Tag: Dynamics 365

It takes a team to close a deal and keep customers happy. Sales teams may need to collaborate with marketing colleagues, technical experts, or work with their finance team and ensure customer payment details are in order, or quickly pivot to follow up with prospective leads. Similarly, customer service agents may need to work with internal and external experts such as engineering to help resolve customer support incidents. In either scenario, both may be juggling between apps and communication platforms, or reaching out to multiple teams via multiple channels to piece together information to uncover key conversations around the account just move the business forward – all of which not only can slow the flow of work, but you may also miss a trivial context to the history of the account.

Dynamics 365 brings together a set of comprehensive intelligent business applications making it possible for organizations to run their business better and deliver great results. Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with their customers, take actions based on insights, and close deals faster. Likewise, Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps businesses to deliver the best customer service experience possible to their customers.

By embedding Microsoft Teams chat into Dynamics 365, we are bringing seamless collaboration and accelerating productivity across all scenarios. Dynamic users will be able to apply all the rich functionalities Teams is known for in chat — from rich text editing, tagging people, threading conversations, sharing files, applying emojis and gifs while sending, editing, or deleting messages is retained.

Now, IT admins can configure the ability for users to initiate or join connected chats at a record-type level. This functionality can help tailor the user experience for your business processes, such as, easily locate the account information, connect to the team member right within their Dynamics 365 collaboration window, transfer a lead, or provide the full account context to a new user. Learn more about how to configure to allow users to join chats.

Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365 comes at no additional cost for Dynamics 365 users.

Since the public preview for Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365, user experience has been enhanced. We’re happy to announce that Teams embedded chat in Dynamics 365 will be generally available in September!

Dynamics 365 users will be able to:

• Start a connected Teams chat in Dynamics 365
• Connect an existing chat or channel from a record
• View all connected chats related to the customer record within Dynamics 365

Let’s walk through a few scenarios to illustrate how Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 enhances productivity

Below is a scenario for a sales team, which can easily apply to Customer Service, Field Service, Marketing, and more.

Start a connected Teams chat in Dynamics 365:
Imagine, a salesperson just took over a large new account in her sales territory that was previously managed by sellers in other parts of the company. She wants to understand what previously happened with this account and reaches out to a technical expert who supported this account. Because she reaches out from within a specific record in Dynamics 365, the account context is carried over to her initial message so the technical expert can easily understand what she wants to discuss. When the salesperson creates a new connected chat with an external partner, the template auto-fills with account information so that the context stays in the conversation and the external partner who receives the chat via Teams can easily follow along. The recipient doesn’t need a Dynamics 365 license to collaborate. They can reply directly from the Microsoft Teams app.

Meanwhile the salesperson notices another account representative from her organization is also looking at the same opportunity. She clicks on the avatar to open the people card and starts a Teams chat directly from there.

Connecting related Teams chats and channels related to a record

The salesperson starts preparing for a pipeline review with her team. Over the last week she has discussed her accounts with several different colleagues spread across numerous teams (sales, finance, operations, and engineering). Keeping her discussions organized is especially important to her. She goes into Dynamics 365 and connects recent conversations with the right accounts, adding valuable context.

During the pipeline review, she can use her account records in Dynamics 365 to retrieve individual chats, group chats, meeting chats, or channel conversations that are relevant to her deals. This allows her to quickly pull together the information and assemble her pipeline status update.

Seeing chats related to an account
To close out her day, the salesperson looks into a large account that was previously managed by an employee who left the company. She needs to make sure that any deals with that customer aren’t dropped as she takes it over. She opens the account in Dynamics 365 to find the latest communications with the customer, including a list of the chats that her predecessor sent. She reads through them and continues the conversation.

Start collaborating seamlessly and accelerate your productivity
With Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365, we’re eager to see how our customers and partners unlock new capabilities for their organizations—winning more customers and closing more deals faster.

Try Dynamics 365 today and accelerate your productivity! Contact your IT admin to turn on Teams chat in Dynamics 365, at no additional cost to your organization. Read more about the feature.

When Jim Chen left his own startup to run his family’s company four years ago, he quickly saw its half-century old business model needed a reset.

King Steel Machinery was founded in Taichung, Taiwan, in the 1970s. For decades, success had come from designing and building precision shoe-making machinery for big-name footwear brands popular with consumers around the world.

But soon after he became vice president for business development under a family succession plan, Chen identified a shift in the market. Footwear brands were looking for more than just machinery. They also wanted customized manufacturing solutions, data insights and sustainable outcomes.

