This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, supply chain disruptions are a common occurrence, leading to rapid shifts in supply and demand. This poses challenges for procurement professionals and buyers, who must deal with a significant volume of purchase order change responses on a daily basis. To address these challenges and streamline the process, intelligent and agile tools are required. To meet this need, Microsoft has introduced Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
The Copilot support for procurement is an advanced tool that empowers users to efficiently manage and assess changes to purchase orders on a large scale. By providing insights into the impact and risk associated with these changes, it greatly enhances procurement decision-making. With this tool, users can swiftly identify high-impact or low-impact alterations, enabling prompt actions to mitigate potential risks.
The technology behind Copilot support for procurement offers a concise overview of purchase order modifications, including adjustments in quantities and delivery dates. It also highlights any potential downstream effects that may arise from these changes. Leveraging the powerful Text-davinci-003 generative AI model, Copilot generates natural-language summaries of these modifications, making it easier to understand and communicate their implications through emails and Teams conversations.
Supply Chain Management Copilot in action:
Procurement: Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes
The latest addition to the Copilot support for procurement set of AI-powered tools is the “Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes” workspace. This feature is particularly valuable as it simplifies the identification and reconfirmation of changes that have minimal downstream impact. Procurement managers can efficiently focus their attention on high-impact changes, thoroughly assessing their effects on downstream orders, and directly communicating with vendors to address any potential issues. Overall, this comprehensive set of features helps optimize the entire procurement process and improves collaboration between stakeholders.
Procurement and sourcing > Workspaces > Confirmed purchase orders with changes.
The workspace lists all previously confirmed purchase orders that have been changed since confirmation. It helps the review process by identifying potential impacts on production work, service work orders, and sales orders.
At the top of the workspace, the three tiles summarize groups of changes to confirmed purchase orders and the related downstream impacts.
In preview, the grouping is predefined and limited to pegged orders that have been created by planning.
Low impact changes – This tile highlights changes to purchase orders that have no known impact on downstream orders that have been created by planning, also called pegged orders. A summary of changes is generated to help you review and validate the purchase orders.
High impact changes – This tile highlights purchase orders that have known downstream impacts on pegged orders. These high-risk changes are summarized together with the detected impacts, to help you investigate further and decide what action to take.
Impacted downstream orders – This tile summarizes impacts on pegged orders by the number and type of orders, and it shows the purchase order changes that cause each impact. This information helps you review potential downstream impacts based on the latest master planning run.
Each tile provides a “Show” link, which lets you filter the list of purchase orders and purchase order lines. The list includes columns for the original and new quantities, original and new confirmed delivery dates, and so on.
Review changes to confirmed purchase orders
Purchasers use the workspace to review and accept changes to confirmed purchase orders. They typically follow these steps.
Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact.
Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact.
Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact.
Review the remaining downstream impact.
The following subsections describe these steps in more detail.
Step 1: Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact
The purchaser first opens the Confirmed purchase orders with changes workspace and studies all the changes that have been submitted through the purchase order change management process. Vendors can submit these changes through several channels.
When a purchase order that was previously confirmed is changed, it’s moved back to the Approved state. The workspace shows all purchase orders that have been changed after confirmation.
The workspace shows two lists: one for the purchase orders and one for the purchase order lines.
The purchase order list shows the purchase order number, the vendor, and the requested receipt date from the purchase order header. To view the related records, select the purchase order or vendor link in the list.
The purchase order lines list shows information about each line that has proposed changes. This information includes the item number, product name, original quantity, new quantity, original confirmed delivery date, and new confirmed delivery date. The workspace also provides a hierarchical view of any downstream impact. The Reference field indicates the type of downstream impact, such as a planned kanban for a production order, a sales order, or a maintenance work order.
Step 2: Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact
To take action effectively and efficiently, you typically start by focusing on low-impact changes. These changes have no known downstream impact according to the current plan.
The Low impact changes tile at the top of the workspace provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a low risk of impact. Select the Show link to open the corresponding filtered view.
The purchaser reviews the changes and can then accept them by selecting individual or multiple purchase orders and then selecting Confirm purchase orders on the toolbar above the list. The procedure for confirming the changes is the same as the procedure for confirming a purchase order for the first time, and it supports batch processing. Any extension that’s registered for purchase order confirmation will also be run.
After the selected purchase orders are reconfirmed, they’re moved back to the Confirmed state.
Step 3: Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact
The purchaser will spend more time on changes that have a high risk of downstream impact. These changes have downstream orders allocated to them, and the downstream impact has been identified.
The High impact changes tile provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a high risk of impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.
Note: Only direct downstream impacts are considered. Indirect downstream impacts, such as product work that depends on other production work, aren’t yet considered.
From this view, you can reach out to a vendor using email or Microsoft Teams. Using the contact details of the vendor contact person, the system generates a proposed message text and adds it to a new email message or Microsoft Teams chat. You can then review, update, and send the message.
