Latest whitepaper & mobile connector downloading address –
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/AX/news-events/news/MSDYN_MobileAppsAX

When you migrate from ACS to SAS, you only need complete below 4 tasks listed in Appendix F: Apply the 2018 update to migrate from ACS to SAS.

1 Follow the steps in Appendix A: Create a new Service Bus namespace to create a new SAS Service Bus.

2 Follow the steps in Appendix B: Configure shared access policies, so that you can provide the key as the Azure service identity password in the connector parameters.

3 Install the latest connector, and update the Azure service namespace, Azure service identity name, and identity password from the previous steps.

Note: The latest connector is not backwards compatible with ACS. Once the latest update is applied it will no longer work with ACS. The previous ACS solution is set to be deprecated on Nov 7, 2018.

4 In AX 2012, In the Settings for workflow form, update the Base URL to approve/reject workflow field with the details of the new Service Bus.

This blog only focuses on some difficulties you might experience in item #1 when you create SAS service bus with the Azure power shell. When you follow the sample power shell commands in the Appendix A, you might run into some errors and cannot proceed. This blog also shows you some screenshots after you complete the configuration and test the feature with email approval.

Errors I faced when handling with Azure power shell

Install Azure power shell

This indicates the windows PowerShell version is too low to meet the minimum requirement for Azure PowerShell. You need to update it to at least 5.1 and then can proceed with Azure PowerShell installation

Login-AzureRMAccount

From below overview of Azure power shell, we know there are 2 modules for Azure power shell, meaning there are 2 different sets of Azure commands you can use to run the Azure power shell commands. Unfortunately, the white paper is using the AzureRM module and I was not able to go through successfully. Instead, Az module works well for me. So, I recommend you use Az module as well to proceed.  Az module is also recommended as you can see from below overview screenshot.

Use Connect-AzAccount instead to proceed.

Enter your Azure subscription account in below screen

Step 3 to check and select the Azure subscription ID.

Create the service bus with power shell command. Note you need to create the resource group manually on Azure portal before your run the command. Otherwise you will face below error. Note the diagram in whitepaper to elaborate this command is really confusing and sort of wrong.

Below is screenshot from whitepaper to elaborate the power shell commands to create service bus, however it’s using AzureRM and has some issue in particular with explanation of the parameters.

Below is my sample command I used to create my service bus. You can simply follow it to create your own service bus.

New-AzServiceBusNamespace -ResourceGroupName LeoResourceGroup20190115 -NamespaceName LeoServiceBus20190115 -Location ‘Southeast Asia’

It will take less than 1min to create the service bus with the Azure PS. Then you’ll get below output. Save it somewhere.

In summary, below is a mapping between the commands in the whitepaper and commands for Az module –

Mobile connector

As of now (Feb 2019), version of the latest mobile connector is 8.2.387.0. Note – you always need to download the latest mobile connector from above link to configure this feature. Due to the topology change, old connector doesn’t support latest SAS.

Side notes for connector–

1. Mobile connector doesn’t have to be installed in AOS servers. You can install it on any server you like. No AX component is required for mobile connector.
2. If you run into below error when opening mobile connector UI, this is because the mobile connector service is in Stopped status. Simply start it from windows service list then you’ll be good to fix this issue and start the UI.

1. ADFS is not required for workflow approval via email. So, you can enter any value when configuring parameters on connector UI for ADFS. Only 4 parameters as below are required for workflow approval via email. All rest you can just provide some dummy values for them.
2. 1. Azure service namespace – it’s the service bus name LeoServiceBus20190115
   2. Azure service identity name – use default sendlisten
   3. Azure service identity password – primary key in SB > SAS > Primary key
   4. Endpoint URI of EmailApprovalsServices – Just replace the placeholder which is the AOS name. Sample : net.tcp://DAX2012R3:8201/DynamicsAx/Services/EmailApprovalsServices

Test result

Below is my received sample email for workflow approval.

After click approve/reject hyperlinks, the web page will be redirected to below new page where you can add some comments for approval/rejection–

The process can even be done on your smart phone –

The workflow is processed and you can check the comments from AX client > workflow history –

Side notes for troubleshooting

When you test the approval via email by clicking the link in email, you might get below error information and cannot proceed with approve/reject.

Checking the connector UI, you’ll notice only one Config service is showing (generally you should see 2 services showing in Started section – …/config, and …/email)

Resolution –

This issue is caused by wrong value (or even empty value) for EmailApprovalService on mobile connector UI. You need to fix the connector parameter by providing correct value for parameter EmailApprovalService (this is from the step #3 – create inbound ports, you need to create it manually in AX > inbound ports form. More guidance can refer to the whitepaper for workflow approval via email), you’ll get 2 services showing in the connector UI (Email & Config) which is expected. And above issue you see from web browser will be gone.

As the manufacturing marketplace continues to evolve, so do customer expectations. Customers expect faster and faster response times and improved asset availability. To meet these growing demands, manufacturers need to transform field service to increase efficiency and ensure a first-time fix. Todays average first-time fix rate is 74 percent, which means over 25 percent of service calls require return visits, which can cost upwards of $1,100 per truck roll., according to an article in Field Technologies Online. Return visits also mean dissatisfied customers, broken SLAs, frustrated technicians, and wasted time and resources.

Remote monitoring of assets is the first step for manufacturers to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to increase operational efficiency and improve profitability. Operational data, provided through remote monitoring, enables field service to deliver quick response times and improve first-time fix rates.

Connected field service is the next step in the journey to transform field support. Connected field service enables organizations to transform service from a costly break-fix model to a proactive and predictive service model through the combination of IoT diagnostics, scheduling, asset maintenance, and inventory on the same platform. It is the foundation of a seamless service process that can increase customer satisfaction and boost revenue.

Want to improve visibility and field operations? Let me tell you a story.

Swiftel International is a telecommunications firm specializing in electronics payment solutions. Swiftel needed greater visibility when it came to device management and field operations. Device malfunctions demanded time-consuming inspections and scheduling field technicians was difficult due to blind spots in the companys performance tracking and work scheduling. Swiftel wanted to:

• Streamline remote device tracking and troubleshooting
• Monitor field technician performance and leverage technicians with the right training
• Improve customer satisfaction with greater service visibility

Collaborating with Microsoft, Swiftel chose a comprehensive solution of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service and Azure IoT. This approach would allow asset tracking and scheduling in the field with the flexibility of cloud access. Swiftel would also be able to optimize technician schedules, track inventory, and perform advanced data analysis for efficient routing and technician skill-matching.

Fast forward to streamlined services and enhanced productivity.

Now Swiftel can manage its devices remotely, and schedule better and manage logistics more effectively. Swiftel has a more comprehensive view of workers in the field, and has increased productivity and lowered costs due to more streamlined services.

Swiftel uses this intelligent system to optimize technician assignments using multiple factors, such as a technicians experience in handling the specific failure, the customers preferred technician or the technicians proximity to the site. Leveraging machine learning, Dynamics for Field Service automatically assigns the work order to the most experienced available personnel.

As the volume of requests increase, this system optimizes the technicians schedule to create the most efficient travel path, allowing the technician to perform additional calls that day. Real-time inventory management ensures that the replacement part is available on the scheduled date and that the technician has access to the tools needed to complete the job. Dynamics for Field Service can identify the right parts to replace, where they should be purchased, and provides more accurate lead time predictions for the organization.

Lets take our story even further. What if a technician needs additional help during the service call? They can leverage Dynamics 365 Layout and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist using HoloLens. This emerging technology offers technicians 3-D renderings overlaid directly onto the device, highlighting the parts needing repair while displaying performance dataeven on a mobile device. Artificial intelligence (AI) can use the data from predictive analytics to make just-in-time recommendations to the technician, ensuring repairs are completed correctly the first time, every time. Remote Assist is in the early phases of being used to improve safety and reduce costs through the use of remote experts for equipment verification and incident response.

Lets get back to our story. Now Swiftel technicians can commit repairs to a device with minimal downtime, and the device is fixed right the first time by the best technician available. Check out the full Swiftel case study for more information.

Create your own story at Hannover Messe

Make your field service dreams come true by experiencing Dynamics 365 for Field Service, and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, using Hololens, and learn how connected field service works. Join me for a personal tour of these technologies in booth #40 at Hannover Messe on April 1 5 in Hanover, Germany.

Youre invited to learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Applications can transform your support operations. Try mixed reality and Hololens and see for yourself how AI can proactively drive efficiencies, optimize resources and modernize field service. Find out how easily you can leverage connected devices and IoT with Field Service to deliver proactive and never fail service to your customers.

I look forward to seeing you at Hannover Messe!

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Applies to: Project Service Automation for Dynamics 365

Were pleased to announce the latest update for the Project Service Automation application for Dynamics 365. This release includes some important feature enhancements, improvements to quality, performance, and usability, and is based on your feedback and requests.

This release is compatible with Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps version 9.x. To update to this release, visit the Admin Center for Dynamics 365 online, solutions page to install the update. For details, refer How to Install, Update a Preferred Solution.

