Microsoft has published the Microsoft Dynamics 365 release wave 1 for the new features due to be released from April 2021 to September 2021. This wave release covers the Dynamics 365 stack of solutions as well as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent, and the Microsoft Dataverse- formerly known as the Microsoft Common Data Service.
What’s new in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 wave one release 2021?
There are hundreds of new features across the Microsoft Dynamics 365 stack in wave one release 2021, and this update will focus on:
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for sales (D365 Sales)
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer service (D365 Customer Service)
- Dynamics 365 Marketing (D365 Marketing)
- SMB Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC).
Dynamics 365 Sales Wave 1 Release 2021.
Microsoft has focused on adding selling enhancements and providing more data insights such as conversation intelligence, automation, and updates to the mobile application.
These new features and updates are aiming to save time by reducing the number of actions a user needs to take. On the side panel of the record in Dynamics 365 for Sales, users will be able to customise their workspace to their needs and role, as well as being able to generate action triggers. There is a ‘deal manager’ workspace to help users view the context of deals quickly and then take necessary actions in just one click.
Microsoft has continued to focus on providing data-driven insights with new filters in the deal manager to find opportunities quickly using a custom filter, or a time-based slicer, as well as providing new out-of-the-box visualisations to help them quickly understand their pipeline.
The mobile experience has been expanded to help field sales’ people to manage their work from a mobile phone. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales mobile experience uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide field sellers with deal insights as well as offering access to the file, notes, and email activities to name just a few enhancements.
With Microsoft Teams you can transcribe customer calls and online meetings and assign them to a Dynamics 365 record which in turn triggers the AI to provide insights, sentiment, and follow-up activity.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Wave 1 2021
Wave one for Dynamics 365 Customer Service has focused on enabling customers to be operational swiftly, delivering a one-stop contact centre experience, and empowering routing of clients in the contact centre.
Delivery timelines for Dynamics 365 Customer Service enhancements are subject to change and some of the new features are not yet confirmed for public preview or early release.
Please check this Microsoft page for up-to-date planned release dates from April 2021 to September 2021 for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
The Dynamics 365 Customer Service wave one updates include:
- A monthly and weekly view of support in a new schedule board which is available for early access review. This enables schedulers to manage bookable resource. Schedulers will also be able to view bookings in weekly and monthly views as well as having the ability to view multiple days.
- Improvements to the case management capabilities with the provision of analytics for service managers. These redesigned reports will now offer a comprehensive view of metrics such as customer satisfaction to develop an understanding of how queues are being managed as well as customer service agent performance.
- One key improvement available for early February 2021 preview is the ability to allow updates to cases that have been resolved or cancelled.
- Knowledge management continues to be enhanced with search analytics and improved configuration.
Dynamics Marketing Wave 1 Release 2021
Please see some of the new features that are planned to be released from Microsoft to Dynamics 365 Marketing from April 2021 to September 2021 here:
- more helpful use of AI
- next action to journeys capability, and improved journey effectiveness
- monitoring of customer journeys in real-time
- the ability to set goals for journeys and the measurement of the goals’ progress
- the ability to create and send SMS to any mobile
- improvements to help marketers create emails quickly.
Focusing on the ability to create emails quickly, there is a revamped email editor due in April 2021 for public preview. This is a completely new design to making it easier to produce professional emails.
Image reference: Microsoft Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1 Plan
This will be a welcome feature for any marketing team working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
SMB Dynamics 365 Business Central what’s new?
In the Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 wave 1 release there will be an improved collaboration with Microsoft Teams and more development on the Excel and Outlook add-ins. There will be the ability to find Business Central contacts from the Microsoft Teams search box, as well as the ability to share a contact with colleagues in Teams conversations. Microsoft has focused on performance, user-ability, and printing. For example, the solution will help users with productivity even if they make an error, as Microsoft have made it easy to correct dimensions for general ledger entities.
There is more control and the ability to restrict codes for particular ‘default dimensions.’ Instead of users having the ability to pick any dimension, there will be a predefined list of allowed dimension values.
As well as improvements for existing Business Central solutions, Microsoft has focused on making it even easier to get up and running with Dynamics 365 Business Central. This will allow Synergy Technology, a Microsoft partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central, to help its new clients to get operational with Business Central quickly and successfully.
Please check out these links which we are sure you will be interested in learning more about if you are using Business Central:
Contact insights and access to history of interactions with contacts
Simplified bank statement file import
The ability to merge Word docs in Business Central
Support cloud printing using Microsoft Universal Print
Power Apps, Power Automate, and The Dataverse.
Power Apps 2021 Release Wave 1
Microsoft Power Apps is a leading low code development platform. Improvements due this April are the debugging of canvas apps, duplicate detection, improved navigation in model-driven apps, and user experience improvements to sub-grids and form tabs.
Power Automate Release Wave 1 Updates
Microsoft continues to deepen the Power Automate integrations with Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI and Microsoft Dataverse.
Improvements due in April 2021 include:
- the trigger of flows when the Microsoft Dataverse is called
- relevant search in the Dataverse
- manage solution-based flows to provide rich visualisation where users identify repetitive time-consuming processes.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Wave 1 Release Dates 2021
Many of these features will be available from the 1st of February 2021 for administrators to start to test in sandbox instances as a preview. The general availability for many of these features will be rolled out from the 1st of April 2021 until September 2021.
I hope these release wave notes have helped offer a flavour of the new functionality and features due in the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Wave 1 release for 2021. To review the full Dynamics 365: 2021 release wave 1 plan please download them here.
If you have any questions of how the Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 1 updates will affect your Dynamics 365 solution, please contact helpdesk@Synergytechnology.co.uk.
If you are using an on-premise Microsoft Dynamics solution, and want to talk about the option of moving it to a hosted environment, upgrading or moving to the Online instance with Microsoft, please contact Sales@synergytechnology.co.uk.