On July 18, 2023, we published the 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between October 2023 and March 2024. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features, including AI capabilities and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

This release wave builds on our commitment to create applications and experiences that add value to every role by breaking down silos between data, insights, and people. New capabilities empower new ways to make informed decisions with AI-guided insights and suggested actions, easier ways to automate tasks and processes, and collaboration seamlessly integrated into the flow of work, plus, new low-code ways for anyone to build solutions.

Discover a whole new level of convenience in reviewing release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform with the release planner. Experience unparalleled flexibility as you personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences. Stay organized, stay informed, and stay in control as you effortlessly navigate through multiple active waves of plans. For more information, visit releaseplans.microsoft.com.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Marketing will bring enhancements to Copilot features empowering marketers to quickly create new experiences and will bring unprecedented levels of personalization to email content, images, and layouts. Additionally, business-to-business (B2B) dashboards and directly assigning leads to the right sales rep will align marketers and sellers, enabling them to act as a unified team across the buying journey.

Dynamics 365 Sales will focus on enabling sales organizations to prioritize and manage digital sales processes through enhanced sequence capabilities. We will allow users to assign and monitor lead assignment status with enhanced lead assignment capabilities by providing recommendations, summarizing data, retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within flow of work.

Viva Sales is reimagining how sellers work by delivering advanced AI capabilities like email summarization, CRM recommendations, sales email composition, meeting summarization, and real-time sales tips. Additionally, we are making further investments to collaboration spaces in Microsoft Teams and will deliver new sales Copilot experiences that accelerate deal progression and close sales faster.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot capabilities, Join me On Teams, and visual enhancements to the agent workspace, ability to see live chats and voice calls in Inbox and personalizing size of conversational control. Additionally, we are making enhancements to the voice channel, call dialer improvements, and routing calls to agents with longest idle time.

Dynamics 365 Field Service updates will include new capabilities for frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers. We are delivering several top requests such as converting quotes to work orders, enhancing inspections, and evolving our resource scheduling capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Finance is focused on enhancing organizations’ visibility into their data, continued enhancements for accounts payable and bank statement automation, and expanding out-of-the-box country coverage in Latin America. Additionally, the team will deliver further automation of complex tax scenarios and e-invoicing requirements for new countries and provide organizations ability for business model expansion and agility.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to improve and optimize business processes to deliver the agility and resilience needed for businesses to thrive in an increasingly complex business environment. The sales and procurement processes will be further enhanced, manufacturers will enjoy greater flexibility, and warehouse processes related to counting, customer returns, and product receipts will be improved.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is investing in enhancements to services procurement scenarios and project contracting and new functionalities and scenarios in pricing models will support the evolving patterns in the service-centric economy. Additionally, improvements to intelligent resource recommendations will provide suggestions based on experience, cost, and utilization across employees and subcontractors.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will be improving recruiting experiences with functionally rich and intuitive experiences that target recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers. We will expand the human capital management ecosystem to include learning management system integration through public APIs using Microsoft Dataverse along with expanding our payroll partner network.

Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including Object Anchors, Azure Remote Rendering, and availability on Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High. Additionally, we are focusing on features allowing seamless integration with systems of record allowing customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data.

Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to enable the effortless creation of engaging product content for digital commerce sites. New B2B investments allow distributors to view, accept, and reject orders from a centralized dashboard that enables B2B sellers, distributors, and buyers to all work in the same place.

Dynamics 365 Business Central will focus on core functionality to help companies manage their intercompany and consolidations across environments. We will continue to enhance our Copilot capabilities and will further improve our warehouse capabilities, create more Power Automate templates, and provide developers with more capabilities for automating testing of dependent apps.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is enhancing our Copilot features to allow you to ask questions in simple words, to quickly receive insights, and action these immediately. New capabilities in real-time data management will provide the latest view of your customers and easy access to insights within Dynamics 365 apps will allow your team to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across the customer’s lifecycle.

Microsoft Supply Chain Center is enabling resilient supply chain with enhancements in key areas such as Intelligent Order Management for purchase order orchestration, seamless collaboration with external partners via Supplier portal, and Copilot. Additionally, the team will be bringing Advanced Data Analytics to enable Insights to Action as well as new Network Inventory Optimization capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI is improving the creation experience for individuals by improving and aligning our experiences with Microsoft 365, bringing more parity on the web, and bringing the Power Query diagram view into Power BI Desktop. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to meetings and multitasking. For organizations, we are enabling Git and source control integration to help developers maintain and collaborate on their business intelligence solutions.