Project Service Automation (V3.6.0.67)

Features

• Support for bulk adjustments of approved Time and Expense lines.
• Allow price setup in any currency for labor prices within a single cost price list.
• Allow price setup in any unit of time within a single price list (in sales or cost context).
• Support for a currency agnostic Cost Price List defaulting for a global PSA practice.
• Make Product price list optional on project based opportunities.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Respect system settings for using currency code vs. symbol on estimates tab.
• Fixed: Expense “New” button displays the incorrect tooltip.
• Fixed: Expense: Incorrect values in the Remaining Effort columns when editing schedule in specific scenarios related to adding a new task to the WBS.
• Fixed: Resource utilization grid not respecting resource calendars correctly and calculating utilization incorrectly.
• Fixed: When creating a requirement through generic team member, requirement details are not respecting the project calendar.
• Fixed: Duration in the Microsoft Project desktop client when linked Microsoft Project Add-in, increases when refreshing the project from PSA.
• Fixed: Unbilled Sales Actual marked as “ready to invoice” is not reversed when cancelled or recalled.
• Fixed: Time duration entry updated to support HH:mm -> HH.hh

-Project Service Automation Team

The post Release Notes for Project Service Automation Update Release 6 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We are excited to announce the support for Apply with LinkedIn for candidates to easily apply to jobs 

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with more than 610 million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Most LinkedIn active users keep their profile up to date so recruiters can match them to the right opportunities. 

Dynamics 365 for Talent Attract customers can now allow their candidates to apply for jobs through the Attract career site using “Apply with LinkedIn” functionality. Once the integration is setup by the Attract administrator, candidates will now be able to easily use their full LinkedIn profile to auto-fill applications for jobs within the Attract career site. This capability streamlines the application for the candidate providing latest and relevant information about themselves. Additionally, for the hiring organization, “Apply Starters” helps to keep track of candidates that started their application with LinkedIn data but do not submit the application. Apply starters is available in LinkedIn Recruiter as we work on adding Apply starters explorers widget in Attract.

To set up “Apply with LinkedIn” integration with Attract, please click here. If you have any feedback or ideas for how we can improve the product and its capabilities, please submit an idea here or leave a comment below. 

The post Dynamics 365 for Talent now supports Apply with LinkedIn appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend two days at the Adobe Summit, where our longstanding partnership with Adobe grew deeper and stronger. The momentum around Adobe and Microsoft was palpable, and Im thrilled that were offering our mutual customers best-in-class solutions to provide great experiences for their customers. It was an exciting week in Las Vegas!

The next steps for the Open Data Initiative

During Wednesdays general session, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen onstage for a conversation covering digital transformation, creating a learn-it-all culture at Microsoft, and leveraging data to create personalized, impactful customer experiences. We also saw the Open Data Initiative (ODI) in action. As originally announced last September by Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP, the ODI is a new approach to business data that helps companies transform customer experiences through real-time insights delivered from the cloud.

Unilever, one of the early global brands to express support and excitement about the ODI, announced its intention to leverage these data connections immediately. At the Adobe Summit, Unilever demonstrated how it plans to bring together disparate customer, product, and resource data and use AI-driven insights to reduce plastic packaging and encourage consumer recycling. By eliminating silos of data, Unilever will connect inventory and plastics data with Adobe data on Azure to enhance customer experiences and encourage participation in this sustainability initiative.

We also announced a new approach as part of the ODI for publishing, enriching, and ingesting initial data feeds from the Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA, into a customers Azure Data Lake. This enables customers to use AI and machine learning to generate new, actionable insights that can transform their business.

Just after Wednesdays general session, I had the privilege of kicking off the first-ever meeting of our ODI Partner Advisory Council, along with my colleagues from Adobe and SAP. Our partners will be critical to unlocking the true opportunity presented by the ODI, and Im excited to work closely with them to develop this initiative further and bring this innovation capability to more customers.

Read more about ODI in last weeks announcement.

Accelerating account-based experiences with LinkedIn

On Tuesday, we also announced a new extension of the Microsoft and Adobe partnership to include LinkedIn. This addition expands opportunities for product innovation and increases value for our joint customers. Were adding new integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud, Dynamics 365 for Sales, and LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to accelerate account-based experiences empowering B2B marketers and account-based sellers to easily identify, understand and engage customers, and create better orchestration, measurement, and delivery of targeted content for more personalized experiences.

Enterprise sales and large account deals often demand long negotiations, multiple decision makers, and complex relationship dynamics. We believe account-based experience drives success. Today, enabled by deeper data integration across Microsoft, Adobe, and LinkedIn, marketing and sales teams can tailor their offerings to individual customers, understand changing demands, and land complex sales.

Read more about this in the announcement from Adobe.

Customers seeing value of Adobe + Microsoft

Also on Tuesday, Brenda Bown, General Manager for Microsoft Business Applications, hosted a panel with Matthew Jafarian, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Miami Heat and Mark Pelletier, Vice President of eBusiness, AAA Northeast. Matthew and Mark represent two of many customers using Adobe and Microsoft solutions to understand and delight customers. They shared their challenges and opportunities, explaining how their partnership with Adobe and Microsoft connects them with people in a more personal, relevant way.

For Matthew, working with the Miami Heat, this was all about the guests in the stadium:

Were focused on fan facing technology. Thats everything from ticketing tech when you walk in the building, thats retail tech, thats food and beverage tech. All of that data flows into our applications, Dynamics 365, our martech stack which is primarily Adobeeverything is focused on creating great fan experiences.

This type of business evolution is underway across the globe.

In Colombia, Avianca Airlines is focused on creating highly personalized and specific customer journeys for every passenger they fly. As Santiago Aldana Sanin, CDO and CTO, explains, success in the travel business requires a focus on the complete experience, from booking, to the gate, to the air. They are already seeing the value of customer-centric IT with Microsoft and Adobe today.

Closer to home, 24 Hour Fitness has pioneered the health and wellness industry for more than 30 years. Today, with the partnership between Adobe and Dynamics 365, 24 Hour Fitness targets and nurtures users throughout their health journey, from exercise evaluation and purchase, to long-term wellness and personal engagement, all on a single digital platform.

Our commercial environment is changing. And my favorite part of this job is not the growing list of marketplace applications, services, and solutions, its the partnerships. By partnering with industry leaders like Adobe, growing our ecosystem with ISVs, and working directly with customers to build new solutions, we can add genuine value and help transform the world together.

Last weeks Adobe Summit was the next step in our ongoing partnership with Adobe. Learn more about how that partnership can transform your business here.

The post Growing the Microsoft and Adobe cloud partnership appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We are thrilled to announce that the much-awaited feature mobile offline for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps (9.x online versions only) is now available for Public Preview. This feature is available on Dynamics 365 for phones and tablet app for iOS and Android users. Going forward, we will also enable this functionality for all model-driven apps.

Today, traveling workforce and frontline workers cannot work with their data in areas with no internet connectivity, thereby hampering their productivity. With the release of offline capabilities, users can now continue to work without hindrance in elevators, building basements, subway commute, etc.

How does mobile offline work?

Using mobile offline solution is easy. Once Dynamics 365 administrators set up mobile offline solution, users can start using it right away without having to do anything else. Administrators can set up offline solution in a few simple steps.

1. Select the data/entities that you want users to have access to in offline mode.
2. Create a mobile offline profile by adding a subset of entities selected above, corresponding filters for data download, and users who will have access to that data.
3. Select app modules and associate them with the profiles created above to ensure that right app modules and data are available to the users.

For more information, see the Mobile Offline Admin Guide.

Once the above set up is done, which should only take a few minutes, users can start to access their data on the device in offline mode without any hassle.

Offline data on the device is updated periodically in the background to ensure that you always have access to the latest data whenever you go offline. At any point, you can check the time and status of the latest data update on your device. While in offline mode, you can easily interact with your data using commands such as create, read, update, and delete. Once you are back online, any changes made in the offline mode are automatically synchronized with the server without any additional steps. Refer to the Mobile Offline User Guide for detailed information.

This is just the start and we are committed to continue working towards improving it. Based on your feedback so far, we have invested in delivering a high-quality feature that caters to your key business scenarios in offline mode. Some of the improvements underway are:

• Improved user experience: Offline metadata download which happens in the foreground today, will be moved to the background, allowing users to work seamlessly in online and offline mode
• Improved admin experience: Improvements to offline profile publishing experience to ensure that administrators can quickly create and publish offline profiles for their users

How do I start using it?

All the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps (9.x online server versions) will automatically have access to mobile offline functionality. Before you can start using it:

1. Follow the detailed step-by-step instructions provided in the Mobile Offline Admin Guide to set up the offline solution for the Dynamics 365 mobile app users. Before users can access their data in offline mode, administrators need to select the app modules and the data within it which will be available to the users in offline mode.
2. Once the setup is done, download the latest version of the Dynamics 365 for phones and tablet app (13.19033.1 or higher) from the app store to start using the solution. For more details on the feature, refer to the Mobile Offline User Guide.

How can I provide feedback?

A huge thank you to all the customers who provided their valuable feedback to help improve the feature. We would love to hear your ideas and suggestions for any improvements in this feature. Please provide your feedback through the Dynamics 365 insider portal.

1. Sign up on the Dynamics 365 insider portal.
2. Once signed in, select the Insider Program and select Dynamics 365 Mobile Offline Preview.
3. Leave your comments on the feedback forum which is regularly monitored by us.

Kavishi Agarwal
Program Manager
PowerApps

The post Stay productive always with mobile offline for Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps (Public Preview) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Today, we officially kick off the release of a six-month wave of more than 350 new capabilities, feature updates and applications across Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

This update continues our commitment to deliver two major releases per yearin April and Octoberwith new capabilities and innovations to help you stay ahead of rapid changes in your business and industry. These biannual updates are supported by our monthly improvements, helping to ensure continuous delivery of exceptional stability and performance of a modern SaaS service (read more about our One Version service updates).

