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We’re bringing AI-powered building to employees across the organization, with new Frontier agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers: App Builder and Workflows.
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As customer service representatives juggle multiple cases, tabs, and applications throughout their day, interruptions—whether from browser crashes, accidental closures, or system reboots—can be costly. That’s why session restore, also known as app session restore, is a game-changer in Dynamics 365 Copilot Service workspace (CSw). This feature ensures service reps can pick up exactly where they left off, minimizing disruption and maximizing productivity.
Before session restore, service reps who lost their session due to a crash or logout had to manually reopen each case, retrace their steps, and rebuild their workspace. This not only wasted time but also increased the risk of errors and customer dissatisfaction.
Now, with session restore, CSw automatically saves the state of an service rep’s workspace, including open sessions, tabs, and navigation context. Then, it restores the workspace when the service rep logs in again. Whether a service rep was mid-case or toggling between multiple records, their environment is rehydrated with precision.
Session restore is enabled by default in CSw and works seamlessly behind the scenes. Here’s what it captures:
When the service rep logs back in, Dynamics 365 reconstructs the workspace as it was, no clicks required.
Organizations using session restore report significant improvements in efficiency and satisfaction. For example:
This feature is especially valuable in high-volume contact centers where every second counts.
To learn more, read the documentation: Enable session restore to automatically reopen browser sessions and tabs | Microsoft Learn
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Across industries, organizations are transforming how they deliver value. From engineering to IT services to internal PMOs, leaders are rethinking their operating models to become more service-centric—where success depends on how efficiently projects are delivered, how accurately time is tracked, and how transparently work connects to financial outcomes.
For these organizations, projects are not side activities—they are the business.
That shift brings new demands on visibility, control, and integration. It’s no longer enough to simply manage schedules and tasks. Modern project management must connect delivery with the systems that run the enterprise: finance, resource planning, HR, and analytics.
With Microsoft Project Online retiring in September 2026, many organizations are now considering what comes next. The decision isn’t just about replacing a familiar tool—it’s about selecting a solution that supports your business model for the future. For organizations managing service-based operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers the capabilities, flexibility, and innovation to support that evolution.
As organizations look beyond Project Online and products like Project Server versions 2016 or 2019, they often share five common needs that shape their evaluation:
These needs define where Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and the broader Microsoft Cloud, deliver the solutions required to manage the end-to-end project-to-profit business process.
Resource planning and time capture are the foundation of effective project management—and the areas where Project Operations offers immediate benefit over legacy tools.
Project Operations brings project planning, resource allocation, and time tracking together in a single application that connects delivery teams with finance and leadership.
Project managers can assign resources based on skills, availability, and utilization targets. Team members can record time and expenses directly against tasks, ensuring that data flows seamlessly into cost and billing calculations.
With configurable approval workflows built using Microsoft Power Automate, organizations can align governance to their unique policies—such as multi-level approval chains or project-based exceptions—without needing costly customization or development.
For organizations that previously relied on custom scripts or spreadsheets to track resource data, this connected model reduces administrative overhead and gives leaders a single, accurate view of project health, capacity, and cost at any time.
While Project Operations is not an ERP system, it is designed to interoperate seamlessly with ERP applications—including both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and third-party systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Workday. This flexibility is a core strength of Microsoft’s platform approach.
At the heart of this interoperability is Microsoft Dataverse, a secured and extensible data platform that connects applications across Microsoft and 3rd party ecosystems. Through Dataverse, organizations can share projects, customer, and financial data across systems while maintaining a single source of truth.
For customers already using Dynamics 365 Finance, the connection is native. Time entries, expenses, and project costs automatically flow into Finance for accounting, invoicing, and reporting, eliminating the need for custom middleware or manual data synchronization. This native link between operational execution and financial management gives leaders a unified view of profitability and compliance.
Customers using third-party ERP systems can achieve the same connected experience through Power Platform connectors and Azure integration services. Whether reporting data into a corporate data warehouse, syncing budgets to SAP, or sharing timesheet data with Workday, Project Operations offers the flexibility to operate within your existing ecosystem.
No two organizations manage projects in exactly the same way. Some rely on centralized PMOs with strict approval processes, while others empower teams to adapt workflows dynamically.
Project Operations supports both models through its foundation on the Microsoft Power Platform—giving organizations the ability to configure without code.
Using Power Apps, project leaders can design tailored forms and dashboards for project creation, approvals, or time capture. Power Automate enables process automation such as notifying managers when utilization thresholds are reached or routing expense reports for multi-level approval.
Meanwhile, Power BI brings advanced analytics to every role—from dashboards that track project margins and resource utilization to executive reports summarizing business performance across portfolios.
