New features in Dynamics 365 & the Power Platform this January

We have rounded up new features that are rolling out this month (January 2023) across Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

In the coming weeks, we will have insight into the first wave of 2023, detailing features set to roll out between March and October. We will be posting more about this when we have more detail, but in the meantime, feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the features coming this month.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Use natural language to create segments in real-time marketing (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

• Ability to use natural language to create segments in real-time marketing by simply describing the segment definition in plain English
• Add the results query onto the segment builder at any level of the query logic, either as a new group or as an additional condition in your existing logic
• Improve the natural language engine by giving thumbs-up or down feedback to achieve even more accurate results in the future

Individually manage segment members with inclusions and exclusions (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

• Adding manual inclusions or exclusions is a powerful way to augment segment-building criteria
• Manually include or exclude specific people to ensure that segments always reach VIP customers, or use inclusions and exclusions as an easy way to build test segments for journeys

Dynamics 365 Sales

Gain insights into the usage of sales records (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

• Sales managers and administrators can gain insights into the usage of the sales records and compare the usage across areas such as business units, roles, and timeframe
• The administrator or sales manager can analyse the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations performed by the respective users
• The CRUD operations analysis can be done on contact, opportunity, lead, and account entities

KPI and Manager Dashboards to improve sales efficiency (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

• Keep your sales team up to date on KPIs and empower staff to make more informed decisions, by easily accessing the KPI and manager dashboards; these provide an effective way to keep sales goals organised and continuously updated
• The manager dashboard allows sales managers to coach staff and easily view the team’s and sequence’s performances
• View key metrics such as ‘time taken to convert the leads and opportunities’, ‘conversion ratio between leads and opportunity’, ‘success rate of the sequences’ and ‘status of the sequence steps associated with the lead and opportunities’

Power Apps

Connect to external data from Dataverse (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

Although Microsoft Dataverse has supported virtual tables for a long time, they can be a challenge to setup. Users can now easily connect existing data sources, such as SQL Server, Excel file, or Microsoft List with Microsoft Dataverse, and interact with that external data as if it’s part of Dataverse.

Power Pages

Utilise code editing improvements (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

Enhancements are introduced to the Power Platform Tools extension for Visual Studio Code, to better support professional developers.

Power Automate

Prevent capturing screenshots when flow runs fail (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

A new machine registry entry enables admins to prevent Power Automate for desktop capturing screenshots when a flow run fails. In the past, if confidential data was visible on screen while a desktop flow was running, this would have been captured in a screenshot in case of a flow run failure.

Run unattended automations with hosted machine group (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

Users can easily run desktop flows using fully managed virtual machines. This feature also allows customers to dynamically scale up and down the virtual machine used to run their automation.

Save a copy of a solution-aware cloud flow into a solution (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

This has been a popular request for enterprise customers, and it will now allow users to create a duplicate of a solution cloud flow and change it slightly. Overall, this feature will make it easier to manage solution-aware cloud flows.

Support for service principals as the owner of flows (General Availability: 1^st Jan)

Currently, you can’t enable flows that service principals own because the connections that flow use can’t be shared with service principals. As a workaround, makers use shared service accounts when they want more than one person to own a flow.

With this feature, connections can be shared with service principal accounts, allowing you to enable flows that service principal accounts own.

Any questions?

For more information about any of the new features, please contact us at 01908 038110, email us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk or fill out the form below.