2020 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available
Today, we published the 2020 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that will be released between April and September 2020. The new features and enhancements demonstrate our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.
Dynamics 365
The first release wave of the year contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, and Business Central, our comprehensive business management solution designed for small to medium-sized businesses.
Highlights from Customer Engagement applications include:
- Dynamics 365 Sales continues to focus on user experience and sellers productivity improvements. New features include a new Kanban board to quickly manage activities and opportunities and a new forecasting experience allowing organizations to drive more accountability and success in their sales teams.
- Dynamics 365 Sales Insights expands focus to include inside sales scenarios and enhances conversation intelligence capabilities. New features include deeper conversation analysis with emotion detection to enable sellers with the information they need, when they need it.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands agent productivity tooling to help organizations evolve a proactive and predictive service model.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights optimizes the customer service experience through AI with new capabilities including richer integration with Power Virtual Agents and access to the insights data for in-depth analytics.
- Dynamics 365 Field Service improves effectiveness through a new resource scheduling dashboard, integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and technician time entries.
- Dynamics 365 Marketing remains focused on enabling marketers by enhancing product usability, personalized marketing capabilities with dynamic content for contacts, and integration scenarios with third-party content management systems and Microsoft Forms Pro.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enhances data profiling enrichment and segmentation capabilities, helping organizations better understand their customer data and derive actionable insights to drive business processes.
Highlights from Dynamics 365 Operations, Finance, Commerce, and HR applications include:
- Dynamics 365 Human Resources expands capabilities for human resources professionals, employees, and managers in leave and absence and benefits management programs.
- Dynamics 365 Commerce strengthens the personalized, omnichannel experience for consumers by adding e-commerce, providing smart product recommendations, and enhancing clienteling.
- Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps merchants increase revenue and reduce fraud losses and costs while improving the consumer’s online check-out experience by releasing two new services, account protection and loss prevention.
- Dynamics 365 Finance releases enhancements to country-specific tax, invoicing, payment formats, and regulatory reporting capabilities to help global organizations stay compliant with newly introduced local regulations.
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps organizations reduce operational costs by introducing customer self-service experiences, enhancements to asset management, and the new on-hand inventory service for inventory visibility across Dynamics 365 and other legacy systems.
Power Platform
New Power Platform capabilities combine Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and the Common Data Service into an unmatched palette of tools to analyze data, build solutions, and automate processes. This release includes robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in Power Automate, to automate rule-based tasks with point-and-click simplicity supporting on-premises or cloud-based apps. Power Apps gains significant improvements for developers of all skill levels, improving the sophistication and usability of apps that are created across the web and mobile devices. Microsoft business intelligence simplifies how organizations derive insights from transactional and observational data. It helps organizations create a data culture where employees can make decisions based on facts, not opinions. In this release wave, Power BI invests in four key areas including intuitive experiences, a unified BI platform, big data analytics, and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI).
For a complete list of new capabilities, please checkout the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2020 release wave 1 plans.
Lastly, we continue to enhance our industry accelerators to enable organizations and partners to quickly accelerate application development within a vertical industry.
Early access period for 2020 release wave 1
Starting February 3, 2020, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2020. There are many features available for early access across Dynamics 365 applications and the Power Platform. We encourage application administrators to review these changes to understand the impact and determine if change management for new features is required.
Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. For questions, please visit the Early Access FAQ page.
We’ve done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about the latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.
