Earlier this year, Microsoft published their 2022 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2022 and September 2022. Although it's the first release wave of the year, it offers hundreds of the newest features and enhancements across applications like Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, and more.
While the features included in these updates can help power your digital transformation on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, they can also impact your data in unintended ways, whether through new data being captured and stored, changes to data that already exists, or data getting removed by way of legacy deprecations.
To help you better understand the impact of the new features, we’ve reviewed all of the release wave updates (you can save yourself a ~600 page read!) and highlighted the ones that are more likely to impact your data. We also recently hosted a webinar on this topic, which you can watch on-demand.
In this post, we’ll focus on Industry Cloud features. You can also read up on how your Marketing & Sales and Customer Service could be affected.
Cloud for industry
Cloud for Healthcare
The short story: By using the same foundation for model-driven apps made available in the MSFT Cloud Solution Center, the healthcare data model will begin supporting Payor business processes and clinical trials. Equipped with tools to optimize data ingestion, the data model matches up with HL7 FHIR standards to provision data fluidity with other services.
Our take: HL7 FHIR provider, Payor data and clinical trials data model are being added to the schema. If customers have used custom data structures previously and will migrate manually to leverage the new OOB data structures, the ability to compare historical data from the custom tables will be critical.
Financial Services
The short story: Microsoft introduces extensions to Common Data Model that have been tailored to insurance situations. Such scenarios showcase changes capable of accelerating time to value for financial solutions by validating that the out of box data is consistent and pertinent to insurance processes.
Our take: Core banking connectors to bring data into Dataverse will present risks of overwriting data from end users and other integrations as well as present the need to compare this data over time to validate the accuracy of the new integration. New data models will be introduced for General Insurance and Wealth Management, so if customers choose to migrate from custom entities/fields to take advantage of the new feature, they will need to validate the data migration effort and compare against snapshots.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
The short story: Sustainability cloud is creating a completely new category that goes beyond just data capture. It allows customers to aggregate data in a way that's actionable by connecting to real-time data sources while accelerating data integration to provide accurate carbon accounting and measure performance metrics to take more effective action.
Our take: With new data getting introduced from external sources like business solutions, energy providers, cloud providers, travel tools, trading partners, systems telemetry, and Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with new dynamic calculation algorithms, existing data could be at risk of being altered. There is no detail in the documentation around protection of existing data (calculations), so backup and recovery will be key.
Deploy new features with confidence using Own
As a leading SaaS data protection company, Own helps customers minimize business disruption when enabling new enhancements by proactively protecting Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform data.
With Own, run daily, scheduled backups of all of your data, and attachments with the click of a button to back up any or all data at any time instantly. If you suspect data did get changed inadvertently, or you made an error, we make it easy to pinpoint additions, deletions, or changes. Then, should you need to restore data, you can go back in time to restore the exact data you need without bringing down production during a full database restore.
Get started with a custom demo to learn more about how Own can protect your mission-critical data during a migration or implementation.
