This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
Since 2019, Dynamics 365 Finance has supported direct system-to-system integration with the web service provided by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to submit Value Added Tax (VAT) returns for UK-registered companies under the Making Tax Digital (MTD) project.
Due to security requirements, we must modify our implementation approach. We can no longer support this integration for on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
Deprecation scope
To meet security requirements, we are implementing modifications to the Dynamics 365 Finance direct system-to-system integration with the HMRC web service for submitting VAT returns for companies registered for VAT in the UK. This involves the adoption of an Electronic Invoicing service as an intermediary to facilitate secure access to the storage of credentials essential for software authorization within the HMRC APIs. These services will not be accessible from on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
After transitioning cloud-based customers to the new integration, the current access for on-premises customers will be discontinued.
Deprecation plan
In version 10.0.43 of Dynamics 365 Finance, we will introduce a new feature with enhanced security protections. In version 10.0.44 of Dynamics 365 Finance, this feature is enabled by default, and all environments will be transitioned automatically.
Starting June 6, 2025, we will discontinue support for the UK MTD VAT integration feature in on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
Recommended alternatives
Do you have on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance using current MTD direct system-to-system HMRC web services for VAT returns? Consider the following options to maintain compliance with HMRC’s VAT submission requirements.
Option I: Migrate to the cloud-based solution, Dynamics 365 online
Transitioning to the cloud deployment of Dynamics 365 Finance offers several advantages. These include enhanced security, automatic updates, and compliance with HMRC’s MTD requirements. This provides seamless integration and access to the latest Dynamics 365 Finance features.
Additionally, you can use a cloud-based environment as intermediary software for submitting your VAT return to HMRC from your on-premises deployment. To implement this solution, establish a cloud-based environment configured to interact seamlessly with your existing systems.
With adjustments to the UK MTD VAT Electronic Messaging, you can efficiently submit your VAT returns to HMRC using Dynamics 365 Finance’s cloud-based solution. This approach allows your organization to benefit from cloud capabilities such as more security options, improved data management, and staying updated with regulatory changes. We recommend this option to ensure compliance with HMRC’s VAT submission requirements.
Customers maintaining on-premises deployment should consider third-party software for VAT return submissions to HMRC. These solutions should meet your operational needs and compliance standards.
Review these options and act before on-premises VAT submission support is discontinued to avoid disruptions in compliance and VAT reporting.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As a marketer, the key to optimize your email performance lies in understanding your customers. Every interaction with a customer is a goldmine of information, revealing critical insights into their behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. Savvy marketers harness this data to tailor content, enhance customer experiences, and elevate engagement rates.
Despite the rise of new digital marketing channels, email marketing continues to be incredibly effective, with its value only growing over time. According to Forbes, email boasts an impressive average open rate of 36.5% for marketing campaigns, and people are three times more likely to make purchases through email marketing than social media. Hence, data and analytics are becoming indispensable tools for unlocking their full potential and optimizing campaigns.
In this context, we are excited to introduce 4 features to optimize your email marketing:
Email Heatmap
Device Types and User Agent Insights
Link Insights
Variation Insights
These enhancements are designed to offer a deeper understanding of customer engagement, empowering you to fine-tune your email campaigns and drive effectiveness to new heights.
Visualize engagement patterns to refine your email content and design
Understanding the effectiveness of email campaigns can often be complex, particularly when information and links are abundant. Gaining clarity on which areas or links captivate your audience and drive them to act is crucial for refining the user experience and boosting email performance, but it often requires compiling and analyzing various email metrics. To help simplify this process, you can leverage the click map for your emails. It provides a quick, visual way to understand engagement based on your email design. You can easily discern what is hitting the mark and what’s missing it.
Leveraging the heatmap results you can strategically optimize your emails marketing. By identifying the hot spots in your emails that attract the most attention, you can optimize your design and layout to ensure your content is highly visible.
Furthermore, based on those insights you can boost user engagement by:
Adjusting the length of your emails to align with reader engagement
Improving the hierarchy of your sections
Strategically positioning your Call-To-Action (CTA) elements for enhanced visibility
For example, Contoso used the click maps to understand which areas of their emails were the most engaging. They discovered that their call-to-action buttons were not getting enough attention. By repositioning these buttons higher in the email and making them more prominent, they increased their conversion rates.
Inform your content strategy by evaluating the performance of each link in your emails
In email marketing, links and buttons serve as essential navigational tools, guiding recipients towards intended actions. As marketers, our goal is to entice readers to engage with the links embedded within our emails. This engagement is a steppingstone towards increased website traffic, heightened brand awareness, and ultimately, higher conversion rates. Consequently, understanding the performance of these links within your email will help you reach your campaigns goals.
