2022 Release wave 1 of Dynamics 365

Discover the latest innovations in Dynamics 365 in the 2022 release wave 1

Microsoft has recently released the 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365, which includes new features and updates across the suite of business applications. Microsoft releases two waves of updates a year for its Dynamics 365 suite of applications. For this release wave, Microsoft has numerous updates, enhancements, and new features planned to be rolled out from April 2022 through September 2022.

In this blog post, we will explore some of the key highlights and new features from this release wave that users can expect for the following Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications:

• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Dynamics 365 Marketing
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Dynamics 365 Field Service
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Capture every customer interaction for real-time insights

In the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Conversation Intelligence will capture all customer interactions to provide business-critical insights to help the sales team save time, reduce manual labor, and focus on winning deals. In this wave, Teams calling will be supported, which includes outbound and inbound calls, using an improved interface, and allowing conversation intelligence to provide business insights on top of any type of Teams call. Additionally, Teams can be integrated with other Dynamics 365 apps to provide business insights on Teams calls made through other apps.

Sales Hub is now preinstalled on all environments

In this release wave, Dynamics 365 Sales has made Sales Hub, a Microsoft app designed for ideal seller experiences, available and preinstalled in all existing and new environments. The Sales Hub app comes configured with several core sales and sales insights features to help get started quickly. If your organization already has the Sales Hub model-driven app installed, there will be no changes. Otherwise, the Sales Hub app will be preinstalled in your environment and set to be visible only to the users with the following security roles:

• System administrator
• System customizer
• Sales, Enterprise app access
• Salesperson
• Sales manager
• Vice President of Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales and Outlook integration

In the 2022 release wave 1, users will be able to enable the Outlook integration to avoid double booking. The sales accelerator Outlook integration ensures that the sales accelerator can read the Outlook calendar while assigning tasks. This feature eliminates the need for double maintenance of availability in both tools, and any out-of-the-box office signals are captured while creating activities for the sales team to work on. This feature includes the following capabilities:

• Can select the option to automatically pick availability from the Outlook Calendar
• The sequence tasks will be scheduled honoring the Outlook calendar of the seller
• Lead and opportunity assignment are made considering the Outlook calendar availability of the seller

Other enhancements in the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Sales

For a full list of new features and updates, you can review the official Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales 2022 release wave 1. In addition to the features listed above, here are a few other noteworthy updates:

• Forecasting and pipeline intelligence updates
• Enhanced experience for adding product lines
• Update activities from sequence step and correlate it with timeline activities
• Move sequences between environments seamlessly
• Improve engagement by aligning activity on the right business day

New channel analytics dashboard

In the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, a new out-of-the-box aggregated channel analytics dashboard in real-time marketing, marketers will be able to track important delivery and engagement metrics at any level of aggregation. This includes across all channels, journeys, and marketing assets. This dashboard helps marketers to review engagement metrics for their campaigns so they can make improvements where needed and create more effective campaigns. With this feature, marketers can:

• Analyze positive or negative engagement, delivery successes, and delivery issues across different channels, journeys, or messages
• Leverage granular filters to drill down and analyze the effectiveness of a single or multiple channels, journeys, or messages
• Unlock insights on the links and calls to actions in outbound messages
• Study trendlines to analyze key metrics over time

Create conditional dynamic content with no-code experience

To deliver highly personalized messages to customers, marketers need to create content where entire sections target specific customer segments. Previously in Dynamics 365 Marketing, achieving this level of dynamics content required complex coding. In the 2022 release wave 1, a new conditional content experience enables marketers to easily create messages targeted to specific segments or attributes without writing any code. With this feature, marketers can:

• Personalize sections of content and images to a specific segment or attribute
• Target variation to any segment, attribute, or combination
• View content variations in the email designer

Outbound subscription centers in real-time journeys

Collecting consent is a crucial business need and some organizations leverage subscription centers to gather consent preferences from their customers. In the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can now bring the flexibility of subscription centers available in outbound marketing to real-time marketing journeys, enabling you to have multiple subscription centers customized and branded to your needs. With a subscription center in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can:

• Create a custom subscription center
• Add multiple subscription centers to real-time compliance settings
• Define which subscription center to use in a given email to generate the company address and unsubscribe URL
• Use the same subscription center in outbound and real-time marketing

Other updates in the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Marketing

For a full list of new features and updates, you can review the official Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing 2022 release wave 1. In addition to the features listed above, here are a few other noteworthy updates:

• Raise triggers from a journey with Power Automate flow
• Personalize emails using predefined dynamic text
• Create personalized journeys by adding conditions based on attributes
• Create emails faster with drag-and-drop, in context menu, and easy select interactions

Mobile app usability enhancements

The Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app is getting some exciting usability enhancements that will benefit your frontline workers. With these new features, they will have access to mobile-friendly experiences, making it easier to perform common tasks and reducing the time spent in the app. Users will be able to navigate the mobile app more easily, making it quicker and simpler to complete tasks while on-the-go. Improvements in this update include:

• Improved user interface with a modern design
• More intuitive navigation through the app
• Enhanced performance for a smoother user experience

Mobile app now supports Windows 10

The Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app now supports Windows 10. Technicians on Windows devices, such as Microsoft Surface tablets, can now see their bookings, manage their work orders, and perform inspections with this rich application deeply integrated with the rest of their Dynamics 365 applications. Here are the details of the new feature:

• The Windows Field Service app is available for the new Power Platform-based mobile app, providing an intuitive user interface and offline support
• The Outlook-style calendar for bookings has an intuitive user interface for quick service task and completion
• Tailored user experiences are available within the Power Apps component framework with hundreds of powerful controls out of the box
• Technicians can access the device camera to take pictures and scan barcodes
• The Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app supports deep linking