At this mornings Virtual Launch Event (streaming live at 8:00 am PST, then on-demand), well provide a preview of feature releases over the next six months, spanning some of the latest applications we are bringing to market in the next few months, including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and Microsoft Forms Pro. Well also show new mixed reality applications and the continued innovations coming to the Power Platform.

Connecting customer experiences with the power of AI

Enabling a world-class customer experience, this update introduces AI-driven applications that produce deeper actionable customer insights and personalized experiences, while giving sales teams more integrated collaboration and buyer insights for a modern, relationship-focused approach to selling.

The trifecta of apps starts with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, which gives businesses insights that help them drive effective sales coaching and personalized engagement with buyers. Dynamics 365 Market Insights tracks web search data and social conversations to help companies know what their audience is saying, seeking, and feeling about products, brands and topics important to their business. And Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, unifies data sources to provide businesses with a single view of their customers and discover insights that drive personalized experiences. For instance, Tivoli, the worlds second oldest amusement park operator, is using Customer Insights to help personalize everything from marketing outreach to frontline, on-property guest experiences. Here is a video with Tivoli talking about their experience:

Watch Tivoli video now

The ability to connect data and then apply intelligence to it to deliver a transformed customer experience extends to customer service as well. Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights provides actionable insights into critical performance metrics and emerging support questions, enabling managers to proactively train agents on new emerging topics, create new materials or automate responses through the virtual agent, so they can resolve customer issues quicker. Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service automates common service requests and issues to let call center agents focus on the more complex topics. It empowers customer service teamsthe people closest to the customers and experts on how to engage effectivelyto be proactive as well as customize and maintain virtual agents without the need to write code or be an AI or ML expert.

Were introducing Microsoft Forms Pro, a comprehensive survey solution that makes it easy to collect feedback across customer touchpoints, correlate the feedback with business transactions, and derive actionable insights from the combined data.

We are also excited to highlight Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, a product built from Microsofts deep experience managing billions of ecommerce transactions. This public preview product offers state of the art fraud protection based on connected knowledge, industry leading AI and operations research to help businesses shield themselves and their customers from payment fraud.

Mixed reality: on-site field training goes mobile

In October, we introduced the first set of mixed reality apps for HoloLens, including Layout and Remote Assist. The April 19 release includes a new wave of innovation that extends Dynamics 365 mixed reality to HoloLens 2 and mobile devices, as well as provides step-by-step Guides that enhance training and on-site guidance for technicians. These new mixed reality applications help to empower front line workers, transfer skills, and reduce the time it takes to train new employees in a fundamentally different and more experiential way.

Were also introducing Dynamics 365 Product Visualize that allows sellers a new way to convey the true potential of products in a customers actual environment so they can interact with and understand the product. This mixed reality business app is available for preview on iOS today.

Power Platform: upgrading the power of three

The Microsoft Power Platform Power BI, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow – keeps getting better with every release, and the April 19 update is no different, offering exciting updates across all three products.

As I recently explained in-depth, the Power Platform enables business users to Analyze, Act, and Automate in ways that can make a big impact across the business. It creates a digital feedback loop that harnesses data sources to build a continuous stream of insightsa perpetual engine for business automation and intelligence. Any business user, from the CEO to frontline workers, can gain insights from data using Power BI, create intelligent business processes via PowerApps without writing code, and then leverage Flow to automate workflows between apps and services.

The April 19 release enables citizen app makers to build higher-quality PowerApps more easily. Flow helps organizations automate and extend processes directly from business and productivity apps like Microsoft Teams, Excel, and OneDrive. Power BI has been updated to further empower organizations to create a data cultureenabled by major new capabilities to support large scale enterprise BI deployments, adding pixel-perfect paginated reports, and new AI capabilities that make it easier to extract insights from data.

The best way to understand whats possible with the Power Platform is to see it in action. Take a look at how Arriva, one of the largest providers of passenger transport in Europe, is giving non-technical users access to PowerApps to do anything from optimizing routes to better servicing buses.

Watch Arriva video now

Get a deep dive look at April 19 release innovations

In addition to the new applications the April 19 release delivers new features and capabilities across all Dynamics 365 applications and on behalf of the entire Business Applications team, its a privilege to introduce this wave of innovation.

Be sure to watch the Virtual Launch Event this morning at 8am and check out our April 19 release page for the very latest release information, key dates, and deep dive demo videos.

Learn more about the April 2019 release

• April 2019 release notes: details about all features releasing from April 2019 through September 2019 for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
• Blog: New AI, mixed reality business solutions lead the way for Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Blog: Introducing Dynamics 365 mixed reality applications for HoloLens 2 and mobile devices

The post April 2019 Release launches with new AI, mixed reality, and 350+ feature updates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Customer relationships are at the heart of every successful organization. To deliver high quality customer experiences, you need to not only be collaborating internally within your organization but also engaging in effective customer conversations. As part of our goal to put people at the center of your experience in Dynamics 365, we are bringing a familiar experience to Dynamics 365s Unified Interface: Profile cards.

Profile cards exist in Outlook and other Office apps today to help you collaborate with a person, whether they are your colleague or an external contact. They enable you to have their information at your fingertips wherever you are in the Office ecosystem. Starting today, this experience is rolling out for Dynamics 365 so you can take the same actions on your data in Common Data Service within Unified Interface.

View your contacts information at a glance

Collaborate with your colleagues in Dynamics 365

For more information, see View the profile card for a contact or user.

Srihari Srinivasa
Senior Program Manager

The post Introducing Profile cards in Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We are pleased to announce that Dynamics 365 Customer Insightsis now generally available! The newest addition to the portfolio of Dynamics 365 AI offerings, Dynamics 365Customer Insights enables every organization to unify disparate data be it transactional, observational or behavioral sources – to gain a single view of customers and derive intelligent insights that drive key business processes.

Watch Customer Insights video now

A key tenet of every organizations unique digital transformation journey focuses on customers. Customers, both existing and potential, leave digital footprints. Every support call, event registration, online and offline purchases or website interactions provides valuable input into better understanding that customer across their customer journey be it marketing, sales or service. When brought together, this data becomes an asset, giving organizations the intelligent insights they need to deliver personalized experiences, at the right time and right channel.

Heres how you can deliver personalized customer experiences and move your business forward with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:

It all starts with data:

Get a holistic view of customers

• Connect all your customer data: Bring in transactional, observational, and behavioral data from popular data sources with ease by leveraging prebuilt connectors
• Transform customer data intelligently: Unify and standardize data to conform to the Microsoft Common Data Model
• Enrich customer profiles: Build a richer, more complete view of your customers by incorporating aggregated audience intelligence from Microsoft Graph

Unlock insights and take action

• Act and activate: Discover and create high value segments to power business processes and deliver targeted messages and content.
• Spot trends and patterns: Gain actionable insights with configurable metrics and KPIs
• Predict customer intent: Get guidance on the next best action and predict churn by leveraging AI and custom machine learning algorithms.

Adapt and extend

• Take action: Drive personalized engagement with contextual customer insights infused directly in business applications such as Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service, and Marketing or any other application using rich APIs
• Gain deeper insights: Leverage an out-of-the-box connector for Microsoft Power BI to customize dashboards and reports that enable informed decision-making
• Build custom apps: With Microsoft PowerApps, create custom business apps with embedded customer insights to empower everyone in your organization
• Automate customer-centric experiences and processes: Setup workflows in response to customer actions and signals using Microsoft Flow

Rely on a productive and trusted platform

• Get started quickly: Optimize for time to value with a finished SaaS application and self-service experience built on the Azure cloud platform
• Maintain control of your data: Help your business support data privacy and GDPR compliance with enterprise ready security and built-in governance tools
• Invest with confidence: Put your trust in Microsofts expertise and experience in world-class AI research, cloud, data and developer platform

Here are additional resources for you to learn about Customer Insights:

• Dynamics 365 product website and trial signup
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights product overview video

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a major step in our journey to enable organizations to centralize key customer data and infuse AI-driven insights into business processes. We are truly excited to see what organizations will be able to do with Customer Insights!

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is now Generally Available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Whats new

In November 2018, AI for Sales started on a journey, aiming to introduce AI driven insights to every sales organizations. At the time, Dynamics 365 AI for Sales (Now called Sales Insights) was only available in North America.

Today, we are happy to announce that Dynamics 365 Sales Insights has expanded availability to also include Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Customers and partners alike can join the product preview, start a trial as well as purchase licenses to empower users across the sales organizations with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights.

Region and language availability for Dynamics 365 for Sales

Before November 2018, we used the term international availability to capture multiple intentions: the physical location of the data, where the data is stored (Region), and the language in which information is displayed (Display language). Following the release of the new Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, we introduce a new intent: the Model language, specifically the language of the data that is parsed by the model to produce insights.

Region

With Dynamics 365 for Sales, System Administrators can specify the region where customer data will be stored. In the process of creating a new org, customers can select a geographic location (Geo) to determine where data will be stored. Data will not move from one geo to another, and Microsoft will not limit the geos/locations where customers, or their end users, can access data.

Starting today, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is available across multiple geos, including North America, Europe and the UK.
We plan to extend the availability to additional geos: Australia, Asia Pacific, South America, Canada, India and Japan, by April 2019.

