Last April I shared that Microsoft is working on an initiative that encourages partners to invest in a cloud-first strategy. Today, we are excited to announce that the Business Central Universal Code initiative went into effect with the launch of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 2.

The Universal Code initiative is designed to encourage the use of a modern architecture in customer implementations of Business Central. It gives all on-premises customers the choice to select a cloud (SaaS) implementation when desired while also finding the right apps on the Microsoft AppSource marketplace. The initiative reduces the friction around potentially complex, lengthy, and expensive upgrades and frees up partner capacity over time. Partners can use the additional capacity for activities beyond (re)implementing customizations, providing more value to their customers.

Microsoft partners share the impact of Universal Code

On AppSource, you can easily discover the success of our modern Universal Code initiative. As of October 2022, more than 2,800 Business Central apps are available to respond to the unique requirements of customers. Our partner channel is sharing the positive impact a modern architecture has on their business:

“It was scary to change our industry solution from a customized code to Universal Code as we didn’t want to compromise its rich functionality, but our team succeeded faster than expected because of their great expertise and out-of-the-box thinking. The impact has been enormous!  Today, we are able to serve 14 localizations through fully automated means and we are able to generate weekly releases. In the past this took us a month of manual work. Universal Code in combination with our tooling is providing us the agility to stay in front!”

Richard Postborg, CTO, TRIMIT Group A/S

“For us here at LS Retail, Universal Code is all about sustainability for the customer. With Universal Code and the move to the extensibility framework, customers can upgrade their environments with a fraction of the effort it required before. This is good for everyone involved. The customer can stay current with a minimal effort. The partners can add value in other areas, such as providing business insights. This is a win-win for everyone involved.”

Dadi Karason, CTO, LS Retail

The future of Business Central on-premises is Universal Code

The modern architectural choice of Universal Code is key to the success of our customers, partners, and Microsoft. We encourage customers to have the Universal Code conversation with their implementing partner.

As of October 2022, new Dynamics 365 Business Central customers deploying on-premises and customers transitioning to Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises deployments will have to deploy a “cloud-optimized extensions” architecture (Universal Code) or license payable modules that unlock classic customization behavior.

Learn more

Find supporting materials with details about the Universal Code initiative at https://aka.ms/BCUniversalCode.

Partners can also learn more about next steps by watching the Universal Code session at the Dynamics 365 Business Central virtual launch event. Register to watch on-demand at https://aka.ms/BCLE.

The post The Dynamics 365 Business Central Universal Code initiative is live appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, many companies face global supply chain challenges. From unexpected demand to ever-increasing fulfillment expectations, the stakes have never been higher. In response, some are looking for new strategies and solutions to help them quickly predict and overcome disruptionsto keep goods moving and their businesses profitable.

Create resilient supply chains with innovative new offerings

Join Chris Capossela and Panos Panay, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, for the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event on November 16, 2022, to explore how to bring visibility, agility, connectivity, and sustainability to your supply chain.

You’ll learn about product innovations, essential insights, and the latest trends shaping supply chains, today and tomorrow. We’ll also take on topics like end-to-end visibility and data connectivity. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how technology is being used to improve both the customer experience and the bottom line. 

And you’ll discover real-world best practices for supply chain resilience from thought leaders, industry experts, and Microsoft customers and partners. Plus, you’ll get valuable lessons learned from Microsoft supply chain leaders across our Xbox, devices, and global Azure datacenter teams as they share the inside story of our own supply chain transformation.

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage in energizing conversations with leading experts about how to overcome today’s supply chain challenges.

Register for the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event today.

Learn how to create a connected, agile supply chain from your existing systems

Many of today’s leading supply chain systems are siloed solutions that don’t talk to each other. Because of that, some can’t handle the complexity of supply chain ecosystems that span providers, manufacturers, distributors, third-party and fourth-party logistics, delivery carriers, and consumerswhich leads to inefficient, reactive supply chain operations.

This digital event is a great opportunity for you to explore an effective solution to traditional supply chain issues. You’ll learn about a composable approach to supply chain transformation, which brings together various best-of-breed solutions on a common platform. You’ll see how to use this modular approach to enhance your existing systemsto deliver faster solutions to urgent problems and help your business become more resilient.

At Microsoft, we believe that a modular approach is key to supply chain resilience. That’s why we’re committed to providing solutions that work with your existing application landscapeto add extensible, scalable, and intelligent technologies that immediately improve supply chain practices, workflow, and value. This boosts agility by giving your teams the ability to quickly rearrange and reorient as needed depending on internal or external factors, like a sudden change in materials or a shift in customer priorities.

