Expanding Business Horizons with Dynamics 365 & Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 2

Organizations have undergone incremental developmental changes in recent years. Embracing low-code developmental tools from Microsoft stack gave a massive breakthrough with tech innovations that continue to disrupt emerging trends, modernize economies, and accelerate growth.

Leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Power Platform, allows organizations and users to analyze, automate and initiate predictive analytics to interpret data and digitally transform their businesses.

2022 Release Wave 2 involves a set of instructions to infuse innovative codes and capabilities that aims at upgrading businesses’ performances. This, in turn, will reflect in a greater return on investment (ROI), time-to-market, and reduced developmental and operational costs to increase efficiency levels.

Starting August 1, 2022, customers and implementation partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will automatically initiate in production environments during October 2022.

Microsoft Dynamics 2022 Release Wave 2

The newest 2022 release wave 2 is forecasted to enter the market between October 2022 and March 2023. It holistically captures Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder, as well as Microsoft Dataverse, Power Platform capabilities for data governance and administration, pro-development, ISV (Independent Software Vendor) experiences, and data integration.

This blog aims to break down the individual upgrades in the 2022 Release Wave 2 as Microsoft’s investment to power digital transformation for customers and partners alike.

Microsoft D365 Release Wave 2 – Takeaways

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based business application platform combining the essential components of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) along with other integrable applications and artificial intelligence tools.

In essence, Dynamics 365 gives automated, incorporated, and intelligent insights to correctly connect, prioritize, and convert leads into paying customers.

Here is a look at the constituents of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and their upgrades in detail:

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Business-to-business (B2B) brands can hyper-personalize experiences throughout the entire buying journey with the help of Dynamics 365 Marketing. This allows them to expand and diversify customer experiences to reach between 100 million customers with up to 300 million messages and interactions each month, with the inclusion of:

• New analytical dashboards
• Hands-off lead nurturing automation
• Intuitive lead capture forms
• Utilizing AI-powered content selection

The upgrades from D365 2022 release wave 2 features allow organizations to achieve new marketing maturity levels, with improved support for business units for efficiency and productivity, including:

• Improved data functionality for a centralized view of customers
• Role-based views to ease information overload
• Advanced data integration for swift navigation, and utilizing data analytics and KPIs
• Artificial intelligence and proactive monitoring for customer retention and increasing sale levels
• Seamless collaboration of sales, service, and marketing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 remains an effective solution that provides all the prerequisites to help increase brand and consumer loyalty while attracting potential customers and stabilizing the business’s financials.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance is making vendor invoice OCR generally available and will keep developing capabilities for subscription billing use cases. This technology automates reading and identifying vendor invoices.

All Finance and Operations apps, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations, are covered by cross-app capabilities. With a focus on enhancing the One Dynamics One Platform workstream, it aims to make Finance and Operations apps available to end users, professional developers, and administrators on the Microsoft Power Platform.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

By allowing human resource business partners to customize experiences and automatically complete processes where manual choices and activities are now required, Dynamics 365 Human Resources upgrade promises increased efficiency.

As part of the 2022 release wave 2, there are two themes: improved efficiency, and expanding Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem. Together, it works to provide notifications to the managers and the staff members outside of the applications for benefits, processes, and tasks, thereby meeting the promised efficiency and effectiveness.

Additionally, it will integrate employee skills and compensation, leaving information to resource managers in Dynamics 365, and enhance user experiences across all Dynamics 365 applications.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Dynamics 365 Project Operations empowers project managers with project budgeting, time-phased forecasting, baselines, and snapshots, as well as modernizing application experiences on the web and mobile form factors.

It enables sophisticated subcontracting and subscription billing features for project accountants and back-office personalities. In addition, across-the-board efforts to lessen the complexity of interaction patterns and acceptance of contemporary and fluent controls are also planned for this release wave.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business management system that connects sales, service, finance, and operations teams to help them adapt seamlessly to the digital transformation system and deliver the results.

It further aims to enhance the reporting capabilities for users. It does so by adding additional Excel report datasets and enhancing Microsoft Power BI reports with the addition of dimension support.