After you’ve communicated with the vendor, you can update the order further and then send it back to the vendor for confirmation. Alternatively, you might cancel the order and plan for alternative supply.
Step 4: Review the remaining downstream impact
After most of the order changes have been addressed, the purchaser can review the overall downstream impact of the remaining open order changes.
The Impacted downstream orders tile provides a summary of the downstream impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.
In this view, you can analyze the changes from the perspective of downstream impact and identify the purchase order changes that are causing the impact. You can then take action on those purchase orders.
A good way to focus on the most pressing downstream impact is to sort and filter the list by the date of impact (the requested date in the downstream order). You can then take action by communicating with downstream stakeholders. Those stakeholders might, in turn, contact affected customers and replan the downstream orders.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Microsoft’s Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers a powerful and intelligent solution to address the challenges of managing purchase order changes in today’s fast-paced business landscape. The tool empowers procurement professionals to efficiently assess and manage changes, identifying high-impact alterations and streamlining collaboration with vendors. With its AI-driven capabilities, Copilot optimizes the procurement process, improves decision-making, and enhances communication between stakeholders, ultimately leading to a more agile and responsive supply chain.
We’re excited to launch Free Trial | Microsoft Supply Chain Center Preview , which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news
Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Customer service agents in a digital contact center interact with a high volume of customers. Often, they handle multiple conversations simultaneously. For example, they might be interacting with three or more customers over chat at the same time.
During customer interactions, they want to capture critical information in quick notes. After wrapping up the conversation, while creating a case, they need to rewrite the information they took already in the note on the customer timeline. Or, after taking notes on the customer’s timeline during the conversation, they need to copy them to the case. Agents must perform this manual process, just to transfer the notes they took onto an existing or a new case.
Now, agents can relate a note on a customer’s timeline to an existing case or create a new case from the note, thus helping them avoid reentering notes during case creation. This expedites conversation wrap-up time and enables agents to create cases quickly.
By linking the note to a case, agents spend less time creating cases and more time helping customers. As a result, agents can have more customer conversations with improved productivity and drive better customer satisfaction.
To ensure agents can create cases quickly, Dynamics 365 Customer Service enables agents to create a new case or associate an existing case with notes they write on the customer timeline during a conversation. This feature is available for the account, contact, and case entities, which means agents can create or associate a note with a new or existing account, contact, or case.
Configure forms to create table records from timeline notes
Administrators can enable this feature from Power Apps by navigating to the form where the timeline is added. They can select one or all the tables (account, contact, or case). Then they can configure the form type and the form to be displayed when an agent creates a new record.
They can also map the notes title and notes description fields to the appropriate table field. For example, they can the map notes title to Case Title. Then they can map the notes description to the case Description. That way, these fields are auto populated when an agent creates a case from the note.
Associate notes from the customer timeline
During the conversation with the customer, the agent might capture a quick note on the customer timeline. Also, while using digital channels, the agent’s notes appear on the customer timeline on the conversation form. The agent can select the note and either search for an existing case (if case table is enabled by the administrator) to associate with it or create a new case.
When they create a new case from the note, the form opens with Case Title and Description fields auto populated with the administrator’s mapping configuration. Upon case creation or case selection, the agent can unlink the note from the current table record. For example, while associating a new or existing case to the note taken on contact timeline, the note will get transferred to case and will be dissociated with the contact. Hence, note will appear on the case timeline and disappear from the contact timeline.
Link the note shown on Conversation form Link a note shown on Contact formCreate a new case from the note and transfer note from the contact to the new case
Based on administrator configuration, agents can associate a note with an existing or a new case, account or contact.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As an IT pro, you know that staying ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly changing tech environment is critical. Your skills are key to your success—and the success of your team. Microsoft Learn has the tools, resources, and opportunities to help you build those skills and get the most value from Microsoft products and services. To keep pace with in-demand job roles and skills and to help ensure a close alignment with current workplace needs, we regularly review our training and certification portfolio. In today’s blog post, check out the latest updates.
Changing the name of the updated Microsoft Certified: Information Protection Administrator Associate certification and its associated exam
Security teams understand that compliance tools and features are essential for addressing the regional and industry-specific requirements that govern the collection and use of data. In a recent job-task analysis of the Microsoft Certified: Information Protection Administrator Associate certification and its associated Exam SC-400: Microsoft Information Protection Administrator, we recognized the need to expand this certification and exam to include compliance features. This resulted in the addition of two new functional groups (“Monitor and investigate data and activities by using Microsoft Purview” and “Manage insider and privacy risk in Microsoft 365”), which we’ve documented in the study guide for Exam SC-400. The updated exam that includes questions to support these groups was released on June 1, 2023.
