Update % progress manually on Project Tasks in Project Operations.
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Today, we’re introducing updates that will help centralize user license management and provide clarity for administrators. Starting April 30th, administrators will have access to license usage reporting that shows seats available and seats assigned. For users that have not yet been assigned a license, they will start to see an in-product notification asking them to contact their administrator to request license assignment. Beginning August 30th, users will require an assigned license to access the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications. We are giving customers time to prepare with tools and training to support any action needed. For users that already have licenses assigned, there will be no disruption, and no action needed from their administrator.
Starting April 30, 2025, we will introduce enhanced license reporting in the Power Platform admin center, offering comprehensive insights into license usage across all security roles. Users who do not meet license requirements will receive proactive notifications directly within the Dynamics 365 application, instructing them to request proper licensing through their administrator. This improvement supports your efforts to maintain precise control and ensures compliance while reducing administrative overhead.
Beginning August 30, 2025, all Dynamics 365 customers will be required to assign user licenses directly through the Microsoft 365 admin center for the following applications:
This shift toward centralized license assignment underscores our commitment to simplifying administrative processes, providing greater visibility and governance, and enhancing the overall licensing experience across the Microsoft Cloud.
To maintain continuous access and avoid disruptions in the future, we recommend organizations proactively review and assign licenses in advance. Users without assigned licenses will no longer have access to these applications and will instead receive prompts to request the appropriate licenses from their administrator.
As we approach this important milestone, we encourage you to:
Taking these steps will help ensure a smooth transition before August 30, 2025, and position your organization for success in managing licenses across Microsoft Cloud solutions.
Now, administrators can better understand and govern licenses with the improved license reporting capabilities available in both the Power Platform admin center as well as in Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS). We have also introduced in-product reporting to provide further control.
Within Power Platform admin center (PPAC), administrators will have access to comprehensive license reporting for required seats. This report also reflects the number of assigned seats from the Microsoft 365 admin center and provides recommended actions to help remediate assignment gaps.
Similarly, in LCS we will be directly integrating the same reporting information from PPAC as part of our admin unification efforts. This ensures that administrators from both the customer and their system implementation partner will have access to the same reporting details and actions as administrators in PPAC.
User Security Governance is also now in Public Preview with Dynamics 365 version 10.0.43, providing administrators with even greater visibility and control. General availability for these features is targeted for July 2025 with version 10.0.44. Customers can opt into these features through Feature Management and test them in sandbox environments ahead of broad deployment.
Learn More
Ready to get started with a centralized license assignment? Learn how to assign Dynamics 365 licenses through the Microsoft 365 admin center or explore the recent FastTrack Tech Talk | User Security Governance Overview.
Microsoft remains dedicated to empowering your organization with the tools and resources needed to thrive in today’s complex business environment. These license management improvements are just one more way we’re working to simplify your experience and help you focus on what matters most—delivering value to your customers and driving operational excellence.
The post Simplifying License Management for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations: Improved User License Validation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-evolving customer service landscape, the integration of AI, such as Copilot and autonomous agents, is transforming how businesses interact with their customers. However, this advancement brings about the need for clear and precise terminology to avoid confusion.
To ensure our AI experiences align with Microsoft’s AI-first vision, we will differentiate our brand accordingly. This approach provides consistent yet distinct user experience and introduces Copilot-related features with appropriate branding and user onboarding.
As a step toward creating an autonomous contact center, we are renaming Customer Service workspace and Contact Center workspace to Copilot Service workspace. Additionally, we are renaming Customer Service admin center and Contact Center admin center to Copilot Service admin center.
Currently, the term “agent” refers to both AI bots and human representatives within Dynamics 365 Customer Service products. This leads to confusion and possible friction. Additionally, to align with Microsoft’s technological direction and ensure clarity, it is crucial that our terminology is helpful and consistent.
Moving forward, “AI agent” will exclusively refer to autonomous agents. “Customer service representative” will be adopted for the human consultants across Copilot Service admin center and Copilot Service workspace, marketing materials, release notes, videos, documentation, and customer interactions. Where “customer service representative” is too lengthy, we will shorten this term to “service representative” or simply “representative.” Specific features that have used “agent” have also been renamed to either become more generic or to a version of this change (e.g., Agent Scripts to Scripts, and the Agent Experience Profiles to Experience Profiles) but are still located in the same areas.
We adopted the term “customer service representative” as a replacement for “agent” in our products. This term broadly applies to various roles within customer service, support, and success, making it the most suitable alternative. While “agent” remains prevalent in the industry, we want to be at the forefront of our mission towards the new age of AI agents. The role of customer service involves direct interaction with customers and includes titles like agent, representative, and technician.
