Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement

Dynamics 365 Release 2022 Wave 1 Announcement

Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement

Dynamics 365 ERP & CRM leads the way for 2022 & beyond!

Introduction:

Microsoft has announced its timeline for the 2022 cloud update wave for Dynamics 365 ERP & CRM. We are delighted to share the Microsoft guidelines below – which outline some of the exciting key highlights showcasing a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2022 and September 2022. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating Microsoft’s continued investment to power digital transformation for its customers.

The release plans enable customers to learn more about the new capabilities that Microsoft will be rolling out across Dynamics 365 modules. In these guides, Microsoft shares its vision for each product and details the timeline of each new feature release.

You can either browse the release plan for some of the key highlights below or download the document as a PDF file. The PDF file also includes information about Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration, and data integration.

Download the 2022 release wave 1 PDF (last updated January 25, 2022)

Further information will also be available from the Microsoft Product Roadmap page

Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement – Overview

The 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and industry clouds brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across 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 much more…

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing is empowering Marketers to leverage the power of data and AI in order to improve marketing content creation and delivery. Make every interaction count, by responding at the right moment with new event triggers based on data changes in any Dynamics 365 app, taking action from journeys in more ways, using no-code conditional text to easily personalize content and taking immediate action on SMS replies through personalized experience based on responses using custom keywords. Collaborate across your organization to create and deliver the best marketing content possible using the built-in Microsoft Teams chat.

Dynamics 365 Marketing combines the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation, empowering businesses to orchestrate personalized journeys across all touchpoints, strengthening relationships and earning loyalty.

Over the past two years, a large number of interactions – social and professional – have moved to a digital format. This has led to the creation of a tremendous amount of data. With this release, we aim to enable you to efficiently harness the full power of your data and out-of-the-box AI insights to not only survive, but also thrive in these times. We aim to enable you to engage with your customers on their terms and deliver connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.

We have three themes to help you better engage your customers and create raving fans for your business:

Enable moments-based marketing with real-time, event-based journey orchestration for all business scenarios.
Use the power of data and AI to personalize interactions across the customer journey.
Collaborate across people, departments, and applications to create engaging campaigns.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales focuses on enabling sales professionals to harness the power of data and intelligence which will help them to forecast, compare annual projections, and measure performance using predictive scoring. Sellers can collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline, while managers can track team performance and provide coaching to increase customer satisfaction. Our goal is to help the seller close more deals, faster, while being as productive as possible.

Dynamics 365 Sales is the market-leading sales application that empowers every organization to sell more by understanding their customers and the way they want to buy—powered by data, intelligence, and experiences that people love. Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of business data everywhere the seller is working—across their favourite productivity tools like Office 365 and Teams. It helps organizations get to the heart of in-the-moment customer needs and prioritizes and refines focus to the most relevant and authentic engagements, enabling sellers to sell more efficiently.

The world’s way of working has transformed dramatically in the last decade and even more so within the last couple of years. The role of the seller is evolving too because buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. The seller evolution requires a need for several shifts in their current experience: prioritization of their work, intelligent digital communication tools, better collaboration to improve productivity, and spend more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. To do this, sellers cannot be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.

For this release, we have focused on enabling the seller to do just that. Sellers will be able to harness the power of data and intelligence that will help them before, during, and after each interaction. Sellers will focus on the highest priority activities and will collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline. Our goal is to help the seller close more deals, faster, while being as productive as possible.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service focuses on the setup experience for administrators with the new Customer Service admin centre app and improving agent productivity with updates to the agent inbox view. Enhancements to embedded Microsoft Teams include Dynamics 365 data integration, AI-suggested contacts, and AI-generated conversation summaries for agents.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an end-to-end service for customer support, spanning self- and assisted-service scenarios across multiple channels of customer engagement. Customer Service provides comprehensive and efficient case routing and management for agents, a knowledge base where users can author and consume knowledge articles, and robust insights through AI suggestions and rich, embedded analytics. It also provides add-ons for omnichannel engagement through chat, social channels, and voice.

For 2022 release wave 1, we plan to:

Deliver the all-in-one contact centre.
Transform contact centre routing.
Enable reliable self-service at scale.
Improve agent experiences with automation and knowledge management.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service brings innovation and usability enhancements to the schedule board, allowing for more intuitive and faster usage, as well as improved dispatcher productivity. The Field Service mobile application has enhancements that will boost technician productivity and now also is fully supported on Windows devices.

Dynamics 365 Field Service is an industry-leading field service management application that allows companies to transform their service operations by connecting people, places, and things to deliver customer-centric experiences. It includes capabilities such as work order management, resource scheduling, and asset management. Dynamics 365 Field Service allows organizations to move from paper-based reactive service to deliver proactive and predictive world-class service, empowering digital transformation and allowing innovative business models such as outcome-based service.

In this next release, the focus will be on usability improvements, enhancements on the new schedule board, and the general availability of the Windows app for Field Service mobile.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is investing in B2B service scenarios by bringing one-time calling to GA and supporting additional calling policies for external users. Additionally, the Dynamics 365 Remote Assist mobile application will be updated to support improved collaboration through the ability to screen share across users on iOS and Android.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is a mixed-reality application that empowers technicians to solve problems faster the first time. Whether in a heads-up, hands-free environment on Microsoft HoloLens, or using an iOS or Android device, technicians can collaborate with remote experts to troubleshoot issues in context. This modernizes field-service operations so technicians can make the most of their time.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is used in the following scenarios:

Service and repairs: Enable companies to service assets faster by doing the right remote collaboration fast and capturing the right fix to perform further analysis.
Surveys and walkthroughs: Perform tasks such as inspections, quality assurance, project reviews, and other field service and operations activities by capturing asset information with augmented reality.
Knowledge and service insights: Empower your technicians to capture the right information and make it available for your broader organization. Use repair data from your technician operations to improve your business processes.

Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP

Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to simplify 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. It is also easier to trigger a Power Automate flow directly from Business Central pages, which can save time by automating processes. Collaborating on Business Central data in Microsoft Teams is improved due to the removal of licensing friction.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business application solution that is designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations. In 2022 release wave 1, you will see further investments cantering on helping users get to productive usage faster, whether they are new or existing customers of ours, by providing in-app improvements to help them get started. We expand out on the capabilities of the Help pane and make it the go-to resource for helping both new and existing users. We continue our geographic expansion, and we will improve performance and usability by focusing on easier navigation in menus. To help users be productive, we enhance our reporting capabilities with Excel layouts.

Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.

Administration: In 2022 release wave 1, Business Central delivers a set of features that are designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions.

Application: The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancement of the capabilities so that users can execute business processes more productively.

Better with Microsoft 365: In 2022 release wave 1, we improve the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams, and we harden the Excel and Outlook add-ins.

Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 1, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.

Onboarding: In 2022 release wave 1, customers can get to productive usage faster using the new modern Help pane.

Development tools: As we have moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, we continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers. Additionally, we introduce GitHub Go for partners to set up CI/CD for their apps without any prior knowledge about pipelines, Docker, or PowerShell.

Power Platform: We improve our Power Automate capabilities, making it much easier to set up workflows for the specific needs of an organization.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights invests in consent enablement features and now provides customers with the ability to integrate consent data from multiple sources and systems. With this feature, consent permissions and customer preferences can be accounted for during real-time personalization scenarios within Customer Insights. New data enrichment capabilities will allow customers to safely collaborate and share relevant data via privacy-enabled workflows.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is an industry-leading customer data platform that enables organizations to understand the data about their customers and drive personalization for them. Customer Insights empowers organizations to consolidate, enrich, understand, and harness their B2C and B2B customer data for intelligent insights and actions.

With Customer Insights, organizations can unify customer profiles from disparate data sources, harmonize the customer consent from each of those sources, and create powerful AI-driven predictions, segments, and measures. This information can be activated across Microsoft and external systems. Leveraging integrations with Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Dataverse, Customer Insights lowers the cost, configuration complexity, and time to value for organizations.

We are making several investments to enhance Customer Insights capabilities as a part of 2022 release wave 1:

New templates and libraries of industry standard metrics to get started faster.
Accelerate B2B sales and increase return on marketing spend through intent data, account-based insights, and lead matching.
Extended semantic types for activities and entities.
New automated transaction churn out-of-the-box model.
Near real-time consent data harmonized from third-party consent management services.
Enrich your customer data safely with clean rooms.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights will enable early warnings around weather, natural disaster, and logistics risk signals, alerts, and predictions. Other investments include building deep integration with Supply Chain Management, ability to collaborate with stakeholders via surveys, cases, and Teams, and monitor and track sustainability metrics.

Our vision is to help businesses build the supply chain of the future that is resilient, efficient, and sustainable. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights will be capable of sensing, predicting, and mitigating disruptions before they occur without sacrificing efficiency or sustainability.

Organizations with complex supply chains such as manufacturers and retailers will be able to create a digital representation of their physical supply chain and achieve end-to-end real-time visibility. They will break down data silos inside their organization as well as across the broader ecosystem. They will be able to take advantage of AI to analyse the huge amounts of data that are surfaced and get recommendations that are predictive as well as prescriptive. Finally, they will be able to collaborate within and across company boundaries, and take actions to simultaneously improve resilience, achieve efficiency, and drive sustainability by closing the loop around supply chain execution systems.

To help businesses achieve this vision, we are bringing to market a software as a service (SaaS) product that enables them to:

Get end-to-end holistic visibility into in-house manufacturing processes, assets, multiple tiers of suppliers and customers, service providers, distributors, 3PLs, and external factors such as natural catastrophes, the financial health of partners, and geopolitical and weather events.
Consume AI-powered analytics that assess and surface insights and risks in a timely manner and recommend the next best actions for supply chain managers, sustainability officers, and business leaders.
Do deep collaboration across internal and external stakeholders to take decisions and implement actions needed to effectively manage risks and optimize for resiliency, sustainability, and efficiency.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI

Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. For individuals, we are improving the create experience through the addition of measures using natural language and allowing users to collaborate via OneDrive.

For teams, we are bringing enhancements to Goals focused on enterprise needs, integration with PowerPoint, and adding new capabilities to the Power BI integration in Teams. To empower the organization, we are improving our experience with big data through automatic aggregations, data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP) policies and providing improved visibility into user activity to admins.

Key dates for Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement

This release plan describes functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see  Microsoft policy).

Just like the previous release waves, we continue to call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:

Users, automatically – These features include changes to the user experience for users and are enabled automatically.
Admins, makers, or 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 business analysts to be available for their users.

With this Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement – You can get ready with confidence knowing which features will be enabled automatically. We’ve done this work to help you – partners, customers, and users – drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms.

Next Steps…

Contact Simply Dynamics

Simply Dynamics are looking forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we’re eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2022 release wave 1 plan.

We look forward to sharing further updates about what is new and planned for Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 Plan 2022 Announcement

If you have any queries about the Dynamics 365 – 2022 Release updates Contact Us now, we’re here to help