Link insights assist you in making data-driven decisions based on the URL’s engagement in your emails. You can easily evaluate the performance of each link within your emails and identify top performing links. This information can guide the strategic placement and promotion of these links in future emails. Furthermore, the insights derived from link performance can inform your content strategy.
If certain types of links consistently perform well, it may indicate that your audience is particularly interested in that content, suggesting a need to feature similar content more prominently. It can also be used to personalize your emails, understanding which links resonate with your audience can help tailor emails to their interests.
For instance, Contoso used link insights to identify which product links were most popular among their customers. They then featured these products more prominently in future emails, leading to a sales increase for those items.
Optimize your email design and layout based on customer behavior across devices
Customers interact with emails using a range of technologies and devices. Understanding the devices and user agents your customers use to interact with your emails is crucial, as it can help you optimize your email design, content, and delivery to align with your audience’s preferences.
In real-time journeys under email insights, you can now get info into the type of applications and platforms your customers use to engage with your emails. You can get data about: device type, email client, operating system, and browser type. By leveraging device data you can optimize your email strategy.
For instance, if most of your customers use mobile devices to read your emails, ensuring your email design is responsive and mobile-friendly becomes essential.
Moreover, knowing the most popular email clients among your customers can guide your testing efforts. By focusing your testing on these platforms, you can ensure that your emails display correctly for most of your audience, improving the overall user experience.
Consequently, by tailoring your email design and content to align with the technologies most used by your audience, you ensure seamless readability for your messages and ultimately increase customer interaction and loyalty.
For example,Contoso used email by device type, and they noticed that a significant portion of their customers were using mobile devices to interact with emails and opened emails on Gmail. By ensuring their email designs are responsive, mobile-friendly, and testing how it renders on Gmail, they increase click-through rates and reduce their bounce rates.
Identify your audience preferences to personalize your email content
Each audience has unique preferences and specific interests. By gaining insights into what content resonates with your customers you can increase open rates and reduce unsubscribes. Variation Insights serve as a powerful tool in this regard, offering an in-depth analysis of the performance of each email variation you’ve sent. It equips you with a comprehensive understanding of essential interaction metrics, including unique opens, unique clicks, the number of messages delivered, open rate, click rate, spam messages, and unsubscriptions for each variant of your email campaign.
By harnessing these insights, you can easily identify which links and content engage each audience, as well as understanding which audience is the most engaged, enabling you to refine your content strategy effectively. This data-driven approach ensures your messaging remains relevant and impactful for each audience.
For instance, Contoso used variation insights to understand which types of products were most appealing to different segments of their audience. Subsequently after tailoring their new email content to match these preferences, they saw an increase in engagement and an increase in product sales.
Understanding your audience is crucial in email marketing. It is the base upon which successful campaigns are built. Thanks to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys advanced analytics features, you get invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. Whether it’s optimizing email design based on device usage, visualizing engagement patterns to refine content, evaluating link performance to inform strategy, or identifying audience preferences for personalized content, these analytics tools are designed to optimize your email marketing effectiveness.
Ultimately, these advanced analytics features not only demystify customer engagement but also offer a roadmap to continuously optimize your email marketing campaigns. Ensuring your messaging hits the mark every time, fostering stronger customer relationships, and driving business growth.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Modern enterprises that offer a diverse range of products and services have equally diverse needs and challenges, including managing complex growth, optimizing costs, and ensuring profitability. These organizations require agile solutions that can adapt to evolving business needs and support smarter decision-making. Microsoft is dedicated to addressing these challenges by providing robust, scalable ERP solutions through Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Transform your ERP processes with agents in Dynamics 365
Join us for an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365.
Microsoft being recognized as a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric and Product-Centric Enterprises*, from our perspective, highlights the ability of Dynamics 365 to deliver flexible, composable ERP solutions that meet these diverse needs of modern organizations to drive results across financial models, operational processes, and organizational structures.
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises**Figure 2: Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises**
For example, BDO, one of the largest accounting and advisory networks in the world, successfully unified its complex tax and accounting services using Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Microsoft Copilot. By connecting their data with AI-driven tools, BDO’s teams have gained critical insights and efficiencies with enhanced visibility across projects and clients.
With Dynamics 365 and Copilot, they have streamlined project oversight and empowered their teams with actionable insights, enhancing their service delivery and customer satisfaction. Read the full story here.
Empowering leaders with financial, operational, and organizational agility
For today’s leaders facing complex growth, cost, and profitability challenges, Dynamics 365 provides a scalable ERP system foundations that can adapt to evolving business needs—empowering faster adaptation, smarter decision-making, and optimized performance. This achievement positions Dynamics 365 as an essential partner for leaders committed to transforming their organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly changing markets.