Display language

When creating a new org, System Administrators need to select a base language for the org. The base language determines default regional and language settings for the org. Once base language is selected, System Administrators can enable additional languages for display as well as for assistance (Help). Dynamics 365 for Sales currently supports 45 display languages.

Currently, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights for Sellers supports all 45 display languages.

Model languages in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

With the new Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, some features use natural language algorithms to derive insights. Those capabilities analyze text (such as email communications or notes) as well as voice utterances (from call recordings), to develop relevant and actionable insights.

Following is the list of features that use text and voice analysis:

Text Based Insights

Talking points: This feature identifies conversation starters from emails. Talking Points include topics that are related to sports, time-off, family and entertainment, giving sellers an opportunity to start their customer meetings on a personal note.

Notes analysis: When users enter notes from a recent meeting or discussion into the timeline, Dynamics 365 for Sales monitors these notes and offers intelligent suggestions for follow up.

Relationship assistance:

• Exchange cards: The action cards are generated based on an analysis of emails. When users receive an email, Exchange and Dynamics 365 for Sales work together to scan the body of the email and extract relevant phrases that suggest the email is related to Dynamics 365 for Sales customers.
• Productivity cards: Productivity cards provide timely information that is relevant to users location and plans.

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights supports only English as the modeling language. However, we plan to extend support to German, French, Dutch and Italian by July 2019.

Voice Based Insights

Conversation Intelligence (Formerly Call Intelligence): Transcribing call recordings in order to analyze and extract meaningful insights, including sentiment, competitive mentions and more.

Currently Dynamics 365 Sales Insights supports English, French, German and Italian as the modeling language for voice. Our roadmap includes plans to extend support to Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish in the future.

Whats not included

From the full list of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights capabilities, two features are still limited to North America. These include Who Knows Whom and Relationship Analytics from Exchange. However, Customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa can still benefit from Relationship Analytics, to analyze the health of their customer relationships, based on activities within Dynamics 365 only.

Whats next

Going forward, we will extend Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to the rest of the world, adding additional model language support, to help sellers be more proactive and productive, and to ensure they are able to personalize their pitch to improve customer engagements.

Below you can find a detailed table of the features:

The post Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is now available in Europe, Middle East and Africa appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

For v2, weve dramatically enhanced the Nonprofit Accelerator itself and the underlying Common Data Model (CDM) to unleash a wealth of new capabilities and standards for nonprofits and the growing ecosystem of partners who serve them.

Building out the Common Data Model

Central to our approach is our commitment to building a CDM, publishing that openly, and working across platforms. This enables powerful interoperability to fuel greater insights and efficacy, while also providing true data transparency. Microsoft has long been committed to open data, and we believe this approach is key to driving innovation in the sector.

The v2 doubles the size of the CDM. Last year we delivered 35 different entities with about 700 attributes. With v2, weve grown the model to 75 entities with 1,400 attributes. These entities and attributes represent sector-specific data elements, relationships, and best practices as defined by Microsoft, our partners, and a group of nonprofit experts.

The CDM also includes the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Organization and Activity standards, which we have made available via GitHub. Not all nonprofits subscribe to IATI, but for many organizations working with institutional donors or government agencies, its a requirement. Recognizing this, we made the IATI modeling available as an add-on so organizations have the freedom to choose whether to add it to their solutions.

Deeper functionality with Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2

Microsoft is the first and biggest consumer of the CDM and has incorporated all the best practices the CDM represents into Dynamics 365 through the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. We are committed to helping nonprofits around the world implement these best practices consistently and efficiently. By incorporating the CDM into the Accelerator, what once required customization is standard today, with the schema included in your Dynamics 365 subscription.

The driving principle behind the nonprofit sector is trust. The Accelerator is designed to help organizations build that trust, communicating their stewardship of donations and grants and demonstrating their impact. With v2, nonprofits have access to a robust set of new features designed to support their most important business needs, including:

The post Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator: a community solution to drive social impact appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In 2018, we announced a new update cadence for Dynamics 365 applications to help you stay current in a consistent, predictable, and seamless manner. Today, with One Version, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations customers have easy access to new capabilities and innovation in an environment that eliminates the cost and disruption that defined enterprise software upgrades in the past. All of this comes as part of One Version, without sacrificing the control that is essential for mission-critical workloads.

In the past, business application vendors delivered innovation slowly. Customer deployments, characterized by extensive customizations and complex integrations, could not adapt new capabilities without expensive, disruptive upgrade projects. The result was that most customers faced even longer delays and increased expense before they could realize the benefits of the new capabilities and in many cases, customers never reached that goal. With One Version, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations innovation will be delivered rapidly and regularly, and every customer will immediately have the ability to opt in to leverage the new capabilities. With One Version, Microsoft delivers tailored service updates for mission-critical enterprise business software.

As a product owner of the new retail solution on Dynamics 365, and my more than 20 years within this industry, I have never seen anything like it. We are already looking forward to version 10 and One Version. Dynamics 365 for Retail is on the right path, and we cannot wait to see whats next from Microsoft.

– Kim Guldager, Retail Circle Product Owner, BESTSELLER

One Version also raises the level of quality that customers can expect in their enterprise software. Historically, a landscape of almost every customer running a different combination of software versions and hot fixes made the challenge of ensuring quality incredibly difficult. With One Version, when Microsoft fixes an issue in one environment, the same solution can be rapidly propagated to all customers. With One Version, Microsoft raises the quality bar for mission-critical enterprise business software.

The One Version journey begins now, but our investments to make this possible started over two years ago. One of the first innovations was the introduction of the extension-only model for customization. This is a critical enabler for the One Version continuous update process, and it extends the coverage of the model to our ecosystem of ISVs and implementation partners, and our customers. This allows them to innovate more quickly and extend the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations product, preserving the promise of One Version.

Having the DXC Eclipse ISV extensions on One Version is enabling our customers to continuously keep up to date with Microsoft’s latest fixes and new features with a minimum amount of effort.”

– Ivan Cole, DXC Technology

The move to One Version enables us to deliver our accelerators to the market faster, saving us time and money while allowing our clients to see business value from our solution.Moving to one-version ensures we have One Version of our solution to maintain, which frees up our capacity to deliver customer enhancements of our solution. The regression suite automation tool allows us and our clients to take these updates with a peace of mind.

– Rachel Profitt, MVP, Director, Client Solution Architect, RSM

The idea of a single version of cloud software that delivers continuous innovation is central to Software as a Service, however core enterprise software is mission-critical, often customized, and generally wrapped in multiple integrations. This raises the bar of the importance of the customer being able to validate software updates before they deploy and have full control of when those updates move to production. Microsoft has developed six essential innovations that let One Version meet this bar:

• Safe deployment rings Each software update progresses through a series of rings, starting from internal Microsoft deployments, and progressing to partners and customers requesting early access before full deployment. At each stage, both the version and the update process are exercised as they will be in general availability. Telemetry is collected at each stage, with the update moving to the next stage only with successful results.
• Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT) This new tool empowers customers to efficiently script regression tests specific to their organization, which can be used to validate pending updates in their sandbox environment, before updates progress to production deployment.
• Release Validation Program (RVP) With this program, multiple customers provide their RSAT suites to Microsoft and Microsoft deploys shadows of their environment and runs their RSAT suites as part of the internal deployment ring validation. Running both our own tests and this diverse set of customer specific tests before production deployment is another key level of quality assurance.
• Enabling new features Customers need to control when new capabilities that change business processes or user experiences are enabled for their deployment. As part of One Version, the ability to manage new features has been added, ensuring that customers maintain this critical level of control.
• Control of update timing Every organization has critical periods when system maintenance can and cant be performed. One Version allows customers to control the timing of production environment updates, and even allows the ability to opt out of selected updates for critical periods.
• Reduced downtime updates With continuous updates, the time spent making updates can add up. To make One Version practical and actually improve system availability, the One Version program includes investments to reduce update downtime.

The words upgrade and “easy” aren’t typically used in the same sentence for ERP, that is until the One Version service updates from Microsoft made it so. As a regulated industry, it is important for us to have the right processes to be ready for continuous update and we have developed processes and are investing in the RSAT tool to experience an evergreen ERP world.

– Jeff Ketelhut, Vice President and Head of IT, Atara Biotherapeutics

We now have a longer-term view on modifications and enhancements that benefit our company. Within hours after we refresh/upgrade an environment, we can have scripts run that create a known set of scenarios in various states – every time.

– Tom Ashbrook, CIO, 5.11 Tactical

While we’re officially starting this journey at scale today, we have already been exercising our muscles with our early customers and partners, and have done thousands of updates in customer sandbox and production environments to create a robust process.

One Version begins NOW. Join us in the transformation to modern application management!

Learn more

• One Version service updates FAQ

The post Modernize ERP updates with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Delight your customers with fast turnaround times to consistently and accurately configure prices and quotes by leveraging Dynamics 365 for Sales integration with partner configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions.

Dynamics 365 for Sales now makes it easy to discover CPQ solution providers that deliver solutions to enable sales people to quickly identify the right configuration of products to fit their customers needs and rapidly create accurate quotes and contracts with the right pricing, considering all the variable factors including discounts.

Administrator users of Dynamics 365 for Sales can now discover related partner apps on AppSource from within the Sales application. If youre a user with administrator privileges, check out partner apps by going to Settings, then App Extensions, and clicking on Partner apps.

You can check out additional applications available on AppSource by clicking on the All Apps link.