Because Project Operations shares the same platform as other Dynamics 365 applications, these extensions inherit enterprise-grade security, compliance, and data governance controls. The result is a solution that can evolve with your organization—without the risk or cost of maintaining custom code.
For professional services organizations—consulting firms, engineering companies, digital agencies, architecture practices, and IT service providers—Project Operations delivers a complete Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution.
It aligns sales, delivery, and finance on a single connected platform, providing end-to-end visibility from proposal to profit.
Through integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, organizations can manage the sales lifecycle for their project-based opportunities. Teams can develop project quotations, proposals and estimates directly within Sales, convert them into active contracted engagements and projects, and continue through delivery, billing, and revenue recognition without switching systems.
Key PSA capabilities include:
Besides professional service organizations, Project Operations can also scale to other project-based verticals. This includes manufacturing, engineering, and construction. It also includes internal Portfolio planning and prioritization when used with key ISV and industry-specific partner solutions and extensions.
By connecting delivery with sales and finance, Project Operations ensures project engagements are executed profitably, billed accurately, and managed transparently. This level of integration is especially valuable for organizations that operate globally, where visibility into utilization, cost, and margin is critical for growth and compliance.
Project Operations is part of Microsoft’s broader service-centric application strategy. Therefore, it benefits from continuous innovation across Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, and Azure AI. Recent investments redefine project management execution—with intelligent agents, predictive analytics, and AI-assisted decision-making.
New agentic capabilities automate routine administrative tasks such as time, expense, and approval submissions, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work. AI-powered what-if scenario modeling helps project managers understand the financial or resource impact of potential changes before they happen. And change order management features ensure logging of adjustments to scope, schedule, or cost with an auditable history.
These capabilities bring Microsoft’s vision for agentic ERP and service management to life. Systems don’t just record data but actively assist in executing, analyzing, and improving business processes.
Because Project Operations is built within the Microsoft Cloud, it also benefits from shared capabilities such as Microsoft Copilot, Power BI advanced analytics, and Azure security and compliance frameworks. This ensures our customers gain access to new functionality as the platform evolves—without disruption or costly upgrades.
Whether you’re managing internal projects, professional services engagements, or large-scale programs, Project Operations is designed to scale. Organizations can start small—managing schedules or work, tracking time and/or resources within Dataverse. They can then expand to include other processes, and AI-driven insights over time. Because the underlying processes and data are in a single place, experiences can be lit up without any large-scale data migrations. Usage patterns can then evolve to include other parts of project cycle across the organization.
This unified approach helps eliminate silos between teams and systems. It also ensures that data flows consistently—from project creation and scheduling to billing and performance reporting. It also positions organizations to take advantage of ongoing Microsoft innovation in automation, analytics, and AI.
The retirement of Project Online marks a turning point. Not just for project management at Microsoft, but for how organizations connect people, processes, and financials around project-based work. For leaders seeking to modernize their project operations environment, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations offers a clear path forward.
It combines the structure and scalability of enterprise-grade project management with the flexibility of the Power Platform and the intelligence of the Microsoft Cloud.
If your organization is evolving toward a service-centric model—where accurate time capture, resource optimization, and financial visibility drive success—Dynamics 365 Project Operations provides the foundation to unify your project lifecycle, connect your data, and prepare for the next generation of intelligent, AI-powered project delivery.
If a Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution that meets the needs of your service-centric organization is what you need, now is the time to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. It’s more than a replacement for Project Online. It’s what’s next to drive project profitability from prospect to project to profit.
The post What’s Next: Why Project Online Customers Should Evaluate Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers expect more than just plain text when interacting with businesses. Traditional text-based conversations can be inefficient. This is especially true when customers need to exchange detailed information, explore options, or make quick decisions. That’s where rich messaging comes in.
Rich messaging introduces interactive elements, such as forms, carousels, and suggested replies, directly within the conversation. This enables businesses to create conversations that are not only more engaging but also visually intuitive. Subsequently, customers understand the choices faster and act with confidence.
Now, you can preview rich media messaging across both live chat and WhatsApp. With rich media messaging, businesses can deliver enhanced experiences on the channels customers use most. This reduces typing, speeds up resolution, and improves overall satisfaction for both customers and agents.
While rich messaging is already available for Apple Messages for Business, forms, suggested replies, and cards are available in live chat and suggested replies are available in WhatsApp.
For scenarios where these options don’t fully meet a business’s live chat requirements, organizations can use Microsoft’s Adaptive Card technology to create fully customized JSON-based messages.
Create rich message templates once and use them across both live chat and WhatsApp. There’s no need to redesign for each channel.
Instantly preview how your rich media message will appear to customers while designing, ensuring accuracy and a great user experience.
Reuse certain rich media templates, such as live chat forms and WhatsApp suggested replies, directly in Copilot Studio—eliminating the need to recreate templates for bots.