New and enhanced schedule board

In the 2022 release wave 1, the new and enhanced schedule board for Dynamics 365 is now available for new customers. This new schedule board brings many usability performance improvements, and it is now at functional parity with the old schedule board. Additionally, the updated schedule board allows for more flexibility and customization when scheduling appointments, making it easier to manage and optimize resources. Updates in this release include:

• Ability to customize schedule board columns and filters
• Improved visual representation of resource availability and utilization
• Increased flexibility in scheduling and dispatching appointments
• Better Bing Maps integration on the Gannt and map views
• Driving instructions for dispatchers and provided with one click

Dynamics 365 integration with Microsoft Teams meetings

The 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service includes updates that now allows agents and other subject matter experts to access and update relevant Dynamics 365 records seamlessly during a Microsoft Teams meeting. This feature helps drive customer satisfaction and agent productivity, as agents can easily access relevant customer data, create, assign, or complete tasks, and take relevant notes without switching applications or losing context. Capabilities in this release include:

• Create a Teams meeting when scheduling an appointment from Dynamics 365
• Join Teams meetings in a single click from Dynamics 365
• Access and update Dynamics 365 records during a Teams meeting
• Capture notes during a Teams meeting that automatically synchronize back to the Dynamics 365 record
• Honor Dynamics 365 permissions and rules for data access

Improved email template experience

The 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service includes a new email template creation experience that helps users to create consistent, professional, and preformatted email messages that can be used when communicating with customers. Additionally, the new insert template experience will help users save time and insert an existing template while composing an email. With these enhancements, users can efficiently provide more personalized and effective communication with customers. With this updates, users will have access to:

• Advanced layouts that are responsive to any screen size
• A new template gallery with multiple views
• Search capabilities based on title, subject, description, and content
• A standard set of filters that can be enhanced with custom fields

Forecasting case and conversation volumes

In the latest release, a new feature will enable customer service managers to forecast case and conversation volumes based on historical traffic and visualize forecast volumes. With accurate volume forecasting, managers can plan the right level of staffing for contact centers, reducing overcapacity and costs, and ensuring that customer wait times are minimized, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. The following are key capabilities of the forecast case and conversation volume feature:

• Forecast upcoming case and conversation volumes based on historical traffic
• Visualize forecast volumes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis for up to six months
• Slice and dice forecasted volumes by channel and queue
• Automatically detect seasonality from historical traffic

Other noteworthy updates from the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service

For a full list of new features and updates, you can review the official Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2022 release wave 1. In addition to the features listed above, here are a few other noteworthy updates:

• Scheduling and IoT capabilities in Customer Service workspace
• Usability enhancements to knowledge article search
• APIs for queue and agent availability
• Enhancements in diagnostics and fallback queues for unified routing

Modern approvals

In the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations, updates were made to the approvals process to provide a more efficient way of processing approval requests while enabling better tracking of their status. This feature introduces Approval sets, which group approval requests together into smaller subsets of operations, allowing for more accurate tracking of the approval status and improved reliability of posting. Approval sets improve the batch processing of approvals by sequencing and retrying them in a specific order, which ensure the reliability and traceability of approval processing, especially for large volumes of approvals.

This feature was enabled for users automatically on October 10, 2021, during public preview, and will become generally available on April 1, 2022. The improved processing of approvals results in a faster time to revenue for the customer and an improved end-user experience when submitting entries that require approval.

Revision and activation of quotes

Updates in the latest release providers users with better control of maintaining price lists, gains performance, and reduces data explosion in the project lifecycle. During the project lifecycle, a full copy of the price list can be initiated in different scenarios, such as when a project is sold and a project contract is created, when prices for project resources change in a given cycle, or when custom pricing is required for a particular project quote. This feature changes the following scenarios around copying price lists in Project Operations:

• Date-effective overrides allow users to create targeted overrides for specific prices in a price list during the project lifecycle
• The number of times a price list is copied fully is reduced or minimized using configuration parameters and dialog prompts
• Customers can reduce data explosion by creating overrides for specific prices
• The ability to use standard price lists on project contracts if there is no need to create a full custom price list

Date-effective overrides in pricing and costing

Updates in the latest release providers users with better control of maintaining price lists, gains performance, and reduces data explosion in the project lifecycle. During the project lifecycle, a full copy of the price list can be initiated in different scenarios, such as when a project is sold and a project contract is created, when prices for project resources change in a given cycle, or when custom pricing is required for a particular project quote. This feature changes the following scenarios around copying price lists in Project Operations:

• Date-effective overrides allow users to create targeted overrides for specific prices in a price list during the project lifecycle
• The number of times a price list is copied fully is reduced or minimized using configuration parameters and dialog prompts
• Customers can reduce data explosion by creating overrides for specific prices
• The ability to use standard price lists on project contracts if there is no need to create a full custom price list

Other top features from the Dynamics 365 Project Operations 2022 release wave 1

For a full list of new features and updates, you can review the official Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations 2022 release wave 1 documents. In addition to the features listed above, here are a few other noteworthy updates:

• Per diem expenses in the modern interface experience
• Transfer all lines with posting errors to new integration journal
• Time-zone agnostic price defaulting on Project Operations actuals
• Editing resource assignment contours
• Project-based vendor invoice reconciliation for resource and nonstocked scenarios
• Support vendor payment of expense liability in foreign currency

Want to learn more?

The 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications includes a range of innovative features and updates that can help businesses transform their operations and deliver better experiences to their customers. The new features and enhancement listed above are only a few highlights of what Microsoft has planned in the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365. Users can start exploring these new features and capabilities. Additionally, many D365 users rely on a Microsoft partner for assistance reviewing the most impactful updates. The right Dynamics 365 partner helps users identify the features most beneficial to their organization and provides training for users to maintain peak performance.