Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Now Generally Available!

Last month we unveiled and provided a first look at Dynamics 365, showing off the capabilities our customers can expect from our latest generation of intelligent business applications. Today, we are excited to announce that Dynamics 365 is generally available.

The first thing users will see with Dynamics 365 is that we are bringing our business applications closer together in how they look, feel and integrate with each other. To better enable end-to-end business processes, we have unified the navigation and core user experience across each of the Dynamics 365 applications. It remains clean, beautiful, and familiar and it gives you the ability to seamlessly move from one application to another without switching windows.

And when a user logs into Dynamics 365, the home-screen will show you all the Business Apps and information relevant to you or your role. With one click, users can connect to Microsoft AppSource, quickly and easily locating the most relevant capabilities from hundreds of precisely curated additional business apps enabled by our partners.

Simple, consistent navigation is only the beginning. Dynamics 365 delivers significant new capabilities across all application areas, moving our proven industry leading in-market solutions to the next level:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales adds new social selling capabilities enabling people to share knowledge and participate in social conversations, find and connect with new companies and people to generate new leads. In addition, gamification is moving from preview to global general availability. It will expand beyond sales scenarios to help teams across the entire organization collaborate and compete in fun, engaging contests. With highly visible contest results, users are motivated to perform their best for themselves and their teams, leading to increased performance, productivity, and adoption.
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, helps agents use relevance search to quickly find related content and use faceting to filter to the right record. Agents are now able to edit records directly in a grid while respecting the business rules for the entity.
• Dynamics 365 for Field Service, helps organizations improve resource productivity by enabling service organizations to fit in more appointments each day by automatically optimizing technician schedules to minimize driving distance between appointments. Connectivity with IoT is now seamlessly integrated at the platform level enabling connected device signals received to initiate many business processes, such as automatically dispatching a technician for preventative maintenance, as well as the ability to send back commands directly from within the application, for example resetting a sensor.
• Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation, enables unified resource scheduling and service billing experiences, allowing organizations to leverage scarce resources and skillsets not only across field and project-based services, but any source of resource demand.
• Dynamics 365 for Operations, the evolution of Dynamics AX on Azure, is our complete business management solution with industry capabilities around Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing, Public Sector and Service industries, across the spectrum of backend operations into Financials for upper mid-market and larger customers. With this update, Dynamics 365 for Operations will add country specific versions of the app for 18 new markets.  Also, as announced last month, we will provide a Cloud Connected on-premises deployment option (available in first half of 2017), with all the inherent benefits of the cloud. The Fall update adds a Vendor Collaboration portal to streamline key processes including Invoicing, a reimagined approach to Cost Accounting, enhanced deployment options for Retail store environments, out of the box support for US Payroll, including Affordable Care Act Reporting, and myriad additional functional enhancements across the product.
• Dynamics 365 for Financials, our comprehensive business management solution for small- to midsize- businesses (SMBs), that has generated tremendous excitement through its public preview program as Project “Madeira” is now also generally available, delivering everything SMBs that have outgrown their basic accounting software require, powered by the Microsoft cloud.

The general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an important milestone. We are incredibly excited to get it into the hands of our partners and customers to enable them to better engage with their customers, empower their employees, optimize their operations and transform their products, services and business. We can’t wait to see how these applications empower you to achieve more. Please let us hear about your success.