Since the original titles don’t include the concept of compliance, we’re updating the certification name to the Microsoft Certified: Information Protection and Compliance Administrator Associate certification and the exam name to ExamSC-400: Administering Information Protection and Compliance in Microsoft 365. These changes are effective August 22, 2023.
If you’re preparing for Exam SC-400, you’ll be interested to know that on June 2, 2023, we added two new learning paths to help you get ready to earn certification:
The corresponding four-day instructor-led training, Course SC-400, was also updated on June 2, 2023, to support the new functional groups.
How might these updates impact you?
The following question and answer set can help you determine how this news impacts your learning journey:
Q. I’ve already earned the Microsoft Certified: Information Protection Administrator Associate certification. What happens now?
A.If you’ve already earned the Microsoft Certified: Information Protection Administrator Associate certification, the name will automatically update to Microsoft Certified: Information Protection and Compliance Administrator Associate on August 22, 2023, on the transcript in your profile on Microsoft Learn.
Retiring the Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification and its corresponding exam
Learners and organizations have shared their feedback that this certification should better align to current needs and the evolving business landscape. To focus on developing the right experience, we’ll retire the Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification and its associated Exam MS-203: Microsoft 365 Messaging, at the end of December 2023. And we’ll invest in building new exams, certifications, and training to meet the needs of today’s workplace.
Updates to Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification.
How might these updates impact you?
The following questions and answers can help you determine how this news impacts your learning journey:
Q. I’ve been preparing for Exam MS-203: Microsoft 365 Messaging. What are my options?
A. If you’ve been preparing for Exam MS-203, be sure to pass it before the end of December 2023. If you pass Exam MS-203 before the end of December 2023, you’ll earn the Microsoft Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification, and it will be active for one year.
Q. I’ve already earned the Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification. What happens now?
A. If you’ve already earned the Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification, it will stay on the transcript in your profile on Microsoft Learn.
Q. What about renewal for the Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification?
A. Learners with an active Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate certification can renew it for one year (one final time) up to six months after its retirement at the end of December 2023. The renewal window closes at the end of June 2024.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Effective communication is vital in building strong customer relationships and closing deals. Mining actionable insights from customer calls can be a daunting task. Conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales is a game-changer for sales professionals who want to unlock the full potential of their phone calls. Conversation intelligence captures and analyzes every call. Insights are available in real time during the call—in the Sales app when using the integrated Teams dialer or in a Teams meeting—and in the CRM record afterward. Managers can view aggregated data in a dedicated dashboard.
Even more exciting, the integration of third-party telephony systems brings this powerful tool to a wider audience. Businesses of all sizes can now harness the true potential of their phone conversations, equipping their sales teams with invaluable data that drives informed decision-making, elevates customer interactions, and boosts overall sales performance.
Integrate conversation intelligence with your own telephony system
We’re excited to unveil new extensibility options for conversation intelligence in the latest update of Dynamics 365 Sales. Partners and developers can now connect their customers’ third-party telephony systems to conversation intelligence using the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework (CIF). Phone conversations are recorded and securely stored in either Microsoft-provided storage or the customer’s Azure blob storage and analyzed to glean valuable insights in real time and after the call.
Integrating third-party telephony providers with the conversation intelligence capability in Dynamics 365 Sales involves three key steps, performed by a partner or developer:
Register the provider: Using the conversation intelligence API, an admin registers the phone provider’s details and obtains the list of users to be recorded. This process establishes a connection between the telephony system and Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling seamless data exchange.
Fork the media: The system directs a fork of the audio stream of a call to the conversation intelligence recorder using the Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC). In this step, conversations are recorded, analyzed, and securely stored.
Send real-time events: In the final step, the system sends real-time events from the provider’s client UI to Dynamics 365 conversation intelligence.
Conversation intelligence highlights
Conversation intelligence for third-party phone calls in Dynamics 365 Sales
Allows sellers to focus on what matters most with real-time, AI–powered assistance. Your sellers can record their calls (either manually or automatically) and get real-time call transcription with business-critical insights, automatically detected action items, intelligent note-taking, and an automatic call summary.
Empowers sales managers with post-call analysis. After a call ends, managers can access a rich summary that includes sentiment analysis, automatic segmentation, call playback, and a transcript where they can leave messages for their team members. Conversation intelligence also automatically tags calls, so managers know which calls are important and worth checking.
Lets managers better understand customers with advanced insights and interactions styles. Get a wide perspective view of customer needs and interests in real time. Use aggregated data to analyze market trends, rising competitors, and overall sentiment, and dive into the details where needed.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today Data Exposed went live at 9AM PT for a special Ask Me Anything and news update. If you missed the episode, you can find them all at https://aka.ms/AzureSQLYT. This month we’ll recap all the updates from May through July. This was a fun and informative episode, and we had great guests (and fun) with the product group and our MVP community.