We will be rolling these changes out in the next few weeks by April 2025 Wave. Through implementing consistent use of these updated terms across all platforms and materials, we aim to eliminate confusion, enhance clarity, and align with industry standards, ultimately improving our customer service interactions and relationships.
If your app name is already customized, it will not be affected. If you’d like to customize your app name, description, or icon, use app designer.
The product names for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center will remain the same.
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Customer expectations continue to grow, with rising demand for seamless, connected, and personalized experiences across sales, marketing, and service. However, meeting these demands can be a complex and expensive undertaking, and legacy applications accessing siloed data cannot keep up. This is why we are seeing many organizations move from point solutions and fragmented application stacks. To further improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, organizations are also looking for ways to harness the transformative potential of generative AI.
Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader
To help organizations accomplish these goals and deliver better business outcomes, Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings together a complete customer relationship management (CRM) platform driven by our latest advancements in generative AI. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management, Q1 2025.
The industry and our customers recognize that we’re developing an integrated and autonomous CRM platform that reduces the complexity of meeting customer expectations and uses groundbreaking generative AI to transform sales and service experiences—for customers and employees alike.
Dynamics 365 CRM applications (consisting of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) are underpinned by a common data layer in Microsoft Dataverse, which reduces the integration burden and serves as the foundation for Microsoft’s generative AI leadership. Data from across sales, marketing, and service engagements fuels Microsoft Copilot and AI agents, allowing them to deliver more personalized and effective self-service experiences and automate tasks to assist human reps.
We’re helping organizations improve customer experience and support reps to be more productive by infusing generative AI in the places where it will have the greatest impact in sales, marketing, and service journeys.
Copilot is fully integrated into Dynamics 365, allowing marketers to target the right prospects, empowering sellers to close more deals, offering customers engaging self-service interactions, and supporting service reps to accelerate issue resolution.
As part of our continuing investment in helping our customers achieve more with AI, we’ve recently augmented Copilot with AI agents. Copilot acts as the interface for AI, working as a personal AI assistant, with agents functioning like apps, automating common tasks or autonomously completing entire business processes.
Microsoft has announced 10 agents across the Dynamics 365 portfolio of business applications, including agents for sales qualification, deep research in sales, intent determination, knowledge management, and case management. These agents are designed to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and enhance decision-making by providing intelligent insights and recommendations. It’s also fast and easy for organizations to build their own agents using the generative AI and low-code tools in Microsoft Copilot Studio. With these tools, businesses can create custom agents tailored to their specific needs, allowing them to automate unique processes and improve overall efficiency.
Importantly, the AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 are developed with a steadfast commitment to trustworthy AI, guided by our responsible AI principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
In addition, generative AI features in Dynamics 365 utilize Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which offers the highest levels of data privacy and security. By developing AI that is responsible and secure by design, we’re furthering our mission to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.
One of the organizations achieving more with Dynamics 365 is First West Credit Union. As one of Canada’s largest credit unions, it aims to forge authentic connections with its members, but this mission was hampered by a patchwork of legacy CRM platform deployments across different parts of the business.
With Dynamics 365, First West Credit Union now has a single platform to help it engage members more effectively while meeting federal regulatory requirements for complaints management. Because Dynamics 365 functionality mapped so closely to the needs of users and the business, First West Credit Union saw 100% adoption within seven weeks of launching the system. What’s more, member complaints are now being resolved well within the federally required timeline, with 87% resolved in 14 days or less, compared to 49% before the implementation.
“One of the key value points of the Dynamics 365 platform is that, need for need, the capabilities are there. We were able to map the functionality to the business needs very well, right out of the box. That really helped us fast-track this initiative.”
Darrell Jaggers, CIO and Chief Transformation Officer, First West Credit Union
Another organization that emphasizes building strong customer relationships is Lexmark, a global leader in printing and imaging products, software, solutions, and services. However, a reliance on disparate legacy solutions meant tracking customer journeys was a complex and inefficient process.
By replacing Salesforce and Siebel solutions with Dynamics 365, Lexmark now has a unified CRM platform for delivering outstanding customer service and operational efficiency. By working more efficiently in Dynamics 365, Lexmark has increased order accuracy by 43% and boosted contact center productivity by 23%.
“We’ve been on the journey with Microsoft after moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales. We’re excited to be one of the first customers to use Sales Qualification Agent and look forward to the ability to scale our sales team with agents and provide an exceptional experience to our customers.”
Kyle Farmer, Vice President, Global Sales and Strategy, Lexmark
We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ and we will continue to invest in creating a state-of-the-art-CRM platform, allowing our customers to constantly enhance experiences for their own customers and empower their employees to achieve more.
Learn more about:
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about what you could achieve with Dynamics 365.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.
The post Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management, Q1 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introducing two, first-of-their-kind reasoning agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The post Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
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