Nevertheless, Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate integration remain a breakthrough upgrade as it converges the low-code development possibilities in D365 Business Central. This makes it easier for users to reverse entries in the journal for payment reconciliation and upgrades to the supply chain capabilities. With more effective and productive tools for development and administration, businesses are sure to make progress in increasing productivity.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service 2022 release wave 2 introduces additional tools allowing businesses to effectively plan service operations for employees. It helps set up and maintain locations and assets for larger facilities.

 

Organizations can also keep costs under control by setting up “not-to-exceed” limitations and similar types under “trades” for simpler and swift administration. This includes:

• Service level agreements
• Predictive travel patterns
• Technician’s geolocation

To continue empowering frontline employees, Dynamics 365 Field Service also aims at providing optimization improvements on booking lock limitations and offering a plethora of user experience enhancements to the mobile app.

Reactive service to proactive monitoring while leveraging predictive analytics based on IoT data and insights to anticipate potential repairs.

Moreover, Dynamics 365 Field Service has initiated optical character recognition (OCR) to automate the reading and identification of vendor invoices for subscription billing user experiences. Implementing e-invoice regulations can further tackle the impeding demands by converging with Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, with the newest upgrades, is focused on driving agility and resilience across the supply chain.

New analytical dashboards allow organizations to optimize “sourcing strategies”. The real-time dashboard visibility allows managers to track consumption levels and stay put with the allocated quantities while supporting special events, promotions, and product launches.

Moreover, it features seamless configuration experiences and guided warehouse implementation. This enables rapid reconfiguration for robust supply chain planning across the process industries.

Dynamics 365 Customer Services

Dynamics 365 Customer Service focuses on delivering the capabilities that function smoothly. Embedded with percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing, it helps customer support teams to resolve complex problems through collaboration.

Businesses can provide their consumers with the opportunity to call virtual agents straight from the voice channel, leave a voicemail, or request a callback. Nevertheless, the chatbot experience is modernized with:

• Enhanced conversational timeline
• Horizontal multisession navigation
• AI-powered conversation summary

This allows the managers to access the analytics from Microsoft Power Virtual Agents through omnichannel analytics dashboards.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales keeps improving the seller experience by integrating business and productivity tools to meet sellers’ business requirements. It fosters on-the-go collaboration opportunities so that every seller can effectively engage with their teams and customers, save time, and be more productive.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

Sales agreements across channels and customer-specific catalogs are just two prominent examples of the new and improved B2B experiences made possible by Dynamics 365 Commerce. As part of the update, workflows are streamlined by omnichannel media management tools. The availability of the Store Commerce app for iOS and Android devices remains essential for point-of-sale investments.

Furthermore, there will be customer assistance alternatives for e-commerce through the combination of a virtual agent and a live agent, as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay digital wallets.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management has a holistic approach that spans the entire supply chain lifecycle, thereby enveloping everything from order ingestion to last-minute delivery. It comes with added support in the 2022 release wave 2 and provided back orders, subscription orders, manual orders, and purchase orders, thereby fulfilling various fulfillment strategies.

Furthermore, the contextual collaboration features allow B2B business to streamline their communication with suppliers and vendors, thereby sharing order updates, and tracking order journeys via embedded ‘Microsoft Teams’.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

The new transaction acceptance booster (TAB) product from Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will let retailers raise bank approval rates without having to completely replace their current fraud provider solution.

Owing to the immense cost and time factors, this upgrade completely replaces a merchant’s current fraud solution. Thereby, enabling the merchant to take advantage of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection TAB capabilities with little impact on their company.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

By improving time to value with speedier out-of-the-box insights, forecasts, segments, and measurements with boundless extensibility across technology ecosystems, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights keeps investing in quickening customer knowledge.

Businesses can now take use of new capabilities to enable tailored experiences with real-time insights, analytics, and activations to offer moment-based marketing and industry-leading personalization. Additionally, new capabilities offer ubiquitous insights that allow for smooth workflows by integrating data flow across Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform.

Dynamics 365 Guides

Dynamics 365 Guides keep making investments in tools to enhance authors’ and users’ Microsoft HoloLens 2 collaboration experiences. The updates have enhanced the offering to more complex content authoring procedures versioning and publication of guides in the following wave.