Moving from a siloed data infrastructure to a unified data platform is another key to supply chain resilience that highlights the benefits of an open, composable solution. Data is at the heart of supply chain operations and having a system that connects data across disparate systems is a critical advantage. You’ll gain end-to-end visibility across inventory systems, supplier schedules, and inbound and outbound orders, and you’ll empower your workforce to move from reactive to proactive, data-driven decision making throughout all areas of your supply chain.

Getting these essential insights is the first step toward building a connected, agile supply chain for your business. And it’s just one aspect of this information-packed digital event. We hope you’ll join us.

Bring sustainability into focus for your organization

Sustainability is a growing imperative for business as customers, regulators, investors, and employees are all asking organizations to do more to reduce their environmental impact. The pressure for measurable change is on supply chain leaders, as their systems often have the largest environmental impacts due to emissions or resource consumption.

At this digital event, you’ll find out how to build sustainable value chains on a secure, connected platform. You’ll learn from leaders in supply chain transformation how to reframe your strategy around sustainability and gain insights into practices that will empower you to deliver sustainability by design.

You’ll also gain insight into how Microsoft leaders have prioritized sustainability in our own supply chain practices, including building circularity into our design and striving to improve the impact across environmental, social, and governance factors.

Strengthen business resiliencenow and in the future

Finally, at the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event on November 16, 2022, you’ll also get an exclusive look at the future of supply chain transformation and the new solutions that can take you there. In addition to learning how to create an agile, connected, and sustainable supply chain, you’ll:  

• Get key insights you can act on from thought leaders on topics like customer satisfaction, business agility, and operational efficiency.
• See what’s shaping supply chain innovation today and tomorrow with real-world best practices and lessons learned from Microsoft and industry leaders.
• Learn how our customers, including Mitch Arends from the Kraft Heinz Company, are partnering with Microsoft to improve supply chain resilience. 
• Hear exciting announcements and be among the first to see new product innovations unveiledall designed to help protect your business from supply chain challenges.
• Ask Microsoft supply chain experts all your most pressing questions in a live Q&A chat.  

Join us on Wednesday, November 16, 2022, from 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Pacific Time (UTC-8).

Supply Chain Reimagined

Start reimagining your supply chain for a more agile, resilient future.

Register now

The post Bring agility, connectivity, and sustainability to the forefront—at Supply Chain Reimagined appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales accelerator helps sellers sell smartly by building a strong and prioritized pipeline, offering context, and suggesting next actions through sales sequences that expedite the sales process. We’ve made three improvements to sales accelerator that can help sellers be even more productive:

• Sellers can now build their own sales sequences
• We’ve made the sequence designer even easier to use
• Sellers can add the Up next widget to any form

Let’s examine each of these improvements in more detail.

Empowering sellers to build their own sales sequences

Before now, sales managers enforced best practices by defining a set of consecutive activities for their sellers to follow throughout their workday. Managers could connect these sequences to leads and opportunities that appeared in the sellers’ work queue. Sales sequences helped sellers prioritize their activities and focus on selling to be more productive and to better align to business processes.

Now, we’re empowering sellers to build their own sequences. Often sellers are in a better position to decide the best engagement strategy to follow with a prospect. Now they can create sequences for themselves and connect them to records. They can also personalize a sequence with their own language and steps.

The following screenshot shows the new functionality in the Personal settings > Sequences page in the Sales Hub app:

Use security roles to manage permissions to create, connect, and share sales sequences.

Improved design experience for sales sequences

As we give sellers the power to create sales sequences, we need to make sure it’s easy to do. That’s why we created a new sequence designer with a modern UX and an enhanced editing experience. Sellers will realize several immediate benefits:

• Consistency between the marketing journey and sales sequences means sellers don’t have to learn two different systems.
• A side panel makes editing easier and scalable with more space.
• Changes are automatically preserved in the browser and can be saved with a single click.
• The updated top command bar shows relevant options, leaving more space for editing.
• An exit icon effortlessly identifies the end of any sequence branch.
• Enhanced error handling enables easy identification and resolution of any errors.

Add the Up next widget to any form

Sales organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of records their sales teams are working on. As they start using sales sequences, they typically create a few to try out and use them to determine the best way to grow and scale based on business needs. The trouble with that is that then the organizations have a few records that are connected to sequences and a multitude of records that aren’t. For sellers, this means that only the few connected records appear in the Up next widget in their worklist, because the Up next widget is fed by sequences. They have to juggle the worklist and their leads, opportunities, and other entities tables, where their non-sequenced records live.

To solve this challenge, we now allow sellers to add the Up next widget to any form. Previously, the Up next widget and sales sequences were available only in the sales accelerator workspace.

To help new users easily discover the benefits of the sales accelerator, we’ve started adding the Up next widget to the default lead, opportunity, contact, and account forms. Sellers can easily start using the sales accelerator to create sequences, streamline customer interactions, and win more deals.