This year we worked with two pilot partners, Experlogix and PROS, to seed the page. We look forward to our ongoing efforts with our additional CPQ solution providers focusing on Dynamics 365 for Sales so they too can be featured in our solutions area. These partners include but are not limited to Apttus, e-Con, and DealHub. If youre currently interested in these solutions, please follow the hyperlinks to view their individual offerings.

Experlogix and PROS are the two initial CPQ partner solutions that are currently featured in our market place. Both applications provide:

• Best in class CPQ capabilities and are leaders in the application space
• Support the Dynamics 365 Sales Hub app and other unified client apps
• Support reading and writing product catalog and configuration data to and from the Dynamics 365 for Sales application

To learn more about these great partners, we encourage you to review the details below:

Experlogix

Accelerate sales, improve profits, and delight customers with Experlogix CPQ for Dynamics 365. Powerful and flexible with enterprise-ready integration to Dynamics 365, Experlogix CPQ enables reps to quickly and accurately configure complex quotes for virtually any industry, including manufacturing, IT, professional services, software, telecommunications, utilities, and more. Proven with organizations of all sizes, Experlogix enables business users to learn and maintain the system and no coding or special scripting is needed.

Experlogix CPQ combines with Dynamics 365 for a seamless quote and order experience across an omnichannel selling environment. It can be used with Dynamics 365 in the office, on the road, or by customers and/or channel users, and works with all Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP platforms and web portals.

For manufacturers, Experlogixs unique modeling workbench enables product managers and engineers to define component relationships that drive unique combinations of parts, materials, sub-assemblies, routings, or lean schedules. New items with dynamic part numbers can be created and seamlessly shared with ERP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Business Central, with the flexibility to leverage existing BOMs and routes or create new ones.

With Experlogix Visual CPQ, sales reps can visualize configured products on-the-fly to instantly see products come to life. Users can apply color or texture, add optional product components, make dimensional changes, and much more to solidify brand loyalty and increase sales.

Get started

• Experlogix home page
• Experlogix CPQ Overview on AppSource

PROS Smart CPQ

Customer experience is the new battleground and providing a great experience for customers starts with your ability to respond quickly to buyer demands. In fact, studies show that 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor that responds first. Your customers demand a frictionless buying experience, and PROS Smart CPQ can help deliver that experience by automating the configure, price, and quote process, and enabling sales to deliver fast, error-free quotes.

By infusing AI into the quoting process, PROS Smart CPQ increases your sales teams ability to deliver targeted offers that win. PROS Smart CPQ uses cutting-edge AI and machine learning algorithms to provide personalized product and pricing recommendations that enable salespeople to tailor offers to each customer, while also maximizing the value of every deal. Whether your sales team is selling a subscription service or a complex product requiring configuration, PROS Smart CPQ accelerates their response times from days or even weeks to minutes and helps them win the deal.

In addition to expecting fast responses from your sales people, buyers are increasingly looking to self-serve. With PROS Smart CPQ, you can extend to customers the same great capabilities that your sales team enjoys, such as the ability to find and easily configure your products and services.

The out-of-box integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables you to accelerate the delivery of your quote-to-cash strategy. PROS Smart CPQ supports the latest version of Dynamics 365 for Sales utilizing the Unified Client Interface.

PROS Smart CPQ integrates into all leading commerce platforms. With PROS Smart CPQ, you can streamline and optimize your sales processes while maximizing your revenue and improving your profitability across all of your sales channels.

Get started

• PROS home page
• PROS CPQ Overview on AppSource

Configure-Price-Quote solutions are key components to enable organizations to better understand customer needs, engage more effectively, and win more deals. We are truly excited to see what organizations will be able to do with our partner solutions!

The post Leverage partner apps for a seamless configure-price-quote (CPQ) experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Last week, as I walked through the trade show exhibit halls at Hannover Messe, I was awespired. Yes, I had to create a new word to capture the moment.

I was in awe of not only the sheer size of the conference, but also the excitement in the air generated by the thousands of attendees. At the same time, I am inspired by the amazing stories of innovation and digital transformation.

Industry 4.0 is here, now, and organizations are looking to break through the barriers that prevent them from delivering exceptional new products for their customers. And while most of the focus at the conference was on product and production innovation, the Dynamics 365 for Talent team showcased the importance of workplace culture and modern workforce management.

Keeping the pace of innovation requires the right people in the right roles at the right time, as well as the HR operational programs required to support a modern workplace and workforce. To address the myriad of challenges facing manufacturersthe challenge of an aging and multi-generational workforce, the gig economy, shortage of skilled talent, and the need to up-skill workersHR needs a new approach to workplace culture to lay the foundation of the talent life cycle.

Maybe youve seen the articles imploring you to stop hiring for culture fit. How to Hire from the Harvard Business Review, is a perfect example. It calls hiring for culture fit a misguided strategy that can contribute to a companys lack of diversity. It highlights that individuals with different personalities can be great at the job you need done.

Thats absolutely true. But the problem here and in many similar articles is that it conflates hiring for culture fit with hiring thats based solely on personality type. In fact, hiring for culture fit is far more encompassing and it requires a rigor that many companies lack.

What is hiring for culture fit and what isnt it?

First off, hiring for culture fit is not about hiring candidates whose personalities all fit a similar mold. That would create a talent echo chamber that shuts out diversity, creativity, and valuable alternate viewpoints. As a recent article in the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) observed, hiring managers define culture fit in terms of personality traits, favoring certain job candidates because they are friendly or have a good attitude, those managers hinder their organizations ability to innovate because of its homogenous workforce.

Hiring for culture fit also is not about relying on gut instinctsi.e., selecting candidates who feel right for the organization. Companies that do a good job of leveraging a culture fit in making high-quality hires do so by acknowledging the culture and making it translate to specific skills, abilities, values and motivators of candidates, the SHRM piece notes.

That insight cuts right to heart of hiring for culture fit. In order to do it properly, you must be able to:

• Identify the essential elements of your companys culture including your vision and values, preferred behaviors and work processes, even the language, habits and beliefs that fuel successful performance.
• Map these elements to your open jobs.
• Use your interviewing and assessment processes to determine which candidates best fit your culture/jobsand, equally important, which candidates can add to your culture, bringing in qualities that fill gaps and help your company progress.

Clearly, the process of hiring for culture fit is the antithesis of hiring based on gut instincts or on personality type alone.

In addition, hiring for culture fit doesnt ignore traditional job fit criteria such as career history, relevant experience, or the core competencies required for a role. It also does not ignore personality type or soft skills such as communication style and emotional intelligence. It actually takes all of these qualities into consideration but they must be mappable to specific aspects of your company culture.

By ensuring that personality is just one component of hiring for culture fit, employers protect themselves from creating homogenous work forces that lack diversity and the capacity for continuous creativity and innovation.

Why hire for culture fit

Even in the current talent environment, where workers are changing employers with greater frequency, you want to onboard people who will stay with your company and add value for a reasonable period of time. Thats crucial to holding down costs, maximizing employee productivity and engagement, maintaining continuity within departments and functional areas, and building a strong employment brand.

By hiring for culture fit, youre bringing in people who are intrinsically aligned with your companys mission and values. These individuals want to join your company, not just for a paycheck but because theyre passionate about the work being done and eager to contribute to it.

People who are naturally aligned to your company culture are far more likely to understand your priorities, your customers needs, the needs of their teammates, and how they can personally facilitate success for everyone. Whats more, these individuals are more likely to gel with the rest of their teams faster, start making meaningful contributions quicker, and willingly give you their very best day after day.

Manufacturing leaders, as well as those in retail, banking, and professional services can gain a competitive advantage in the fight for top talent by incorporating culture into their employer brand.

In part two of this blog series, Ill drill in a bit deeper to provide a step-by-step actionable approach to culture-centric talent acquisition.

Learn more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent can help your organization hire top talent and enable their success from our demonstration experience.

The post Talent at Hannover Messe 2019—Hiring for culture fit: Should you or shouldn’t you? appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps version 9.x
Applies to Common Data Service

The maximum user session timeout of 24 hours is being removed. This means that a user is not forced to sign in every 24 hours to use the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps and other Microsoft service apps, like Outlook, that were opened in the same browser session.

Honor Azure AD session policy

By default, the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps leverage the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) session policy to manage the user session timeout. Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps uses the Azure AD ID Token with Policy Check Interval (PCI) claims. Every hour a new Azure AD ID Token is fetched silently in the background and Azure AD enforces the Azure ID instant policy. For example, if an administrator disables or deletes a user account, Azure AD instant policy will force a user password reset and revoke the refresh token.

This Azure AD ID token refresh cycle continues in the background based on the Azure AD token lifetime policy configurations. Users continue to access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement/Common Data Service data without needing to re-authenticate until the Azure AD token lifetime policy expires.

Resilience to Azure AD outages

In an event that there are intermittent Azure AD outages, authenticated users can continue to access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement/Common Data Service data if the PCI claims have not expired or the user has opted in the Stay signed in during authentication.

Set Custom Session timeout for individual environment

For environments that require different session timeout values, administrators can continue to set the session timeout and/or inactivity timeout in System Settings. These settings override the default Azure AD session policy and users will be directed to Azure AD for re-authentication when these settings expire.

For detailed information, see Security enhancements: User session and access management.

The post Release Notes for User Session Timeout Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

One might think that the worlds oldest brands are least resistant to changeas if innovation and heritage are opposing ideas in business. Instead, we can learn a lot about endurance in modern business from brands that have adapted to change for decades or, in the case of luxury linen maker Frette, for more than 155 years.

