Marketing teams have more data available than ever. Email engagement, website activity, lead scores, campaign conversions, sales opportunities, and customer interactions can all contribute to a clearer picture of marketing performance.

For organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365, the challenge often isn't a lack of information. It's deciding which metrics deserve attention and how to connect marketing activity to meaningful business outcomes.

A campaign can generate impressive engagement without producing qualified opportunities, a nurture program can have modest click-through rates while helping prospects move closer to a purchase, and a customer communication program may deliver value through stronger relationships rather than immediate conversions.

As organizations plan for 2027, it's worth reconsidering what their marketing dashboards measure.

The goal isn't to track everything. It's to identify the Dynamics 365 marketing KPIs that help teams make better decisions, demonstrate their contribution, and improve the customer experience.

Start With Business Outcomes, Not Available Metrics

It's tempting to build a marketing dashboard around whatever information is easiest to access. Most marketing automation platforms provide ready-made reports for email delivery, opens, clicks, and conversions. Dynamics 365 adds visibility into leads, opportunities, accounts, and sales activity.

These are valuable data sources, but availability shouldn't determine importance.

Before choosing KPIs, identify what marketing is expected to accomplish.

For some organizations, that means generating qualified leads and supporting pipeline growth. For others, it means improving customer onboarding, increasing engagement, supporting renewals, or expanding existing relationships.

Each objective requires a different combination of metrics.

A team focused on lead generation might prioritize lead-to-opportunity conversion. A team responsible for customer retention may need to monitor onboarding completion, renewal engagement, and customer participation.

The most useful dashboards connect day-to-day marketing performance to these broader objectives.

1. Measure Audience Health

Before evaluating campaign performance, marketers need to understand whether they're reaching the right people.

A large contact database doesn't necessarily represent a healthy or engaged audience. Records may be outdated, incomplete, duplicated, or ineligible for certain communications.

For Dynamics 365 organizations, useful audience health metrics include:

• Reachable contacts: The number or percentage of contacts eligible to receive communications through a particular channel.
• Data completeness: The percentage of records containing the information required for segmentation and personalization.
• Suppression and unsubscribe trends: Changes in the number of contacts who cannot or should not receive marketing messages.
• Audience growth and quality: Whether new contacts match the organization's target audience and can be meaningfully engaged.

These metrics provide important context for campaign results.

For example, declining email engagement may reflect a targeting problem, but it could also indicate that contact information is outdated or that the reachable audience has changed.

Connecting Dynamics 365 with marketing automation can help teams use CRM attributes alongside communication preferences and engagement data to understand the audience they're actually able to reach.

2. Look Beyond Email Opens and Clicks

Email engagement metrics remain useful, but they shouldn't be treated as definitive measures of marketing success.

Open rates can be affected by privacy protections and automated activity. Clicks provide a stronger indication of interaction, although security scanning and bot traffic can also influence click reporting.

For 2027, marketers should place greater emphasis on behaviors that demonstrate meaningful interest.

Consider tracking:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients or visitors completing a defined action.
• Content engagement: Downloads, event registrations, form submissions, or other meaningful interactions.
• Repeat engagement: Whether contacts continue interacting across multiple campaigns or touchpoints.
• Journey goal completion: The percentage of participants who achieve the intended outcome of an automated journey.

The important distinction is between activity and progress.

A campaign with a high click-through rate may generate interest, but a campaign that consistently produces qualified inquiries may contribute more directly to business goals.

Rather than evaluating every campaign against the same benchmarks, define success according to its purpose.

3. Track Lead Quality and Progression

Lead volume is one of the easiest marketing metrics to report. Unfortunately, it doesn't reveal much about whether marketing is attracting the right prospects.

A growing lead database means little if contacts never qualify, engage with sales, or progress toward an opportunity.

Dynamics 365 provides an opportunity to connect marketing engagement with sales outcomes, particularly when lead and opportunity data are consistently maintained.

Useful lead progression metrics include:

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs): Leads meeting agreed-upon qualification criteria.
• MQL-to-SQL conversion rate: The percentage of marketing-qualified leads accepted or qualified by sales.
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate: The percentage of leads that become sales opportunities.
• Time to qualification: How long it takes a lead to reach a defined qualification milestone.
• Lead source performance: Which channels or campaigns produce leads that ultimately progress.

These measurements require shared definitions between sales and marketing.

If one team considers a content download sufficient for qualification while another expects a demonstrated buying need, the resulting reports will be difficult to interpret.

Lead scoring can help prioritize contacts based on fit and engagement, but scores should be evaluated against actual sales outcomes.

If high-scoring leads rarely become opportunities, the scoring methodology may need adjustment.

