Microsoft took its corporate mission seriously to \u201cempower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more\u201d in this year\u2019s Wave 1 release.<\/p>\n
2023 Release Wave 1 contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications. We are excited about the new capabilities and have already planned to use them with some of our clients.<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition to the long list of features Microsoft is rolling out, we\u2019ve also been given access to a new release planner<\/a> for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, which includes the release dates for each specific feature. This interactive interface enables Dynamics<\/a> and Power Platform<\/a> users to view release plans and timeframes across all active waves. Users also can personalize, filter, sort and share these plans.<\/p>\n This article will highlight some of the more notable features in the 2023 Microsoft Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, which will launch from April 2023 through September 2023. <\/span> We break down features for the following modules and their subsets:<\/strong><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Business Central<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement<\/a><\/p>\n Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations<\/a><\/p>\n Microsoft Power Platform<\/a><\/p>\n Let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n Administrators will now be able to move and sync master data between companies in the same environment. The capability will exist to add and remove tables to synchronize with advanced coupling options. This feature will aid in testing and training scenarios when creating configuration packages for moving data between environments is not a viable option.<\/p>\n Procure-to-pay processors can now post non-inventory costing, such as handling and freight, while posting the inventory receipts. Currently, Dynamics requires you to do this in two transactions, potentially using two different resources.<\/strong> This update will allow for faster and more accurate payment processing.<\/p>\n Administrators will now be able to extend the Shopify Connector to allow for a custom and more robust connection to Business Central. Customers will be able to further align the online shopping experience with internal business processes.<\/p>\n Many end users find the tooltip notes too general to provide any real value. Moving forward, Microsoft will enhance tooltips with more robust notes and instructions. This enhancement will allow for better and easier onboarding of new customers and end users.<\/p>\n Add existing table fields to optimize your pages: Administrators and customizers will now be able to choose from all table fields when personalizing views. Currently, the available fields are limited and require a developer to expose additional fields to become available to add to a view. This enhancement will allow for a better navigation experience without requiring customization.<\/p>\n This section will cover feature highlights for the following modules: Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights and Marketing.<\/p>\n Organize and update your opportunities in a more personalized way using a bird\u2019s-eye view of your pipeline with key sales metrics shown along the top. Manage Opportunities quickly with editable sub-grids and a personalized side panel, plus add notes and tasks right from the pipeline view.<\/strong> With the enhanced Opportunity form, which Microsoft has redesigned to keep high-value attributes front and center and make the form easier to view and use, sellers can get the information they need quicker than ever.<\/p>\n Engage with customers in smarter ways using the new sales engagement capabilities. While there are several enhancements planned, here are a few worth noting:<\/p>\n Instead of manually creating follow-up tasks throughout the day, focus on higher-priority items and rely on this new AI-based feature to create the tasks for you. This feature automatically captures follow-up tasks from emails, Teams messages and call transcripts and can provide friendly reminders to help you drive them to completion.<\/p>\n Today, you can associate activity records with business records, such as Leads, Accounts or Contacts, but it is impossible to associate an activity with another activity. Users can associate activity records, like Teams Chats, with Tasks with this new feature.<\/p>\n Engaging with your customers in the method they prefer is critical. Sellers can engage with customers<\/a> through SMS through any record of the sales process and maintain a historical log of ongoing conversations. Supporting SMS as another quick and effective communication option will help your business fully deliver a streamlined omnichannel customer experience.<\/strong><\/p>\n With a variety of new case management capabilities Microsoft<\/a> is releasing this year, here is what we found most noteworthy.<\/p>\n In the new email template editor, Microsoft gives users a handful of new options in a WYSIWYG-like designer screen. Users can easily add images, buttons, dividers, text and more to make their email templates more advanced and visually appealing than ever.<\/p>\n Companies can provide a better experience to customers using the direct callback capabilities \u2013 enabled at the queue level \u2013 by letting them wait for the next available agent without remaining on the line. Once the customer reaches the top position in the queue, Dynamics assigns the work item to the next available agent and automatically starts the callback to the customer when the agent accepts the work item.