Microsoft has done it again! The much-awaited Microsoft 2023 first release wave for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform is here, and it’s full of exciting updates that will leave you breathless. From advanced AI capabilities to improved business intelligence tools, this first release has something for everyone.
Dive deep into the highlights of Microsoft’s 2023 first release and discover how it can help transform your business.
This highlight blog covers:
Sales | Marketing | Customer Service | Customer Insights | Customer Voice | Business Central | Finance | Supply Chain Management | Field Service | Project Operations | Human Resources | Commerce | Fraud Protection | Power Platform | Power BI | Power Apps | Power Pages | Power Automate | Power Virtual Agents
Sales
Microsoft 2023 first release for Dynamics 365 Sales aims to help sellers make sense of data by providing value in every customer interaction. It will enable sellers to leverage data and AI to prioritise and personalise customer engagement more efficiently for effective customer interactions.
Intelligent AI Suggestions
As a salesperson, you know that working on multiple activities for a single account or deal can be overwhelming.
But don’t worry. This update has got you covered! The enhanced Up Next widget will help you prioritise the most critical tasks and guide you through the sales process. As a result, you can improve your customer interactions and build stronger sales relationships with intelligent suggestions and guided activities.
The up next widget that displays the upcoming actions assigned to a record will now include intelligent AI-based suggestions within the same widget with this new feature. This will help guide sellers on follow-up actions to make their workflow more efficient.
Public Preview from May 2023 | General Availability from April 2023
On-Call Tips and Suggestions
Remote selling can be challenging, but this update will make it easier for sellers.
They will get AI-driven tips and suggestions on what to say next on a call. These intelligent insights are real-time and based on contextual information. Admins can enable this feature so sellers can get suggestions on product and service details, pricing, and more to make remote selling more powerful.
Public Preview from July 2023 | General Availability from September 2023
Marketing
Microsoft wants to help companies personalise their marketing activities, making marketers’ jobs more efficient with its 2023 first release for Dynamics 365 Marketing. It comes with exciting updates, like the new lead-scoring builder, the new drag-and-drop editor in marketing forms, and the ability to send segment-based emails without building a journey. With features like these, marketers can do more with less.
New Lead Scoring Builder
Finding the best leads and enabling the sales team to engage with them at the right time optimises your marketing ROI.
Using this new feature, you can leverage engagement and profile-based scoring to identify and prioritise the most engaged leads that match your ideal customer profile. This simple but powerful lead score builder is easy to use and continuously optimises the model with not only behavioural but also firmographic and demographic data. You can also evaluate the performance of your scoring model with enhanced insights, along with defining lead qualification criteria and follow-up actions.
This will help you maximise your marketing efforts and ensure each qualified lead gets the proper attention of your sellers.
Public preview from May 2023
New Drag-and-Drop Editor in Marketing Forms
When lead capture forms creation for your website becomes effortless, you can capture your customer details more efficiently. That helps you expedite your lead conversion pipeline.
This new intuitive form experience in real-time marketing will allow marketers to easily create modern forms with enhanced capabilities without needing pro developers. Its modern drag-and-drop editor will guide you through the entire form creation process so you can start within seconds. What’s more, you can instantly publish these smart forms as a standalone page or embed them on an existing page.
Public Preview from December 2022 | General Availability from April 2023
Send Segment-Based Emails Without Building a Journey
Much like lead capture forms, email creation also benefits from workflow optimisation so that marketers and agents can close the most prospective leads efficiently.
Now, your marketing team can send emails and newsletters without creating a customer journey. Sending simple, one-time emails which do not require follow-up emails and reminders will be a breeze with this new enhancement.
From a new template library, they can easily select, edit, and send emails to prospects within minutes. This capability will enable users to send emails optimised with email templates, personalisation, email analytics and connected CRM from within Dynamics 365 Marketing. This not only adds efficiency to your email communication workflow but also optimises the results of your email marketing efforts.
Public Preview from March 2023 | General Availability from April 2023
Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides the best-in-class customer service through live customer engagements, agent collaboration, advanced telephony, and AI-based analytics. Microsoft 2023 first release for Customer Service seeks to deliver capabilities for enhanced case management, knowledge management, assisted AI, and more while simplifying administration and integrated analytics.
