Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Wave 2 Release Plans

Microsoft have now published the 2020 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. This will bring a number of a new capabilities that will be released later this year between October 2020 and March 2021.

This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating Microsoft’s continued investment to power digital transformation through Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Dynamics 365 Sales includes updates for more simplified experiences; including collaboration tools, a new mobile experience for quick access to customer information, and new enhancements to forecasting to natively create and manage bottom-up sales forecast processes.
• Dynamics 365 Sales Insights continues investments in digital selling across multiple areas: sales acceleration, conversation intelligence, relationship intelligence, and advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence with predictive lead and opportunity scoring to help sales teams uncover top deals.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands agent productivity capabilities enabling agents to engage in multiple sessions simultaneously. Omnichannel for Customer Service is enhanced with additional extensibility options to enable integration with mobile applications, Microsoft bot framework, and outbound messaging channels.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights adds new capabilities to help agents using similar case suggestions to resolve customer issues quickly and easily. A new analytical view for customer service managers helps them focus on key support areas that need attention. These highlights will also be included directly in the core Customer Service Hub app so that users can get insights in context without having to switch between applications.
• Dynamics 365 Marketing improves the customer journey design experience, for example layout options, zoom, and performance improvements. Integration with Microsoft Teams live events and meetings allows users to create and host live events as a webinar provider. Segmentation is enhanced with a new natural language experience to create and consume customer segments, helping eliminate the specialized skills needed to build complex segments.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights continues to enhance data ingestion and unification, segmentation, and extensibility capabilities using Microsoft Power Platform to enable and extend line-of-business experiences. For example, users can gain deeper customer insights with Microsoft Power BI, build custom apps with Microsoft Power Apps, and trigger workflows based on insights and signals using Microsoft Power Automate.
• Dynamics 365 Finance continues to focus on automating common tasks to reduce the number of processes that finance users complete manually. We are introducing Asset leasing to enhance the core capabilities of Finance and continue to expand our global coverage delivering localisations for five additional countries/regions (Bahrain, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar) extending the number of supported countries/regions to 42.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management expands planning optimisation for manufacturing to perform supply and production planning in near real-time with in-memory services. Enhancements to Product Information Management include engineering change management and production versioning capabilities. Cost Management includes new features that will enable global companies maintain multiple cost accounting ledgers by allowing dual currency and dual valuation. Enhancements to the job card device include a new user experience and a new feature to enable reporting serial numbers.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central investments for this release wave include service enhancements to meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base, improved performance, handling of file storage, geographic expansion together with support for Group VAT, top customer requested features, and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams.

Highlights from Power Platform

• Power Apps includes significant improvements for Power Apps developers of all skill levels, improving the sophistication and usability of apps that are created across the web and mobile devices. Makers will be able to create Power Apps directly within Microsoft Teams in order to easily customise the Teams experience. Makers will also be able to add custom pages to model-driven apps using the app designer, bringing together the best of canvas and model capabilities, including creating custom layouts and components. Power Apps portals adds Microsoft Power Virtual Agents as a component in the Power Apps portals studio, as well as support for code components created using Power Apps component framework. AI Builder introduces new AI scenarios for receipt scanning and translation, and improvements to connect to remote training data. The AI builder home page and model details page are updated to improve discoverability and integration with Power Apps and Power Automate.
• Power BI is investing in three key areas that drive a data culture: amazing data experiences, modern enterprise BI, and insights where decisions are made. Power BI Desktop includes many new capabilities for users to create content quickly and easily, enabling authors to empower their users, enterprise grade content creation, and AI-infused authoring experiences. Power BI Mobile adds split view support for iPad and Power BI Service integrates with Azure Synapse to automatically create and manage materialised views on larger Power BI models as well as enhanced integration with SharePoint lists to build additional custom reports. We continue to enhance our Data protection capabilities enabling customers to classify and label sensitive data.
• Power Automate enhancements will combine the best of WinAutomation with the cloud-based AI builder and connector-based capabilities in automated flows. This new version will offer customers a way to automate everything from Office apps to legacy terminal applications that haven’t been updated in decades. In addition, enhancements to automated flows running in the cloud will include richer automation and approval experiences.
• Power Virtual Agents brings expanded capabilities in the authoring experience including tools to create richer content, Adaptive Cards capabilities, topic suggestions from documents, improved Power Automate integration, voice integration with smart speakers, theming to customise the look and feel of the bot, and much more.

At Sysco, we’re excited to see these features roll out over the next 6-8 months. If you have any questions about the new release wave, please feel free to get in touch at sales@sysco-software.com

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