2023 Release Wave 1: New features for Business Central, Dynamics 365 CRM, and Power Platform
The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.
View the entire 2023 Release Wave 1 plan for Dynamics 365 →
Here’s an app-by-app overview of the features to come:
BUSINESS CENTRAL
Business Central will better support environments with multiple companies, making it easier to complete intercompany tasks, processes, postings, and transactions, as well as better set up and sync master data across multiple companies—allowing you to move one company’s setup over to other companies in the same environment.
New filters will be added to warehouse management capabilities to simplify the process of creating, sorting, and organizing information when creating inventory put-away, pick, and movement documents in the batch jobs. Another new warehouse change includes the ability to add non-inventory items on sales or purchase order—like cost, insurance, and shipping fees— to consolidate necessary information on warehousing documents.
An enhanced integration with Power Platform means business events (even from external systems and applications) to notify and trigger flows, and you have more pre-built Power Automate and Power Apps templates for Business Central to utilize—like the ability to approve documents via Teams or apps that simplify routine business tasks. Coupled with an enhanced connector to Shopify, this will be a marked benefit for ecommerce businesses.
The workflow approval process will also become more convenient for users, approvers, and admins alike, with yet more new Power Automate templates that simplify the flow setup process to approve documents using Business Central on a mobile device, approving documents through Teams (including requesting urgent approval) to setup certain approval flows in selected Business Central environments and companies, and more. And, as always, more improvements will be made to the Teams integration to make collaboration more seamless than ever before.
DYNAMICS 365 SALES
As a fast-growing CRM application, Dynamics 365 Sales will focus on creating intuitive, modern processes for users that will allow your sales teams to use data and customer insights to provide an excellent experience for new and repeat customers alike.
Feature upgrades will allow users to better understand different customer touchpoints and use tools like targeted selling, personalization efforts, and creating a standardized sales cycle process to increase impact. The new opportunity management workspace will fast-track the sales process with more organized seller activities, actionable AI suggestions, automated follow-up activities, account insights, and more.
You’ll be able to more accurately forecast with revenue intelligence tools, visualizations for sales and upcoming deals expected to close, per-product pricing, and configuring and tracking forecasts for different business units. Forecasts can be configured with weekly or yearly recurrences and can be tracked to measure week-by-week sales goals.
Another change worth noting is that the Sales Accelerator, a Sales Insights feature, will now be called sales engagement capabilities but will still provide sellers with high-end tools to aid in quality outreach, AI-enabled insights, and increased ease-of-use. Sellers will save time with prepopulated emails based on their most-used content, like company background, personal introductions, and product offering details.
DYNAMICS 365 MARKETING
As part of the entire Dynamics CRM suite, Dynamics 365 Marketing will continue to develop personalization and analytics capabilities to provide a well-rounded approach to nurturing relationships with lead and account-based marketing activities. And to help your business scale for growth, Marketing is ready to scale with you. Now, you’ll be able to reach up to 100 million contacts or leads and send up to 300 million messages per month—3x the current limit of 30 million contacts or leads and 100 million monthly interactions—with real-time customer journey orchestration.
With the new lead scoring builder, users will be able to prioritize the best leads that come in and feed that information to sellers—and sellers will be able to engage more quickly with new sales sequences that alert users of certain lead activities like completing tasks or actions within customer journeys. Sales sequences can generate contextual recommendations for sellers to use when engaging with the lead, too.
Marketing will soon have an analytics dashboard that will integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales data, providing marketing and sales teams with a comprehensive view of prospects, leads, and opportunities, as well as insights like revenue per lead, lead sources, and marketing engagement statistics.
DYNAMICS 365 CUSTOMER SERVICE
The agent experience in Dynamics 365 Customer Service will be improved with start-to-finish case management features, like enhanced case creation forms and context based on past cases and customer details. Agents will also be able to attach multiple documents or attachments to cases, as well as adding notes during the case creation process. Cases will soon be color-coded by priority and case status for better visibility over remaining cases and workflows. Layout changes will also make it easier to find and navigate through recent cases and customer conversations.
Users will also be able to create and select from email templates to quickly use the correct content for recurring customer service issues and requests, freeing up time while still upkeeping consistent service quality. The template builder will function like the drag-and-drop Marketing email builder, allowing you to customize elements like text, images, buttons, links, and dividers.
Supervisors will be given better staffing insights and volume forecasting to best allocate agent capacity and meet customer service demand. Forecasts refresh in 15-minute intervals, will use historical traffic data, and can be created daily, weekly, and monthly—up to 6 months in advance.
POWER AUTOMATE
Power Automate will allow users to describe flows with natural language so people of all experience levels can create and utilize flows that simplify the workday. The native integration between Flows and Excel means you can create flows while working in spreadsheets—be sure to use Excel-specific templates to find the most helpful flows. New sequential approval features allow users to create more complex approval flows, which can be made via Power Automate or Microsoft Teams.
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