Archive for the ‘Dynamics 365’ category

 Launch of the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot 

March 7th, 2023

 Provide interactive, AI-powered assistance across business functions. With Dynamics 365 Copilot, organizations empower their workers with AI tools built for sales, service, marketing, operations and supply chain roles. These AI capabilities allow everyone to spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less time on mundane tasks.

According to a Microsoft recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are mission-critical; however, these both frequently require burdensome tasks like manual data entry, content generation and notetaking.

Dynamics 365 Copilot uses recent advancements in generative AI to automate these tedious tasks to unlock the full creativity of the workforce.

This is not the first time Microsoft has used the term “copilot” in relation to its AI technology. When it announced in February that Bing was incorporating AI, the company said the search engine is now an “AI-powered co-pilot for the web.”

Dynamics 365 Copilot puts CRM and ERP can accelerate pace of innovation and improve business outcomes in every line of business:

  • Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales helps sellers to dramatically reduce the time spent on clerical tasks. AI can help to write email responses to customers and to create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary also pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, and insights from the recorded Teams call.
  • With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.
  • Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to deliver exceptional customer care. Dynamics 365 Copilot can drafts contextual answers to queries in both chat and email. Interactive chat experience uses knowledge bases and case history and this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.
  • Customer service departments can now build virtual agents in minutes with conversation boosters in Power Virtual Agents,to harnesses the power of the Azure OpenAI Service and Bing to provide answers from company websites and internal knowledge bases.
  • Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing empowers marketers to simplify data exploration, audience segmentation and content creation.
    • With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marketers can curate highly personalized and targeted customer segments, using dialogue with their customer data platform in natural language.
    • Marketing staff can receive suggestions about additional segments not previously considered. This new capability can handle complex calculations and match customers that fit a select profile.
    • In Copilot for Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can describe their customer segment in their own words to create a target segment with the query assist feature.
    • Marketers can also use Dynamics 365 Copilot tfor inspiration for fresh email campaign content based on a simple request. Copilot makes suggestions based on: key topics entered by the marketer, the organization’s existing marketing emails, and from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas.
  • Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central streamlines the creation of product listings for online commerce. Use Product attributes such as colour, material and size to create compelling product descriptions for online storefronts in seconds. Tailor the descriptions and choose tone of voice, format and length. Business Central customers who use Shopify can seamlessly publish the products and their descriptions to their Shopify store in just a few clicks.
  •  Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers can access Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center, to proactively flag external issues such as weather, financials and geography that impact key supply chain processes.
  • Predictive insights can then
  • surface impacted orders across materials, inventory, carrier, distribution network and more. Supply chain planners can automatically draft an email generated by Dynamics 365 Copilot to alert impacted partners and mitigate potential disruptions before they happen.

The next era of business applications is already transforming with generative AI. Users will increasingly expect their CRM and ERP applications to include AI-powered expertise.

The recent AI momentum incorporates the next generation of AI capabilities across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform and includes::

  • Viva Sales, which helps sellers by bringing a sales copilot to their flow of work in Microsoft 365;
  • Power Apps, enabling citizen developers to write code using natural language.
  • Microsoft Teams, the collaboration platform for work with more than 280 million monthly active users; 

Dynamics 365 Finance – Tags – new feature

February 13th, 2023

Source: Microsoft

After transactions are posted, it’s common for organizations to require visibility into subledger data, to analyse the accounting entries. Organizations use fields such as the document number, description, or financial dimensions to track subledger data in the general ledger, because it’s difficult to navigate the data model to the subledger data.

The types of subledger data that are often tracked include sales order or purchase order numbers, vendor or customer names, payment references, invoice numbers, or reference numbers from external transactions that are imported into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

In addition to being used for analytics, the subledger data is used for processes such as ledger settlement.

The Financial tags (tags) feature eliminates the need to solely rely on document numbers, descriptions, or financial dimensions and an organization can now create and enter up to 20 user-defined fields on transactions. Those fields are then stored on the accounting entries that are created for the transactions.

Tag values aren’t stored in any subledger tables, nor in the Customer transactions or Vendor transactions table.

Tags were introduced in the 10.0.32 release of Dynamics 365 Finance. This release supports the capability to define up to 20 user-defined tags and to enter tag values on the following journals (and corresponding Open Data Protocol [OData] and Data management entities):

  • General journal
  • Global general journal

In subsequent new releases, tags will be implemented in additional journals, documents, and processes.