Financial agility to drive strategic decisions
Leaders today need financial clarity and flexibility to make bold, data-backed decisions—whether for mergers and acquisitions activity, international expansion, adaptive pricing, or new product and service offerings. Dynamics 365 can provide a financial backbone that goes beyond traditional ERP systems, enabling leaders across finance, operations, and strategy to assess complex scenarios, plan for the future, streamline compliance, and mitigate risk. Business models are shifting and hybrid revenue streams like subscription and consumption-based models are becoming more prevalent; Dynamics 365 supports organizations in navigating this complex landscape.
Through embedded analytics and AI-powered insights, like business performance planning and analytics capabilities, Dynamics 365 helps ensure that decision-makers have the financial, operational, and organizational visibility they need to stay agile. By aligning financial operations with strategic goals, leaders can pivot confidently with a product designed to support compliance, enhance audit readiness, and improve security. Dynamics 365 can also empower executives with the insights needed to support rapid, impactful financial decisions, positioning them to meet today’s demands while planning for future growth.
Operational agility to build resilient and adaptive processes
Operational agility is essential for organizations striving to deliver products and services on time, within budget, and at scale. Dynamics 365 equips leaders with tools to help develop resilient processes that can adapt to changes in supply chain dynamics, regulatory environments, and shifting customer expectations. Real-time data and predictive AI-driven insights help organizations proactively manage inventory, resources, and service delivery.
Whether focused on delivering products, services, or a combination of both, Dynamics 365 offers the flexibility to meet diverse customer needs with tailored pricing and delivery models. This scalability enables leaders to optimize operations to drive efficiency, even as market conditions fluctuate. The composable ERP approach of Dynamics 365 helps to ensure that organizations can streamline operations, enabling teams to respond to customer demands with speed, accuracy, and consistency.
Organizational agility to empower people for strategic impact
In a modern organization, empowering people with the right data and workflows is key to driving strategic impact. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in fostering agile, cross-functional teams that can operate with autonomy, making informed decisions aligned with organizational objectives. A composable architecture—in addition to Copilot and agents—help Dynamics 365 connect employees to the insights they need, promoting a culture of proactive decision-making and collaboration.
This adaptable structure is particularly beneficial for hybrid business models that blend product and service offerings as it breaks down silos, allowing teams to work fluidly across departments. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in building an environment where empowered employees can focus on high-impact work, aligning their efforts to drive outcomes that matter.
Why recognizing Microsoft as a Leader in cloud ERP systems for product and service centric enterprises matters
Industry recognition, such as our inclusion in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, helps support the unique ability of Dynamics 365 to serve organizations regardless of their business focus, helping to ensure leaders have the tools they need to adapt as business models evolve. For service-centric enterprises, Dynamics 365 delivers essential tools for managing timelines, budgets, and resources. Product-centric organizations benefit from advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionalities that drive efficiency and control.
By supporting evolving business objectives and complex blended business models involving both product- and service-centric operations, Dynamics 365 helps organizations scale confidently. Dynamics 365 further empowers leaders to be agile and responsive, meeting the demands of a diverse and interconnected market.
A strategic approach to ERP modernization
Gartner’s dual Leader recognition of Microsoft, in our view, underscores the strength of Dynamics 365 as a flexible, adaptive ERP solution designed to meet the needs of today’s complex business landscape. By delivering insights and tools that support transformation across financial, operational, and organizational models, including Business performance planning and Copilot, Dynamics 365 empowers leaders to align their strategies with agile, performance-driven ERP systems.
The future of business relies on AI – first business processes with autonomous agents as catalysts transforming how work gets done and how operations are managed. We recently announced new pre-built agents that become part of your workflow autonomizing execution of business processes and performing the tasks alongside your teams like confirming product orders, reconciling financial transactions, and managing time and expense reporting. Your teams can scale better and achieve better business outcomes, including the ability to:
Consistently meet customer demand on time.
Enhance cash flow visibility to help make faster and better business decisions.
Promptly invoice customers and ensure projects stay on track and within budget.
Now more than ever, ERP modernization requires a strategic approach that champions agility, empowers teams, and drives impactful results across the organization. Dynamics 365 provides the foundation for leaders to turn their strategic vision into reality, supporting innovation, resilience, and sustained success in an evolving world.
We invite you to watch an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365 recorded at Microsoft Ignite 2024. You’ll discover the transformative power of AI in ERP systems and how the latest advancements in generative AI are paving the way for more autonomous ERP processes and scenarios.
For more information on Dynamics 365 AI-driven ERP systems, you can request a demo or take a tour today.
*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.
Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises,” Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, Dixie John, Tomas Kienast, David Penny, November 11, 2024.
Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises,” Robert Anderson, Denis Torii, Sam Grinter, Naveen Mahendra, Tomas Kienast, Johan Jartelius, November 4, 2024.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-paced market, agility is the key to success. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need an AI solution that helps them work smarter.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s world, sellers struggle to meet their goals due to competing priorities, manual processes and increased customer expectations. Most spend their time on administrative and non-selling tasks. However, it’s now the age of AI. Agents help free up sellers’ time to focus on higher value activities, engaging customers and moving them through sales cycles faster. For example, the recently announced Sales Qualification Agent (available soon in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) automatically researches and prioritizes inbound leads and develops personalized sales emails to initiate sales conversations.
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new capabilities to further enhance agents in Dynamics 365 Sales by grounding them in your company’s unique data and taxonomy, as well as enriching the agents’ knowledge with third-party data. This allows the agent to assess a lead’s intent to buy with greater precision, while saving sellers precious time they may currently spend piecing together information from disparate sources. These capabilities will be rolling out in early 2025.
Enhance Copilot and agents with your business terminology and knowledge sources
Organizations will be able to enhance their interactions with Copilot and agents by training them to understand and use specific business acronyms and terms through a customized glossary. This means tailoring AI to the unique language and terminology of a particular business or industry, improving interactions with Copilot and enabling agents to perform tasks on your behalf with higher relevancy.
For example, if a company frequently uses the acronym “TCV” to refer to “total contract value,” they can train the agent to recognize and use this term instead of the more generic “estimated revenue for opportunities.” This customization ensures that the agent’s work aligns with the company’s internal language, improving communication and reducing misunderstandings.
Additionally, organizations will be able to add various knowledge sources to Copilot and agents, such as documents created in Word or Excel, files from SharePoint and tables from databases and lake houses such as Microsoft Fabric or Azure SQL, to complement the Sales data in Dataverse. Agents are built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, which announced new knowledge integrations this week at Ignite and will continue expanding the portfolio–meaning access to even more options over time. This allows the agent to leverage the full power of your organizational data, no matter where it is stored or which apps you use.
By incorporating a business-specific glossary and relevant knowledge sources, the agent becomes more powerful, capable of understanding and responding in a way that is consistent with the company’s unique terminology and data needs.
Enrich your CRM with data from third party enrichment providers
Integrations with third-party data providers and Dynamics 365 Sales, as listed on AppSource, provide data and insights to augment the agents’ customer understanding beyond conventional sources.
We announced a new data integration with Clay, a leading enrichment and orchestration provider. Clay combines first-party data with over 100 enrichment providers and an AI research agent, maximizing data coverage to create a more comprehensive view of the customer.
Through the integration between Microsoft and Clay, Dynamics 365 Sales customers can add insights that would typically not be available in first party sources, such as valuation of private companies, headcount, key competitors and more. With these additional insights seamlessly synced back to Dynamics 365 Sales, agents can perform tasks with more precision, such as identifying leads that fit your ideal customer profile or their intent to buy.
We’ve designed this integration to be user-friendly and efficient. Here’s how it works:
Setting Up Connection: You can easily connect Dynamics 365 Sales to Clay using the out-of-the-box integration and select the specific data tables and fields you want to enrich.
Populating Insights: Once set up, you can enrich your selected Dynamics tables with a variety of insights that can help your sales teams – either from one of 100+ data providers or from scraping public web sources through Clay’s AI agent.
Automatic Synchronization: The enriched data is then synchronized back to Dynamics 365 Sales automatically, ensuring that your agents always have access to accurate and up-to-date information.
Clay joins other integrations already available on Microsoft’s AppSource that can similarly augment your first party data. While data-hungry autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 Sales work tirelessly on behalf of your sales team to reduce time spent while increasing the number of closed deals, these integrations feed unique insights to them to power even the most complex sales playbooks.
Summary
In summary, you can customize your agent to meet your business needs by integrating relevant data sources that are bespoke to your business. You can configure the agent to use your business-specific terminology and response styles, ensuring it aligns with your internal language. Finally, enrich your data with one of the many data enrichment integrations and ensure a perfectly optimized agent for your requirements.
Take the next step
Today’s sellers need the right data and tools to find, qualify, and close deals – all while offering personalized engagement at every step. The innovations introduced this week at Microsoft Ignite can not only help sellers with time-consuming sales activities but also provide access to actionable insights and superior agent performance to build stronger customer relationships and win more business.
To learn more about these updates and how they can benefit your organization, be sure to explore the resources below:
![Hide Resources from Schedule Board in Project Operations [Quick Tip]](https://www.drware.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/cropped-cropped-21688204_10213848566435612_2978963762468624084_o.jpg)
Recent Comments