This post is a copy of Vicky Rogers great summary of some of the exciting new functionality we’ll be getting with the Spring update rolling out across the world at the moment. The original article can be found on LinkedIn.

Best New Features of Dynamics 365 Spring 2018 Release

I read the 200 or so pages of the Spring 2018 release notes so you don’t have to. Here is a summary so you are ready by this April.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing

The big item which was not really a surprise is the now general availability of Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The same features in the preview will go live. The main question on everyone’s lips right now is whether it will be included in which plan or will be sold separately.

GDPR Compliance

When I read the Release Notes, it seemed to me like Microsoft repeated at every few pages that Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be GDPR compliant (that’s the new European Union privacy regulation). I really hope they will mention such an item once and mention that every app will be compliant instead or boring the reader.

Unified Interface

Over the last few days, I played with a new sandbox with the Unified Interface. It looks really nice and I know end-users will love it! However, I have seen some developers complaining about potential limitations when it comes to customizations. Just like GDPR compliance, Microsoft loved to mention it every few pages.

New Features to be Thankful for

While the first section about the new features of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement repeat GDPR compliance and unified interface like a broken cassette, this is where things got really interesting and I started to get really excited about this release.

First of all, I would like to thank the PowerApps team for releasing model-driven apps. This is a true lifesaver for non-developers or PowerApps beginners who can now build apps based on the exact same app designer as Microsoft Dynamics 365. I cannot wait to get my hands on it and build some really useful stuff for my users! This is drag and drop at its finest.

Second of all, I would love to thank the Common Data Service team and the Power BI team for supporting virtually every data type of Dynamics 365 fields in Power BI. If you have an instance with a ton of option set fields, this is an early Christmas present.

Finally, I would like to thank the Microsoft Flow team who is able to integrate approval workflows directly into Dynamics 365. This is a much long-awaited feature for me and will be useful for companies who had to use multiple workarounds to arrive at a solution.

Which feature are you the most excited about?

By Vicky Rodgers – Original Link

Updating

For those of you on the Cloud, you should already be seeing the v9.0 update and be able to schedule it as required, further information on the update can be found on the Microsoft blog.

For those of us like me who are using On-premise deployments of Dynamics we’re still awaiting a release date from Microsoft but I’ll be sure to update this once we know more.