Setup

To use the functionality, enable the Financial tags feature in the Feature management workspace.

The feature can be disabled at any time. When the feature is enabled but later disabled, any values that were entered for financial tags on transactions will be maintained in the database. However, they’ll no longer be visible on any transactions or in inquiries in Dynamics 365 Finance.

Enter tags on transactions resembles similar to entry a ledger account that uses financial dimensions.

Tags don’t use the same control as a ledger account, but those still require a delimiter between the tag values, so define the tag delimiter before you define any financial tags.

  • On the General ledger parameters page, select Financial tags, and specify the delimiter.
  • The delimiter that you specify must not be used in any tag values that are entered on transactions. The delimiter can’t be changed after it’s defined.

After the feature is enabled, each legal entity can define up to 20 financial tags.

 Tags are legal entity–specific.

Use the Financial tag configuration and Financial tags custom list value entities to import the tags for each legal entity to quickly and easily define the same initial setup in multiple legal entities.

Create financial tags

Before you create financial tags, note the following points:

  • Evaluate whether the data should be tracked as a financial dimension or a financial tag.
  • Financial tags are an alternative to financial dimensions, especially when you’re tracking values that have little or no reusability, such as sales order numbers or purchase order numbers..
  • After a financial tag is created, it can be deactivated but not deleted. This restriction helps to ensure that the tag values remain available for reporting on posted general ledger entries. Financial tags can easily be activated and deactivated at any time.
  • The label of each financial tag can be changed at any time, even after transactions are posted.
  • If no transactions have been posted for a specific financial tag, then a change to the tag’s label will have no impact. This behavior is useful when you must repurpose a tag so that you can track other data.
  • When transactions are posted for a specific financial tag, the tag values don’t change. When the tag’s label was originally “Purchase order number,” but it’s later changed to “Sales order number,” the accounting entries that were posted before the label change will still contain the purchase order numbers that were entered and posted to the general ledger.

Create a financial tag

Follow these steps to create a financial tag.

  1. Go to General ledger > Chart of accounts > Financial tags > Financial tags.
  2. Select New to create a financial tag.
  3. Enter a label for the tag. The label must start with a letter or underscore, and it can contain only letters, numbers, and underscores. No special characters, including spaces, are permitted.
  4. In the Value type field, select TextList, or Custom list.
  5. If you selected List in the Value type field, select the value source in the Use values from field. The field contains a list of entities that the tag values can be selected from during transaction entry.
  6. If you selected Custom list in the Value type field, select Tag values to create the custom list of tag values that will be available for selection during transaction entry.
  7. Select Activate to activate the tag.

Enter financial tag values on transactions

After one financial tag is activated, tags are available for entry on each transaction that supports the feature.

Journals and lines

When you enter journals, define tag values on the journal batch header. Those values will be used as default values for the lines in the journal.

  • As for other default values in the journal, they’ll automatically be entered on new lines that are added to the journal.
  • However, these will not be entered on lines that already exist when you define the values on the header.

Default values

Tag values that you enter in a journal are entered as default values in the following way:

  • Single-line voucher:
    • Tag values that you add to the journal batch header are entered as default values on the account.
    • Tag values that you add to the account are entered as default values on the offset account.
    • If the offset account already exists when you add tag values to the account, then those tag values aren’t entered as default values on the offset account.
    • If tag values exist on both the account and the offset account, then changes to the tag values in one place don’t cause the values in the other place to be updated. For example, when you change the tag values on the account, the tag values on the offset account aren’t updated. This behavior helps to prevent loss of data should a user manually override the default values.
    • When you add a new line, and you assign a new voucher number (which represents a new transaction), the defaulting behavior starts over.
    • Tag values from the lines of one voucher are never entered as default values on the lines of a different voucher.
  • Multiline voucher:
    • Tag values that you add to the journal batch header are entered as default values on the account of each line that’s added to the voucher.
    • The tag values that you add to the account on the first line aren’t entered as default values on the account of the next line of the voucher, and so on.
Financial tag values on journal lines.

Tag values from master data are never used as default values. For example, there’s no capability to define default tag values on customers or vendors.