Since 1860, Frette has crafted luxury linens found in the worlds most prestigious hotels, private homes, royal palaceseven the Titanic and Orient Express. Now the company is taking a big step to bridge its past, built on a tradition of quality and customer service, and its future, as an omnichannel business built on Dynamics 365.

Frette initially set out to update its point-of-sale system in its boutiques across the U.S. and Europe. Behind the scenes, however, the company was struggling to present customers with an omnichannel retail experience. The business operated on over a dozen legacy, outdated systems, so there was a need to unite lines of business across European and North American operations.

As Paolo Fabiocchi, CFO of Frette explains, We started just by looking for a solution for our stores, but once we learned about Dynamics 365, our vision became having true omnichannel capabilities to better serve our customers. That the solution (Dynamics 365) has global, Tier 1 capabilities but is still so much less complex and costly to maintain was what really put it over the top for us.

Frette met with Sunrise Technologies, an award-winning Dynamics 365 partner, to help modernize the business. Sunrise focused on solving several key challenges, connecting Frettes business ecosystem, improving visibility across the organization, and automating manual, error-prone processes.

Unifying operations on a modern cloud platform

For many companies, legacy modernization is a daunting initiative, and Frettes challenge was no exception. The company has multiple divisions to handle hospitality, wholesale, consultancy, and retail businesseswith divisions segmented across Europe, North America, and Asia. With disjointed systems and databases, customer service agents had limited access to inventory and orders, and customers experienced increased order processing times and wait times to check order statuses.

On Dynamics 365, Frette is unifying international systems and business processes. By dismantling data silos, they now have a single platform to run operationsfrom production to back office to POS. Best of all, Frette can unlock company data for a holistic, 360-degree view of the business, customers, and employees. For example, they can now follow an order from production in Italy to a boutique in New York, with real-time order and inventory status available to frontline workers. Frette also expects to explore IoT, machine learning, and other emerging technologies that will provide pervasive intelligence to reveal insights and trends across the organization.

Automation, everywhere

With company data like orders and inventory scattered across silos, Frette struggled with highly manual processes and a lack of visibility at every level of the organization, from the call center to the C-Suite. Overstocking was common to ensure popular items were on hand. The B2B hospitality business had increased staff by 30 percent in three years to keep up with manual order entries. Ecommerce orders had to be manually duplicated between the POS system and distribution systems. And returning an ecommerce order in store caused hassles on the back end.

Sunrise Technologies focused on streamlining and automating the business, including implementation of its custom supply chain solution that seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365. Now Frette has a single platform that eliminates time-consuming, error-prone processes while seeing everything from inventory levels, orders, and allocation scenarios in one place.

The takeaway

Frettes story shows us whats possible when ingenuity and foresight are baked into a companys values and culture. By modernizing its entire operation on future-proof business solutions, the company has ensured its 155-year tradition of first-class customer experiences is preserved for generations to come.

Check back for more success stories from retail throughout 2019.

Ramp up 2019 with insights from the retail frontline

In case you missed it, we just released the 2019 Retail Trends Report, a survey of six trending areas of focus to create an exceptional shopping experience for customers. Its a great companion to our new eBook Why Choose Dynamics 365 for Retail?a great overview of whats possible when you transform retail operations with Dynamics 365.

The post How Frette modernized a heritage brand on Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights enables you to quickly connect to your customer service data and use out-of-the-box AI-powered insights to take informed action to increase customer satisfaction. Interactive dashboards use AI, business intelligence, and machine learning to give you a comprehensive view into engagement patterns, agent performance, and call center operations on multiple dimensions. Armed with actionable insights into critical performance metrics and emerging trends, service teams are empowered to anticipate and deliver what customers need, increase operational efficiency, and implement data-driven service improvements.

In October 2018, we announced Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights is available in public preview, and since then we’ve written blogs to help you get started and to learn about support for custom CDS data entities. If you havent already, try it out at https://aka.ms/trycsinsights.

The team has been working hard to enable more capabilities for you, and today were excited to share the latest updates. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about these additional features weve introduced since October, including:

• View related cases in a topic
• Give feedback to cases in a topic
• Move cases to another topic
• Rename topics
• Set topic granularity
• Refresh dashboards on demand
• Persist filters across dashboards
• Improved experience in the website header

View related cases in a topic

Customer Service Insights uses AI to automatically group similar cases into topics. These topics allow customer service managers to get more visibility into key drivers of various KPIs. A topic represents a group of three or more similar cases discovered through artificial intelligence. One top requested feature is the capability to view cases that AI automatically groups into topics. Now you can do that through the new Topicspage.

Figure 1: The new Topics page

TheTopicspage lists all the AI-discovered topics from your case data and sorts them by case volume. You can search for the topic of interest and choose the topic name to browse the top 200 related cases, including their names, case numbers, status, agent owners (if assigned to an agent), and the case creation date.

Figure 2: View top 200 cases grouped into a topic

When you choose a case title from the cases list, the corresponding case form for Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is opened in a new browser tab, which gives you more case details and allows you to take immediate action on the selected case.

Check out this how-to article, Manage and improve artificial intelligence grouping of support cases as topics, for more details.

Give feedback to cases in a topic

Topics in Customer Service Insights are generated from a general AI model that weve fine-tuned and configured to cover most cases. However, we also know that different organizations have different business needs. The same model configuration doesnt fit all organizations. That’s why we introduced the capability that allows you to provide your feedback to the cases grouped in a topic based on your business needs.

When you hover over or select a case on the Topics page, the thumb-up and thumb-down buttons display. If you see any cases that match perfectly to the topic and you want to keep them in this topic over time, choose the thumb-up button. If you want to exclude any cases from a topic, choose the thumb-downbutton. Once you do that, in the next workspace refresh, the AI model will pick up all your feedback and improve the cases grouped to a topic.

Figure 3: Give feedback for case grouped in a topic

Move cases to another topic

If you see any cases grouped in a topic that should belong to another topic listed in the Topicspage, you can now move those cases to the desired topic right away. In addition, when a case is moved to another topic, the AI model will consider this action implicit feedback (for example, a similar case should belong to the other topic that the case is moved to and shouldn’t belong to the original topic) and improve the topic generation results in the next workspace refresh.

To move a case, on the page that lists cases in a topic, when you hover over a case, you see the Move option by choosing three dots at the end of the Case title column.

Figure 4: Move option to move a case to another topic

Then you select the destination topic from the Move casetitlepanel to move the case:

Figure 5: Select the destination topic to move the case

Rename topics

To make each AI-discovered support topic easy for customer service managers to understand, Customer Service Insights automatically assigns the case title as the topic name from the most relevant case in a topic. If you want to give your topic a better name (for example, a shorter name that is easier to manage), now theres a way to do it. And no worries, renaming a topic wont affect future topic clustering results.

You can rename a topic either in the topic list or in the case list of a topic. On the Topicspage, when you hover over a topic, you see the Rename option by choosing the three dots at the end of the Namecolumn.

Figure 6: Change a topic name from the Topics page

When you view cases in a topic, you can choose the pencil icon next to the topic name on top of the page to rename the topic. After you complete the edit, select the Enter key to save your new topic name.

Figure 7: Change a topic name inline

Check out this how-to article, Manage and improve artificial intelligence grouping of support cases as topics – renaming a topic, for more details.

Set topic granularity

As mentioned earlier, although Customer Service Insights is shipped with a fine-tuned general AI model out of box, we know that different customers have different business needs. Another common request weve heard from you is for the flexibility to control the topic granularity: some organizations want to track support topics at a higher level to gain a bigger picture of where problems live, while other organizations need to track more issues with more specificity. Thats why we introduced the topic granularity settings where you can control the AI model to generate topics with a more general or specific scope.

Figure 8: Change topic granularity through the workspace settings

This setting supports five levels of granularity. The illustration on the Settings page explains the corresponding topic granularity impact for each level. Please note that the topic granularity impacts the scope of a topic instead of the total number of topics that will be generated. Depending on the similarity between your case titles, you may see more or fewer topics when the granularity is more specific.

You’ll find more information in this how-to article: Set the granularity of how Customer Service Insights generates customer service topics

Refresh dashboards on demand

Customer Service Insights refreshes dashboards automatically each day. If you make any changes in your workspace, now you can trigger a refresh on demand without waiting for the next automatic daily refresh. The on-demand refresh option appears at the top of dashboards when you make any of following changes:

• Update data mapping settings
• Change case title cleansing settings
• Change topic granularity settings
• Rename a topic
• Move cases to another topic

Figure 9: Refresh workspaces on-demand

The maximum number of times you can do an on-demand refresh on a workspace is 10 times per day. Because refreshing a large amount data consumes a lot of resources, the limit is to ensure a stable and scalable service across all our customers. We welcome your feedback if you find this limit doesnt work in your scenario.

Persist filters across dashboards

Now the filters you set on any dashboard persist across all dashboards in the same workspace, until you refresh the browser. If you use filters to focus only on a subset of data, this capability gives you consistent data slicers when you switch between different dashboards, without any extra clicks.

Improved experience in the website header

You may have noticed the new look and feel of the website header. The new header allows you to browse and manage your workspaces more efficiently. It also enables an integrated experience to access other Microsoft apps.

With the new header, you can browse all your workspaces, switch workspaces, create a new workspace, or delete an existing one by choosing the workspace icon(the first icon in the header). You can also quickly access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Service environment connected to each workspace by choosing the URL below the workspace name in the drop-down list.

