Launch event highlights new 2021 release wave 1 capabilities and spotlights how they benefit BNY Mellon, Patagonia, Rockwell Automation, and The Coca-Cola Company

Today officially kicks off a six-month wave of hundreds of new capabilities, feature updates, and applications across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

These updates include the first of two release waves this year, ensuring we continue our commitment to helping you adapt to rapid change in your industry, innovate and solve challenges collaboratively, and harness insights to stay focused on what matters. As the world prepares for life beyond the pandemic, we are laser-focused on helping build agility and resiliency into every layer of your business.

At this morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (then available on demand), we will preview some of the new capabilities spanning end-to-end customer experience, commerce, and supply chain and fulfillment, in addition to low-code tools to power insights and innovation.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 plans, as well as the overviews of new capabilities for Dynamics 365, integrated Microsoft Teams experiences, and Power Platform announced at Microsoft Ignite in early March.

Modernizing end-to-end customer experiences

At the launch event, we will demonstrate the very latest innovation to orchestrate customer journeys for seamless engagement at the right moments. Additional customer journey orchestration capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing bring together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation to engage customers in real-time based on interactions across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. And the latest customer analytics capabilities, such as surveys, segmentation, churn analysis, and product recommendations help create more personalized experiences.

We'll walk you through how one of the oldest banks in the world, BNY Mellon, is leveraging some of these new capabilities to usher in a new era of customer engagement for financial services.

What's next for Microsoft industry clouds

In October 2020, we launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcarethe first end-to-end, industry-specific cloud solution that unlocks the power of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform to transform customer engagement and optimize operations.

Today we will discuss the Microsoft industry clouds approach, recently announced. Microsoft Cloud for Retail and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services are now available for preview. Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit will be available in the near future. All four clouds enable organizations to tackle digital transformation by focusing on priority scenarios, then continue to transform customer engagement and operations at the right time.

At the launch event, you'll learn how Patagonia, a leader in outdoor clothing, is activating solutions in the Microsoft Cloud for Retail to orchestrate seamlessly personalized experiences at every point in the customer journey.

Over the next few months, we will continue to share new innovations across the applications and services that comprise Microsoft Cloud for Retail, such as new capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce that introduce B2B e-commerce offerings, synergize task management with Microsoft Teams, and further bring together frontline and back-end operations, improving the way retailers engage customers.

We're also building on our strong legacy in inventory management, order fulfillment, and intelligent orchestration by bringing these together in a new application, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, helping you optimize for speed, experience, and profitability by meeting future order and fulfillment complexities while supporting contemporary methods like buying online for in-store or curbside pickup.

Empowering unique data experiences and insights with Power BI

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced Power BI Premium Per User general availability and autoscale preview for Gen2, which automatically adds a vCore to Premium capacity when utilization peaks and removes it when no longer needed. At the launch event, we demonstrate how Rockwell Automation, a worldwide leader in Industrial Automation, is using Power BI and many of our AI capabilities to get great insights from data and act on those insights in familiar experiences such as Teams and Microsoft Excel. They are also leveraging Power BI Premium Gen2 as a way to create a better user experience, with deeper resource management and cost control.

Build and deliver applications faster and more cost-effectively

As announced at Microsoft Ignite, new capabilities across Power Platform will accelerate low-code application development for business users, business analysts, IT admins, and professional developers.

The Coca-Cola Company has recently started using Power Platform as part of its digital transformation efforts and has created some remarkable business solutions with Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Power Automate, including the new Power Automate Desktop robotic process automation (RPA) capability. In a demo at the launch event, we will share how they are using Power Platform to help their bottlers easily update the expected sales date of its industry-defining syrup concentrates through an end-to-end seamless digital process.

In addition, Coca-Cola UNITED, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, has also taken advantage of Power Platform to transform and reduce costs while improving customer and partner experiences through advanced automation. The video below tells their story.

Attend our launch event for a closer look at this wave's highlights

Tune in to the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event today, April 6 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time or on-demand after the broadcast, for a first look at the new innovations on the way over the next six months. Be sure to check out our detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, key dates, and deep-dive demo videos.

Don't miss your chance to learn from and connect with your worldwide Dynamics 365 and Power Platform communityregister for Microsoft Business Applications Summit on May 4, 2021.

The post Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 2021 release launches with hundreds of new capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Know your customers like never before

In every industry, we hear about the struggle to transform from a reactive to proactive organization that can respond to changes in the market, customer needs, and even within their own business. When we talk to customers who have rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, the conversation shifts to the breakthrough outcomes they've achieved, often in very short time frames.

Customers talk about Microsoft's unique ability to connect data holistically across departments and teams with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes. This is precisely the business need that we identified and addressed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft's customer data platform (CDP).

Customer Insights has resonated with organizations across industries and, as a result, it's the fastest growing application in the Dynamics 365 portfolio. Customers such as Walgreens Boots Alliance, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Campari Group, and Dayton Children's Hospital recognize Customer Insights as a trusted platform to realize business outcomes.

Transforming vision into reality

At this time last year, I described our vision for Microsoft’s CDP, which has become reality for a number of our customers. For example, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is helping Tivoli Gardens, one of the world's longest-running amusement parks, personalize guest experiences across every touchpointon the website, at the hotel, and in the park. American Electric Power Energy is using Customer Insights to better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure delivery of efficient and sustainable energy solutions. Marston's has onboarded Customer Insights to unify guest data and infuse personalized experiences across its 1,500-plus pubs across the United Kingdom.

Earlier this year, we announced that Customer Insights expanded its availability to the Microsoft Government Cloud, an environment built to meet the higher compliance needs of United States government agencies. The Microsoft Government Cloud meets the demanding requirements of the United States Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), enabling United States federal agencies to benefit from the cost savings and rigorous security of the Microsoft Cloud.

New capabilities to help customers drive business outcomes

Today, we're meeting this growing customer demand for the Microsoft CDP by announcing new capabilities in Customer Insights to:

• Deliver the most comprehensive view of their customers with the new engagement insights capability, currently in preview, that enables deeper understanding of customer intent and behavior with cross-channel analytics from their websites, mobile apps, and connected products. We bring yet another dimension to customer profiles though integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Organizations can automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving detailed understanding of customers. Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.
• Unlock powerful AI-driven insights through limitless analytics with deep integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations can leverage a library of prebuilt AI templates for churn prediction, product recommendations, and customer lifetime value, giving business users the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data for quick insights without having to involve data scientists and IT.
• Drive meaningful actions across the customer journey with turnkey integrations that make it easier to share insights with any application, be it Microsoft or third-party platforms. Customer Insights is designed and built to be vendor-agnostic, from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations including AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and more.
• Build on our commitment of unmatched data privacy and security by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection. This allows organizations to configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.

Real customers, real insights, real value

Across the world, so much has changed since last year. The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every organization and its customers. We've been inspired to see how many organizations are using Customer Insights to not only survive but thrive through this challenging environment.

In the healthcare space, Dayton Children's Hospital uses Customer Insights to build a deep understanding of patient interactions across digital applications and in-person visits, and curate a secure single source of truth that complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other essential regulations. This enables healthcare providers to improve the patient experience across every channel and touch point, helping transform the end-to-end healthcare journey. We are now scaling this use case through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare solution.

The pandemic has also had an outsized impact on nonprofits who are facing difficult fundraising environments and reduced government aid; however, the demand for services from nonprofits has never been greater. Innovative organizations such as UNICEF Netherlands are leveraging Dynamics 365 applications such as Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to increase engagement with high-value donors through personalized experiences and communications. Ultimately, they can raise more funds with precise segmentation and AI-driven insights.

