As long-time Dynamics 365 users know, Microsoft announces the release of its updates to D365 apps in 2 waves each year. In 2022, the wave 1 release announcement describes features that will be rolling out between April and September 2022.
The 2022 Wave 1 release announcement for Dynamics 365 CRM includes hundreds of new features and capabilities across the Sales, Marketing, and Service apps. You can read all about the full release here, but going over all those updates can be overwhelming to say the least. To make things a bit easier, our team of expert consultants have already combed through the announcement, so you don’t have to. Here, we’ve put together a list of the three key updates that we believe are most impactful to our clients.
1) A New Modern Advanced Find
This new, more intuitive, feature will replace the legacy Advanced Find and includes updates on how users can search for data, create personal views, and organise personal and system views to better suit their needs.
Once enabled from the Power Platform Admin Center, the legacy Advanced Find icon will be removed, allowing users to search for record all in one spot with the Dataverse Search Bar.
Personal views can easily be created using the “Edit Columns” and “Edit Filters” buttons.
Once changes are made to the default view using these buttons, an asterisk will appear to indicate that unsaved changes have been made to a default view. Users can then easily save these changes to a new personal view in the view selector menu, allowing for a much simpler and more streamlined approach for creating new views.
2) Managing Personal and System Views
This new update provides users with much more flexibility for managing the views they see in each data table. It eliminates the previous sectioning off of Personal and System Views while allowing users to hide system views that are irrelevant to them. They can change their default view for data tables as well as adjust the sort order within their own views.
The ability to tailor personal views provides more customization for individual users and reduces the effort required from system admins to create more customized user experiences.
You can read more about the Modern Advanced Find and new Personal and System View Management here.
3) Improvements to Activities
New improvements to the Appointments and Activity Filtering will help users more easily navigate their CRM Activities. The Appointments Description Field will now use a rich text editor, which allows users to include additional formatting and hyperlinked URLs within their appointment descriptions. As well, updated filtering for Activity Types will now be available, streamlining the Activity Types users see to only those that have been added by the application designer. This will allow users to navigate their Activity Types more easily without having to sort through Activity Types that are irrelevant to them.
On top of these Activity improvements, Microsoft has also announced that, coming in June 2022, a Unified View of Activity from D365 Sales, Service, and Marketing will be available within the Contact Timeline. This means that users will be able to view all activities related to a given Contact within the main Contact Timeline. Previously, Marketing Activities could only be viewed though a separate Insight tab.
You can read more about theses Activity improvements here.
While we’ve chosen to highlight these 3 updates from the 2022 Wave 1 D365 CRM release, there are A LOT more included in the announcement. It’s all part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to improving the D365 CRM apps and finding new ways of aligning the platform capabilities to the needs of today’s users. If you’re interested in learning more about how your team can take advantage of the 2022 Wave 2 release updates, or Dynamics 365 CRM in general, get in touch to find out how we can help today.