AI-Suggested Replies
Support staff often struggle to find the right response to send to customers, resulting in long handle times and frustrated customers. But not anymore!
With AI-suggested replies, Dynamics 365 Customer Service will provide agents with response suggestions and multiline prompts based on the ongoing conversation. In addition, the AI model will learn from your organisation’s chat history and evolve over time, ensuring that response suggestions are always relevant and high quality. This way, you can significantly improve handle time, service performance, and agent satisfaction.
Public Preview from April 2023
AI-Generated Summaries
It is often tedious to manually summarise customer conversations and track key. But there’s no way around that if agents and supervisors want better visibility into their interactions.
That’s where this AI-generated conversation summarisation comes in! Your agents and supervisors will now get automated and intelligent summaries of customer interactions. This will save them time and effort and help them expedite service delivery. They can also easily copy the summary and create a case from it to share it with experts for feedback.
Public Preview from April 2023
Customer Insights
The Microsoft 2023 first release for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies data across digital and physical interactions. It also allows agents to leverage AI-powered insights to empower companies to develop a deeper understanding of their customers and provide personalised interactions and value-based experiences.
Add Insights to Sales Workflow
Sellers need complete visibility into customer data to optimise engagement and expedite deals. Without access to customer insights, seller effectiveness suffers greatly.
But with the 2023 first release, Sales admins can embed valuable data from Customer Insights directly with the Contact, Account, and Lead forms within Dynamics 365 sales. As a result, seller effectiveness will increase with a more holistic view of customer information and rich insights to improve engagement and accelerate deal closures.
Public Preview from April 2023
Display Customer Insights activities in a Dynamics 365 activity timeline
For a holistic understanding of customer activity, businesses need a single view of all customer interactions. It allows sellers to deliver deeply personalised customer experiences for digital and physical channels.
With this new feature, users can view all Customer Insights activities in the unified activity timeline in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing. This unified activity timeline will be available across Accounts, Contacts, and Leads, allowing sellers, agents, and marketers to track and understand customer activities and optimise their departmental efforts to create value-based experiences.
Public Preview from April 2023
Customer Voice
Microsoft 2023 first release update for Dynamics 365 Customer Voice adds functionalities to unblock key scenarios for customers and improve the overall user experience along with the architecture evolution and stability fixes for survey owners and responders.
Transfer Projects if the Owner Leaves an Organisation
A recurring issue when survey owners leave the company is that their projects get lost. That’s because they typically do not share their projects with the team.
This new functionality will come in handy in these scenarios. It will provide an option for the administrators to fetch such projects and assign them to new survey owners. Doing this will prevent the loss of valuable data and ensure important survey projects will continue. New survey owners will also have the flexibility to update and modify those projects easily.
Public Preview from April 2023
Record Partial Survey Responses
Another recurring problem with surveys is that the respondents occasionally answer some questions and close their browsers without submitting them. Consequently, survey owners lose valuable customer feedback.
Using this new feature, however, survey owners can now record partial responses. Additionally, they can define survey settings to enable this functionality and specify the number of days after which the partial responses need to be recorded. This will allow them to capture insights even from partially completed surveys.
Public Preview from June 2023
Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central feature updates in the 2023 first release focus on enhancing finance capabilities for intercompany transactions as well as improving several warehouse management areas to make customer-centric processes more efficient.
Create Product Descriptions Using AI-based Copilot
Writing product descriptions manually can get tedious and eventually require more creativity and consistency. Therefore, Microsoft is leveraging its AI to streamline these content-writing tasks to help Dynamics 365 users focus on value-adding tasks instead.
With the 2023 first release, Microsoft is introducing Dynamics 365 Copilot to enable interactive, AI-powered capabilities across Sales, Service, Marketing, Supply Chain, and Business Central. This will be the world’s first AI copilot natively integrated into CRM and ERP.