Further, these demands are exactly why we're launching Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales, built with MISSION CRM. Nonprofits, schools, hospitals, and research institutions can utilize Fundraising and Engagement to uncover new funding sources, strengthen existing relationships, and drive fundraising efficiency. Dynamics 365, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Azure, bring the most modern digital platform to nonprofit organizations to engage with their donors, design campaigns, manage recurring giving programs and events. Learn more about our commitment to help nonprofits tackle the worlds' biggest challenges.

Like many other fast moving-CPG companies, Campari Group is using Customer Insights to connect consumer and bartender engagement by integrating bespoke marketing and sales data into a single repository. Campari Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions, each bringing in another IT landscape to assimilate including more than seven martech vendors in the marketing domain. They chose Customer Insights for several reasons, including compliance with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Campari Group's trust in Azure. Customer Insights unifies all the consumer and business partner data, across regions and brands, to gain a 360-degree customer view. They can now take one standardized approach to calculate CLTV and personalize marketing campaigns that support end-to-end customer journeys across marketing, sales, and customer service.

Learn more about the industry's top-rated CDP

The Microsoft CDP empowers every organization to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers allowing any business professional the ability to learn from interactions and optimize engagement for delivering personalization at scale. For more information about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, please visit us online or contact your Microsoft representative.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event today at 9:00 AM Pacific Time to learn about the incredible innovation across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to help keep businesses moving forward. With updates, insights, and demonstrations from our experts, you'll learn how to best leverage innovations to strengthen resiliency across your organization. Be sure to review the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform for details about the hundreds of new features and updated capabilities that will be released as part of this wave.

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This morning, Alysa Taylor and I are welcoming the global community of technology professionals to Microsoft Ignite in two key segments streaming live and rebroadcast throughout the event.

This community will play a leading role in realizing the vision and priorities we're discussing at Microsoft Ignitesolutions to help build resiliency into every layer of business and that help you weather today's challenges so you can proactively get ahead of tomorrow's opportunitiesto reimagine tomorrow. Today, we are announcing new capabilities across Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 to help deliver this vision, including:

• Low code updates for professional developers with an integrated Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Azure API Management experience to scale solutions through Power Apps with low-code and distribute through Microsoft Teams.
• Power Platform SDLC (software development lifecycle) workflows and templates with GitHub Actions.
• Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Azure Bot Framework integration to build bots with no code, plus a simpler, one-click publishing experience on Teams.
• Deeper Power Apps and Teams integration, including Power Apps authoring app within Teams, Project Oakdale for a free low code data platform, and Teams visual style support.
• The preview of the Microsoft Power BI app for Teams which provides a central, personalized home for data in Teams will help customers scale insights across the organization by ensuring that insights are just a click away from where conversations are happening and where decisions are made.
• Power BI is now natively integrated with Excel and is easier than ever to discover and work with trusted Power BI datasets that are refreshed, governed, and secured directly in Excel.
• Two new Power BI offerings: Power BI Premium Per User as an entry point to Premium and a new on-demand capacity scale option for Premium customers.
• The preview of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, bringing robotic process automation (RPA) to every desktop.
• A new first-party voice channel for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, built on Microsoft Azure Communication Services.
• New add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Cloud and Edge Scale Unit and Inventory Visibility.
• The October general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Accelerate your app development

To accelerate the growing trend of low-code and code-first "fusion" projects, we have made significant improvements and investments over the past 18 months in making Power Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Visual Studio work seamlessly together.

We are advancing our vision for Power Platform to shape and scale the future of work with low-code apps and new capabilities to help professional developers rapidly transform the business from the ground up using the tools and languages they are already familiar with.

Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Azure API Management will now work seamlessly together to allow developers to scale solutions through Power Apps with low-code and distribute through Microsoft Teams. Developers can create custom connectors to unlock access to any Microsoft cloud hosted data source, as well as seamlessly push custom connectors to dedicated Power Platform environments for easy discovery in Power Apps. In addition, you can leverage Microsoft Azure Functions and Azure API Management to enable citizen developers to distribute Power Apps in Teams. Read more about this solution in our blog “Achieve your app development goals with Power Platform and Azure,” including how professional developers at T-Mobile are using Power Apps and Azure to develop a series of apps that helped them adjust quickly to operating in the pandemic at T-Mobile.

To help streamline development, we are thrilled to announce that we are bringing Power Platform to the platform where developer teams collaborate on projectsGitHub. Available in preview, pro developers can create their own SDLC (software development lifecycle) workflows using GitHub Actions for Power Platform on the marketplace, as well as use pre-configured SDLC workflow templates.

In addition, Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Framework will now work seamlessly to allow developers to build bots with no codethe capability will be generally available in October. We've also enhanced Power Virtual Agents to make it even easier for developers and users to publish on Teams with just one clickwhich will also be generally available in October.

Infuse teamwork with data insights to help everyone make better decisions

Teams is a platform for work, school, and everyday life. Data is a part of all those things too, and now Power BI in Teams is evolving to help everyone find and collaborate around insights.

We recently introduced a new Power BI app for Teams, which provides a more streamlined experience for accessing Power BI reports in Teams, making it easier to collaborate with data and to connect insight into action with sample reports, automation, and easy sharing experiences.

At Ignite, we are announcing the preview of the new Power BI app for Teams. The app will enable users to quickly discover, search, and discuss data without ever leaving Teams. This central, personalized home for data in Teams will ensure that insights are always just a click away from where conversations are happening and where decisions are made. For example, PayPal moved to Teams and added a tab for Power BI visualizations to Teams meetings, providing an easy way to easily share a project's current status and goals as people join.

In addition to these Power BI updates, we are also providing customers with broader analytics choices and scalability with two new Power BI offerings, Power BI Premium Per User as an entry point to Premium, and a new on-demand capacity scale option for Premium customers to enable them to elastically scale Premium nodesboth in preview.

Learn more about these updates to Power BI and more details about how Power Platform integrates with Microsoft Teams.

Automation for everyone

We continue to invest in robotic process automation (RPA). Our acquisition of Softomotive opened doors to pare Power Automate with WinAutomation, enabling anyone to automate manual business processes across both legacy and modern applications.

Today, we're introducing the preview of Power Automate Desktopenabling you to automate on-premises processes and tasks, from simple data transfers between systems or searching for images to more complex business processes and workflowsall from your desktop.

Read more about the capabilities of Power Automate Desktop.

Driving faster results at Toyota

These updates demonstrate what's possible when everyone, from pro developers to non-technical users across the organization have access to no-code or low-code tools. In my key segment, I demonstrate three ways that Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) is empowering everyone across the organization to solve business problems with the Power Platform. More than 400 applications are in progress, along with more than 800 Power Automate flows, to help them improve business processes and boost customer service and satisfaction.

For example, the team is using Power BI, Teams, and Microsoft Azure Synapse to monitor their network and analyze the immense amounts of data that is created as part of that process, including surveys performed by their field travelers that are responsible for different regions. Toyota harnessed the full suite of Power Platform features plus Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to rapidly build and deploy a Vehicle Delivery Quality app that improved accuracy and efficiency for field travelers collecting information. Plus, it gave them 100 percent coverage across their dealers enabling Toyota to better understand what dealers are doing right and improve the quality and safety of vehicles delivered to their customers.

Dynamics 365 updates to help you build a resilient organization

Every organization needs to prioritize delivering on customer expectations even during change and uncertainty to stay resilient and relevantas well as secure the business from the economic impact of COVID-19. We are introducing new additions and updates to Dynamics 365 focused on the most critical centers for customer satisfaction, especially in today's business climate: service and supply chain. These enhanced solutions are business-ready yet rapidly scalable and customizable to build unique digital capabilities.