Customer service representatives can easily customize admin-designed templates by editing fields before sending them to customers, enabling personalized interactions.
Rich messages are more visually engaging and make it easier for customers to share relevant information. This boosts customer satisfaction and reduces resolution times.
To get started, navigate to the Copilot Service admin center, select Productivity in Support experience and then select Manage for Rich messages. Here you can start designing rich message templates for customer service representatives and bots.
Watch a quick video introduction.
To learn more, read the documentation: Create rich messages | Microsoft Learn
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Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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Business leaders are facing a new reality. AI and agents are transforming traditional systems of record into systems of action, becoming applications that not only store data but use it to drive decisions and outcomes.
In this new model, the user experience becomes almost invisible. What matters most is the foundation: structured data, clear governance, and business logic that allows agents to operate effectively.
These are agentic business applications. They can help teams scale up capacity, lower operational costs, grow topline revenue, and surface key insights on an ongoing basis for smarter, faster decisions.
But technology alone isn’t enough. Business transformation requires functional leaders to align processes with these new capabilities. That means rethinking how work gets done. Agents can operate in the background, continuously monitoring, analyzing, and acting. They surface insights and take action, helping leaders stay focused on outcomes.
Early adopters—what we call Frontier Firms—are building the right foundations now. They are investing in agentic customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERP), and contact center solutions (CCaaS), as well as rethinking how to align business processes with agents. They realize there must be a fundamental shift in how work gets done.
To help organizations move to the Frontier, Microsoft offers a suite of agentic business applications with Dynamics 365—bringing enterprise-grade AI and Microsoft Copilot experiences across CRM, ERP, and CCaaS. Organizations can extend Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio to build custom AI-powered applications and agents tailored to unique business needs.
At the core of every agentic business application there are three components:
Let’s take a look at each of the components of the stack.
Over the last year, we have launched more than a dozen business process agents in Dynamics 365, giving organizations a starting point to transform sales, service, finance, and supply chain. We’re continuing to expand our agent portfolio to deliver proactive and growth-oriented outcomes.
In Dynamics 365 Sales, the new Sales Close Agent (in public preview beginning October 25, 2025) help sellers prioritize high-value opportunities, identify and mitigate risks for deals in pipeline proactively, and close simple transactions—accelerating deal velocity and improving win rates.
Also in Dynamics 365 Sales, agents are moving to public preview and general availability, including Sales Research Agent (public preview began on October 1, 2025) and Sales Qualification Agent (with general availability beginning October 25, 2025).
In Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the new Quality Evaluation Agent (general availability beginning October 24, 2025) gives supervisors and service teams a real-time pulse on service quality across both human and AI-led interactions. Unlike traditional, manual approaches that review a small fraction of engagements, this agent uses the speed and scale of AI to evaluate the majority of cases and conversations, uncover actionable insights, and assess AI-handled interactions. It monitors quality metrics, detect anomalies, and initiate corrective actions—enabling broader, faster, and more consistent quality management.
In addition, service agents moving to general availability beginning October 24, 2025, include: Case Management Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Customer Knowledge Management Agent, and Customer Intent Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center. In Dynamics 365 Field Service, Scheduling Operations Agent, in public preview, keeps schedules agile and service running smoothly.
“By adopting agents in Dynamics 365 service solutions, we’re making every interaction faster and more empathetic. In a service where demand exceeds capacity, this can be a game changer.
Agents help gather information, route contacts based on need, and streamline resolution—enabling counselors to focus on direct support to young people.
In our fundraising unit, we’re also exploring how agents can manage inbound calls to reduce abandonment rates from 20 to 30% to under 5%—directly lifting revenue streams that fund vital services.”
—Helen Vahdat, Chief Information Officer, yourtown (Kids Helpline)
In our ERP portfolio, customers can use Account Reconciliation Agent in Dynamics 365 Finance and the Supplier Communications Agent in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to complete reconciliation faster and process inbound supplier emails autonomously.
“The Account Reconciliation Agent pilot sharpened our team’s understanding of AI in practice and paved the way for a confident move toward the Supplier Communication Agent where we see clear potential to drive efficiency and enhance collaboration.”
—Wolfgang Bauer, ERP Team Lead, Haas Baumanagement GmbH
Additionally, customers can access Sales Order Agent and Payables Agent in Dynamics 365 Business Central and Time and Expense Agent and Activity Approvals Agent in Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
To further support organizations on their journey to the frontier, we’re making it easier to get started with agents. Beginning in late November 2025, Dynamics 365 Premium SKUs—including Dynamics 365 Sales Premium, Customer Service Premium, Supply Chain Management Premium, and Finance Premium—will include 1,000 Copilot Credits per user, per month, pooled at the tenant level. New and existing customers can use these credits to run agents in the scenarios most meaningful to their business. When the included capacity is exhausted, customers can add more capacity with additional Copilot Credits as needed.
