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Featured News

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Highlights from Dynamics 365 release wave 2

Catch up on the 2020 release wave 2

Review the Dynamics 365 release plans for specific details for each update and additional resources.

• Sales
• Service
• Microsoft customer data platform (CDP) | Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
• Dynamics 365 Marketing

Check out further information on this page on Power Apps blog.

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Mobile Offline for Power Apps

• As part of the 2020 Wave 2 release, we made generally available offline capabilities for model driven apps for users of Power Apps.
  • Makers and administrators can now configure apps to be available offline on a user’s device, and users can continue to complete their tasks against the local cache on their phone even with intermittent or no network connectivity.
  • When the network is re-established, the users’ changes are seamlessly synchronized back to the cloud.
  • The capabilities and enhancements below are in the Power Platform and are thus, applicable for both users of Power Apps as well as Dynamics 365 apps.

Check out further information on this page on Dynamics 365 blog.

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Dynamics 365 Sales updates | Digital selling and customer engagement improvements

With the 2020 release wave 2 of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales,

we aim to streamline the work of sellers and deepen their engagement with customers:

• Accelerate your proactive digital selling
  • In this release, we’ll support automatic leads routing based on sales and marketing automation, streamline the sequences experience, and encourage sellers to reach their goals.
  • Sales accelerator: Help inside sellers to further accelerate their sales rhythm, manage their interactive workday by prioritizing activities related to leads or opportunities, and engage directly with customers through integrated emails and phone dialer.
  • Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence: Organizations need to accurately forecast sales targets to truly understand business health and to make accurately informed strategic decisions.
• Leverage a better understanding of your customer
  • This release includes a premium version of auto capture to make data capture simple and faster for sellers, so that they can have more focus on revenue-generating activities.
  • In this release, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice lets sales managers and sellers measure sentiment and NPS metrics to better hear and act on customer concerns around sales processes, products, and experiences.
• Streamline your team’s productivity and collaboration
  • This release delivers improved data management capabilities, enhanced email capabilities, an optimized PDF generation and sharing experience for standard and custom entities, and an improved search experience which provides search suggestions, search as you type, and a helpful search result grouping.

For more information, check out the full documentation here on Dynamics 365 blog.

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Dynamics 365 Customer Service updates | Innovation on the service suite of Dynamics 365 applications

We are announcing an expansive scope of features coming to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist during the 2020 release wave 2.

• Enhancing productivity with Dynamics 365 Customer Service
  • We’ve enabled multi-session case management and flexibility with app profile customizations by administrators to make modifying the app experience for different roles more streamlined.
  • Finally, we’re tackling one of the most challenging problems in the contact center today that only Microsoft is positioned to solve—fragmented solutions—with our announcement of first-party telephony built on the recently announced Microsoft Azure Communication Services.

• Streamlining technician experiences with Dynamics 365 Field Service
  • Enabling technician success to increase first-time fix rates is one of the business outcomes of Dynamics 365 Field Service.
  • We’re accelerating technician success with enhancements to the technicians’ mobile experience, added fidelity for asset tracking and management, and improved resource scheduling for increased dispatch and technician efficiency—all resulting in better and more cost-effective service delivery.
  • In this release, our next generation mobile app (built on Microsoft Power Apps) has been updated with push notifications, offline enhancements, and recording services such as photos, videos, and files, plus inspection capabilities.

Take a look at the full list of Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2020 release wave 2 features.

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Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | Microsoft customer data platform |New cross-channel analytics capabilities with Engagement Insights (Preview)

Customer Insights expanded its availability to the Microsoft Government Cloud.

Customers talk about Microsoft’s unique ability to connect data holistically across departments and teams with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP).
  • Use an intuitive and intelligent CDP to unlock insights and drive personalized customer experiences.
  • Unify all your customer data across the full range of sources to get a 360-degree view of customers in real time.

See below a set of new capabilities to help customers drive business outcomes in Customer Insights:

• Deliver the most comprehensive view of their customers with the new engagement insights capability, currently in preview, that enables deeper understanding of customer intent and behavior with cross-channel analytics from their websites, mobile apps, and connected products.

• Unlock powerful AI-driven insights through limitless analytics with deep integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations can leverage a library of prebuilt AI templates for churn prediction, product recommendations, and customer lifetime value, giving business users the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data for quick insights without having to involve data scientists and IT.

• Drive meaningful actions across the customer journey with turnkey integrations that make it easier to share insights with any application, be it Microsoft or third-party platforms.

• Build on our commitment of unmatched data privacy and security by enabling organizations to better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions from Microsoft Information Protection. This allows organizations to configure policies to classify, label, and protect data based on its sensitivity.

For more information, check out the full documentation here on Dynamics 365 blog.

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Updates & Releases

Manage Updates | General availability deployment

• Check out Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Plans to learn more about new features to be released in the release waves.
• After a release wave is generally available, all environments will be automatically turned on to receive mandatory updates which will enable the early access features and the general available features of a release.
• Tips: Stay Informed with Message Center notifications for Dynamics and PowerApps HERE

More information: General Availability deployment & Dynamics 365 release schedule

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online Release

For the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 release notes, visit Released Versions of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.

Note:

• Service Update naming convention has been revised to clarify the link between the version number and Service Update number.
• For example, Service Update 150 will now correspond to version number 150xx.
• Occasionally a Service Update will be canceled and all associated fixes will be rolled into a subsequent Service Update.
• For this reason, Service Update numbers may not always increase incrementally.

