Service Economy, IoT in Focus as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Spring 2016 Wave Hits General Availability

Microsoft has officially made the Dynamics CRM Spring 2016 Wave generally available today. With a focus on the "service economy", Microsoft unveiled plans for Connected Field Service, a new preview offering that "provides out-of-the-box IoT to field service capabilities", as well as an online event in June where they will explore the range of features in the spring wave.

With the Spring 2016 Wave Microsoft is introducing capabilities it has onboarded from recent acquisitions, including field service (via FieldOne) and a range of portals (via Adxstudio), as well as project service.

"Portal solutions empower customers, employees and partners to get the resources and information they need when they need it, streamlining simple tasks and making it easier to get the right help for more difficult problems," wrote Param Kahlon of Microsoft in a new blog post announcing the general availability.

Microsoft is introducing four preconfigured portal solutions - Customer Portal, Community Portal, Employee Portal, and Partner Portal.

And Microsoft is introducing Learning Paths for CRM, a guided navigation model for "context-sensitive interactive and scenario-based tasks and sidebars that are personalized to the user". Learning paths will be used to introduce users to features in a range of scenarios, from role-based for new users and for trials.

Connected Field Service will be the first Dynamics CRM offering that uses Azure IoT Suite and Azure Machine Learning to enable both monitoring of device data and the triggering of appropriate service or maintenance responses based on service level agreements and factors like proximity of service agents. Dynamics CRM general manager Jujhar ...