Microsoft has recently announced the release notes for Dynamics 365 October '18. They are enhancing features across the whole of the CRMs applications, helping organisations to accelerate their digital transformation. We mentioned in previously in our blog how Microsoft has changed their product update strategy, with the upcoming October release reflecting that.
The new update promises hundreds of new capabilities across Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance and Operations, Field Service and Business Central. Microsoft will introduce a set of mixed reality experiences using Microsoft Layout and Remote Assist.
Performance, usability and supportability enhancements will arrive with the update, which will improve the applications and underlying platform, delivering a better experience for your organisation.
New intelligence applications employ decades of AI work pioneered by Microsoft Research to make Dynamics 365 more intelligent. You can enhance sales performance and plan with the new Dynamics 365 AI for Sales applications.
Data integration provides built-in connectivity to the Power platform and more, with data across hundreds of business systems, enabling rich and intelligent experiences. The Common Data Model provides semantic consistency for canonical business entities across Dynamics 365, Common Data Service for Apps, and Power BI dataflows, increasing time to value for application developers, ISV partners, and integrators.
We've provided a summary of the release below, with an in-depth analysis of each application in the coming days.
Marketing
- Reusable content blocks
- Social listening for campaigns
- Marketing calendar for planning
- Deep LinkedIn integration
- Richer Segmentation experience
- Custom Analytics
- Additional Languages
- Video content using Microsoft Stream
- Account-based Marketing
Sales
- Playbooks
- LinkedIn insights
- Microsoft Teams integration
- Who knows whom
- Talking points
- Quick actions
- Predictive lead scoring
- Relationship analytics with LinkedIn InMail
Field Service
- Integration with Finance and Operations
- Entitlement management
- Multi-resource scheduling for work orders
- SLA management
- Field Service mobile updates
Dynamics 365 Web Portals
- Embed Power BI visualisations
- Restrict portal access by IP address
- Manage SharePoint documents
- Simplified customisation
- Self-service portal diagnostics
Finance and Operations
- Dual Currency repurposing
- Productivity to view settlement transactions
- Global number sequences
- Vendor or customer approvals for specific fields
- Ease of data entry for dimension values
- Consistent validation actions
- Automatic ledger settlements
- Reverse journal posting
- Simplification through configurable templates
- On-hand inventory report performance
- Public sector enhancements
- Enterprise credit management
You can prepare your organisation for the new update by downloading the Dynamics October '18 release overview PDF.
Microsoft continues to show clear intent in helping organisations transform how they operate their business with the Dynamics 365 platform. Deeper integration with other cloud services and products and new capabilities constantly being introduced will make it an increasingly viable choice for organisations looking to improve productivity and manage business level data.
If you are looking to upgrade your CRM, you couldn't have looked at Dynamics 365 at a better time. Flexible licencing, mobile ready, cloud-based software is proving to be the way forward.
