With the arrival of Microsoft’s October 2019 release notes comes a lot of new, exciting developments for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. This article will give you a brief overview of the new features that will be released by Microsoft between October 2019 and March 2020.
Dynamics 365 Updates
The Dynamics 365 2019 release wave 2 will provide plenty of new capabilities across all Dynamics 365 applications, such as Customer Engagement, Finance & Operations, and Business Central.
Users can expect enhanced artificial intelligence capabilities, enabling organisations to take control of and transform their sales, marketing and customer service functions.
- Sales Insights will enable teams to enhance productivity and more accurately forecast outcomes throughout the sales process.
- Customer Service Insights provides an actionable view into critical performance metrics, operational data, and emerging trends using industry-leading artificial intelligence.
- Virtual Agent for Customer Service is an exciting new development that will enable organisations to create bots, powered by artificial intelligence. These bots will be able to chat with customers, and provide new opportunities for organisations to improve the customer experience through digital transformation.
- Customer Insights is an update to empower organisations to harness the power of their customer data. With Customer Insights, organisations will be able to understand and unify their customer data, and use this to gain insights into their strategy and performance.
- Market Insights is aimed at business users, who will benefit from increased insights into consumer behavior. Through Market Insights, users will be able to more effectively monitor consumer response to their brand, product or service, and adjust their marketing strategy accordingly.
- Improved Fraud Protection has been designed to support e-commerce merchants in an increasingly competitive market. Fraud costs as a percentage of annual revenue rose to 2.91% in 2018, but Fraud Protection from Microsoft will enable e-commerce merchants to minimise fraud loss, increase bank acceptance rates to yield higher revenue, and more generally improve the online shopping experience for consumers.
This release will also bring enhancements to support employee productivity through the use of mixed reality.
- Remote Assist will enable technicians to get to work on issues and provide solutions more quickly than ever.
- Layout is an update designed for space planners, empowering them to take designs from initial idea to finished project faster and with more accuracy.
- Product Visualize is an augmented reality update, giving salespeople the power to show products to customers in their own environment.
- Guides is another mixed-reality application, this time for Microsoft HoloLens. Guides will enable employees to quickly and efficiently learn in the flow of work by giving holographic instructions where and when they require them.
Power Platform Updates
The Power Platform release wave 2 will provide plenty of new capabilities across all three Power Platform applications – Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps.
For PowerApps, the improvements released in this wave will be focused on delivering increased quality and ease of use whilst still allowing for advanced enterprise and administrator requirements. In addition, Microsoft will also launch PowerApps Portals, web portals that surface data stored in Common Data Service to employees or users outside their organisations.
Users of Microsoft Flow can expect developments for Flow makers, end users of Flows and Flow administrators. Microsoft will release improved creation experiences, ability to work with business processes offline and richer tooling for administrators.
A brand new development, AI Builder (preview) will allow teams to easily automate processes and forecast outcomes to improve business performance and inform strategy. AI Builder is essentially a turnkey solution that allows users to access the power of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence through a point-and-click experience directly integrated into Microsoft Flow and PowerApps.
In keeping with the AI theme of this release, Power BI will receive updates designed to support organisations building a data culture. By providing organisations with the ability to perform big data analytics with built-in artificial intelligence on the unified BI platform, Microsoft is empowering users to make important business decisions derived directly from facts.
Lastly, the Common Data Model will receive updates to continue to provide semantic consistency for canonical business entities throughout Dynamics 365 and Common Data Service. These updates will save time and offer increased value for application developers, ISV partners and integrators.