While Dynamics 365 was always a game-changer in its ability to holistically address the applications that are required to drive process, accountability, and performance within the modern business, the latest releases for D365 has taken the solution up a notch in employee engagement and collaboration.
Dynamics 365 for Talent
Dynamics 365 for Talent is a game-changer for businesses that rely on attracting talented people and helping them realise their potential. The innovation starts in the hiring process, where LinkedIn integration drives improved candidate pipeline development and analytics data leads to smarter hiring decisions.
Once a new employee joins the company, customised onboarding plans ensure that expectations are clearly communicated and that new hires make the right connections inside the company to ensure success. Performance management initiatives can be tied directly to incentive schemes, compensation packages, and employee engagement programmes. Finally, employee development initiatives can be organised, monitored, and analysed to measure the organisation’s ability to transform today’s employees into tomorrow’s leaders.
As part of this release, Microsoft has also released updated versions of the D365 specific content packs These cover the employee engagement, sales, and social engagement areas. These content packs supply the business with a great baseline that is immediately usable out of the box and allows for insights to be gained with almost no investment required. If done well, this can drive achievement in the sales, marketing, services, and social engagement space across the company.
Finding new ways of working
Helping companies to adopt new ways of working is an art form. Get it wrong and perfectly implemented multi-million dollar investments can tank. Organisational insights provide a one-stop-shop for IT managers wanting to track D365 operational performance and usage from a single simple-to-use interface. The new version enables change managers to describe user behaviour and adoption with real-time data and insights. That data provides a strong foundation to build strategies and initiatives to improve adoption and transform organisational culture.
Enter Virtual Entities
Perhaps the most understated part of the new release is the addition of Virtual Entities. In the traditional Dynamics CRM application, integration with other systems meant data duplication, as data from other systems would be replicated to CRM entities where they could be used by the application. This also meant additional processing overhead, as data would need to be updated from the source systems routinely.
Virtual Entities allow a Dynamics 365 application to access external data in real-time on runtime. This enhancement should drive down the cost of ownership (in the form of reduced storage requirements). It also enables other applications to leverage the business & workflow process capabilities of the D365 application to improve their performance. CIOs who understand this development should be salivating at the improved value and reduced costs that Virtual Entities can provide to operations and executive stakeholders.
With the July 2017 release of Dynamics 365, Microsoft continues to drive employee engagement and collaboration beyond Office 365 and SharePoint. The toolset is increasingly robust right out of the box, and organisations that are driven to performance and employee engagement should see immediate improvements to efficiency and collaboration in the expanded features. All of this together makes it even easier to create your organisation’s tomorrow.