In addition, tag values from the transaction itself aren’t automatically entered as default values. For example, when a tag was created to track the customer name and subsequent transaction contains a customer, then the  tag value isn’t entered as the customer name by default. The value must be manually entered or imported.

Validation

When tag values are entered on transactions, no validation occurs during either transaction entry or posting.

Even when a tag of the List or Custom list value type is defined, the tag values aren’t validated to ensure that they exist in the list.

For example, a tag of the List value type is created, and the purchase order number is selected as the source of the list. Although a list of purchase order numbers will be presented, the user can still enter a purchase order number that doesn’t exist in the list.

Posting transactions that have tag values

After a transaction is posted, the financial tags are available on the lines of the general ledger account entry.

  • Those are shown on the Voucher transactions ,and the Transactions for main account pages.
  • The financial tags are shown in separate columns, so that they’re easier to sort and filter.

For reporting, the tags aren’t part of the dimension sets. Therefore, you can’t get a summarized balance of transactions for a specific tag value. For example, when you’re looking at the trial balance, you can’t get balances per tag value.

However, when you drill down into the balances from the trial balance, the tag values will be shown on the detailed transactions. The detailed transactions, including the tag values in separate columns, can be exported to Excel, where they can be summarized if balances are required.

When a tag is deactivated, the tag values remain on the posted transactions.

 By default, deactivated tags aren’t shown on inquiry pages. However, you can add the columns by selecting Show inactive financial tags.

Correct tag values after posting

Although financial tags are available for reporting, they aren’t part of the ledger account and have no impact on financial statements.

Because tags are used only for internal analysis, edits to the tag values are permitted after transactions are posted.

  1. In the Feature management workspace, enable the feature that’s named Allow edits to internal data on general ledger vouchers. This feature enables some roles to modify the Description field of posted accounting entries.
  2. If the Financial tags feature is also enabled, then this feature is enhanced to enable edits to the tag values.
  3. After the feature is enabled, go to Voucher transactions.
  4. Use the query to find the transactions that you want to edit.
  5. Select the lines in Voucher transactions, and then select Edit internal voucher data.
  6. You can edit only lines that are selected.
Editing tag values on voucher transaction lines.

The page shows the lines that you selected in Voucher transactions, including the current financial tags and new financial tags.

The current tag values are entered as default values for the new tags. Therefore, you don’t have to manually enter everything again but can instead change only what’s incorrect.

Use the Bulk update selected records button to do mass updates. Mass updates are useful to assign tag values to large groups of posted transactions that were incorrect or that no tag values were defined for (for example, because they were posted before the feature was enabled).

Example uses

  1. Stock # – Solar company or auto reseller wants to keep track of all the transactions for a specific unit throughout the life of an asset.
  2. Vendor accruals – Keep track of accrued expenses by vendor in the General Ledger, instead of maintaining Excel files outside the system to track Vendor ID for expenses coming through accrual entries.
  3. Lot – Expense tracking by specific lots, value add, etc. going directly through AP/GL
  4. Marketing campaigns – tracking marketing campaigns is not a perfect candidate for a financial dimension as you don’t want to keep adding too many financial dimensions. But Financial tags can serve this purpose to track expenses by marketing campaign.

Financial tag values used within D365 are not critical for financial reporting outside the company, but they can be important for the internal reporting by FP&A teams. These teams need the ability to make changes to transactions after posting rather than reclass journal entries.

Tags and Financial dimensions

Financial dimensions are used to code accounting entries for reporting (for example, to identify sales per department or expenses per cost center in general dimensions are primarily used to create a detailed P@Ls at the dimension level).

 Financial tags (tags) are not meant to be an alternative to financial dimensions. An organization can create up to 20 user-defined financial tags and enter values for these on transactions.

 Like financial dimension values, tag values are stored on the accounting entries that are created for the transactions. However, tag values aren’t stored in any subledger tables, such as the Customer transactions or Vendor transactions table. Both financial dimensions and financial tags can be used for analytical reporting, and also for some processes, such as ledger settlement.

Financial dimensions are very structured. The setup is used to control which dimensions are required, which dimension values are valid, and which dimension combinations are valid.

Financial tags have limited structure, no validation is done, and very limited defaulting is done.

The following table describes, in detail, the differences between financial dimensions and financial tags, to help organizations determine which feature they should use.

