What Is A Release Wave?

Microsoft offer 2 release waves per year; one comes in April and another in September. As you can probably tell from reading this (or if you’re catching up, the published date of the post) then we’re talking about this in early February. This is because within the release wave, they are released in batches, and stages as well.

The stages of release are:

• Early access
• Public Preview
• General Availability

The release waves are released for general availability, but obviously they are slowly released prior for early access and public preview, so we get to know what’s coming ahead of the general availability release.

What does this mean?

This means that you can opt in to some of the features as part of the early access from February 3^rd, 2025.

The date of public preview varies for each feature, some will begin in February, but for others you’ll need to wait until April 2025.

General availability often begins to roll out in April 2025 but will scatter throughout May 2025 as well.

Overview Of Customer Insights – Journeys

Customer Insights – Journeys is a tool in Microsoft Dynamics 365 which focuses on the engagement with your customers and prospects. Giving you the opportunity the visualize, track and personalize all your touchpoints with your customers across the span of the customer lifecycle. From lead to customer you can enhance, automate and analyse each point of contact.

Connecting your sales and marketing has never been easier, unify your sales and marketing, revolutionize your day-to-day operations and well as understanding your customer expectations and knowing the best way to engage with them. From event registrations to enhanced automation this release wave covers enhancements to every corner of your sales and marketing journey.

What To Expect & When

This release wave is broken down into 3 topics:

• Copilot & AI Innovation
• Moments that matter
• Unify Sales and Marketing

Copilot & AI Innovation

Through leveraging the power of generative AI you can automate tasks and bring new communication channels to your customers & prospects leading to better business outcomes. In the new release wave, which will reach general availability in April 2025, you’ll be able to create journeys by using Copilot to describe them. Removing the need to manually calculate the best automation journey to use, you can save time by harnessing the power of Copilot to automate your marketing campaigns.

Moments That Matter

Every touch point with your customer and prospects matter, and ensuring you have a personalized approach is a must in the modern market. The release wave enhances this ideology by respecting quiet times and allowing you to engage with someone based on their location and time zone, an email landing in your inbox at 2am local time, can often be a bad sign, but timing your communication to the start of the business day in that specific geography could impact the results you see from your campaign.

Everyone see’s the need for a reactive campaign, or a last minute event, in April when it reaches general availability, you’ll be able to pause and resume journeys to handle those unexpected events and allow individuals to re-enter a one-time dynamic segment journey giving them the most bespoke content available at the time.

Unify Sales and Marketing

Use Customer Insights – Journeys to extend and enhance your sales and marketing machine, accelerate revenue and drive your organization forward. With additional accelerators becoming available in this release wave, here is what to expect.

Reaching general availability in April 2025 you’ll be able to create an event portal on your own website, automate seamless handoff between sales and marketing by creating sales activities directly from Customer Journeys, and create event portals with event and registration details by leveraging Power Pages.

In May you’ll see waitlist registrations to enhance your event capacity and the ability to collect extra customer info without updating your data model, so you can find out if someone has any dietary requirements for your event, but with out the need to update the entire record as this value will be linked with the event form.

If you want to know more about Customer Insights – Journeys, or perhaps how the release wave will impact you and your organization then please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we’ll be glad to assist you in anyway we can.