Microsoft has recently released its plans for the upcoming Wave 2 release which will be bringing a whole host of new and improved features to the Microsoft 365 stack of applications.
In our latest blog article we will take you through the new capabilities coming to its Dynamics 365 applications as part of the Wave 2 update which will be rolled out between October 2020 and March 2021.
What new & improved capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central from October?
The main focuses for the new & improved capabilities coming to this application will revolve around providing a world-class service to meet the growing demands and expectations of the increasing customer base, improved performance, better support for Group VAT along with customer requested features in addition to a better integration with Microsoft Teams.
Support for an unlimited number of production and sandbox environments
Essentially the point of this feature is to make it easier for businesses to expand Business Central to more than three countries or three business offices by allowing more than three production environments.
This will give customers the ability to buy additional production environments. Therefore for every newly purchased production environment, the customer can create additional sandbox environments. Better still the additional production environments will help to ramp up the database capacity quota for a business.
Group VAT Reporting
More and more businesses are starting to use VAT groups in order to comply with certain regulations for MTD when reporting VAT to HMRC. With this update, Business Central will support VAT groups with some new features that will make reporting possible and seamless.
You will find that Group VAT reporting in Business Central will look to focus on the inter-group communications and the gathering of VAT data to make it easier to securely manage VAT reporting.
Use Word document layouts to customize outgoing customer documents
It is often the case where a business needs to tailor the documents they send out to customers. This has a particular importance for outgoing documents such as shipments, service quotes, invoices. By using Word as the document-authoring tool provides power users in Business Central with the ability to easily modify layouts of reports. This update will be rolled out for the following documents, Shipments, Return Orders, Service Quotes, Orders, Invoices & Credit Memos.
Continued enhancements for migrating from Dynamics GP to Business Central
The ongoing drive to try and persuade existing Dynamics GP users to make the move to Business Central will continue as Microsoft have made some additional enhancements to make the transition even smoother.
Customers will now be able to see the checkbooks, open purchase orders & fixed assets from Dynamics GP in Business Central after the migration has been completed. Thus reducing the amount of manual setup required after the migration.
The enhancements made will allow users to have the following:
- Have the Dynamics GP checkbooks migrated as checkbooks in Business Central.
- Have open purchase orders migrated to Business Central.
- Bring over assets, asset books, outstanding depreciation amounts and asset groups.
If you want to find out what other capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central in October, you can do so here.
What new capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing from October?
A large proportion of the new & improved capabilities coming to this application will largely focus on providing a comprehensive view of the customer which will make it easier to acquire real time data which will enable personalisation to take place in the form of automating the whole customer journey.
Build tailored emails quicker
Microsoft have now made it simpler for users to draft customised emails without using any form of coding. The email editor has received the following additions:
- You can now add more than three columns to the email.
- Dedicated support for email rendering in Outlook.
- Enhanced email editing performance which includes quicker loading and better element engagement.
Build & monitor content-rich social media posts & performance
Following Microsoft’s latest Wave 2 release, users are now able to draft and schedule content-rich social media posts for both Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. Microsoft will be completing the following:
- Rebuilding the post create experience, allowing marketers to build better engagement through the ability to build and post rich content.
- Easily view all related social interactions and performance.
- Rebuilding the whole scheduling experience making it easier to create consistent streams of content across different social media platforms.
Deliver webinars and meetings seamlessly through Microsoft Teams
As part of this latest release, users are now able to manage registrations, all communications as well as reporting for all webinars and meetings taking place in Teams straight from the comfort of the Dynamics 365 Marketing application. Additionally, Microsoft have also added the following capabilities:
- The ability to create and host live events through Teams which acts as the webinar provider.
- Seamlessly integrate Teams webinars into Marketing events.
- The ability to create a webinar event either as a live event or meeting in Teams.
If you want to find out what other capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing in October, you can do so here.
What new & improved capabilities will be available in Dynamics 365 Sales from October?