Power Apps is expanding the use of Copilot to bring AI-assisted experiences to increase developer productivity, bring natural language to all users, and give insights to admins. We will bring modern controls and rich collaborative experiences to users, as well as improved deployment and governance support to ensure low-code can be enabled organization wide.

Power Pages continues to make strides in the Copilot maker experience to enable building a site. Managed environments will include Power Pages capabilities for maker usage and onboarding. For data, you can connect easily to data where it exists today. Low-code makers can collaborate and detect co-presence.

Power Automate will continue to make it easier to get started building new flows by using natural language across cloud flows and desktop flows, and by improving process mining to jumpstart creation of automation and authoring experiences. Additionally, we’re making it easier to manage work at scale by introducing unified activity view and deeper notifications on capabilities across the product. 

Power Virtual Agents will bring general availability for capabilities including Multi-Lingual bot support, Generative Answers and Actions, Standalone interactive voice response (IVR) and IVR integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and our integration with the Conversational Language Understanding service. Additionally, we will continue to enhance our offering for customers by delivering on new Enterprise Trust capabilities.

AI Builder will allow makers to easily process structured and unstructured documents. Using the power of GPT, responses to customer requests can be pre-generated according to enterprise guidelines and will be available in a human validation station allowing makers to easily review and enhance content that is automatically generated from intelligent copilots.

2023 release wave 2 early access period

Starting July 31, 2023, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2023. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2023 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, or visit the early access FAQ page. 

Release planner

Personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences.

View the release planner

The post 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Copilot is breaking down data silos, turning insights into actions, and giving customers a new reason to embrace the cloud.

Since March, when we introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot—the world’s first copilot for both customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—and Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform, we’ve seen an incredible response with more than 63,000 organizations experiencing Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Customers like Campari Group, Leatherman Tool Group, and Northrop & Johnson are able to transform how work is done, from the front office to the back office. Copilot assists employees wherever they are working, surfacing valuable business data and delivering business insights so they can focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. And with this momentum in AI, it’s a great time for our customers to move to the cloud.

Microsoft Sales Copilot

Empowering sellers to increase productivity and personalize customer interactions.

Learn more

Introducing Microsoft Sales Copilot

Today, we are announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot—a role-based copilot designed for sellers that empowers them to increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. Designed to be a seller companion, Sales Copilot can be accessed in the tools where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce.

Sales Copilot saves sellers time with CRM task automation, auto-generated email or meeting summaries, and more. Sellers can go from one customer meeting to the next feeling prepared, armed with AI-powered, real-time insights such as top opportunities and customer opportunity summaries. Sales Copilot also helps sellers with customer follow-up by generating AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as contextual emails based on Outlook and CRM data.

Microsoft Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, kick-started our work of transforming seller experiences, and these capabilities are now part of Sales Copilot. In our own sales organization at Microsoft, more than 10,000 sellers have been using Sales Copilot. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers report completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent stated that Sales Copilot helped them improve productivity.

Today, we’re also announcing new Sales Copilot capabilities. Sellers can now: 

• Get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Create contextual emails that utilize customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more—in Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Get real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers to stay ready to handle objections.

“Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel. With this capability in the hands of our sellers, they can spend more time equipping organizations with best-in-class security solutions to help make our world a safer place.”

—Philip Eklund, Vice President of Client Engagement Platform, Securitas

“At Investec, we are very excited to see how we can leverage Microsoft Sales Copilot and AI within the Microsoft stack to connect our internal teams and to enhance our understanding further of prospective and current clients to ensure we are providing a best-in-class experience.”

—Dan Speirits, CRM Product Manager, Investec

Sales Copilot is generally available today both as a standalone subscription and included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses at no additional cost, with the new capabilities above rolling out this month.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: AI-powered customer insights and journeys

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is at the heart of what sellers, marketers, and customer service agents do. From building brand loyalty and generating leads to addressing customer issues and closing deals, these roles all rely on knowing the customer in the context of their journey with the brand. Yet, limitations in managing and harnessing customer data in meaningful ways, coupled with organizational silos, have prevented organizations from delivering and realizing the value of a truly connected customer journey.