Copilot for Business Central will provide content writing and creation assistance for users who author product descriptions. Within a few clicks, Copilot will generate creative and engaging text based on product attributes, like size, colour, and material. Marketers and sellers can further tailor the tone of voice, length, and text format using AI. This will be useful when marketers need to sell hundreds of products in online stores like Shopify or Amazon, targeting multiple customer segments with varying preferences.
Dynamics 365 Copilot is available for preview across Dynamics 365 applications, including Business Central.
Efficient Data Analysis and Pivoting Within Business Central
Switching between several application windows while analysing complex data can severely hurt data analysts’ productivity.
To mitigate this issue, Microsoft is bringing Analysis mode in Business Central. This new feature will allow end users and data analysts to interact with data from list pages directly within Business Central, eliminating the need to use Excel spreadsheets or Power BI to run reports.
With this capability, users can do more in report objects, Excel, Power BI, or other data analysis applications. For example, they can simply add additional tabs for different tasks or views on the data based on their preferences so that they no longer need to run reports in other data analysis applications.
Public Preview from April 2023
New Approval Workflow Experience With Power Automate Templates
Approval workflows are part of many business processes and must be expedited for quicker and more efficient workflow.
With this update, the advanced and flexible approval workflows will become even more simplified. It will allow business owners or decision-makers to choose from multiple templates while setting up approval workflows in Business Central. They can use Power Automate for approvals on mobile devices and in Microsoft Teams and become more productive with the rich user experience.
Public preview from April 2023 | General availability from May 2023
Manage User Permissions Using Security Groups
Managing permissions at a growing organisation can be a complex process. But security is vital, and admins must ensure people only have access to the information they need for continued operation.
So, this update is here to make permissions management much easier. It will allow admins to group users by department, job function, or other criteria and assign mass permissions. This will help save time and lower human errors while also ensuring easier access control. Additionally, onboarding new employees or contractors also becomes effortless and quick this way.
Public preview from May 2023 | General availability from April 2023
Convenient Multitasking
Improved work efficiency often demands multitasking across multiple windows and capturing shareable links to records. But it becomes confusing when these links are not easily distinguishable.
This feature will help users become more productive with Business Central. It will allow them to copy and paste readable hyperlinks to make multi-tasking across windows and capturing links to records more convenient. Also, while managing multiple tasks, switching across windows using Alt+Tab will clearly indicate your destination page or record.
Public Preview from April 2023
Finance
The new updates to Dynamics 365 Finance in the Microsoft 2023 first release focus on enhancing visibility into business data, continuing finance automation, further automation of complex tax scenarios, and full end-to-end automation of accounts payable and ledger settlements, among other things. The two areas that these updates cover are core financials and Globalisation Studio.
Data Archives
Working with large datasets can hurt system performance and consume storage space. This can, in turn, lower productivity and increase costs.
So, this update will allow admins to archive past data in Dynamics 365 Finance. And they can do so consistently, securely, and automatically! This will allow admins to save storage space and gain performance with a smaller active data set.
Public Preview from July 2023
Invoice Capture
Processing vendor invoices manually is time and cost-intensive, particularly if your organisation processes them in huge volumes. That reduces productivity, and complex invoices just add to it.
But this new update will fully automate accounts payable with invoice capture. This means the system will automatically recognise and read vendor invoices with OCR capabilities and update the accounts payable data. Users can, thus, save time and money and avoid errors while processing complex invoice formats in higher volumes.
General Availability from April 2023
Additional Exchange Rate Types for Tax Currency Conversions
Businesses typically need to declare tax amounts in the local currency and specify exchange rates while importing and exporting.
Currently, Dynamics 365 Finance only allows for the tax amount calculation that’s based on the transaction currency. Finance then converts it into the tax currency amount through the accounting currency or reporting currency.
With this feature update, finance managers will have additional exchange rate types for direct tax currency conversions from transaction currency. These tax exchange rate types support the local tax requirements and perform direct calculations based on the transaction currency amount of the document.
General Availability from July 2023
Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management updates in Microsoft 2023 first release cover inventory and logistics, manufacturing and asset management, planning, and procurement. It also adds capabilities for product information management and warehouse Management.
