The post Upcoming program for Business Applications ISVs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Organizations can automate repeatable sales activities and respond to external events by standardizing best practices using the Playbooks feature in Dynamics 365 for Sales. Playbooks can include guided actions and contextual sales materials that sales representatives need for closing deals and can be triggered manually or automatically based on entity record events.

Lets look at the basic expectations of sales managers and sales representatives.

Playbooks help your organization to meet the expectations of sales managers and sales reps and in driving sales efficiency, productivity, and consistent outcomes.Here are some scenarios where your organization could use playbooks:

• A sales representative working on an opportunity suddenly comes to know that the key decision maker and top champion of the product has left the organization in the middle of a deal. This event could possibly jeopardize the entire commercial transaction. With playbooks, automation can trigger a play that creates a set of tasks and activities needed to mitigate the situation. A task to reach out to current contacts at the customer account and identify the new stakeholder could be immediately followed by an introductory phone call to better understand the new stakeholders priorities. This carefully crafted orchestration of activities ensures that the new decision maker is successfully identified and turned into a new champion for the product so that the deal can be salvaged.
• A seller receives multiple leads from the marketing team, which they must follow up on. From experience, many of the leads turn out to not show any true interest and are a waste of the sellers time. With playbooks, organizations can automate the sequence of emails and activities to effectively communicate with the potential customer and only involve the seller when a connection is initiated.
• After closing an opportunity, there may be certain products, industries, or regions where the seller must provide some post-sale deployment support. Playbooks can help automate a set of defined tasks or activities that would help the customer get up and running, and potentially adopt the product or solution faster.
• Contract renewal is a key process that helps sales teams to boost their recurring revenue. Playbooks can provide a guided set of best practices when contracts are nearing renewal. These can be based on contract types, such as license, support, and maintenance agreements. You can configure tasks like checking any open customer issues and the latest NPS score as part of the information the playbook gathers to assist sellers in achieving their planned revenues.

Learn more about how to create and use playbooks, including links to step-by-step instructions, by going to Enforce best practices with playbooks.

How are playbooks different from business process flows?

While a playbook may seem like a business process flow conceptually, there are some fundamental differences between the two. Lets have a look.

Primary usage

Configuration / authoring

Runtime experience

Conclusion

Playbooks are a great way to automate repeatable processes and respond to events, thereby improving sales reps’ efficiency and productivity, and helping to ensure more consistent outcomes for your organization.

Dynamics 365 for Sales is making strong investments toward helping sellers automate their work and guiding them on their next best action. The Playbooks feature is the initial step in that direction. Stay tuned for future innovations from our product in this area!

The post Use playbooks for guided selling in Dynamics 356 for Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Field Service (FS) solution will enable system-driven, automatic updates, in alignment with other Microsoft announcements that have highlighted the improved update process for Dynamics 365 (online):

• Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence – Business Applications Summit
• FAQ for Dynamics 365 Update Policies

New Field Service Update Policy:

• Manual updates lead to irregular and delayed updates which increase risks to the customer, support difficulties, and potentially increase downtime.
  • This required organizations to increase update planning and testing across their instances.
  • Leading to longer gaps between updates and often required deeper customer investments into their upgrade planning and testing.
• FS will move to an automatic update approach.
  • Many other solutions already push minor updates into customer orgs, automatically (i.e. Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing).
  • This will reduce customer risk, improve system supportability, and will make the update motion smoother and more predictable.

Field Service Version Eligibility:

• The new policy will be rolled out to instances with FS v7.5 and later as early as May 13th.
  • Microsoft will gradually exercise the new policy for instances eligible for automatic upgrade, so customers may not see any immediate impact to their eligible instances.
  • Customers can still update from the Admin Center if there is an update that has not yet been applied.
  • For instances with FS earlier than v7.5, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.
• For customers using FS v8, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for FS v7.
• Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from FS v7 to FS v8; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on FS v7 to FS v8.

Scope of the Automatic Updates:

• Field Service releases new updates of the solution roughly once a month with occasional hotfixes being released more frequently.
  • These monthly updates will include patches to resolve issues and may include minor functional, reliability, and performance improvements.
• For major updates, Field Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
  • Field Service will deliver two major updates per year, in April and October.
  • These will offer new capabilities and functionality.
  • Major new capabilities will be enabled in a public preview prior to this delivery period so customers can validate major updates in a sandbox environment.

Solution Upgrade Timing and Impact:

• FS updates will undergo testing to ensure the solution upgrades successfully while also safeguarding that no breaking changes are shipped through upgrade.
  • Major changes to the user interface, solution behavior, or significant new features will be shipped twice yearly after theyve been available behind a preview.
  • Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.

The post Automatic Update Policy for Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Were thrilled to announce Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian will be our special guest keynote speaker at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, coming to Atlanta, Georgia on June 10 and 11, 2019.

Dubbed the Mayor of the Internet by Forbes, Ohanian cofounded Reddit in 2005, sold the site to Cond Nast in 2006, then returned in 2015 as executive chair of a newly independent Reddit. Today, Reddit is one of the internets most powerful community gathering spaces and the 6th largest website in the world.

Ohanian has invested in and advised more than 200 tech startups, was a partner at Y Combinator, and cofounded Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital firm, where he now serves as managing partner. He also created and hosted two seasons of Small Empires, a series profiling tech startups and their communities. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list two years in a row, Ohanian is the bestselling author of Without Their Permission, a guidebook for harnessing the power of the internet for good.

Ohanian will bring his fresh new vision to this one-of-a-kind keynote you wont want to miss. Its sure to inspire you to take your organization to the next level with innovative new solutions. Register today!

While youre there, check out the session catalog

Were gearing up for an incredible event this year, with 150+ expert-led sessions and workshops (plus 16 pre-days!), filled with demos, hints, and hacks that will help you ramp up your skills and transform your business.

Our session catalog is live, and its growing every day. Weve got all things Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, mixed reality, and more under one roof. No matter your skillset, no matter your level, weve got you covered with sessions featuring your favorite tools that will help you innovate at every level. Plus, youll learn about the latest trends and product roadmaps before anyone else.

All this, plus our vibrant community

Were building an incredible community of power users, analysts, technical architects, and more youll have plenty of chances to connect and collaborate at the conference. We hope youll join us for 2+ days of total immersion to drive better data, stronger solutions, and bigger transformation.