You can read this blog to get all the updates and references mentioned in the show. Here’s the August 2023 update:
In May, we released a short episode on all the updates at Microsoft Build. It’s a great one to see what landed and some awesome demos from the team. Many of the updates in this blog for Azure SQL Database started at Microsoft Build.
XML compression became Generally Available (GA) in SQL DB and SQL MI, which provides a method to compress off-row XML data for both XML columns and indexes, improving capacity requirements.
In the security space, Always Encrypted with Intel SGX enclaves in Azure SQL Database with up to 40 vCores was released in public preview on the DC-series hardware. Yes, a lot to unpack there, but basically we’re enabling you to take advantage of more cores and Always Encrypted together, more details here.
On the tooling and experiences front, since our last episode we released updates to Azure Data Studio.! In May, we added support for GitHub Copilot in Azure Data Studio, GA-ed the SQL Database Projects extension, and improved connectivity (release blog here). In July, we added more connection improvements, Object Explorer functionality, addressed your feedback and more (release notes here). Go-sqlcmd, a tool you should probably go try out now, added more enhancements to connectivity, querying, and setting up your environment.
For Migrations, we released a new SQL Migration journey planning experience and offline migrations to Azure SQL Database in Azure Data Studio. We also have been releasing several things in the migrating from Oracle space – Database Migration Assessment for Oracle extension GA in Azure Data Studio, Database Migration Service Pack for Oracle in preview, Database Schema Conversion Toolkit for Oracle GA in Azure Data Studio, and the Data Migration for Oracle extension preview in Azure Data Studio. So the summary is if you are trying to migrate from Oracle to Azure SQL, we got your back and are here to help, just get the extensions in Azure Data Studio!
For Azure SQL Managed Instance, one big announcement was the public preview of blockchain capabilities with Ledger in Azure SQL Managed Instance. This is available in Azure SQL Database and so it’s exciting to see that parity land in Azure SQL Managed Instance. We also recently added updates to SSDT including support for Ledger. Additionally, the team added some great options including all subscription types in large Azure regions are available for SQL MI, license-free Geo-DR through passive standby replica (GA), higher CPU vCores available for Premium Hardware on BC tier, and export capability for Data Virtualization in SQL MI (GA).
SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is powered by the SQL IaaS Agent extension, which enables you to get a lot of benefits for managing your SQL Server Azure VMs with ease. Pam Lahoud came on and told us about the preview of Microsoft Azure Boost (https://aka.ms/AzureBoost). Microsoft Azure Boost is the infrastructure technology behind the improved I/O performance on Ebdsv5 (#DoubleSprinklesVMs). There are many different components that improve overall price-performance, but one of the key aspects for SQL Server customers is that Azure Boost enables Azure current customers to achieve an industry leading remote storage throughput and IOPS performance of 10 GBps and 400K IOPS with our memory optimized E112ibsv5 VM using NVMe-enabled Premium SSD v2 or Ultra Disk options.
Last but certainly not least, we got an update on SQL Server on Linux and containers, which we don’t talk about enough on the show. We got some guidance for deploying on Kubernetes, and the assessment API (which you’ve heard about in the SQL VM and Hybrid space) is integrated with Red Hat Insights. Also, the Ansible SQL Server system role developer version and fully supported “microsoft.sql.server” part of RHEL 8 appstream is now available. SQL Server cross-platform availability groups, which include heterogeneous replicas with complete high-availability and disaster recovery support, is available with DH2i DxEnterprise. And the Azure Marketplace image for SQL Server 2022 for all distributions is available including RHEL 8 HA, Ubuntu Pro, SLES 15, plus RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04 are coming soon.
Videos
We continued to release new and exciting episodes. Here is the list of what we released since the last News Update, or you can just see the playlist we created with all the episodes!
Query Store: How It Started…How It’s Going
[MVP Edition]: Making the Most of Clustered Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2022 & Azure SQL
[SQL Insider Series]: Microsoft Fabric (Analytics in the Era of AI)
Overview of Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions
How to achieve data virtualization on Mainframes
SQL Integration with Microsoft Fabric
[MVP Edition]: Quickly creating containers with the new, open-source SQLCMD
How do you use JSON data in Azure SQL Database & SQL Server 2022
Calling a REST service from Azure SQL DB
New benefits of Azure Arc Enabled SQL Server
Build 2023: What’s new in Azure SQL
[MVP Edition] Easy APIs with Azure SQL Database
Ledger in Azure Managed Instance
What’s new in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT)
We’ve also had some great Data Exposed Live sessions this year. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see them all and get notified when we stream.
Events If you are looking to attend some in-person and virtual events this month, the Azure Data team has you covered. We’ll be at the following events and are looking forward to seeing you there!
