Twice a year, Microsoft announce the latest updates to the Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, highlighting new and improved features being rolled out. It’s now that exciting time again, with the first release of 2024 recently announced.
Following on from the release notes, there are plenty of new capabilities Dynamics 365 and Power Platform users can look forward to April to September 2024.
There are hundreds of new and improved features included. In this blog, we’ve picked out some of the biggest highlights.
You can access the full lists below if you want to read all the features:
- Dynamics 365: Microsoft Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1 plan overview | Microsoft Learn
- Power Platform: Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 plan overview | Microsoft Learn
You can also watch our video to find out what’s coming up:
Copilot_
Let’s start with the big one: AI.
If you haven’t heard yet, Copilot is Microsoft’s umbrella term for the AI capabilities being built into all if its products and services. You will find Copilot mentioned throughout this latest set of release notes.
From a sales perspective there are new features to help you draft effective emails, get a 360-degree view of accounts with an AI-generated summary, get AI-driven insights on the homepage, summarise long emails, get answers from documents and much more.
It’s interesting to see how Copilot features are being rolled out more widely across the application as Microsoft identify key use cases. One of the challenges of wide adoption of AI is ensuring there are clear use cases which deliver value, but these updates seamlessly integrate it into the flow of work within Dynamics 365.
Sales_
Sequences are a great way to add structure and process to your sales operations. You can define sets of actions (such as emails, phone calls, meetings, and LinkedIn connections) and apply them to different types of records depending on the scenario. For example, treating high volume low value leads differently to low volume high value. They can also be a great tool for account management, ensuring there is an always a next action planned.
With the enhancements in this release, sellers will be able to view a preview of the sequence applied to their record in the right-hand side bar, making the context of where they are in the journey clearer.
You can now also assign multiple sequences to the same record for different sellers. This is a great improvement for managing the flow of work in teams.
It helps to guide multiple sellers to work together to win a deal: for example, having experts in different disciplines working together for the same opportunity.
Customer Service_
As ever, there are some great improvements to the customer service application within Dynamics 365 too.
This release adds the ability to forecast case volumes daily and at 15-minute intervals. This can help customer service managers ensure that there is enough resource to meet demand and plan accordingly. By doing so, they avoid poor service due to being under-resourced or incurring unnecessary costs by being over-resourced.
There are also some productivity enhancements, such as being able to drag and drop attachments into emails. There are also lots of Copilot additions (naturally!), such as:
- Automatic prompts to help agents ask the right questions and get help faster.
- Being able to filter Copilot responses based on business line or customer to get the most relevant information to case handlers.
- Enhanced citation of information for more transparent responses from Copilot.
Field Service_
Dynamics 365 Field Service is an application designed to manage the end-to-end needs of a field based team or organisation. There are lots of productivity enhancements in this release, including the addition of the ability to create work orders in Microsoft Teams. There are also updates to the Field Service Mobile application, a key tool for your resources out in the field.
One particularly useful update is the ability to use Copilot to summarise a work order in the mobile app, giving the agent in the field a quick overview of all they need to know about the job.
Additionally, engineers can use natural language to describe what they’ve done while attending the job and Copilot will translate this into a set of updates to the back-end system, changing the status of the job and recording any parts used.
With the recent announcement that Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will be included in the core Dynamics 365 Field Service licence, it’s exciting to see these capabilities seamlessly integrated into the mobile app too.
For organisations using Business Central as their finance platform, you’ll be pleased to know that a native integration between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Field Service will be available from April 2024.
Business Central_
The list of new and improved features for Business Central is huge in this release, a sign that Microsoft is investing heavily in this product and the success it’s having in the market.
There are deeper integrations with the Power Platform and Dynamics 365, with the ability to use virtual tables to expose more data in Dataverse, which can then be surfaced across other apps such as Sales and Customer Service.
There are also multiple improvements to the project management experience, including the ability to archive projects, a new ‘Assemble to project’ feature and the ability to invoice a single project to multiple customers.
The already great Shopify integration is getting some improvements too, including a connection from Business Central to Shopify B2B and a simplified experience when creating a Shopify connection.
You haven’t heard the word Copilot yet, but don’t worry. Copilot will soon be here to:
- Help with bank reconciliation.
- Create product information faster.
- Create sales lines more easily.
- Get insights faster.
- Learn about any field within the application.
Marketing_
The marketing capabilities within Dynamics 365 have recently been rebranded from Dynamics 365 Marketing to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. It’s been bundled in with what was formerly called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and is now called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data. This combination has created a powerful customer data platform and marketing automation platform in a single tool and available for a single licence cost.
New features include the ability to create real-time segments, opening the possibility of instantly contacting customers at the right moment. For example, when they reach a higher loyalty tier or become eligible for a cross-sell.
Recently, Microsoft have also advised customers to move from the legacy outbound marketing experience to the new real-time marketing app, which is where Microsoft are making all new investments.
Whilst the real-time marketing application contains new and improved features compared to the legacy outbound marketing app, there are a few features which haven’t been ported across. A key one of those is now included in this release: the ability to track prospect and customer activity online using a web tracking script.
Another addition for administrators is the ability to move components such as segments, measures, and more, between environments using solutions. This is a great improvement and adds some much-needed governance to environment management and version control.
A nice new feature is the ability to capture custom fields on marketing forms, without having to add them to data structure in Dataverse. This is especially handy for temporary information – such as meal preferences or survey type questions, where you need to know the answer but don’t want to pollute your database with lots of extra data.
A long-awaited feature is the ability to easily test journeys in sandbox environments before deploying them to production using solutions, creating a much safer and more reliable way to test key functionality before putting it live.
There are also some additions to help sales and marketing teams work together more efficiently – such as automation around the handover from marketing to sales when a lead is ready.
Power Apps_
Power Apps is not only a set of tools for building custom applications for a host of business scenarios, with built-in AI, automation and reporting capabilities. It is also the platform that underpins Dynamics 365, so it’s interesting to read about the developments within Power Apps and understand their impact on the wider platform.
First is the fact that the new UI for model driven apps (Dynamics 365 is a set of model driven apps) will be enabled by default. This is beneficial as the new UI is more performant, responsive and engaging, with the use of the latest Microsoft Fluent Design System and nice-looking new controls.
As with everything else, Copilot has been infused into the maker experience, and whilst the functionality is fairly limited now, we can see the possibilities that this technology could unlock.
On a technical note, there is now also the ability to call SQL Server stored procedures directly from Power Fx. This removes the performance overhead that exists currently as this has to be done via Power Automate today.
Power Platform_
Finally, there a raft of new features available across Power Pages, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and AI Builder, all focussed on increased productivity and automation.
There are also a set of new tools within Dataverse to cater for enterprise deployments and increase security and performance.
We could talk about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform all day. The latest release notes are full of exciting updates in Microsoft’s roadmap, which can improve your operations substantially.
If you’d like to know more just get in touch – we’d be happy to take you through the updates!
