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Today marks a significant shift in endpoint management and security. We are launching the Microsoft Intune Suite, which unifies mission-critical advanced endpoint management and security solutions into one simple bundle.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This month, we’re bringing new AI-powered capabilities to Microsoft Teams Premium, helping keep everyone aligned with Microsoft Viva Engage, and sharing new Loop components in Whiteboard to help your team collaborate in sync.
Today’s buyers value authentic engagements and expect the companies they buy from to know them and to provide one-of-a-kind experiences. This past year, we continued to invest in solutions that help our customers meet these demands by delivering personalization at scale.
Customers can automate buyer-centric experiences and processes using trigger-based journeys to respond to actions and signals in real time and easily optimize customer journeys with insights from across digital and physical channels. With configurable key performance indicators (KPIs), customers can use out-of-box machine learning templates or bring their own AI/machine learning modelsboth options supporting rapid innovation that expands the discovery of insights.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 equips organizations with holistic views of their customers so they can discover what buyers need with insights that power individualized experiences and the delivery of deeply personalized content in customer journeys. Going forward, we will continue to expand this functionality for our customers.
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation**
Data at the center of everything
Gartner recognizes “B2B marketing automation platforms as technologies that serve as an essential tool for customer journey orchestration in support of B2B customer acquisition, retention and growth objectives.”
Dynamics 365 supports the practice of demand generation, helping our customers to capture, qualify, and nurture leads and accounts across multiple channels.
Data is at the center of all these functions, and it is the power behind the insights that drive what businesses need to do now and what they should do tomorrow. Microsoft helps businesses thrive and grow by capturing, analyzing, predicting, and reporting on their data.
One of the ways we are helping customers like Eika use one, coherent data platform to optimize their business-to-business (B2B) customer engagement with a high level of agility is the common data platform, Microsoft Dataverse. Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data used by business applications.
By using one single vendor that unifies and simplifies support processes for all solutions, customers benefit from products built to talk and complement each other. For instance, solutions like Dynamics 365 can work closely with other Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Azure, Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend Dynamics 365 capabilities. This native integration also simplifies user adoptionusers are more comfortable when working with a familiar set of applications, and this ease of use can help lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs.
Additionally, customers that want to extend their investments in Microsoft technologies with applications to support their unique business needs have a huge range of options. Independent software vendors (ISVs) across the globe have created hundreds of software as a service (SaaS) applications that use Dynamics 365 and the underlying Microsoft Power Platform to deliver business value on top of Microsoft’s B2B automation platform.
Helping to ensure our customers’ success
Microsoft customers can participate in two customer success programs that deliver support for their implementations and can help them drive continuous adoption. FastTrack for Dynamics 365 is an engineering-led implementation guidance service that has been shown to speed deployments, drive higher usage, and reduce customer support needs. The second program, the Subscription Support for Microsoft Dynamics 365, is a support option delivered by a dedicated customer success unit within Microsoft.
Together, these programs have driven proven and lasting customer success. FastTrack for Dynamics 365 guides customers through successful implementations, bringing the best practices from thousands of deployments. The Subscription Support for Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps them drive continuous adoption, ensuring customers are realizing ongoing business value from the solutions they deploy.
Reimaging your B2B marketing automation
As today’s digital-first buyers become more informed, meeting their expectations is becoming a more difficult challenge. They’re more likely than ever to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authenticforcing businesses to connect customer insights and data across the organization to meet customers where they are and to capitalize on every opportunity.
B2B marketing automation platforms serve as an essential tool for customer journey orchestration in support of B2B customer acquisition, retention, and growth objectives. As Gartner mentioned in their report, “while B2B marketing automation platforms are designed to primarily support B2B use cases, they can also provide much needed functionality to B2C organizations selling high-consideration products and/or B2B2C models with more complex, indirect sales processes.”
We are excited to be positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping both our B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers meet the changing expectations of their customers. We invite you to learn more about how Microsoft is helping marketers around the world reimagine customer experience.
