Another great launch to the Business Applications wave release. This time 2020 Wave 2. Tons of new features released with a few highlighted by the product team.

James highlighted why more than ½ million organisation and 97% of the fortune 500 companies are currently using the Power Platform and Dynamics 365. The main reason is how Microsoft is moving beyond the forms over data type of implementation and focusing more on gathering data from multiple sources (sensory data and system integration) and mashing it all into one platform.

James gave the example of how in a manufacturing scenario (aerospace), an employee maybe be picking some epoxy on a product, and the visual assistant device would know that they product they are using is past it’s best by date because it knows what is in the inventory. The device will then warn the user of the expiry date.

Over the past decade Microsoft has evolved into building a truly integrated environments part of a mature ecosystem as opposed to fragments systems that are mashed together.

A truly comprehensive ecosystem unparalleled by any other. The industry’s first comprehensive Business Applications solution.

And in this release more than 500 new features are released

Customer Insight and Dynamic 365 Marketing

James then handed over to Sangya Singh who demonstrated the Customer Insight (audience and engagement insights) as well as Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The success story was focus on the Campari organisation. Campari had over 30 acquisitions over the years. As such its customer data was fragmented and scattered across different legacy systems (booking, social, several CRM, etc). Customer Insight allowed them to bring all this data back into one system and build customer segments and journey from it.

More than ½ million customer were aggregated from the different sources using different integration points.

They could then dive into each customer and see a detailed aggregated timeline

Customer insight also had real-time analytics coming from web site usage.

Furthermore AI models allowed them to create new segments based on existing segments form previous years.

In second part of the demo, Sangya demonstrated how that customer journey was then imported into Dynamics 365 Marketing. She also demonstrated the latest refreshed to the customer journey editor with its updated analytics and reporting visualisations, and the new email editor.

Dynamics Health Care 360

Oren Ryngler then demonstrated the latest features of health care 360 that are very relevant to the current world pandemic. Microsoft is dedicated to support health organisations in the current landscape and get them to define what the new normal is.

Ryan Darby Martin and Lydia Williams then demonstrator how the new application allows customers to book use the chat bot to discuss their condition and book an appointment.

They then demonstrated the virtual consult that leverages augmented reality to take notes and diagnose the patient (using the new omnichannel voice channel that leverage Azure Communication Services).

Hi Ryan! Hi Doctor! 🤣

Finally the doctor virtual visit allow medical professionals to have access to all medial records will conversing with the patient.

Commerce

Muhammad Alam then talked about the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 for Commerce, the portal editing capabilities, payment, and fraud prevention in the context of Coca-Cola United.

Supported by Matt Sheard, Matt ran the demos. I particularly liked the Order Fulfilment app that also worked like a mobile PoS.

Together, they also demonstrated Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and how they can use cloud scale units to address performance issues between supply warehouses.

Power App native integration with Teams

Charles Lamanna passionately talked about how the Power Apps experience is now native to teams including the authoring part.

The scenarios are truely facinaing where a power app can trigger an approval that is handled by power automate which then integrates with the new power automate desktop for use robotic process automation (RPA) to enter data in a legacy system. All of this without leaving teams.

Charles also demonstrated how the pro-code no-code relationship works by leveraging custom connectors in Power Apps Studio as if an out of the box one but in fact built by the pro-code team using Visual Studio and Azure API Management.

Power BI

And finally Arun Ulagarachagan talk about the executive  summary (smart narratives) capability of Power BI, Anomaly Detection, and Excel integration.

Conclusion

James Phillips then concluded by saying if you think October was a big release, wait to see what is planned for April.

Q&A were answered by

Ray Smith: Sales

Sangya Singh: Customer Insight

Dina Apostolou: Customer Engagement CRM

Richard RleL Power BI, PVA, P automate

Stephanie Dart: ERP

Ryan Cunninglhams: Power Apps Engineer

Pepijn Richter