time events, and developer tools. Have more data exchange between Finance and Operation apps, Microsoft Dataverse, and Customer engagement apps.
Marketing
Personalization is the key for marketing. Create personalized paths to interact with your customers across all access points. Use AI-based content ideas to deliver superior experiences and win more customers and their loyalty. And that is what marketing is all about.
Sales
Sales has new functions and enhancements to Microsoft Teams’ calling experience, LinkedIn integration for the business-minded community, easy access to Sales Navigator, forecasting updates, guided selling improvements with the sales accelerator, and there is a launch deal manager to help manage your pipeline more efficiently.
Commerce
Invest in customer segments and use the site builder with specific page layouts and content to integrate with Microsoft Clarity to create a customer-specific catalog that provides a limited view to those with specific access in the organization, plus enhancements to reordering and admin privileges.
Connected Stores
AI models and insight provide store analysis to drive your data decisions to measure the effectiveness of promotions. You can also determine cashier queue lengths and wait times to improve queue management. But there is no chance you can disprove Ettorre’s Observation that the other line (queue) moves faster.
Human Resources
Benefits management offers an easier user experience. Employees can manage leave requests with Teams and provide businesses viewable analytics on leave balances to meet company policies.
Fraud Protection
Deeper views of fraud directly from the web. It also allows payment service providers (PSPs) to merge with fraud prevention and let merchants observe and combat fraud.
SMB
Expand integration with Microsoft 365, country and regional expansion in 10 more markets and simplify tenant administrations.
Guides
Help authors create guides without 3D or programming skills when they use the HoloLens app and PC app to provide an updated user experience using HoloLens instinctual interactions.
Remote Assist
Cascades Teams meeting policies for Remote Assist to simplify configuration.
Customer Insights
Audience Insights
Eliminate data silos. Build a single customer profile to provide intelligent insights and to-do actions for their B2B and B2C customers. For B2B, there are churn predictors for individual customer records. Audience Insights can predict the likelihood of churn for accounts in a straightforward guided experience. Data consumption insights include more Power Query connectors and improved data consumption.
Engagement Insights
Connect data sources from a variety of apps so you can have interactive analytics over the web, mobile, connected products, and customer interaction points. This includes out-of-the-box analytics, customer interaction analytics, and advances AI-driven analytics and insights into personalization and attribution models. Multichannel analytics are expanded over date from other channels for better customer analytics, downstream actions, activations, and optimizations.
Customer Voice
Help survey owners act on feedback and trends. Use Power Automate to define and trigger custom workflows to meet with the right contacts.
Microsoft Cloud for Industry Solutions
Healthcare
Deliver exceptional patient care by making the patient experience better, coordinating patient care, and driving operational efficiency through tailored capabilities from Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Teams, and Azure. It provides a unified patient profile and activity timeline for a better patient understanding, improved input of healthcare data into Microsoft Dataverse, and expansion to more countries and regions.
Financial Services
Provide different customer experiences and increase customer retention through one customer profile to help relationship managers gain an all-around view, predict customer churn, and make cross and upsell easier. There is transparent loan onboarding through automation and integrates with the Teams loan manager to reduce the time from interest to closing the deal.
Non-profit
There are two volunteering applications: a volunteer management model-driven app for non-profit staff to manage engagement opportunities and a Power Apps portal to integrate non-profit sites to span volunteer recruiting.
And all that is in the 2021 Wave 2 release. Again, these should be generally available after October 1, 2021. What will they think of next for the 2022 Wave? Stay tuned.
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