2024 Release Wave 2: Dynamics 365 & Power Platform updates

Sep 26, 2024

As we move further into the autumn season, we are excited to announce the second release wave of 2024 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform! This release brings a host of new capabilities and enhancements to help you drive business success. Via this newsletter we will uncover the most relevant upcoming changes & updates for all your apps.
 

Dynamics 365 Sales

Use Copilot in your preferred language

The introduction of multi-language support in Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales empowers you to interact seamlessly with your customers in their preferred non-English languages. This feature ensures that language barriers no longer hinder the sales process, allowing you to provide a personalized and inclusive customer experience. 

With this enhancement, you can effortlessly access and use Copilot's powerful capabilities in multiple languages, facilitating better communication, understanding, and rapport with customers. This leads to improved customer satisfaction, stronger relationships, and greater ease of use for sellers, ultimately driving sales growth. 


Feature details:

With this feature, you can use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales in the following languages: 

  • Chinese (simplified) 
  • Greek 
  • Portuguese (Brazil) 
  • Czech 
  • Danish
  • Japanese
  • Spanish
  • Finnish
  • Russian
  • Korean
  • Swedish
  • French
  • Norwegian 
  • Italian 
  • Thai
  • German
  • Polish
  • Turkish

Let Copilot email assistance help you elevate your Sales Pitch

As a language model trained on a vast collection of text, Copilot can generate personalized, high-quality emails that are tailored to meet the specific needs of each customer. By using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, Copilot can help you craft clear, concise, and compelling emails that resonate with your audience.

This can lead to improved customer engagement, increased sales, and enhanced brand reputation. You can adjust the tone and length of the message to better resonate with customers, fostering stronger connections. You can also customize the suggested content before you send it. Stop losing time with composing emails today, with this new feature.


Feature details

  • Select a predefined category or enter your text and Copilot will suggest content with specific prompts and actions.
  • Adjust the tone and length of the email. 
  • Customize the suggested content before you send it.



Let Copilot summarize lengthy emails

When summarizing lengthy email threads, it saves valuable time and energy by condensing complex discussions into concise and easily understandable summaries. This streamlines the communication process, allowing teams to quickly grasp the key points and make informed decisions. By facilitating efficient comprehension, this feature enhances productivity and enables effective collaboration within the organization.


Feature details 

  • Review detailed summaries for emails exceeding 1,000 characters.
  • Efficiently share feedback by copying and pasting the generated summary.



Get a 360-degree view with account AI-generated summary

In the fast-paced world of sales, you often work on multiple accounts simultaneously. It can be challenging to stay on top of all your accounts and gather relevant information efficiently. With the Account summary feature, you can now access a consolidated summary of vital customer data, including buying behavior, associated opportunities, leads, marketing campaigns, and the latest news about an account through the power of AI.

You no longer need to spend excessive time shifting through scattered information or manually compiling account details. You can quickly access a comprehensive overview of each account, prioritize your work effectively, and engage with customers in a more personalized and targeted manner.


Feature details

As an admin, you can:

  • Enable Copilot Account summary for any Dynamics 365 application.
  • Configure the entities and fields to use for creating the account summary.


As a seller, you can:

  • Get a 360-degree view of your account, which is built using all the data associated with the account.
  • View a summary of the associated opportunities.
  • Know about the associated leads.
  • Learn the latest news about the account.


Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (previously known as Dynamics Marketing)

Turn on the heat with email heatmap analytics

Understanding the effectiveness of email campaigns can often be complex, particularly when information and links are abundant. Gaining clarity on which areas or links captivate your audience and drive them to act is crucial for refining the user experience and boosting email performance.

Real-time journeys email insights now offer a clear view of your audience's preferences by illustrating their interactions within your emails. This immediate visual feedback highlights the content that resonates the most, empowering you to adjust your messaging for heightened impact and better conversion rates.


Feature details

  • Get a fast and visual way to understand engagement based on your email design.
  • Understand which email area and links get the most and the least engagement by viewing the click-through rate (CTR), total clicks, and unique clicks.
  • Filter the heat map based on the email version, journey version, and date.


Streamline form filling with form prefill

The repetitive task of filling out forms can be a significant deterrent to event registration. Nobody likes to repeat information that they've already provided. Imagine loyal customers who attend multiple conferences each year having to input their contact information and preferences every time.

Form prefill in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights eliminates the need to repeatedly request basic details from your customers, reducing redundancy and saving time. This not only expedites the registration process but also allows for more strategic collection of customer data over time.


Feature details

Your customers can now register for upcoming events with minimal effort, simply confirming or updating their prepopulated data. The ease of use enhances the overall customer experience and boosts your conversion rates.

  • To have the form automatically filled, your customer needs to open the form from the link sent in the Customer Insights-generated invite email.
  • Available for marketing and event registration forms.




