Dynamics 365 CE Release wave 1 2023

It’s here, the release of wave 1 2023 is announced. Every year Microsoft hits us twice with the release wave, and yeah it’s always a long list of features, so I’m very glad it’s only twice and not three times a year 

The following is my top feature list on Dynamics 365 CE. I know it’s a bit of a long list, but there are so many good features this year that I couldn’t leave them unmentioned in this blogpost.

I’ve used the new experience to dig into the release wave documentation, so go I highly recommend it if you haven’t started using yet.

Before we go any further, it’s worth mentioning that everything in this list is subject to change and the following images are the same ones that Microsoft has released as part of the feature wave, including the quality of them.

Let’s start with Sales which by the way in this release wave many of its features contain AI, something to think about because it could be something more common in the next wave releases.

Sales

Engage with your customers using SMS conversation

Now the seller will have the ability to send and receive SMS messages to customers. What this means for sales rep is that they will receive real-time notifications on the app and interact with it on the side panel that you can see in the image. It is true that nowadays everyone is moving towards a digital way of life, however some customers prefer to be contacted via SMS.

And to be honest some people (including myself) find this less intrusive or more effective as a reminder channel, or to provide quick updates.

The key functionalities of this capability include:

  • Allow sales managers to choose a service provider for sending and receiving SMS.
  • Ability to add SMS and automated SMS as a step in a sequence.
  • Create and add SMS templates as part of the configured sequence step.
  • Send SMS from the Sales Accelerator workspace.
  • Easily access past SMS interactions in context with relevant sales entities such as lead and opportunity records.
  • Admins will be able to assign specific numbers to any user/team for SMS.
  • Receive customer responses for SMS sent and revert to build an ongoing conversation.
  • Send and receive SMS from all relevant Dynamics 365 Sales entity forms.
  • Get real-time notifications for incoming SMS.

  

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Apr 2023

GA: May 2023

Improve lead engagement rates with validated emails

We all know that a typical problem with lead databases is email addresses, which are often not validated on a regular basis, reducing the quality of the data over time. Therefore, the sales rep could end up with a database full of leads with invalid or inactive email addresses.

This feature will help the sales rep with that email addresses validation, resulting in lower email bounce rates, and overall, a better return on their time invested.

The key functionalities of this capability include:

  • Administrators will be able to run a partial or full review across all email addresses maintained on active leads in the organization.
  • Sellers will be informed of invalid email addresses associated with email-based tasks that are appearing in their sales accelerator worklist card, and the Up next activities widget on the lead.