6 Features Coming to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Microsoft emphasized efforts to offer more connections and bring the communities together.
May 7, 2021
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Microsoft introduced a new user experience consisting of tools to discover, join, create and run local groups for the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft’s Power Platform.
“We have new community-owned, Microsoft-empowered user groups, where you’ll be able to engage directly with Microsoft to answer questions, learn about the latest innovations and influence future product road map,” Taylor said during the opening keynote. “They’re also a great place to find the information that matters to you, with Microsoft employees joining your local community.”
According to Microsoft, there are more than 775 user groups that total 2.85 million active users. A key benefit of these groups is that they connect users with partners and Microsoft. Now, Microsoft is supporting these user groups with an administrative team chartered with facilitating connections to local Microsoft subject matter experts throughout the world.
“You can engage with experts to answer questions, learn about the latest innovations, and influence future product roadmaps,” Taylor noted. “Our goal is to enable a global network of local user groups that are Microsoft-supported and community-led.”
Automated Insights is a new feature coming to Power BI that will use the popular analytics tool’s AI capabilities such as anomaly detection, smart narratives and the decomposition tree in an integrated user experience. Automated Insights runs in the background when a user is running a report, and it surfaces important information that might require immediate attention.
Power BI Automated Insights will enable self-service AI visualizations without requiring a Power BI creator to publish them.
While Power BI now lets users embed interactive Power Apps into their reports, Microsoft plans to extend Power Automate to the Power BI Canvas. “You can kick off a business process using power automates 300 plus connectors,” said Arun Ulagaratchagan, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Power BI.
Power BI Premium users can now test the preview of Goals, which provides “a data-driven, collaborative and adaptable way to measure key business metrics and goals built directly on top of Power BI,” Microsoft program manager Justyna Lucznik explained. Lucznik demonstrated the Goals feature during a dedicated session.
“Goals enables teams to easily curate business metrics that matter most and aggregate them in a unified view,” she added. “From there, teams can measure progress against their goals, proactively share updates with their teammates and dive deeper into their data when something needs further analysis. Users can easily monitor the health of their business, bringing in data across multiple Power BI workspaces and create gorgeous scorecards to drive impact.”
Power BI is currently the only analytics app for Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headsets. However, given the entry price of $3,500 for HoloLens2, Microsoft’s complete augmented reality solution will be far from ubiquitous. “But you can expect that the HoloLens will get cheaper, the field of view will improve, the battery will last longer, the software will get better, it will get lighter,” said a company spokesperson.
Now Microsoft is bringing some of the HoloLens capabilities to the Power BI Mobile app on both Android and iOS. Amir Netz, a Microsoft technical fellow and chief architect of the company’s business intelligence offerings., demonstrated how frontline workers can enhance their Power BI simulations with the HoloLens technology on mobile devices.
“Our vision is truly to empower everyone in the world with data,” Netz said. “And that means not just the people sit in offices and have computer and screens, but people who are really working, and working in the real world, people who are moving things, creating things producing things with their hands. And for this, we have to think again about how we deliver data to help them make better decisions.”
Netz demonstrated a building manager walking through a facility and mapping Power BI reports with real-time telemetry to resolve a problem with an elevator.
Data in Space will come to Power BI Mobile later this year.
The integration of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with the Microsoft Advertising platform brings unified customer data and segments it, to allow for targeted messages using Microsoft Marketing, as well as third-party tools such as Google Ads, Marketo, SendGrid, AutoPilot and MailChimp, among others.
Microsoft describes Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as a real-time customer data platform (CDP) that collects transactional, behavioral and demographic customer data. It models that data into multidimensional profiles. Microsoft Advertising has a feature called Customer Match, which uses first-party data to target customers via the Microsoft Search Network and Microsoft Audience Network. Microsoft claims Customer Match was able to deliver a 120% greater conversion rate (CVR) and 44% lower cost-per acquisition (CPA), based on its own internal data.
The integration of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with the Microsoft Advertising platform brings unified customer data and segments it, to allow for targeted messages using Microsoft Marketing, as well as third-party tools such as Google Ads, Marketo, SendGrid, AutoPilot and MailChimp, among others.
Microsoft describes Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as a real-time customer data platform (CDP) that collects transactional, behavioral and demographic customer data. It models that data into multidimensional profiles. Microsoft Advertising has a feature called Customer Match, which uses first-party data to target customers via the Microsoft Search Network and Microsoft Audience Network. Microsoft claims Customer Match was able to deliver a 120% greater conversion rate (CVR) and 44% lower cost-per acquisition (CPA), based on its own internal data.
A wave of enhancements are coming to Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and Power BI tools. The software giant showcased many of them at this week’s Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS).
Microsoft’s Alysa Taylor
During the virtual event, Alysa Taylor, corporate VP for business applications and industry, emphasized the company’s efforts to bring the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform communities together to assess learnings over the past year “and explore ways to proactively reimagine every layer of business.”
Microsoft officials, subject matter experts, partners and customers attended the various sessions. They outlined a range of case studies and revealed various new features coming to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. They include some significant enhancements coming to Power BI.
Our slideshow above shows some of the highlights of the Microsoft business applications road map.
Microsoft posted a complete recap of MBAS; plus, the sessions are available on demand here.
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