Personalize messages and journeys based on website interactions

With Customer Insights – Journeys, you can now track and leverage your customers’ online behavior to deliver personalized experiences across your digital channels. For example, you can boost conversions and customer loyalty by sending tailored offers after customers visit your website and show interest in a product or service. By tracking additional data about customers' online journeys, you can get valuable insights into your customers' preferences and needs and easily measure your campaign’s effectiveness.

Feature details

Trigger and personalize customer experiences, score leads, and track engagement history based on customers' web activity and clicks.

  • Easily generate a tracking script and embed it in your website.
  • Use web interaction triggers to build personalized customer experiences.
  • Get a holistic view of your customer engagement across touchpoints leveraging first-party data, protecting your customer privacy, and complying with data privacy regulations.

Create an event portal allowing access to event details and registrations

Events are a pivotal element of your business strategy, aiding in customer acquisition and engagement. A centralized location is essential for your clients to discover and learn about events you are organizing.

The new event portal allows for the swift creation of a comprehensive hub where customers can access event details, session specifics, and speaker schedules and conveniently register using the event registration form. The portal can be seamlessly integrated into your existing CMS or deployed through Power Pages, where it can be tailored to align with your brand identity.

Feature details

Create a comprehensive event portal where customers can access event details and registration.

Portal hosting options:

  • Embed in an existing website.
  • Leverage an out-of-the-box Power Pages template for quick deployment.

 

Portal includes:

  • A list of your upcoming events.
  • A detailed summary for each event, including session information and speakers.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Enhanced Case Controls

With this enhancement, the out-of-the-box case form in Customer Service workspace, Case for multisession experience, allows agents to perform the following actions by default:

  • Take notes during case creation.
  • View and upload multiple attachments directly to the case.
  • Access all the attachments related to a case in a consolidated view.
  • Quickly get up to speed on the activities due on the case.
  • Identify case fields using color-coded icons through the Option set wrapper control.

 All these capabilities are enabled by default on the out-of-the-box case form, Case for multisession experience in the Customer Service workspace application.


Enhanced email composition

With the enhanced email attachment experience, agents can:

  • Add attachments by dragging and dropping them to the email.
  • Copy attachments from one or more emails and paste it to another email.
  • Download and attach email as an attachment to another email.
  • Bulk download and deletion of attachments.
  • See the attachment size in the appropriate units.
  • Toggle between the tile and grid views.
  • Export attachment details to Excel.
  • Receive reminders to add attachments.
  • Add attachments before saving an email.
  • Add previously used attachments.



Agents can use the enhanced email recipient experience to compose emails. The following are the key capabilities:

  • Drag and drop recipients among To, CC, and BCC fields.
  • View recipient's email address along with their name.
  • Easily resolve email addresses to Dynamics 365 records.
  • View recipient's presence status and out-of-office messages.
  • Block the resolution of an unresolved email address to Dynamics 365 records for a read-only email.



Copilot – Plugin extension

With plugins for Copilot in Customer Service, you can reduce the need for customer service representatives to switch to other tabs and tools:

  • Connect to Dataverse
  • Connect to External Systems (via Custom Connectors in Power Automate)


Copilot – Proactive prompting

Proactive prompting will provide the following benefits for agents:

  • Contextual prompt starters at the beginning of a Copilot conversation.
  • Follow-up suggested prompts to Copilot responses.
  • The ability to discover plugins through suggested prompts.
  • The ability to understand case, conversation, and email context.
  • Proactively generated insights. (idea prompt)


Real-time queue membership update

Before

When a contact center experiences a surge in conversations, admins and supervisors are suddenly faced with a staffing shortage. To handle these surges, they need to quickly add or redistribute the workforce between channels and lines of business represented by queues. These changes might take up to 15 minutes to reflect in Dynamics.

Real-time update

Administrators who manage these updates won't have to wait for 15 minutes for an agent's queue membership update to reflect in the system. With the real-time queue membership update, agents can take work in their new queues immediately after they are added to them. When you remove agents from queues, they won't receive work from the removed queues, thus reducing the wait time due to reroutes.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Use Remote Assist Mixed Reality Annotations in Teams

Service technicians can now utilize the Remote Assist tool directly within Teams on their mobile device, without switching to the Remote Assist app. All functionalities with 3D spatial annotations are directly available in Teams.


Summarize Work Orders with Copilot in Outlook

With the new Outlook add-in, you can now get summaries for Work Orders without ever leaving your inbox. This feature harnesses the power of Copilot, making it easier than ever to stay updated on the status of your work orders. Previously, accessing work order summaries required opening the Field Service mobile or desktop application. Now, all the information you need is conveniently available within Outlook. 


Improved usability and performance of schedule board

Planners and dispatchers can manage schedules more efficiently with the additional schedule board features and improved performance.


