Microsoft announced its Release Wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform on January 25, 2023. The new release plan is packed with several new features and enhancements, showcasing Microsoft’s dedication to its partners and customers in delivering the best products for seamless digital transformation.

Let us see what is new in the first release wave of this year:

Dynamics 365 Marketing

The feature enhancements in D365 Marketing are aimed at increasing the business output, organizational efficiency, and the capability of analyzing the impact of the business campaigns to achieve the most out of marketing activities.

The advanced D365 Marketing application can be seen incorporated with the following features:

• Business-to-business (B2B) analytics dashboard
• Frequency capping
• Multiple email recipient activation
• Emails timeline
• Customizable preference centers
• Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) marketing tagging

Dynamics 365 Sales

The updated D365 Sales application will include the following new features:

• Enhanced sequence capabilities supporting personalized
• Account-based engagement
• Actionable AI-powered suggestions within the seller workflow
• An updated form layout
• New opportunity management workspace
• Enhanced email templates
• Content suggestions and text message capabilities
• Various new abilities to create, loop, and optimize sales sequences

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

D365 Customer Service has been improved to allow agents to work more efficiently. Microsoft is largely using AI for the contact center with intelligent-suggested replies and robust real-time analytics with customization.

Users can observe enhancements in the given below features:

• Voice features
• Unified routing
• Embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration
• Elements of the agent workspace such as the case form, timeline, and conversation control.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Microsoft is extensively working on improving the new schedule board for dispatchers in the first wave of this year.

Users can see Microsoft D365 Field Service supporting frontline workers with the following features:

• Workers can now see their appointments in Outlook
• Find information faster through improved global search
• Highly improved performance and reliability on the mobile app

Dynamics 365 Finance

D365 Finance application, on the other hand, has been improved with increased visibility into an organization’s data, improved finance automation, and other enhancements, such as:

• Added Latin American Language
• Extended automation of complex tax scenarios
• Full end-to-end automation of accounts payable
• Automation of ledger settlements

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

More focus is on delivering increased agility and resilience across the supply chain. Plus, add features to elevate efficiency for discrete manufacturers, maintenance workers, and warehouse workers.

Upcoming features in D365 Supply Chain Management are as follows:

• Enhancements to omnichannel sales strategies
• Improved ways of managing attribute-based pricing
• Integrated soft reservations
• Optimized end-to-end process integration across Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Project managers and project team empowerment are in focus in this wave with new features as follows:

• Expansion of project budgeting and time-phased forecasting to resource/non-stocked deployment modes
• Improving the core experiences for expense management on the web and mobile form factors
• Across-the-board investments in performance and usability
• Consumption of modern and fluent controls in sales, billing and pricing
• Subcontracting experiences

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Microsoft continued working on improving human resource executives and employees’ experience through the following features:

• Expand the human capital management (HCM) ecosystem
• Expanding Microsoft’s payroll partner network to provide broader coverage for global organizations
• Better experiences for resource managers in Project Operations through the integration of employee skill, compensation and leave information
• Bringing project and experience information back into employee profiles to help employees grow their careers.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

The release wave also reveals Microsoft’s effort in improving new and updated B2B experiences. Here are the new features:

• Distributors modeled as sellers
• Added distributor fulfillment dashboard
• Improved the out-of-the-box B2B user sign-up flow
• Revised and improved payment flows
• Enabled network health checks to diagnose network-related issues impacting point of sale (POS) uptime for POS and Store Commerce users.
• Improved asynchronous payment capabilities to offer support for Klarna and other “buy now, pay later” methods and ACH real-time banking.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

A new functionality called Assessments API has been introduced in the 2023 release wave 1. The idea is to enable customers to define their own fraud event apart from existing default events that the Fraud Protection covers such as Purchase Protection and Account Protection. Hence, customers will be able to configure their Fraud Protection and achieve protection against fraud events specific to their businesses.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Enhanced finance capabilities and the warehouse management area can be noticed in Microsoft D365 Business Central. New features that would make customers’ processes more efficient are as follows:

• More default setup data to hasten onboarding procedures of customers
• Improved capabilities such as reporting, automation, and collaboration opportunities in Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365 and Teams.

New Features in Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI

This release wave is also about driving a data culture to empower individuals, teams, and organizations. Microsoft will offer the following features:

• Enhanced creation experience for individuals for more functional equality on the web and added the Power Query diagram view into Power BI.
• Enhanced meetings and multitasking capabilities for teams to work seamlessly with data remotely.

Power Apps

Reducing risk to organizations is another area Microsoft is focusing on in this release wave. Users will see the following features in Power Apps:

• Advanced governance capabilities for easy onboarding using low-code capabilities
• Manageable ways for the organization to scale
• Modern app building, data management, and logic creation for makers and developers of all skill levels.
• Modernized web and mobile experiences for modern and fast experiences across apps.

Power Automate

The Power Automate is going to be much easier for new users and simpler for existing users.

• New capabilities to simplify creating new flows by describing them in natural language.
• Improved creation and authorization flow for new users to easily get started.
• Introduced work queues with viewable and manageable automatable tasks with simpler connectivity to a machine for desktop flows
• Eliminated the need for additional password management and installation.

Power Virtual Agents

Bot building is now going to be more effortless for the larger section of users in the organization. Features described in this wave are as follows:

• A new unified authoring canvas has been introduced as Microsoft’s single conversational AI studio for building bots.
• Improved integration with Microsoft Bot Framework capabilities and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, bot creators.
• Everyone in between subject matter experts and developers is empowered to build bots with the public preview.
• Advanced authoring canvas will be available as a general feature.

AI Builder

The AI Builder will come with various document processing improvements, such as:

• Increased prebuilt model capabilities, such as contract processing
• Ability to identify personal information
• Ability to extract field types from documents
• Facilitating model governance and licensing