To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution and continue investments into real-time marketing. In March, we announced content ideas, query assist, and dialogue with data—copilot capabilities for brainstorming marketing copy for email campaigns, creating new targeted marketing segments, and using natural language to infer key insights from your customer data and support better business outcomes. These copilot capabilities are available now for use, and we’re adding enhancements in the coming months to include the ability to refresh and improve existing marketing content as well as to summarize audience definitions and suggest improvements to simplify definition.

Today, we also announce two new copilot capabilities for marketers—all included in the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights subscription. The new capabilities help you:

• Easily style your email, forms, and event registration pages to perfectly match brand guidelines (as simple as using an existing website) using natural language, so you can deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience.
• Use natural language to easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, so customer actions can be responded to appropriately and quickly, generating sales leads or increasing customer satisfaction.

These new capabilities will start rolling out in preview next month. The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering will be generally available on September 1, 2023.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unlocks the full potential of your customer data and elevates customer experiences with predictive real-time insights, contextual and relevant customer journeys, and built-in next-generation AI. When customers combine the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they can create even more seamless leads-to-sales-to-retention cycles with differentiated capabilities, including these features that are available today:

• A 360-degree view of the customer profile, associated marketing interactions, and predicted customer lifetime value to guide both sellers and service agents in their customer interactions.
• Ability to surface the next best action to the sales team or service team when a lead engages with the marketing team.

“Super exciting—it’s the right move to bring together the customer data and journey capabilities into a single solution”… “this will enable our team to deliver more cohesive experiences quicker and easier.”

—Keith Perfect, Director of Technology & Intelligence, Northrop & Johnson

“At Leatherman, we are thrilled about the potential of generative AI and Microsoft Copilots to advance our business. We are beginning to realize the benefits of improved productivity, streamlined processes, and personalized customer experiences. This technology will undoubtedly propel us towards greater innovation and success.”

—Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group

Customer service organizations around the globe are using AI technologies to improve service delivery and customer experiences. As examples, AB InBev and Virgin Money are empowering their customer service departments with tailored chatbots built with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Within minutes, businesses can train a bot using natural language to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications, and web data through Bing. Virgin Money’s chatbot addresses more than 195,000 customer interactions a month, helping their service agents to focus on more complex customer inquiries. In the next few months, we’ll be rolling out additional role-based copilots, similar to Microsoft Sales Copilot, that will help customer service agents be more productive and better engage with their customers using the innovation of Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Learn more about Power Virtual Agents.

AIM for the future with Microsoft

Copilot is redefining productivity, efficiency, and collaboration across business workflows. However, today many businesses are challenged to access new technology innovations, like AI, to improve profitability and maintain a competitive edge because they are still operating on legacy on-premises solutions. At Microsoft, we are committed to helping customers gain access to and take advantage of AI capabilities, starting now.

So, today, we’re also announcing AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move), a brand-new program that offers a tailored path for our customers to move from on-premises to cloud-first Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications.

With AIM, customers of all sizes can accelerate their migration to the cloud to adopt AI-powered technologies starting with AIM assessments. These assessments are designed to help customers understand the business value, expected outcomes, and key steps and dependencies for moving their on-premises business applications. Customers can innovate faster to stay ahead by using the proven Success by Design methodology from Microsoft to implement Dynamics 365 and go live with confidence. Customers get expert implementation guidance and services from FastTrack and its certified partners. And finally, they’ll also be able to move with agility and scale as their business grows. AIM provides exclusive offers that help customers optimize their investments and transform the business processes in an incremental manner.

AIM is a comprehensive offering that unlocks the potential of AI-powered business systems while reducing costs, providing agility for business model innovation, and operating securely with resilience. AIM provides access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, assessments, offers, tools, and support to give customers a faster route to innovation and success.

Get started today with AIM and future-proof your business.

Looking forward to Dynamics 365 solutions

• Learn more about Microsoft Sales Copilot.
• If you are an existing Dynamics 365 Sales or Marketing or Customer Insights customer, start using the new capabilities in preview. To learn more about the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering, read more here.
• If you are not a customer yet, learn more and sign up for a trial on our website.
• If you are a customer using ERP and CRM systems on-premises, and want to migrate to Dynamics 365 in the cloud to accelerate adoption of AI-powered technologies, get started today with AIM.

