April RW1 is Upon Us: See what data impacts may be present with key new features

Agent Experiences - Bulk operations

The short story: In an effort to increase efficiency and productivity through quicker decision making, the Case grid in UI has been modernized to perform bulk operations. Improved agent experiences will enable bulk operations to be carried out at an even faster pace.

My take: There is no mention of whether or not an ‘undo’ option will be made available to users, increasing the propensity for human error. Human error is statistically a leading cause for data corruptions – having an ability to identify changes and revert them becomes crucial for any organization wanting to adopt this feature.

Agent experiences - Email templates

The short story: Another key customer service deployment includes Email Template enrichments, which promotes even more distribution of targeted emails. The feature gives agents an ability to pick and assign open conversations from inbox in order to triage customer issues.

My take: Subsequent email sending includes repetitive and recurring messages which could present an increased risk of user error as well as bulk corruption due to bulk email options.

Communities

The short story: Communities adds moderated customer forums, speeding up self-service through peer-to-peer support while driving high quality content at scale. Community managers can now create and manage idea forums, moderate content, and close the feedback loop. There is added emphasis on out-of-the-box features for customers to post suggestions in community forums and collaborate to impact future products by upvoting, commenting, sharing, and flagging, etc. 

My take: The ability to merge duplicate ideas submitted from community users can potentially represent data loss. This can happen if a merge removes one of the two records being merged. Additionally, the release notes show no indication of an unmerge option or any details of what happens to the original merged records, implying a real potential for data loss.

Service-level agreements

The short story: Service-level agreements (SLAs) clearly outline the way businesses ensure customers are supported based on corporate policy. After deploying the new feature, users will be able to customize the calculation warning and failure times of SLA KPIs.

My take: As a result, standard calculating time in existing cases may inherently affect terminations. The release shows no specific detail explaining whether or not existing data will be overwritten or not, which emphasizes the need for the ability to query and restore from backups in the case of errors.

AI-generated convos

The short story: AI-generated convos enhance collaboration by allowing end users to alter auto-produced content. Conversations in embedded Teams are linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience.

My take: As users learn the new tool, there is no designation showing whether or not end user changes will be audited. To that point, an ability to compare changes to the new data over time will be critical when assessing user adoption and overall trust of the AI-generated data. The capacity to link and unlink chats to cases and conversations within the Contextual collaboration feature presents another change based need for historical snapshot data. There is no specification or details that suggest any underlying data rows for the linking and unlinking, therefore, the act of unlinking could be seen as a data loss event. It allows end users to change what the AI-generated content says. If an end user does this unknowingly it becomes a data control scenario for the admins and harder for end users to trust the AI generated data and the feature overall. 

Unified routing simplifies queue diagnostics

The short story: Unified queue-based routing aims to bolster support by creating SLA efficiencies through account-specified criteria like priority and auto-skills matching. “Administrators and supervisors will be able to see the errors and exceptions that occur during the routing process.”

My take: Enhancements in diagnostics inherently implies that the system creates its own data corruption based on improperly handled routing automation efforts – having an easily accessible snapshot with the ability to restore any failed scenarios is crucial to the validation and overall success of the new feature.

Cloud for Industry

Cloud for Healthcare

The short story: By using the same foundation for model-driven apps made available in the MSFT Cloud Solution Center, the healthcare data model will begin supporting Payor business processes and clinical trials. Equipped with tools to optimize data ingestion, the data model matches up with HL7 FHIR standards to provision data fluidity with other services.

My take: HL7 FHIR provider, Payor data and clinical trials data model are being added to the schema. If customers have used custom data structures previously and will migrate manually to leverage the new OOB data structures, the ability to compare historical data from the custom tables will be critical.

Financial Services

The short story: Microsoft introduces extensions to Common Data Model that have been tailored to insurance situations. Such scenarios showcase changes capable of accelerating time to value for financial solutions by validating that the out of box data is consistent and pertinent to insurance processes.