The 30-something entrepreneur realized that to survive, grow and compete, the company needed to embrace digital transformation and become an eco-friendly innovator. To get there, employees, managers and his family would have to adopt a new mindset.

“Digital transformation is the process of choosing the right digital tools. Once goals are set, choosing the tools is easy,” Chen said. “My family elders who started this company have been supportive, but we didn’t make these changes all at once. It was a step-by-step process. Both customers and employees have felt the impacts and benefits.”

Previously, Chen headed Otrajet, a startup that developed an innovative never-flat tire for bicycle-sharing fleets. It thrived under a culture based on innovation and transformation.

So, when Chen moved across to King Steel he was well versed in how to launch new product lines, add systems for easy onboarding of new hires and open new manufacturing centers. He had a vision in place, but to execute it he needed to get more than 100 employees on board to support change.

King Steel’s staff range in age from 18 to 70, each with their own ways of thinking. When Chen asked managers what problems they were facing, they all had different answers. Reaching consensus was next to impossible.

Chen rose to the challenge. He wanted to foster an environment in which employees could talk to each other regardless of hierarchy or position.

That’s when managers started training employees to use Microsoft Teams as a platform for staff communications. Six months later, he has noticed a difference. Employees at all levels started exchanging ideas and company-wide communications were fluid, Chen said.

The company decided to apply Teams to even bigger projects, even using it to boost operational efficiency by adding suppliers into the Teams ecosystem for instant communications.

Chen also faced another challenge: the threat of cybercrime. After the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform was hacked, its entire system had to be shut down for recovery.

It was a major blow to operations, and a wake-up call for King Steel. Leaders in the company needed to build resilience against both competitors and malicious hackers. The right digital tools could help. Chen and his team implemented the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform and rolled out a suite of Microsoft Cloud data solutions.

It also embraced the mixed-reality capabilities of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, using HoloLens 2 to troubleshoot and maintain their equipment on the factory floors of their customers.

King Steel then looked to Microsoft boost its manufacturing services with custom data solutions. The company started mining equipment data, such as how injection molding machines work and how changing materials can achieve new results. Employees now collect parameters such as temperature, pressure and input quantity, which they use to bring new insights to their clients.

The company also stepped up its efforts around sustainability by developing its Nature Cross Future initiative – a direct molding process that allows shoemakers to produce recyclable midsoles.

“In 2020 we launched a new machine that’s very different. It can 100 percent recycle the midsole, helping brands enormously reduce the waste of midsoles and flip flops.

“It’s a big deal for the industry. Going forward, Nature Cross Future will help redefine the whole shoe industry and King Steel will focus on sustainability,” he said.

Midsoles are notoriously difficult to recycle. However, King Steel has developed high-tech machines that can produce completely recyclable midsoles.

The company has also incorporated Microsoft digital technologies into the manufacturing process, increasing efficiency and boosting sustainability. It uses Teams and Dynamics 365 to increase the speed of research, development and manufacturing. These technologies help create new machines for different brands in different production lines, so the whole industry can move into green manufacturing much faster than expected.

Additionally, Microsoft Azure IoT Digital Twins make the entire value chain transparent, reducing material waste and saving energy. Some shoe factories lose inventory when unofficial shoes get produced to be sold on the black market. Digital Twins help factories precisely manage the whole value chain.

King Steel also has been looking at other ways to reduce carbon emissions from shoemaking. The company has developed a process that uses a foam agent to collect carbon dioxide from the air.

Chen says that by embracing digital transformation, King Steel can now offer its shoemaking customers sustainable and customized manufacturing and data solutions.

While it’s hard to predict what he’ll face next, Chen believes his family business is well prepared for challenges in the years ahead.

Top image: A King Steel worker on the factory floor of King Steel using HoloLens 2. Photo credit: Microsoft 

Since 2017, Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact initiative has been working to empower the nonprofit sector. As part of that effort two years ago, we released our Common Data Model for Nonprofits, a set of best practices represented as data entities, attributes, and relationships.

The Common Data Model is essentially a Rosetta Stone that helps nonprofits relate data across applications and platforms, and it is the foundation for all of the technology we create for the sector.

Nonprofits represent a wide diversity of mission types and beneficiaries served, but these organizations share many scenarios common to all. Every nonprofit has to fundraise and partner with constituents and donors. At the same time, donors want to understand how their contributions drive impact. This requires nonprofits to support strong, diversified funding portfolios grounded in transparent data and reporting.

