Microsoft pushes their “unmatched platform for digital transformation” with Spring 2018 Business Applications release

Microsoft today announced the spring 2018 release for Microsoft Business Applications, and also detailed the new tools coming to the small and mid-sized businesses who use Microsoft Dynamics 365. The company says the release should unleash “a wave of innovation across the entire product line” with hopes of helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation.

As the first part of today’s news, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The company says this marketing automation application is perfect for companies that need basic email marking to help turn prospects into relationships. Also announced is Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales Professional, which is a streamlined version of Microsoft’s sales application complete with core Sales Force automation capabilities.

Since Microsoft has invested in AI over the past few years, the company also said today it has worked intelligence into Dynamics 365. With the Spring 2018 release customers can expect new AI-inspired features such as “relationship assistant” which helps sellers see alerts and reminders to move relationships forward. Other notable Intelligence related announcements can be seen below.

• We are also announcing Microsoft Power BI Insights apps, delivering out-of-the-box insights tailored to specific business scenarios – across marketing, sales, service, operations, finance and talent.
• Power BI for Sales Insights and Power BI for Service Insights will be available in preview this spring. Power BI for Sales Insights will include an embedded experience for Dynamics 365 for Sales, which allows customers to take advantage of: Relationship analytics – offering a single relationship health score, calculated from large amounts of data.

Wrapping up the day’s news is the Spring 2018 update for the Microsoft Business Application platform. The spring release will bring a significant update to the Common Data Service for Apps, as well as a new Common Data Service for Analytics capability in Power BI. You can learn more about the technicalities of these updates by checking here and here, or reading the excerpts below.

• Common Data Service for Apps that ships with PowerApps and will enable a broad set of capabilities for modeling sophisticated business solutions. Combining these new capabilities with PowerApps existing high productivity point-and-click app development approach unlocks new potential for customers to customize existing apps across Dynamics 365 and Office 365, and quickly build new ones.
• Common Data Service for Analytics will help reduce complexity with the addition of an extensible business application schema built on the common data model. Organizations will be able to integrate data from multiple sources and empower users with access to business analytics across all data relevant to them.

Today’s news was announced at the Microsoft Business Forward event in Amsterdam. You can see these new capabilities in action now by tuning into the live stream or visiting the virtual event site. A summary of all these features is also available here in PDF format, and Microsoft is encouraging interested customers to visit the Business Applications virtual spring launch event on March 28.