The post “Mayor of the Internet” to keynote Microsoft Business Applications Summit appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Project Service (PS) solution will enable system-driven, automatic updates, in alignment with other Microsoft announcements that have highlighted the improved update process for Dynamics 365 (online):

• Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence – Business Applications Summit
• FAQ for Dynamics 365 Update Policies

New Project Service Update Policy:

• Manual updates lead to irregular and delayed updates which increase risks to the customer, support difficulties, and potentially increase downtime.
  • This required organizations to increase update planning and testing across their instances.
  • Leading to longer gaps between updates and often required deeper customer investments into their upgrade planning and testing.
• PS will move to an automatic update approach.
  • Many other solutions already push minor updates into customer orgs, automatically (i.e. Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing).
  • This will reduce customer risk, improve system supportability, and will make the update motion smoother and more predictable.

Project Service Version Eligibility:

• The new policy will be rolled out to instances with PS v2.4 and later as early as May 13th.
  • Microsoft will gradually exercise the new policy for instances eligible for automatic upgrade, so customers may not see any immediate impact to their eligible instances.
  • Customers can still update from the Admin Center if there is an update that has not yet been applied.
  • For instances with PS earlier than v2.4, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.
• For customers using PS v3, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for PS v2.
• Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from PS v2 to PS v3; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on PS v2 to PS v3.

Scope of the Automatic Updates:

• Project Service releases new updates of the solution roughly once a month with occasional hotfixes being released more frequently.
  • These monthly updates will include patches to resolve issues and may include minor functional, reliability, and performance improvements.
• For major updates, Project Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
  • Project Service will deliver two major updates per year, in April and October.
  • These will offer new capabilities and functionality.
  • Major new capabilities will be enabled in a public preview prior to this delivery period so customers can validate major updates in a sandbox environment.

Solution Upgrade Timing and Impact:

• PS updates will undergo testing to ensure the solution upgrades successfully while also safeguarding that no breaking changes are shipped through upgrade.
  • Major changes to the user interface, solution behavior, or significant new features will be shipped twice yearly after theyve been available behind a preview.
  • Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.

The post Automatic Update Policy for Project Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We are pleased to announce the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection public preview is now available! With Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection were providing a cloud-based service for online merchants to help increase revenue, lower fraud-related costs, and improve customer experience. In this release, Fraud Protection preview supports payment fraud detection and account creation protection.

Watch Fraud Protection demo

Like many other ecommerce merchants at Microsoft, both our in-store and online channels have been hit by high fraud costs during our retail digital transformation over the past few years. With the large variety of products, diverse buying experiences, and the scale of our operation, we couldn’t find a vendor to meet our needs, so we designed a solution in house. Our internal solution helps protect against payment fraud and much more. At the heart of the system, the solution focuses on finding the right balance between reducing fraudulent transactions without blocking legitimate transactions we receive from our customers. It has been nominated by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a finalist for the 2019 Franz Edelman Awardan international award for achievement in advanced analytics and operations research. The solution we delivered for Microsoft is the basis for the technology that we are now commercializing.

Our approach with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection combines our expertise as a merchant, with our world-class AI and fraud protection technology, and a depth of valuable data. With this product were focused on helping customers achieve three outcomes:

• Help lower fraud-related costs through the fraud protection network, our connected knowledge graph, and advanced AI that adapts to the changing fraud landscape. The product builds a graph of data that provides a view of suspected fraudulent behavior across participating Fraud Protection customers while still helping to protect the privacy of shoppers and the competitive intelligence of merchants. As a result, Fraud Protection customers can get increasingly accurate fraud assessments delivered by advanced adaptive AI that uses both their own real-time data and that of the connected graph.
• Help increase revenue through innovative bank and issuer partnerships that share fraud related information which can help increase acceptance rates for legitimate transactions.
• Create a better customer experience by reducing wrongful rejections and lowering friction during the buying experience. If a legitimate transaction gets blocked, we provide tools to help your customer support team quickly resolve the problem.

Get started with a fraud diagnosis

In early feedback from customers, we learned many are frustrated that the only way they can get a sense of whether a fraud prevention vendor may help them is to run a long proof of concept. While this is often the best evaluation approach, its also time consuming and comes with hard-to-justify expenses. For this reason, one of the differentiated experiences in Fraud Protection is the ability to preview the products capability to detect fraud in your business using your data, through the diagnose experience. By uploading historical data into Fraud Protection, the product will present an AI-driven analysis of the fraud-protection and revenue opportunities. This provides you with a way of helping to justify the investment in a proof of concept.

Do a real-time evaluation through API integration

After doing a diagnosis, you should have an initial understanding of the opportunity to improve your fraud protection. At this stage, we typically recommend that you proceed with a deeper evaluation of the product using more of the products features. You can start by implementing our device fingerprinting on your ecommerce portals and sending real-time transactions to the Fraud Protection APIs, so those transactions can be assessed for fraud risk. Our detailed KPI dashboards will help you shadow-test Fraud Protection relative to your incumbent solution. Your fraud analysts can use the AI-based virtual fraud analyst to help them set the right operating point to optimize the balance between fraud detection rate and false positives. Finally, when you are comfortable with the products performance in your business, you can enter the protection experience where you can further evaluate the products risk assessment in your purchase flows, and optionally choose to send trust knowledge to issuing banks to help improve acceptance rates.

Both of the above marquee features, diagnosis and the virtual fraud analyst, and many more, can be experienced today in the newly available preview. If you want to get a better understanding of how Microsoft might help you improve fraud detection in your ecommerce business, request the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection preview to get started!

More resources to explore

• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection in the April 19 release notes.
• Stay connected and read about how to get started
• Engage with us in the Dynamics 365 community

We look forward to your feedback and input!

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection public preview is now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In the next release of Lifecycle Services (LCS), were excited to unveil a major update to the look and feel of the user interface (UI) in LCS. This change is in alignment with our goal to create similar experiences for the different Dynamics 365 products. There is no change in the functionality with this change.

The following changes are in this UI update:

• Accessibility is now built into LCS.
• Alignment in the user experience and controls used across Lifecycle Services and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
• Alignment in the new Dynamics header that extends the Office header.

