This is a continuation of an earlier blog post on unified environment management options in Power Platform admin center.  

Customers of finance and operations apps have historically had two choices for deploying their development workloads: self-hosted as a virtual machine on-premises or hosted on a customer-provided Azure subscription.  Both of these models have been available through the Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) admin center and have been heavily used by more than 99% of customers.  This speaks to the extensibility requirements that enterprise customers have to enrich the products, creating competitive advantage and tackling unique circumstances. 

Over the last couple of years, customers have been increasingly seeking faster and low-code extensibility options to complement their core Dynamics 365 business software.   To that end, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of unified, developer environments that IT administrators can deploy directly from Power Platform admin center. 

New environment templates in Power Platform 

Customers who have purchased Dynamics 365 customer engagement have been able to enjoy a concept in Power Platform known as environment templates, which allow for faster creation of new sandbox environments that include Microsoft Dataverse, their Dynamics 365 application of choice, and several other related apps in a single deployment workflow.  Now, finance and operations apps customers will find new templates available to them in Power Platform admin center for Finance (Preview), Supply Chain Management (Preview), and Project Operations for ERP (Preview).  This will include Dataverse, the finance and operations core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, and related apps for dual-write, virtual tables, and business events pre-installed and configured so that they are ready for immediate use. 

How to deploy these new templates 

If you want to simply try the deployment process for free, you can read about signing up for a no-cost, subscription-based, trial offer.  After which, you will see templates such as these when you deploy a new trial environment via Power Platform: 

Trial subscriptions are limited to 30 days, and you can only deploy up to 3 trial environments at the same time.  During preview, we will not support converting the trial to a sandbox environment. However, this restriction will eventually be removed. 

For the unified developer environments, during the preview these are limited to deployment via Power Platform for administrators PowerShell.  For more information, see the step-by-step tutorial.   

Storage-based provisioning model 

As part of this preview, the new unified, developer environments will utilize the storage-based provisioning model that other Dynamics 365 applications rely upon today.  For finance and operations apps customers, they will have two main categories of storage to manage: Dataverse database and Finance and operations database: 

Every new environment requires at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of available storage for both Dataverse and Operations database capacity to deploy.  Capacity is granted from finance and operations apps user licenses, sandbox add-on purchases, as well as add-on capacity packs.  For more information on storage, as it relates to finance and operations apps, see the documentation. 

Customers, partners, and ISVs can leverage this storage-based capacity model, and it will not bill to your Azure subscription.   

More capabilities for admins and developers 

Historically administrators for finance and operations apps have needed to manage time-consuming and complex tasks on behalf of the development teams they support.  Such examples include backing up and restoring copies of production data over to the developer VMs hosted on-premises or in Azure, manually deploying new environments and assigning remote desktop credentials to a developer, and managing virtual machine uptime schedules to reduce cost.   

Now administrators can: 

• Deploy environments at scale using admin tools like PowerShell or the Power Platform API.   
• Copy Lifecycle Services-based production or sandbox environments directly to the new, unified, developer environments both via the new admin center or via admin tools. 

• Add developers in Dataverse to give them permissions to deploy X++ to the new environment. 
• Add microservice add-ins to the developer environments such as Planning Optimization, and Export to Data Lake. 
• Enable customer-managed keys (CMK) for Dataverse and finance and operations apps together. 

And more capabilities are coming!  For developers, they can enjoy a simpler way of writing and deploying X++ alongside Dataverse solutions. For more information, see the related Unified Developer blog post. 

Call to action 

Ready to get started?  Check out the Unified admin experience for finance and operations apps article to learn about this new way of provisioning developer and trial workloads.  If you have any questions or feedback, please join our community in Viva Engage.  We look forward to hearing from you! 

The post Announcing Unified Trial and Developer Environments for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Introduction

In the fast-paced realm of modern business, companies often find themselves in need of agile warehousing solutions that can quickly adapt to changing customer demands. This evolution frequently involves a departure from their central ERP(enterprise resource planning) system, enabling the rapid establishment of a new warehousing entity. This shift requires the separation of warehouse management functionality from the broader ERP functions. In certain cases, the inexorable shift towards cloud-based operations drives the adoption of cloud-based warehouse systems.

