Organizations that run their Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics NAV workloads on-premises often have large amounts of data built up from a high volume of transactions. Over time, it may become too expensive to host it on Business Central online.

In addition, many organizations want to glean insights from their ERP data by combining it with external data sources such as IoT, AI, or machine learning capabilities. In both cases, having direct access to information hosted inside the Business Central cloud can be useful.

You can access data in Business Central using REST APIs, of course. However, we’re piloting a way to host the information in an Azure Data Lake outside of Business Central. This capability will allow you to:

• Maintain a lower-cost alternative data warehouse that syncs to your production data.
• Run analytics without disrupting Business Central operations.

Our solution opens up some interesting possibilities for organizations using Business Central. If you’d like to try it out, we’re making it available as a proof of concept at aka.ms/bc2adls.

Configuration guidance

There are two parts to the solution:

• A Business Central extension that pushes incremental data from the database to Azure Storage
• An Azure Synapse pipeline that reconstructs the full dataset from the increments pushed by the extension

Configure the extension with an Azure Storage account and access credentials, and then determine the tables and fields to export. Each time the export process runs, the Business Central extension places the inserts, updates, and deletions that were made since the last export in a container in the Azure data lake.

The Azure Synapse pipeline assimilates updates from multiple exports and creates a replica data warehouse in Common Data Model format. If an entity doesn’t yet exist in the data warehouse, the pipeline creates it.

Use case 1: Periodic exports of Business Central data

The export process can run as a recurring background batch job or as a one-time operation, allowing you to maintain your data in the lake over time. Combine it with a recurring run of the Azure Synapse pipeline to have the final data updated at the lake. You can tune the frequency of recurrence in accordance with an acceptable delay between when changes are made in Business Central and when they’re updated in the lake.

Use case 2: Business Central data archive

Over time, older information in the Business Central database may need to be removed to make space for new operational data. Our solution duplicates the information from Business Central in Azure Storage, while giving you the option to skip exporting deletions. This feature is indispensable to auditing and historical tracking scenarios, because records can be maintained in the lake when they have been removed from Business Central.

To skip deletions for specific tables, uncomment or edit the relevant lines for the subscriber OnAfterOnDatabaseDelete procedure.

Use case 3: Richer analytics

Using Business Central data that resides in Azure Data Storage as a source of analytics decouples it from the Business Central database. The database can then focus on running operational workloads.

Because the data is available in the Common Data Model format, it’s available to an increasing number of analytics services, such as Power BI and Azure data services. Query your Business Central data in the lake using familiar T-SQL syntax using Azure Synapse Serverless SQL pool endpoints, too.

Next steps

Get more information, try out our solution, and read some instructions at aka.ms/bc2adls.

Information about the proof of concept is also linked from the BCTech repository. We encourage your contributions and suggestions.

The post Host your Dynamics 365 Business Central data in Azure Storage appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

At Microsoft Ignite last November, we announced Context IQ, a set of capabilities across our Microsoft portfolio that intelligently connects you with the information you need, where and when you need it. Today, we’re sharing how products that leverage Context IQ are redefining work, creating new ways to collaborate, and democratizing access to and the use of information to benefit the organization and ultimately, the customer. 

With this April 2022 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365, the focus continues to be on two critical departments within organizations: customer service and sales. Locating information is a pressing issue as salespeople and customer service agents continue to work across local and cloud systems in collaborative environments. Employees are consistently frustrated updating the same information across multiple platforms and having to jump from app-to-app to reference information and complete tasks.  

It is with great pleasure that I share the latest Context IQ capabilities leveraged in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales. We’re excited about the cross-organization collaboration features with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams, including customer support swarming, embedded Teams chat within Dynamics 365, unified Teams meetings experiences with Dynamics 365 data, and sharing and updating Dynamics 365 records within Teams. These new capabilities will continue to nurture and expand collaboration within the workplace, empowering employees with the information and insights they need to thrive, be more productive, collaborate in the flow of work, and focus more time on the parts of the job that matter most.

Seamlessly collaborate in the flow of work

• Customer support swarming in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Teams chat embedded within Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Unified Teams meetings experience for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service users
• Share and update Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service records within Teams

Customer support swarming

Transform an entire organization into a unified customer service team by bringing together the right talent to effectively resolve complex cases with customer support swarming. Using smart rules, customer support swarming suggests skills and invites the best relevant experts to resolve an agent’s issue. When joining the swarm, relevant skills are displayed identifying the expertise of each swarm participant. Participants with key relationships are included as each swarm member brings a unique perspective and skillset to resolve the issue at hand. Powered by Teams, customer service agents and subject matter experts can swarm cases in the applications they’re accustomed to using, including Customer Service workspace and Teams. Customer support swarming can save an agent time by bringing together the right resources to quickly resolve complex issues while maintaining focus on the customer.

Preview available in Dynamics 365 Customer Service in April.

To learn more, visit the documentation: Teams Integration.