4. Connect Marketing to Pipeline

One of the most valuable uses of CRM data is understanding how marketing contributes to sales opportunities.

Traditional campaign reports show what happened during an individual marketing activity. Pipeline reporting adds context about what happened afterward.

For organizations using Dynamics 365, consider measuring:

• Marketing-sourced opportunities: Opportunities attributed to a marketing-generated lead or defined source.
• Marketing-influenced opportunities: Opportunities with qualifying marketing interactions during the buying process.
• Opportunity conversion rates: How effectively opportunities progress through the sales pipeline.
• Pipeline value by source: The value of opportunities associated with different acquisition channels.
• Sales cycle length: Whether certain lead sources, segments, or engagement patterns are associated with shorter or longer sales cycles.

These metrics require careful definitions.

Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline are not interchangeable. An opportunity influenced by several campaigns should not automatically be counted as revenue generated by each one.

Organizations also need consistent opportunity stages, reliable lead-source information, and agreed-upon attribution rules.

The objective isn't to assign marketing credit for every sale. It's to better understand which activities support meaningful pipeline development and where marketing can improve its contribution.

5. Include Customer Lifecycle Metrics

Marketing measurement shouldn't stop when an opportunity closes.

For relationship-driven organizations, some of the most valuable marketing activities happen after the initial sale. Onboarding, education, customer engagement, renewal communications, and cross-sell programs can all contribute to long-term customer value.

However, these programs are often measured using the same campaign engagement metrics applied to lead generation.

A better approach is to connect measurement to the customer's lifecycle stage.

For example:

• Onboarding completion: Whether new customers complete important onboarding milestones.
• Customer education engagement: Participation in training, resources, or educational communications.
• Renewal engagement: Interaction with communications supporting upcoming renewals.
• Cross-sell engagement: Interest in additional products or services.
• Customer retention: Changes in retention or renewal rates across relevant customer groups.

Not every metric will be available directly within a marketing automation platform. Some outcomes may depend on CRM records, customer service data, or other business systems.

That's why defining the objective first is so important.

A successful onboarding campaign isn't necessarily the one with the most clicks. It's the one that helps customers complete the steps needed to get value from their purchase.

6. Monitor Reporting and Automation Health

Even well-designed dashboards can produce misleading conclusions when the underlying data is incomplete or inconsistent.

For Dynamics 365 organizations using marketing automation, reporting reliability depends on more than campaign performance. It also depends on how information moves between systems and how consistently records are maintained.

Consider monitoring:

• Data synchronization issues: Errors or delays affecting the availability of important CRM and marketing information.
• Workflow performance: Whether automated programs are executing as intended.
• Record completeness: Missing fields that prevent accurate segmentation, attribution, or reporting.
• Reporting discrepancies: Differences between systems that require investigation.
• Conversion tracking accuracy: Whether important actions are recorded and attributed consistently.

These aren't necessarily executive-level marketing KPIs. They're operational indicators that help teams trust the results they're reporting.

For example, a decline in qualified leads might reflect weaker campaign performance. But if a CRM field stopped synchronizing correctly, the apparent decline could be a reporting problem instead.

Monitoring data and automation health helps teams distinguish genuine performance changes from technical issues.

Building a Practical Dynamics 365 Marketing KPI Dashboard

Once the right metrics have been identified, the next step is organizing them into a useful reporting framework.

Rather than putting every available metric into one dashboard, group KPIs according to the decisions they support.

Recommended Marketing KPI Framework

Not every organization needs every metric.

A smaller marketing team may benefit from a dashboard containing just six to eight KPIs tied to its most important goals. Larger organizations may need separate views for campaign managers, marketing leadership, and sales teams.

The key is ensuring that every metric has a clear purpose, an agreed-upon definition, and someone responsible for acting on the results.

Make Dynamics 365 and Marketing Automation Work Together

Marketing dashboards become more useful when they reflect information from both marketing and sales.

Dynamics 365 can provide important context about leads, accounts, opportunities, and customer relationships. Marketing automation platforms contribute campaign activity, engagement data, audience behavior, and workflow performance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys also includes built-in analytics for journeys, channels, and campaign goals. Depending on an organization's configuration and reporting needs, additional tools or integrations may help connect these insights to broader business outcomes.

For organizations using a dedicated marketing automation platform alongside Dynamics 365, integration becomes particularly important.

The emfluence Marketing Platform's native Dynamics 365 integration supports two-way lead and contact synchronization, marketing activity visibility, and campaign reporting within CRM.

This helps marketers and sales teams work from connected information instead of relying on disconnected reports and manual data transfers.