Our top priority is getting technology into the hands of nonprofits to help them be more successful. The tech sector has a responsibility to provide an easier and less costly path for nonprofits to modernize its fundraising and constituent management programs. And with the impact COVID-19 has had, there has never been a more critical time to deliver on that vision.

That is why I’m announcing a new milestone in that journey today, with the release of Fundraising and Engagement for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, a Microsoft solution built with MISSION CRM.

Engagement and impact delivered

Fundraising and Engagement is a comprehensive solution designed to help fundraisers, marketers, and development operations staff transform the way they work with workflows and business logic to match their priorities.

The solution supports the most common fundraising scenarios across multiple donation types and channels—including major and annual giving, recurring gift and membership programs, opportunity and designation management, and household and life event management.

Marketers can leverage campaign, package, and appeal workflows, along with insights and campaign segmentation tools available on the Microsoft platform, to execute informed campaigns. Finance, database administrators, and business analysts will love that payment processing, data management, and business intelligence are powered by Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power BI.

The Common Data Model removes the silos between all of these activities. Since alignment of funding to programs and projects is at the core of the solution, it can deliver proactive insights and business intelligence to transform reporting, strengthen existing relationships and uncover new opportunities for growth.

The solution leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Azure, and as part of Microsoft’s ecosystem of products, it integrates with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Power BI, and Microsoft Power Platform through the Common Data Service to deliver the most robust digital platform available to nonprofit organizations.

Nonprofits can now transform how they manage their full lifecycle of fundraising. This is an incredibly powerful application that allows organizations to truly digitize their operations without requiring substantial investments in customized solutions.

Customer spotlight: Right To Play

MISSION CRM’s work with Right To Play offers an early look into the value of this new solution. Since 2017, Right To Play has been working with MISSION CRM to digitize its operations in support of an outreach initiative to acquire new donors.

Before working with MISSION CRM, Right To Play had been handling the initiative manually, leading to challenges and delays. Payment confirmation often took a full day, and the organization had a difficult time projecting revenues, adding high volumes of new donors, and rolling out programs to help more children.

Fundraising and Engagement has automated many processes and improved workflows to allow Right to Play to focus on relationships and programs. Today, donor information is imported directly into the system, so Right To Play can dynamically assess revenue streams. The solution also facilitates greater transparency with stakeholders about program results and challenges. Donors know exactly where their dollars are going and the impact they are having.

Fundraising and Engagement has enabled Right To Play to scale from 100 to more than 3,000 new stakeholders per month, managing a broad and international portfolio of donors, engaging them in new ways—and building better programs and serve more than two million children each and every week.

Partnership with MISSION CRM highlights opportunity for ISVs

Right To Play’s story shows how the shift from paper or manual processes to truly digital workflows can improve both operational efficiency and programmatic efficacy, while allowing an organization to more quickly and transparently tell that impact story to donors.

Historically, realizing that kind of digital transformation in a nonprofit has come with a unique set of challenges. Nonprofits haven’t had a wealth of choice in configured solutions. Many have had to adopt a hodgepodge of applications for different fundraising needs.

This patchwork approach obscures insights, creates manual workarounds, and is expensive to maintain. Integrating applications to create efficiency and insight can require costly development or significant manual effort every month. Many nonprofits are unable to make those investments.

MISSION CRM was one of the first ISVs that engaged with Microsoft around the Common Data Model concept to solve this problem. In partnering to build Fundraising and Engagement, Microsoft and MISSION CRM bring together a mature data model built on the most secure, scalable platform to raise the standard of what technology can deliver to the sector and really light up any nonprofit organization.

Delivering this on a rich cross-cloud ecosystem makes it easy for partners to integrate with and innovate from a trusted platform supported by Microsoft. Partners effectively require only a single integration point with Microsoft to provide interoperability and exchange of data. This allows Microsoft and its partners to innovate towards productivity, online collaboration, rich data insights, operations and financials, and program design.

Three years of TSI: looking ahead

Three years ago, we started the Tech for Social Impact initiative. At the time, Microsoft worked with about 60,000 nonprofits worldwide. Today, we work with more than 200,000 organizations, and our engagement with the sector overall has deepened dramatically.

And we’re just getting started. As a platform company, Microsoft is committed to building a vibrant ecosystem with diverse expertise to deliver the most effective range of solutions. We have fostered strategic partnerships with industry-leading technology companies including Blackbaud, whose world class fundraising solutions are powered on Azure and enhanced with connectors that make it simple to integrate Blackbaud’s fundraising solutions with applications on Microsoft Power Platform and in Microsoft Office 365.

