Microsoft is continually developing and improving its applications to stay current with the latest technology advances and customer needs. These new or updated features are announced twice a year and then released over the next several months. The easiest way to review and track individual feature plans is the infinitely helpful Release Wave Planner tool or the full release wave documentation. We encourage you to use the release wave planner, where you can sign in, save features you’re interested in, and keep track of general availability. 

Microsoft’s twice-yearly release waves are highly anticipated. They include features across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications, and they are packed with improvements and brand new features, some of which are requested from app users themselves.  

The Microsoft business application ecosystem provides a comprehensive array of applications that integrate seamlessly to support businesses of any size. Microsoft boasts a unified business and productivity application platform that is scalable, reliable, and integrated, enabling organizations to work smarter, not harder. This ecosystem optimizes operations while remaining current with technology. So, let’s talk about a couple of the big benefits to joining (or further engaging with) the Microsoft ecosystem--from built-in AI capabilities to automation features to advanced security.

As you’re likely aware, Microsoft will be removing the Outbound Marketing Module from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys app on June 30th, 2025. To prevent the interruption of your marketing efforts, you’ll want to work on getting your organization transitioned over to the Real-Time Journeys module within the next few months. This checklist can help to organize your thoughts and plan for the transition. There’s a simplified version with just the checklist items at the bottom. 

We’ve written a separate blog post discussing some of the most useful Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Sales. We want to add to that conversation by discussing another new feature that is designed to help you enter data faster, and this new feature is called form fill.

Within Dynamics 365, it’s easier than you may think to create a dashboard yourself, and it’s a process that can be repeated multiple times over to ensure that you have the right data visualization for specific needs or user roles—for instance you can create a salesperson dashboard to show salespeople their open leads and opportunities and where they are in the pipeline, and you can create a sales manager dashboard to help managers see what their team has on their plates).

In Dynamics 365 Sales, you have the pre-built list views available, which you can customize by changing filter and columns. This is one example (and some of our favorite parts) of the extreme customizability of the app’s interface. You can build your own views with only the data you want to see. Then you can save those views to use later, share them with your team, work with that data, and even export it.

Soon, we’ll be seeing many of the features mentioned in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1 Plans--a lot of items will become generally available in April. While they may not be here just yet, there are a few things standout features that we think lots of CRM users will find value in.

As part of the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 CRM has been updated with a new modern look and feel. Early access to the New Look was rolled out in February 2024, with general availability in April 2024.

The New Look brings upon visual changes to make Dynamics 365 sleeker, more modern, and more intuitive to use. Here’s a breakdown of the subtle yet impactful changes you can expect to see.

If your company uses Microsoft business solutions such as Dynamics 365 Sales or Business Central, you’ve probably been seeing Copilot in your app recently. Copilot is Microsoft’s answer for how to begin integrating AI into your normal business processes and includes a variety of tools to improve efficiency, such as providing summaries and generating email content ideas.

Though it is true that every business handles its sales funnel a little differently, in broad strokes, an opportunity will be nurtured until it is either lost (if the prospect decides not to buy) or until they are ready to see a quote. Within CRM, the quote is both an extension of the Opportunity stage and a new record itself. So first we’ll talk about creating a quote from an opportunity, making a quote from scratch if you don’t have an associated opportunity, revising the quote, and then converting it into an order (if you handle orders in your CRM).

If you’ve done any A/B testing in the Outbound Marketing module, you’ll know that the system is primarily based around setting the tests up at the email-level since that is the primary focus of Outbound Marketing. Real-Time Marketing has a couple additional channel options, such as texting, outside of just sending emails. As such, it pulls the A/B testing back to the Journey-level. Rather than setting up an A/B test on an email and then adding the element to the customer journey, we instead will simply add an action to our journey and select “Test which variation performs better.”

Sandboxes are for playing around and testing customizations and features. Production environments are where you do your actual work. Now let’s dig in a little deeper into how to work with sandboxes, and how to move your sandbox content into a production environment if/when you want to!

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

In this blog, we’ll discuss leads within Dynamics 365 Sales: how we get them there, what we do with them, and also how we move them from a lead into the next step of the sales funnel—an opportunity. In future blogs, we will discuss the sales process beyond this step.