You’re probably familiar with how Microsoft’s wave updates work, but in summary Microsoft releases two major updates every year in April (wave 1) and October (wave 2). These major updates deliver new features and functionality to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform as part of Microsoft’s continuous release cycle.
On July 16th 2024, Microsoft revealed the upcoming features for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform that will be rolled out between October 2024 and March 2025.
In general, the wave 2 update features a lot of productivity improvements in Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, with enhancements to Copilot and general productivity and usage improvements.
This emphasis on Copilot is consistent with Microsoft’s wider push on generative AI, demonstrating their intention to continue expanding Copilot’s capabilities across the Microsoft Business Applications suite.
This focus is different to many previous wave updates, where there have been more significant ‘platform changes’.
The upcoming emphasis on productivity will help users with day-to-day activities in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, while there have also been some enhancements to Power Pages and data governance capabilities.
For a high-level summary, you can watch this Q&A where our Senior Technical Architect, Nick Murdock, discusses the key points to be aware of for wave 2:
You can find the release plans via the following links:
If you prefer, you can also watch Microsoft’s official summary video below.
In this summary article, we’ve listed the most notable new features that we’re eager to try. Some features are already in “Early Access”, which means you can test them in non-production environments before they are officially released. We’ve marked the features that you can try now, and dates of Public Preview and General Availability where known. As usual, Microsoft will release the features gradually over time.
Please note, all information in this article is subject to change by Microsoft right up to the point of release, and any given feature may even be pulled before release. Our expert “insights” are based on the current information available to us at the time of writing.
Our thoughts: “Our account managers have been eagerly anticipating this functionality. With integration into Teams meetings and transcripts, AI can generate summaries and next steps emails to send to customers, handle objections raised during meetings, and update the CRM directly from the post-meeting insights page. We’re excited to start using it!”
Within your Teams meetings, Copilot for Sales can help sales representatives handle customer objections effectively by logging and categorising objections, providing real-time suggestions, data, and insights based on the client’s needs and sentiment with contextual information from your CRM data.
This feature streamlines capturing sales opportunities from meeting summaries within Teams, requiring just a few clicks. It leverages CRM / Dynamics 365 connectivity, automating data entry to enhance accuracy, productivity, and free up time for more strategic tasks.
Our thoughts: “Combining the power of taking your own notes in One Note, with the transcript of meeting insights in Teams, and being able to push that information back into CRM, feels like something from the future.”
Users can now summarise customer notes using Copilot in OneNote and directly save these summaries into your CRM / Dynamics 365 without leaving OneNote.
Our thoughts: “Microsoft are building on their initial release of Copilot for Sales, which, let’s face it, was quite limited. This release appears to bring some truly useful functionality to Copilot, including the highly popular email summary feature and more detailed account overviews.”
Image sourced from Microsoft Learn.
The Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot home experience enhances sales performance by providing real-time insights, natural language chat functionality, and an immersive interface to efficiently manage sales activities and nurture customer relationships.
The Account summary feature in Dynamics 365 enables sales professionals to efficiently access a consolidated overview of vital customer data, including buying behaviour, opportunities, leads, marketing campaigns, and the latest news, allowing for more personalised and targeted customer engagement.
As a seller using Dynamics 365 Sales, you can benefit from actionable insights generated by Copilot to enhance productivity and decision-making, with recommendations for email follow-ups, meeting actions, record updates, and engagement for new opportunities.
Our thoughts: “Microsoft has quietly introduced a fantastic feature that allows you to group most views by simply clicking on the header of a column and selecting options like “group by” or “sum.” It’s brilliant! But there’s even more to get excited about. Using similar functionality to analyse opportunity pipelines will be a game-changer for salespeople.”
The upgraded opportunity pipeline view in Dynamics 365 Sales enhances opportunity management by allowing sellers to dynamically group opportunities, aggregate numeric values, and gain clear insights into their entire pipeline for more effective and personalised sales strategies.
Streamlined lead qualification in Dynamics 365 Sales allows for precise alignment with organisational needs, insightful Copilot lead summaries, creation of multiple opportunities from a single lead, and enhanced collaboration, ultimately boosting productivity and focusing on high-value sales activities.
Our thoughts: Dynamics 365 Customer Service is one of the oldest areas of the system. Case management was part of the original 1.2 release, nearly 20 years ago, and it has come a long way since. The new wave further enhances the core foundations, empowering agents with a more modern user experience, with drag and drop email recipients, attachments and, of course, more features in Copilot.
The enhanced recipient experience in emails allows agents to drag and drop recipients among fields, view email addresses and presence status, and resolve email addresses to Dynamics 365 records, improving overall user experience.
To save time and increase productivity for agents, the new attachment experience in emails allows agents to drag and drop attachments, copy and paste attachments between emails, download and attach emails, bulk manage attachments, view attachment sizes, toggle views, export details to Excel, and receive reminders to add mentioned attachments.