Announcement: Legacy schedule board retired

The legacy schedule board has been deprecated since April 1, 2023. Starting October 1, 2024, the legacy schedule board will be permanently disabled, and all users will automatically be redirected to the new schedule board experience.


Power Platform | Copilot Studio

Power Apps – Act on your data efficiently with new grid features

Now, when you're viewing data in a table, you can do much more than just look at it. For example, you can :

  • Group related data together, summarize or aggregate information, and customize how your data is displayed. 
  • Reorder columns to place the most important data where you want (Move left/right column headers) or adjust the width of columns to make sure everything fits just right.
  • Select all records with infinite scroll to allow you to select a maximum of 1000 records without clicking on “Next” page after 250 records.
  • These updates are designed to make your data not only easier to understand but also quicker to act on, so you can work more effectively without any hassle.

Power Apps - Monitor and improve operational health

Admins can monitor key metrics that directly impact user experience and business performance within the Power Platform admin center. These metrics provide insights into how your apps are performing. For example, you can see how long users have to wait to interact with an app or page, and which automated flows (processes) are taking longer than they should. With this information at your fingertips, it’s easier to spot and fix issues that could be slowing down your operations.

But it doesn’t stop at just monitoring. Admins can collaborate with app makers to act on recommendations that will improve these metrics. This proactive approach ensures your Power Apps stay in top shape, delivering the best possible performance for your business.

Over time, this monitoring experience will expand to include even more insights and recommendations, covering additional areas like Dynamics 365 apps, flows, and custom copilots. This means you’ll have even more tools to optimize your entire Power Platform environment, keeping your operations running smoothly and efficiently as your business grows.

Governance & Administration – Delegate admin responsibility with group admin roles

This feature brings several important benefits:

  • Controlled Access: You can now ensure that users only have access to what they need to do their jobs, which enhances the security of your platform.
  • Efficiency: By allowing trusted users to manage specific environments, administrative tasks can be handled more quickly, leading to faster response times when issues arise.
  • Scalability: As your number of environments grows, managing them all centrally can become overwhelming. Delegating admin roles helps keep things organized and manageable, no matter how large your operations get.
  • Specialization: You can assign admin roles to users who have expertise in certain areas, giving them control over the environments where their knowledge will make the biggest impact. This leads to more effective and specialized management.

Governance & Administration – Permit or deny guest access to an environment

With this feature, admins can decide whether to allow or deny guest users from interacting with the environment. Here is what can be done:

  • Block Data Access: Admins can prevent guests from connecting to any data sources within the environment, ensuring that sensitive information stays secure.
  • Restrict Maker Actions: Guests can be stopped from creating or modifying apps, flows, or any other components within the environment, which helps maintain control over what gets built and shared.
  • Limit App and Flow Usage: Guests can also be prevented from using any apps or flows that have been shared with them in that environment, further tightening security.
  • The best part? This security is managed directly within the Power Platform admin center, so there’s no need to rely on additional tools like conditional access or continuous access evaluation.

Power Pages – Disable external authentication providers in Power Pages

Provide administrators with the ability to enforce who can access their Microsoft Dataverse data using Power Pages websites. Using this governance setting, admins can block certain authentication providers (and determine which authentication providers are allowed) in the Power Pages websites in their tenants.



Microsoft Dataverse – Restore deleted records within a specified timeframe

Restore any deleted table records yourself. This saves you the engineering support and the wait time formerly needed to recover deleted record data. The recycle bin is now available for any type of delete scenario within a specified configurable time frame, from both UI and through APIs/SDK.


Power Automate – Use workflows on calendar events in Teams and Outlook

You can boost productivity with calendar-related templates to get ideas for scenarios you might be interested in.


Power Automate – Monitor performance for cloud and desktop flow activities in Automation Center

With this feature, you get a centralized, consolidated view of all your flow activities. This means you can monitor and understand how your automated processes (flows) are running, whether they're in the cloud or on your desktop, all from one place.

This new monitoring capability helps you quickly identify any issues, track performance, and ensure everything is running smoothly. It gives you better visibility into your automation efforts, making it easier to manage and optimize your workflows.


Copilot Studio – Add suggested prompts to custom copilots

One common challenge with conversational AI is that users might not know how to get the most out of these tools. By adding suggested prompts, you can guide users on how to interact with the copilot effectively. These prompts appear as suggestions when users start a conversation, helping them quickly discover the capabilities and value of the copilot.

This feature makes it easier for users to understand and use the copilot, ensuring they can fully benefit from the custom AI solutions you've built in Copilot Studio.


Mediahuis improves customer service across Europe with Dynamics 365

To improve customer experiences, Mediahuis built a centralized, standardized customer service solution on Microsoft Dynamics 365. With support from delaware, that solution is now gradually being rolled out to all the Mediahuis’ entities.

read case

Ready to boost your productivity?

Fanny Lay
D365 Customer Engagement Senior Consultant at delaware
Connect with Fanny on LinkedIn

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