FunctionalityFinancial dimensionsFinancial tags
Account structuresDimensions must be included in an account structure before they can be used in a legal entity. The account structure determines the dimensions that are required for the main account and the valid combinations.Tags aren’t part of the account structure.
ValidationDimension values on the ledger account are validated against the account structures to determine whether the dimension values are active, the dimension combinations are valid, and the values exist.Tag values aren’t validated during transaction entry or posting.  Any value can be entered, even when the tag is defined as a tag of the List or Custom list type. A value doesn’t have to be selected in the list. There’s no way to require a tag value.
DefaultingDefault dimension values are entered from master data, such as customers, vendors, products, or projects. These are also entered from the header of a document to the lines. For journals, these are entered from the journal header to the account, and from the account to the offset account.Default tag values aren’t entered from master data. However, they’re entered from the header of a document to the lines. For journals, these are entered from the journal header to the account, and from the account to the offset account.
ReportingDimension values can be used for reporting in multiple ways. Dimensions can be included in a dimension set, which is used to calculate totals for the ledger account. Dimension values can also be viewed on each detailed transaction. The segments can be parsed out, and then used to sort and filter the detailed transactions.Tag values aren’t included in dimension sets. In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, you can’t generate a trial balance to view balances for tag values. When you drill down from the balances on the trial balance, tag values are shown on each detailed transaction.  The tag values are in separate columns. Therefore, it’s easy to sort and filter on transactions in the Voucher transactions or Transactions for main account inquiry. The detailed transactions can be exported to Excel or Power BI.
Impact on General ledger processesAlthough dimensions are considered unlimited, the more dimensions that are created and used in a dimension set, the slower transaction entry, import, and processes will become.Because tags have no structure or validation, there’s minimal impact when they’re used on transactions or imported via an entity.
Non-reusable valuesDimensions should never be used to track non-reusable values, such as document numbers or reference numbers. This type of data will cause your chart of accounts to explode, because of the uniqueness of so many ledger accounts. Therefore, performance will be negatively affected, especially around the year-end close and during foreign currency revaluation and consolidations.Tags should be used to track non-reusable values, such as document numbers or reference numbers.
Ability to activate or deactivateNew financial dimensions can be activated, but the system must be in maintenance mode. Financial dimensions can’t be deactivated. Instead, they can be removed from an account structure, so that they’re no longer used by any legal entities that use that account structure.Tags can be activated or deactivated at any time.
Ability to deleteDimensions can’t be deleted if they’re referenced anywhere, such as on a posted transaction. If the dimension references an entity, the entity and entity values can’t be deleted. This restriction helps maintain referential integrity.Tags can’t be deleted. This restriction helps maintain the tag values that have been entered on posted transactions. However, tags can be deactivated at any time. If a tag references an entity for a list, then no reference to that entity is maintained. For example, if the tag is mapped to the Customer name entity, customers can be deleted, because the tag values hold no reference to the customer. In addition, if a customer name is changed, the customer name isn’t updated in the tag values.
Ability to edit after postingDimension values can’t be edited on posted transactions, because any change to the ledger account will directly affect financial statements.Tag values are used only for internal analysis and processing. Therefore, they can be added, removed, or edited on posted transactions by using the Allow edits to internal data on general ledger vouchers feature. An audit trail is maintained for all edits that are made to the tag values after posting.
Global or legal entity specific?Dimensions are set up globally, and they are “assigned” to each legal entity through the account structures. Dimensions also have legal entity overrides, so that the same dimension can be active in one legal entity but inactive in another legal entity.Tags are set up at the legal entity level. They can be shared by using the Shared data feature. The tags and custom tag values can be copied to each legal entity by using the data management entities.

Some highlights:

  1. Create financial tags and use these in the general journals, via the web interface or through the upload function.
    • Update Financial tags after posting (as needed without need for journal entries for reclass)
  2. To reduce maintenance derive Financial tags from other values like a vendor, customer, etc. either as a standalone list or created as custom list.
  3. Unlike Financial dimensions; Financial tags are not validated against such lists and do not have to be predefined prior to use on the transaction.  
  4. Voucher screen and standard reports will show financial tags.