This is just the beginning. We will be making changes in the future as part of a longer journey to improve the usability and align the experience with the rest of Dynamics 365.

The post An update to our UI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We want to notify you of the changes that were making to the servicing flows that will be released in the May 2019 update of Lifecycle Services (LCS).

Sign off on maintenance operations triggered through LCS

Today, on completion of any maintenance operation (servicing, database movement, upgrade, and putting system in maintenance mode) you have the option to sign off or sign off with issues as the last step to indicate completion of the operation. Only after you indicate sign off, is your environment ready for the next operation. The following changes we will be made to streamline the sign off process:

• Going forward the environment will be ready for the next operation after the current operation has been successfully completed. This means that sign off is no longer the terminal state but rather it is the completion of the operation. Operation completion states are now Successful, Rollback Successful, or Aborted.
• The Sign off button will be moved to the Environment history page, so after the operation is complete, you can navigate to the Environment history page to indicate sign off if you want to validate and capture this information.
• The release candidate check for moving packages from sandbox to production will continue to check if the package was successfully applied in a sandbox before you can move it to production. It does not depend on you signing off on the update.
• The sign off will only apply to servicing operation as that is the main operation where you validate the environment state to verify if there are any issues. For other operations, such as database movement, upgrade and maintenance mode, sign off does not apply and will not be visible.
• For service updates pushed by Microsoft, if the environment is not in a terminal state (environment has a pending sign off), then we do not apply the update. We see many instances where customers forget to sign off on a previous operation and because that is the terminal state we skip the environment and don’t apply the update. As a result, many customers ask us why we didnt update their environments. With this change, sign off is managed separately, so if your environment is in a Deployed state we will apply the update.

Provide a single package containing all customizations and ISV solutions

One recommended best practice is to provide a single package containing all customizations and ISV solutions when doing updates to your environment. The reason for this best practice is that with a single package containing all the changes it is easy to recreate the environment because you don’t need to worry about the order of packages applied. This also helps with CI/CD pipeline and provides reliability when doing the updates, as all the dependencies are included in the package. However, we dont have any validation checks that enforce this best practice. Soon we will be adding a warning check to highlight that there is a difference in the modules that exist on the environment and what is available in the package that is provided during deployment. This will initially be a soft-check but will later become a hard check that will prevent you from applying updates if all the modules on the environment are not accounted for in the package and in the list of modules to delete. If there are modules that are listed in the ModuleToRemove file, then those will be deleted. With the new self-service deployment feature, it is required that you use a single package because whatever is available in the package overwrites what is on the environment. Today, self-service deployment is available only to new customers signing up for Finance and Operations; however, existing customers will be soon be migrated to this feature based on their Azure region. We are adding this new check to help with this transition and enforce the recommendation. In addition to this, today you can manage customizations andthird-party models from your build server. In the near future we will also be adding a feature that allows you to create such a package from your development environment.

The post Upcoming changes to the servicing flows triggered through Lifecycle Services (LCS) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Last month, we announced the availability of new features in Lifecycle Services (LCS) that would enable you to configure when you get updates to your production environment and how you can pause an update if youre unable to take the update due to a critical business activity. At that time these features were only available to customers using version 8.1 and above. However, starting today these features will also be available to customers that are using version 7.3. For customers that are on 7.3, we will update their sandbox and production environments to the latest Platform update each month. For customers that are on version 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0, you can apply the latest platform update manually using the servicing flows. With the features now available in LCS, you will be able to do the following:

• Configure whether to get Platform updates for your production environment in the first, second, or third week of the month and in what time zone.
• Pause updates through LCS if you are unable to take the update. You can pause a maximum of 2 continuous updates. However, if you are more than 2 releases behind, then you will not be allowed to pause updates. For example, if you are on Update 23 and the currently available platform update is Update 25, then you will be able to pause. But if you are on Update 22, then you will not be allowed to pause.
• Get notified about upcoming service updates through LCS.

For more details, visit theONE Version FAQ.

The post Configuring LCS for monthly Platform updates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Many manufacturing organizations are transitioning from a traditional product business model to an as-a-service business modelincluding flexible consumption models (FCMs) and Anything-as-a-service (XaaS)that lets them pay for what they use. As-a-service models provide compelling benefits, such as:

• Predictable and renewable revenue streams
• Greater value to the customer, as they only pay for what they consume
• Deeper insights into consumption patterns to help inform add-on sales
• Lower operational costs by serving customers through a common platform

There are benefits and risks to an as-a-service model in manufacturing. For manufacturers, the service has value in that it provides a consistent revenue stream. Conversely, the risk lies in the service not being available for the customer to consume. Any downtime interrupts revenue for the manufacturer as consumption is halted and frustrates the customer with costly interruptions of service.

For the customer, the benefit is that there is a set recurring cost and no capital outlay. Plus, the customer doesnt have to keep up with the latest technology as its not their device. Upgrades and maintenance are typically factored into the service fee. The risk lies in the reliance on the service provider to provide a steady, reliable service and the possibility of the customer increasing usage of the service.

In manufacturing, the move to a service model is made possible by IoT and analytics, which enable the equipment to be part of a broader ecosystem. This process is known as connected field service and can detect and diagnose issues before the customer is even aware. Data generated from the device and analyzed by the manufacturer can drive predictive and preventative maintenance. The data gives the manufacturer a better understanding of how the device is being used and helps to form part of a digital supply chain to get the right equipment to the right place at the right time so there are no interruptions of service.

As a Service, or servitization, shifts the focus from the product to the end solution. It creates a frictionless customer experience. It takes the complexities of owning a device, including capital outlay, installation, maintenance, and other considerations out of the hands of the customer to the service provider for one consistent and recurring charge.

This transformation from product to service model is changing the manufacturing landscape. In an IFS research report of 750 decision-makers in 16 countries, 70 percent reported offering some level of servitization.

Companies that experience a downfall in demand can reinvent themselves as a service. For instance, a car manufacturer experiencing an economic downturn with an oversupply of vehicles can create a car rental service. Then, when the economy returns to its former good health, the car rental service becomes just another revenue stream.