Make Soft Reservations from Sales Orders
Companies operating across multiple order channels often face double-booking or overselling. Without proper inventory visibility, this can impact fulfilment.
This new update helps you avoid such scenarios by creating a single source of truth of inventory levels. This will enable users to make soft reservations directly from sales orders for omnichannel fulfilment in Supply Chain Management. When reservations fail, users get a warning and are blocked from proceeding. On the other hand, successful reservation will offset inventory levels, and this change will be readily visible to all.
Public preview from April 2023 | General availability from June 2023
New Mobile Experience for Workers
Assigning work orders and tracking performance to maintenance workers who deliver services remotely can be a little tricky.
With the Asset Management Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, however, that can become a lot easier and more efficient. You can empower your maintenance workers with this mobile app that supports the most common platforms, devices, and form factors. While it helps them manage work orders easily, admins can also create maintenance requests remotely.
Public preview from March 2023 | General availability from June 2023
Field Service
The enhancements in Microsoft 2023 first release for Dynamics 365 Field Service continue to help managers empower frontline workers, optimise service operations, and ease resource scheduling. The highlights of the 2023 first release for Field Service include:
Organise Service Operations Using Trades
Organisations are always looking for ways to save time and money on their service operations.
This new update provides a clever way to do that. Managers will now have the ability to organise the types of services they provide by creating work categories called trades. For instance, consider trades like plumbing, electrical repair, floor cleaning, landscaping services, and so on. This will simplify work-order creation by allowing managers to associate trades to locations and accounts to see only those services that you provide. This way, you can optimise your service operations and ensure you only deliver the agreed-upon services.
General Availability from April 2023
Enhanced Field Service search
When information is easier to find, users can do more in less time. This means user productivity and experience improve, and people can focus more on value-based tasks.
With this feature update, you can effortlessly find work orders based on the customers and locate bookings based on technicians. The enhanced global search simplifies information search by displaying all relevant records across Field Service tables on a single page with a few clicks.
This saves time and makes workflows more efficient by enabling quick actions right within the search results.
Early access from January 2023 | General Availability from April 2023
Project Operations
Microsoft 2023 first release for Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers rich capabilities to improve user experience, implement project budgeting and time-phased forecasting, provide mobile experience, and more.
Time-Phased Forecasting
Project managers need a clear view of the project timeline, expenses, and outcomes to better control the spend and consumption. To ensure project efficacy, they rely on project budgets, which they use to track project lifecycle.
With this 2023 first release, project managers can leverage time-phased forecasting to add improved forecasts based on current spending trends for the desired timeframe. This will allow them to monitor the actual spending and compare it to the budgeted and forecasted ones. By doing this, they will get a deeper understanding of the project schedule and financial progress. They will also be able to easily revise the budget based on the new information and start tracking the actual budget with the revised one.
Public Availability from September 2023
Human Resources
Dynamics 365 Human Resources capability updates in Microsoft 2023 first release expand on the Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem and cover these functionalities:
Access Unified Employee Training Data
Assigning, delivering, and tracking employee training can be a real challenge for a globalised workforce.
To overcome this challenge, Dynamics 365 Human Resources is introducing this new capability to unify all training data from partner learning management systems and place it alongside employee data. This, in turn, will enable HR managers to set up virtual courses with content links, view courses by type and status, and assign courses at scale from multiple systems.
General Availability from July 2023
Enable Resource Management Integration
Resource managers can have a tough time finding the right resources for a project without a centralised view of the workforce.
This feature update will enable resource management integration to bring together all the employee information around skills, time, and more in one place.
Resource managers within Project Operations can later use this worker information to quickly and easily find the right resources for projects.
Public preview from July 2023 | General availability from September Sep 2023
Note: Are you aware of the infrastructure merger between Dynamics 365 Human Resources and the legacy HR module in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations? The deadline for this HR merger ends on 31 December 2023. So, head to our Dynamics 365 HR merger blog for more clarity on what’s your next step to transition into the new infrastructure.
