It’s that time of the year when Microsoft announces its second release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Due for release between October 2023 and March 2024, Microsoft’s release notes can be more technical and detailed and, thus, tricky to comprehend.
That’s where we come in! We track and translate key updates and improvements and highlight their benefits for your company and users every time Microsoft announces a release wave. So, why should this time be any different?
Here are all the key updates, enhancements, and announcements for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from Microsoft 2023 release wave 2.
Sales | Marketing | Customer Service | Field Service | Finance | Supply Chain Management | Project Operations | Commerce | Business Central | Customer Insights | Power BI | Power Apps | Power Pages | Power Virtual Agents
Microsoft Dynamics 365: 2023 Release Wave 2 Highlights
Microsoft’s second release for Dynamics 365 in 2023 introduces a range of fresh innovations designed to empower you with substantial capacities for revolutionising your enterprise. This release encompasses an extensive array of novel functionalities spanning the spectrum of Dynamics 365 applications, such as Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, Human Resources, Commerce, Business Central, Customer Insights, and more.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Viva Sales has been rebranded as Microsoft Sales Copilot after this year’s Inspire. And Microsoft’s 2023 second release for Dynamics 365 Sales is bringing many new Sales Copilot capabilities to help you boost productivity by saving time and lowering workloads.
Designed to revolutionise your way of work by leveraging GPT technology, these new Sales Copilot capabilities include:
- AI-generated proposals to accelerate sales
- AI-generated account summary for a better understanding of your contacts
- AI-recommended content to boost customer engagement
- AI-generated notes to prepare for meetings
- AI-generated opportunity summaries to stay on top of your deals
- AI-generated lead summaries to track and improve your leads
- Copilot chatbot to help you stay updated with contextual information
Besides Viva Sales, Sales Accelerator has also been renamed as Sales Engagement. The new features within it will:
- Streamline recurring follow-ups with customers by creating a series of repetitive steps and exit criteria
- Allow multiple sellers and agents to simultaneously work on multiple sales sequences for faster deal closures.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
It’s not just Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing is also being merged into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. With this move, Microsoft wants to combine the journey orchestration of Marketing and the data analytics of Customer Insights.
From 1 September 2023, Microsoft will now offer both these solutions as the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which will include two modules: Customer Insights-Data and Customer Insights-Journeys. This new Customer Insights will provide a unified customer profile, allowing you to orchestrate customer journeys in real time based on the updated customer insights.
Microsoft will also offer a new licensing model for this new Customer Insights module for new customers. If you’re already using Dynamics 365 Marketing and don’t want to switch to Customer Insights, you can still renew your existing Marketing licence for another contract term from 1 September 2023.
That said, here are the 2023 Microsoft second release highlights for Dynamics 365 Marketing, starting from Copilot:
- Style your emails, forms, and event registration pages easily to match your branding using Copilot to save time and effort
- Authenticate your domain effortlessly with Copilot’s guidance to increase your email reputation and deliverability
- Reformat and repurpose existing content quickly by changing tone and voice with Copilot
- Create complex customer journeys using natural language prompts in Copilot
Additionally, Microsoft 2023 second release also unifies marketing and sales functions to drive revenue and improve lifetime value. The new capabilities supporting this initiative are designed to:
- Create tailored reports using Microsoft Fabric
- Provide personalised customer experiences with data from Customer Insights
- Qualify leads and route to sales automatically based on predefined criteria
- Expedite your sales pipeline with integrated AI-driven analytics
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Copilot functionalities remain as the highlights of the updates for Dynamics 365 Customer Service as well. Built to facilitate expedited resolutions of customer issues and boost satisfaction, these Customer Service updates from Microsoft 2023 second release include:
- AI-generated summaries of support cases
- AI-generated conversation summaries
- Visibility into Copilot’s impact on your business
- Smart knowledge discovery for new content
- AI-drafted email and message replies grounded on business data
On the agent’s side of things, the new Customer Service update will help agents handle multiple interactions easily, move between sessions quickly, and become more productive with improved workflows. The new updates helpful for agents include:
- Enhanced search options to manage subjects
- Share live chats and calls with others in the inbox
- New user interface for better call control for voice channel
Dynamics 365 Field Service
The 2023 Microsoft second release enhancements for Dynamics 365 Field Service come together to facilitate proactive service delivery, allowing service admins and managers to get their tasks done faster leveraging simplified and streamlined workflows.
The new capabilities for Field Service enable you to:
- Create a work order from a quote
- Improve flexibility for booking status automation
- Quicken service delivery with extended customer details
- Manage certifications for frontline workers
- Support for multiple recurrences within work hours calendar
Dynamics 365 Finance
Microsoft 2023 second release for Dynamics 365 Finance aims to add extended planning and analysis alongside introducing additional improvements to the core finance capabilities for automation, reporting, and analytics.