September 11-13: SQL Koferenze: SQL Server Workshop, Keynotes, Multiple Sessions on Data, Fabric, and AI
September 8:Data: Scotland: Free event with multiple Sessions
September 27:Future Driven Summit: Data & AI, Azure DevOps, DataOps, Power BI, integration and automation, and cloud infrastructure
November 12-17:Live! 360: Microsoft Fabric Workshop, Keynotes, Multiple Sessions on Data, Fabric, and AI November 14-17:PASS Summit: SQL Server Workshop, Keynotes, Multiple Sessions on Data, Fabric, and AI
Special highlight on PASS Data Community Summit! Steve Jones came on the show to tell us all about what’s happening at PASS Data Community Summit, including 150+ industry leading sessions from 130+ speakers, networking opportunities, on-demand sessions, and staying ahead with cutting-edge trends. There will be learning opportunities for professionals at all stages of their careers. You can register now at www.passdatacommunitysummit.com with code DATAEXPLIVE150 to claim $150 off a 3-day pass. You know that Data Exposed will be there live and in person, so we’d love to see you there!
Blogs to follow
There are a lot of blogs that I follow to stay up to date. If you want more details than I give here, I recommend checking out:
That’s it for now! Be sure to check back next month for the latest updates. We also release new episodes of Data Exposed on Thursdays at 9AM PT and new #MVPTuesday episodes on the last Tuesday of every month at 9AM PT at aka.ms/DataExposedyt.
Having trouble keeping up? Be sure to follow us on X to get the latest updates on everything, @AzureSQL.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Only months after announcing Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, employees at more than 63,000 organizations—including brands like 3M, Prada Group, Campari, and Kraft Heinz—have had the opportunity to experience some of the AI-assisted features firsthand—and the reviews are pouring in.
A common theme in the feedback we’ve received is a boost in efficiency and productivity, with employees able to reduce the time and effort spent completing common tasks. Organizations also report higher quality work, helped by AI-assisted insights and guidance, from suggested actions and content ideas to faster access to valuable business data.
Dynamics 365 Copilot
Explore what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot.
Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF), a 103-year-old football club in eastern Spain, has used Copilot to help create opportunities for more meaningful and personalized fan engagement. “From creating content or journeys, to segmentation to gaining insights—Copilot enables our teams to deliver fan experiences and business impact faster and easier,” shared Franco Segarra, Innovation Director at Valencia CF. “It’s going to be amazing to uplevel our work with Copilot.”
Northrop & Johnson, the world’s leading superyacht brokerage, shared the team’s early experiences with Copilot. “We’ve tried some machine learning-based AI point solutions before—they were expensive and not as efficient as what we are seeing now with generative AI,” explains Keith Perfect, Director of Tech & Intelligence. “It’s amazing to have Copilot built right into Dynamics 365 as it is in the flow of work, has the business context, adheres to our existing security model, and also doesn’t come with the extra cost.”
Like Valencia CF and Northrop & Johnson, we’re hearing from a range of organizations that expect Copilot to boost results across teams, from customer-facing departments like sales, marketing, and service to operations, finance, and supply chain roles.
Copilot helps sales professionals focus on closing deals
One of the first sales organizations to try Copilot in Viva Sales, launched in March, is Microsoft’s own business-to-business sales team. Nearly 4,000 sales professionals have used its capabilities, and the impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. Viva Sales was rolled out with a “customer zero” mindset, designed to create the best experience for employees to accelerate innovation and improvements for customers. According to Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience platform, feedback from the team has influenced new capabilities added to Microsoft Sales Copilot. “Sellers can get real-time suggestions and guidance as they craft emails, pulling insights from automated email summaries. It’s like having a virtual assistant right at their side, helping them to generate compelling content and ensuring that no opportunity is missed. Our sellers have embraced these features with enthusiasm, recognizing how it significantly boosts their productivity and enables them to focus on building strong customer relationships.”
Using Copilot to gain better insights faster from the data in Dynamics 365 is a strategic priority area for Sandvik Coromant, one of the world’s leading suppliers of tools, tooling solutions, and know-how for the metalworking industry. “We are very excited about Sales Copilot helping us accelerate here with opportunity summary,” shared Per Hoffner, Product Owner, Dynamics CRM at Sandvik Coromant, referring to the ability to get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes; all from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. “The feedback from our pilot groups has been very positive.”
We previously announced Copilot capabilities for marketers, including AI assistance to help brainstorm marketing copy for email campaigns, create targeted marketing segments, and use natural language to infer key insights from customer data. These and newly announced Copilot capabilities are available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights which, as reported last month, will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution.