For the future?:

  1. We can only use tags now in GL transactions not in subledgers. It will be a much stronger feature when available on purchase orders, sales orders, and inventory close/adjustments to track write-down adjustments, purchase requisitions, and other transactions.
  2. To distribute an amount across multiple tag values. For example, the GL has one transaction for an expense, but the amount needs to be distributed across multiple Financial tag values for reporting purposes.

Business Central is now the time? – ask Synergy Software Systems, Dubai.

January 25th, 2023

See a collection of features designed for a particular role, and learn how to get to other features in the application.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one business management application . Upgrade your legacy ERP system or accounting software to a comprehensive solution to seamlessly manage your finances, operations, sales, and customer services.

Twice a year, Microsoft releases feature updates for Dynamics 365 Business Central. The first update is in February and the second one is in October. Microsoft has named these updates as release waves – 1, 2, 3, and so on. These updates both improve BC’s features and enhance its performance, to help users be more productive and more efficient.

How to implement Business Central in my business?

It’s easy contacting us to or schedule a meeting to assess your current ERP system, and business operations, challenges and future needs to assess how well whether Business Central fits.

Why Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations technology makes a difference.

December 7th, 2022

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into Dynamics 365 technology and security, which has produced many great new features.

When you move to the cloud, everyone is maintained on the same version, and you will always be in lockstep with Microsoft updates. You can be proactive and flexible in promoting those upgrades into your production environment to enhance your user experience.

Your integrations will become extensions-based, rather than relying on over-layering. This will give you several benefits because Extensions make rolling updates much easier

  • Easier to apply new releases, updates, and hotfixes without affecting customization
  • ISVs provide new releases quicker
  • Reduce the cost and effort involved with an upgrade
  • – all of this without impacting the core code of your environment

We understand why some businesses are hesitant to move to the cloud, but from our view, the benefits outweigh the risk. Microsoft has invested heavily in Azure. It is built on the latest hardware, has 24-7 monitoring year-round, and is consistently updated.

With this move, you will have peace of mind not having to worry about the hardware, energy, labour costs and work associated with backup and disaster recovery. While many businesses feel they have control over their on-site servers, this can lead to a false sense of security. Cyber threats are prevalent and getting faster and more sophisticated. Whether a business has on-site servers with a backup plan or not, many simply aren’t prepared for the worst-case scenario unless they have a large internal IT team or pay for a costly third-party IT service.

Microsoft recognizes this and has over 3,500 Azure cybersecurity professionals working to protect its cloud and has invested in it to the tune of over $1 billion annually. Simply put, upgrading takes that load off your shoulders and puts it onto a specially trained Microsoft team.

Azure also has thousands of connectors, and a Dataverse ( Common data model) to integrate non-Microsoft systems with your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environment.

One of the greatest benefits of upgrading is you can create low/no-code applications using the Power Platform. Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, and the Dataverse combine to form the Power Platform, a program that integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 solutions.

It lets you compile, design, and publish your data very easily into visually appealing reports and dashboards that can be used internally and externally and published to workspaces or organizational/public-facing apps.

Create apps for your team to have the information they need to work from wherever they are, on whatever device they use..

One of the best features of the Power Platform is that data changes synchronise across your system. For example, go into a system to update a client’s contact information, and that change will update in all your connected systems.

Power BI is a cloud-based analytics tool that gives you a single visual view of your most critical business data. You can create reports on the health of your business, dashboards displaying critical numbers and figures that help your staff work, and rich and interactive visualizations. It is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 technologies. There are out of the box embedded dashboards and Synergy has created many client specific dashboards.

Time to move to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations with Synergy Software Systems

December 7th, 2022

No more Dynamics Ax support

Most versions of Dynamics AX are off both Mainstream and Extended Support, which means they have no access to new features, and will not get fixes for either non-security or security issues, and cannot reach out to Microsoft for one-on-one support.

AX 2012 R3 is on extended support, but that support cycle will end on January 10, 2023. Extended support means you still get security fixes. However, you have no access to new features, and need to pay an annual fee plus a per-incident charge for non-security fixes and access to support.

AX TO FO 2 SUPPORT LIFECYCLE

From January 2023, all Dynamics AX customers will be on their own for Microsoft core code and security threats, or for issues about compatibility with database or operating system changes. It’s essential to have a proven partner to support local builds and customisations and to help explain and manage the upgrade process.

