Brace yourselves, the first release wave for 2021 is here and it has some cool features. The newest release wave describes the new features releasing from April until September this year, and the first sneak peek can be accessed today.
The features are going to cover a broad range of functional areas, which we summarized it in a few points, and for the details, you can read more in the release plan online. Be prepared to take the chance, test, and validate all the new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2021 release, before they are live for your users.
Here are part of the wave highlights:
Finance and Operations
- Dynamics 365 Finance continues with the lead in bringing in intelligence and automation to the users. With this release users experience out-of-the-box machine learning for their different financial operations. Also, this release in core finance is focused on incorporating capabilities into the cash flow forecast and continuous enhancements across all financial areas.
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is expanding the inventory and logistic scenarios for chain management increasing transparency and efficiency for Asset Management users. Another thing is that it’ll help in reducing training time and cost, and increasing productivity of warehouse workers with a fresh, user-friendly mobile application.
- Dynamics 365 Project Operations in the 2021 release wave 1, Microsoft will deliver functionally rich experiences in several areas such as: the ability to forecast, use, and invoice nonstock materials on projects. It will enable the ability to set up contractual commitments like billing methods and chargeability rules by the task or a work breakdown schedule element, and it will enable customers using the Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation application to upgrade to Project Operations.
- Dynamics 365 Guides is a mixed-reality application that displays step-by-step holographic instructions right where the work happens, enabling employees to quickly learn and execute complex tasks. In this release wave, the Dynamics 365 Guides team is focusing on intelligent workflows. Additionally, new entities for completion time will enable customers to build Power Automate flows that support their unique enterprise needs.
Commerce
As we mentioned in one of our previous blog posts, this year Microsoft has big plans for commerce, especially by introducing cloud for retail. Besides that, commerce expands the native integrations with Bing for Commerce search for product search, as well as Customer Service and Power Virtual Agents.
Human Resources
Through integration APIs and strategic partnership Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to broaden the human capital, providing a better employee experience with a consolidated view of benefits for employees.
Sales
On the other hand, Dynamics 365 for Sales is focused on adding productivity enhancement for sellers, helping them in the decision-making process by providing data-driven insights. The updates will tackle automation, conversation intelligence, and enhancement to the mobile dashboard for a better experience for sellers on the go.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
The audience insights will enable every company better understanding of the customer data by adding customization and extensibility capabilities of the customer view, additional connectors for data ingestion, better controls for AI-based unification, and much more. Besides that, the engagement insights capabilities will enable individual and holistic analytics over different device usage.
Customer Voice
Will take the customer’s feedback on a whole another level, by expanding the capabilities to collect feedback with a lot of different customized survey options. Additionally, creating follow-up action workflows will be much easier with the Power survey response trigger.
Service
With the all-in-one contact center, the Dynamics 365 Customer Service will ship with a logistic and integrated first-party voice and chat solution, which will enable customers to be up and running quickly.
Marketing
The improvements in Dynamics 365 for Marketing definitely are going to enhance marketer’s reach, analysis and with the help of AI, are going to deliver deeper personalization and different channels for customer engagement.
SMB
Dynamics 365 Business Central with the new features will simplify and improve the way Microsoft Partners administer tenants, and how the managing of licensing and permissions is done. The integration will also include Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio Code, which will help in providing modern development tools.
Check all the key dates for the 2021 release wave 1 here.
If you are interested in optimizing/improving your business processes, making the experience while using the application a whole lot easier in the long run, having the data secured in the cloud at the same time, and in need for someone to upgrade your systems from Microsoft Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365, we are open for future collaboration. Write us at sales@axaptamasters.com!
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