Microsoft has published its 2022 release wave 1 plan for Dynamics 365, unveiling hundreds of exciting new features and enhancements which Microsoft says demonstrates its continued investment to power digital transformation.

Microsoft’s 2021 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a series of automatic updates made across all applications creating hundreds of new features, changes and opportunities

Automatic production deployment for the 2022 release wave 1 begins April 2022, continuing until September 2022. In this article, Telefónica Tech provides an overview of the key features of release wave 1 and how Microsoft users can begin preparing their adoption strategy.

What’s new in Dynamics 365?

The release will affect all Dynamics 365 applications, including; Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, Intelligent Order Management, Project Operations, Guides, Remote Assist, Fraud Protection, Business Central, and Customer Insights. Below we highlight just a few of the new features:

Dynamics 365 Finance will offer general availability (GA) of subscription billing to ensure organisations can thrive in a service-based economy. Intelligent automation around vendor invoicing, ledger settlements and year-end close services will enable customers to maximise financial visibility and profitability.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management investments continue to focus on driving agility and resilience in the supply chain. With enhanced warehouse and manufacturing execution workloads, organisations can scale mission-critical operations using cloud and edge scale units.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides intelligent talent management capabilities to enable companies to understand the skill set gaps to ensure the right people are in  jobs and to plan for future investments.

Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to simplify and enhance the customer onboarding experience by offering a modern Help Pane that provides learning guidance and helps to increase productivity and process adoption. Customers using Microsoft Power Platform can also use the newly available connector capabilities

Dynamics 365 Marketing continues to invest in improved data and AI capabilities, allowing marketers to include advanced personalisation using codeless experiences. Marketers will be able to respond to SMS replies with personalised engagement based on custom keywords added to journeys, improving the impact of campaigns.

Dynamics 365 Sales is levelling up data integration in this release. Business data is now ambient and actionable from within Microsoft 365 interfaces, enabling sellers to quickly establish context and act on data. Utilising Sales Hub, sellers can adjust their sales pitch using AI-guided live feedback and suggestions, and managers can track team performance and provide valuable coaching.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will be introducing a range of improvements to empower agents. These include enhancements to the inbox view which allow agents to work through issues across channels and further collaboration with Microsoft Teams which include data integration and AI-suggested contacts.

Dynamics 365 Field Service is launching innovative usability with an improved schedule board. The schedule board will have an enhanced user experience of hourly and multi-day views to improve dispatcher productivity.

Preparing for the 2022 release wave 1

From the 31st January, 2022 our customers will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2022. We encourage you to take advantage of the early access period to try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence.

Incremental’s also recommends that organisations opt–in to early access as soon as possible. At the time of writing, Microsoft has only published descriptions of upcoming changes, but opting–in provides time to transition to the new features, enabling each change to be validated by use across the organisation.

Organisations should identify the changes that will impact them now and prepare by structuring a delivery plan, factoring in any required remedial action. Once validated by your teams, the upgraded solution can be deployed to production with confidence and ease.

If your organisation requires assistance navigating the rollout of Microsoft’s 2022 release wave 1 across Dynamics 365 please get in touch.