The first single vendor omnichannel solution including native voice

Customer service is not only a frontline for loyalty and retention, it’s an essential way to understand how to better serve the people who depend on your products and services. Your customer service team needs to offer multiple lines of always-on communications.

As organizations evaluate customer service software solutions, they are increasingly demanding single-vendor solutions to ease the burden of managing multiple vendor contracts and integrations. Dynamics 365 delivers the optimal customer service solutions for everyone in the businessfrom frontline agents and customer service management to solution implementers and administrators.

At Ignite, we are announcing the addition of a new first-party voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, built on Azure Communication Services, available in preview. By integrating voice into existing omnichannel capabilities, we are providing a seamless, end-to-end customer service experience within a single solution built on the Microsoft cloud that empowers teams to deliver consistent, connected support across all channels. AI-powered features help resolve issues faster, including real-time agent suggestions and sentiment analysis that starts working right out of the box, and thanks to our Common Data Model, voice channel data natively integrates into pre-existing datasetsno data manipulation or reformatting necessary.

Learn more about the new voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Azure Communication Services.

Manage supply chain risk and maintain continuity

This year, companies have had to deal with rapidly changing customer demand and major disruptions to their supply chains. Most have found it hard to quickly shift to meet these new demands and are looking to build more agility and resiliency into the way they operate by digitizing the entire supply chain.

A Ignite, we are announcing two new add-ins for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to enhance visibility and enable customers to quickly respond to changing demand and supply: Cloud and Edge Scale Unit and Inventory Visibility.

Companies often struggle with latency and connectivity when running operations in remote facilities. High volume and resource-intensive processes running in parallel can lead to network latency and reduced productivity. The new Cloud and Edge Scale Unit add-ins for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management available in preview in October, bring the power of the intelligent cloud to the edge. The add-ins allow organizations to run critical warehousing and manufacturing workloads on the Edge using Azure stack devices to improve resilience and ensure around-the-clock operations even when temporarily disconnected from the cloud.

The new Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables large volume retailers and manufacturers to easily handle millions of transactions every minute and determine cross-channel inventory accurately in real time. Organizations can easily scale to fulfill orders from multiple channels on time, and mitigate stock-outs and overstocking. The new capability, available in preview in October, is hyper-scalable and can also work with third-party systems.

Read more about the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Transform project-based services

The solutions we're discussing at Microsoft Ignite share a common theme: enabling organizations with the speed and agility to adjust to change, build resiliency across every line of business, and exceed customer expectations. If your business is structured as a project-based organization, it's especially critical to be adaptable to the types of changes we've seen over the past few months.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations, generally available in October, connects and empowers your sales, resourcing, project management, and accounting teams with the visibility needed to deliver exceptional services to your customers on-time and on-budget. Dynamics 365 Project Operations integrates with your current enterprise systems helping you to drive business growth across your sales and delivery processes, without the need to rip and replace your existing systems. You can also easily scale Dynamics 365 Project Operations using the Power Platform and other applications from Dynamics 365, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Siemens Mobility is one customer utilizing Dynamics 365 Project Operations to help streamline their service teams.

Read more about the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Catch the next wave of Business Applications updates

All of these solutions join hundreds new capabilities that will be released between October 2020 and March 2021. Read the 2020 release wave 2plans forMicrosoft Dynamics 365andMicrosoft Power Platform for details.

You'll learn about many of these updates over the next few days, as well as during the first week of October when we host the Business Applications Launch Event for the 2020 release wave 2.

Be sure to check out the full line-up of Business Applications sessions and connect with your global community in the Connection Zone. Enjoy the show!

The post Announcing Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 updates at Microsoft Ignite appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today marks the official start of the 2020 release wave 1, kicking off the deployment of new applications and hundreds of new capabilities and updates across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

This release lands at an unprecedented time for business and society. We are providing support and resources for organizations on the frontlines of the COVID-19 outbreak and prioritizing the seamless business continuity for our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform customers. Our customer commitment includes allowances for uptake of the 2020 release wave 1, as well as the timely release of innovations and capabilities that can help your business adapt to challenges during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Eventnow available on-demandfor demonstrations of some of the new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform capabilities spanning customer engagement, commerce, and supply chain management. For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 release wave 1 plans.

Seamless B2C and B2B customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we'll demonstrate updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft's customer data platform (CDP), including first and third-party data connections that further enrich customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real-time. Organizations can unlock the value of their data by quickly and accurately predicting customer behavior using out-of-the-box AI templates for churn, customer lifetime value, and next best action recommendations, as well as enable deeper insights with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. We'll also share how Chipotle Mexican Grill, one of the most popular chains of fast casual dining, brought in Customer Insights to create a real-time, up-to-the-moment understanding of their customers to drive relevant and intelligent engagement.

B2B organizations can take advantage of new customer engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Field Service to provide customers with unified, consistent, and personalized experiences throughout the entire buyer journey. Sales teams can leverage advanced AI-powered predictive sales forecasting and a new sales acceleration hub for inside sellers. Marketers can enhance campaigns with more personalized and sophisticated email messages, integrated surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro, and aggregated data and segments from Customer Insights. In addition, service centers benefit from centralized scheduling capabilities for dispatchers to schedule technicians and new omnichannel capabilities to reach customers on their preferred channels. We'll bring these capabilities to life at the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event by demonstrating how HP's sales, marketing, and service teams can coordinate a seamless, integrated customer journey for an upcoming launch of a new printer.

Delivering seamless omnichannel retail experiences

Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers an end to end retail solution that helps organizations deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences through advanced e-commerce capabilities, intelligent product recommendations, and enhanced clienteling. At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we'll show you how Dr. Martens, the iconic British footwear brand, could replace all legacy applications with Dynamics 365 Commerce, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Power BI to gain greater visibility into its end-to-end processes and virtual warehouses, as well as get a single view of customers across retail and e-commerce.

Exceed customer expectations with an intelligent supply chain

We're updating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to deliver predictive insights and intelligence from AI, IoT, and mixed reality to your organization across planning, production, inventory, warehouse, transportation management, and asset management.

We've added out-of-the-box IoT capabilities that leverages Azure IoT Hub to connect signals from mission-critical assets with business transaction data. This enables manufacturers to improve uptime, throughput, and quality by proactively managing shop floor and equipment operations with a real-time view of their entire production and stock.

Supply Chain Management now integrates with Dynamics 365 Field Service to help reduce downtime of geographically dispersed mission critical assets by automating field service operations, as well as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to train your workforce faster, more effectively, and in some cases, more safely using mixed reality learning experiences.

Eaton, a multinational power management company, with 97,000 employees serving customers in 175 countries, is leveraging Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions as part of its ‘Industry 4.0’ transformation. Following pilot evaluations by their IT and business teams, Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are being deployed globally by different business units starting with the Vehicle Group in over a dozen locations for maintenance, digital layout, training, product development, and connecting global teams on knowledge transfer and best practices sharing.

In addition to these highlights for operations, we're introducing Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, which brings the power of AI into your finance processes, as well as Dynamics 365 Project Operations, a comprehensive solution for service organizations to connect and run every part of the business. Learn more about these two new applications.

Power Platform: New ways to analyze, act, and automate

Power Automate adds robotic process automation (RPA)

Today marks the generally availability of UI flows, the new robotic process automation (RPA) capability in Microsoft Power Automate. Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation. The key Power Automate RPA capabilities that are reaching general availability today include RPA for attended and unattended scenarios, a flexible business model to support any business scenario, and several AI Builder models.

