Category: Teams

A running list of my favorite announcements/features from Ignite 2019

Project Cortex (Skynet?)

Project Cortex is the newest AI-powered service released by Microsoft. At a high level, it creates a knowledge network for your organization and can deliver relevant knowledge to people though topic cards and pages in the apps that they are already using every day.

Key Links:

Teams

Pop out windows for chat and meetings. A long awaited feature is being rolled out some time in early 2020.

Private Channels. Maybe the most requested feature in Teams. These are available NOW!

Live Captions AND Video Backgrounds

Power Apps

New name (notice the space) which now fits all of the other Power Platform application names.

Enhanced Formula Bar. Is any explanation needed here? The previous version constantly was in the way of your app making screen and the autocomplete list was hard to see and navigate.

Environment Variables. Use these when apps or Flows need different configuration across different environments. They can act as input parameters to reference within solution components.

Embed Power App in Teams as a Top Level App. I love this feature, especially if you have an organization wide Power App that needs to be accessed quickly.

Power Apps Monitor. See what users are clicking and be able to pinpoint connection failures or why your performance is dragging.

Power Automate

Microsoft Flow is no longer! Welcome in Power Automate and give it a round of applause for a list of brand new features such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

Robotic Process Automation – UI Flows. Available now in Public Preview, create a flow that automates a process in a point-and-click experience.

Virtual Agents. Azure Cognitive Services and Bot Framework fully integrated and just a few clicks away.

Key Features of the New Dynamics Integration with Teams

Chatbot

Talk to the Dynamics 365 Bot to search, update and post to records.

The bot will prompt you with some example questions, and from there you can imagine this comes in handy when you want information quickly without having to go to Dynamics.

Add record as a tab

Add records to a Teams channel to get easy access to any record. Such as the Account, Contact, Opportunity or Project.

This is great for managing Projects. Put the Project record right in the Teams channel you are using to collaborate with your other project team members and you can quickly pull up the project estimates, as well as key information you are using to keep track of it in Dynamics.

Conversations

Get and keep conversations going about the record you have created a tab for.

View your dashboards

Gain quick insights into your data with the dashboards embedded right into Teams. Whether they are Dynamics Dashboards, or PowerBI dashboards that you have embedded into D365, get the quick insights you may need at your fingertips.

 

In summary, this new Teams integration with Dynamics will allow your users to perform most of their work in Teams. They won’t necessarily have to go to Dynamics 365 every time they need to perform an action on a record or get insights on a report/dashboard.