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 Sales and Marketing features. Over the next few weeks, we'll share posts on how your Customer Service, Industry Cloud, and Power Platform data could be affected.
Marketing features
Collaborative apps
The short story: You can now trigger journeys based on data changes to engage your customers without writing code. A feature like this might come in handy when creating "support tickets" or "new orders placed."
Our take: Custom event triggers and journeys can easily be configured incorrectly. They can also create cascading data corruption issues if not tested fully. Given what we know, this scenario presents a greater need for an ability to restore data subsets as opposed to an entire environment database.
Sales features
Predictive scoring for leads/opportunities
The short story: Predictive scoring, a key feature driving digital selling, will allow you to view up to 1,500 leads and opportunities per environment per month. Here, AI is used to remove manual efforts and improve data quality by helping sellers prioritize their worklist, provide real-time analysis during calls, automate action notifications, and programmatically generate meeting summaries.
Our take: With the enhancements of predictive scoring for leads and opportunities, customers who have previously had to custom design their systems to get this sort of data will be in a position that will require them to retrofit their designs to use the new data points. Data migrations and deprecations are commonly areas where a comprehensive backup and restore capability is beneficial.
Forecasting pipeline intelligence
The short story: By filtering the right attributes, you're able to forecast opportunities and monitor data to measure impacts on predictive scoring models. The ability to compare these models over time allows us to train the AI to forecast intelligently.
Our take: As AI models are emerging and maturing in the product, the topic of data corruptions to the model outputs has not yet been addressed. If key attributes receive a bulk update, the models could intuitively predict false positives. Ensuring an ability to restore data corruptions can help downstream AI be more accurate.
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.
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