Power Automate now provides a single solution for end-to-end automation that spans on-premises systems and the cloud. This approach addresses three primary areas:

• Intelligent understanding of data: Structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices to images can be easily understood and integrated with other critical business applications. AI-driven capabilities like forms processing in AI Builder are now generally available.
• RPA connects to enterprise applications without APIs: Some applications are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. With UI flows, end users can automate their work in these applications by recording manual tasks such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry, and then automate the replay of these steps to integrate with legacy systems.
• Connecting to over 300 modern apps and services: It is easy to work with information stored in the cloud or on-premises apps and databases. We offer native connectivity to common apps or a company's APIs with over 300 connectors out-of-the-box.

Power Apps adds mixed reality experiences

Today, we’re announcing new mixed reality capabilities coming to Microsoft Power Apps.With these new features, Power Apps is one of the first low-code no-code platforms that makes it possible for everyone to build mixed reality applications.

With hundreds of millions of augmented reality capable mobile devices in the hands of business users, every Power Apps maker will be able to leverage the power of mixed reality to extend their apps with the ease of drag-and-drop development. With these new capabilities, makers can start to digitize workflows in physical space in new and innovative ways.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, you will learn how GSK, the global healthcare company, has fully embraced the Microsoft Power Platform. This includes a mobile Power App leveraging the new mixed reality capabilities, AI Builder forms processing, Power Automate RPA, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.

Power BI adds new capabilities

Microsoft Power BI is delivering new capabilities focusing on three key areas to help customers drive a data culture:

• Building on Power BI's core amazing data exploration experiences, we've added the highly requested decomposition tree AI visual, a new Q&A experience, and added a modern ribbon that users are familiar with from Microsoft Office.
• As we continue to meet the most demanding needs of our enterprise customers, we are adding full application lifecycle management, with the ability for customers to move an app through a deployment pipeline. We have also completely opened Power BI's semantic models by adding full support for the industry standard XML for Analysis (XMLA) protocol.
• Finally, to help our customers weave business intelligence deeply into the fabric of the organization, we've added support for Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security to protect data even when it leaves Power BI, added deep integration with Azure Synapse, and a completely revamped Microsoft Teams integration.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we will show you the work we're doing with one of the world's largest companies, ABB, a leader in robotics, power, heavy electrical equipment, and industrial automation technology worldwide.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event live stream

Join us this morning to learn more about these and more 2020 release wave 1 updates, see the capabilities in action, and explore how customers are already taking advantage of the new features.

The Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event is now available on-demand. Be sure to explore detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

The post 2020 release wave 1 launches with new apps and over 400 features appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As organizations respond to the ongoing, unprecedented situation and grapple with disruptions across their workforce due to the evolving global health crisis, we want to share the steps we’re taking to help ensure our customers' business continuity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Our priority is the seamless delivery of Business Applications services for our customers. This begins with the global response plan for our Azure cloud, designed to help ensure the continuous, reliable operation of our cloud services. We are building from that, ensuring that our Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform incident response teams are available, and equipped with all the tools they need. Consistent with COVID-19 response plans across Microsoft, we will continue pushing critical updates to our Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform services. We’re humbled and honored to support government agencies, hospitals, first responders, food and life sciences companies, and many local nonprofits on the front lines dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Our services are essential to their ability to quickly respond and continuing critical updates will help keep our services safe, stable, and available for them.

During this critical time, we want to reduce pressure on our customers and partners to absorb updates driven by end of support or deprecation deadlines. The details will vary by specific service, for example, we're relaxing the deadlines for deprecating the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement legacy web client by two months to December and simplifying the ability for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce customers to pause updates for an extended period. The product specific FAQs provide details and if you have additional questions, please post them to our official forum.

We will continue to deliver on our innovation roadmap and leverage our safe deployment models, but will provide allowances for uptake of the 2020 wave 1 release. Our April and, in some cases, May updates are already progressing through our readiness phases according to the published Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans. We expect that those will be available as planned.

However, we will defer the mandatory uptake of the 2020 wave 1 update For Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement by one month to May, instead of April, and enable one additional update deferral for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. This should allow customers to take the 2020 wave 1 updates when it is most convenienteither in the month of April, as originally planned, or deferred to May.

The work we've driven over the last two years to empower rapid innovation and protect quality is built on two key factors:

• First, the signals and feedback from our partner early access programs, release validation programs, previews, and first customer deployments are essential to our delivery for general availability with high quality. As our customers and partners must prioritize running their organizations and protecting people in response to COVID-19, we will be monitoring all channels to ensure that we are still getting the right level of feedback.
• The second key factor is reducing the number of versions in distributiona critical component of driving service quality and reliability. We will also be monitoring the pace of our customers' ability to move off older versions. As we've seen with the response to the pandemic across the world, it is important to keep monitoring conditions and adjust plans dynamically. We will continue to drive innovation and achieve the right balance between innovation and safe deployment to our customers.

One of the cultural pillars for the Microsoft Business Applications team is that "we are all in this together." Please know that “we” extends to our entire ecosystemfrom our global team devoted to your success to our partner community to everyone in your organization. These are challenging times. Working together, we'll all emerge stronger.

If you have questions about Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform services, please check the FAQs, as we are continuously updating the content with the very latest guidance and information. Again, if you don't find what you need, please post your questions at our official forum, our team will be working to answer questions and address concerns as quickly as possible.

Please be safe and stay healthy.

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Today we're unveiling new and enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across Dynamics 365 applications, as well as a new solution to help project-centric services organizations transform their operations.

Joining more than 400 new and updated features in the 2020 wave 1 release, these new capabilities expand a fast-growing set of applications powered by AI-driven insights, and further propel our vision to empower every organization to unify data across the business and use it to power personalized customer experiences and processes.

Personalize customer experiences with unified data and unmatched time to insight

Customers expect personalized and consistent experiences across every touchpoint. Many organizations, however, struggle to modernize the customer experience, often due to disconnected systems and data siloes that can't deliver the full picture of the customer's journey across websites, purchases, service calls, and mobile apps.

Updates to MicrosoftDynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft's customer data platform (CDP), will help solve these issues. We're introducing new first and third-party data connections to further enrich customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real-time, as well as enabling deeper insights with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.

Customer Insights will now uniquely enrich profiles with a combination of proprietary audience intelligence and 3^rd party data sources such as demographics and interests, firmographics, market trends, and product and service usage data. Customers can also integrate Microsoft Forms Pro, the simple, powerful enterprise survey solution, to bring in the valuable voice of the customer across channels, allowing organizations to act on insights based on changing customer behavior and perception. All of this comes together to create a holistic, 360-degree view of a customer and to update those customer profiles and activities in real-time enabling organizations to know their customers and improve engagement.

Customer Insights is built on a powerful and flexible platform that enables full extensibility. Organizations can derive deeper insights by using Azure Synapse Analytics, which combines customer data with enterprise and streaming data to improve data completeness, run high-speed analytical processing, and build custom machine learning models. This allows organizations to predict customer needs with insights and get guidance on the next best action to reduce churn and capitalize on revenue opportunities for the lifetime of a customer relationship. Organizations can act upon these insights in real-time across multiple destinations through prebuilt APIs to enable onsite clienteling, website personalization, dynamic marketing campaigns, and effective ad targeting.

As part of the wave 1 release, we're expanding the availability of Customer Insights to government cloud computing (GCC) environments helping to improve the citizen experiences essential to modern government. This means our government and public customers with higher compliance needs can now leverage Customer Insights to better understand and interact with citizens, empower employees, and transform cities at scale.

Automate sales forecasting with predictive analytics

In addition to expanded AI capabilities on our customer data platform, we're extending the ability for sales professionals to forecast sales more accurately and introducing a new, unified engagement center for inside sales representatives.