The post Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and a new cloud migration program appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile is a robust and scalable mobile application created for your frontline workers. With the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse, you can customize and configure the mobile application to meet your unique business needs. In this post, we’ll explore the most important things you can do—and not do—to create the best possible experience for your frontline workers when you implement Field Service Mobile.

5 “Dos” when you implement Field Service Mobile

Do use “mobile offline“ for frontline workers

Frontline workers often perform tasks in areas with variable network connectivity. Online-only applications can experience slow performance when network connections are poor. Responses can be delayed or even fail when the network isn’t available.

Using offline-first mode with Field Service Mobile provides a consistent user experience for frontline workers regardless of network conditions. Even if the network is often available, offline mode has advantages for your organization.

• The offline-enabled application stores and retrieves data from a local database on the device. App performance improves without the dependency on network calls to fetch data from the server.
• When a network is available, the offline application automatically synchronizes data with the server. Without a network connection, the sync pauses until the device is back online. Frontline workers can focus on completing their tasks without worrying about network connectivity.
• Frontline workers’ job progress is not delayed by long waits or networking errors in cases when they temporarily lose network access.

Learn more about offline mode:

• Field Service offline overview
• Offline profile guidelines
• Offline capabilities and limitations

Do keep the mobile workflow simple

When configuring Field Service Mobile, you have control over the precise layout of forms and fields. It’s important to keep core user scenarios in mind when defining the layout of your forms to create a streamlined experience. Focus your customizations on making the interface intuitive and efficient. This is especially useful for new employees to help them familiarize themselves with the necessary processes and steps to complete their work.

Here are some suggestions to simplify the application:

• Use fields in a logical sequence. Avoid forcing users to move between forms.

• Consider performance when you lay out form fields and tabs. Fields that are off-screen are loaded on a delay to avoid impacting the user accessing data that’s visible on the screen. However, sub-grids and charts are loaded with the initial form and can have an impact on performance if they’re added to the form’s default tab.

• Use Work Order Service Tasks, Services, and Products. These out-of-the-box tables help guide frontline workers to complete a work order.

Do minimize customizations

Field Service Mobile provides much of the necessary app experience out of the box, but there are times when business requirements necessitate business logic unique to your organization.  When customizations are necessary, follow best practices and use common Power Platform capabilities. This enables your organization to get the latest new features and enhancements sooner. It also helps to improve supportability and lower maintenance costs.

We recommend documenting your customizations. This helps you to understand changes and set yourself up for success when making future revisions.

Do train users and use feedback for improvements

Training your users on how to use the app and any unique workflows leads to higher productivity and satisfaction. Training should include a feedback loop to assess user satisfaction and be responsive to misunderstandings or requested changes that will improve the frontline workers’ workflow.

Do take advantage of documentation and the Field Service community 

A wealth of information is available in Field Service documentation and learning sites. Help is also available in the community-driven Field Service forum. Use these resources to build solid understanding of Field Service, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform.

General documentation:

• Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app overview

Customization:

• API reference for model-driven apps
• Debug JavaScript code for model-driven apps
• Client-side scripting for model-driven apps
• Best practices for client-side scripting

Community support and feature requests:

• Dynamics 365 Field Service – Forums, Blogs, Support
• Field Service Mobile ideas

5 “Don’ts” when you implement Field Service Mobile

Don’t skip user acceptance testing 

Assessing the end-to-end application in real-world scenarios with your organization’s customizations and data is critical to a successful rollout. This can be a challenge when introducing diverse Field Service scenarios in addition to complex online and offline capabilities.

• Focus testing on the “happy path” workflow through the application. Make sure frontline workers can complete that workflow without error in various situations.
• Test with the same set of devices that users will have.
• Test with the same security role and data access that users will have.
• Test with production-level amounts of data.
• Test offline mode in variable network conditions emulating real-world usage.
  • Strong network access: Wi-Fi or stable cellular networkNo network access: Device disconnected
  • Intermittent or ‘flaky’ network access: Weak or variable cellular signal or areas of high latency
• Test customizations and make sure they work well on different devices with the network and in offline scenarios.
• Enable a feedback loop with your tests. Listen closely to actual users who are taking part in user acceptance testing. Plan a phase to incorporate feedback, which will help users during the final rollout.

