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In the second quarter, the Dynamics CRM Online spring update will bring technologies from two of Microsoft’s corporate acquisitions last year, FieldOne and Adxstudio, into the fold.
“This release is focused on the integration of two of our recent acquisitions, (FieldOne and Adxstudio,) providing our customers with market leading capabilities for field service and portal solutions for community engagement,” wrote Jujhar Singh, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in a blog post today.
Microsoft snapped up FieldOne, a cloud-based field service customer relationship management application last summer. Adxstudio, a Web portal and application life cycle management specialist, became a Microsoft property in September.
By incorporating FieldOne and Adxstudio into Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is expanding its reach into a wider variety of business processes and workflows.
“With the new capabilities we’re introducing in our Spring wave to support field and project service, organizations will have the ability to schedule, manage and deliver onsite service, whether it be their field technician who is supporting multiple customers on a single day, or complex, multi-day projects,” Singh wrote.
“Through our service delivery foundation, we bring project service and field service together within the core CRM solution to help companies manage resources across all sources of demand,” he wrote. “No other vendor in the market is doing this and these new capabilities make Dynamics CRM uniquely positioned to support the breadth of self, assisted and on-site service.”
After the update, Dynamics CRM will help users navigate the cloud application platform more intuitively and complete tasks with the help of personalized guided tasks and support. “These new capabilities are role-based and contextual, making onboarding new application users quick and easy, helping to drive business user productivity,” Singh wrote.
Microsoft is also baking more intelligent services into Dynamics CRM Online “with the introduction of two new machine learning scenarios for Microsoft Social Engagement—adaptive learning and automated triage,” Singh revealed. “Adaptive learning, powered by Azure Machine Learning, enables users to customize sentiment scoring models and the system will learn from it to reach higher sentiment precision.”
In addition, Dynamics CRM Online will soon be able to mine social media for sales or customer service opportunities. “With automated triage, Microsoft Social Engagement will automatically detect intention in social posts and, using machine learning, route them as cases or leads into CRM—boosting sales performance and organizational efficiency,” added Singh.
Finally, Microsoft has published a new roadmap, offering customers visibility into how the software will evolve in the future.
“I am also pleased to announce the launch of a new CRM Roadmap site powered by Dynamics CRM Online 2016 and our new portal capabilities,” Singh said. This publically accessible site will enable a real time view into our available and planned product capabilities.”
For example, the site shows that a Power BI Service Manager content pack, mobile company news timelines and social CRM automation rules, among other enhancements and functionality, are “in development.”