As organizations begin using agents to transform core processes, the next priority is ensuring these solutions deliver measurable value so that leaders can make confident high-impact decisions. Microsoft is meeting this need through benchmarks that provide a standardized evaluation framework to continuously measure quality of output from AI solutions. The most recent example is the Sales Research Bench, which uses a 100-point scale to measure what we have heard from sales leaders that matters most to them: accuracy, relevance, clarity, and transparency. More specifically, the Sales Research Bench evaluates how AI solutions generate text and data visualizations in response to the strategic, multi-faceted questions that sales leaders have about their business data.
The Sales Research Bench runs 200 business research questions typical of enterprise sales leaders on a sample customized data schema that reflects the complexities of enterprise environments. It assesses performance across 8 quality dimensions with scoring by large language models (Azure Foundry out-of-box evaluators for two dimensions and OpenAI’s GPT 4.1 model with specific instructions for the other six dimensions). Dimension-specific scores are weighted to create a composite quality score.
In evaluations executed by Microsoft using the Sales Research Bench framework, the Sales Research Agent in Dynamics 365 outperforms both ChatGPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5. More details on the benchmark methodology and results are available here. We intend to publish the full evaluation package including the 200 benchmark questions and sample dataset in the coming months, so others can run these evaluations themselves.
With this approach, we’re creating purpose-built agent benchmarks aligned to the priorities of business leaders. Our intent is to demonstrate a new standard for trust and transparency, providing clear insight into the quality and performance of agents in a specific business function. We also plan to publish agent performance regularly to reduce friction and help leaders make confident, data-driven decisions.
The next critical layer in agentic transformation is Microsoft Copilot, which is embedded across Dynamics 365 enhancing sales, customer service, and finance. By automating routine tasks, such as summarizing key opportunities, drafting email responses to customer queries, and predicting and acting on supply chain disruptions, Microsoft Copilot frees employees to focus on strategic work to drive more impact.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can spend less time in their CRM, and more time nurturing customer relationships. For example, Copilot can provide quick summaries of sales opportunities and leads, meeting preparations, and account-related news.
Grand & Toy uses Copilot’s real-time insights, dashboards, and time-saving features like chat summarization, email creation, and sentiment analysis to deliver exceptional customer service.
Lastly, there is the data layer—the foundation of agentic transformation. When unified, it can connect every interaction, insight, and action. With integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, organizations can unify data and workflows, so teams can stay focused and make faster decisions.
Built on Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365 agents deliver real-time insights across departments like sales, service, and finance without silos and enabling faster and more collaborative decision-making.
Banco PAN is a strong example of this transformation, using Dataverse as a core part of their Dynamics 365 solution to enable real-time integration across systems.
“Our operators now have immediate access to the customer’s history and can resolve issues more quickly.”
—Tulio Prado, Service Superintendent at Banco PAN
Dynamics 365 seamlessly connects with Power Platform and Copilot Studio, creating a unified foundation for apps, agents, and AI. This deep integration empowers everyone—not just professional developers—to build, customize, and deploy intelligent solutions that adapt to business needs. By bringing low-code innovation and enterprise-grade security together, organizations can streamline processes and workflows, reduce costs, and unlock new ways to work smarter.
With today’s business applications varying widely in capability and impact, organizations face critical choices. Agentic business applications are the path forward. Discover how leading companies are moving on that path with Dynamics 365, beyond static systems of record to intelligent systems of action to drive real-time insights, automation, and growth.
1 Methodology and Evaluation dimensions: Sales Research Bench includes 200 business research questions relevant to sales leaders that were run on a sample customized data schema. Each AI solution was given access to the sample dataset using different access mechanisms that aligned with their architecture. Each AI solution was judged by large language model judges for the responses the solution generated to each business question, including text and data visualizations. We evaluated quality based on 8 dimensions, weighting each according to qualitative input from customers, what we have heard customers say they value most in AI tools for sales research: Text Groundedness (25%), Chart Groundedness (25%), Text Relevance (13%), Explainability (12%), Schema Accuracy (10%), Chart Relevance (5%), Chart Fit (5%), and Chart Clarity (5%). Each of these dimensions received a score from a large language model judge from 20 as the worst rating to 100 as the best. For example, the large language model judge would give a score of 100 for chart clarity if the chart is crisp and well labeled, score of 20 if the chart is unreadable or misleading. Text Groundedness and Text Relevance used Azure Foundry’s out-of-box large language model evaluators, while judging for the other six dimensions leveraged Open AI’s GPT 4.1 model with specific guidance. A total composite score was calculated as a weighted average from the 8 dimension-specific scores. More details on the methodology can be found in this blog: The Sales Research Agent and Sales Research Bench.
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Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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