Figure 10: Use new header to manage workspaces

The Settings icon (gear) in the new header makes it easier for you to access individual settings functions with fewer clicks.

The header is also closely integrated with other Microsoft apps, which let you easily access the other applications via the Apps launcher on the left side of the screen.

Figure 11: Access more Microsoft apps from the new header

Summary

In the coming weeks, you’ll get more features that can help you to better manage your workspaces and improve the AI-driven topics over time. Please stay tuned!

The product team is eager to hear your feedback. If you have any questions about these (or other) features, we are available at the Customer Service Insights forumto help you.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, please do not hesitate tocreate an idea or vote on others ideas.

Enjoy!

Xiaoying Guo

Senior Program Manager

The post Announcing new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 for Marketing

The April 2019 update of Dynamics 365 for Marketing is rolling out starting now! The roll-out schedule will follow that of the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement platform team as they apply the prerequisite platform updates in each region. To see when the update should be available in your region, see When will the April 2019 features be enabled for customers who did not opt in to the preview?

Though we update the product every month or so, this is the first major new update to the product for 2019. Many features that were previously in preview are now generally available, plus it includes many new features and plenty of performance and stability improvements.

Customers updating to the April 2019 version of Dynamics 365 for Marketing will also receive all features that were released for new (but not updated) instances installed in February and March 2019.

Keep reading to learn how to get this update and which new features it includes. For more information about this update, including known and recently fixed issues, see the Dynamics 365 for Marketing readme page.

How to get the update

To benefit from this update, you must manually apply it to each of your Dynamics 365 for Marketing instances as described in Keep Marketing up to date. Check the roll-out schedule to find out when the update should be available in your region.

Personalized marketing

Personalized marketing now extends to landing pages, which can provide content that’s personalized for known visitors, and marketers can achieve more on social channels by posting right from the app.

Website personalization

Landing pages continue to be the most common call-to-action items within marketing emails. You can now personalize these pages for each prospect based on their attributes and past behavior. This personalization can affect the layout, dynamic content, branding, and more. For example, a prospect receives a tailored email that shows the logo of their local sports team. When they click a link, the personalization continues by opening a page that shows their local weather and sports news. This maintains a continuum of personalized experience and is likely to improve demand generation.

More information: Provide personalized page content

Social posting

Create social content for multiple channels and schedule social posts to hit the web in sync with your overall campaign. This lets you synchronize audience communication across channels using a single platform. Social posting is enabled by a new outbound activity that can post directly to your accounts on social-media sites, starting with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We will be adding more channels over time.

More information:

• Schedule and post messages on social media
• Configure your social media accounts

Improved dynamic personalization of Emails

We’ve both simplified and expanded the dynamic-content capabilities for marketing emails. For example, the new assist-edit dialog makes it much easier to place dynamic values in the message body, especially when referring to related records. We’ve also expanded support for relations in the from-address and from-name for email messages, which means, for example, that your marketing emails can now show each recipient’s personal account manager as the return address. Emails that show a familiar from-address are much more likely to be opened than those that show a generic or unfamiliar address.

More information:

• Use assist-edit to place dynamic field values
• Dynamic values in To, From-name, From-address, and Reply-to fields

Easy onboarding

We are overhauling the onboarding experience so that new customers can sign up quickly and new users can easily get started on their marketing tasks. The product looks modern and welcoming, and users can discover its value instantly. Key improvements include:

• The new get started dashboard prominently calls out key marketing tasks like building a campaign and using insights.
• Simplified trial sign-up now enables customers to sign up for a trial in just a few steps.

More information: Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Integrate and extend the solution

Platform extensibility enhancements help customers and partners meet specific needs, deliver turnkey projects, and support vertical scenarios. New APIs will enable you to link journeys to business processes, and to create target segments programmatically. You can use your own content management system to submit information directly via forms, and to set up event pages or landing pages. Social integration is further enhanced to include social-posting capabilities. Sales users can now influence marketing with a few clicks.

Extensibility for campaigns and segments

This release provides a rich set of APIs for customer journeys and segments. These APIs provide key integration points for external services integration and can easily connect with Microsoft tools like Flow. For example, you can build a customer journey programmatically and modify its properties as neededor build a new segment based on any existing segment. You can also control entity lifecycles, such as starting, stopping, or editing a journey. Customers and partners can use these abilities to extend the marketing app, address self-service and lightweight usage scenarios (such as automating repetitive processes) and enable complex scenarios (such as triggering from external systems).

More information:

• Basic operations on segments using the Segmentation API
• Basic operations on Customer Journey using the API
• CRUD operations on customer journey using code

Integration with third-party content management systems (Portals optional)

Marketing campaigns need good content with consistent branding, so most organizations already use a content management system (CMS) to help manage and host their online content. With the April 2019 release, Dynamics 365 for Marketing can seamlessly integrate with any third-party content management system while still providing the same level of capabilities and insights.

Previously, the application required Dynamics 365 portals to host features like the subscription center and event portal, but in this release, portals will become optional. Now you can choose to host all Dynamics 365 for Marketing forms and content on an external CMS while still collecting rich interaction data like visits, submissions, registrations, and more.

More information:

• Create interactive features with or without portals
• Integrate with landing pages published on an external website
• Provide personalized page content

Sales integration enhancements

We continue to break down the silos between sales and marketing departments by enabling salespeople to add contacts to running journeys or specific segments. Dynamics 365 for Sales users could already review some Dynamics 365 for Marketing information through the marketing calendar and contact insights, and now they can influence it, too, with just a few clicks.

More information: Manage segment memberships from a contact record

Fundamental investments

Fundamental investments continue to deliver improved usability, performance, scalability and throughput for campaign execution and email marketing. The segmentation interface has been improved and optimized for frequently used marketing scenarios. Usability improvements in insights provide complete visibility across all campaign elements, form interactions, email messages, and more.

Lifecycle enhancements and deeper insights

Many entities, such as email messages, travel through a lifecycle that takes them, for example, from draft, to live, back to edit, and then live again. We’ve improved lifecycle management throughout the app to provide a more intuitive and consistent experience across all the phases of a campaignwhether you’re drafting an email, crafting a segment, going live with a journey, managing events, or editing a lead-scoring model. This provides a more consistent approach for how and when records can be published, deleted, or deactivated. We’ve also improved our built-in insights pages to make them more comprehensive and easier to use. Marketers can easily understand how journeys are running and see which communications were delivered, which weren’t, and why.

More information:

• Analyze results to gain insights from your marketing activities
• Insights glossary
• Go live with publishable entities and track their status

Marketer friendly segmentation experience

Dynamics 365 for Marketing enables you to create dynamic segments based on rules that combine demographic, firmographic, transactional, and interaction data without requiring technical knowledge or IT support. In this release, we continue to simplify the process of creating segments. For example, we’ve made it much easier to traverse complex relationships and build segments based on marketing interactions. We’ve also improved segmentation performance across the board, so designer load times, segment deployment, and segment provisioning are all significantly faster.

More information:

• Design profile-based dynamic segments
• Marketing segments vs. marketing lists

Enhanced event registration experience

The event-registration experience is crucial for marketers because it contributes to prospects’ early impressions of the related brands or products. Any inefficiencies can result in a potential loss of leads. With this release, we introduce a few enhancements to the event registration experience:

• Session registration for free events enables marketers to capture registrations at the session level for free events, which can help you plan room capacities, and indicate sessions already at full capacity.
• The ability to provide waitlists for events has now been extended to support waitlists for individual sessions (for free events). This provides improved control for event planners, helps them to gauge interest in individual sessions, and helps them plan capacities and services accordingly.
• QR codes for event registration can be embedded into emails, making it easy for registrants to check in using their mobile devices on the day of the event.

More information:

• Set up session-level registration and waitlisting
• Event registration QR code elements

The post The Dynamics 365 for Marketing April 2019 update is rolling out now appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In this blog, you’ll find the following sections to help you use Microsoft Flow to automate tasks in Dynamics 365 for Marketing:

• Prerequisites
• Scenario description
• Solution
  • Prepare Dynamics 365 for Marketing
  • Create a Microsoft Flow to automate segment creation
• End-user experience
• Taking it further

Prerequisites

The solution proposed in this blog has the following prerequisites:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales or Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement subscription with customization permissions
• Microsoft Flow subscription
• Dynamics 365 for Marketing subscription with administrator permissions

Scenario description

Within organizations today we increasingly see staff diversify their roles to cover activities which may not be their core discipline. This situation often leads to challenges for the individual to learn an area which may only be used on occasion, and to receive training in applications which are used sporadically. For occasional users of Dynamics 365 for Marketing, the terminology and controls used in the application would be unfamiliar and could lead to resistance to adopting processes that span multiple applications or that are not explicitly tailored to their tasks.

Consider a scenario where a company desires to implement a process in which on a quarterly basis, on-the-road salespeople need to trigger email communication to the primary contact of accounts which have had orders fulfilled in the last quarter. These salespeople work primarily on tablets and want to retain ownership of the action so to align with their needs, goals and targets but are unfamiliar with the Segmentation process in Dynamics 365 for Marketing. For this user scenario, there are only a few parameters which are changing (start and end date of the quarter) but creation such segment, would require the salesperson to traverse the data model. Instead, providing a simple input dialog for the key variables would allow segments to be created quicker and correctly.

