In the last post of our blog series, we presented the highlights of Microsoft Dynamics 365 from the current release wave in 2020. About 70% of the announced innovations are now available in the preview function or have already been released completely.

The second publication wave is already in the pipeline

Microsoft has announced that a large number of new functions will be made available to end-users regionally from October. The release includes enhancements for all Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection and Business Central.

A list of features and important dates for the Wave 2 is available here.

Highlights of the 2nd wave – What you can look forward to

We at AlfaPeople have taken a closer look at the latest innovations for you. As a small preview you should not miss the following functions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing:

• Integration of live events and appointments with Microsoft teams

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales:

• Tools for more effective collaboration in the fields of app integration and gamification
• A new mobile solution for fast access to customer information
• Forecasting innovations to natively create and manage bottom-up sales forecasting processes
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Insights: proactive lead and opportunity scoring
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Product Visualize: Presentation of 3D products to the customer

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Service:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Enhance agent productivity to enable multiple agents to participate in sessions
• Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Insights: Introduced a new field service dashboard to monitor KPIs and metrics for work order completion
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist: Extension to capture service and repair data to provide insights from service operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations:

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance: Integration of further automatisms in the standard to reduce manual processes to a necessary minimum
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Real-time delivery and production planning via advanced planning optimization
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: New cost management features that enable global companies to maintain multiple cost accounting accounts
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations: a new module for unifying workflows to link sales, resource, project management and finance teams

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources:

• Management of vacation and absence times directly in Microsoft teams

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce:

• Easy creation and management of environments for non-developers, including integration of third-party services, connectors, modules and designs
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connected Store: Integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce with task assignment and tracking for on-site employees by Microsoft teams

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection:

• The new function “manual check” is used to mark transactions for further verification and to evaluate them by experts

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central:

• Invest in service improvements through performance optimization, file storage management and geographic expansion

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:

• Unification of data from different sources for continuous business process improvement
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Products Insights: Provides analysis of customer usage, experience and contact history across product channels

Microsoft Forms Pro:

• Tracking elementary customer metrics through customer feedback loops based on survey response data to improve response times

As you can see, Microsoft is not getting tired and offers a whole bunch of new features and updates in the second wave of releases. In the upcoming articles, we will go into more detail about individual functions. If you have any suggestions, questions or requests in advance, please do not hesitate to contact us.