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You can now connect bots to phone call interactions with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Microsoft has recently released this feature which offers a fantastic potential for customer service and voice-based bot interactions. You can now expand the scope of support by allowing customers to interact with bots using their voice. Integrate those chats with Dynamics 365 Customer Service for escalation to a human agent.

With Power Virtual Agents, you can contextually hand off escalated Power
Virtual Agents sessions to live (human) agents using the Chat Add-in for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. You can also connect both voice-based and text-based bot conversations by installing extension solutions that link your bot with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The Power Virtual Agents telephone extension adds a number of additional actions and
variables that can be used by Power Virtual Agents chatbots to understand, reply to, and
transfer voice calls to the bot.

This is a great feature and offers excellent extensibility for many of our customers’ Support Operations.

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Microsoft AI Builder new capabilities as part of Power Platform Fall 2021 Wave 2 Release

As part of Microsoft Power Platform Release Wave 2 (Fall 2021), Microsoft is adding new functionality to Microsoft AI Builder, part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Features include intelligent document processing with the ability to extract new content types such as checkboxes, signatures and typed fields (date and currency). There will also be support for more prebuilt models in the document automation solution.

AI Builder aims to give makers the ability to build AI scenarios with easy-to-use and modern user interfaces. It is already integrated into Power Apps and Power Automate, giving` makers the ability to create AI models and embed them into their apps and flows. Microsoft Product team is focusing on improving the ability to integrate AI models into Power Automate and Microsoft Teams with new templates and easy-to-leverage authoring examples for makers.

Some of the key document processing new capabilities include:

  • Checkbox detection in documents
  • General availability of the supervised tables feature that allows users to customize an AI
    model to detect complex tables in documents
  • Support for multipage tables
  • The ability to process a page range of documents
  • Extraction of typed fields (for example, dates and currency)
  • Signature detection in document
  • Accuracy score
  • Increased collection size, which allows users to train a model to detect up to 200
    collections of documents in the same model
  • Support for more than 73 languages detected in forms processing custom model

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Voice channel added to D365 Omnichannel

Microsoft announces native Voice channel for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This is to complement Dynamics 365 Omni Channel which now has Voice, Chat, SMS, Whats App and more.

This is a significant move forward by Microsoft as competitors are way behind when it comes to native voice channel in their Customer Services solution offerings. The new Voice channel is built on Microsoft Azure Communication Services and I expect this to be a fantastic feature for all Dynamics 365 customers.

Microsoft said native voice support, which plugs into the same calling platform used by Microsoft Teams, will better connect contact centre agents to customers and also more easily integrate natural language processing and transcription with existing Microsoft AI tools that already can handle channels such as chat, SMS texting and social media messaging.

You can watch this video which is introducing it here

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6 Months FREE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Licences, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Apps Portal and Power Virtual Agents due to Corona & COVID-19

Fantastic news! Microsoft has just announced that they are offering 6 months of FREE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Licences, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Apps Portal and Power Virtual Agents!

Microsoft said in the announcement: “We are making Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Apps portals and Power Virtual Agents available for a free six-month product offer, that includes all premium capabilities for customers in the healthcare, education, non-profit, and government sectors.”

The announcement is also saying:

“during the COVID-19 crisis, Dynamics 365 Customer Service (including Digital Messaging) is available free of charge for up to six months.”

 

Here is the Offer Criteria:

Power Platform:

  • In healthcare, government (any level or branch), nonprofit, or education sectors
  • Implementing a Power Platform solution in response to COVID-19, either a Microsoft-provided template or custom implementation

Dynamics 365:

  • Implementing a Dynamics 365 Customer Service or Dynamics 365 Remote Assist solution in response to COVID-19, either a Microsoft-provided template or custom implementation

Full announcement can be found here:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2020/03/26/resources-and-support-for-our-global-customers-impacted-by-covid-19/

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Due to Coronavirus and COVID-19, Microsoft will relax the deadline for deprecating legacy web client by two months to December 2020

More good news from James Phillips announcement about helping Business continuity for Microsoft Business Solutions customers.

Microsoft is relaxing the deadlines for deprecating the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement legacy web client by two months to December 2020.

As we know, Microsoft was due to end the legacy web client for Dynamics 365 Online organisations from October 2020 and have asked all Customers to move to use Dynamics 365 Unified Client Interface (UCI). This has now been delayed to December, which is good news for those business still struggling to move to UCI.