Don’t use low-performance hardware or outdated software 

Mobile devices evolve quickly, and it’s best to keep up to date by using recent hardware with sufficient memory and processing power. Using modern, high-performance mobile devices increases productivity through faster access to data and better battery life. Additionally, apps on modern devices are more reliable and less prone to slowdowns or crashes.  

Field Service Mobile recommends evaluating the device based on CPU benchmark scores as given in the system requirements documentation.  

Don’t implement offline mode without understanding data needs

It’s highly recommended that you use offline mode with Field Service Mobile. When implementing offline mode, plan based on your scenarios and data needs for a successful experience for your users.

Include only the required data. It’s important to take a minimal amount of data offline as required for frontline workers to perform their work. Reducing data helps with the sync time, cellular data usage, device battery usage, and device storage. It’s important to understand users’ true data needs and how security roles influence data access.

Minimize the number of relationships between tables to reduce query complexity. The amount of data isn’t the only factor to consider. Complex queries with multiple joins against large tables can also have a high impact on offline sync time.

Avoid frequent schema changes. Schema changes may force the redownload of tables that had changes, resulting in longer sync times.

Be aware of server-side business logic. The offline-enabled Field Server Mobile application syncs data from the server at regular intervals. If part of a workflow depends on interaction with the server, the response may take minutes to return to the client when the network is available and not at all if the user is truly offline. It’s recommended that you move as much business logic to the client as possible to reduce wait time and dependency on the network.

Understand limitations. There are limitations on the offline capabilities of the Power Platform.

Refer to the offline profile guidelines for more information.

Don’t design a workflow that includes switching applications or context 

Try to bring as much of the Field Service workflow into the Field Service Mobile application as possible so frontline workers don’t need to switch between multiple applications. Maintaining multiple applications is time-consuming and frustrating for the user and increases organizational overhead. Use the Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) to build custom experiences, bringing in other data sources when necessary.

If alternate applications are required, try to ease the burden of context switching by using deep links to navigate between the apps.

Don’t reuse web forms on mobile devices 

A benefit of working on the Power Platform is being able to reuse forms on both web and mobile. This capability can make development of your form more efficient, reduce maintenance, and provide a common user experience regardless of how the form is accessed.

However, a form intended for use on a larger-screen device may have information that’s not necessary for a technician using the mobile application. For this reason, we recommend creating mobile-specific forms in some cases to provide an optimized experience that contains only the data that’s necessary for the user.

Conclusion

Field Service Mobile is a powerful application that brings the robust capabilities of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform into the field. Following these best practices and avoiding common mistakes will help you implement Field Service Mobile successfully.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post Top 5 “dos and don’ts” when you implement Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Collaboration spaces in Viva Sales, transforming the way sales teams collaborate. Collaboration is essential for sales success, yet many organizations struggle to stay organized and find the right digital tools to bring them together. In the pursuit of closing deals, sellers find themselves collaborating with an average of over 15 cross-functional teams within their organizations, while simultaneously serving their customers. This intricate web of interactions adds a significant layer of complexity to their already demanding work.

With Collaboration spaces, sellers now have an organized and effortlessly created space, tailored to their needs, where they can collaborate seamlessly with their colleagues and customers.

Collaboration made easy with Sales templates

Sales templates in Viva Sales simplify the process of creating purpose-built Collaboration spaces in Microsoft Teams, directly linked to D365 or Salesforce accounts or opportunities. Collaboration spaces are set up with predefined channels and pinned apps, providing a ready-made environment for effective collaboration built on the secure and trustworthy framework provided by Teams.

Once set up, sales teams can conveniently access these Collaboration spaces from the Viva Sales app in Outlook or directly from the Sales app, within the context of their accounts or opportunities. This eliminates the hassle of searching for the right place to collaborate, saving valuable time for the sales team.

We are excited to offer two sales templates as part of this release:

1. Account team template: The Account team template is designed for seamless collaboration within account teams and with customers. Applied at the team level and linked to a CRM account, this template provides a comprehensive solution. It comes equipped with predefined channels and pre pinned apps, ensuring a smooth and efficient workflow for effective collaboration.

2. Deal room template: The Deal room template is tailored for focused collaboration on deal related activities. Applied at the channel level and linked to a CRM opportunity, this template provides a dedicated space for efficient teamwork. With predefined channels and pre pinned apps, it streamlines communication and enhances productivity, allowing sales teams to effectively collaborate and drive successful deal outcomes.

