2023 Release Wave 1 Plans for
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1.
Microsoft published its 2023 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform on January 25. They comprise a compilation of enhanced capabilities planned to be released between April 2023 and September 2023. The first release wave of this year includes hundreds of updates and enhancements, which demonstrate Microsoft’s continued commitment to empowering digital transformation.
By bridging data, insights, and people silos, this release wave adds value to every role. By enabling AI-guided insights and suggested actions, automating tasks and processes, integrating collaboration into workflows seamlessly, and building low-code solutions, new capabilities empower informed decisions.
A review of Dynamics 365 updates
Dynamics 365 Marketing integrates sales and marketing capabilities to enable marketers and sellers to operate together as a unified team. This wave of features includes new features such as a business-to-business (B2B) analytics dashboard, frequency capping, multiple activation of email recipients, timelines, customizable preference centres, and Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) marketing tagging, so businesses can reach higher levels of marketing maturity by increasing output, improving organizational efficiency, and analysing the impact of their campaigns.
New features in Dynamics 365 Sales include enhanced sequence capabilities that support personalized and account-based engagement, actionable AI-powered suggestions to improve seller workflows, and an opportunity management workspace. Additionally, this wave will include enhanced email templates, content suggestions and text message capabilities, as well as several new abilities for creating, looping, and optimizing sales sequences.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides agents with the tools they need to work more efficiently. As a result, voice capabilities have been enhanced, unified routing has been implemented, Microsoft Teams collaboration has been embedded, as well as enhanced elements of the agent workspace such as a case form, timeline, and conversation control. With intelligently suggested replies and robust real-time analytics customized to each contact center, Microsoft will continue to invest in AI throughout this wave.
This wave of Dynamics 365 Field Service continues to improve the updated schedule board for dispatchers. In addition to that, Microsoft also makes it easy for frontline workers to access their appointments through Outlook. With improved global search capabilities and improved performance and reliability on the mobile app, they can find information faster.
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice invests in functionalities to remove obstacles for customers and focuses on improving the overall usage experience, along with architecture development and stability fixes for survey owners and respondents. A key feature will be enabling employees to record partial survey responses, for example, if a project owner leaves the organization.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, improved data interoperability and governance features will be available, which will allow users to control and restrict access to data, configurations, and actions; enhanced application and enterprise lifecycle management maturity; activation capabilities will be improved with tighter integration with Microsoft Dataverse, and they will receive navigational guidance, AI-powered suggestions, and task assistance, increasing the depth of insight they can gain from the product.
As part of the Dynamics 365 Finance solution, organizations will be able to gain a deeper understanding of their data, continue finance automation, and expand functions into Latin America. As part of the release, additional enhancements will be added to the system, such as further automation of complex tax scenarios and full end-to-end automation of accounts payable and ledger settlements to expedite the close and allow talented finance users to devote more time to value-added activities.
With improvements to omnichannel sales strategies, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to deliver increased agility and resilience throughout the supply chain. Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management has improved the ways in which attribute-based pricing can be managed, integrated soft reservations can be managed, and end-to-end processes can be integrated more effectively. This wave will focus on investments to increase agility and efficiency for discrete manufacturers, maintenance workers, and warehouse workers as well.
As part of its ongoing investment in capabilities, Dynamics 365 Project Operations is empowering project managers and teams with new features that include extending budgeting and time-phased forecasting to resource/non-stocked deployments and enhancing expense management’s core experiences across the web and mobile devices. In addition to performance and usability improvements, this release wave aims to incorporate modern and fluid controls in sales, billing and pricing, and subcontracting.
Dynamics 365 Guides will continue to invest in technologies to improve the experience of collaboration for HoloLens 2 users. This wave of updates will include improvements in handling incoming calls, join settings, and more accurate mixed reality annotations. Also coming soon will be holographic workflows and features like manipulating a hologram as an operator and taking a photo while in the guide.
With Dynamics 365 Commerce, B2B experiences are being updated and enriched, including the ability to model distributors as sellers, introducing distributor fulfilment dashboards, and improving the out-of-the-box B2B registration flow. Payment flows will be revised and improved, and network health checks will be implemented to diagnose network-related issues that can affect POS and Store Commerce uptime. Asynchronous payment capabilities will also be developed to support Klarna and other “buy now, pay later” methods, as well as real-time ACH banking.
In 2023 release wave 1, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will introduce Assessments API, which will allow customers to define their own fraud events (in addition to those covered by Fraud Protection such as Purchase Protection and Account Protection). Through this functionality, customers will be able to configure Fraud Protection to protect against fraud events specific to their business.
Dynamics 365 Business Central will continue to develop enhanced finance capabilities for intercompany transactions as well as several improvements to the management of warehouses for improved customer efficiency. This wave will also provide more default setup data to expedite the onboarding process for customers. Additionally, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365, including Teams, capabilities will be enhanced to facilitate better reporting, automation, and collaboration.
With Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, the AI skills detect actionable patterns within a space containing vehicles, whether stationary or mobile, and send alerts and notifications via Teams or Outlook. Microsoft Azure Stack HCI devices will also be released for configuring Connected Spaces for AI models to run at the edge during this wave. This is in addition to the existing Microsoft Azure Stack Edge devices.
Organizations can benefit from Microsoft Supply Chain Center by improving their end-to-end visibility of their supply chain, enhancing AI-based recommendations, and enabling them to collaborate seamlessly with their teams and suppliers on the workflow, resulting in better business processes.
Microsoft Power Platform Updates
As part of Power BI‘s commitment to drive a data culture, it continues to invest in empowering individuals, teams, and organizations. Individual users can easily create their own reports, gain more web parity, and use the Power Query diagram view into BI. Professional teams can take advantage of enhanced meetings and multitasking to work seamlessly.
Power Apps aims to reduce risk for organizations using advanced governance capabilities, ensuring easy onboarding, and using low-code capabilities in a manageable way to scale. With modern experiences for building apps, managing data, and coding logic, makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive. As a result of modernizing web and mobile experiences, customers will have a fast and enjoyable experience across apps.
Power Pages continues to invest in offering both low-code and no-code development tools as well as professional developer tools. As a result of the new features in this release, designers will be able to have greater flexibility when creating their solutions. Through the Microsoft Power Platform CLI tool and Microsoft Visual Studio Code, professional developers will be able to carry out additional actions and work with code more productively. Meanwhile, administrators will be able to better manage and govern their Power Pages sites.
With Power Automate, the creation of new flows is made easier by using natural language descriptions. The combination of these improvements and other improvements to the user experience means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started creating and authoring flows. Among these improvements are the introduction of work queues where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together, as well as the provision of simplified connection to a machine for desktop flows, eliminating the need for additional installs and password management.
Power Virtual Agents offers a comprehensive unified authoring canvas that Microsoft has designed as its one-stop shop for all bot-building needs. Developers and subject matter experts alike now have the capability to begin building bots today with the public preview. This is thanks to the continued integration with Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. In this wave, advanced authoring will become generally available.
AI Builder will improve document processing by adding more prebuilt model features like contract processing, personal identification, and the ability to extract fields from documents. Besides offering model governance and licensing, Microsoft is also making it easier to govern the use of AI Builder credits across environments, apps, and flows by improving their admin interface.
Here are the key dates for the 2023 release wave 1.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
| Release plans available | January 25, 2023 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2023 release wave 1 (April 2023 – September 2023) across Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry. |
| Early access available | January 30, 2023 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2023 release wave 1, coming in April, before they get enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | February 21, 2023 | The Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry release plans are published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | April 1, 2023 | Production deployment for the 2023 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will start on April 1, 2023. |
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