Commerce
Dynamics 365 Commerce updates in Microsoft 2023 first release seek to enable new and updated B2B experiences, including the modelling of distributors as sellers, introducing a distributor fulfilment dashboard, and improving the out-of-the-box B2B user sign-up flow. These updates cover digital commerce, omnichannel commerce, and store commerce.
Enable Units of Measure in e-Commerce
B2C and B2B companies often look for the flexibility to buy products in different units of measure. Some may want to buy a single product or purchase it in dozens.
This new digital commerce feature will solve this issue. Additionally, it will allow companies to view prices per unit of measure, like price per square foot or millimetre, alongside a price in a different unit for easy comparison.
Public Preview from April 2023 | General Availability from June 2023
Improve the B2B Buyer Sign-up Process
B2B buyers expect a simple and easy sign-up process for a B2B site for efficiency and good user experience.
This new feature will eliminate multiple sign-up and approval steps and directly direct the business customer to the password creation process for a streamlined workflow. By making the B2B buyer sign-up process more seamless, this update will increase adoption, improve sales, and reduce support costs. It will also improve B2B buyer experience and expedite the entire process.
Public Preview from May 2023 | General Availability from June 2023
Fraud Protection
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection enhancement in Microsoft 2023 first release comes with Assessments API that will allow customers to define fraud events.
Use Assessments API for Customised Fraud Coverage
Digital commerce comes with its own security and fraud risks. And a common fraud protection solution does not fit all unique business needs.
So, with this feature update, Microsoft will allow system admins to use Assessments APIs to customise all core fraud protection capabilities, including risk scoring, rules, device fingerprinting, and case management, to meet their specific business needs. As a result, they will be able to fight fraud at scale and protect end-to-end e-commerce journey.
Public preview from March 2023 | General availability from June 2023
Power Platform
Organisations use Microsoft Power Platform to analyse, act on, and automate the data to digitally transform their businesses. Currently, Power Platform offers Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. It additionally has two add-ins: Power Pages and AI Builder. Microsoft 2023 first release for Power Platform brings several new features and enhancements across these Power Platform solutions.
Power BI
Microsoft’s 2023 first release brings with it improvements in Power BI Premium and Power BI Pro. Power BI Premium features will help organisations to accelerate the delivery of insights at scale, meeting the most demanding needs of their business. Likewise, Power BI Pro updates will allow them to create a strong data culture by empowering every team and individual to discover and collaborate on insights.
Automate Migration From Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium
Because Power BI Premium provides increased performance and reduced management overhead at affordable cost, more and more businesses intend to migrate from Azure Analysis Services models to Power BI Premium.
So, this update will allow for a seamless and automated migration. Admins can bring Azure Analysis Services models to Power BI Premium database along with necessary security settings. It will also provide server redirection, so existing reports continue to work without manual changes.
General availability from April 2023
Teams Meeting Integration in Power BI Pro
Nothing hurts collaborative Teams meetings more than having to keep switching between windows to view Power BI reports. As a result, people can easily lose context, and decision-making can get delayed.
To make it easier for Power BI users to collaborate and make expedited decisions, this update will bring new in-meeting experiences for Microsoft Teams. That will make it easier for agents and managers to add, organise, find, and present their reports in meetings. What’s more, they will effortlessly keep everyone updated, ensuring that people have access to data when and where decisions are madE.
Public preview from April 2023
Power Apps
Microsoft Power Apps is a widely-used low-code application development platform that provides Dynamics 365 extensibility, Microsoft 365 customisation, and a line of standalone business apps. With Microsoft 2023 first release, Power Apps is investing in areas that cover reducing risk, accelerating app modernisation, and efficient and productive experiences.
Work Offline When Using Power Apps Mobile Apps
Both low-code and professional canvas developers may need to use canvas apps when there’s no connectivity. The canvas app provides users with a blank canvas where they can drag and drop elements to design a user interface. It enables users to easily create apps and portals.
With this update, that’s no longer an issue. Developers can easily enable their apps to function in remote areas with little to no network. That’s because the Power Apps sync service relies on an offline profile, which automatically downloads data to the device and syncs new updates. There’s no need for Power FX LoadData or SaveData functions anymore.