NC Fusion, a professional soccer team and sports organization serving the Triad region of North Carolina, is an early adopter of Copilot. Marketing director Chris Barnhart shared the team’s experience. “Normal engagement runs about 20 to 30 percent and there’s a lot of factors that go into the email itself, but with the email written with content ideas the engagement was about 70 percent.” The content ideas feature helped them save time, too. “[It] helps us tremendously to efficiently produce emails,” said Barnhart. “In fact, I can tell you it was normally at least an hour, and I did it in 15 minutes, it takes me ~25 percent of the time it took before to create email content!” Learn more about how NC Fusion is using Copilot to inspire young soccer players.
Campari Group, a worldwide leader in the spirits industry, is also benefiting from the ability to prompt Copilot to generate content ideas. “Setting the tone allows Campari Group, a global company, to tailor the tone of voice for each brand and region’s communication style saving us hours of copywriting,” said Liam Barnes, Global IT Director – Marketing Technologies at Campari Group.
“It’s pretty impressive,” said Keith Perfect, Director of Technology and Intelligence from Northrop & Johnson. “Our team has been very happy using the feature. it’s making delivering great content faster and easier.”
Institutions for higher learning can also benefit from Copilot by equipping departments and colleges with Copilot capabilities to better engage a variety of audiences. “Once we share this with our teams, it has the potential to be quite transformational,” shared Sidney Fernandes, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Technology at the University of South Florida. “Students and staff won’t need to be educated on the nuances of student data or copywriting to engage the right audiences impactfully.”
Coffee + Dunn, a leading technology and customer engagement consulting firm, shared its experience using query assist to use conversational, everyday language to quickly build targeted segments. They can simply describe the attributes of the target segment—such as demographics, psychographics, behaviors, or preferences—and query assist will automatically generate the list of contacts. “Using query assist was quick and easy,” said Tyler McClain, Senior Solution Consultant. “I just typed ‘anniversary within the past five years,’ and it gave me exactly what I was looking for. This feature can further empower our clients to engage their customers with ease, and I’m excited to share it with them.”
Using AI for breakthrough customer service experiences
Customer and field service teams are on the frontline for customer satisfaction and retention. Based on early reviews, Copilot promises to help service agents and field teams to improve service delivery and customer experiences.
Firesafe, a market-leading provider of fire protection components and systems in Nordic countries, will deploy Copilot as part of an extensive customer engagement transformation. “We are excited about the Copilot capabilities for customer service and omnichannel and are looking forward to see the anticipated productivity gains for the customer service agent in real action,” explained Petter Aamot Vangstein, CDO.
Delivering more strategic value across operations, supply chain, and finance roles with AI
With Copilot, you can further unlock the potential of enterprise resource planning (ERP) by bringing together data and AI to accelerate the speed of execution and business outcomes. Bartek is the world’s largest producer of malic and fumaric acid—two key ingredients for many foods, beverages, and industrial applications. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it now has perpetual inventory sales that gives the company visibility to see inventory and customer orders all in one system. “Business Central and the Power Platform really lets us leverage a small team, and create very big outcomes,” explained Steven Chambers, Chief Financial Officer, Bartek. “As we move into more automated planning and bringing in AI-assisted demand planning, I know Microsoft and Business Central are there.”
Explore what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot—and share your review
We are dedicated to helping your employees be more effective and provide customers with amazing experiences. With Copilot, your teams can do more with less and focus on higher-impact work. Best of all, teams across your organization can start experiencing Copilot. Many Copilot capabilities are available now, with more coming over the following months. Explore more about what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot and get started on your journey today.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce the preview of SharePoint integration with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Dynamics 365 customers can now sign up to preview this capability in their test environments and provide early feedback.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service already works with your internal knowledge base to guide agents and improve their productivity. It can generate suggestions for chat and draft email content. Agents can also use the multi-turn conversational experience to discover high quality information and serve customers with confidence.
However, our customers currently previewing Copilot capabilities also indicated the need for Copilot to use substantial knowledge across external sources like SharePoint. Acting on this feedback, we are now inviting customers to participate in the preview to help us understand their use cases for this feature.
Administrators can easily configure Copilot settings within the Customer Service admin center app to include underlying knowledge sources, which could be either an internal knowledge base or SharePoint. If they choose SharePoint, they must configure and link active SharePoint portals with Copilot as shown below:
After configuration, Copilot will use the federated search framework within Dynamics 365 with graph search APIs to search for SharePoint content in real time. Copilot will then process it further with Azure Open AI service to generate a relevant response parsed across thousands of lengthy files (Word, PDF, text formats) making the content easy for agents to read and act upon quickly.
Plan for future Copilot updates
Currently, customers previewing Copilot can use either their internal knowledge base or SharePoint as their primary knowledge source, but not both. Based on feedback and collective assessment, we would like to bring SharePoint and internal knowledge bases together for Copilot to generate unified responses across both sources. The following features are already on our roadmap:
Unified Copilot response: We will be enhancing the ability for Copilot to search and index both internal and SharePoint content together to generate unified response.
