Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing is generally available as part of the spring release. This is a new marketing automation application for companies that need more than basic email marketing at the front end of a sales cycle to turn prospects into relationships.
To further simplify the Dynamics 365 offerings and increase ease of selection, new release are introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales Professional, a new streamlined version of Sales application with core Sales Force Automation capabilities. From opportunity management to sales planning and performance management, the solution optimizes sales processes and productivity.
Intelligence infused throughout
In this new release Dynamics 365 for Sales is coming with new embedded intelligence capabilities include: Relationship assistant – helps sellers see alerts and reminders to move relationships forward; auto capture with Outlook – helps sellers save time by analyzing email to find messages relevant to specific accounts and then track in Dynamics 365 for Sales with just one click; and email engagement – delivers insights from email with customers, so sellers can prioritize the most receptive contacts.
They are also introducing Microsoft Power BI Insights apps, delivering out-of-the-box insights tailored to specific business scenarios – across marketing, sales, service, operations, finance and talent.
Insights are generated by applying advanced intelligence to a subset of unique Microsoft data. Also, customers can easily incorporate additional data from a range of third-party sources to enhance relevance and accuracy. Power BI Insights apps can be customized in Power BI and further tailored by applying the full power of Azure data services.
Power BI for Sales Insights and Power BI for Service Insights will be available in preview this spring. Power BI for Sales Insights will include an embedded experience for Dynamics 365 for Sales, which allows customers to take advantage of: Relationship analytics – offering a single relationship health score, calculated from large amounts of data representing transactions, customer sentiment, emails and content exchanged, and frequency and level of customer interactions brought together from Dynamics 365, email, and social networks; and Predictive lead scoring – to predict what will happen in the future to help exceed quota attainment by prioritizing efforts on quality leads.
New Application Platform capabilities
With the spring release, Microsoft is announcing a significant update to the Common Data Service for Apps that ships with PowerApps and will enable a broad set of capabilities for modeling sophisticated business solutions. Combining these new capabilities with PowerApps existing high productivity point-and-click app development approach unlocks new potential for customers to customize existing apps across Dynamics 365 and Office 365, and quickly build new ones.
Microsoft is also announcing a new capability in Power BI – the Common Data Service for Analytics. Integrating and analyzing data siloed across business apps and services can be challenging. Common Data Service for Analytics will help reduce this complexity with the addition of an extensible business application schema built on the common data model. Organizations will be able to integrate data from multiple sources and empower users with access to business analytics across all data relevant to them.
You can find a summary of new features across the Dynamics 365 apps and the platform in the spring 2018 release notes.
Microsoft has clear path and roadmap to deliver new capabilities and features in Dynamics 365 for customers and partners of all sizes, and for any degree of business complexity.