Teams chat embedded within Dynamics 365

As we announced last November at Ignite, you can collaborate with stakeholders directly from within Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This capability allows you to use Dynamics 365 data as an organizing layer for your Teams collaboration activity and link chats to Dynamics 365 records, such as sales opportunities and service cases, for convenient access for all participants.

• AI-suggested contacts for Teams-based collaboration. When agents initiate a Teams chat on an active case or a service conversation, they’re proactively provided with suggestions of other agents who’ve resolved similar cases.
• AI-generated conversation summary. Using intelligence, a conversation summary is automatically produced when an agent has a customer conversation and wants to collaborate with other teammates using embedded Teams.

Preview available in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service in April.

To learn more, visit the documentation: Teams Integration.

Unified Teams meetings experience for Dynamics 365 and Dynamics 365 Customer Service users

The number of virtual meetings has grown significantly over the past two years, as has the value in having the customer context available for all meeting participants. Starting in April users will now be able to create and join Teams meetings from Dynamics 365 and be able to view and edit records within the context of the Teams meetings interface. Having context of the customer conveniently within the Teams meeting interface reduces the need to switch between apps during the conversation, empowering the user to be more engaged with the customer and increasing the likelihood the customer relationship management (CRM) record receives timely updates. Additionally, Conversational Intelligence capabilities will be integrated into the Teams meeting experience providing sellers with AI-guided suggestions that improve customer engagement.

Preview available in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service in April.

To learn more, visit the documentation: Drive seller productivity with a seamless experience between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams meetings.

Share and update Dynamics 365 records within Teams

Teams chat and channels have become an increasingly common place for Dynamics 365 users to discuss customer records. Sellers and agents can easily share, reference, and edit Dynamics 365 records in the context of Teams chats and channels, eliminating the need to switch context or applications to get work done. Other participants of the conversation can see the summary details and choose to view or edit the record right from within Teams or Dynamics 365, whatever their preference. Users will also be able to select posts within Teams and quickly add to Dynamics 365 as an activity update to a specific record.

Preview available in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service in April.

To learn more, visit the documentation: Easily edit a Dynamics 365 record within a Microsoft Teams conversation.

Better together

We’re continuing our investment in Context IQ, connecting users with the information they need, when they need it. The power of Context IQ brings you new ways to collaborate and enhance user productivitywhether your team resides in the same city, country, or hemisphere. We’re committed to improving employee experiences by securing real-life solutions to the everyday challenges of locating and updating siloed information across disparate systems and applications.

To learn more, visit the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams webpage.

If you’re not already a Dynamics 365 customer, visit the Dynamics 365 webpage and sign up for a free trial.

The post How Context IQ improves collaboration in Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Every year, millions of basketball fans fill out brackets for the Division I Men’s College Basketball Tournament hoping to predict the team that will win it all. The Microsoft Business Applications Applied AI group has joined in on the fun, leveraging AI to help guide our bracket picks.

So far, we’ve had a pretty good run. Out of the 17 million brackets submitted for the 2022 ESPN Men’s Tournament Challenge, the Microsoft Business Applications Applied AI group’s bracket is ranked 21st on the leaderboard, which after four rounds (semifinal stage) is more accurate than 99.9997 percent of all brackets submitted at the beginning of the competition.

In this post, I’ll discuss how we built this bracket and explain how we use similar techniques to power AI capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. Why does this matter? Because businesses want to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes, andas the accuracy of our tournament predictions help showturning to AI to provide those insights can deliver impressive outcomes.

How we build our tournament AI model

Since readers are probably more interested in the construction of our bracket, let’s start with that (for business-minded readers, you can skip to the next section). We’ve previously explained how to build better brackets, and we had deeper dives providing details of our models. To summarize, we take over 10 years of historical data for teams and analyze many factors, including:

• Regular season and tournament outcomes.
• Current player composition, excluding injured team members unavailable for the tournament.
• Historical competitive success of the head coaches coaching this year’s teams.
• Success away from home and in neutral sites, which is where all tournament games happen for the men.
• Historical analyses of seeds and conference successes.

With these factors, we created a model which determined that 5th seeded Houston was dramatically underrated at that position and we were thus able to correctly predict their upset wins over 4-seed Illinois and 1-seed Arizona and that 8th seeded North Carolina would upset 1-seed Baylor and 4-seed UCLA. The model understood team strengths well enough that by the quarterfinals, each of the four teams we predicted to make the semifinals was the stronger remaining seeded team in the four contests. And fortunately for us, all four teams delivered to ensure we’d have a perfect semifinal bracket going into this weekend.

Solving business problems with AI

Businesses have many questions they need answers to today. For example, what’s the likelihood that a customer will churn? What’s the predicted lifetime value of a customer? What products should be recommended to a customer? Will I have enough supply of a given product on the shelf? Accurately answering these questions leads to better outcomes, as customers are retained, loyalty programs are designed to reward your best customers, and customers see the products that are most relevant to them available on the shelf. We have built easy-to-use, out-of-box AI models that are trained on your data so you can get the predictions optimized for your business to answer these questions.

