On July 12, 2022, we published the 2022 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between October 2022 and March 2023. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.
Highlights from Dynamics 365
- Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer journey orchestration to enable business-to-business (B2B) brands to hyper-personalize experiences across the entire buying journey and confidently grow their marketing and customer experience programs to target up to 100 million customers with up to 300 million messages and interactions per month. Intuitive lead capture forms, leads nurturing hands-off automation, and a new analytics dashboard enable alignment between sales and marketing teams like never before. Organizations can reach new levels of marketing maturity with AI-powered next best content selection and increased support for business units.
- Dynamics 365 Sales continues to optimize the seller experience using data and AI to help sellers prioritize their work, blending business and productivity tools to meet sellers where they are and driving in-the-moment collaboration experiences so that every seller can engage with their colleagues and customers efficiently, reclaiming their time and being more productive.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering the capabilities that help run contact centers optimally by providing enhancements in unified routing with features such as percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing. Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams will help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration. Organizations can empower their customers with options to leave voicemail, callback, and dial agents directly in the voice channel. The agent experience is modernized with an enhanced conversation timeline, horizontal multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary. Supervisors can view Microsoft Power Virtual Agents analytics within their omnichannel analytics dashboards.
- Dynamics 365 Field Service brings new capabilities that enable organizations to better orchestrate service operations for workers. Organizations can now build and maintain location and assets for large facilities, keep their cost at bay by configuring “not to exceed” limits, and group similar incident types under “trade” for ease of management. We are also bringing optimization improvements on booking lock constraints and introducing a myriad of user experience improvements to the mobile app to continue empowering frontline workers.
- Dynamics 365 Finance is launching the general availability of vendor invoice optical character recognition (OCR) which automates the reading and recognition of vendor invoices and continues adding additional capabilities for subscription billing use cases. We will integrate tax calculation service with Dynamics 365 Project Operations (preview) and extend electronic invoicing service to support new upcoming e-invoice legislations for France, Poland, and Saudi Arabia.
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to invest in capabilities that drive agility and resilience across the supply chain. New analytics and support for multiple vendors in planning optimization help organizations optimize their sourcing strategies. Inventory visibility lets organizations track real-time consumption within allocated quantities in support of promotions, special events, and new product introductions. Guided warehouse implementation and configuration experiences enable rapid reconfiguration of supply chains and manufacturers in the process industry can use Planning Optimization for shortening their planning cycles.
- Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management has continued to expand its ecosystem of providers and built on the continued success of FedEx. We now have 14 providers that span the supply chain lifecycle from order ingestion to last-mile delivery. In the upcoming release, we are adding support for various order types—back orders, subscription orders, manual orders, and purchase orders. We will also provide the ability to simulate fulfillment so that our customers can model and understand the impact of choosing various fulfillment strategies. Finally, we also have contextual collaboration features where an order can be shared with multiple stakeholders using embedded Microsoft Teams.
- Dynamics 365 Project Operations is continuing to invest in capabilities to empower project managers and project teams in this release wave with project budgeting and time-phased forecasting, baselines and snapshots, and in modernizing application experiences on the web and mobile form factors. For the project accountants and back-office personas, we are lighting up advanced subcontracting and subscription billing capabilities. In addition, across-the-board investments to ease the complexity of interaction patterns and uptake of modern and fluent controls are also targeted for this release wave.
- Dynamics 365 Guides will continue investing in capabilities to improve collaboration experiences for authors and operators on Microsoft HoloLens 2. The application will also be updated to provide more advanced content authoring workflows versioning and publishing of guides in the coming wave.
- Dynamics 365 Human Resources will bring improved efficiency by enabling human resource business partners to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes where manual decisions and tasks are needed today. Improved efficiency will also be available to managers and employees by providing notifications outside of the application for benefits processes and tasks. We’ll also be providing better experiences across Dynamics 365 applications by integrating employee skill and compensation, and leaving information to resource managers in Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
- Dynamics 365 Commerce enables new and updated B2B experiences, including sales agreements across channels and customer-specific catalogs. Omnichannel media management features streamline workflows. Key point of sale investments includes Store Commerce app availability for iOS and Android devices. And Apple Pay and Google Pay digital wallet integration, as well as new customer support options through virtual agent and live agent integration will be available for e-commerce.
- Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will be offering a new transaction acceptance booster (TAB) offering that allows merchants to increase their bank approval rates without having to rip and replace their incumbent fraud provider solution. Having to rip and replace a merchant’s incumbent fraud solution is costly and timely, this enables the merchant to benefit from Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection TAB capabilities with minimal disruption to their business.
- Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to improve the reporting capabilities for customers, including new report datasets for Excel and improvements to the Microsoft Power BI reports which now will support dimensions. The Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate integration also continue to offer new capabilities for low-code development. The application will get several improvements like helping users do reverse entries in the payment reconciliation journal and several improvements to the supply chain functionality. We are taking steps forward in scaling productivity of our partners via more efficient and performant tooling for development and administration.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights continues to invest in accelerating customer understanding by enhancing time to value with quicker out-of-the-box insights, predictions, segments, and measures with limitless extensibility across technology ecosystems. New features will allow you to power personalized experiences with real-time insights, analytics, and activations to deliver industry-leading personalization and moments-based marketing. New features also enable ubiquitous insights that allow an integrated data flow across Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform for seamless workflows.
- Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces now supports alerts and notifications via Teams or Outlook when business AI-skills detect actionable patterns within a physical space. Customers can now use Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces in Germany (besides US and UK) and connect up to 10 cameras for each Azure Stack Edge device maximizing their existing investments in expanding Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces across their physical footprint. Customers can also leverage the Azure Stack Edge Pro 2 device for configuring Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces at the edge in addition to the existing Pro 1 devices.
Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform
- Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. Creation experience is improved by aligning our experiences with Office and enabling datasets authoring on the web. By bringing power query diagram view into Power BI Desktop, creators can use a no code experience to perform extract transform load (ETL) on their data. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to metrics focused on enterprise needs and integration with Microsoft Viva Goals. In addition, big data experience is increased through automatic aggregations, query scale out, data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP), and providing improved visibility into activity to admins.
- Power Apps will expand governance capabilities to allow organizations to enable, manage, and support citizen development across the entire organization. Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive over Dataverse in a unified studio, with modern experiences to build and manage data and logic, as well as infused intelligence to support development, enrich data, and optimize end-user experiences. In addition to ensuring trust and the ability to leverage rich data experiences, both makers and end-users will benefit from out-of-the-box collaboration capabilities to enable users to be more productive when working together.
- Power Pages continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development as well professional developers. Some of the salient capabilities in this release allow makers to have additional capabilities to work with forms and lists using the design studio and get them started quickly using additional solution templates. There are enhancements for professional developers to do more with the sites using Microsoft Power Platform command line interface (CLI) tool and visual studio (VS) Code as well as for administrators to better administer and govern their Power Pages sites.
- Power Automate is more accessible than ever before with new experiences to help users of every skill level build out their cloud and desktop flows. Organizations need to automate their deployments of Power Automate, so there are additional enhancements for application lifecycle management (ALM). And, with increased usage of robotic process automation (RPA), we are adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts.
- Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Pages integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Teams, and more. Creating a bot is typically a complex and time-intensive process, requiring long content update cycles and a team of experts. Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user’s questions.
- AI Builder continues to enable citizen developers to use and customize AI capabilities to build more intelligent apps and workflows. Lifecycle and governance of AI Builder models will be improved with enhanced versioning, deployment, and monitoring capabilities. Makers will also benefit from new features for intelligent document and text processing like the ability to manage human in-the-loop validation, easier integration of large data sets for automated e-mail processing, and the ability to process contracts and multi-page tables in documents.
For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2 plans.
Early access period
Starting August 1, 2022, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2022. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform pages. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.
We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform product updates and product roadmaps, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.