2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
Microsoft is excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Julian Poulter, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg , 19 September 2022
*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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In this fast-paced world, customers expect to be able to interact with brands in ways that extend beyond traditional channels. Brands are constantly competing for the attention of customers who are deluged with messages daily. Text messages and messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram represent an opportunity to engage your customers where they’re paying attention. Your customers benefit from increased and faster engagement with your brand through a real-time, personalized experienceand you’re more effective in triggering a specific customer action or behavior.
Curious about how you can integrate WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, and many other channels in your journeys to engage your customers in the moments that matter?
Discover Dynamics 365 Marketing custom channels
With custom channels, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing meets the need for a customizable model that supports any customer outreach and engagement medium marketers may demand. Along with built-in channels like email, text messages, and push notifications, you can now create custom communication channels to use in your journeys. Custom channels provide additional extensibility and personalization capabilities when reaching out to your customers, increasing the efficiency of your communications.
With custom channels you can:
Bring a new communication channel like WhatsApp, Viber, or Telegram to Dynamics 365 Marketing. These channels support a custom message editor and deliverability analytics. Two-way communication and custom interactions will follow in future releases.
Extend the functionality of text messages by connecting to any provider you want. Custom text message channels come with all the features supported by the built-in providers: text message editor with preview, two-way communication, analytics, and interactions.
By adding a custom channel to Dynamics 365 Marketing, you unfold its true potential and maximize your users’ engagement through:
Creation of personalized messages content for a more individualized experience.
Plugging your custom channels and messages into any customer journey.
Tracking the deliverability of your messages to assess and optimize the effectiveness of your new channels.
Engaging your customers in non-conventional channels can also freshen up the image and perception of your brand. For instance, sending messages on WhatsApp can give your customers a feeling of closeness. You can define the channels that match your brand and your audience.
Our Dynamics 365 Marketing customers are already using custom channels in their journeys to send:
Appointment confirmations with local text message providers, for customer to never miss on them,
Promotional campaigns with exclusive discounts on WhatsApp or Viber,
Various types of reminders through text messages or WhatsApp,
Informational WhatsApp messages to increase the attendance for upcoming community events.
For instance, one of our customers has set up a journey that informs like-minded professionals about webinars and live community events that could interest them. The message includes a link to a form for professionals to sign up for the events. WhatsApp was chosen as a more engaging and real-time channel than emails, while less intrusive than text messages. In addition to keeping customers informed of upcoming events, the goal is to increase event registrations and the average attendance.
Start using custom channels in your customer outreach
Take advantage of custom channels in Dynamics 365 Marketing to capitalize on favorite and proven channels you’ve already invested time and effort in. Add real-time marketing capabilities like personalization, consent, and deliverability analytics to take your personalized targeting to the next level and maximize the impact of your communications.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Intelligent Order Management announced a truck load of new features in November 2022. This article explores the core investment themes for the November Release enabling our customers and partners to explore and implement the relevant features for their business.
Prior to this release, IOM only contained broad functionality in certain key Order Management functions that span across the Supply Chain. This release focused on closing the gaps for these critical functionalities, while continuing to expand on IOM’s core strengths which include the Provider Ecosystem, Fulfillment & Returns optimization, and the continued embrace of the low code-no code Power Platform.
Investments made to IOM focusing on improving 3 core tenets. These are:
Resiliency: Will this investment reduce the time taken to orchestrate and adapt to dynamic events
Visibility: Will this investment improve the end-to-end view of an order and inventory across heterogenous systems and locations
Extensibility: Will this investment help customers extend features and fine tune for their own business needs
With the November 2022 release complete, we fulfill multiple order scenarios in a way that customers can leverage the power of the low code platform. The pre-built providers also now span the order to cash (and returns) lifecycle.
Some of the new feature set capabilities for the Nov ’22 release are below.
Additional Order Capabilities
We have introduced comprehensive application support for various order scenarios. These include:
– Back Orders
– Pre- Order Management
– Returns integrated with F&O
– Purchase Order support
– Enable Manual Orders
– Transfer Orders
– Subscription Orders
Customers can leverage the orchestration platform to consume and orchestrate business processes based on these order scenarios. Order preferences can be configured, and workflows can then be orchestrated to adapt to these configurations.
