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Our Top 5 Favorite Features: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Spring Release 2022


This is my guest blog post on pavliks.com

The number of new features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is nearly overwhelming!

Spring is nearly here, and in April the first wave of the 2022 release of Dynamics 365 will arrive.  The release contains hundreds of new features for Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Insights, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Connected Spaces, Guides, Remote Assist, Customer Insights, Customer Voice and Microsoft Cloud for Health Care, Financial Services, Sustainability and Nonprofit.

The number of new features is nearly overwhelming, the release wave 1 plan is 412 pages long!

That is too much to cover in blog post, so we are focusing on Customer Insights, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and industry cloud solutions.

Here are our top picks of the new features:

  1. Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Enable AI Suggestions - Enable AI Suggestions for similar cases and knowledge articles.  With the use of AI, suggestions about similar cases that were previously resolved successfully help agents find the right solutions quickly, increase agent productivity and provide better and faster service to customers.  More on how this this AI Enabled feature works.
  2. Dynamics 365 Marketing - Raising Triggers from a Customer Journey - Trigger customer processes or Power Automate flows at relevant points in a customer journey or have multiple journeys that logically function together.  More on how these triggers function.
  3. Data and AI - Using Customer Insights Data from Azure Data Lake Storage - You can now use data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage to build segments, specify conditions and personalize messages to build rich, real-time journeys while maintaining full control over the underlying data.  More on Data and AI feature details.
  4. Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise - Improve Predictive Score Accuracy - Provide sales team with predictability to their revenue forecasts, and a workspace that provides comprehensive view and insights into their sales pipeline.  By assigning the relevant sales stages to each attribute that trains the model, the accuracy of the predictive scoring model is improved.  More details on sales forecasting and pipeline intelligence.
  5. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit - Newest Features to the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit include Program Impact Dashboard enhancements, Automated Azure post deployment configuration for Fundraising and Engagement and Payment Processing enhancements.  More on what's new and planned for Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.

Key dates for the Release:

  • February 23, 2022 - Release plans available in 11 additional languages
  • April 1, 2022 - General availability for the 2022 release wave begins
  • September 2022 - Release wave ends

Microsoft will call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:

Users, automatically - these features include change to the experience for users and are enabled automatically

Admins, makers, analysts, automatically - these features are meant to be used by administrators, makers or business analysts and are enabled automatically.

Users by admins, makers or analysts - these features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers or analysts to be available for their users.

With all of the new features being released, knowing how they impact your solution and how you can realize the benefits can be overwhelming.  We can help you understand the benefits and apply the new features to your business solutions. 

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