Public Preview from May 2023
Coauthor With Other Makers in the Modern App Designer
App makers often face collaborative issues while creating model-driven apps, which hinders innovation and efficiency.
Using this coauthoring feature, pro and low-code makers can both simultaneously work together in the app designer. They can quickly drag and drop to edit and see the change results in real time. This way, businesses can drive faster outcomes by leveraging low-code development.
Public preview from September 2022 | General availability from April 2023
Power Pages
Power Pages capabilities are updated in this 2023 first release wave across administration and governance to boost admin efficiencies when managing, configuring, and maintaining websites. The core platform also enables makers to easily configure and customise webpages using low-code/no-code development.
Provide Website Inventory Data for Tenants and Environments
Right now, Power Platform admin centre provides a read-only list of websites in a tenant. The list includes metadata like name, status, environment, created on, type, and site visibility. The problem is that users cannot export that for additional analysis.
But tenant admins must have an accurate inventory of all websites in their tenant to help them gain better control over the website activities like access and modification. So, with this new feature, admins will have extra website metadata such as last modified time, last modified by, and when the site was made public. They will also have the option to export website data to a CSV and access additional metadata through admin APIs.
General availability from June 2023
Use Cloud Flows With Power Pages Sites
This update will allow professional developers to use Power Automate flows from Power pages to integrate with external apps and automate their processes.
By enabling native integration of Power Pages and Power Automate and using a Microsoft connector, developers can authorise specific cloud flows and configure security. Moreover, this will allow bi-directional data exchange between Power Automate and web pages.
Public Preview from May 2023
Power Automate
In the 2023 first release wave, Power Automate gets more investment in capabilities that drive organisation-wide low code adoption, achieve experience excellence, and enable flagship solutions with high scale.
Get Explanations and Suggestions When You Create a Flow With Natural Language
This new feature will help makers create more precise flows that meet their business needs using interactive natural language authoring. When makers start creating flows from a natural language description, they will get guided tips and suggestions on how to better explain what they want to build. This will add more accuracy to the outcome.
Public Preview from May 2023
Define Sequential Approvals in Power Automate
Approval workflow can be anything but simple for most organisations. Complex business processes demand comprehensive approval processes with multiple levels.
Using this feature update, admins can define multi-level approval flow in Power Automate and Microsoft Teams. They can then assign these flows and levels to those who need to approve them. Admins and makers can also define how the approval is validated and passed on to the subsequent stages. Additionally, all approvers will have visibility into approval history at each stage and the outcome.
General availability from May 2023
Power Virtual Agents
Using Power Virtual Agents, businesses can easily create AI-powered bots that can chat with users, answer routine questions, resolve common issues, and automate manual tasks. Microsoft 2023 first release improves the bot authoring experience, which includes topic overlap detection, adaptive card authoring, and multi-modal response authoring.
Trigger Bot Topics by Events
To meet business-critical requirements, bots need to perform pre- or post-messaging logic, such as adding each message to a central suit trail or redacting sensitive personal information.
This advanced triggering feature for bots provides a powerful extensibility point, which allows authors to add processing logic for key events, like when a message is received or sent, within a bot. In addition, this update will now allow authors to enable the triggering of topics by events, leveraging connectors and Power Fx expressions.
Public preview from Nov 2022 | General availability May 2023
Enrich Conversations With Adaptive Cards
Some business scenarios may need the bot user to interact with custom-formatted data to enrich conversational experiences.
This new feature will help businesses meet that requirement by allowing bot authors to create actionable and interactive media content using Adaptive Cards. A set of pre-built Adaptive Card templates in Power Virtual Agents will enable authors to add rich conversational experiences for the bot users. That way, they can interact with custom data, manipulate visual content, fill a form, and more.
Public preview from Nov 2022 | General availability May 2023
Note
The features listed here are planned for release from April 2023 through September 2023. However, the delivery timelines may change, and listed functionality may not be released. For more information go to Microsoft policy. Also, don’t forget to read our 2023 first release highlights for other Dynamics 365 applications.