Consider Siemens Gamesa, a renewable energy manufacturer of wind turbines. Siemens Gamesa is leveraging field service to extend the field capacity of its wind turbines. The company produces the wind turbines and performs on-going maintenance as a service offering. Siemens Gamesa performs predictive maintenance through IoT and analytics, by way of connected field service, collecting volumes of data from the wind turbines and leveraging artificial intelligence to pinpoint potential repairs.

Using Dynamics 365 for Field Service, Siemens Gamesa continuously monitors the turbines and leverages the power of IoT to collect data from the blades. If an anomaly arises, Siemens drone solution called Hermes, is launched to fly across the turbines to take images of the blades. Later, the images are stitched together in the cloud, removing the blade from the background so cracks along the blade can be easily seen. What took days to identify a crack in a turbines blades, now takes just minutes. Field service is scheduled and the most qualified technician is dispatched. Tickets are generated only when there is a need, reducing operating costs and ensuring first time fix rates.

According to Siemens Gamesa, its wind turbine and service portfolio creates value that reduces the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE), ensuring long-term returns for customers. Siemens Gamesa has significantly differentiated itself in the market by servitizing their renewable energy offerings.

Watch Siemens Gamesca video

Learn more about the Microsoft Connected Field Service solution.

The post Transition from a product to service model with connected field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Account-based marketing (ABM) can increase engagement, deal sizes, and conversions if its deployed for the right accounts at the right time. The challenge many organizations face is knowing how to customize an approach with the mix of ABM and broad-based demand strategies and tactics.

In a new webinar, Jonathan Tam from SiriusDecisions joined me to explore the SiriusDecisions Demand Spectrum, a methodology that helps organizations determine and deliver the right approaches to drive their demand marketing engine, and the three key elements that determine which approach is most appropriate for your company.

Watch the webinar to see examples of the requirements for each stage of the Demand Spectrum below and learn how you can evaluate your own company to come up with a demand strategy.

Element #1: Available account insights

Is your demand creation focus driven by market information with a broad concentration, or do you have strong account insights that allow your organization to develop and execute on specific account plans?

Understanding the current depth of information within your accounts is the first step in evaluating your demand approach. The level of account insights provides key information that ultimately dictates what demand activities your organization will look to drive.

Element #2: Sales and marketing joint engagement

The most effective approach to driving demand is with jointly engaged sales and marketing teams. If your organization lacks collaboration, you may find yourself unprepared when approaching new customers or trying to plan activities around demand creation.

Insight from marketing is imperative for the sales team to be most effective, so for account-based marketing to be viable, there must be a willingness for sales and marketing to engage in joint planning and execution of activities at the account level.

Element #3: Account-specific customization

Customizing the approach that you take with different accounts can lead to greater success both internally and externally. Understanding the different factors of customization will help you determine your organizations opportunities and capabilities within demand creation.

The more you can customize these different factors, the better prepared your marketing and sales teams will be to drive the execution of the demand creation approach. Not all accounts require the same level of customization, and tailoring your approach correctly will lead to more success.

Watch the webinar: Driving demand with account-based marketing

Tune into the webinar to learn about the SiriusDecisions Demand Spectrum and how to determine what demand approach is most appropriate for your company. Youll also see some examples of demand analysis, as well as how Dynamics 365 for Marketing can help you increase your demand with account-based marketing.

The post Drive demand with account-based marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Customer Service Insights provides an actionable view into critical performance metrics and emerging trends using industry-leading artificial intelligence. Today, were very excited to announce Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights is now generally available!

Get started with Customer Service Insights today

Since our public preview in October 2018, weve been working hard to continue adding value and extending the service to users across multiple regions. Getting started with Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights is free; just go to https://dynamics.microsoft.com/ai/customer-service-insights, and follow the instructions for a 30-day trial. Continue reading for an overview of a few key areas of the product, including the AI-driven topic clustering, the out of the box business dashboards and the better-together product integrations that differentiate this product.

Get better insights with AI-driven topic clustering

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights supports the automatic parsing of case titles imported into the system and determines which cases are semantically similar. These cases are grouped into what we call a topic. Without using Customer Service Insights, this type of clustering would typically be done manually over thousands of cases with high costs to the customer service workforce or done through basic keyword matching which can be inaccurate and misleading.

Instead, Customer Service Insights uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing models to understand the meaning of the case titles and provide better topic clustering out of the box. For example, our model can understand that coupon and promo code which are very different words, actually have the same semantic meaning. This all happens without user intervention, and will stay up to date with every completed data refresh. In addition to a powerful model, the product also provides controls to remove common tags and prefixes from case titles, to ensure the most meaningful part of the case is used for the clustering.

We also understand that not every business is the same and even semantics may change across customers. Thats why we also allow you to refine the topic clustering through several controls directly in the product, to ensure the model is the most relevant for your business needs. You can change the granularity of the topic clustering, affecting the scope of issue areas you want to track in each topic. Once topics are created, you can review the cases that were clustered in a topic and provide feedback on whether or not this is the right place for this topic, through a thumbs up/thumbs down motion or by moving the case to another topic. During the next workspace refresh, the AI model in Customer Service Insights will interpret user feedback and actions to improve the topic clustering, resulting in topics that should better align with your business needs over time.

Immediate view into key metrics with out-of-box dashboards

Adding to the value of the topic clustering, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights provides a number of out-of-box dashboards that correlate the AI-derived topics and the traditional BI metrics and key performance indicators.

Today, Customer Service Insights includes four dashboards on the most common areas a customer service manager would focus on KPI Summary, New Cases, Customer Satisfaction and Resolutions. You can also select a topic on any of these dashboards and drill into a dedicated dashboard, where you can better understand how this specific topic rates amongst your key metrics like Average Resolve Time and Overall Average CSAT impact. Right-clicking on a topic provides an opportunity to drillthrough to a dashboard dedicated to analytics for that topic.

These dashboards use the power of Power BI embedded to provide rich interaction capabilities. For example, clicking on a specific topic will cross filter the other charts to provide a better view on how the cluster of cases impacts the key business metrics.

