What Is A Release Wave?

First though, what is a Release Wave?

Twice a year, Microsoft release a rollout of updates to their suite of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform products.

Each wave is carried out in stages, with each update assigned a specific rollout date to ensure a stable release, with early adopters getting preview access to features, and consequently helping to flush out any bugs before it hits general availability!

Today, we’ll run you through the highlights of the Release Wave 2 updates for Dynamics 365 Sales. If you or your clients depend on this SaaS, you’ll need to know this.

New Features Available Now

• Copilot email summaries ­– of course this Wave is going to be packed with Copilot! This particular new feature will summarise those long email chains so that you don’t spend all your time reading unnecessary chat.
• Copilot email assistant – You’ll now be able to instruct Copilot to draft an email and then have them assist you in changing the tone and content. Or get advice on an existing email you’ve already written.

Features Coming Available This Month

• Copilot Account Summaries – It wont be long before you can view a summary of Opportunities, Leads, and Cases in an Account record. The coolest bit though is that it summarises recent news articles on the Account, including stock price.
• Copilot Sales Document Summary – This update will mean organisations can get summaries of lengthy, cumbersome sales documentation to make better, informed decisions quicker meaning you can spend more time building a relationship with clients.
• Opportunity Grouping & Aggregation – A new Opportunity pipeline view means you’ll soon be able to group Opportunities by Account, seller, closing date… almost anything you want. You’ll also be able to aggregate numerical values from those groups to prioritise the Opportunities most important to you.
• New Lead Qualification Process – Finally, this month will allow you to set qualification rules so that a single Lead can qualify into multiple Opportunities with pre-populated fields and Copilot summaries

Upcoming features

• Copilot Immersive Homepage – It won’t be long before real time insights and natural language capabilities combine to give you a dashboard to run your day from. See suggested actions, target progress and updates, all from your Opportunities and Accounts.
• Copilot Actionable Insights – Lastly, you’ll soon be able to view insights and act on them, including keeping records up to date, email follow-ups, meeting actions and engagement of new opportunities.

For FormusPro, these changes offer a wide range of opportunities for our clients.

The forward charge of Copilot hasn’t been subtle for good reasons… these new features will help solve problems that every single one of you encounter every day.

Reading long emails, understanding sales documentation, communicating effectively and acting on accurate information. Each of these issues can now be much less cumbersome with the assistance of Copilot.

Along with the new functionality to configure Lead qualification, this a big step towards automating the dull minutia of work, so we are free to focus on what’s important to us and the organisation as a whole.