Proactive prompting allows agents to discover and prompt Copilot without the need for manual typing, saving time and improving their overall experience by providing contextual prompt starters, follow-up suggestions, plugin discovery, contextual understanding, and proactively generated insights.
You can now connect external systems to Copilot through plugins. This will allow customer service representatives to securely access data from various systems, reducing the need to switch between tabs and tools, improving resolution time and customer satisfaction.
Our thoughts: Generative AI via Copilot is now available in Customer Journeys. This widely-used feature, which allows you to describe what you want and let AI handle the rest, has been available in the maker portal for some time now. Microsoft have now introduced it to Customer Insights – Journeys. We’re looking forward to exploring its capabilities and putting it through its paces.
To enable marketers to get customer experience ideas to market quicker, you can now use natural language to describe a journey you want to create, get inspiration from suggested journeys, see a preview of the Copilot-created journey, and receive a detailed summary before adding your content.
Our thoughts: We regularly work with Not for Profit organisations that depend heavily on events. The events portal was previously removed from the marketing functionality and it’s great to see it back. We’re hoping that paid ticketed events will be included, or at least in the not too distant future. It’s definitely one worth exploring.
The new event portal allows for the swift creation of a comprehensive hub where customers can access event details, session specifics, speaker schedules, and register, with options to integrate with an existing website or use a Power Pages template for quick deployment.
Form prefill will allow customers to register for events with minimal effort by confirming or updating prepopulated data from a link in the invite email, enhancing the overall customer experience and boosting conversion rates.
You can now create journeys that wait until a customer becomes part of a segment before continuing. You’ll be able to choose a segment as the condition for an if/then branching step, set the waiting time, and decide actions based on whether the customer has a segment membership.
You’ll now be able to track and leverage customers’ online behaviour to trigger and personalise experiences, score leads, track engagement history, and generate a tracking script to embed in your website, all while protecting customer privacy and complying with data regulations.
Real-time journeys email insights provide a fast and visual way to understand customer engagement with heatmap analytics. This shows which email areas and links get the most and least engagement, allowing you to refine your email strategy with actionable insights based on click-through rates, total clicks, and unique clicks.
This feature enables the creation and management of environment groups with delegated admin roles, which enhance security, efficiency, scalability, and specialisation with Power Platform environments.
This will allow admins to mask and restrict access to sensitive data fields and prevent data exfiltration by bulk export operations, with special permissions for selected users and auditing to allow security teams to detect potentially fraudulent activity.
When an admin configures this environment setting, guests can be blocked from accessing data sources in the environment, performing maker actions, and using shared apps or flows. These security measures can be implemented directly within the Power Platform Admin Centre and don’t require additional controls such as conditional access or continuous access evaluation.
Our thoughts: “These Power Apps changes are geared more towards admins and developers focusing on general usability and administrative tools rather than introducing specific new functional features. That said, this is always our favourite part of the release notes, as they have a big impact on the solutions we create for our customers. The ability to undelete has been a long-requested feature ever since we moved to the cloud and left the world of SQL table access behind. Until now, delete has meant delete, with no going back!”
The recycle bin in Microsoft Dataverse allows users to recover table record data from any type of delete scenario within a specified configurable time frame, addressing the difficulty of retrieving deleted records.
The Power Apps grid control now allows users to group and aggregate data, reorder columns, set column width, and perform other tasks with ease, enhancing the overall user experience with many functional and aesthetic improvements.
Power Apps end users can now quickly select the first value in a look-up dropdown menu by pressing ‘Enter’, enhancing productivity while entering data.
In the maker portal, you can now customise offline profiles in your app settings for faster downloads on mobile devices. You can select the required columns for each table, either using the system’s suggested columns or manually selecting them.
AI flows use generative AI to create and refine automation plans based on natural language, allowing for refinement, validation, and review of flow performance, incorporating both structured and unstructured data for flexible and efficient process flows.
The automation centre in the Power Automate portal, powered by Copilot, offers a comprehensive monitoring experience and allows users to ask questions about cloud flow and desktop flow activity, work queues, and Power Automate features.
This new feature enhances file uploads by allowing larger file sizes for SharePoint storage, enabling drag-and-drop functionality, scanning for malware, and providing a streamlined configuration experience in the design studio.
The new governance control feature allows administrators to block or allow specific authentication providers for all Power Pages websites in their tenants, building on the existing ability to block anonymous access to Dataverse data.
Wave 2 2024 brings notable productivity improvements to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, especially with enhancements to Copilot. Although not the most significant update in recent years, each wave update can impact your environment with deprecated functionality and new features.
We understand that staying on top of wave releases can be challenging without the right technical expertise or in-house resources. To assist, we offer Dynamics 365 support services, including our Upgrade Impact Assessment. We recommend running this assessment at least once a year to help organisations prepare for major updates. We identify areas needing attention, ensure system health, and provide a detailed report with remedial actions.
Get in touch with us today to book your assessment.
We also provide Dynamics 365 consultancy and Power Platform consultancy services, should you require help with your projects.