Providing better-together solutions across Customer Service

Customer Service Insights today connects to the Common Data Service (CDS) to access the case records and import them into the Customer Service Insights workspace. By default, the system looks for case data that is created by Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. However, you dont need to be a user of Dynamics to use Customer Service Insights. If the system detects your CDS environment doesnt appear to have the default data structures, it will prompt you directly in the product to select where your case data is stored. This allows you to leverage the many data integration capabilities within CDS today to bring data from other case management systems and use them in the platform with Customer Service Insights.

Over the next few weeks, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights will also become available to existing customers of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service Enterprise. For more details, please review the licensing guide and the messaging center communication. With the upcoming release of the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service, youll continue to see a powerful suite of customer service management capabilities that ultimately improve the workforce and your customer satisfaction.

Get started today

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights helps empower customer service organizations to improve their customer experience. Were excited to see how it can help your organization! Next steps:

• Get started and sign up for Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights
• Watch the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights overview video
• Learn more about the features from our help content
• Contribute to the Customer Service Insights community

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

Its my pleasure to announce the general availability of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights. Customer Service Insights helps provide better customer service experiences through the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

Customer Service Insights empowers your customer service managers to make better decisions to improve customer satisfaction and workforce productivity. This application delivers:

• • • Out-of-the-box dashboards offering visibility into critical operational and performance metrics for your customer service organization.
    • Visibility into your top case volume and resolution time drivers, allowing you to focus on areas with the greatest impact.
    • Insights into emerging topics, allowing you to tackle issues before they become a major problem affecting your customers.
    • Deeper understanding of your customer satisfaction scores, helping you improve customer loyalty and brand sentiment.
  Read the detailed blog post

  Built-in dashboards with interactive charts and visual filters provide views of critical performance metrics, operational data, and emerging trends across channels from your customer service system. With Customer Service Insights, you can easily identify opportunities for improvement that have the greatest impact. This helps you evaluate and respond to key performance indicators (KPIs) while enhancing customer satisfaction.

  One of the outstanding capabilities is how were using AI to tackle a key problem for data-driven decision making in customer service; giving users the ability to understand in detail what new topics are showing up in support traffic and how KPIs correlate to specific topics. Traditionally either coarse tagging of support issues is done by agents handling the case, or fine grain clustering is done through manual inspection after the fact. Our natural language understanding technology supports automatic grouping of cases by support topicseliminating the need to manually tag cases or rely on very coarse topic areas selected by users of agents. The AI models learn from human feedback to improve topic clustering and personalize topic generation over time. Users can rename topics to better suit their business needs, combine or split topics to achieve desired granularity, provide feedback on cases within a topic, and automatically identify emerging support topics before they reach an overwhelming volume.

  Thanks to this advanced topic clustering, new insights can be discovered as well. For example, it helps identify new emerging issues that may not have good solutions or KB articles available yet, or where there may be training needs on specific areas for agents. These unique AI capabilities empower your support team to better identify opportunities for providing positive customer experiences. Tessa Klosters blog post provides more detail on these additional capabilities and how to get started using Customer Service Insights.

  Watch this space

  Its clear: AI is a catalyst for changeand in this case, change for the better. Its transforming customer service by providing customer service managers insight into opportunities to improve the customer experience. Our AI technology supports a better customer experience, and helps businesses better engage and earn customers for life.

  Soon we will be announcing availability of the public preview of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service. Virtual Agent for Customer Service is tightly integrated with Customer Service Insights, providing a natural way of translating findings from Customer Service Insights into action by automating common requests and fueling a positive customer experience.

  Check out Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights, get more details on the capabilities in Tessa Klosters blog post, engage with us on theCustomer Service Insights community,and learn more in ourhelp documentation. Please let us know your feedback on the public preview of Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service. We look forward to hearing your input.

  Get started with Customer Service Insights today

  Cheers,

  Frank

The post Deliver better experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS April 2019 release.

An update to our user interface

With this release of LCS, we are excited to unveil the new look and feel of the user interface (UI) in LCS. This change is in alignment with our goal to create similar experiences for the different Dynamics 365 products. There is no change in the functionality with this change. The following changes are in this UI update:

• Accessibilityis now built into LCS.
• Alignment in the user experience and controls used across Lifecycle Services and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
• Alignment in the new Dynamics header that extends the Office header.

This is just the beginning. We will be making changes in the future as part of a longer journey to improve the usability and align the experience with the rest of Dynamics 365.

Self-service upgrade and One Version

The available versions for self-service upgrade will be aligned with One Version starting with this Lifecycle (LCS) release. The possible target versions with this release will be:

• 7.3 Platform update 23 – Platform update 25
• 8.1.3 Platform update 23 – 10.0.1 Platform update 25

Each month we will continue to add the latest General Availability version and will remove the oldest version. Our recommendation is to select the highest available version when you begin the self-service upgrade process to allow for ample time to upgrade both Sandbox UAT and Production environments to the same version.

Service request retirement notice – Sandbox Point-in-time Restore (PITR)

With this release, we are adding a deprecation notice for the Sandbox Point-in-time Restore (PITR) service request type. This functionality has been previously released as a self-service action and is available for on-demand use. The functionality will be entirely removed from Service Requests in May 2019.

Database refresh enabled between version 10 and version 8.1.X

Historically, the ability to refresh a database between environments on different application versions has been blocked. This is because a database refresh does not run any data upgrade scripts, and so copying a version 7.2 Production database to a version 7.3 UAT environment would result in data loss.

With One Version, there are no longer data upgrade scripts between versions. With this release of LCS we will be enabling database refresh self-service capabilities between version 8.1.X source environments to version 10.0.X target environments.

Sandbox environment database scale

Starting in April 2019, Sandbox environments will begin to scale out their databases to different Azure SQL servers. This provides scale and resiliency against single point of failure on the Azure SQL platform. We are rolling this out in a safe deployment process, starting with one Azure region and increasing over time.

• To determine which SQL Connection string to use, locate the Database Accounts section of your Environment Details page.
• To build the proper connection, you will use the SQL Server\Database Name combination in SQL Server Management Studio. The server will require you to append “.database.windows.net” to the SQL Server name value. Sign in using the axdbadmin account.

• From there, also explicitly connect to your required database by selecting the Options button and updating the database name.

