09/01/2021

By Mohona Dutta | Reading time 6 mins

Microsoft Dynamics 2021 release wave 2, an overview: Part 1

The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds release plan for the 2021 release wave 2 describes new features releasing from October 2021 through March 2022. Here’s a brief snippet about their release plan regarding the various new feature across Dynamics 365 applications. In this blog, we have highlighted a selection of the latest announcements for Dynamics 365. This information is based on the initial documentation released by Microsoft, and as with any pre-release information, this is subject to change.

 

This is the first part of the blog.

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Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on capabilities to create personalized journeys to engage with customers across all touchpoints. Marketers will be able to create segments for leads and custom entities in the new segmentation builder experience using natural language to build segments and target audiences quickly and easily.

Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales launches the general availability of Deal Manager, a new, modern workspace for managing your pipeline, as well as enhancements to the integration between Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams, including more collaboration tools and calling capabilities. Seller productivity investments include LinkedIn integration enhancements for easy access to Sales Navigator, forecasting updates, and guided selling improvements with Sales Accelerator.

Service

In the new release, Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers enhancements to agent experience and productivity to handle omnichannel support and investing in routing diagnostics for supervisors, machine learning-based rules for classification such as sentiment analysis, and effort estimation, and improved historical analytics.

 

Dynamics 365 Field Service continues down the path of providing easy customer engagement: a new customer portal will incorporate existing capabilities such as technician locator and new general availability capabilities such as self-scheduling and appointment management to enhance service and customer communication.

Finance and Operations

Dynamics 365 Finance is investing in data insights as part of the general availability of Finance Insights. Through automation and modernizing the services, this release wave brings enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions.

 

When it comes to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, it enables a resilient supply chain with investments in main areas such as resource planning, manufacturing, asset management, planning, and inventory management. In this wave, new manufacturing execution scenarios are included to allow integration between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution solutions (MES), and shop floor automation systems.

 

Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams under a single umbrella to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability.

 

The new capabilities in this release include providing enhanced data exchange experiences between Finance and Operations apps, Microsoft Data verse, and Customer Engagement apps in Dynamics 365.

Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources offers enhancements to Benefits management capabilities that provide a simplified user experience. In their quest for bringing capabilities that enable employee workflow, the new release includes managing leave requests using the Teams app and providing organizations the ability to view analytics on leave balances that help meet company policies.

Commerce

For this wave, Dynamics 365 Commerce includes key investments in customer segmentation and using site builder with specific page layouts and content, integrating with Microsoft Clarity, creating a customer-specific catalog that creates a limited view to only see and order products that are configured for their organization and enhancements to the reordering experience and admin privileges.

 

In the second part of the blog, we will talk about the other services that fall within the new release. We would recommend previewing these features in a non-production or trial environment before you deploy in a production site.

 

For more information regarding Dynamics CRM and its capabilities, do talk to us.

Author’s bio:

Mohona is a Content Writer for the Marketing team in AhaApps since 2019. When she is not busy attending to her creative, technical side, she likes to binge on sitcoms on Netflix. She loves writing poems and reading short stories when she wants to break away from the humdrum of life.

Microsoft Dynamics 2021 release wave 2, an overview: Part 2

This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating Microsoft’s continued investment to power digital transformation for their customers and partners.