2021 Release Wave 2 part 2: D365 Sales App

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In the previous article we talked about the released features to the Power Apps, so now, let’s talk about the Dynamics 365 Sales App.

​​​​​​​For this release, Microsoft gives the sellers more features to focus on the highest priority activities and collaborate using Microsoft Teams. Let’s take a look!

Intelligence worklist and workspace enhancement

Now on the Sales Accelerator workspace will be populated based on activity ownership instead of entity ownership. This will allow a seller who is responsible to finish the task to stay on top of the activity without leaving your Sales Accelerator workspace

Also, the worklist user interface is being enhanced to make it more usable, customizable, and improve the seller’s productivity like filtering and sorting capabilities to improve efficiency. You can check it out in Prioritize your sales pipeline by using worklist for more details.

Collaboration using Microsoft Teams

In my opinion, this is one of the most exciting features of the Release Wave 2 for Sales App (unfortunately we’ll need to wait for Dec 2021 to start the public preview). This release will enable the Microsoft Teams embedded chat experience. I thought nice these features:

• Chats and channels will be linked to sales records, enabling the contextual interactions with Microsoft Teams;
• The users can edit or update, and change state records from Microsoft Teams conversations through adaptative cards;
• Support to customizer forms and manage the access control;
• Add notes or tasks to a record’s timeline from the Microsoft Team message in a chat or channel;
• Send a quick summary of the records in a Teams chat using the interactable card;
• You can use @mentions to notify the users automatically in their Teams through the Dynamics Sales bot;
• Follow/unfollow Dynamics 365 records to get notifications about the updates to sales records.

Besides all these capabilities through messages, the users can click to call or create and join Teams meetings direct from Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the record context enabling real-time call analysis and insights during the meeting.

As I’m not able to enable these features on my environment I can’t show some samples to you how it works but you can check it out in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams: extend collaboration across teams. Once I get the access I’ll share more details in a new article. 😊

All these features will be released between Dec 2021 and Mar 2022. Of course, Microsoft may change the release dates.

Improve predictive scoring by enabling intelligent field augmentation

You can configure the attributes that may have key values that, when recognized by the model, can further its efficacy and exclude confounding data points. Field augmentation could include:

• Whether a customer is new or returning.
• Whether an email is legitimate or fake.
• Recent activity.
• Phone number length.
• Private or public email domain.

It’s a good, interesting feature to understand your customer’s database. If you would like to know more about it, take a look at this link

Mobile enhancements

The mobile enhancements will release in Public Preview starting Dec 2021 (if Microsoft doesn’t postpone). Unfortunately, these enhancements won’t be part of the early access but I’m looking forward to seeing it running to get more features details. So now, I just give you the highlights that will come from soon:

• Smart look-up experience to quick-connect activities to the relevant record.
• Enriched meetings experiences include data from Dynamics 365 Sales appointments and Exchange.
• In-app actionable notifications.
• Summarize activities easily.
• Speech-to-text notes experience using Microsoft voice detection.
• Generate and share links for app pages.
• Collaboration experiences.
• To-do view for every record includes relevant activities.
• Support outgoing and automatic transcription Microsoft Teams calls.
• Post-call conversation insights.

It’s a cool list, isn’t it? Let’s stay tuned!

I hope you enjoyed this article. We can see we have a lot of exciting work upcoming in the next months, mainly when we’re talking about the enhancements Microsoft Team and Mobile integration.