<\/p>\n You will be able to use nuance interactive voice response (IVR) to enable self-service help for customers, letting agents have more meaningful help conversations with customers who really need it.<\/p>\n The quality of your reports and insights are only as good as the quality of your data<\/a>. Following a data import, use the new easy-to-read AI-generated data quality report to quickly see an overall grade of your data import, an overview of data quality issues, suggestions for improving the data and more.<\/p>\n Most Dynamics administrators are familiar with the limitations of activity tables. After this release, activities are no longer limited to using a fixed schema, and you can customize how you capture interactions to meet your unique business needs. With better tracking of customer interactions comes a more holistic picture of the customer, enabling Dynamics users to get better insights and provide better, more personalized experiences.<\/p>\n By enabling you to use customer insights data on the Contact, Account and Lead forms, Dynamics now allows you to use rich customer insights directly on the form itself. Sellers can view insights such as average transaction amount, total sales and customer lifetime value to get a more holistic view of the customer and know how to best engage with them. You can also add customer insights to the unified activity timelines for these tables.<\/strong><\/p>\n Keep your key stakeholders in the loop by copying them on email campaigns. You can use this feature in any number of ways. For example, you could use this feature internally by copying key groups across the enterprise on your campaigns to raise awareness and increase collaboration. You could also use this feature to boost campaign success by copying account managers on email campaigns so they can personally follow up with each client.<\/p>\n Create milestones to define key steps in the buyer\u2019s journey, for example, making a purchase, becoming a qualified opportunity or joining a loyalty program. Measure the milestones over time and track marketing activities and journeys against them to understand effectiveness. This feature enables your marketing team to better understand which marketing efforts are most successful and which they can improve upon or avoid altogether.<\/p>\n Create smart, visually appealing forms without the help of a developer using the new intuitive form experience.<\/strong> Using a modern drag-and-drop editor, you can easily design forms to be placed on your website or portal to capture customer information.<\/p>\n Create richer outbound marketing content by embedding documents, presentations, PDFs and more in your emails. Upload your files, images and so on to the asset library, which has a new user interface for document management, and simply add links in your emails to pull the assets from the library.<\/p>\n Here we\u2019ll cover a few key features related to Finance, Supply Chain and Project Operations.<\/p>\n The \u201cvendor invoice capture\u201d feature is a powerful tool that helps capture data noted from a vendor invoice, imports the data into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, and attaches the uploaded images to the vendor invoice.<\/p>\n This release will introduce using both vendor invoice types (vendor invoice related to purchase orders (PO) and those that are non-PO related) and improvements on the data exception. It will help end users build a custom AI model for invoices that is more robust than the out-of-the-box feature can handle. The overall benefit of this feature will allow the end user to focus on vendor exceptions and less on data entry.<\/p>\n Microsoft will add an enhancement to the ledger settlement page related to viewing payment references. The ledger settlement page allows you to view all transactions not marked as settled. When reviewing unsettled payments on this page, it is hard to match them to the correct invoices. With this release, the end users will be able to see the payment reference within the page and apply it to the correct transactions.<\/p>\n The \u201csimplify integration with tax solution ISVs\u201d feature will support end users who integrate a third-party tax software with D365 Finance & Operations. Connecting two systems takes a lot of time and money to implement and maintain. This new feature will make integrations more cost efficient and reliable with this out-of-the-box approach connecting to the independent software vendors (ISVs).<\/strong><\/p>\n This feature will include validation against addresses of the account and tax tolerance, including external tax rates for the API and other components such as parameters and mapping configuration to connect the two systems.<\/p>\n The addition of currency revaluation posting profiles allows the user to get very specific regarding the postings to specific adjustment accounts. This new feature allows you to make account selections per currency and module. This allows postings for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger and Bank to each post to different main accounts, versus a single account in previous versions.<\/p>\n Dynamics back-ported the cross-year settlements feature to version 10.0.29, allowing users to settle and unsettle transactions across different fiscal periods. This feature is particularly handy when someone has misapplied customer payments, and you discover it later.