Wednesday, August 10, 2016

CRM 2016 Update 1 and SP1 features


Productivity features



Get in-app help tailored just for you (CRM Online)


We’re introducing Learning Path - a new guided user experience that’s tailored just for you and your role. For example, if you’re a salesperson, you’ll see guided help just for sales people. If you’re a Customer Service Rep, you’ll see the appropriate content for your role. Learning Path leads you step-by-step through specific tasks while you work in CRM and provides videos, eBooks, and Help topics in context just when you need them.
In this release, we’re providing in-app guidance for what’s new, common tasks such as lead management in the web and mobile apps, and onboarding an organization.




Collaboration gets better with Office 365 Groups enhancements (CRM Online)


In CRM Online 2015 Update 1, we introduced the integration of Office 365 Groups with CRM. With Office 365 Groups, you can share information related to accounts or opportunities with team members even if they don’t have access to CRM Online.
With this release, we made enhancements to Office 365 Groups in CRM. For example:
  • Prior to this release, you needed to create a new group for each CRM record you wanted to collaborate on. Now, you can set and connect an existing group to different records.
  • Project team members added to a project will be automatically added to that project's group.
  • We let you know when a group is deleted so you can connect the record to another group.




Add email signatures to your web client email


Save time on your email correspondence and add a professional touch by adding an email signature. Use a default signature for everyday replies and new email messages, and then create other signatures for those special cases. You can also assign a default signature to a queue. When you change the From field from a user to a queue, the default signature changes automatically.


Display multi-entity search results as a single list (CRM Online)


Search for records across multiple entities (record types) by using Relevance Search. The results from this search are returned in a single list, sorted by relevance.
You can continue to use multi-entity Quick Find, which is now called Categorized Search, to view the results grouped by entity types, such as accounts, contacts, or leads. To find records of one record type only, use the Quick Find view from the entity list (grid).
Note
Relevance Search is offered as a preview feature for CRM Online customers only. A preview feature is a feature that is not complete, but is made available before it's officially released so customers can get early access and provide feedback. Preview features aren't meant for production use and may have limited or restricted functionality. Preview features must be enabled by a CRM administrator. More information: What are Preview features and how do I enable them?

Service features



Manage project-based sales (CRM Online)


Project service automation capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics CRM provide an end-to-end solution that empowers organizations to deliver project-based engagements on time and within budget. Project service automation capabilities help you:
  • Estimate, quote, and contract work
  • Plan and assign resources
  • Enable team collaboration
  • Capture time, expense, and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing


Note
Project service automation capabilities are provided as an add-on for customers who upgrade to the latest version (CRM Online 2016 Update 1).
Project service automation capabilities include:
  • Project-based contracts. Project contracts relate quotes and orders to project plans, financial estimates, labor pricing, and billing arrangements, like time and materials or fixed price. The contract highlights key metrics, including profitability and feasibility.
  • Project planning. Visual project planning and estimation includes predecessors, automatic task scheduling, and views of sales and cost information for time and expenses. You can use the resulting plan in quotes and project contracts.
  • Resource management. Resource information includes the skills and proficiencies of your workforce. You can view and filter resources based on skills and availability, so you can assign the right people to the right projects. You can also track resource utilization and forecasting metrics.
  • Time and expenses. Team members can use the web or mobile apps to record time and expenses for multiple projects. Managers can easily approve new entries while understanding the financial implications of the newly-approved items.
  • Project billing. Project invoices reflect the terms of the contract and the approved work and expenses. The financial impact of project work, including costs, unbilled revenue, and invoices, is recorded for use in analytics and integration into financial systems.
Both project service automation capabilities and field service capabilities (see below) share a resource pool, with resource schedules appearing in both.
More information:


Manage your field service workforce (CRM Online)


Field service is an end-to-end solution that delivers advanced scheduling, inventory tracking, and asset management for service depots and highly mobile, in-field specialists who need to fulfill work orders and provide preventive maintenance across multiple sites under complex service agreements.


Note
Field service capabilities are provided as an add-on for customers who upgrade to the latest version (CRM Online 2016 Update 1).
Field service capabilities include:
  • Characteristics and proficiency ratings. You can define proficiency and competency levels and set them as requirements for a work order. Proficiency and competency levels are also part of the worker profile, so you can make an appropriate match when scheduling resources.
  • Detached schedule support. Field service capabilities support time allocation outside of a work order. For example, a field tech can schedule time for lunch or supply provisioning without having to associate that time with an empty work order.
  • Out-of-the-box business processes. The CRM incident management business process is closely aligned with the work order process. If a field service work order originates from a case, the originating case is visually part of that workflow, which spans from case creation through work order completion.
  • Mobile enhancements. Drip scheduling enhances and de-clutters the user experience by displaying fewer upcoming work orders. It also improves dispatch control by limiting the number of declined work orders or change requests by field techs.
Both field service capabilities and project service capabilities (see above) share a resource pool, with resource schedules appearing in both.
More information:


Self-service portals for an external non-CRM audience (CRM Online)


This release introduces the first Microsoft-published version of portal capabilities for CRM. Portal capabilities for CRM empower the 84% majority who prefer to find answers on their own through self-service and community options.
Note
Portal capabilities are provided as an add-on for customers who upgrade to the latest version (CRM Online 2016 Update 1).
We’re extending CRM to the web to include:
  • Profile management capabilities
  • Configurable business components
  • Rich web content configuration capabilities
  • Responsive design for desktop, tablet, and mobile
Customers can purchase portal instances as a CRM add-on in the Office 365 admin center. These portal instances can then be configured to work with their CRM Online instances. The provisioning system automatically deploys the portal solution to Azure.
Out-of-the-box portal solutions include:
  • Custom portal. The custom portal is a basic portal that contains flows and pages common to all portals. It includes basic support content as well as custom applications to meet the specific support needs of different organizations, including login/authentication features and contact pages.
  • Customer Self-Service portal. Lets customers access self-service knowledge and support resources, increasing customer satisfaction, reducing call center volumes, and ultimately allowing service agents to focus their efforts on issues of greatest impact.
  • Employee Self-Service portal. Creates an efficient and well-informed workforce by streamlining common tasks and empowering every employee with a definitive source of knowledge. Employee self-service is now available worldwide using CRM and portal capabilities, and is available in all CRM Online markets.
  • Community portal. Enables peer-to-peer interactions between experts in the community, subject matter experts within an organization, and internal and external users. Communities organically grow the catalog of available knowledge from knowledge base articles, forums, and blogs. Participants can provide feedback through rating and comments features. Contributors can also receive alerts on content revisions and workflow updates.
  • Partner portal. Create an environment for interacting with your partners and collaborating on sales opportunities to provide products and services based on your customers' needs.
    Partner relationship management portal capabilities include:
    • Account and contact management
    • Channel opportunity management
    • Partner profiling
    • Opportunity distribution
    • Delegated administration
More information:


Create SLAs for any custom entity and other system entities


In previous releases of CRM, you could only create SLAs for the Case entity (record type). Now you can create SLAs for any custom entity and for any of the following system entities:
  • All activity entities (such as Email, Task, and Appointment) except recurring appointments
  • Account
  • Contact
  • Invoice
  • Opportunity
  • Quote
  • Lead
  • Order


Interactive service hub enhancements


We introduced the interactive service hub in CRM 2016. Interactive service hub dashboards and forms help you prioritize your workloads and solve cases faster. In this release, we’ve enhanced the interactive service hub to support more customer service scenarios.
With this release of the interactive service hub, you can:
  • Apply service level agreements (SLAs) for Case and custom entities. This functionality is the same whether you use the web client or the interactive service hub.
  • Track progress of SLA KPIs with the timer control.
  • Remove redundancies between similar cases by merging them into a single case.
  • Access forms and dashboards easily using keyboard navigation.
    We’ve also included support for accessing the interactive service hub on the Apple Safari 9 browser.


Mobile features



Rich mobile offline experience (CRM Online)


If your CRM system is configured for it, you now have access to a richer offline experience with the CRM mobile apps. You can view, update, and add records when you're disconnected from the Internet, and you don’t have to save changes or additions as drafts first.


Mobile enhancements


In this release, we’re making the following enhancements to CRM for phones and CRM for tablets:
  • Service reps can now search for, view, create, and edit knowledge articles.
  • Sales professionals can now manage quotes, orders, and invoices.
We also made improvements to reduce start-up times whenever your CRM admin makes changes to the system.


Keep up with company news from your mobile device (CRM Online)


Stay on top of all the news related to an account, lead, contact, or opportunity right from your CRM mobile app. The latest and most important news articles from Bing news are organized by time (Today, This Week, Last Week) and contain the headlines, date/time, and source of the news article. Important events are detected and categorized, including management changes, earnings releases, new offerings, cost cutting, growth, legal issues, acquisitions, and partnerships.
You can:
  • Filter news articles by category
  • Tap a news article to open the original at the source website
    Go to Bing to view more news and search


Analytics features


Enhanced Power BI integration

Enhanced Power BI integration lets you discover, analyze, and share data-sourced visualizations with colleagues. Power BI provides information workers and everyday business users with data analysis and visualization capabilities to get better business insights.
Features available in this release include:
  • New Service Content Pack includes several key indicators such as cases created, cases resolved, satisfaction percentage, top agent leaders, and most used and viewed KB articles.
  • Improved Sales Manager Content Pack includes OData (Open Data Protocol) version 4.0 support.
  • The ability to embed Power BI tiles directly into CRM user dashboards. This allows you to launch an interactive report from Power BI tiles directly from a CRM user dashboard, without having to switch to the Power BI service.
Source : From Microsoft
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