Solution

Using Microsoft Flow, it is possible to automate the creation of records in Dynamics 365 for Marketing, including those that can drive key functionality like segmentation and customer journeys. The example below illustrates a possible solution aimed at allowing a minimal effort on behalf of the salesperson, following a simple setup by the Marketing team.

Prepare Dynamics 365for Marketing

1. Ensure all the relevant entities are synched to insights. For the purpose of this scenario, we are adding the Sales Order entity to the Customer Insights Sync, first navigating within the Marketing App to the Settings Area.

In this area, when selecting Customer Insights Sync in the Marketing Settings section, we are able to view the entities which are currently synchronized. These are the entities that can be used in segmentation.

For more information, see this article: Marketing settings.

After the relevant entities are added, publish the changes. For this scenario, we added Order only because the entity already connects to Contacts.

2. In the Marketing app, create a segment to be used as a model for the dynamic segments to be created by users. (See Working with segments.)

Using the Explore view, we can confirm the data model is being navigated correctly by the created segment.

3. In the Query tab we can see the details of the query created as part of the segment. This will become an important part of the automated creation. In our example, the resulting query is:

PROFILE(salesorder).FILTER(datefulfilled >= DATE(2019, 4, 1, 0, 0) && datefulfilled <= DATE(2019, 4, 30, 0, 0)).TRAVERSE(salesorder_account_customerid).TRAVERSE(account_contact_primarycontactid)

4. Create a Customer Journey template which the salespeople will be able to use to communicate with the end-users. (See Create and manage customer journey templates.)The Customer Journey template can start with a segment and have a predefined email message to use, thus making it easier for salespeople to send the communication.

At this point, our Dynamics 365 for Marketing app has the necessary building blocks enabled. Order has been added as entity that can be used in the segmentation and we have obtained the model of the segment we will creating in an automated fashion.

Create a Microsoft Flow to automate segment creation

5. Next step is to create the Microsoft Flow which will be used by the end users. Documentation for Flow is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/flow/.

• From the Segment view, click Flow and select See your Flows.
• Create a new flow from blank.
• In the new flow, search for the trigger Manually Trigger a flow.

• Add two date inputs (for example, Start Date and End Date).
• Add a step after the trigger to create a new Dynamics 365 record.

• Select the relevant organization and the entity Segments.
• Ensure the mandatory fields contain data. For option set fields, the numeric values of the desired option should be selected. Because in this example we want the segment to be activated immediately for evaluation we are using the following values:
  • Activation Status = 192350000 (Active)
  • Segment Type = 192350000 (Dynamic)
  • Status Reason = 192350001 (Live)
• In the query definition we use the query from the model segment, substituting as necessary the input parameters captured in the manual trigger. The input may require conversion to match the query syntax. In the example, the resulting Step should look similar to this:

• In order to correctly convert the date inputs into the text to substitute, the following Expression was used:

concat(formatDateTime(triggerBody()[‘date’],’yyyy’),’,’,formatDateTime(triggerBody()[‘date’],’MM’),’,’,dayOfMonth(triggerBody()[‘date’]),’,0,0′)

6. The Flow can now be saved, tested and shared with the relevant people (in this case the sales individual).
7. After the configuration has been tested, the users may wish to be able to view the segments they create. For this, you can add Segment and Customer Journey as an entity to the Sales Hub App and to its Sitemap. For a description of the various options available in the Sitemap, see the documentation. The screenshot below shows an example.

In this section we have now defined a Flow process which will prompt the users for key parameters that need updating on each segment creation. Our Sales Hub App is also ready to consume the Dynamics 365 for Marketing functionality we have decided to expose to the salesperson.

End user experience

With the configuration in the solution, users working on a tablet, will be able to view segments and also trigger Flows to allow for the creation of new segments based on the input criteria. Lets take a look:

1. Salesperson can now sign in on their tablet.

2. In the navigation menu, the entities for Segment and Customer Journey now appear. Selecting Segment, allows navigation to the latest list.

3. From the list of segments, the salesperson can go to Flow –> See your flows

4. From the list of Flows, run the Flow that has been shared with the user, entering values for the start and end date of the fulfilled orders to use in the marketing communication

5. Back in the Dynamics App, review the list of segments to find the newly created one.

6. Create a Customer Journey from the template

7. In the new Customer Journey, user can select the segment that has been created by Microsoft Flow and “Go Live” with the Customer Journey

Taking it further

Through this process we have created a code-free extension to our Sales Hub App to expose targeted Dynamics 365 for Marketing functionality to our salespeople. In addition, we have simplified the segment creation process by using Microsoft Flow to reduce the learning curve and the potential for errors by users who are not focused on marketing activities. Finally, this was made available for on-the-go users in their mobile devices.

An alternative approach to the one described could be to use Microsoft Flow to create a copy of the model segment but leave it in a Draft state by changing the value of the Status Reason. The benefit of this approach would be that users would not have to interact with the Microsoft Flow input dialog and could change any other parameter in the segment. In this approach, it should be considered that the end users would need to become familiar with the segment creation controls and understand the activation process to complete the task.

We hope you find this approach a useful scenario in addressing cross-app and automation scenarios.

Thank you for the interest in the topic and feel free to comment and give your feedback.

Emanuel Caraza

Principal Solutions Architect,Microsoft Dynamics FastTrack

The post Use Microsoft Flow to automate tasks in Dynamics 365 for Marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In my previous blog, I highlighted the importance of incorporating culture into your recruiting and hiring processes. I wanted to drill in a bit deeper to provide a step-by-step actionable approach to culture-centric talent acquisition.

Step 1: Make a list of the essential elements of your company culture.

This can include your vision, values, preferred behaviors and work styles, motivations, even the language, habits, and beliefs that fuel success at your organization. Many employers find it useful to write a sentence or two about each element, capturing why these things are important and how they support the success of the organization and its people. If your company values spirited debate, for example, that should be clearly stated along with why and what that term means to you.

Step 2: Map these cultural elements to your job descriptions.

In addition to spelling out the hard skills and previous experience required for a role, your job descriptions should tie back to your company culture. You can achieve this by:

• Identifying specific challenges candidates will face in getting the job done. This can provide real insight into your company culture and how work actually gets done. These challenges can relate to the preferred work style, communication skills, personality attributes, personal interests and motivationsanything thats necessary for success in the job and at your company in general.
• Describing how the job contributes to your companys overall mission and success. This ensures new hires dont go into their jobs disconnected from the bigger picture and from what drew them to your company in the first place. Having a clear understanding of how and why their contributions matter keeps them motivated and engaged in their day-to-day tasks.
• Crafting a section of the job description that actually describes your culture. Remember, candidates are looking for an organization where theyll fit in. Once youve given them the specifics of the job itself, tell them about your company culture, including your values, your mission, your leadership and managerial styles, what current employees love about working there, etc.
• Asking current team members to collaborate on writing job descriptions. This is a great way to make certain your culture shines through in your job descriptions. Employees can speak from first-hand experience about the skills and attributes needed for successand if you allow them to do it in their authentic voices, it will speak volumes about your culture.

Step 3: Tie your culture to your candidate interviews.

To achieve this step, you must ensure that every recruiter and hiring manager has a clear grasp of your company culture. Thats why Step 1 (making an actual culture-related list) is so critical. Without a clear and uniform understanding among your recruiters and hiring managers, gut instinct and cultural disconnects can easily creep in, which undermines the entire process.

To tie your culture to your interviewing process:

• Openly discuss your company culture during the interview. As stated above, candidates want to find an organization where theyll feel comfortable and fit in. Use your culture list to talk about the companys values, preferred styles of collaborating and communicating, the habits of successful employees, and the like. Also consider addressing issues such as the companys approach to career development, opportunities for reach assignments and personal development, and work-life balance.
• Ask questions that probe around issues of culture. These questions might include: What drew you to our company? Why are you interested in this job? What kind of work environment do you prefer? What management style do you like to work under? What type of culture do you thrive in personally? What concerns would you have coming into this job and this company?
• Ask questions about the candidates own values and motivations. These kinds of questions might include: What kind of work gives you meaning and satisfaction? What excites you most about this job? What excites you most about this company? What was your best job and why? Who was your best boss and why? How many hours do you normally work each week? How do you handle pressure, periods of heavy workload, and personal conflict?
• Encourage candidates to ask your interviewers questions in return. Questions from candidates can be every bit as insightful as their answers to your questions. Often their questions will help you assess how well theyll fit into their prospective teams and whether theyll thrive or struggle under a specific manager. But just as frequently, their questions can help you discern whether they truly are personally aligned with your organization and not just interested in securing a job.

The bottom line

Your recruiters and hiring managers want to make high-quality hires. They want to bring in people who have the greatest chance of success and who will sustain high levels of performance, job satisfaction, and retention. Hiring for culture fit empowers all of thatbut it isnt without its risks.

When done incorrectly (by placing too much emphasis on personality type, for example), it can reinforce conscious and unconscious biases among recruiters and hiring managers, hamper diversity, and limit your organizations potential. When done correctly, however, hiring for culture fit considers the candidate as a whole and in the context of your unique and specific work environment.

In its best practice, hiring for culture fit is a progressive endeavor, one that embraces the notion of culture add by identifying and welcoming people from a spectrum of backgrounds and experiences. After all, these are the individuals who can fill critical gaps and move your culture forward.

Learn more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent can help your organization hire top talent and enable their success from our demonstration experience.

The post 3 ways to incorporate culture in your talent acquisition strategy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.