New Features and Capabilities Announced for Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Microsoft Ignite 2021
As we all know, Microsoft Ignite is one of the numerous global events conducted by Microsoft dynamics 365 across different locations, in a free two-day format that allows IT Professionals, Developers, Architects, Educators, Data Professionals, etc. an opportunity to learn about the new capabilities, latest technologies, and tools, ask questions and discuss with Microsoft experts and local industry leaders and peers across the various Microsoft Technologies like Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, etc.
This year because of the prevalent Covid-19 situation, the event was held virtually from 2nd to 4th March 2021, starting with the keynote by Satya Nadella and followed by numerous sessions by Microsoft Experts.
Let us have a quick look at the new capabilities that were announced and showcased for Power Platform and Dynamics 365
The first is around Power Automate Desktop, which uses low code RPA – Robotic Process Automation to automate the repetitive process and tasks. Earlier the subscription cost around RPA was 15 USD per user per month, which is now available free to all Windows 10 users. Users can download the tool from the official website – https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/ and the tool will also be included as part of the Windows Insider Preview build in the coming days.
Integration with Power Platform and Teams introduces the complete Power Apps authoring experience from within the Teams, the same goes for Power Automate flows and Power Virtual Agent bots. The users can create Teams-specific apps, flow, and bots from inside of Microsoft Teams, without any need of switching apps and logging into the PowerApps Maker Portal to develop the same.
New Governance controls allow Endpoint Filtering, using which Power Platform Admin can define the rules or restrictions around the endpoints for the connectors based on servers or range of IP addresses. Through Connector actions controls, the admin instead of disabling the entire connector, can now granularly allow and deny specific actions within the connector.
Tenant isolation capabilities will empower the admin to manage the connectivity requirements when in multi-tenant scenarios along with Tenant wide analytics capabilities improvement with a much richer and detailed set of information available for the administrator for analysis and take the decision.
Microsoft Power FX is an open-source language for low code programming. Microsoft announced Formula-based Model-driven app customizations as well Formula-basedDataverse Plugins the 2 new features to be added to the platform around June 2021.
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 managed services, a new capability Customer Journey Orchestration public preview was announced. The journey can be created from the Dynamics 365 Marketing app and can use AI-driven information from the Customer Insights app while defining the orchestration or flow of the journey. It can also use the Customer Voice app to collect feedback and responses, to decide on the next course of action, and get real-time analytics of how the journey is performing, giving a complete end-to-end picture.
Dynamics 365 suite of apps now includes a new app called Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, which is a purpose and AI-driven supply chain management solution, that allows the organization to manage the entire life cycle of an order, starting from order intake, till order processing and till its successful fulfillment.
Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management app can be easily integrated with any other existing enterprise CRM, ERP, Order, or Warehouse Management used by the organization. It uses Dataverse and other Power Platform capabilities to synchronize data as well as real-time inventory visibility capability.
The new embedded Teams chat experience for Dynamics 365 includes a new side panel that shows the team chats and channels mentioning the customer record which allows the sales agent to start the conversation and take quick actions from within the Dynamics 365 Sales app, without the need for switching to Teams. The embedded Teams chat experience is also available to Customer Service insights agents as part of the productivity pane within the Customer Service Workspace app, allowing the agent to quickly have a conversation with colleagues or subject matter experts allowing for quick resolution of the cases, again all without switching to the team’s app.
Apart from embedded Team chat experience, Microsoft also announced embedded Teams dialer experience, which includes a click to dial option to the sales agent in the side panel of Dynamics 365 for sales app, allowing agents to quickly reach out to the prospective customer along with the provision of taking notes, automatic detection of action items that ensures all the necessary details are captured for follow up.
All these new capabilities mentioned here along with hundreds of other capabilities added in other Microsoft’s products will be released between April 2021 to September 2021.
To understand more about these capabilities, head to the Microsoft Ignite website, where you can see the recording of all the sessions
The continued improvements in the platform show Microsoft’s investment in innovation and focus on the cloud platform as the platform of choice for organizations to be more efficient, insightful, and collaborative.