Eliminate set-up overhead for effortless teamwork

Setting up a Collaboration space is now easier than ever. With just a few clicks, sellers can create their own space for collaboration. By clicking on the ‘Set up account team’ or ‘Set up deal rooms’ button from Collaborate in Teams card in Viva Sales app within Outlook, sellers can quickly get the set up going. The process involves three simple steps: choosing a new/existing team, reviewing default team/channel names, and adding recommended team members to new teams.

Convenient access within sales workflows

Once set up, sales teams can conveniently access these Collaboration spaces from the Viva Sales app in Outlook or directly from the D365 Sales app, within the context of their accounts or opportunities. This eliminates the hassle of searching for the right place to collaborate, saving valuable time for the sales team.

Next steps

New to Viva Sales? Sign up here: Microsoft Viva Sales | Microsoft Viva
Learn more about Collaboration spaces: Introducing Collaboration spaces for sales teams

The post Purpose built Collaboration spaces in Viva Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Join me, Lori Lamkin, and my esteemed colleague Nathalie D’Hers, as we take you on an extraordinary journey through the development, deployment, and continuous improvement of Microsoft Viva Sales. As the Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Dynamics 365 Customer Experiences, I bring extensive leadership experience and strategic vision to guide the product team responsible for Viva Sales. Viva Sales is a tool that maximizes Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce seller teams’ productivity with AI-assisted experiences in Microsoft 365 apps. Nathalie, another accomplished CVP, leads the deployment efforts across Microsoft, positioning the Microsoft sales field as customer zero. Together, we bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to revolutionize the way sellers engage with customers through Viva Sales. In this Q&A session, we will share our insights, experiences, and the remarkable story of Microsoft’s journey in unlocking the full potential of Viva Sales. Get ready to be inspired!

Rapid deployment: Unleashing the potential of Viva Sales

Lori: It’s been six months since you’ve deployed Viva Sales, what results are you seeing? What key considerations did you have when rolling out a generative AI tool like Viva Sales on a global scale?

Nathalie: Viva Sales is deployed across Microsoft. Being customer zero has been invaluable in this process. It has allowed us to confirm the product, learn important insights, and make improvements along the way. We’ve been focused on turning on Copilot features to enhance the seller experience, and the feedback we’ve received from our own teams has been instrumental in refining and perfecting the deployment. I’m so excited to partner with our teams to see the first commercial solution at Microsoft to combine Copilot and Viva Sales.

Since the launch of Copilot in March, we have seen incredible adoption with nearly 4,000 users taking advantage of its capabilities. The impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. It’s encouraging to see the positive response from our users and the value they are experiencing. In fact, during a recent customer conversation, the Senior VP of Sales expressed their enthusiasm to partner with us as early adopters, emphasizing their willingness to invest in any technology that enhances the productivity of their sellers. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of Copilot and its ability to drive tangible benefits in the workplace.

Nathalie: It’s been quite the journey since we launched Viva Sales to our Microsoft sellers. What were the main goals your team hoped to achieve with this product?

Lori: We’ve been focused on seller productivity gains through taking advantage of conversation intelligence, enabling Copilot features, and ultimately improving customer connection, job satisfaction, and revenue for our sellers. Microsoft being customer zero has provided us with a unique advantage. It has allowed us to test these features within our own organization, gather valuable feedback, and fine-tune the experiences before rolling them out to more customers.

In the new update, we are adding some exciting capabilities to Viva Sales that have been influenced by your team’s customer zero work. 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.

Nathalie: Speaking of Copilot, how does your organization ensure that the implementation of Copilot features align with Microsoft’s ethical and responsible AI principles?

Lori: Supporting ethical and responsible AI practices is of paramount importance to us and our customers. As we use generative AI, we are committed to helping our customers be transparent, fair, and accountable to their employees and their customers.

As you know, one of the ways we do this here is with our works councils, where a few of our colleagues volunteer to help us protect the privacy of all our employees when we deploy new technology like Viva Sales. More importantly, they make sure we follow privacy laws in each of the countries and regions where we operate. We roll the feedback that we get from them directly into our products, which helps our customers protect their own employees. It’s this kind of thinking—and these kinds of checks and balances—that helps with the ethical use of AI in Viva Sales.

Lori: We were so excited to be the first Microsoft product to bring Copilot to our users; the feedback we have received from sellers has been incredibly positive! How have our newest Copilot in Viva Sales features influenced your thinking about supporting the employee experience?

