Microsoft Dynamics 365 deploys two release waves per year:
- Release wave 1 covers features releasing from April through September
- Release wave 2 covers features releasing from October through March
Production deployment for the 2022 release wave 2 begins October 1 with North America regional deployment taking place October 21–23. This means that if you haven’t enabled the early access updates in your environments, your environments will be updated automatically to receive the new release updates and features.
2022 Wave 2 Release Highlights
Below are a few updates and features we’re excited to see.
Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance the seller experience using data, customization, and AI to help sellers prioritize their work, reclaim their time, and increase productivity.
One feature becoming available in October is the new designer for enhanced sequence creation. Sequences guide salespeople through a recommended set of activities over the course of a sale. The new sequence designer provides an updated user experience that helps make it easier for users to create sequences. It uses pop-up functionality to add sequence steps, conditions, and commands.
The new sequence designer also features a top command bar that shows relevant options and has enhanced error-handling capabilities to help make it easier to identify and resolve errors.
Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer insight to support your customer journey strategy and personalize experiences across the entire buying journey. Intuitive lead capture forms, lead nurturing automation, and a new analytics dashboard can enable alignment between marketing and sales teams like never before.
A few noteworthy items include:
- Increased monthly maximum interactions: Dynamics 365 Marketing customers can now reach up to 100 million contacts or leads and send up to 300 million messages per month.
- AI-powered next-best content selection: This new functionality uses AI to generate content ideas when creating email content. It can help boost creativity while keeping messaging on point.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering capabilities to help increase contact center efficiencies. New features in the 2022 release wave 2 include percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing. Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams can help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration.
There also will be new voice channel options that can be made available to customers. The voice channel in Dynamics 365 Customer Service allows for users to engage customers with chat, SMS, and social media. As an example, an agent can escalate a web chat conversation to a voice or video call. New voice channel options for customers will include:
- Dialing contact center agents directly through assigned phone numbers
- Keeping a queue spot and getting a callback
- Leaving voicemails for agents
The agent experience is getting a few upgrades as well with an enhanced conversation timeline, horizontal multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary.
Power Apps are driving more collaboration and time savings. For instance, in the wave 2 release, you’ll be able to create and join Teams meetings directly from Power Apps with just one button click.
AI Builder continues to enable developers to use and customize AI capabilities to build more intelligent apps and workflows. New features in the wave 2 pipeline include:
- Intelligent document processing, such as signature detection, document categorization, and the ability to process contracts and multipage tables in documents
- Automatic image captioning to create accessibility text for images in Power Apps
We’ve shared a few 2022 wave 2 release highlights we’re excited to see. For a complete list of what's new for specific Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform apps, visit the release planner page.
FORVIS’ Business Technology Solutions is a Microsoft Dynamics Gold Partner and 2022 recipient of the Microsoft Inner Circle Award. FORVIS assists clients across the world by providing analysis, design, implementation, upgrades, training, and support services for Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications.
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