Additionally, these order attributes (where applicable) will seamlessly work with the built-in integration of Inventory Visibility. This puts the focus on allowing users to define their specific business rule while IOM takes care of the inventory integration.
Real Time Inventory Visibility
Intelligent Order Management is one of the few Order Management systems that does not rely on a pub-sub architecture (where the source of inventory is Dynamics 365) to report Inventory levels. We provide an out-of-the-box integration via the Inventory Visibility provider.
We h made it easier and more accessible for various IOM personas like a CSR worker to query and get real-time inventory information within the IOM application.
Through improvements made with how we categorize warehouse through D365, customers can look up store inventory and further orchestrate BOPIS or Ship from Store scenarios. This information can now also be used in e-com shopping carts to provide shipping options to customers.
Here is an example of how we are leveraging this feature to build out carting functionality.
Error Handling
For an orchestration-based system like Intelligent Order Management which interacts with other heterogenous systems, timely and intuitive error handling is imperative.
One of the key feedbacks we had received was to make Error Handling more concise, arranged logically to reflect the key flows in IOM and to make them more intuitive. The latest release now simplifies and streamlines the Error Handling experience and provides:
Improved error visibility across the system – giving you a single source of truth for all errors across all entities.
Ability to navigate directly to the power automate flow that failed from the orchestration step.
Improved surfacing of error messages that allow for quicker debugging.
Providers
Providers remain a core component of how IOM connects to other systems and ecommerce engines. Our viewpoint is biased to extensibility, and we have extended the provider ecosystem to ensure increasing coverage across the order lifecycle.
Intelligent Order Management Diagram
We will continue to build key providers (based on mutual agreement) on both the left and right side of IOM.
As of November, ’22 we added Amazon and Adobe Magento to the Order Channels (left side of image). We are pleased to add UPS as a Delivery Provider (right side of image). These providers now allow customers to ingest Sales Orders into IOM seamlessly. Moving forward we will extend this support via APIs for customers to avail carting features this will be e-com platform agnostic.
The goal is to optimize time to value for our customers who don’t need to build, maintain, extend, support, and scale these integrations.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In times of economic uncertainty, business agility is critical to meeting stakeholder expectations and delivering customer value. These challenging times put CFOs and finance teams in the spotlight as leaders across the business look to them to protect short-term financial health and long-term growth. Yet, many leaders struggle to get the insights needed to pivot quickly. Join us at Finance Reimagined on February 28, 2023 to see how automation, AI, and analytics can help you lead the way through disruption.
While business intelligence (BI) and cloud analytics tools can provide actionable insights, a significant obstacle that hinders finance professionals and business leaders from maximizing the potential of these tools is the need for advanced technical skills to consolidate, manipulate, and integrate data from various systems utilized in business operations. This requires a deep understanding of complex data models and the ability to normalize, transform, and combine data sets to provide a coherent, usable output for all business users.
Historically, finance teams have spent most of their time running accounting and financial operations, closing the books, and creating financial reports and statements. Business performance insights were delivered monthly, quarterly, or yearly. As the speed of business has accelerated and continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace, finance professionals are being asked to deliver performance metrics daily and at a micro level. Many teams have invested in data scientists and reskilling their people to take on modern data storytelling roles. However, this approach does not scale. To achieve the level of business agility to succeed in ultra-competitive markets, business leaders need to activate actionable insights securely at every level of the organization. This means that all people, regardless of their technical expertise, need the ability to get the analytics they need to understand business performance better.
The question becomes, how do we get the business performance analytics needed in the hands of people across the organization? The answer lies in creating a hyper-connected enterprise through an intuitive data model and empowering people to use familiar tools like Microsoft Excel and Power BI for self-service analytics.