Improved quality of response: Use Azure Open AI to improve overall quality and relevance of responses with SharePoint content.
Support for SharePoint site page contents (*.aspx): Enhance Copilot to include site page content in its responses while answering queries.
AI solutions built responsibly
Enterprise grade data privacy at its core. Azure OpenAI offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Copilot is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.
Responsible AI by design. We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Rolling out in preview, there’s now limited support for labels configured for user-defined permissions. This encryption configuration refers to the settingLet users assign permissions when they apply the labeland the checkboxIn Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, prompt users to specify permissionsis selected:
When a document is labeled with user-defined permissions and uploaded to SharePoint or OneDrive, these services can now process the document so that it can be opened and edited in Office for the web, the label name is displayed in theSensitivitycolumn, and the encrypted file is returned in search results for the label ID.
Labels with this configuration are now displayed in Office for the web. However, currently, users can’t apply these labels in Office for the web and if these labels are selected, users see a message instructing them to apply the label using a desktop app.
The contents currently can’t be inspected for search, data loss prevention, or eDiscovery.
Windows: Minimum version of 16.0.16327 from Current Channel (Preview), or minimal version of 16.0.16414 from the Beta Channel
macOS: Minimum version of 16.51 from Current Channel (Preview) or from the Beta Channel
Note: If you use earlier versions and co-authoring is enabled for your tenant, AutoSave and co-authoring will be temporarily disabled for documents after users apply a sensitivity label that’s configured with user-defined permissions, or users change the permissions. After they close the document and wait 10 minutes, these features are available again.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
a banner depicting the title of the blog with tagline ”Your monthly IT admin blog for all things Microsoft 365”
Welcome to the Microsoft 365 IT admin blog, your monthly source of tips, insights, and best practices for managing and optimizing your Microsoft 365 environment. In this edition, get ready for the next AMA on Microsoft 365 Copilot, learn about Bing Chat Enterprise, and the latest enhancements to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Read on to catch up about all things Microsoft 365 administration.
Join the next AMA on Microsoft 365 Copilot
We’ll be hosting the next AMA (Ask Me Anything) focused on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise on August 10 in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Tech Community. The event was a great opportunity to hear from members like you and have the team of experts answer questions. You can start sending in your questions to the event page now, and a team of experts will join us to help answer them during the event. The first AMA was held on July 13, and focused on preparing for Microsoft 365 Copilot. If you missed it, you can review the full list of questions and answers here.
Bing Chat Enterprise now in preview
At Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise, giving organizations AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. Chat data is not saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data is not used to train foundation models. This gives users access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative while staying secure. Users can access Bing Chat Enterprise using their work account wherever Bing Chat is supported – Bing.com/chat and Microsoft Edge sidebar.
To enable the preview, eligible customers can turn on Bing Chat Enterprise by going to https://aka.ms/TurnOnBCE to opt in. You will also need to ensure Microsoft Search in Bing setting in the Microsoft 365 admin center is turned on. Learn more about managing Bing Chat Enterprise here.
Have questions about Bing Chat Enterprise? Check out the FAQ here.
Highlights across Microsoft 365 administration
Let’s check out some of the latest features we launched in the Microsoft 365 admin center and how they can help you get things done.
Learn about Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive
Microsoft also announced many new AI capabilities across Microsoft 365 at Inspire. Particularly for Microsoft 365 admins, Microsoft 365 Backup was introduced to help you back up and quickly restore your organization’s data to a prior point-in-time after a catastrophic event or unforeseen data loss. Microsoft 365 Archive offers long-term storage of inactive or aging files that you might still want to maintain for compliance or retention requirements. You can also catch up on details on Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing and availability announced during the opening keynote.
Simplify controls with the Microsoft Edge manager service
Following our announcement in May, The Microsoft Edge management service is now generally available (Roadmap ID 123856). You can access the service through the Microsoft 365 admin center, Org settings > Microsoft Edge to configure Microsoft Edge browser settings for your organization and apply these settings by group assignment or group policy. Through the portal, you can also manage browser extensions and policies or view user requests for browser extensions. To learn more, read about the Microsoft Edge management service.
An image of the Microsoft Edge management service portal
Improve employee experience with Viva Pulse
Last week, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Viva Pulse, a new employee feedback experience that is now available for use with your Viva Suite subscription. It empowers managers and project team leaders to request and receive feedback from their teams at any time. Managers and project leads can choose from research-based templates to quickly create a survey and send it to select individuals or groups. They can also track feedback to understand team sentiment over time and show teams they’re being heard by working together to take clear steps to address needs.
As an admin, you must execute a script in PowerShell for these notifications to appear. After the script is executed successfully, users will receive email notifications when a feedback author requests a Pulse, when feedback providers are reminded to respond, when a feedback author is notified their Pulse request has closed, and when a feedback author shares a Pulse report. Find the script to enable notifications for your organization here.