• The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 online version 9.1 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others.
• To determine which version your organization has applied, check your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online version number.
• Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, then click About.

Service Update 249 (9.1.0.24906 or higher) resolved issues including in this list below and much more:

• Accessibility
  • The opacity settings were too low for adequate visibility when applying focus to page elements in the Unified Interface Timeline.
• Unified Interface
  • When creating a new meeting with duplicate attendees, the synchronization process became continuous and the duplicates were not removed.

Service Update 246 (9.1.0.24607 or higher) resolved issues including this list below and much more:

• Solutions
  • Attachment preview failed when previewing large PDF files, in the Chrome browser.
• Unified Interface
  • When opening a form, the user interface displayed a duplicate border on the command bar.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-premises Updates

The Service Updates for Dynamics 365 on-premise version 8.2 and 9.0 are now available in some regions and coming soon to others.

These cumulative update rollups include all the hotfixes that were released for limited distribution.

Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 9.0

Service Update 0.21 (9.0.21.8 – October 2020) resolved issues including:

• Repaired Functionality
  • When you create or change an email signature, the user interface allows JavaScript inserts.
  • An error occurs when you create an email message and select the “set regarding” option in Outlook.

Cumulative updates available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 8.2

Service Update 2.23 (8.2.23.16- October 2020 ) resolved issues including:

• Repaired Functionality
  • Critical Security Updates

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Portal Capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Releases

Version Check and Upgrade Information

• To determine the version of a particular portal deployment, please reference to this KB #3166126.
• For instructions on how to upgrade the solutions within Dynamics 365 when a newer version is available,

please reference to this KB #3192042.

Latest Portal Capabilities Update-

To know the release schedule please check Office 365 message center for release schedule in your geographical region.

This article describes the features and enhancements that were included in this update, as well as the scope of the release.

For a full list of all portal updates released to date and their corresponding KB articles,

please reference this KB article.

The latest Portal host Version 9.2.10.x resolves the following issues and more:

• Related Record Filtering defined on lookups is not working correctly when a 1:n relationship is used to filter records.
• Unable to search datetime field in dd/MM/yyyy format when using search functionality in entity list.
• Month chart does not honor the sorted order defined in the chart for link entities.

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Additional News

PowerApps ISV Studio| Announcing app usage analytics in ISV Studio

ISV Studio supports applications built on the Common Data Service that are published to and deployed through AppSource.

ISV Studio is designed to become the go-to Power Platform destination for Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to monitor and manage their applications.

We are announcing the public preview release of a new feature in ISV Studio – allowing an ISV to monitor the usage of your published applications.

• ISV Studio allows an ISV to monitor their published app.
• With the release of this feature, in addition to seeing the total number of installations, a user will now be able to see the Monthly, Weekly and Daily active usage of their app.
• This feature is expected to provide a valuable way for ISVs to measure the success of their applications.
• You can see this data under the Usage tab in ISV Studio.

Learn more about this feature here.

Learn more about PowerApps ISV Studio here.

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Power Apps | Introducing the Relevance Search API

We are introducing the Relevance Search API for Common Data Service (CDS) environments.

This provides access to exciting new search capabilities in environments with Relevance Search enabled.

The API can power three types of search experiences:

• Search results page
• Suggestions-as-you-type
• Autocomplete: Autocomplete using Relevance Search API

The following documentation provides details about the Relevance Search API: Search across entity data using Relevance Search.

Note that it is accessible through Web API only at this time.

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Power Apps | Custom API | Preview

Common Data Service has had the Custom Action feature for many years.

Custom Actions provide a no-code way to create a new API that can be called from CDS web services.

• Custom API is a new code-first approach that extends the concept of Custom Actions to provide capabilities that will make life easier for developers.
• This is a preview feature and the following is a list of some of the capabilities enabled with Custom API:

Create your own messages

Create and use Custom APIs

Create a Custom API in the maker portal

Create a Custom API with code

Create a Custom API with solution files

Read more details on this page on Power Automate blog.

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Power Automate Desktop October 2020 update | Preview

We are announcing that the Power Automate Desktop October 2020 update has been released!

Several updates have taken place in this monthly release.

There have been some key updates that enhance the productivity of Power Automate Desktop.

• Error notifications are available in the console
• Invalid path characters are allowed in flow names
• Caching is now available for stored flows
• Power Automate run history logs now provide specific subflow information
• Action parameters are now grouped to improve efficiency during configuration
• The ‘Send keys’ action is fixed in the desktop recorder
• SAP recording
• Subflow tab options are now functional during flow execution
• New icons used in Power Automate Desktop
• Mail message variable properties ‘From’ and ‘To’ can now be retrieved
• Enhancements in UI automation, Active Directory, OCR and Terminal emulation modules

Read more details on this page on Power Automate blog.

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Training Corner

Dynamics 365 Server-Side Synchronization | Learning Corner

• Check out the Server-Side Sync multi-part blog series to deep-dive into topics related to Server-Side Synchronization for Dynamics 365.
• This series explore various topics such as how Server-Side Sync works, Exchange properties, correlation methods, authentication, advanced configuration and common issues seen with the service.

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Power Apps | Opening Main Form Dialogs from OOB Grid Events

• Open a main record in a dialog in a model driven app by overriding the default onclick behavior.

• For full Power Platform Training Materials, check out this page on Power Apps Blog.

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Podcast – Coming soon

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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Field

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