Available now for Dynamics 365 Sales and for Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, new manual and predictive forecasting capabilities empower sales organizations to have a better understanding of the pipeline, more accurately predict results, and gain visibility into future performance.

The predictive forecasting capabilities enable the proactive decision-making needed to meet sales goals. Dynamics 365 does this by extracting patterns from customer relationship management (CRM) data, current and historical leads, won or lost opportunities, contacts, accounts, customer interactions such as emails and calls, and more data sources, and then projecting these patterns into the future. Best of all, anyone can access the insights, no data scientists or tech experts needed (a big change from some other forecasting systems).

With a new engagement center designed to accelerate sales, we're giving each inside seller a streamlined way to quickly triage, research, and engage new leads or opportunities. This provides them with their own prioritized work queue to take action on the highest priority leads and tasks based on built-in predictive scoring from Dynamics 365 Sales Insights and new, configurable sales cadences.

The experience helps sellers stay in the context of Dynamics 365 and quickly move from one lead or opportunity to the next in an AI-prioritized work queue, without needing to switch views to take the next best action. Additional embedded AI capabilities offer sellers a path to a warm introduction, and guidance from the assistant.

Transform the back office with AI-infused finance insights

Not only are we expanding AI capabilities for customer and sales insights, we're also bringing the power of AI to the finance department.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, coming to preview in May, accelerates your digital transformation by bringing the power of AI into your finance processes. As organizations look to make decisions rapidly, reduce risk, and focus on strategic initiatives, it's critical to free finance from repetitive, time consuming and low value daily activities. Leveraging the power of AI, Finance Insights enables you to not only quickly understand and act on your company’s cash position, but also to take proactive action to improve it. Menial tasks are automated or removed, the barrier of developing or hiring AI-expertise is bypassed, and you’re left with insights to move your business forward.

Our continued investment in expanding AI capabilities across Dynamics 365 helps your organization accelerate digital transformation initiatives while empowering employees with insights to drive better business outcomes every day.

Optimize project success and profitability with the ability to drive operational excellence across service-centric organizations

How people work today has changed, as has the way organizations run their business operations. Companies across all industries are innovating business models to support project-centric service offerings. And while business optimization has gotten easier with the rise of mobile and cloud technology, organizations continue to stitch together systems and struggle with managing data across disparate systems. These data silos within project-centric businesses and teams are negatively impacting business model transformation, customer acquisition, employee retention, project delivery, and business profitability.

Today we're announcing a new Dynamics 365 application that connects cross-functional project teams, providing the visibility, collaboration, and insight needed to drive the success of project-centric organizations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, which will be generally available on October 1, 2020, delivers everything needed to optimize operations from prospect to cash, all in one application.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is built on our unified business cloud and leverages our rich-history across front and back office, as well as project management. We're in a unique position to connect project-centric teams around actionable data. By applying the power of Microsoft Project together with Dynamics 365, Microsoft is developing the next generation of tools to reinvent how project-centric organizations operate.

Explore new applications and features headed to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

These new and updated capabilities join hundreds of other updates headed to Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform in between April and September 2020, the 2020 wave 1 release.

We look forward to sharing more updates and customer stories in the weeks and months ahead, including at our Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch event on April 2nd. In the meantime, view the 2020 release wave 1 plans for details about all features releasing from April 2020 through September 2020 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. We're also anticipating connecting with thousands of global attendees from our vibrant community at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Dallas, TX May 67, 2020. We hope you'll join us as we show the latest innovations and help you get hands on to experience how Microsoft business applications work together seamlessly to unify your data so you can make better decisions with in-the-moment intelligence.

The post New AI features connect and extend insights across the organization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Empowering organizations everywhere to gain insight from all their data sources and deliver personalized customer engagement

There is a fundamental change occurring across industries and organizations: Data now comes from everywhere and everything. As customers have access to more content, purchasing channels, and brand options than before, the touchpoints become exponentialevery website visit, use of a product, and interaction with a customer service representative creates an observation or generates data. But this data is often siloed across multiple systems and organizational departments, making it difficult to gain a single source of truth.

With such an overload of information and choices available, organizations must demonstrate they both understand and value their customers. To this end, we've been working to bring customer experiences to the forefront of the business conversation with a new set of intelligent applications with our modern, unified, intelligent, and adaptable business applications. Today, I'd like to dig into our vision and strategy for Microsoft's customer data platforma critically important investment from Microsoft. Specifically, how it is helping organizations overcome data silos and leverage artificial intelligence to guide decisions and empower organizations to take meaningful actions for their business.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Microsoft's customer data platform

Historically, the customer interaction with a brand ended the moment they completed the purchase and walked out the doorlimiting an organization's understanding of why or how its customers are using its products and services. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organizations to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers by unifying data across diverse sourcesbe it transactional, behavioral, or observational dataas well as uniquely enriching profiles with market insights and real-time product usage.

From data analysts to marketing, sales, and service professionals, every employee in an organization can leverage AI-driven insights. These include churn risk, customer LTV, and recommended next best action, to power business processes across the customer journey that help boost personalization and build richer relationships.

The Microsoft CDP enables breakthrough experiences for customers while maintaining the strictest compliance and security standards so that all customer data is securely managed and adheres to GDPR regulations. Built on a hyper-scale Microsoft Azure platform, the application allows organizations to run powerful analytical capabilities using Microsoft AI and Azure-based machine learning models. Customer Insights can easily extend and customize with the Microsoft Power Platform for even richer data processing and customizations. Customers can benefit from the Microsoft partner ecosystem for development of custom applications and solutions to fit specific industry or business needs.

Let's look at a few organizations using our CDP to deliver business outcomes and rich customer experiences:

Empowering organizations worldwide

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) works tirelessly in over 190 countries and territories to save the lives of millions of children. As private donors and volunteers are increasingly hard to find and retain, UNICEF Netherlands found that personally engaging supporters increased their overall commitment to the organization. Key details on donors, such as their contact information, philanthropic interests, and donation history, were housed in disparate data silos, making it difficult to gain a unified view of the donor base and personalize interactions at scale. To solve this problem, the team adopted Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to quickly and easily combine data from multiple sources, analyze the data to derive insights, and activate the insights via marketing and communication channels. Customer Insights' out-of-the-box interoperability with Dynamics 365 Marketing helps the team create and optimize marketing campaigns on-the-fly, enabling UNICEF to better develop a customer lifetime value model, which will help it identify and optimize engagement with high-impact donors. Learn more in the UNICEF video below.

American Electric Power Energy (AEP Energy)a competitive retail energy solutions company serving more than 400,000 residential, small-business, and commercial customers nationwideis using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deliver efficient and sustainable energy solutions to customers. Previously, AEP Energy faced cumbersome manual processes that required lots of analysis and input to piece together various customer information for a holistic view of its customer, which was both timely and costly. With a cloud-first approach, using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, AEP Energy can now easily migrate large data sets across various systems of record into a single, unified customer profile. As a result, AEP Energy can better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure both front and back-end operations are focused and efficient to deliver quality, tailored experiences to its customers. Learn more in the AEP Energy video below.

What's next?

Thus far, we've seen great momentum and impact resulting from the customer data platform and how businesses are evolving customer engagement and experiences. Looking ahead, we will continue to innovate on the platform and plan to deliver more opportunities and features in the coming months.

The post Our vision for the Microsoft customer data platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

It's a privilege to work with global organizations every day to help them compete and innovate in a modern, data-driven economy. Our goal with Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform is to help your organization drive more impactful business outcomes and take proactive actions that will uniquely position and differentiate your business in the fast-evolving market.