Microsoft Power Platform – Takeaways

Microsoft Power Platform aims to bring visibility and control across organizations while accelerating transformation for citizen developers and professionals alike.

With the 2022 release of Wave 2, new capabilities are launched to upskill the businesses via:

• Improving desktop automation by connecting flows with SharePoint
• Connect existing data sources into one Dataverse table and allow teams to collaborate on the whole data sets
• Allow makers to quickly build engaging websites to deliver information and services to their customers

Let’s look at the exciting new features being launched in Power Platform for the 2022 Release Wave 2:

Power BI

Power BI keeps making investments to equip people, groups, and businesses to promote data culture. Integrating Office 365 experiences and enabling online data sets ensures seamless creation of user experiences.

Power BI Desktop’s integration of the power query diagram view allows data producers to extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations on their data with no programming required.

2022 release wave 2 has introduced a tailored set of guidelines to meet corporate requirements and integration with Microsoft Viva Goals.

Additionally, automated aggregations, query scale-out, data security features via data loss prevention (DLP), and greater activity visibility for administrators all improve the big data experiences.

Power Apps

With Power Apps, businesses will enable, manage, and promote citizen development throughout the whole company. The 2022 release wave 2 updates allow businesses to:

• Create and manage logic and data
• Integrate intelligence to assist the development
• Enrich data and enhance end-user experiences

This adds productivity to makers and developers of all skill levels across Dataverse in a single studio. Both manufacturers and end users will profit from out-of-the-box collaboration features to enable users to be more productive when working together, in addition to assuring trust and the capacity to utilize rich data experiences.

Power Pages

Power Pages is still making investments in introducing new out-of-the-box features to help both professional developers and low-code/no-code development. Key features in 2022 Release Wave 2 provide the creators with more flexibility when utilizing the design studio to work with forms and lists, and they can get going fast by using more solution templates.

There are improvements for administrators to better manage and oversee their Power Pages sites as well as for professional developers to do more with the sites utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform Command Line Interface (CLI) tool and Visual Studio (VS) Code.

Power Automate

With new experiences to support users of every skill level as they build up their cloud and desktop flows, Power Automate is more approachable than ever.

• Allows creation of personalized flows in every Office 365 application for improved suitability
• Hyperscale cloud RPA allows business users to create automation that executes commands directly
• Improved user experience for first-time users that prompts automation configuration

Power Automate’s application lifecycle management features have been improved further since organizations need to automate their deployments of the software (ALM).

Additionally, with the newer updates and wide applicability of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), it is simpler to manage machines and login information (for users and accounts) in Azure.

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents bring revolutionary enhancements with Power Pages integration, commenting, proactive bot update messaging in teams, data loss prevention options, and much more.

A team of professionals is often needed, along with lengthy content update cycles, to complete the complicated and time-consuming task of creating a bot.

Using a simple, code-free graphical interface and Power Virtual Agents, anybody in your business can build robust bespoke bots without the aid of AI specialists, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot may communicate with people, elicit clarification from them, and then respond to their inquiries.

AI Builder

To create more intelligent apps and workflows, citizen developers may continue to leverage and personalize AI features using AI Builder.

The versioning, deployment, and monitoring features will be strengthened, which increases the lifecycle and governance of AI Builder models.

New capabilities for managing human-in-the-loop validation, simplifying the integration of big data sets for automated e-mail processing, and processing contracts and multi-page tables in documents are all advantageous to makers.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2 plans.

Dynamics Solution and Technology | Unlocking the Potential of Your Business

Microsoft demonstrates its commitment to continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform as a safe choice for business application processes to run the entire business.

Nevertheless, deploying these advanced features seamlessly with your business requires apt consultants and experts to achieve the anticipated levels of efficiency. After all, the updates are subject to change and upgrade!

Dynamics Solution and Technology, with its global expertise in meeting the B2B clients’ needs with utmost diligence and efficiency, is the one for you. Being a Microsoft Gold Partner, our skill set, and track records showcase the immense value in meeting the business needs. Our functional and technical experts begin from the grassroots level and perfectly embed the Microsoft tool to achieve promised digital business transformation.

Accelerating your digital business transformation journey is just a click away. So, let’s connect!