These models use the same concepts that we used to create our bracket, as the propensity of a business outcome can be modeled similarly to that of a sports outcome. Take, for instance, the classical Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) model for predicting churn. 

• For recency, in the basketball model we look at streaks and “last 10” performance, while in business churn, we look at the recent purchase history of a customer. 
• For frequency, we might analyze the number of wins a team has for basketball, while analogously we look at the quantity of purchases from a customer for our business applications models. 
• Finally, for monetary, this would be the point differential in basketball and quantity of spend in our churn model.

This is only a subset of all features we analyzed to give you an idea of our approach.

Beside the questions above, there are a lot of other questions that businesses are asking in every domain. For example, what are customers saying about our product? How do we identify business entities in text? How do we find the most relevant news articles about suppliers? How do we analyze your processes and automatically label the activities that are being done to identify bottlenecks and suggest improvements? We have AI capabilities to help answer these questions available in our Dynamics 365 product family today.

Of course, AI models need not be fully self-service as human intuition and guidance can be included when desired. This is why we have spent time discussing the importance of explain-ability of models in a recent post. People can take AI and use it as a guide to improve decision-making both in creating a bracket as well as solving your business problems. Namely, our AI models explain the insights so that you can add in your own intuition when planning your next marketing campaign or building your next material requirements plan.

Keeping pace on and off the court

The dynamic nature of our models can be seen with the tournament, too, where we incorporated the early results from additional post-season college tournaments to adjust the modeled strengths of conferences before main bracket play beganin 2022, this meant observing a stronger Atlantic Coast Conference based on Virginia upsetting Mississippi State and Wake Forest winning in outcomes from another tournament’s first round. Such a signal increased the model’s confidence in this conference, leading it to correctly pick a Duke versus North Carolina semifinal and a quarterfinal run for Miami.

In business, the only constant is change. How do you pivot and adjust to the latest disruptions in your supply chain? How would you route customer support calls to the best agents based on real-time staffing changes and that day’s routing behavior? We’re running a full court press in solving these types of problems, so if you want to learn more about how AI can help your business, try our line of business applications, visit our Insights blog, and come apply to the many AI-powered jobs we have for Dynamics 365.

The post Microsoft AI-assisted bracket exceeds 99.9997% of others in basketball tournament appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations face new challenges every day. Priorities change, markets shift, opportunities emergethe pace isn’t slowing down. As your competitors transform their business models and customer expectations evolve, your future depends on how well you can empower your teams to adapt, innovate, and make a positive impact every day. You need to be ready for disruption, to embrace constant change, and, most of all, be fast on your feet.

Building a more agile future

That’s why we’re excited to invite you to the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on April 6, 2022. Register now for your first look at hundreds of new features, enhancements, and innovations to transform your business into a more agile, customer-centric organization.

Catch all the latest advancements across Microsoft Dynamics 365 being unveiled, including:

• More collaborative content creation, improved authoring efficiency, and advanced personalization using Dynamics 365 Marketing.
• Ambient and actionable business data, a single workspace in Sales Hub, and AI-guided live feedback with Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Simplified setup with guided, task-based experiences and inbox enhancements for rapid issue resolution using Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• Subscription billing and intelligent automation around invoicing, ledger settlements, and year-end close services in Dynamics 365 Finance.

And that’s just the start. You’ll also learn how new features across Microsoft business applications are already helping our customers navigate change and seize opportunities. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platform, about how your business can innovate by modernizing processes and uncovering game-changing insights. Then listen in as senior Microsoft engineers and experts behind the technology guide you through the latest advancements in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 1 and how they’ll help you:

• Adapt quickly to change as new business priorities, market conditions, and customer opportunities emerge.
• Innovate everywhere by solving problems with solutions that ease collaboration and work seamlessly together.
• Deliver more value to your customers in less time by quickly adopting or enhancing solutions that accelerate results.
• Create more memorable customer experiences by modernizing your processes and uncovering insights into your supply chain.

Real-life innovation

Your inside look at business applications goes even more in-depth with demonstrations of real-life customer scenarios, led by the experts who know Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform inside and out. See new capabilities in actionand learn what’s possiblefor organizations big and small, across every industry. You’ll be the first to find out how new features are aligned with customer needs to help solve pain points across organizations, ease everyone’s workload, and take on today’s toughest business challenges.

Fresh insights

Innovation in AI, mixed reality, and industry solutions is enabling a new generation of agile organizations. Understand the why and how behind the trends with insights and best practices from industry leaders on how to accelerate results. Have questions for the experts? You’ll have a chance to ask them during the live Q&A chat. You don’t want to miss this digital launch event packed full of ways to help you adapt fast, collaborate with ease, innovate together, and make a positive impact. We hope to see you there. 

The post See what’s new for Dynamics 365 at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.