Microsoft have been busy over the last few updates in trying to transform the overall user experience as well as making improvements where needed. This hasn’t changed in the latest Wave 2 update for Dynamics 365 Sales as they have continued to focus their efforts on streamlining the overall user experience, improving app integration, developing a new mobile experience & transforming the overall forecasting capabilities.
Introduction of the new Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile Experience
Microsoft has come to the realisation that most salespeople are often on the go and away from their laptops meeting their customers. To make them more productive, Microsoft has introduced its very first mobile-first sales app for both Android & iOS. The purpose of this application is to provide a much more slick looking mobile experience to enable customer data to be easily accessed in real time as and when required.
Easily create orders directly from quotes within Dynamics 365 Sales Professional
You will find that new and improved capabilities are being released to help transform the whole quoting process. Following this, users will be able to easily and accurately create quotes, produce contract documents as well as use e-signatures to finalise any deals.
Better still, users using Dynamics 365 Sales Professional will be able to build an order from a quote that has been won via the command bar.
Usability Improvements
Further improvements in terms of usability will help to enhance the user interface interactions of sales teams within the Dynamics 365 for Sales app:
- Duplicate detection & merge capabilities are crucial in maintaining the integrity of your data. As part of the Wave 2 update, the current duplicate detection and merge user experiences have been developed further. This will not only help businesses to retain data quality but also to help users come to informed decisions & avoid duplicate entries.
- Optimised features around PDF generation and collaboration, with extended capability around custom entities.
If you want to find out what other capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Sales in October, you can do so here.
What new & improved capabilities will be available in Dynamics 365 Customer Service from October?
Microsoft have stated that the latest updates for Dynamics 365 Customer Service revolves around the three following areas: agent productivity, integrated insights & AI-driven suggestions.
Agent suggestions for closely matched cases
When it comes to finding solutions for customer cases & giving a comprehensive answer, support agents usually make use of a number of different resources. Such resources include referring to knowledge articles, seeking knowledge from other support agents or matching up similar problems highlighted by cases in the past. Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft will be able to highlight the right cases by navigating through thousands of cases by taking other historical cases into account.
Familiar, modern email template experience for both admins and agents
Emails are vital in communicating with your customers at all stages of the support life cycle. The use of email templates allows this to be much more streamlined which is why Microsoft have decided to roll out the following new and improved capabilities as part of the Wave 2 release:
- Easily build templates with an intuitive and easy to understand experience
- Tailor the messaging with dynamic customer or entity data
Usability enhancements for timeline
Enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Customer Service timeline include the ability to:
- Use inline images for rich text notes
- Expand or collapse all records
- Provide email-specific actions for email records
- Highlight matching text for the search filter
If you want to find out what other capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, you can do so here.
What new & improved capabilities will be available in Dynamics 365 Field Service from October?
Microsoft have revealed that the latest updates for Dynamics 365 Field Service as part of the Wave 2 release will be targeting the following areas: insights, proactive service delivery, scheduling & technician success.
Work order completion surveys with Microsoft Forms Pro
This feature enables administrators to configure work order completion surveys using Forms Pro in order to gather and collate feedback and present the survey natively as part of the customer's experience.
Predictive work duration
Currently, dispatchers assign a fixed duration for a job type, regardless of the various factors that may lengthen or shorten the work order. This can potentially cause a number of delays or low usage, reducing the effectiveness of schedules.
Predictive work duration solves this problem by predicting a realistic duration for a given job. This helps dispatchers reduce risk by identifying unforeseen delays and shorten buffer time.
Dashboard for key field service metrics
This new dashboard provides out-of-the-box field service metrics and measures. This dashboard enables a field service manager or dispatcher to use the field service reports to monitor KPIs.
If you want to find out what other capabilities will be coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, you can do so here.
Next Steps?
If you have read the above Dynamics 365 Wave 2 Updates and are looking to improve the way you work by implementing a tailored Dynamics 365 solution, looking to add to your existing Dynamics 365 solution or wanting to move your Dynamics 365 support over to us then please speak to our experts today to discuss exactly what your business requires.
Want to receive more emails from us? Then simply sign up to our mailing list to get all emails delivered straight into your inbox.