Other partners are delivering integrated solutions as well, including Adobe through our participation in the Open Data Initiative. Still others have aligned their existing solutions to the Common Data Model, including Unit4 with Oracle’s NetSuite not far behind. We have 20 launch partners such as m-hance, Barhead, Quantiq, and Avanade who are building industry-specific solutions on the Common Data Model that are interoperable with Fundraising and Engagement.

Our goal is to create an ecosystem of solutions aligned to Common Data Model. As beneficial as the Common Data Model is, it still is only a model. To truly realize its promise, it needs to be used and adopted widely. Taken together, our nonprofit partner ecosystem now has more than 200 ISVs, developers, and systems integrators supporting nonprofits worldwide.

In this challenging time, we recognize that it’s not just about the technology. Applications tailored for nonprofit workflows go a long way to reduce the cost of modernizing the digital ecosystem at any charitable organization, just as important is the ability to adopt and effectively use this technology. That is why we combine all of our technology offerings with free training and affordable, ethical pricing. To help nonprofits get started with Fundraising and Engagement, we are announcing a grant available by end of this calendar year. Qualified nonprofits can get Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise free for up to five users, as well as Microsoft Power Apps (per App plan) free for up to 10 users. Sign up for alerts to receive a notification when the offers are ready.

The solution we are announcing today is part of this broad commitment to the nonprofit technology ecosystem. We are committed to working with tech companies large and small to align their solutions to Common Data Model, and we’ll have more of those to announce later in 2020.

Ultimately, people don’t go to work for a nonprofit to worry about technology. They are focused on the mission of their organizations. Working with our partners around the world, Microsoft is delivering tools for nonprofits that reflect their business and those priorities right out of the box.

Learn more

To learn more, join us October 27, 2020 for the “Introducing Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales” launch event. In this virtual session with live Q&A, you’ll get a deep dive into Fundraising and Engagement with Microsoft experts and Microsoft partner MISSION CRM, see a demo, and hear a panel discussion with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada on the impact this solution is having on their organization.

Business applications are rapidly evolving to meet the needs of an increasingly digital and complex world. The era of form-based software and simple business logic is history–replaced with data-first, intelligent applications that proactively guide critical business outcomes across the organization.

The 2020 release wave 2 expands our vision to help you unlock the agility, innovation and resilience to adapt and thrive. More than 500 new and updated capabilities join an unparalleled breadth of intelligent, modular and seamlessly-integrated SaaS applications for the front and back-office; all atop the world-leading Power Platform to enable anyone to create apps and business processes.

In this time of unprecedented disruption—from remote workforces to changing customer expectations to supply chain challenges—this release wave extends investments to help your organization quickly adapt to any conditions with speed and agility—to build resilience into the fabric of the DNA of your company.

Connected customer experiences

Managing today’s omnichannel customer journey is no easy feat. Customer engagement requires constant attention at every touch point, whether human-assisted, self-serve, or automatic, and doing so requires visibility and collaboration across marketing, sales, and service. The 2020 release wave 2 updates further our vision to seamlessly connect data and insights across departments—breaking down the siloes that limit innovation and connected, personalized experiences.

Microsoft customer data platform (CDP)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the Microsoft CDP and fastest-growing Dynamics 365 application, is a foundation for modern customer engagement, all on a trusted platform with unmatched privacy and security. Updates in the 2020 release wave 2 cement the solution as uniquely able to connect data holistically across departments and teams, with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes.

Your teams will enjoy the new engagement insights capabilities, which give them a more comprehensive view of customers—easily accessible across teams, and always up to date. Audience insights boost the ability to analyze cross-channel customer interactions from websites, mobile apps, and connected products using engagement insights. And with seamless integration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, your team can track customer feedback signals across channels to proactively identify insights and drive meaningful engagement when customer sentiment and behaviors change.

Read more: Announcing new innovations for the Microsoft customer data platform

Marketing

We’re dedicated to delivering solutions that bridge marketing, sales, and service departments, seamlessly connecting ushering customers from first touch to acquisition to exceptional support. The 2020 release wave 2 updates take steps to connect that journey.

Over the next six months, we’re providing marketers with tools to build relationships and interact with customers at scale in this new world. New capabilities will help them orchestrate customer journeys, align sales and marketing, and make informed decisions. In response to increased demand for digital channels, this release integrates Microsoft Teams for digital events, improves social posting, revamps the customer journey designer, and lets teams use natural language to create target segments easily. And enhanced integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps teams discover segments and use them directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to make campaigns more targeted and effective.