Better plan for change with Feature release status in the message center
In continued efforts to make it easier for IT departments to manage change with greater predictability, Microsoft recently made feature release status in the message center for Teams, and Outlook on the web, and Microsoft 365 admin center available worldwide to customers. Now, you can have visibility to feature rollout status in the message center, Planner sync for the message center, and Service Communications API, along with the ability to view release status in Targeted and Standard release rings. Additionally, on the message center, you can apply filters based on the status of the releases and the timeframe of their status changes. To learn more, you can read the documentation here.
An image of the feature release status column in the message center
Stay updated
As always, stay current with the latest updates Microsoft 365 admin center from the Microsoft 365 roadmap and the message center. In addition, we also highlight new feature releases and enhancements released each month in our What’s new in the Microsoft 365 admin center article.
Comment below if there are IT admin or change management topics you would like us to explore in the future!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The customer service world has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. With the rise of digitalization and advanced technologies, customers now expect seamless and personalized experiences across multiple channels. Automation and AI have become integral to customer support teams, enabling faster response times and more efficient issue resolution.
Moreover, post-pandemic, remote work and virtual communication have become the norm, reshaping the way customer support teams operate and collaborate. Agents find themselves in silos, unable to seek immediate help from colleagues in neighboring cubicles like in traditional office settings.
As businesses strive to meet the escalating demands of customers, contact center leaders must be strategic about agent productivity. They must enhance agent collaboration and efficiency, ensuring the delivery of high-quality customer service even in a dispersed working environment.
We acknowledge customer service is a collective effort. Hence, by bringing together Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams, we aim to provide agents with a cohesive environment to get help from experts across the entire company to resolve complex customer issues which they might not have expertise on. Both experts and agents can use their preferred tools; Dynamics 365 Customer Service for agents and Microsoft Teams for experts. Experts don’t have to be Dynamics users; a Teams license is all they need to participate and collaborate effectively.
With the enhancements in this release wave, Teams collaboration features (embedded chat, swarming, and Teams meeting integration) are even more robust. Let’s dive into the details of these exciting advancements.
Keep Teams chat participants informed of updated fields
Reduce overhead for agents by automatically updating all chat participants when an essential field on a connected record is updated. This time-saving feature helps keep everyone in the know without any manual effort. This allows agents to focus on what’s important and helping experts in the chat be aware of pertinent updates.
Send a bot event update in the connected Teams chat to inform participants of an updated field on the connected record. With the suite of Teams collaboration features, not only you can start a chat with the users who are connected with Dynamics 365 records, now you can keep them informed when the record changes, without any manual effort. For example, when the priority of a case changes, all the chat participants are notified.
Dynamics links unfurled in Teams chat
Links to Dynamics 365 and Power Apps records are unfurled when pasted in Microsoft Teams chats and meetings. See the details of your business data in your Microsoft Teams chats and feel confident that the link you’re selecting is an authentic Power Apps link. Now, when you paste a Dynamics 365 Customer Service link into a Microsoft Teams chat, meeting, or channel, participants will see an adaptive card with more details about the shared link. Links to canvas apps will show the app name and record name. Model-driven app links to records show the entity type. The user pasting the link can delete the card in the message compose window before sending the message if they don’t want to send the link as a card.
Timeline integration
When you start a connected chat or connect an existing chat to a record, you can see it as an activity on the connected record’s timeline. This makes it easy for agents to get the full case view by allowing them to see any chats related to the case or record directly on the timeline.
If there is an agent hand-off, the next agent, who may not have been a part of the chat initially, can also see the conversation on the timeline. The next agent can directly join the discussion as a chat participant to see the entire chat exchange.
To enable the feature, the admin can turn on the Join chat toggle in the Customer Service admin center app. This gives users with read and write privileges the ability to join a connected chat.
Swarming enhancements
Customer support swarming helps agents connect with experts in their organization to solve cases faster. We made the following enhancements to swarming:
Guided admin setup: The guided, step-by-step setup makes it easy for admins to configure and onboard their agents. It significantly reduces the time for admins to configure swarming in their organizations, helping make the onboarding experience more efficient. Now agents can more quickly get the help they need from experts across the organization.
Swarm form UI: Administrators can add a tab, section, or field to the swarm form and customize it as needed. The changes they make will promptly reflect in the agent workspace. The swarm creation form now comes with an advanced look and feel. With the visual indicator, agents can view the progress of swarm creation and see the steps completed and those remaining.
Auto resolve swarm: When a case is closed (that is, canceled or resolved), associated swarms are automatically resolved.
With Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, collaborating with colleagues is easier than ever. Both agents and experts can stay informed about important case details without making a lot of manual updates and circling back. Try these features and more with the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
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