We introduced over 400 new capabilities just a few weeks ago with the 2019 release wave 2. Today, at Microsoft Ignite 2019, we're announcing more major updates to the Microsoft Power Platform that unlock new possibilities, including:

• Microsoft Flow is being renamed to Microsoft Power Automate, to better align with the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) has been added to Microsoft Power Automate, delivering an end-to-end automation solution that spans AI, APIs, and UI on the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Microsoft Power Virtual Agentsa no-code/low-code app that allows anyone to create and deploy intelligent AI-powered virtual agents.
• A host of new security enhancements for Microsoft Power BI, that add industry leading data security capabilities no matter where your analytics data is used and accessed.
• Tighter integration between the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Teams, bringing the world's most popular collaboration app and the Power Platform closer together.
• A new set of prebuilt models for AI Builder that add even more advanced AI models to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps that are available to everyone.

These new features and products substantially advance our vision for the Power Platform, an unmatched set of capabilities that enable everyone to analyze, act, and automate across their organization to transform businesses from the ground up.

Be sure to watch my technology keynote today at Microsoft Ignite (or on-demand after the 11:00 AM presentation) for a deep dive into these new capabilities.

Introducing RPA in Power Automate

One of the biggest challenges organizations face is scaling and automating business processesfrom digitizing pen and paper processes, to automating complex processes that span legacy and modern applications. Robotic process automation has rapidly become a key technology to address many of these scenarios but generally requires a patchwork of automation services that need integration and management before the real work can get done.

Power Automate simplifies these end-to-end scenarios through a unified automation platform that can bridge the gap between API-based automation and UI-based automation.

Today we're announcing the preview of our new RPA capability in Power Automate called UI flows. Creating a UI flow is a simple and familiar point-and-click, low-code experience that makes it easy for users to turn manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don't support API automation. Couple the capabilities of UI flows with Power Automate's prebuilt connectors for more than 275 widely-used apps and services that support API automation, and you have an end-to-end automation platform capable of reinventing business processes for a wide range of workloads across industries.

For example, let's say you work for an insurance claims processing company, where clients fill out digital forms, paper forms, or communicate through email. The claim is processed on modern cloud services while staff also maintain cumbersome paper records and legacy applications. With Power Automate, this entire process can be automated. Digitized data from scanned paper forms is processed with AI that recognizes forms, and old legacy systems can be automated with RPAone platform that brings both worlds together seamlessly.

TruGreen, one of the largest lawn care companies in the U.S., recognizes the growing need for powerful automation capabilities.

“The need for automation at TruGreen is growing quickly, and Power Automate is, and will continue to be an important part of accelerating TruGreen’s digital transformation journey. Power Automate will help us bridge the integration gap between legacy systems and modern applications. With the new UI flows RPA capabilities, we are excited to bring automation to legacy applications with no API capability." – Ayman Taha, CIO of TruGreen

Take a closer look at UI flows in Power Automate and sign up today for the UI flows preview.

Power Virtual Agents: Enable anyone to build a no-code/low-code virtual agent

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now in preview, is a new offering that enables subject matter experts in your organization such as customer service, sales, marketing, finance, or HR – to easily create virtual agents using a guided, no-code/low-code point-and-click graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers. Customer service questions and other types of external or internal inquiries at an organization can be serviced by a virtual agent, freeing up staff to focus on more complex tasks.

There's no code to get started, no AI expertise needed, and you can be up and running in minutes. And because they're already integrated with Microsoft's Power Platform, you can use hundreds of prebuilt connectors so your virtual agents can talk to your backend systems with a few clicks or easily add capabilities like using Microsoft Power Automate to call an API.

What's more, if you want to add code or, say, some more complex capabilities, Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot Framework are fully integrated and just a few clicks away.

Learn more about Power Virtual Agents and sign up for the preview.

Power BI security enhancements help protect data wherever it's accessed

Organizations recognize the value of empowering their employees to embrace data-driven insights. Power BI helps customers drive data democratization in their organization because it enables anyone to draw insights from data with easy-to-use data visualizations and analytics to guide business decisions. As customers empower every employee with Power BI, it is critical for them to ensure that they better protect their data no matter where it is accessed.

Today we're announcing brand new capabilities in Power BI data protection.

These enhancements take advantage of Microsoft world-class security capabilities, enabling organizations to:

• Classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the same familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office.
• Enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, to help ensure data is protected even when it leaves Power BI.
• Monitor and protect user activity on sensitive data in real time with alerts, session monitoring, and risk remediation using Microsoft Cloud App Security.
• Empower security administrators who use data protection reports and security investigation capabilities with Microsoft Cloud App Security to enhance organizational oversight.

Now in preview, these capabilities engage when Power BI is paired with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security.

Avanade, a management consulting company, recognizes the importance of powerful data security solutions.

"Changing user behavior is difficult, but having Microsoft Information Protection data protection capabilities available to users directly within Power BI, a tool we use daily, greatly increases our confidence that our documents will be labeled and protected correctly," said Cem Urfalioglu, Director of Avanade ITS.

In addition to these security updates, major advances in AI and natural language, Power BI integration with Azure Synapse Analytics, and more are now available. Read more about all of these enhancements and to learn how to gain invaluable insights while keeping sensitive data more secure.

Teams and Power Platform empower workers to collaborate in a data-driven business

As organizations encourage a data-driven culture, it's important they break down silos and ensure that the right people in the organization have the data they need to be involved in the decision-making process. The pairing of Teams and Power Platform brings together the best of workplace collaboration and data-driven business into one place.

Bringing Power Platform applications to Teams means users' dashboards, apps, and automations are available within Teams, so they are easier to find, share, and use on an everyday basis. The conversational nature of Teams enhances how users interact with Power Platform applications. For example, adaptive cards and bots let users engage with these tools directly through conversation. This integration also provides IT Administrators with high fidelity control and prioritization of features.

Power Apps creators can now publish their apps directly to their company's app library in Teams, making them more discoverable to users and improving the experience of adding these apps to Teams. By the end of 2019, users will be able to pin Power Apps to their Teams left rail, providing easy access to regularly used apps.

New triggers and actions for Power Automate are now available within Teams. These capabilities streamline the completion of common team and personal tasks, such as scheduling focus time and automating document approvals.

New features coming to Power BI in 2020 include the ability to create rich adaptive cards in Teams conversations, which help users see and act on their data. An improved Power BI tab experience in Teams will also make selecting the correct reports easier than ever.

The American Red Cross is leveraging Power Platform integration with Teams to improve disaster response times.

"When we respond to disasters, we have to ensure communication and understanding both internally and with external partners. Workplace collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power BI enable different groups to exchange information and collaborate quickly when it's needed most. Being able to pair that with tools made in Power Apps also helps us gather important data so we're making informed decisions to better help people in need." – Denise Everhart, American Red Cross Division Disaster Executive Pacific Division.

Learn more about the enhanced Power Platform integration within Teams.

AI Builder unlock new low-code and no-code AI scenarios

AI Builder is the no-code AI capability for Power Apps and Power Automate, made generally available on October 1^st. It enables organizations to tailor AI to their specific business needs and their unique data without the need to hire data scientists or pro-developers to make their apps and processes more intelligent. AI Builder takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.

Today, we're introducing a new set of prebuilt AI models for the Power Platform. For business users, having prebuilt AI models means they don't have to gather data, build, or train their models. Now available in preview, these prebuilt scenarios include:

• Key phrase extraction identifies the main talking points from your text
• Language detectionidentifies the predominant language from your text
• Text recognitionextracts embedded, printed, and handwritten text from images into machine-readable character streams
• Sentiment analysisdetects positive, negative, neutral, or mixed sentiment in social media, customer reviews, or any text data

Learn more about the new prebuilt scenarios

Learn more about AI Builder in this post

Take a closer look at the new Power Platform enhancements

Browse the release notes and watch my technology keynote live or on-demand to learn more about these new updates.