Read more: 3 new ways to build customer relationships using Dynamics 365 Marketing

Sales

Customer buying experiences are increasingly digital. In fact, 80 percent of enterprises expect a sustained shift to digital buying and selling methods, where sellers guide and collaborate with customers remotely. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales will help to further streamline the work of sellers and deepen their engagement with customers.

We’re ramping up AI-infused intelligence capabilities to deliver contextual insights that guide sellers to the next best action. Features like sales accelerator, advanced forecasting, and pipeline intelligence help sellers understand the health of the business and make accurately informed strategic decisions. Conversation and relationship intelligence helps sellers focus on activities and interactions that connect with buyers. And sellers can leverage Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to measure sentiment and Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics to better track and act on customer concerns around sales processes, products, and experiences.

Read more: Digital selling and customer engagement with Dynamics 365 Sales updates

Service

We’ve invested in the critical scenarios that businesses need to optimize support delivery and enhance customer satisfaction, reflected in the expansive scope of features is heading to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces a milestone in Microsoft’s first-party service solution. The addition of a native voice channel to existing omnichannel capabilities, built on the Microsoft cloud, empowers service teams with a seamless, end-to-end customer service experience across every channel within a single solution.

Dynamics 365 Field Service updates continue to drive productivity aligned to increasing technical success with first-time fix rates, optimized scheduling, asset tracking, and management. Plus, updates to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist give technicians even more ways to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues including the ability for allowing technicians and external customers to join a mixed reality call; expanded support for non-AR phones and added call analytics to surface challenge areas and opportunities for improvement.

Read more: Innovation on the service suite of Dynamics 365 applications

Connected operations

Effectively running a complex organization requires the seamless sharing of data, consistent business processes, and close collaboration across finance and operations departments. That’s why we are dedicated to ensuring cross-app capabilities across Dynamics 365 operations apps. This release wave continues the journey of making finance and operations data and business processes seamlessly available to Dynamics 365 applications, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure Data Lake.

Finance

For Dynamics 365 Finance, we continue to focus on adding insights and intelligence and automating common processes. Intelligent cash flow forecasting, which previewed in 2020 release wave 1, will be released for general availability along with additional intelligence and automation in vendor invoicing.

We’ll also enhance core financials by adding asset leasing. This helps automate complex processes and eliminate risk, by making sure the system stays compliant with changing accounting regulations.

The Electronic invoicing add-on (preview) expands the invoicing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations to help organizations save money and reduce risk. The add-on simplifies adherence to the latest electronic invoicing standards, and provides consistent experiences in electronic invoice processing and exchange across different geographies.

Read more: Optimizing financial processes and reducing risk with Dynamics 365 Finance updates

For this release wave, Dynamics 365 Business Central investments center on delivering a world-class, comprehensive business management solution for small and midsized organizations.

We are expanding scenarios across Microsoft experiences—which today includes integration with Excel, Outlook, Word, and others—by introducing Microsoft Teams as a way to interact with coworkers and improve productivity, workflow, insights, and results.

A host of additional updates help meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base, improve the handling of file storage, and address top customer requested features; and service security and performance improvements further safeguard business data and improve application performance.

Read more: What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central

Supply Chain

The pandemic took a toll on supply chains, from suppliers to consumers. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is introducing new capabilities to keep the production line running and ease the day-to-day work on the factory floor.

Building on the Cloud and Edge innovation announced at Microsoft Ignite, we’re rolling out a new Engineering Change Management add-in, improving the ability to handle changes throughout the lifecycle of a product and ensure they are produced and released in a controlled manner. The new production floor execution feature provides more flexibility with a modern UI and a touch interface that makes managing complex jobs easier, even under the demanding conditions of the production floor.

New integration with Dynamics 365 Guides gives frontline workers interactive, guided instructions right at their workstation. This helps manufacturers adapt to operational complexity on the factory floor with a new set of features focused on usability, so complexity can be managed in real time.

Read more: Overcome disruptions in your supply chain

Service-based operations

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is now generally available—the business application for service-based businesses that operate in a highly competitive market where winning new deals, retaining the best people, and increasing profit margins are significant challenges. Project Operations is designed to transform and modernize the project delivery lifecycle by bringing together cross-functional teams to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

In a single application—seamlessly connected to other Dynamics 365 applications—you can bridge your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability.

