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At a digital event for commercial customers and partners, we shared an update on how we’re empowering organizations to advance in the new era of work with Microsoft Copilot, Windows, and two new Surface devices that will start to become available in April.
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Since we first introduced Copilot to our earliest customers, we’ve been closely studying how people are using AI at work—what’s going well, where there are challenges, and what early behaviors can teach us about adopting and rolling out AI broadly. And we want to share what we’re learning with leaders who are looking to drive AI adoption with their own people.
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End of support for Project Service Automation (PSA 3.x)
In April 2022, November 2022 and April 2023 release waves we announced the availability of the first, second and third and final phase of upgrade experiences from Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation to Dynamics 365 Project Operations. With the third and final phase of upgrade experiences, it is now possible to upgrade projects of any size to Project Operations. Today, we are announcing the deprecation of Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation or PSA 3.x.
As of March 31st 2025, Microsoft will no longer be supporting the PSA application. Beyond this date, there will not be any feature enhancements, updates, bug fixes or other updates to this application. Any support ticket logged on the PSA application will be closed with instructions to upgrade to Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
We strongly encourage all customers of PSA application to start planning your upgrade process as soon as possible so you can take advantage of many new Project Operations features such as:
Integration with Project for the Web with many new advanced scheduling features
Project Operations was first released in October 2020 as a comprehensive product to manage Projects from inception to close by bringing together the strengths of Dataverse, F&O and Project for the web assets. Want to learn more about Project Operations? Check this link and navigate to our detailed documentation!
Want to try Project Operations? Click here and sign up for a 30 days trial!
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Harness the power of streamlined integration with third-party tax solutions through the universal tax rate API, now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management and project management and accounting functionality of Project Operations. This advancement eases the complexities of managing multiple and frequently changed tax rates and rules across diverse tax jurisdictions for businesses worldwide.
Navigating the Challenges of Tax Calculation
The tax calculation functionality of Dynamics 365 offers highly flexible and powerful tax determination and calculation capabilities right out of the box. It allows customers to input and manage tax rates and rules to cover complex tax scenarios across Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications. In some countries, tax rates and rules are inherently intricate, demanding constant vigilance and updates to comply with constant changes by local tax authorities across multiple jurisdictions. This complexity escalates for businesses operating internationally, necessitating the maintenance of accurate tax rates and rules for each location. Traditionally, this process has had a high potential for errors, requiring extensive manual data management and exposing businesses to risks of non-compliance, penalties, and reputational harm.
Recognizing these challenges, many businesses opt for third-party tax solutions to automate and simplify their tax calculation processes. However, integrating these solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications could be a complex endeavor, burdened by the need for deep understanding of the ERP systems data models and business logic, along with ongoing maintenance to ensure alignment with release updates.
Empowering Businesses with the Universal Tax Rate API
In response to these challenges, we are releasing the universal tax rate API as a standardized solution facilitating communication between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications, and third-party tax solution providers. This API offers a consistent, reliable interface for data exchange, eliminating the need for extensive customization and simplifying the integration process.
Benefits of the Universal Tax Rate API
The universal tax rate API drives simplification and efficiency for users of Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications. By offering integration with third-party tax solutions, this innovative API dispels the complexities traditionally associated with managing tax rates and rules, enabling businesses to focus on growth and scalability. Harnessing the universal tax rate API enhances compliance and operational efficiency, through delivering:
Simplified Integration: Connect with supported third-party tax solution providers, leveraging their expertise without the need for expensive customizations.
Standardized Communication: Utilize a predefined set of APIs for various tax operations, including address validation, tax calculation, and transaction posting, all employing the JSON format for efficient data exchange.
Enhanced Compliance and Efficiency: Keep your tax calculations accurate and up to date, minimizing risks of non-compliance and improving operational efficiency.
Comprehensive Dynamics 365 coverage: Take advantage of the wide coverage of tax transactions within Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications, as well as within other Dynamics 365 applications that can be available through the universal tax rate API later.
Utilizing the Universal Tax Rate API
The process of employing the API is straightforward. Upon transaction creation or update, the system identifies taxable transactions configured for external tax calculation. It then prepares and sends a data payload to the chosen tax solution provider via the API. The provider calculates the tax and returns the results, which are then validated and recorded in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications for audit and reporting.
Get started today
To begin leveraging this powerful feature, select a compatible third-party tax solution provider that aligns with your business needs from the list on Microsoft Learn. Follow the detailed guide provided in the Connect to an external tax solution provider via the Universal Tax Rate API learning path on Microsoft Learn, ensuring a smooth setup and efficient use of the universal tax rate API in your organization.
Embrace the universal tax rate API to transform your tax calculation process, focusing on compliance, efficiency, and scalability within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications.
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Continuing our vision for Microsoft Copilot to bring the power of generative AI to everyone across work and life, we’re expanding availability and purchase options for individuals and organizations and bringing new value to Copilot Pro subscribers.
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Most organizations find it’s no longer good enough to just measure successful service engagements solely on whether a customer issue is resolved. Instead, they aim to deliver personalized, fast service experiences at every touchpoint through all engagement channels. The best way to do this is by building long-term customer loyalty and transforming operations with modern, AI-enhanced capabilities across all service processes and interactions. That’s why we are continuously enhancing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to empower our customers and help them differentiate their service organizations. Today, we’re happy to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 attaining top scores possible in the business intelligence, process management, and collaboration criteria.
Investing in AI and a unified platform for modernizing customer service
More and more, service agents feel increased pressure to provide smart, fast, and customized answers when presented with customer issues. But finding information and experts to quickly resolve an issue can present its own challenges. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 62% of people spend too much time scouring for information during their workday. For service organizations, agents who must scramble to find information can mean both slower time to resolution for individual cases and a lower number of cases addressed per day overall. The agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The key to improving satisfaction in service delivery is enabling agents to take customer requests from any channel, handle multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools. Our answer is to provide a solution that helps service organizations harness the power of data, AI, automation, and collaboration to help agents focus on resolving customer issues quickly. Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps service organizations unlock trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work.
More recently, we’ve brought Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases and other sources. Agents can use Copilot to respond to incoming email, factoring in other relevant customer data to produce a personalized, accurate, and editable reply. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. In addition, service agents are empowered with additional AI experiences and automation to help fuel collaboration and productivity for delivering world-class customer service at scale. We recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for our own Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high-volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22% reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.
At Microsoft, we strive to enable our customers to empower their customers to engage on their terms, at their optimal times, and on their channels of choice. We believe we have earned our position as a Leader by developing a customer service solution that enables agents to focus on delivering more cutting-edge service experiences by harnessing available data and using the power of generative AI to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences; maximize their productivity; and optimize service operations. And with our comprehensive service platform that includes automation, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, service organizations can streamline case management, enable more personalized service, and get a clear, 360-degree view into how their service organization is performing. As Forrester points out in its report, “Microsoft’s vision is broader than just customer service, and it’s firmly grounded in three principles: Engagement must be personalized via AI; customer service must be highly collaborative; and outcomes must drive improvements. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service actualizes this vision.”
Building on next-generation AI that’s enterprise ready
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, so our customers can rest assured that it offers data privacy and protection. Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage, enabling organizations to control access to their data, and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities.
Creating responsible AI solutions
Most importantly, we are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.
The Forrester Wave™
Microsoft is a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024.
We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative customer service platform capabilities to help our customers continuously improve their own customer service offerings.
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