That’s why if you have not already moved to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations then time has run out. Urgent action is advised. It takes time to review options, to understand the different licences, the many new features, the new technology platform, and to mobilise resources and to reimplement an enterprise company.

Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 2 – ask Synergy Software Systems

October 6th, 2022

This covers the new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2022 to March 2023. 

Updates in 2022 release wave 2 include:

  • 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: Business Central delivers a set of features for better and improved communication about the health of each environment.
  • Application: Improve integration with Shopify. The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements so that users can run their business processes more efficiently.
  • Better with Microsoft 365: Improved the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. Users can pin cards inside Teams, and delegated admins can now use the Excel add-in.
  • Country and regional: In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central is generally available in more countries and regions.
  • Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive usage faster because it’s easier to discover and install apps.
  • Development tools: Now entirely Visual Studio Code
  • Power Platform: More efficient automation with Power Automate so that users can set up workflows for the specific needs of their organization.
  • This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.

FUNCTIONAL ENHANCEMENTS

FeatureEnabled forPublic previewGeneral availability
Better bank reconciliation for checks and improved reportingUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Extended text functionality for VAT clausesUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Financial reporting replaces account schedulesUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Find posted and non-posted document lines in searchUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Flexible sorting in the Planning Worksheet pageUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Make entry of variant codes requiredUsers by admins, makers, or analysts Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Post item charges for each step of the processUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Service – minor improvementsUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Simpler Shopify connectionUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
Track items that are used in projects, including picksUsers, automatically Sep 1, 2022Oct 2022
New VAT Date field on documents and entriesUsers, automaticallyOct 2022Oct 2022
Set up data exchange more easilyUsers, automaticallyOct 2022Oct 2022
Use multiple remit-to addresses for vendorsUsers, automaticallyOct 2022Oct 2022
Reverse payment reconciliation journal entriesUsers, automaticallyOct 2022Nov 2022

Dynamics 365 2022 Wave 2 Highlights

August 26th, 2022

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2022 second release plans, announced on 12 July 2022, provides users with a wide range of new capabilities and hundreds of new features. These product updates will roll out over the next 6-9 months.

. These release plans, can be overwhelming so here is a summary significant of updates for the different modules.

MARKETING

Scale a multi-brand business

Implement marketing strategies across multiple brands and product lines at scale and with more control over your marketing assets and data across brands.

Define their organisation structure and access roles to delve deep into the performance insights of a specific brand.

Key Features

  • All brands can use AI to extend and to customise marketing assets.
  • Control and organise all digital assets, content, journeys and customer preferences to align with multi-brand strategies.
  • Out-of-the-box campaign, and data segregation capabilities, across organisational boundaries will both help to reduce compliance risk.
  • Marketing analytics for each brand, region or department.

Lead capture forms to convert visitors to customers 

The new lead capture forms are an upgrade to the marketing forms in the Marketing Application. Enable moments-based marketing with real-time journey orchestration  to capture customer information, to enhance customer experience and to increase conversion rates. These forms vary based on past customer interactions, and can also validate data. Dynamic fields give an intuitive user experience.

Key Features

  • Create intuitive and engaging forms with a modern editor or use eye-catching templates to convert more visitors into customers.
  • Use smart forms to dynamically hide or display fields based on past interactions.
  • Enhance usability for your customers with advanced form validation.
  • Create new interactions with customer journeys whenever possible like sending a thank you email.

Extend your outreach with custom channels

A new capability to leverage real-time marketing in existing communication channels to easily engage your customers in critical moments in their journey. Insert proven channels into your journeys to boost customer engagement. Use real-time marketing personalisation, consent and analytics tools for content creation and delivery through your communication channels, e.g. SMS or WhatsApp.

Key Features

  • Create custom channels on top of the built-in channels of email, SMS, and push notifications for real-time, personalised targeting .
  • Create custom templates for your channels.
  • A new tile makes it easy to find channel templates to add into your customer journey.
  • Easy review of analytics for your custom channel

New segment builder

To target the right audience and improve returns on your marketing investment, build segments using natural language and an easy drag-and-drop logic builder, without need for technical know-how.

Build segments using leads and then target those directly with customer journeys. To help you build the right segments. preview the members and estimate the size of draft segments t

Key Features

  • Create segments directly based on attribute data for both contacts and leads.
  • Enrich segments with complex logic and scan across all attributes in the right pane and add those to your queries.
  • Preview and estimate the number of segment members as part of segment creation.
  • Use natural language to assist and ease the segment creation process.