Read more: Optimize your project-centric business with Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides a comprehensive personnel management solution, including performance, leave and absence, and payroll integration. For the 2020 release wave 2, we’re focused on updates that further help HR professionals empower and engage their workforce, provide modern benefits packages, and stay compliant.

New self-service capabilities include the ability for employees to manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams. Employees can view time-off balances and submit leave requests, and managers or HR will be notified when a request needs attention.

A benefits management workspace will provide administrators with a single experience to view items that require action or to track the enrollment progress for a single employee or groups of employees, including progress and associated actions for new hire enrollment, qualifying life events, and open enrollment.

Other highlights include an enhanced leave and absence workflow experience enhancements and simplified integrations and extensibility, including LinkedIn Talent Hub and Azure Active Directory.

Read more: Overview of Dynamics 365 Human Resources 2020 release wave 2

Commerce

We’re heavily investing in innovation for retailers—including updates in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce to further empower retailers to know how best to serve customers’ needs, ramp up digital commerce and contactless shopping, and efficiently run operations across the value chain. Read more about 2020 release wave 2 updates to enhance omnichannel shopping with Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Connected Store

We’re also continuing to evolve Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connected Store to offer benefits to retailers that are traditionally available only to online retailers, and to help bridge the physical and digital divide. For instance, you will be able to define a Power Automate workflow that makes inventory recommendations based on dwell time around a specific product, or make shift changes based on queue-length trends. To assist with social distancing, store managers will be able to understand shopper density and social distancing status in monitored areas, and set up notifications when the appropriate safety conditions are not being maintained. Read more about what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Connected Store, as well as updates announced in July.

Fraud Protection

At the point of sale, updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will help protect from purchase and payment fraud, account fraud, and shrinkage fraud while delivering a smooth experiences to online shoppers. Building on the new account protection and loss prevention capabilities announced in July, you’ll find tighter integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce and a new “manual review” capability that allows users to flag transactions for review, and then allow expert human agents to consume and adjudicate those transactions. Read more about what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Catch up on the 2020 release wave 2

Review the Dynamics 365 release plans for specific details for each update and additional resources.

Know your customers like never before

In every industry, we hear about the struggle to transform from a reactive to proactive organization that can respond to changes in the market, customer needs, and even within their own business. When we talk to customers who have rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, the conversation shifts to the breakthrough outcomes they’ve achieved, often in very short time frames.

Customers talk about Microsoft’s unique ability to connect data holistically across departments and teams with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes. This is precisely the business need that we identified and addressed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP).

Customer Insights has resonated with organizations across industries and, as a result, it’s the fastest growing application in the Dynamics 365 portfolio. Customers such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Campari Group, and Dayton Children’s Hospital recognize Customer Insights as a trusted platform to realize business outcomes.

Transforming vision into reality

At this time last year, I described our vision for Microsoft’s CDP, which has become reality for a number of our customers. For example, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is helping Tivoli Gardens, one of the world’s longest-running amusement parks, personalize guest experiences across every touchpoint—on the website, at the hotel, and in the park. American Electric Power Energy is using Customer Insights to better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure delivery of efficient and sustainable energy solutions. Marston’s has onboarded Customer Insights to unify guest data and infuse personalized experiences across its 1,500-plus pubs across the United Kingdom.

Earlier this year, we announced that Customer Insights expanded its availability to the Microsoft Government Cloud, an environment built to meet the higher compliance needs of United States government agencies. The Microsoft Government Cloud meets the demanding requirements of the United States Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), enabling United States federal agencies to benefit from the cost savings and rigorous security of the Microsoft Cloud.

New capabilities to help customers drive business outcomes

Today, we’re meeting this growing customer demand for the Microsoft CDP by announcing new capabilities in Customer Insights to:

• Deliver the most comprehensive view of their customers with the new engagement insights capability, currently in preview, that enables deeper understanding of customer intent and behavior with cross-channel analytics from their websites, mobile apps, and connected products. We bring yet another dimension to customer profiles though integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Organizations can automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving detailed understanding of customers. Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.
• Unlock powerful AI-driven insights through limitless analytics with deep integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations can leverage a library of prebuilt AI templates for churn prediction, product recommendations, and customer lifetime value, giving business users the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data for quick insights without having to involve data scientists and IT.
• Drive meaningful actions across the customer journey with turnkey integrations that make it easier to share insights with any application, be it Microsoft or third-party platforms. Customer Insights is designed and built to be vendor-agnostic, from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations including AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and more.
• Build on our commitment of unmatched data privacy and security by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection. This allows organizations to configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.