<\/p>\n If you are invoicing processes that might take place days after the shipment of goods, this feature allows the system to charge the correct tax more accurately on goods. Especially in the US, where states implement tax codes at various times, this feature will now use the shipment date versus the invoice date for tax rate determination and subsequent calculation.<\/p>\n This feature allows the user to make detailed journal entries for specified customer or vendor payments.<\/strong> In the past, those detailed entries translated to detailed entries in the bank account sub-ledger, but now Dynamics lists those entries as summary postings.<\/p>\n The “archive inventory transactions\u201d feature will help end users store historical inventory transactions more efficiently. With this release, Dynamics 365 allows you to store these transactions in Dataverse instead of your working environment. The key benefit of this feature is that it will lower the cost of storage and increase performance in the system.<\/p>\n The deferrals for stock or production project feature will help end users capture deferred cost at the project-group level. Based on the project group you select when creating a project, it will allow you to defer ledger posting instead of having to select Balance Sheet or Profit and Loss options. This also allows the options to state which revenue transaction types (expense, item, fee or HR) to defer.<\/p>\n In this section, we\u2019ll cover feature highlights for the following Power Platform<\/a> applications: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, AI Builder, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI, Microsoft Dataverse and key deprecations.<\/p>\n Power Fx now supports user-defined functions. This feature allows makers to store logic into functions and reuse it, making the app-creating experience more streamlined and efficient. It\u2019s now easier to build on top of your previous work or repurpose bits and pieces of your logic.<\/p>\n Microsoft recognized one of the biggest friction points for Microsoft Dataverse<\/a> makers is that when creating table columns, the system doesn\u2019t automatically update forms and views used for model-driven apps. This feature introduces a new button called \u201cupdate forms and views\u201d that will allow users to choose what table columns to add to forms and views for the table instead of the current method of manually adding each newly created column to the form and view.<\/p>\n You may have heard about the ChatGPT chatbot, which has been making waves in the technology world. We\u2019re seeing a lot of platforms leverage AI models to support natural language to enable complex capabilities.<\/strong> This feature is now available in Power Automate, allowing users to describe a flow and then create it based on their description of the automation needed. It will generate the flow and parameters, explain how Power Automate built it, and suggest improvements.<\/p>\nTop Features in Business Central<\/h2>\n
Set Up and Sync Master Data Across Companies<\/h4>\n
Ship and Receive Non-inventory Items on Warehouse Documents<\/h4>\n
Shopify Connector Becomes Extensible<\/h4>\n
Modern Tooltips Are Easy to Read and Understand<\/h4>\n
Customer Engagement Release Wave 1 Features<\/h2>\n
Top Features in Sales<\/h3>\n
Manage Opportunities More Effectively Using Pipeline View and Enhanced Opportunity Form<\/h4>\n
Sales Engagement Enhancements (formerly Sales Accelerator)<\/h4>\n
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Automate the Creation of Follow-up Tasks<\/h4>\n
Associate Activities With Other Activities<\/h4>\n
Engage With Your Customers Using SMS Conversation<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Customer Service<\/h3>\n
Case Management Enhancements<\/h4>\n
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Email Template Designer<\/h4>\n
Enable Customers to Keep Queue Spot, Get Callbacks<\/h4>\n
Integrate Nuance IVR to Boost Agent Productivity<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Customer Insights<\/h3>\n
Data Quality Insights<\/h4>\n
Add Custom Columns to Activity Tables<\/h4>\n
Add Customer Insights Directly to Contact, Account and Lead Forms<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Marketing<\/h3>\n
Copy Key Stakeholders on Email Campaigns<\/h4>\n
Use Defined Milestones to Understand the Success of Marketing Activities<\/h4>\n
Create Forms Using the New Intuitive Form Experience<\/h4>\n
Enrich Marketing Content by Embedding Additional File Types From the Asset Library<\/h4>\n
Finance and Operations Release Wave 1 Features<\/h2>\n
Top Features in Finance<\/h3>\n
Accounts Payable Fully Automated With Invoice Capture<\/h4>\n
Payment Reference on Ledger Settlement<\/h4>\n
Simplify Integration With Tax Solution ISVs<\/h4>\n
Currency Revaluation Posting Profiles<\/h4>\n
Review Cross-year Settlements<\/h4>\n
Packing Slip Date as the Delivery Date for Sales Tax Calculation<\/h4>\n
Customer and Vendor Payments Posted in Detail With Summary Bank Postings<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Supply Chain<\/h3>\n
Archive Inventory Transactions<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Project Operations<\/h3>\n
Use Deferrals for Stock or Production Project Scenarios<\/h4>\n
Microsoft Power Platform Release Wave 1 Features<\/h2>\n
Top Features in Power Apps<\/h3>\n
Reuse Power Fx Formulas With User-defined Functions<\/h4>\n
Add Table Columns to Forms and Views Automatically<\/h4>\n
Top Features in Power Automate<\/h3>\n
Use Natural Language to Create Flows<\/h4>\n
Sequential Approval Flows<\/h4>\n