Nathalie: It helped a lot! Seeing a tangible implementation of Copilot with real value opened our eyes to what was possible and is influencing ways that we’ll incorporate generative AI into our own employee experience. Kudos to you and your team for dreaming big and acting fast to bring that experience to the market!

Lori: Thank you. So, tell me more about this employee experience and how deploying Viva Sales Copilot in Microsoft has given your team insights and learnings that shaped your approach to using AI?

Nathalie: Just like Viva Sales provides conversation summaries and next actions for sales opportunities, we’re thinking through scenarios that will enable us to transform the way employees interact with our different services—like support and HR—to make them more personalized and efficient.

Broadly, our efforts fall into three categories—AI for IT, AI for the hybrid workplace, and AI for the employee experience. AI for IT includes investments to help us proactively detect and remediate issues in our employee services and IT infrastructure. AI for the hybrid workplace includes investments to help us perfect space planning and to enhance the experience when employees come into the office. Finally, AI for the employee experience is all about transforming the ways that Microsoft employees interact with our services and support. Across each of these investment areas, Viva Sales provided us with a great benchmark for how AI can really propel employee productivity.

Microsoft Viva Sales

Learn more about our internal deployment of Microsoft Viva Sales.

Read here

Talking about works councils and deployment

Lori: Nathalie, as the leader responsible for deploying Viva Sales across Microsoft, I understand that your team has been actively engaging with works councils. Can you provide insights into the impact of working with works councils during the deployment process?

Nathalie: Absolutely, Lori. Works councils play a critical role in standing for the interests of employees within our organization, particularly in European countries where they are prevalent, and they make sure that whatever we deploy internally within the company protects the privacy of the employees who live in that region. Engaging with works councils ensures that we consider the perspectives and concerns of the workforce during the deployment of Viva Sales. Their input is valuable in addressing compliance, privacy, and employee relations matters, making our deployment process more robust and aligned with local regulations.

Lori: What have you found to be some of the challenges in managing a global-scale deployment of Viva Sales?

Nathalie: Deploying any new technology globally has challenges, but the speed and efficiency with which we were able to roll out this transformative product was truly remarkable. We are working on a brand-new solution that is revolutionizing the way generative AI changes the workplace, and being customer zero has given us some unique advantages. We’ve had to navigate compliance and obtain necessary approvals for deploying AI features on a global scale. Our active engagement process, which includes working closely with works councils, has been instrumental in streamlining the deployment process and ensuring that our global teams can receive help from Viva Sales. Despite the challenges, the feedback from sellers has been incredibly positive, especially with the AI-generated email content enhancements we’re introducing. The best part is how easy and painless it is to enable Viva Sales, allowing our teams to quickly harness its productivity-boosting capabilities and experience a seamless transition to a more efficient way of working.

Lori: It seems like building an effective approval process is crucial. How replicable has Microsoft made this process for other companies?

Nathalie: At Microsoft, we have developed a globally recognizable, efficient process for enabling Copilot scenarios. By supporting open dialogue, we can gather feedback, address emerging concerns, and align our deployment approach with evolving regulations. We recently set up a framework with European works councils to supply valuable insights into employee needs and expectations, enabling Microsoft to tailor the product and deployment process accordingly. We encourage all companies to get connected with their respective works counsels to achieve a balance between rapid implementation and compliance, ensuring that their employees are protected, and the organization meets regulatory requirements.

Lori: It’s truly exciting to see the transformative power of Viva Sales in action and see the positive impact it’s having on our organization!

Learn more about Viva Sales

To learn more about our internal deployment of Viva Sales, read about how we’re simplifying sales with Viva Sales. You can also read more about our internal deployment of Viva at Microsoft by visiting our “Viva la vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva” content suite. Learn more about other applications and capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales using the links below:

• Learn more about tips Microsoft has for working with works counsels.
• Take a look at Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Watch the Copilot in Viva Sales demo.
• Stay up-to-date on Viva Sales features and updates on the Viva Sales Blog.

If you’re not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post The power of AI in Viva Sales: Insights from Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Finance teams’ roles have evolved—and expanded—into new realms. As economic pressures demand that everyone deliver more with fewer resources, finance professionals’ plates are increasingly crowded with analysis, strategy, even supplier relationships—plus all the traditional finance processes they’ve long been responsible for.  