Unleash your organization's creativity and innovation with a deep dive into the Microsoft Power Platform.

The post Announcing RPA, enhanced security, no-code virtual agents, and more for Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

2019 release wave 2 launches with new applications and hundreds of capabilities across Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Today marks the general availability of more than 400 new feature updates and capabilities across Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. This release waveone of our largest to dateshowcases our continued investment in artificial intelligence to unlock proactive insights and drive intelligent action to accelerate your business transformation.

The updates I've highlighted belowin addition to new AI-infused and industry-focused capabilities announced last weekare reflected in the latest release notes for Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. We'll also highlight some of these capabilities at our Virtual Launch Event on Thursday, October 10^th.

AI goes to work for proactive, predictive business results

As market disrupters know, a business can no longer function in a vacuum with teams, ideas, and data locked in silos. That's why Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in AI research to bring insights to everyone in context of the task at handa key to transforming from a reactive to proactive organization.

With this release, we're introducing a wave of new AI-infused applications and capabilities that enable more people across the organization to take informed actions and deliver exceptional personalized experiences, powered by an unprecedented level of advanced intelligence being delivered with Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications.

As announced last week, Dynamics 365 Product Insights will connect product telemetry to Microsoft Business Applications, bringing insights from connected physical products and give visibility into product performance and customer interactions. For organizations like Ecolaban innovator in water, hygiene and energy technologiesDynamics 365 Product Insights will capture real-time information from products like dishwashers, providing deeper insights that can reduce water usage while increasing product performance and reliability.

In addition, we're enhancing applications to help organizations better understand and serve customers. An update for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will go beyond B2C scenarios to allow your organization to generate insights into complex B2B journeys to better understand and serve leads and accounts. Read how segment leaders Marstons and Tivoli are finding success with Customer Insights.

Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service, currently in preview, will be enhanced with new authoring capabilities to more rapidly test and deploy AI-powered chat bots to free agents to focus on more complex issues, while providing deep insights into customer satisfaction metrics. For instance, TruGreen, the largest lawn care company in the U.S., is deploying a Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent to respond faster to its 2.3 million customers.

Browse the release notes for a comprehensive overview of new and improved features to our growing portfolio of insights applications powered by Azure AI.

Reimaging retail

The future of retail is all about connected experiencespersonalized, secure, and friction-free experiences shoppers expect.

To deliver this unified experience, retailers need intelligent business practices driven by connected data to optimize operations, inventory, supply chain, fulfillment, service, and frontline, customer-facing interactions. Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers on these needs. It's an omnichannel solution for retail and e-commerce companies that unifies back office, in-store, call center and digital experiences, providing frictionless, consistent engagement across every online and offline channel. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the third largest premium wine company in the U.S., is one of the first organizations to deploy Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Just as important, retailers need insights from data beyond transactions and clicks, such as observational data generated as customers move through physical retail spacesuntapped data sources that can help retailers make sense of their entire business, enabling them to act faster and run smoother. Dynamics 365 Connected Store delivers a new level of insight into the retail space by analyzing data from video cameras and IoT sensors to provide real-time and predictive insights to optimize the in-store experience. Connected Store unlocks the ability for retailers to be proactive in every aspect of their business, from alerting staff to restock shelves, optimizing store layouts to tracking long-term trends in shopping patterns week-by-week, season-to-season.

Together, these applications bridge data-driven intelligence with modern business applications that help retailers deliver the personalized, differentiated shopping experiences consumers expect.

More secure and personalized banking and commerce

Last week at Sibos 2019, the annual banking and financial conference hosted in London, weannounced a trifecta of enhancements to empower intelligent banking with AI on our secure, compliant cloud.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is generally available starting today, providing a powerful fraud protection solution to decrease fraud costs and help increase acceptance rates for customer payment transactions with e-commerce merchants. Learn how Microsoft reduced fraud-related costs by $76 million over a two-year period using the technology now available to every organization.

We also enhanced the Microsoft Banking Accelerator, released in July, with use cases for retail banking and sample APIs for interoperability with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BAIN). These enhancements enable banking and financial organizations to rapidly build intelligent, data-driven solutions across retail and commercial lines of business, accelerating time to value for a range of customer scenarios.

Power Platform: new capabilities to analyze, act, and automate

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Microsoft Power Platform community is second to none, inspiring us to deliver in each release the improvements and new capabilities to help you and your organization achieve more. We're excited to share this wave of updates across PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Power BI.

We're updating PowerApps with improvements to help you build higher-quality apps more easily and better engage your customer and partners. Portals, allows anyone to build a low-code web portal that surfaces data stored in Common Data Service to employees or users outside their organizations. Check out the full list of PowerApps updates.

Microsoft Flow makers will find new features for smarter and more powerful experiences that let them leverage world-class business process capabilities, including working with business processes offline. And administrators benefit from richer tooling, such as PowerShell Command lets (cmdlets) and the new Power Platform Admin Center. See what's new with Flow.

AI Builder is now generally available in PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, allowing everyone from pro developers to front-line workers to build apps and workflows that leverage AI models based on our low code platform.

For this release, we've focused Power BI updates on four key areas that drive a data culture: intuitive experiences, a unified BI platform, big data analytics, and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). Check out the full list of Power BI updates.

Attend our Virtual Launch Event for a closer look at this wave's highlights

We invite you to attend our Virtual Launch Event on Thursday, October 10^th streaming live at 8:00 am Pacific time, then on-demand, for a first look at the new innovations coming to market. Be sure to register for updates and reminders leading up to the event, and check out our October release page for detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, key dates and deep dive demo videos.

The post Release wave 2 launches with over 400 updates, new apps, and industry solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

2019 release wave 2 plan, AI Builder, updated AI capabilities, and a new look for Power BI, PowerApps Portals, and enhancements for Microsoft Flow all coming this year.

Today, I had the opportunity to join more than 4,500 members of our community at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) in Atlanta. MBAS is a special event for us because it's our chance to connect in person with the makers, thinkers, and developers that make up our community.

This is also a moment when we get to showcase some of the amazing work our customers are doing. We're thrilled to have so many customers join us in Atlanta this year, including G&J Pepsi and Grant Thornton, who joined me onstage during the opening keynote.

We're also sharing some important news this week.

Firsta first look at the 2019 release wave 2 plans! For those who want to see what's coming, you can dive into the Dynamics 365 2019 release wave 2 plan and Power Platform 2019 release wave 2 plan. We look forward to telling you more about the 2019 release wave 2 in the coming months before these features go live starting October 1st.

Secondwe're announcing important Power Platform advancements.

Earlier this year I outlined our vision for the Power Platform. Along with Satya and the rest of the leadership team, I am bullish and enthusiastic for all things Power Platform. But what I appreciate most is the work of our community and what they DO with the Power Platform.

Today, we are giving our community more tools so they can take full advantage of what the Power Platform has to offer. On behalf of the entire team, I am incredibly proud to announce the following:

• AI Builder and PowerApps Portalstwo brand new capabilities
• Accelerating intelligent automation in Microsoft Flow with built-in AI
• Updated AI capabilities and an exciting new look for Power BI

This is a great time to be innovating with Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, and I love being on this journey with you all. Please find more information below about today's news along with details for how customers and partners like G&J Pepsi are already taking advantage of this work.