These key new updates for Dynamics 365 Finance will allow you to:
- Archive all your tax transactions
- Add financial tags to accounting distributions
- Manage periodically recurring invoices easily
- Import bank statements automatically
- Extend planning and analytics
- Analyse business performance and security effortlessly
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management has also received several new enhancements to help you benefit from in-built generative AI and gain visibility, efficiency, and resiliency in your supply chain.
These new updates include:
- Copilot conversational guidance for smart purchase order management
- New mobile app to track and manage inventory
- Automated document update when receiving purchase orders
- Integrated inventory visibility with Dynamics 365 Commerce
- Optimised customer returns and inbound receiving processes
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Microsoft 2023 second release updates for Dynamics 365 Project Operations focus on optimising your project execution processes holistically: from inception, ideation and sales to accounting and invoicing. Here’s a quick rundown of the key updates:
- Effortless budget creation with summarisation during estimate import
- Recommendations on best resources for your project
- Progress-based billing for fixed-price contracts
- Bulk resource reconciliation
- New intuitive experience in Expense mobile app
Dynamics 365 Commerce
For Dynamics 365 Commerce, the 2023 Microsoft second release offers an enhanced Copilot experience along with new features for digital and omnichannel commerce. While Copilot features aim to cut down content creation time and expedite workflows, other updates seek to streamline B2B commerce and simplify inventory and product media management.
The key updates among these are:
- Copilot assistance for ecommerce content creation
- Streamlined sign-up process for buyers
- Optimised online store operations management for distributors
- Real-time inventory tracking with Inventory Visibility
- Integrated workflows for simplified product media management
Dynamics 365 Business Central
For Business Central, too, Microsoft is bringing innovations in Copilot that provide marketing text suggestions. This will boost the productivity for SMEs.
Additionally, Microsoft is embedding Power Apps within Business Central to leverage several app connectors to support varying business scenarios. Plus, there are more enhancements in multicompany capabilities and in inventory and warehousing.
These updates include:
- AI-generated marketing suggestions with Copilot
- Faster bank account reconciliation with Copilot
- Support for business events in Business connector for Power Automate
- Control over the visibility of Power BI-embedded content
- Availability overview to help you calculate warehouse quantities
- Financial consolidations across multicompany environments
- More productive timesheet approvals
- Support for intercompany transactions across Business Central environments
- Document synchronisation and date posting for sales and purchases
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
While Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will incorporate the Marketing module, for the customers still using the older Customer Insights, there are several updates from the 2023 Microsoft second release wave. They include:
- Effortless identification and elimination of data quality issues with Copilot
- Accelerated time to insights
- Elevated customer experience in real time
- Automated customer insights from Dataverse
- Real-time segments for better moment-based experiences
Microsoft Power Platform: 2023 Release Wave 2 Highlights
Much like Dynamics 365, Power Platform, too, is getting a bunch of updates and enhancements. These are all geared towards empowering both individuals and businesses to seamlessly delve into, respond to, and mechanise data, culminating in a profound digital metamorphosis of their enterprises.
This expansive upgrade encompasses Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder, and even extends its influence on Microsoft Dataverse, bestowing unparalleled governance, administration, and expert development capabilities to the Power Platform ecosystem.
Power BI
The Power BI updates will help you create a data culture and empower your teams to collaborate with AI-driven insights.
The key Power BI updates are:
- Support for sharing Power BI charts into Microsoft 365 documents using Loop
- Connection with business data to create a semantic model in the Power BI service
- Viewing, saving, and sharing files in OneDrive and SharePoint
Power Apps
The updates for Power Apps from Microsoft’s 2023 second release will help you build responsive apps that use modern controls and have offline capabilities. In addition, Copilot for Power Apps will allow makers to leverage AI to build apps and bring natural language to their own apps, making them more productive.
The key Power Apps updates include:
- Quick creation of data-connected, responsive apps
- New look and feel for model-driven Power Apps
- Formula creation using natural language and examples with Copilot
- Effortlessly app development and editing in Power Apps using Copilot
Power Pages
Power Pages will also receive new updates from Microsoft’s 2023 second release that includes capabilities for Copilot, admin and governance, and design studio and collaboration.
The key updates among these are:
- Copilot for website creation
- Copilot for AI-generated answers to your queries
- Copilot-driven actions for website users
- Admin security and analytics views
Power Virtual Agents
The major improvement for Power Virtual Agents in Microsoft 2023 second release comes for its Copilot features. Leveraging this industry-leading generative AI in Power Virtual Agents, you can get a lot more work done in no time.
The Copilot capabilities in Power Virtual Agents include:
- Use of internal SharePoint content and Dataverse as sources for AI-generated answers
- Get generative answers with GPT-powered AI
What’s Next
As part of Microsoft’s 2023 second release, you will be receiving several hundred updates and enhancements to your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions between October 2023 and March 2024. To discover more about these improvements, read the Microsoft release planner here.
Alternatively, you can also subscribe to Dogma’s blogs, where we will be simplifying the functionalities and benefits of the key updates as they roll out.