James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Solutions, has today announced a number of actions by Microsoft to support businesses globally due to the current difficult times caused by Corona Virus and COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement is part of Microsoft’s commitment to help ensure business continuity for its Customers and Partners especially those using Microsoft Business Solutions such as Dynamics 365 CRM (Customer Engagement) and Microsoft Power Platform.23

Here is a link to the full announcement:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2020/03/23/our-commitment-to-customers-to-help-ensure-business-continuity/

 

 

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Announcing the deprecation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Outlook COM Add-in for D365 Online

Today, 25th March 2020, Microsoft announced the deprecation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Outlook COM Add-in.

This is the second time Microsoft announces that! First time was in 2017 until James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Solutions, announced the “un-deprecation” during his Q&A session with me as part of his keynote of our 365 Saturday event in London in January 2018. (I’m obviously very proud of this exclusive news I got at the time! – you can see and read it here )

Back then, James announcement was very welcomed as many organisations relied heavily on the Outlook COM Add-in. This time, Microsoft is differentiating Online organisations from On-premise ones. The deprecation and end of support only applies to D365 Online and not on-premise organisation.

The announcement says: “we are announcing the deprecation of the Outlook COM Add-in. Customers should make the move prior to October 1, 2020. Microsoft will continue to provide support, security and other critical updates to the Outlook COM Add-in until October 1, 2020.”

It also says: “This announcement applies to online organizations, but we recommend our on-premise customers also take advantage of the benefits of Dynamics 365 App for Outlook and upgrade from the Outlook COM Add-in at the earliest.”

So in summary, the announcement is saying:

  • Outlook COM Add-in is now officially deprecated for Online D365 organisations
  • Outlook COM Add-in support ends on 1st October 2020
  • Outlook COM Add-in is still available to on-premise customers but they are highly encouraged to move to the modern D365 App for Outlook.

Full announcement is here: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-future-of-outlook-integration-for-dynamics-365-and-power-apps-customers/

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The Rise of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in the Real Estate, Property and Housing Market

I have recently published an article on MS Dynamics World discussion the rise of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform in the Real Estate, Property and Housing Market. I also discuss the reasons for this and why other old-time established vendors are unable to compete. Keen to hear everyone views on this (no swearing!).

The post is inspired by our own firm’s experience (TechLabs London) in the Dynamics 365 platform and in the Property and Housing Industry through our solution (iProperty Cloud)

Here is a link to the article – feel free to comment below or on the article itself:

https://msdynamicsworld.com/story/rise-dynamics-365-real-estate-property-and-housing-market

 

 

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Due to Coronavirus and COVID-19, Microsoft will defer mandatory uptake of 2020 Wave 1 to May instead of April

James Phillips, President of Microsoft Business Solutions, has today announced a number of actions by Microsoft to support businesses globally due to the current difficult times caused by Corona Virus and COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement is part of Microsoft’s commitment to help ensure business continuity for its Customers and Partners especially those using Microsoft Business Solutions such as Dynamics 365 CRM (Customer Engagement) and Microsoft Power Platform.

A key part of this announcement is that Microsoft will now defer the mandatory uptake of 2020 Wave 1 update from April to May. James said in the announcement: “..we will defer the mandatory uptake of the 2020 wave 1 update For Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement by one month to May, instead of April, …”

This is great news and very considerate as businesses globally are struggling with the current Coronavirus related issues such as having all their employees working from home all the time and making sure they have tools and capabilities to do their job remotely. Hence, delaying any upgrade that may impact these businesses, is very helpful.

Here is a link to the full announcement:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2020/03/23/our-commitment-to-customers-to-help-ensure-business-continuity/

 

 

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Connect your Microsoft Azure Function to Dynamics 365 using Server to Server authentication within a Single Tenant

If you are using Microsoft Azure Functions in your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform projects (and you should be), then you should never use a simple username and password authentication to your Dynamics 365. The same applies if you have a web application, website, or any other external solution accessing your common data services (CDS).

You should instead consider using single-tenant server-to-server authentication. This is different from a multi-tenant situation where your web application where the application resides on a different tenant to where your CDS is.

For Single-tenant server to server (S2S) authentication, the process is a bit lengthy but pretty straight forward. Here is a link to the official documentation on how to do this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/use-single-tenant-server-server-authentication

You might also want to explore how you can connect your Azure functions using Azure key vault via this article: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminthefield/archive/2019/05/29/certificate-based-authentication-with-azure-functions-key-vault

 

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Microsoft Business Applications Summit is now a Virtual Event – Make sure you register for updates

Due to the Corona Virus and COVID-19 global challenge, Microsoft has decided to change its Business Applications Summit, a virtual event rather than in-person. The summit was due to take place on 6th and 7th May 2020 in Dallas, Texas. However, this is all now switching to be a virtual event. The event focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, Power Apps, amongst many other applications.

Make sure you register for the event updates via this URL:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/BusinessApplicationsSummit