One Version updates

Last month, we released a new experience in LCS for customers to configure when they get their service updates from Microsoft. As we were slowly releasing this feature, not all customers could see this new experience. With this release of LCS we are happy to announce that all customers that are on version 7.3 or are on version 8.1 and above will see the new service update configuration experience. For more details about how to use this feature, refer to Configure service updates. If you are part of the First Release program, this feature is not yet available but we are working on making it available soon.

Performance troubleshooting for environments deployed using self-service deployment

With this release of LCS, you will see the performance troubleshooting experience including Live View, Queries, and Actions tab available on the Environment Monitoring page for environments deployed using the self-service deployment option. For details on how to use this feature, see Performance troubleshooting.

LCS Support

To better support regression issues, in LCS Support flow weve added a required question in the case detail step for customers. This question identifies whether a feature was working in an earlier version but is not working in the current version. This information will allow our Support team to better support regression scenarios and the impact required to deliver the solution.

The post Lifecycle Services – April 2019 release notes appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Next week, thousands of developers will gather in Seattle, WA for Microsoft Build, our premier event to explore new and upcoming technologies, gain hands-on experience, and level up development skills.

While the conference gets technical, with a focus on developer tools and platforms, the experiences attendees take away from this years show will benefit nearly everyone using Microsoft Business Applications.

As arguably the most adaptable, extensible, and customizable business applications on the market, the skills and inspiration gained at Build will be infused into cross-platform solutions created by in-house developers and third-party solution providers. The collaborative event will even help inspire future innovation by our own development teams at Microsoft.

Developers will access new Power Platform tools and resources to build and customize Dynamics 365 applications that can be quickly implemented for specific departments, functions, and roles in days, not months. Several sessions will detail best practices to integrate data from cloud and on-premises sources using pre-built or custom data connectors and APIs to surface business insights and drive business forward. And for developers looking to take a new app to market, learn about our new investments in AppSource, the cloud marketplace that connects ISV publishers to business customers.

In fact, attendees will have the opportunity to engage in collaborative coding with peers using the latest development tools, helping to fast track projects and application development after the show.

Leveraging Dynamics 365 and Azure services, attendees will learn how to enhance emerging technologies like mixed reality, AI and machine learning, and IoT solutions. These popular sessions spawn conversations that help us understand how to focus innovation based on feedback on real-world use cases needed across industries, from manufacturing to retail to healthcare.

Just as importantly, attendees will have time to collaborate and share experiences that bring greater efficiencies and innovation to your organization, improving productivity, business insights, and customer engagement experiences that can make a big impact on your bottomline.

We look forward to hosting your technical teams and technology partners at Microsoft Build 2019.

It’s not too late to register

Want to see your organization at Build? Its not too late to register for the conferenceyour teams chance to learn about new innovations, gain hands-on experience, and collaborate with peers. Register nowto start building your personalized schedule and enable your team to imagine, create, and code with Business Applications and the Power Platform at Microsoft Build.

Register Now

The sessions below are just a few of the opportunities to learn about the latest developer tools, technologies, and resources for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, as well as get an inside look at new Business Applications capabilities. Be sure to browse the session catalog for many other related sessions.

Future Business Apps in Power Platform, Dynamics and Office
Monday, May 6, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Featuring Steven Guggenheimer, this session will cover demands for software engineers to create impactful business apps and continue to increase faster than resources become available. Managing data, creating apps, and getting them to where your users are is always a challenge. We have the tools and technologies for you to customize, extend, and build the apps that you need. Come to this general session to see how you can start with data and use the Power Platform plus the capabilities in Azure to create business applications for your users where they are in Office and Dynamics 365.

Power BI & Azure Data Services – Better together

Tuesday, May 7, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Come to this session to learn how to enable collaboration and solution design for business users and IT specialists to build solutions that enable an organization to harness the power of their big data. This session will enable you to collaborate across business and IT, and learn how we can extend intelligence beyond Power BI into Azure Data Services. Once Power BI has landed in an organization, attaching and extending into Azure can be achieved using common use cases and modernization plays.

The E2E process of building an ISV App on the Power Platform

Wednesday, May 8, 9:30-9:50 AM

Through the lens of an ISV/software developer, we will walk through the entire process for building an application on the Power Platform for commercial distribution. You will get a feel for what the entire process would look like, covering the flow from initial onboarding to the platform, building out the core app functionality with our no-code/low-code tooling to extending the out-of-the box UX experiences leveraging our pro dev extensibility capabilities. We will finish off with a high-level view of the flow to package and publish your solution to AppSource for broad distribution.

Learn How to Monetize your Product through AppSource and Azure Marketplace
Wednesday, May 8, 3:30 PM – 3:50 PM

Join us for an introduction to Microsoft’s cloud marketplace, how to publish to the marketplace, merchandise to the right storefront AppSource or Azure Marketplace for your target customer, and the new go to market benefits available from Microsoft.

PowerApps component framework

Wednesday, May 8, 3:30-4:30 PM

Now you can extend what’s possible in low code by building fully custom components for PowerApps. Learn the ins and outs of the PowerApps component framework, including how to customize Dynamics 365 applications as well as standalone PowerApps. We’ll cover how to get up and running with dev tooling, how to build your first control, as well as some inspiration from what others have built.

Sprinkle some DevOps on your PowerApps & Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement projects

Wednesday, May 8, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

The PowerApps is perfect for building apps at warp speed. However, when it comes to getting those apps out to the users where the real business impact happens, many customers are struggling. In this session, we’ll share how you can do continuous integration and deployment where multiple teams are involved in building an app and requirements calls for safe deployments through multiple downstream environments before hitting production. You will also learn about the details of canvas apps and flows in solutions and learn whats next on the roadmap for PowerApps and Common Data to accelerate the adoption of a healthy application lifecycle management (ALM) practice.

The post Sneak Peek: Dynamics 365 + Power Platform at Microsoft Build appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to Universal Resource Scheduling solution (version 2.4.10.xx), Field Service application (version 7.5.8.xx), Project Service Automation application (version 2.4.11.xx) On Dynamics 365 version 9.0.x (web client)

Werepleased to announcethe latestupdate to Universal Resource Scheduling, powering the Field Service and Project Service Automation applicationsfor Dynamics 365.This release includesimprovements to quality, performance,and usability,and isbased onyourfeedback and requests.

