Microsoft Business Applications Summit – Previewing what’s next
Today, we welcome more than 3,500 customers and partners to our inaugural Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle. Over the next two days, this community will come together with the engineering teams that build Dynamics 365, Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow to connect, share, learn, and be the first to know where we’re going and what’s coming next across the Business Applications landscape.
This event is all about making the community more successful: enabling our customers to be more agile in their adoption of transformational technology, to help them grow and drive better experiences for their customers and employees, ultimately unlocking insights and actions from their data, to discover new opportunities and stay competitive.
Earlier this year we committed to delivering major product releases twice a year, to offer predictability around new capabilities and a clear roadmap to enable adoption of new technology for our customers and partners. Today we’re making available the October 2018 release notes, which details hundreds of new capabilities and features across all our Dynamics 365 applications and the Power Platform.
Infusing intelligence and AI throughout our applications, enabling new modern experiences with mixed reality and deeper integration across Office 365, LinkedIn, and Azure are key focus areas for the October 2018 release. We’ll be showing these new capabilities throughout the event. Some of the highlights include,
- Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, the first of a new class of AI applications that delivers unique out-of-the-box insights by unifying data and infusing it with advanced intelligence to guide decisions and empower organizations to take informed actions. For Sales, in particular, we’ll show how AI can help salespeople prioritize their time to focus on deals that matter most, provide answers to the most common questions regarding the performance of sales teams, offer a detailed analysis of the sales pipeline, and surface insights that enable smarter coaching of sales teams.
- Enhanced Azure IoT Central integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service will enable proactive and predictive service. Building on previous integration, we’ll now support bi-directional flows. For example, sending commands from Field Service through IoT central to the device. The power of IoT is also extended to the technician with embedded IoT Central visuals and measurements within the Field Service mobile app.
- New enterprise credit management, revenue recognition and new dual accounting currency capabilities in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to give businesses a real-time view of global financials. In addition, enhanced process-based integrations across Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with Dynamics 365 for Field Services, Project Service Automation, and Talent, will give customers end to end visibility across departments.
- Continued integration across Office 365 and LinkedIn, there are dozens of new features coming with the October release. For example,
- Integration between Microsoft Teams, giving sellers access to Dynamics 365 for Sales within Teams for enhanced collaboration, while also taking advantage of the built-in Teams bot capability to provide new intelligence and self-service capabilities.
- Deeper LinkedIn integration with Dynamics 365 for Marketing that brings interactions information for smarter segmentation and lead scoring.
- Integration with Skype and video streaming within the interview process using Dynamics 365 for Talent to keep your hiring team in the know about candidates while also delivering a providing them with the ability to utilize Skype, video streaming, and submit mobile feedback.
- We continue to enhance and add even more new capabilities to Power BI to enable everyone in an organization to work from the same data platform and deliver intuitive tools so teams can leverage vast quantities of data quickly to reach new and compelling insights. New preview features for Power BI will begin appearing in the service this month (July).
- Mixed Reality is another area of investment with promising new scenarios from helping a frontline worker resolve an issue hands-free, to a retail store manager designing the best layout to make their products more appealing to customers. Earlier this year, we demonstrated the mixed reality Remote Assist application that would help our customers collaborate remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing, and mixed-reality annotations. We will show this technology in action at Business Applications Summit and share more details in the coming months.
The impact technology can have on businesses is evident. The connections between customers, products, people with data and intelligence at the center are creating feedback loops that enable businesses to transform. Microsoft is uniquely positioned in the market to enable that feedback loop and help our customers unlock their next opportunity.
I invite you to watch this morning’s keynote and learn more about Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. You’ll see how Microsoft is using Dynamics 365 to modernize our hiring processes as well as hear from some of our customers including Polaris, Macdonald Miller, and Auto Glass/ Belron that are on the cutting edge of technology and will share how they are transforming their businesses.
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