The swift adoption of advanced warehouse management systems in a two-tier environment, working in harmony with any ERP system, represents a significant leap forward in operational efficiency. This dynamic solution provides robust core Warehouse Management System (WMS) capabilities, supports shared warehousing, seamlessly facilitates extended warehousing scenarios beyond advanced core WMS capabilities through pre-configured integrations with Microsoft’s suite of cloud solutions, including Sustainability Cloud, Intelligent Order Management, PowerBi, and a wide array of others. At the same time, it offers the flexibility to effortlessly integrate with numerous third-party Material Handling Equipment (MHE) systems, cloud-based printing solutions, and carrier hub cloud platforms.

Depending on specific operational requirements, businesses may choose to implement a Warehouse Management Only solution to address temporary or growing warehousing needs. These solutions offer customizable deployment options finely tuned to align with the enterprise’s unique demands. Operating in Warehouse management only mode enhances warehouse capabilities, ensuring a trifecta of flexibility, efficiency, and scalability—all achieved without necessitating a comprehensive overhaul of the existing system.

The embrace of Warehouse Management Only mode optimizes warehouse operations in an exceptionally effective manner, unlocking transformative potential that should not be underestimated. Take the plunge into these possibilities today by exploring the preview release and immersing yourself in the profound impact it can have on your business.

You can use lightweight source documents that are dedicated to inbound and outbound shipment orders to communicate between the systems. These documents focus exclusively on warehouse management, so they can replace multiple types of general-purpose documents (such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders) from a pure warehouse management perspective.

Warehouse management only mode also provides several deployment options to support your business needs. You can use Supply Chain Management to handle only warehouse operations, or you can use it to handle warehousing plus a wider range of processes (such as sales, purchase, and production orders). You can also set up a dedicated legal entity in Supply Chain Management that handles only the warehouse management processes for external systems.

To learn more about how Warehouse management only mode works and how to set it up, see Warehouse management only mode in Supply Chain Management.

Conclusion

Warehouse management only mode is a great way to enhance your warehouse management capabilities without having to overhaul your existing systems. It offers flexibility, efficiency, and scalability for your warehouse operations. Don’t miss this opportunity to try out this feature and see how it can transform your business. Try out the preview release today and get ready to experience the power of Warehouse management only mode. 

Supply Chain at Microsoft

Take a tour – Supply Chain Management | Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot: Dynamics 365 AI webpage

The post Leverage Warehouse management only mode to optimize your business  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces regional formats for reports, which adds a new dimension of customization for reports. This feature gives you more flexibility to tailor how reports print, according to your unique needs. Addressing inherent limitations, such as the inability to customize region formats for specific reports, the absence of support for designating a specific format for Customers and Vendors, and the reliance on report format settings from My Settings, this enhancement simplifies the reporting experience in Business Central. In this article, we’ll dive into the mechanics of these changes and explore how they enhance the overall reporting process in Business Central.

Behavior and Priority Order

To understand how the new regional format feature works, let’s explore its behavior and order of priority. This insight will help you grasp how Business Central determines the language and format to use for reports in different situations, so you can adjust these settings to suit your business requirements.

1. Request Page: Advanced Settings Take Center Stage

The highest priority in the report generation process resides with the advanced settings on the report request page. When you generate a report, you can specify the language and format you want to use for the report.

Advanced settings in the report request page

2. Report Object in AL: Precise Configuration

The heart of the matter lies in the AL triggers associated with the report object. Reports now include two important properties: Report.Language and Report.FormatRegion. These properties, defined within the AL triggers, play a key role in configuring reports. For many standard document reports in the Base App, these properties are set based on the Language Code and Format Region fields from the document itself. These fields get their values from the corresponding entity settings. For example, the Sales Header report gets its settings from the customer entity.

3. Language and Format in Customer/Vendor Card

If a report should be printed in the language of the recipient rather than in the working language, the developer can add code in the report to handle this. This functionality is already enabled for most reports in the standard Business Central database. The document is printed in the language that is specified in the Language Code field on the Customer or Vendor Card page.

