Microsoft readies Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps with added analytics, new partnerships

Microsoft has started preparing its Dynamics CRM users for a broad range of advances as the company re-works the product for the future as part of the Dynamics 365 suite.

Microsoft has promised both enterprise and SMB offerings for customer experience functions like sales and marketing, but the focus at CRMUG Summit 2016 was squarely on the Dynamics 365 Enterprise apps that will evolve directly from CRM 2016 and CRM Online: sales, service, marketing, project service automation, and field service.

The upcoming release, where CRM Online will be rebranded as Dynamics 365, starts rolling out on November 1, but only a subset of the new capabilities shown by the CRM/Dynamics 365 team will be immediately available with that update. The range of updates promised will include new and improved features and apps related to intelligence, productivity, customer engagement, and more.

Purpose-built applications

A new collection of standalone applications related to traditional Dynamics CRM are coming, and while they are designed to work with Dynamics 365 sales, marketing, and service apps, they arenot part of a monolithic codebase.

Customer Insights and Relationship Insights apps will be provided by Microsoft as secondary applications that rely on data and relationships from the CRM system (not necessarily Dynamics) and other sources to give workers a more complete picture of their customer or prospect. These apps will use other Microsoft technology like Power BI and Cortana Intelligence Suite technology.

"Data in CRM is not the whole picture," said Microsoft corporate vice president and Dynamics CRM leader Jujhar Singh at the CRMUG Summit general session. "...