Soon, we’ll be seeing many of the features mentioned in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1 Plans--a lot of items will become generally available in April. While they may not be here just yet, there are a few things standout features that we think lots of CRM users will find value in.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

On its own, Microsoft Teams give great tools like messaging, calling, file sharing, and much more. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, provides a plethora of tools for sales teams to better engage leads and customers. By combining these two products, we can expand the capabilities of both. Teams can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales to allow for conversations to start directly from records, initiate calls to customers, or link records into Teams channels.

We’re always watching the latest and greatest changes coming to the Dynamics 365 suite to see how they can benefit our users. Lately, there have been a few helpful shifts regarding the timeline and forms within Dynamics 365 CRM apps that allow for better workflow and easier management of what you’re doing within the system. Although these features aren’t brand new—they are generally available and your administrator or partner can help get you started with them whenever you want—but we’re highlighting them since they may not be on your radar.

Native cloud, Dynamics 365 Project Operations combines features from Project Online and Project Service Automation to create a comprehensive project management application that seamlessly integrates with other Dynamics 365 applications.

On April 5, 2019, the Dynamics 365 April release was made Generally Available to customers. Learn about upgrades made to the suite of Dynamics 365 apps, Business Central, the Microsoft Power Platform, and how they’ll all be affected. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to get started with Dynamics 365 for yourself.