Dynamics CRM 2016 Fall Preview Features

The 2016 fall preview will be a major release for Online and on premise customers which will emphasis on providing end-to-end Customer Engagement solutions from Microsoft Dynamics. This blog article will put light on capabilities of the Dynamics 2016 release.

Marketing

SMS Marketing
SMS Marketing is focused on both – Inbound and Outbound SMS marketing in selected markets.

1. Inbound SMS campaigns can be configured with SMS keywords to receive opt-ins from target marketing lists.
2. Maintain opted-in and opted-users in different lists
3. Outbound SMS campaigns to be used to actually send out marketing SMS messages to opted-in marketing lists.
4. Tracking performance of campaigns.

 
Email Marketing

1. Email editor to be enhanced with the ability to see generated HTML.
2. Improved editing experience.

 

Sales

CRM For Outlook App

1. Key sales capabilities are delivered within Outlook.
2. Users can create data in the Outlook application itself like Contacts, Opportunities etc. based on the Email in their Inbox.
3. The CRM For Outlook App. will expand support to include Firefox, Safari for Mac & Outlook for Mac.

 
Excel Integration

1. Leveraging the capabilities of Excel Online from right within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
2. Data can be saved back to CRM while maintaining work context.

 
Information Discovery

1. Trending documents from Office Delve will now be available within CRM.

 
OneDrive For Business

1. OneDrive for Business has been added to give consolidated view of documents across SharePoint, OneDrive For Business and Office 365 groups within the context of a CRM record.

 
Document Generation

1. Documents can be built out of CRM data. Data can be extracted by a single click by using pre-generated Word and Excel templates.
2. Authors should be able to manage the predefined templates and use wizard-like flow to design custom templates in Word or Excel.
3. Documents generated from CRM will open as a downloaded document. Exception here is, for CRM Online, Excel documents will open in Excel Online.

 
Cortana Integration

1. Sales activities, accounts and Opportunities now embedded into Cortana.
2. This will be a preview feature in Dynamics CRM Online 2016 customers.

 
Customer Service

1. Companies these days look to engagement and experiences that proves to be a differentiating factor for competition.

 
Voice of the customer

1. A new designer to design questionnaires and send the same to customer to get feedback.
2. Customers can take survey on a computer, tablet or a phone.
3. Once a customer completes a survey, Dynamics CRM triggers follow-up actions.
4. Survey records are stored in customer records in CRM so that salespeople can use the same during a service case.

 
Interactive Service Hub

1. The new online user experience (UX) design provides intuitive end user experience for customer service roles.

 
Multi-Stream Dashboard

1. These are dashboards targeted at Tier One agents. Users can view and act on their data from My Activities, My Cases etc.
2. Interactive charts are available to give a visuals of key metrics related to work.

 
Single Stream Dashboard

1. These dashboards are meant for Tier Two agents. This will consist of a single data stream on the left hand side of the view to show an aggregated view of the workload.
2. Additionally, tiles on the right hand side of the dashboard are available to show data in numbers.

 
Modern and Intuitive Design

1. Data will be found with reduced clicks and navigation.
2. The guided business process flow is further enhance to show process stage information as a fly out.
3. The timeline provides rich time and record based filtering capabilities.
4. Quick Actions on search results.

 
External Party Access

1. A foundation that allows external parties such as Employees, Customers and Partners to access CRM data with proper permissions.

 
Knowledge Management

1. Enables organization to create a single source of knowledge.
2. The new editor provides team to keep knowledge articles approved and updated.

 
Unified Service Desk

1. Provides service organizations the unique ability to deliver a single agent desktop with access to back-end systems.
2. This release improves the install experience by providing upgrades though Windows Updates.

 
Service Intelligence

1. A PowerBI dashboard provides Customer Service Managers (CSMs) with an aggregate view of customer service performance.

 

Social

Social Listening & Social Analytics

1. You will now also be able to search board/forums and RSS feeds.
2. In addition to existing sentiment and localization languages, Social Listening will be adding 14 more languages.