B2B marketing with a new OOB analytics dashboard

New out-of-the-box analytics capability to track your pipeline development and to examine the performance of different customer journeys, marketing assets, and channels for the engagement and their contribution to each stage of your pipeline.

  Share the pipeline view between Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, to align your marketing and sales teams common objectives, to speed up your pipeline development.

Key Features

  • Track your business pipeline develops from lead generation to won opportunities to optimise the key stages through the OBB funnel.
  • Understand the correlation between your marketing efforts and key business outcomes across different pipeline stages.
  • Pin-point the top-performing customer journeys, marketing assets and channels that drive engagement and contribute pipeline development and revenue generation.
  • Integrate seamlessly with Dynamics 356 Sales for a shared overview of your pipeline and collaborate together to boost ROI.

Grow your business with 3X maximum monthly interactions

Use this feature to reach up to 100 million contacts and send up to 300 million messages per month with Dynamics 365 real-time marketing customer journey orchestration.

Deliver personalised messages and experiences at scale at key touchpoints of their journey.

Increase your customer base in existing and new markets, reach more locations, promote new products and services, and expand your prospective customer pipeline to meet higher sales targets.

Key Features

  • Reach up to 100 million marketing contacts through emails, SMS, and push notifications (3X more than the previous 30 million contacts limit).
  • Deliver up to 300 million monthly outbound interactions through email messages, SMS, push, or custom channels ( 3X more than the previous 100 million outbound interaction limit).
  • Create segments of up to 100 million marketing contacts.
  • Engage with customers in near real-time with a 30-second response time.

Personalised AI-powered next-best content 

Automate content personalisation with rich data and AI to grow interactions and increase conversions, so you don’t have to do the same work for each customer every time. 

Create some content variations and define rules for customer targeting and leave the rest to the AI model. Guide the AI with auto-generated control groups to test different content so that it trains itself to disseminate hyper-personalised content in every step of the customer journey, and it will use 360 customer profiles from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Key Features

  • Create different content variations and define AI rules to better target customers.
  • Apply AI to past interaction data to tailor and to send specific, personalised content variations to delight customers at every touch point.
  • Use optimisiation criteria and auto-generated control groups to train the AI to use the most appropriate content selection logic .

SALES

Seller dashboard To track progress

The new seller dashboard and its standardised reports help sales managers both to analyse and to gain insights into how the Sales Application is used, and also how well the teams and individuals that use the application perform.

Key Features

  • Access seller dashboard to monitor sales performance and get summarised insights into sales activities progress.
  • A clear picture of all activities, relationships, and conversations.
  • Manage permissions to access the seller dashboard with admin privileges.

Tips and suggestions during a customer call r

Sellers get AI-driven insights to guide them on exactly what to say during difficult sales calls.

This is particularly useful for remote calls when conversation intelligence automatically shows tips and suggestions to the sellers either while they are on a phone call or talking to a customer in Teams.

All customer calls are transcribed, and the AI gives sellers contextual information about customers, as well as talking points on product or service details, competitive battle cards, pricing, benefits, and more.

Key Features

  • Enable sellers to close deals hrough remote calls with real-time contextual information about customers, products, and pricing.
  • AI-driven insights and customer intelligence that sellers can access easily during tough sales calls.

Orchestrate sellers’ activities in Teams

A smart deal room dashboard, gives a view of customer insights, activity coordination, and intelligent activity recommendations on a single pane with seamless integrations between Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

Key Features

  • The entire team can view team member activity. Provide the latest account information required to facilitate team collaboration.
  • Improve the visibility of customer information and sales progress for everyone working on the same account.
  • Manage key account documents centrally and assign tasks .
  • Organise meetings and communication and access information and action items centrally from meetings.
  • Receive intelligent recommendations on the next best actions based on account updates.

@mention to find, share Dynamics 365 records in emails, chats 

Use @mention to insert Dynamics 365 data into emails and chats intuitively. This makes it much easier to find and share contextual business data in communications..

Key Features

  • Use @mention to quickly find, insert and share relevant sales information like customer details in Outlook and Teams.
  • Collaborate on fresh Dynamics 365 records easily with intelligent suggestions based on recent data and use it to add relevant customer data into Outlook emails and Teams chats.