Learn more

New to Dynamics 365 sales accelerator? Watch the overview video and read the documentation: Configure the sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn

Read how to add the Up next widget to any form: Add the Up next widget to a custom form | Microsoft Learn

Read how to allow any security role to create or connect sequences: Sequences in sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn 

Read the seller guide to creating sequences: Create and connect sequences for yourself | Microsoft Learn 

The post New sales sequences experience improves seller productivity appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sensor Data Intelligence, a new feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, helps you drive business processes based on automated IoT (Internet of Things) signals from machines and equipment on the production floor. With Sensor Data Intelligence, you can:

• Drive predictive maintenance with details collected from machines and equipment.
• Use a simple onboarding wizard instead of manually installing and configuring components in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS).
• Configure, scale, and extend the solution as business logic running on your own Azure subscription.

Sensor Data Intelligence supports a variety of automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence supports several specific business scenarios, each with its own set of configuration options:

• Asset downtime: Accurately track the efficiency of machine assets by using sensor data to track machine downtime.
• Asset maintenance: Minimize maintenance cost and extend asset life by improving maintenance plans based on sensor readings of critical control points.
• Machine status: Ensure operation efficiency by using sensor readings to notify planners about machine outages and provide options for mitigating potential delays.
• Product quality: Ensure the quality of product batches by comparing sensor readings for properties of each product batch, such as moisture, temperature, or custom-defined quality metrics. The system notifies operators when deviations occur.
• Production delays: Use sensor readings to compare actual cycle time to planned cycle time, and notify supervisors when production isn’t on schedule.
• Custom scenarios: The architecture of Sensor Data Intelligence allows you to customize the out-of-box scenarios and even create new automated IoT scenarios to meet your unique business needs.

Fit equipment with automatic sensors for real-time monitoring and decision-making

You can fit your organization’s assets with a variety of automated IoT sensors, each designed to provide information for a specific purpose. For example, you might fit a metal stamping machine with a sensor that counts each stroke. You could then configure your system to receive a signal from that counter and set a threshold (for example, 40,000 strokes) at which Supply Chain Management should automatically generate a maintenance work order.

Enjoy fast, wizard-based setup for automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence is simple to onboard. Deploy a template of resources (including an Azure IoT hub and Azure stream analytics) by walking through a few steps in a wizard.

It’s just as fast and easy to add a new sensor to your system. Choose a scenario, identify the new sensor, and map it to the required system functionality.

Flexible and extendible Azure architecture lets you fine-tune the system

Because everything is deployed on your own Azure subscription, the solution is easy to scale and configure to your own requirements.

The following architectural diagram provides an overview of Sensor Data Intelligence and its components:

Learn more

Sensor Data Intelligence is a public preview feature of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For more information, check out the Dynamics 365 release plan and the documentation.

The post Automated IoT sensors keep equipment running safely and effectively appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers rely on email to reach out to contacts when working on deals. The new email address validation feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales flags email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) system that are in the wrong format or have an expired or fictitious domain. That lets your sellers connect with subscribers and boost their conversion rates without wasting time and energy trying to communicate with uninterested or non-existent customers.

Improve lead quality with email address validation

Email address validation in Dynamics 365 Sales finds and removes non-working email addresses in your CRM. This lets your sellers prioritize leads that have a valid email address for lower email bounce rates, improved engagement, and a better return on their time.

Email address validation looks for the following errors:

• Incorrect syntax: An address that does not have both a username and an email domain
• Disposable domain: An address that has a known disposable or temporary email domain
• Test or spam address: An address that has known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code, and email content and formatting
• Expired address: An email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email
• Address with unregistered domain: A domain that does not appear in the domain registry

You can view flagged email addresses on primary entity and sales insights forms as well as on the Up next widget and work list items.

If you try to send an email to a flagged address, a notification gives you the reason the system marked the address as not valid.

• If you know the email address is correct, select Mark valid. The system marks the address as valid and removes the alert.
• If you don’t know the email address is correct but you still want to send the email, select Compose anyway.

More data hygiene improvements in Dynamics 365 Sales

In addition to email address validation, we have also implemented duplicate detection for leads. Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and “fuzzy” matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that the system identifies as duplicates not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values. This helps sellers focus on the records that truly matter and clears out any “noise” that they would otherwise have to spend time manually reducing.

On top of that, we are continuously working on even more improvements to data hygiene in Dynamics 365 Sales to help your sellers be more focused and productive. 

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating leads with incomplete, non-working, or spam email addressesand Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To get started with email address validation, read the documentation:

• For admins: Enable email validation (preview) | Microsoft Learn 
• For sellers: Work with invalid email addresses (preview) | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

The post Email address validation improves seller conversion rates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.