 
Intelligent Social

1. Role-based views to help sales people find leads Potential to automatically detect potential leads vs cases.

 
Group Collaborations & Custom Roles

1. Introduction of processes and workflows centered around groups.

 
Social CRM

1. Create CRM actions like cases and opportunities from social posts. These records can be created either from Post View or Social Center.

 
Social Center

1. Ability to publish tweets and Facebook posts from within the Social Center.
2. Author lookup provides details about the post publisher.

 

Mobile

Mobile Offline Support

1. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will get full offline experience with mobile.
2. Ability to create, change and delete records while being offline. This will be automatically synchronized once the device goes back online.

 
Document Management

1. Ability to view documents in the context of CRM records within the mobile apps.

 
App-to-app Deep Linking

1. Let’s other mobile apps to directly navigate to CRM records using the link.

 
Modern Mobile Friendly Experience

1. Addition of variety of modern UI controls. Business Analysts have the ability to bind a data field to a new control. For instance, slider and calendar controls among set of 15 controls.

 
Task Based Experiences

1. Allows users to focus on the Tasks than Data from multiple entities brought together in a single user experience.
2. This will be a preview feature in phones and tablets.

 
Mobile Client form preview

1. ‘Configure Once, Deploy everywhere’ paradigm makes it easy for business analysts to visualize configuration changes.

 
Web Resources and IFRAME

1. In the previous release, support for IFRAME and Web Resources was introduced in CRM for tablets and phones as preview feature. This release will provide support for Windows tablets (Windows 10) as well.

 
Mobile Management

1. Customers will be able to secure the CRM data in BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenario with Mobile Application Management (MAM). This will separate personal and corporate on their devices.
2. Policy managed CRM mobile apps can support policies like:
   1. PIN enforcement
   2. Prevent data leakage on the device.
   3. Enforce encryption of app data at rest.
   4. App-level selective swipe.

 

Online Visibility & Control

Data Encryption for CRM Online (server)

1. Ability to encrypt full customer database by using SQL Transport Data Encryption (TDE) to perform real-time I/O encryption and decryption of data.

 
Data Performance Dashboard

1. Admin driven optimization within Dynamics CRM will enable customers to understand the performance over time of components with long running queries.

 
New Datacenters

1. New Datacenters to be introduced in Canada and India.

 
Bulk Data Loader for CRM Online

1. A new cloud service to enable bulk data import/export in CRM Online.
2. This tool will allow uploading large files to cloud staging tables and then push data to CRM.

 
Compliance and data protection

1. CRM Trust Center is a single location to access all information regarding Microsoft’s approach to security and compliance.
2. Link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-trust-center.aspx

 
Guided User Experience

1. In-product context based learning introduced that will speed up CRM Online training.
2. This user experience will be role specific showing only what’s necessary based on a user’s role.

 

Platform

Web API

1. New and robust API for modern day third party integrations. Protocols for broadly adopted industry standards like (HTTP and REST), security (OAuth 2), format (JSON).

 
Ecosystem enablement

1. Allow for sub-components of a Solution Package, patching support, lifecycle improvements.

 
Server-Side Synchronization

1. This release will also support hybrid scenario for synchronization between CRM Online and Exchange on-premise.

 
Next Generation Search

1. Single list of search results across entities sorted according to relevance. This capability is off by default.

 
Azure Machine Learning

1. This release will introduce ML scenario based integration with Azure ML for product cross-sell recommendations and suggested knowledge articles.

 

Compatibility

1. Microsoft will keep updating their compatibility list to keep up with latest technology scenarios
2. Link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2669061

 

References

Here’s the link where you can download the Fall 2016 Preview Guide for Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/5/D/D5D38A09-6A5C-4DC0-8649-3A4F39A8F8F3/Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM_2016_Release_Preview_Guide.pdf

There’s a lot of stuff coming up in the Fall 2016 release. Watch out this space for more updates once the 2016 Fall Preview CRM Online trial is available!