To update to this release,visittheAdmin Center forDynamics365online, solutions pages toinstall theupdate.For details, refer to our topic onhow to update a preferred solution.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Schedule assistants Book button on the Create Resource Booking panel is disabled once clicked until the booking is created to avoid duplicated bookings
• Fixed: Multiple issues preventing upgrades
• Fixed: Travel time display on the hourly vertical view on the schedule assistant
• Fixed: The auto-scrolling whenever a booking is made or booking status of the booking is changed on schedule assistant

Vinay Nalam

Program Manager, Dynamics 365 Engineering

The post Release Notes for Universal Resource Scheduling Version 2.4.10.56 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to Universal Resource Scheduling solution (version 3.6.0.xx), Field Service application (version 8.6.x.xx), Project Service Automation application (version 3.6.0.xx) On Dynamics 365 version 9.0.x)

Were pleased to announce the latest update to Universal Resource Scheduling, powering the Customer Service, Field Service, and Project Service Automation applications for Dynamics 365. This release includes improvements to quality, performance, and usability, and is based on your feedback and requests.

This release is compatible with Dynamics 3659.0.x. To update to this release,visit theAdmin Center for Dynamics 365 online solutions page to install the update. For details, refer to our topic on how to update a preferred solution.

Enhancements

• When inserting a booking between two bookings or reassigning a booking to another resource, the travel time of all associated bookings will be recalculated and updated on hourly schedule board and schedule assistant. This feature can be enabled by Auto Update Booking Travel field under Resource Scheduling > Settings > Administration > Scheduling Parameters.

• When the Book button is used on the resource requirement and the timezone on the pop-out schedule board is updated, the date time fields on the bottom requirement info panel will reflect the changed timezone.
• All the date and times in the filter panel and requirements panel on the schedule board are updated when the time zone is changed in the scheduler settings on the schedule board.
• Performance: Various performance improvements when searching for resource availability.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: On the schedule assistant, the radius unit behavior reflects kilometers or miles as per the preferred unit of distance when Search for field is changed.
• Fixed: The zoom level on the Map View on the Filter Panel will be preserved after entering or exiting the Schedule assistant search.
• Fixed: Only activated members of a crew get booked when a crew is booked.
• Fixed: On the schedule board setting for schedule assistant, the unavailable resources field can be changed from “Unavailable resources do not appear” to “Unavailable resources appear dimmed“ to show the unavailable resources on the schedule assistant.

• Fixed: Alignment of scheduler settings controls.
• Fixed: On a schedule assistant search for available resources on a location agnostic resource requirement, the Time From Promised and Time to Promised time window precedes over the Search Start and Search End time window, and the recommendations will be presented to make sure the technician can start work in the Time From Promised and Time To Promised window.
• Fixed: Onsite multi-resource requirements will be presented with travel time in the schedule assistant recommendations.
• Fixed: The filter panels characteristic field on the schedule assistant is populated with the characteristic from the resource requirement or work order.
• Fixed: Multiple issues preventing upgrade.

• Fixed: Resource utilization of a resource on non-working day, along with the color code of the non-working day.
• Fixed: Dragging the technician travel route to a requirement pin to schedule the booking in the maps view on the filter panel of schedule board.
• Fixed: The schedule board setting Order Number default maximum value is increased to 1000 from 100.
• Fixed: Duration field value text in Hebrew on schedule assistant.

Vinay Nalam

Program Manager, Dynamics 365 Engineering

The post Release Notes for Universal Resource Scheduling Version 3.6.0.18 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 version 9.0 and higher, Field Service solution version 7.x or 8.x

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Resource Scheduling Optimization v3.0 update release (3.0.19109.3). This release includes a number of new features including:

• Support for resource capacity greater than 1
• Better ways to manage and cancel optimization requests
• More options for range duration
• Consideration of a booking’s work location
• Various usability, performance, and quality improvements.

Below is a list of features introduced in this release.

Support resource capacity greater than one

Resource capacity dictates how much work can be scheduled to a resource for a specific time slot. This basically translates into how many times a resource can be double-booked.

With this release, Resource Scheduling Optimization is able to schedule resources with capacity greater than 1.

This achieved by increasing the capacity in the resources working hours. In the screenshot below, we are setting the capacity of a bookable resource named Brady Hannon to 3.

Later on, when RSO runs and optimizes schedules, it will consider a resources capacity which may be important to fill more requirements within a day and meet SLAs.

In the following screenshot, we can see Brady Hannon was scheduled up to a maximum of 3 requirements at one time.

Two important notes regarding how RSO considers resource capacity:

• If capacity is set to decimal (e.g. 1.75) on the resources calendar (working hours), RSO will round down to 1
• RSO will not consider requirement capacity. This means the effort field value on requirements will always be treated as if its value is 1.

Ability to cancel optimization requests in the middle of optimization

Sometimes optimization requests take too long time to run or simply will not finish. In the past, administrators stopped the request by resetting the entire optimization schedule. With this new release, administrators can Cancel Request at any time without resetting, and republish the whole schedule. This is more efficient and targeted.

More options for range duration

Range duration is a field on the Optimization Scope that dictates how many days should be optimized. As an example, if range duration is set to 2 days, then RSO will attempt to optimize requirements or schedule new requirements within the 2-day window.

In previous versions, the minimum value for Range Duration was 1 day, but the new release allows custom ranges set to the hours or minutes level. This provides more flexibility to run an optimization schedule for the rest of the remaining day.

In the screenshot below, range duration is set to 7 hours.

Range durations are visualized on the schedule board as yellow lines indicating the beginning and end of the optimization range. This is only displayed on the schedule board tab related to an optimization schedule. We can see in the image below the yellow barriers reflect a 7-hour range duration, which is great for organizations that may need to optimize schedules in the middle of the day for the rest of the day.

Consider a booking’s Work Location field

Work location defines where the work must take place whether at the customers location (Onsite), at the companys location (Facility) or remotely (Location Agnostic). This information is noted on the initial requirement record (also called the demand side) and is passed on to the eventual booking record (also called the fulfillment side).

In some instances, the fulfilled booking location can be different from the demanded requirement location. In the new release, RSO will consider the booking location when it attempts to update an existing booking during optimization.

