Author: Jennifer Morrison, Client Engagement Manager, Silverbear
Microsoft’s last Dynamics 365 Wave release (Wave 1), which announced a series of features updates across Dynamics 365 applications, only took place in spring. Now, as we enter autumn, the Wave 2 release has brought in several hundred more!
As you might expect with a supporting guide totaling 510 pages in length, the updates, which cover October 2022 – March 2023, are vast, and there are too many new benefits to go into each and every single one in detail here. And it’s highly likely that you wouldn’t want us to, either.
So, to keep it brief, we’ve worked through the entire Wave 2 release guide and selected what we think are the five best updates for Silverbear 365 and, of course, our customers.
In no particular order, here they are.
1. Modern advanced find with enhanced view management in model-driven apps
Admittedly, this benefit doesn’t have the snappiest of names – but don’t judge a book by its cover, for this benefit is important. Ironically, it’s not strictly a new benefit, as it was introduced some time ago – but its initial introduction was optional and admins would have to proactively opt users in. Now, choosing any table in the app to perform a structured search will be the default experience for everyone. This is likely to increase the speed and efficiency of search, so we’d encourage all Silverbear 365 users to get to grips with this new feature as soon as possible.
Click on the image to watch the video
2. Enhanced timeline functionality
The timeline has always played an important role as it provides our customers with the ability to access information on individual members in one glance. From our perspective, it’s one of the most used functions of a contact record – and the latest update has brought with it improvements to sorting and filtering. Not only that, but it can now show emails as conversation threads and also allows colleagues to tag each other in notes. Perhaps more importantly, though, is that Teams chats can now be linked into the timeline.
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3. Updated dashboards and improved lead management*
Dynamics 365 for sales now offers new standardised dashboards that allow users to fully understand how their sales pipeline is performing. The reports also help users gauge the performance of teams and individuals. So, how does this benefit Silverbear 365 users? Well, for membership managers and administrators, these reports can provide insights into the usage of the sales records across users, roles, timelines, and other parameters. Each sales usage dashboard can now also analyse the create, read, update and delete operations on contact, opportunity, lead and account entities. Our favourite aspect of this update, though, is that it provides automated alerts for potential invalid email addresses on lead records.
*Public preview available now. General availability from November 2022
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4. Form enhancements
Forms display data and often have links to other data records related to the key record you are viewing. Silverbear 365 has always provided the ability for its users to preview these linked records via a small, popup card form. However, if users needed more details, or they wished to edit a sub-record, they had to actually click into it – which meant their focus went elsewhere. The latest update to the form component allows administrators to embed an editable sub record form inside the main form, which means that you don’t need to leave the primary record you were originally working on. By way of an example, imagine viewing a member’s employer (Company) record and realising the business had moved or changed their main phone number. Instead of having to open the Company record to make the edit, you would be able to have an embedded, editable company form within the contact form instead.
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5. Grid enhancements
When it comes to grids – or views, as our users might refer to them as – there has been one standout bugbear. Having to click ‘next page upon reaching the 250 records-per-page limit can be frustrating. However, users can now benefit from the new infinite scrolling feature. Not only that but Wave 2 brings nested records based on the main record selected. For example, hovering over a specific member will enable you to open their list of payments if this has been configured in the view settings by an administrator. The new grid format is more in keeping with Excel, too, with promised ability to add sum, average, and max/min to numeric columns of data – we are definitely looking forward to seeing that one in action!
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And there are many, many more
You can, of course, download the entire 510 pages here. Alternatively, why not get to grips with the best bits of Microsoft’s 2022 Wave 2 release for Dynamics 365 by contacting our team of membership experts at 01483 409409 or by emailing hello@silverbear.co.uk.