Real customers, real insights, real value

Across the world, so much has changed since last year. The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every organization and its customers. We’ve been inspired to see how many organizations are using Customer Insights to not only survive but thrive through this challenging environment.

In the healthcare space, Dayton Children’s Hospital uses Customer Insights to build a deep understanding of patient interactions across digital applications and in-person visits, and curate a secure single source of truth that complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other essential regulations. This enables healthcare providers to improve the patient experience across every channel and touch point, helping transform the end-to-end healthcare journey. We are now scaling this use case through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution.

The pandemic has also had an outsized impact on nonprofits who are facing difficult fundraising environments and reduced government aid; however, the demand for services from nonprofits has never been greater. Innovative organizations such as UNICEF Netherlands are leveraging Dynamics 365 applications such as Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to increase engagement with high-value donors through personalized experiences and communications. Ultimately, they can raise more funds with precise segmentation and AI-driven insights.

Further, these demands are exactly why we’re launching Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales, built with MISSION CRM. Nonprofits, schools, hospitals, and research institutions can utilize Fundraising and Engagement to uncover new funding sources, strengthen existing relationships, and drive fundraising efficiency. Dynamics 365, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Azure, bring the most modern digital platform to nonprofit organizations to engage with their donors, design campaigns, manage recurring giving programs and events. Learn more about our commitment to help nonprofits tackle the worlds’ biggest challenges.

Like many other fast moving-CPG companies, Campari Group is using Customer Insights to connect consumer and bartender engagement by integrating bespoke marketing and sales data into a single repository. Campari Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions, each bringing in another IT landscape to assimilate including more than seven martech vendors in the marketing domain. They chose Customer Insights for several reasons, including compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Campari Group’s trust in Azure. Customer Insights unifies all the consumer and business partner data, across regions and brands, to gain a 360-degree customer view. They can now take one standardized approach to calculate CLTV and personalize marketing campaigns that support end-to-end customer journeys across marketing, sales, and customer service.

Learn more about the industry’s top-rated CDP

The Microsoft CDP empowers every organization to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers allowing any business professional the ability to learn from interactions and optimize engagement for delivering personalization at scale. For more information about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, please visit us online or contact your Microsoft representative.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event today at 9:00 AM Pacific Time to learn about the incredible innovation across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to help keep businesses moving forward. With updates, insights, and demonstrations from our experts, you’ll learn how to best leverage innovations to strengthen resiliency across your organization. Be sure to review the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform for details about the hundreds of new features and updated capabilities that will be released as part of this wave.

Today marks the official start of the 2020 release wave 1, kicking off the deployment of new applications and hundreds of new capabilities and updates across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

This release lands at an unprecedented time for business and society. We are providing support and resources for organizations on the frontlines of the COVID-19 outbreak and prioritizing the seamless business continuity for our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform customers. Our customer commitment includes allowances for uptake of the 2020 release wave 1, as well as the timely release of innovations and capabilities that can help your business adapt to challenges during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event—now available on-demand—for demonstrations of some of the new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform capabilities spanning customer engagement, commerce, and supply chain management. For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 release wave 1 plans.

Seamless B2C and B2B customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we’ll demonstrate updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP), including first and third-party data connections that further enrich customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real-time. Organizations can unlock the value of their data by quickly and accurately predicting customer behavior using out-of-the-box AI templates for churn, customer lifetime value, and next best action recommendations, as well as enable deeper insights with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. We’ll also share how Chipotle Mexican Grill, one of the most popular chains of fast casual dining, brought in Customer Insights to create a real-time, up-to-the-moment understanding of their customers to drive relevant and intelligent engagement.

B2B organizations can take advantage of new customer engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Field Service to provide customers with unified, consistent, and personalized experiences throughout the entire buyer journey. Sales teams can leverage advanced AI-powered predictive sales forecasting and a new sales acceleration hub for inside sellers. Marketers can enhance campaigns with more personalized and sophisticated email messages, integrated surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro, and aggregated data and segments from Customer Insights. In addition, service centers benefit from centralized scheduling capabilities for dispatchers to schedule technicians and new omnichannel capabilities to reach customers on their preferred channels. We’ll bring these capabilities to life at the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event by demonstrating how HP’s sales, marketing, and service teams can coordinate a seamless, integrated customer journey for an upcoming launch of a new printer.