Example of Language and Format Region Codes on the Customer page

4. Language and Format in My Settings

If the report properties mentioned earlier aren’t configured within the AL triggers, Business Central then refers to the settings in My Settings. For example, consider a scenario where a regional format isn’t defined for a customer. In this case, when you print documents associated with the customer, the Report.FormatRegion property won’t have a specific regional format set. Consequently, Business Central will turn to the regional format setting in My Settings as a fallback. While My Settings had a more prominent role in earlier versions, its current function is to step in when no alternative settings are available.

By using this order of priority, Business Central ensures that the report output language and format are based on the most relevant and specific configurations. This approach gives you greater control over language and format customization for individual reports. Ultimately, this feature streamlines the reporting process, making it more efficient and user-centric.

The post Adding Regional Formats to Reports in Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.

Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.

Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.

With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.

Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.

Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.

Helping to ensure our customers’ success

Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.

MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

__________________________________________________________________________

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Join us at the second annual Power Platform Conference, sponsored by Microsoft, October 1-6 in Las Vegas! Discover, connect, and explore in-person across keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more – dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform—Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents—and Dynamics 365 applications; and featuring the latest on AI-infused experiences, including Copilot. You don’t want to miss this unique opportunity to learn directly from leaders and community experts!

Learn more below and register today for updates leading up to the event. We look forward to connecting with you in Las Vegas!

Power Platform Conference at-a-glance

WHAT: The 2^nd annual Power Platform Conference, featuring more than 100 speakers, 140+ sessions, 18+ workshops, and 35+ exhibitors. This is your opportunity to connect – and reconnect – with users from around the world, build personal and professional relationships, and gain valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications – including AI.

WHERE: MGM Grand, Las Vegas, Nevada

WHEN:  Kicking off October 1 and 2 with pre-conference workshops, the event runs October 3-5. 2023, ending with post-conference workshops on October 6

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Whether you’re a business leader, IT pro, developer or consultant, you’ll come away with the knowledge and skills you need to modernize your organization. Join thousands of other Power Platform and Dynamics 365 users, MVPs, technical experts from Microsoft and our partner community to gain deep insights, learn directly from Microsoft engineers, develop new skills to level-up in the workplace, and gain best practices to bring a new level of innovation and efficiency at your organization. You’ll also get a sneak peek at the latest updates and future roadmaps, see live demos, and get a chance to ask questions directly to the experts.

WHAT TO EXPECT: The learning-packed days feature more than 140 activities presented by Microsoft team members, Microsoft MVPs. and community experts—including:

• Keynotes from thought leaders at Microsoft, who will provide insight into the future of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Featured speakers include Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Platforms; Thomas Dohmke, Chief Executive Officer, GitHub; Sumit Chauhan, Corporate Vice President, Office Product Group; and Arun Ulagaratchagan
• Corporate Vice President, Azure Data.
• Specialized sessions designed to deliver skills and best practices that be applied right away, including these sessions for Dynamics 365 users:
  • 10 Fantastic User Adoption Tips for Dynamics 365 CRM
  • How Supply Chain Center Unlocks the Power Platform
  • Extending Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement First Party Apps with Power Automate
  • What the Avengers Taught Me About Working with Dynamics 365 Developers
  • Revolutionizing Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Generative AI
  • Dynamics 365 Copilot Extensibility
  • Introduction to Dynamics 365 for the Microsoft 365 Guy / Gal
  • Unveiling the Magic: Inside Copilot in Dataverse, Empowering Low-Code Makers
  • Power Platform Release Planner – Your New Superpower!
  • Enable Context Sensitive Support and Training in Dynamics CE and Reduce Your Support Costs
  • And many more!
• Workshops, taking place on October 1, 2 and 6 provide in-depth, hands-on learning to equip you in a range of skills. View the full workshop schedule.
• Live question and answer panels, as well “ask the expert” breakout sessions—your opportunity to connect directly with experts at Microsoft.

Don’t delay—register for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference and reserve your hotel room at the MGM Grand today. We can’t wait to see you in Las Vegas!

The post Extend your Dynamics 365 skills at the second Power Platform Conference this October in Las Vegas appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.