Simplified administrative setup experiences

When RSO is deployed for the first time, it will come with a default unpublished optimization schedule that includes a default scope and goal by default. Administrators only need to publish it to begin using RSO to optimize unscheduled requirements for next day. This helps simplify setting up RSO and begin testing and development.

Below is a sample optimization schedule created by RSO when it is enabled for the first time.

Other enhancements

• Numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements as part of continuous engineering fundamental improvements

Important Notes

If you deploy this version of RSO with Field Service v8.x, RSO doesnt support Pool, Facility, Crew scheduling scenarios, please ensure:

• Exclude Pool and Crew types of resources from bookable resource view(s), which are used for optimization scope.
• Exclude Pool and Crew types of resource requirement from bookable resource view(s), which are used for optimization scope (or set Scheduling Method to Do Not Optimize).

For more information:

• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v3.0 Release
• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v2.8 Release
• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v2.7 Release
• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v2.6 Release
• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v2.5 Release
• Release Notes for Resource Scheduling Optimization (v2.0) Dynamics 365
• Whats New for Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization v1.5 Release
• Resource Scheduling Optimization Overview
• Scheduling anything in Dynamics 365 with Universal Resource Scheduling
• Dynamics 365 for Field Service – User’s Guide

Feifei Qiu

Program Manager

Dynamics 365, Field Service team

The post What’s new in Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling Optimization (version 3.0.19109.3) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

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

The administration of app and data access for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Common Data Service has been extended to allow administrators to use their organization’s Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups to manage access rights for licensed Customer Engagement and Common Data Service users.

Both types of Azure AD groups—Office and Security—can be used to secure user-access rights. Using groups lets administrators assign a security role with its respective privileges to all the members of the group, instead of having to provide the access rights to an individual team member.

The administrator can create Azure AD group teams that are associated to the Azure AD groups in each of the Customer Engagement and Common Data Service environments and assign a security role to these group teams. When members of these group teams access these environments, their access rights are automatically granted based on the group teams security role.

Provision and deprovision users
Once the group team and its security role is established in an environment, user access to the environment is based on the user membership of the Azure AD groups. When a new user is created in the tenant, all the administrator needs to do is assign the user to the appropriate Azure AD group, and assign Customer Engagement and Common Data Service licenses. The user can immediately access the environment without the need to wait for the administrator to assign a security role.

When users are deleted/disabled in Azure AD or removed from the Azure AD groups, they lose their group membership and wont be able to access the environment when they try to sign in.

Remove user access at run time
When a user is removed from the Azure AD groups by an administrator, the user is removed from the group team, and they lose their access rights the next time they access the environment. The memberships for the users Azure AD groups and Customer Engagement group teams are synchronized, and the users access rights are dynamically derived at run time.

Administer user security role
Administrators no longer have to wait for the user to sync to the environment and then to assign a security role to the user individually by using Azure AD group teams. Once a group team is established and created in an environment with a security role, any licensed Customer Engagement and Common Data Service users who are added to the Azure AD group can immediately access the environment.

Lock down user access to environments
Administrators can continue to use an Azure AD security group to lock down the list of users synced to an environment. This can be further reinforced by using Azure AD group teams. To lock down environment or app access to restricted environments, the administrator can create separate Azure AD groups for each environment and assign the appropriate security role for these groups. Only these Azure AD group team members have the access rights to the environment.

Share PowerApps to team members of Azure AD group (** coming soon **)
When canvas and model-driven apps are shared to an Azure AD group team, team members can immediately run the apps.

User-owned and team-owned records
A new property has been added to the security role definition to provide special team privileges when the role is assigned to group teams. This type of security role allows team members to be granted User/Basic-level privileges as if the security role is directly assigned to them. Team members can create and be an owner of records without the need to have an additional security role assigned.

A group team can own one or more records. To make a team an owner of the record, you must assign the record to the team.

While teams provide access to a group of users, you must still associate individual users with security roles that grant the privileges that they need to create, update, or delete user-owned records. These privileges can’t be applied by assigning a nonmember’s privilege inherited security role to a team and then adding the user to that team. If you need to provide your team members the team privileges directly, without their own security role, you can assign the team a security role that has members privilege inheritance.

Availability
These enhancements will be released regionally in the next few weeks. To check if your environment has been enabled to use Azure AD groups, follow these steps:
1.Go to Settings > Security.
2.Select Teams.
3.Open the View drop-down list.

If the AAD Office Group Teams and AAD Security Group Teams are listed, then your environment is enabled.

For detailed information, see

Team Members privilege inheritance, About Group teams, and

Manage app and resource access using Azure Active Directory groups

The post Using Azure Active Directory groups to manage an user’s app and data access appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The platform recently shipped a UCI-only setting. In the near future, this setting will be enabled by default.In support of this, beginning on May 17^th, Field Service v8.x and Project Service v3.x will begin to be made the default solutions available through AppSource. Depending on an instances geography, the default version changes may happen shortly thereafter.

While this will not block customers that are currently using the web interface, in new instances created after this change takes effect, customers will need to toggle this new setting to get back to the old interface.

This is a change to our previous policy of only enabling Field Service v7.x and Project Service v2.x by default. In future Field Service v8.x and Project Service v3.x will no longer exist behind an opt-in for paid instances; they will become the standard versions available. This is part of an effort to encourage users to adopt the improved interface and phase out the legacy functionality.

As of May 17th, customers that want a new instance with the legacy FS v7.x or PS v2.x will need to contact support with their instance details so support can enable their new orgs for the old versions of FS and PS.

• Any instances enabled for the legacy versions (FS v7/PS v2) cannot already have the latest versions (FS v8/PS v3) installed. If they do, the process will fail.
• Instance copies should bring across the same configuration from the source instance to the target; however, in AppSource, instances which are copied will only see default AppSource experience (which will show the newest versions available for upgrade) until the instance is requested to be enabled for the legacy versions.

All existing instances with the legacy versions of FS or PS currently installed will be automatically enabled to continue to receive updates for the legacy versions.

When ready to upgrade to the newest version, any org enabled for the legacy versions will need to submit a request with support to make the upgrade available from AppSource.

Note: Support requests related to this switch should not be submitted before May 17^th.

The post Disabling the Opt-In Model for Field and Project Service for Unified Interface Version (v8.x and 3.x) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.