Delivering seamless omnichannel retail experiences

Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers an end to end retail solution that helps organizations deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences through advanced e-commerce capabilities, intelligent product recommendations, and enhanced clienteling. At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we’ll show you how Dr. Martens, the iconic British footwear brand, could replace all legacy applications with Dynamics 365 Commerce, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Power BI to gain greater visibility into its end-to-end processes and virtual warehouses, as well as get a single view of customers across retail and e-commerce.

Exceed customer expectations with an intelligent supply chain

We’re updating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to deliver predictive insights and intelligence from AI, IoT, and mixed reality to your organization across planning, production, inventory, warehouse, transportation management, and asset management.

We’ve added out-of-the-box IoT capabilities that leverages Azure IoT Hub to connect signals from mission-critical assets with business transaction data. This enables manufacturers to improve uptime, throughput, and quality by proactively managing shop floor and equipment operations with a real-time view of their entire production and stock.

Supply Chain Management now integrates with Dynamics 365 Field Service to help reduce downtime of geographically dispersed mission critical assets by automating field service operations, as well as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to train your workforce faster, more effectively, and in some cases, more safely using mixed reality learning experiences.

Eaton, a multinational power management company, with 97,000 employees serving customers in 175 countries, is leveraging Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions as part of its ‘Industry 4.0’ transformation. Following pilot evaluations by their IT and business teams, Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are being deployed globally by different business units starting with the Vehicle Group in over a dozen locations for maintenance, digital layout, training, product development, and connecting global teams on knowledge transfer and best practices sharing.

In addition to these highlights for operations, we’re introducing Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, which brings the power of AI into your finance processes, as well as Dynamics 365 Project Operations, a comprehensive solution for service organizations to connect and run every part of the business. Learn more about these two new applications.

Power Platform: New ways to analyze, act, and automate

Power Automate adds robotic process automation (RPA)

Today marks the generally availability of UI flows, the new robotic process automation (RPA) capability in Microsoft Power Automate. Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation. The key Power Automate RPA capabilities that are reaching general availability today include RPA for attended and unattended scenarios, a flexible business model to support any business scenario, and several AI Builder models.

Power Automate now provides a single solution for end-to-end automation that spans on-premises systems and the cloud. This approach addresses three primary areas:

• Intelligent understanding of data: Structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices to images can be easily understood and integrated with other critical business applications. AI-driven capabilities like forms processing in AI Builder are now generally available.
• RPA connects to enterprise applications without APIs: Some applications are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. With UI flows, end users can automate their work in these applications by recording manual tasks such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry, and then automate the replay of these steps to integrate with legacy systems.
• Connecting to over 300 modern apps and services: It is easy to work with information stored in the cloud or on-premises apps and databases. We offer native connectivity to common apps or a company’s APIs with over 300 connectors out-of-the-box.

Power Apps adds mixed reality experiences

Today, we’re announcing new mixed reality capabilities coming to Microsoft Power Apps. With these new features, Power Apps is one of the first low-code no-code platforms that makes it possible for everyone to build mixed reality applications.

With hundreds of millions of augmented reality capable mobile devices in the hands of business users, every Power Apps maker will be able to leverage the power of mixed reality to extend their apps with the ease of drag-and-drop development. With these new capabilities, makers can start to digitize workflows in physical space in new and innovative ways.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, you will learn how GSK, the global healthcare company, has fully embraced the Microsoft Power Platform. This includes a mobile Power App leveraging the new mixed reality capabilities, AI Builder forms processing, Power Automate RPA, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.

Power BI adds new capabilities

Microsoft Power BI is delivering new capabilities focusing on three key areas to help customers drive a data culture:

• Building on Power BI’s core amazing data exploration experiences, we’ve added the highly requested decomposition tree AI visual, a new Q&A experience, and added a modern ribbon that users are familiar with from Microsoft Office.
• As we continue to meet the most demanding needs of our enterprise customers, we are adding full application lifecycle management, with the ability for customers to move an app through a deployment pipeline. We have also completely opened Power BI’s semantic models by adding full support for the industry standard XML for Analysis (XMLA) protocol.
• Finally, to help our customers weave business intelligence deeply into the fabric of the organization, we’ve added support for Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security to protect data even when it leaves Power BI, added deep integration with Azure Synapse, and a completely revamped Microsoft Teams integration.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we will show you the work we’re doing with one of the world’s largest companies, ABB, a leader in robotics, power, heavy electrical equipment, and industrial automation technology worldwide.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event live stream

Join us this morning to learn more about these and more 2020 release wave 1 updates, see the capabilities in action, and explore how customers are already taking advantage of the new features.

The Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event is now available on-demand. Be sure to explore detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.