Enhanced sequence creation experience with new designer 

With the sales accelerator and process automation, set up sequences to develop and to implement winning sales strategies. Provide an improved user experience with features of the sequence designer during sequence configuration.

Key Features

  • A consistent and convenient automation experience across Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration and Dynamics 365 Sales sequences.
  • Use the new sequence designer to edit a sequence step using a side panel.
  • Define an exit rule for a sequence and understand the end of any sequence branch with an exit icon.
  • Save all the changes in sequence steps with a single click.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Use customer support swarming for complex cases

All your conversations in Microsoft Teams are now directly integrated into Customer Service records. This provide a contextual experience to licensed users and also allows other non-licensed users to easily collaborate on that data across the organisation through Teams. Much easier to find the right people across multiple departments to more speedily resolve complex customer issues.

Key Features

  • Richer user experience with enhanced swarm creation flow, ability to create notes and manager swarm progress, and enhanced wrap-up activities.
  • Simplified admin experience that expedited setup and allows admins more flexibility to specify automatic addition of certain CRM users as participants to specific swarms.
  • Availability of additional roles like agent’s manager, account owner, and Team admin to support additional CRM users other than the default users.

Route calls to agents who are idle for the longest time

Use AI and definable rules, assign incoming service requests to the best-suited agents or those who are mostly idle, to boost your operational efficiencies and customer service.

Classify, route, and assign work items with complete automation rather than to rely on manual queue supervision and work distribution. 

Key Features

  • Match agents based on their idle times on the voice channel.
  • Configure their voice queues to use the Longest idle assignment method.

Route work items to preferred agents 

Provide personalised and specialist customer service,to develop deeper customer relationships and improve customer satisfaction. Customers feel comfortable with their familiar service agents who are aware of past customer interactions and preferences.

Key Features

  • Define the preferred agents for your customers.
  • Configure assignment of work items to the preferred agent.
  • Select the assignment logic if the preferred agent is unavailable.

Why now is the time to adopt Power Bi – ask Synergy Software Systems, Dubai

August 19th, 2022

Power BI innovation never stops. For several years in a row now, it is positioned as a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, furthest to the right for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the Leaders’ quadrant.

The gaps are widening with interactive reports, paginated reports, datasets, dataflows, deployment pipelines, scorecards, dashboards, metrics, data alerts, and much more, and recently announced in public preview, self-service datamarts. No wonder, customers are adopting Power BI at an accelerated pace. Boost Office 365 productivity with Power BI integrated into PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, connect to data anywhere with hundreds of built-in connectors, leverage industry-leading AI, go quickly from insight to action with the Microsoft Power Platform, and provide best-in-class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile.

Reports can be mobile friendly, they can be paginated, and you can link into Azure Analysis Services.

Omnichannel for Customer Service – Dynamics 365

July 18th, 2022

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers a suite of capabilities that extend the power of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise to enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers across digital messaging channels.

Omnichannel for Customer Service provides omnichannel capabilities for Dynamics 365. Gives us many of the contact centre features we require out of the box.: web chat, SMS, voice and more directly within Dynamics 365.

Put simply we’re talking about giving customers many different ways of contacting you for support.

Omnichannel customer service is also often used to describe a system which combines many channels in to a single stream. The single stream gives a seamless experience for customers and support agents

Other related functionality includes Unified Routing to intelligently allocate work items to agents and also the Customer Service Workspace which gives agents a multi-session UI. And not forgetting Power Virtual Agents that can be used as voice IVRs or webchat BOTs.

An additional license is required to access Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Supervisors get real-time and historical visibility and insights into the operational efficiency of agents and the utilization across various channels.

The enterprise-grade routing and work distribution engine allows customers to configure agent presence, availability, and routing rules, thus ensuring agents are working on the most relevant engagements.

Dynamics 365 Field Service on premise is no more…

July 13th, 2022

Microsoft acquired the IP that became Dynamics 365 Field Service in 2015, and the company announced last year it will end support for the on-premises version of the product in June 2022.

The on-prem product, which Microsoft refers to as “Dynamics 365 Field Services (on-premises)”, uses the older Field Service Mobile app built with Xamarin and that app is also retired, becoming “no longer available” from Microsoft.