Introducing AI Builder

Today, we're excited to announce AI Builder, the no-code AI capability on the Power Platform supporting PowerApps and Flow.

AI Builder enables everyone to leverage AI and machine learning to make their apps and automations more intelligent. It takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.

PowerApps already enables employees to easily create applications for your business. AI Builder now provides a way for app makersprofessional and citizen developers aliketo add AI capabilities to those apps.

The potential uses for AI Builder span industries and scenarios for banking, hospitality, manufacturing, and more. For example, an organization may want to improve customer service so they can use AI to analyze customer feedback responses, map them into categories, and generate an AI model to classify and respond to customer feedback as it's received.

G&J Pepsi, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has more than 1,600 employees focused on manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the full line of Pepsi-Cola products. The G&J Pepsi IT team used AI Builder and PowerApps to create the next generation of their Store Audit App, enabling better mobility and efficiency for field personnel whose job is to assess product needs on the shelves in stores.

"With AI Builder, we were able to easily build an AI model to help automatically identify and track our products using the object detection model. For our field worker, it's now as simple as taking a photo and letting AI builder do the rest." – Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager at G&J Pepsi.

Delivering intelligence in Microsoft Flow

The no-code AI Builder capability is also coming to Microsoft Flow. Flow provides a powerful visual experience for a range of users to build everything from personal automation to business-critical enterprise-wide processes. With AI Builder, we are now making it easier for users and organizations to optimize these processes with intelligence without having advanced knowledge of how AI works.

For example, Flow makers can now extract meaningful data from images and text that can drive logic in their processes. Today, many processes involve paper forms such as a rental or job application. Historically, the first step in processing these forms would be to have someone look at the paper and manually type in each of the fields on their PC.

Now with AI Builder and Microsoft Flow, flows can automatically pick up scanned documents from an incoming email or a file server and recognize all the content. Based on the values in the form, different steps can runfrom sending out simple notifications to performing a credit check.

Beyond parsing content in documents, AI Builder can also learn based on historical performance. For example, it can predict the risk of an application and, depending on how high that risk is, add additional approval actions to a business process. All of this is possible for Flow makers without having any expertise or experience with AI by leveraging guided, point-and-click experiences.

Leveraging blockchain in PowerApps andMicrosoftFlow

Blockchain can bring trust and transparency to business processes that span multiple business partners. Using blockchain is easier than ever with the ability to write low-code applications using the Power Platform and Azure Blockchain Service.

Applications built on blockchain using PowerApps and MicrosoftFlowcan easily create attestable workflows that bring together data from every point in the business process across the value chain. For mobile clients, PowerApps enables developers to effortlessly capture all of the information from the phone's sensors (barcodes, photos, GPS coordinates, etc.) and send it to a smart contract on a blockchain. Using connectors for popular enterprise blockchains in Microsoft Flow, you can easily integrate blockchain with popular SaaS, legacy enterprise systems, web and messaging services, and different types of data technologies.

Some industry examples that leverage the power of blockchain and the Power Platform include:

• Multi-party supply chain: Building applications and workflows that provide irrefutable proof of delivery of shipments to manage shrinkage risk between point-of-manufacturing and point-of-sales.
• Food safety: Users can get real time insights when goods that can be impacted by temperature and humidity are in transit. Blockchain can provide real time insight with trustworthy data that can help avoid costly public health issues, streamline return processes, and dispute resolution.
• Attest genuine media: Many industries have a need to ensure that documents have not been tampered with. Build applications that can attest and/or validate that media is genuine with PowerApps and Flow.

Announcing PowerApps Portals

PowerApps can now reach users external to an organization with PowerApps Portals, coming soon to public preview.

PowerApps customers can now create websites that can be accessed by external users with a wide variety of identities including personal accounts, LinkedIn, and other Azure Active Directory organizations, and enable anonymous access to content. Portals works exclusively over data in the Common Data Service and customers benefit from its robust security and advanced capabilities for modelling business processes, which now includes low-code AI with the release of AI Builder.

PowerApps Portals also comes with a reimagined maker experience, embracing the core PowerApps principle of low-code productivity for everyone. With these new capabilities, app makers can create a website from scratch using pre-built templates, and then customize the layout and content using components like forms, views, and dashboards.

Portals capability was previously only available as an add-on to Dynamics 365 and is used extensively by customers including the University of Canterbury, Internet Initiative Japan, and Wineshipping to serve millions of users for scenarios like partner management, customer support, community feedback, employee benefits, and more. With this release, we're enabling the creation of a custom portal directly from PowerApps.com using the Common Data Service, which will open new categories of use cases.

New AI capabilities in Power BI

Power BI is a popular tool that millions of users trust for exploring data. More than 25 million models are hosted in the Power BI service, more than 12 million queries are processed each hour, and more than 20 petabytes of data are ingested into the Power BI service each month.

Today, we're excited to announce new Power BI AI capabilities, and more.

Power BI has been a pioneer in applying AI to business intelligence and making AI accessible to everyone. We recently previewed several new AI capabilities that enable users to detect objects in images, analyze free-form text, build new machine learning models, and automatically understand what drives outcomes, all with point-and-click simplicity.

We have important updates to Power BI AI capabilities:

• Text and image analytics in Power BI powered by Azure Cognitive Services, and the ability to invoke Azure ML models are both now generally available.
• We're announcing two new AI visuals: Distribution Changes analyzes what makes a distribution look different, and the Decomposition Tree enables users to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric.
• We are expanding Power BI's vision and text analytics capabilities and adding entity detection and text and handwriting recognition, enabling one-click transformations for insights on unstructured data.
• For enterprises that need custom lifecycle management or further tuning, models created in Power BI can be exported to Azure ML.

And finally, we are extending Power BI's natural language capabilities. The new updates include the ability to train Q&A so it understands and adapts to company-specific language like synonyms, phrasings, or specific domains, and the ability for report authors to see every natural-language question asked so they can make adjustments to how Power BI responds.

Kinepolis is a cinema group operating 53 complexes throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Poland, as well as 44 cinemas in Canada. The company uses Power BI AI capabilities to understand how they can improve their visitor experience by analyzing the sentiment of customer reviews and tweets.

"Kinepolis serves visitors in and from many countries, who vocalize their opinion through various channels. With text analytics in Power BI, we are able to structure and analyze all this feedback. It allows us to score the sentiment of our visitor reviews without investing in the data science behind it." – Carlo Wambeke, technical lead BI at Kinepolis.

Welcoming a new look for Power BI

In addition to the updates above, we're also releasing a new look for Power BI, so it's more closely aligned to the experiences in Office 365 already familiar to users around the world. The new user interface makes it easier than ever to create reports, explore data, get answers, and make decisions without having to learn specialized skills.

We're also making users more productive through new features like report commenting which allows people to collaborate on their data, and Siri shortcuts for our iOS mobile app, simplifying how users find data.

New capabilities for a unified enterprise business intelligence platform

Organizations can now move to one modern, compliant platform as the single destination for business analytics with key enterprise-facing updates on enterprise-grade semantic models and reporting at worldwide scale. Paginated reports, available for over a decade in SQL Server and a staple of corporate reporting solutions, are generally available in Power BI this month, enabling pixel-perfect formatting and advanced export options. Additionally, organizations can encourage reuse and create a single source of truth with certified datasets, now available in preview. With future capabilities for data lineage, administrators can understand usage and plan changes.

For more information on today's news, please refer to the following blogs:

AI Builder: Introducing AI Builder for the Power Platform

Microsoft Flow Updates: May Updates for Microsoft Flow

PowerApps Portals: Announcing PowerApps Portals to create websites for external users

Power BI Updates: Announcing New AI and Enterprise features for Power BI

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