My take: Core banking connectors to bring data into Dataverse will present risks of overwriting data from end users and other integrations as well as present the need to compare this data over time to validate the accuracy of the new integration. New data models will be introduced for General Insurance and Wealth Management, so if customers choose to migrate from custom entities/fields to take advantage of the new feature, they will need to validate the data migration effort and compare against snapshots.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

The short story: Sustainability cloud is creating a completely new category that goes beyond just data capture. It allows customers to aggregate data in a way that's actionable by connecting to real-time data sources while accelerating data integration to provide accurate carbon accounting and measure performance metrics to take more effective action.

My take: With new data getting introduced from external sources like business solutions, energy providers, cloud providers, travel tools, trading partners, systems telemetry, and Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with new dynamic calculation algorithms, existing data could be at risk of being altered. There is no detail in the documentation around protection of existing data (calculations), so backup and recovery will be key.

Power Platform

Power Apps - Grid Control Inline Editing

The short story: A previously read-only grid control now encourages users to be more productive by letting users edit values directly in grid views and subgrids.

My take: There’s no question that the new Power Apps Grid Control Inline editing will function to accelerate operational efficiency. Admins should consider the fact that this will simultaneously increase the risk for end user error and data corruption. The ability to restore granularly would help in scenarios like these.

Power Apps - Rich Text Formatting (RTF)

The short story: Microsoft will now allow you to include rich text descriptions in your appointments, including links to online meetings. It is included for all model-driven apps and is now a default standard for email activities and appointments.

Our take: Rich text formatting has been a long-standing feature gap that is now getting resolved. This will require customers who have created work-around solutions to turn off those customizations and potentially retrofit legacy data to meet the new standard and work in the new UI. Data retrofitting (e.g., RTF to HTML) is often a cause for corruption and loss, so having an accessible backup with the ability to restore is key.

Power Apps - Intelligent corrections

The short story: Many Microsoft products (like Excel) use Program Synthesis using Examples (PROSE) to automatically suggest a fix for errors found in a given formula. What used to require days of labor can now be completed in just a few seconds.

Our take: Intelligent formula corrections with PROSE might result in “auto-correct” style errors in formulas that change the face of data in Power Apps. PROSE based intelligent formula corrections could cause lazy app design and ‘autocorrect’ downstream data errors. This accentuates the need for the ability to query backups and restore the affected data.

Power Apps - Power Fx

The short story: Power Fx removes the need for variables to be manually started and maintained. This alone drastically simplifies app writing and allows apps to perform better because the system is free to defer loading data and calculating values until needed.

Our take: The use of Power Fx to replace calculated fields will enhance this area of functionality, but the RW1 documentation does not discuss what will happen with existing calculated fields, implying a potential risk to any prevailing calculated fields experiencing data corruption.

Power Apps - Offline

The short story: Using Power Apps Mobile in offline mode, will typically cause data to be downloaded in the background.

Our take: Enhancements and additions to run Power Apps in offline mode will present common challenges with offline to online synchronization. This is where data corruption by way of conflicts typically occurs and presents the need to restore from backups.

Power Apps Portals - Image Columns

The short story: Power Apps portals is provisioning image columns from tables in Microsoft Dataverse to forms and lists in portals. Creators can assemble basic forms and advanced forms.

My take: Adding the ability for external portal users to upload and add images and file attachments will drastically increase the usage of Dataverse tenant storage, so this new data will require additional safeguards with backup and recovery.

Dataverse

The short story: Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse enhancements will include Delta Lake format and rollback capability. It’s tentatively set for preview in June and GA targeted for September.

My take: The time interval from preview to GA as well as rollback capability validate the importance of being able to snapshot and rollback (recover), however, documents don’t specify if the intended rollback will apply to actual Dynamics environments or if it will only rollback in its native state of Azure storage (Synapse). It also does not specify hierarchical options or the ability to rollback to production or not. Many feature nuances are missing in the description so it cannot be fully assessed until preview is available.

Pro Development - Connectors

The short story: In this release, Microsoft drives efficient application lifecycle management for custom connectors to enhance the way we deploy solutions to environments.

My take: Power Platform Connectors will enable more capabilities for pro dev users to work in C# and potentially even add trigger based models to custom connectors for incoming payloads. This presents a potential risk to data if the custom connectors are used in conjunction with the Dataverse connector.

So there you have it, a short summary of the RW1 features that could have a material impact on your data and/or data management strategies!  

Cheers!