Finance leaders can create a hyper-connected enterprise
Although CFOs may not be directly responsible for data security and connectivity, a strong partnership between finance and IT is crucial for successfully implementing business performance analytics. During our upcoming virtual event, Finance Reimagined, on February 28, 2023, you will hear how Robert Walters, a leading global recruitment and talent management company, strengthened their partnership by adding a finance expert to their IT team. The results were remarkable, as they were able to replace their financial management solution on time and within budget, providing near real-time insights to all recruiters within their workflow. Easy access to correct information enables teams to achieve strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively.
With unified and accessible data, finance leaders can empower their teams to quickly gain insights and position themselves as leaders in innovation and business transformation. To realize these benefits, it is essential to consolidate all business data for a comprehensive view of the organization and embed intelligence in every function to promote proactive decision-making and collaboration among employees. To achieve this, finance leaders should collaborate with IT to:
Unify data: Many well-defined business processes, like procure to pay, quote-to-cash, and other regular ledger and subledger processes, consist of a collection of documents related to the other. Unifying data from the ledger, subledger, and source documents makes using data from these different sources simpler.
Simplify reporting: Streamlined reporting enables the finance team and other teams to create the reports they need, which previously would have taken weeks or months with IT experts or outside vendors.
Adopt self-service analytics: Operationalizing custom reports and ad hoc analytics for the business through self-service analytics enables comprehensive digital transformation, even for organizations with limited IT investment. This empowers finance teams to use their data.
Actionable insights with self-service analytics
Self-service analytics refers to the ability of a business user to access unified, actionable data and intelligent technology to make informed decisions quickly. This technology is designed to be used by any user, no matter their sophistication, and can significantly contribute to driving growth and creating value beyond financial metrics. In the past, these benefits were challenging for organizations to achieve due to the complexity of technology implementation.
With self-service analytics, organizations can take advantage of technology that eliminates the need for finance professionals to have expertise in data science and IT, or access to external resources.
Now, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance users can validate data quality, generate customized reports, and easily extract valuable insights. With self-service analytics, finance teams can independently access, analyze, and use their data to make informed decisions.
Business performance analytics
To tackle the challenges faced by CFOs and finance professionals in consolidating data and utilizing self-service analytics, we are proud to introduce new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance. Our latest innovation, business performance analytics, delivers insights directly to all users, regardless of technical ability. Business performance analytics empowers finance professionals to make informed decisions without needing advanced skills or data science understanding. This solution simplifies the process of gaining insights from data by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple business processes.
With business performance analytics, all users can easily access and analyze data, helping to streamline regular financial reporting and shorten cycle times, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives. It enables reporting in a more holistic, less siloed way, across multiple systems of record, by normalizing data. Built on Microsoft Dataverse, it includes a web-based reporting hub where customers can create reporting via Excel, Power BI, and other templates.
Finally, with business performance analytics, we enhance the growth potential of Dynamics 365 Finance capabilities by leveraging unified data for AI and machine learning. With AI-powered solutions, we will enable teams to identify opportunities to improve financial performance automatically. Through our partnership with Open AI and recent acquisitions in business domains like process mining and AI-driven spend analytics, Microsoft will help auto-detect and recommend ways to protect organizations from risk and guard against future disruption.
Learn what’s next at Finance Reimagined
Integrating financial data across an entire organization and giving the finance team a wealth of self-serve analytics tools will deliver significant benefits across a business. Business performance analytics will be available in public preview with 2023 release wave 1. Our focus will be on ensuring the business performance analytics capabilities within Dynamics 365 Finance helps customers to:
Simplify data insights by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple sources in near real time.
Allow all users of all technical abilities to quickly access and analyze data to facilitate faster decisions and better business performance.
Enable ease-of-use through familiar apps like Excel and Power BI.
Streamline financial reporting and operations to reduce cycle times and focus on strategic initiatives.
Provide auditors with direct access to financial data, enabling them to quickly access and analyze the information they need, making the audit process more efficient.
Finance Reimagined
Learn how Dynamics 365 Finance can deliver the benefits of digital transformation, activating insights through analytics, AI, and automation.
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