It’s not just moving invoices along—finance teams are being asked by upper management to bring cost-saving, time-optimizing, and value-adding insights to the table when business model evolution and digital transformation are discussed. And they’re looking for any solution that will give their overstretched employees time back in their day to think bigger, by tightening up tedious processes that drain human energy and douse the spark of innovation. 

The Future of Finance

Streamline your accounts payable process and free up resources to fund your business transformation

Watch the webinar

For finance teams, incorporating automation into accounts payable (AP) is a great place to start. After all, the work of capturing invoices, processing and verifying them, then paying vendors can be complex—with plenty of sub-processes to support the end goal of on-time payments and stronger customer relationships. Automating parts of the accounts payable process lets finance teams spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on higher-value work that builds agility in finance operations and across your business.  

5 ways accounts payable automation elevates finance operations

To get started on your AP automation journey, check out this webinar, The Future of Finance: Unlocking the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation, and learn how automating accounts payable data can help you:

1. Focus on strategy—not tedious data tasks

Allow your finance teams to put more energy where it matters—fulfilling, strategic work that keeps them engaged—not cumbersome accounts payable processes that waste time and drag down productivity.  

2. Reign in costs and unnecessary fees

Understand payment trends, analyze vendor performance, and improve processing time to drive significant savings. Cut paper costs by automating manual processes, while helping avoid handwritten errors that lead to mistakes and late payment fees downstream.

3. Stop small errors from becoming big problems

Improve accuracy with automated accounts payable software that limits the unavoidable errors inherent with manual data entry—so you sidestep risk now while dialing in what you need for compliance later.

4. Get to know your vendors

Strengthen vendor relationships by automating AP processes to pay them on time, every time. And over time, analyze accounts payable data to reveal valuable cost-saving insights that put you on more solid footing for future negotiations.

5. Gain more visibility

Put more eyes on your cashflow to help people across your business focus more on cost savings. Empower everyone—not just data specialists or finance operations teams—to support larger initiatives with more readily available data.

When should you automate accounts payable?

To keep pace with competitors, you’re probably looking at ways your finance team can integrate new technology into traditional processes like accounts payable that have long kept business’ bottom lines in order. Because the pace of business isn’t slowing, nor are potential disruptions retreating. To respond to changing business conditions and guard against long-term risk, finance leaders are starting to recognize how the latest AI-powered automation can help them take on what’s currently taking up too much of their employees’ time: 

• Complex processes: The more complex the process, the more challenging it can be to manage effectively. Inefficient processes with too many steps are not only a drag on people’s time and energy, they’re often a barrier to digital transformation. When that leads to a delayed payment, it can damage customer relationships that have taken years to build—putting the wrong kind of spotlight on finance teams. 
• Strained IT: When organizations are facing flat (or shrinking) IT budgets and people don’t have the tools they need, it’s hard to build consistent processes. A lack of IT budget is more than annoying; unreliable systems can overwhelm employees, get in the way of strategic work they’d rather be doing, and make it tougher to follow processes that finance regulations demand. 
• Data overload: Invoices, payment records, information on multiple vendors—all that data is difficult to manage on its own. When people naturally turn to manual processes to make sense of it all, it’s often time intensive and susceptible to errors, fraud, and missed opportunities for insights. 
• People power: Freeing up resources to hire new talent is tough enough, and retaining that talent is even tougher when mundane tasks fill up their plate. Engaging them in their current role with opportunities to be creative and offer strategic insights is often a better investment than trying to find, onboard, and retain a new hire. 

If these obstacles sound familiar, automating accounts payable processes is a cost-efficient way to start moving your organization past them. When your company is ready to shift from managing cumbersome accounts payable operations to supporting strategic initiatives, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance can help. 

How Dynamics 365 Finance modernizes accounts payable operations

Dynamics 365 Finance modernizes accounts payable operations by capturing invoices in multiple formats (digital and manual), processing them while coding and resolving errors with full automation, then automatically paying vendors on time—with analytics around payment scenarios and compliance gathered in real time. Be sure to watch the webinar to learn more, including how one Microsoft customer cut invoice costs in half and reduced overall costs by 25 percent by streamlining procedures across their business, including invoice processing, with accounts payable automation. It also features a demo of how to use AI-powered automation to accelerate digital transformation with Dynamics 365 Finance.  

The post 5 ways accounts payable automation drives digital transformation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.