The goal isn't to replace every existing report. It's to make the information already available more useful for planning, execution, and performance evaluation.

Start Small and Refine Throughout 2027

Improving marketing measurement doesn't require rebuilding an entire reporting environment.

Start by reviewing your existing dashboards and identifying which metrics actually influence decisions.

Ask a few practical questions:

• Which metrics do we review regularly but rarely act on?
• Which business outcomes are difficult to connect to marketing activity?
• Where do our CRM and marketing reports disagree?
• Which KPIs would help us make better decisions about campaigns, audiences, or automation?
• Who is responsible for reviewing each metric and recommending changes?

From there, choose a manageable set of priority KPIs.

Document how each metric is calculated, where the data comes from, and how frequently it should be reviewed. Establish a baseline before making major changes, and revisit the framework as marketing priorities evolve.

A useful dashboard isn't simply a collection of charts. It's a tool that helps marketers recognize problems, identify opportunities, and decide what to do next.

Better Measurement Starts With Better Connections

As marketing teams prepare for 2027, the opportunity isn't necessarily to collect more data. It's to make better use of the information they already have.

For Dynamics 365 organizations, that means looking beyond individual campaign results and connecting marketing engagement with lead progression, pipeline activity, and customer relationships.

When CRM and marketing automation work together, teams can move beyond reporting what happened and start understanding what those results mean.

Want to make more of your Dynamics 365 data? Explore how the emfluence Marketing Platform integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to connect marketing activity with CRM information, or request a demo to see the integration in action.

The post What Should Dynamics 365 Marketers Actually Measure in 2027? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Most Dynamics 365 service teams have a task list nobody works from. It runs to hundreds of open items, everyone agrees it needs cleaning up, and the real priorities live in a morning meeting instead.

The usual fix is a cleanup day. Someone goes through the list, closes what’s done, merges what’s duplicated. Six weeks later it looks the same, and the team concludes it simply has too much work. Usually it doesn’t.

Count What Goes In, and What Comes Out

Pull two numbers from your system: tasks created last month and tasks closed last month. Then take twenty open tasks at random and sort them. How many are duplicates? How many are ideas, not work? How many are the client’s homework logged as yours? How many are already done?

At P2 Automation we ran this on our own client list. We had 482 open tasks on a 47-page printout. Every request came from an email or a call and had to be typed in by one person. Small requests made in passing never got in. Duplicates and ideas did. And finished work rarely got closed, because closing it was more typing. The list grew; it never shrank.

The Tell

Look for tasks your clients have already confirmed are working. If they’re still open, the problem isn’t workload. Every change to the list has to pass through someone’s keyboard, so only the urgent changes get made.

What Fixed It?

We replaced the typing with a task inbox built for the role. An AI agent reads selected client emails and call notes every hour and proposes changes: a new task, a note on an existing task instead of a duplicate, or closing a task when the client says it works. Nothing changes until a person approves. Of the first 240 proposals, we edited about four in ten and rejected four. The list now shrinks as fast as it grows, and clients see it update the moment we approve.

When a CRM list grows faster than it closes, look at what it costs to change it before you blame the workload.

Read the full case study, with screenshots: https://www.p2automation.com/insights/why-client-request-lists-go-stale

See more about how P2 Automation works with Dynamics 365 teams: https://www.p2automation.com/managed-services-plans

Or tell us the process your team hates most. Twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether a My Day view would fix it, and if it wouldn't: https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post Your CRM Task List Isn’t Too Long. It Just Never Shrinks. appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

As attachments accumulated in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Stars Behavioral Health Group was approaching its allocated storage limits, and the cost of purchasing additional capacity was becoming difficult to justify.

By implementing CB Dynamics 365 Seamless Attachment Extractor, Stars moved attachments from Dynamics 365 to its existing SharePoint environment. Documents remain accessible from within Dynamics 365, allowing the organization to reduce storage pressure and costs without introducing a new system or changing how users work.

“We knew we needed to rethink how we were storing attached documents in Dynamics 365. We were approaching our allocated storage limits, and the cost of continuing to expand that storage was becoming difficult to justify.”
– Demetrius Henry, IT Director at Stars Behavioral Health Group

Key Takeaways

• Address Dynamics 365 storage growth before capacity and costs become urgent

• Use an existing SharePoint environment as a more scalable, cost-effective repository for Dynamics 365 attachments

• Keep those documents accessible through Dynamics 365 to avoid disrupting users or requiring retraining

Want to Know More?

Read the complete case study on Connecting Software’s blog to learn how Stars Behavioral Health Group moved Dynamics 365 attachments to SharePoint, reduced pressure on Dataverse storage, and preserved the familiar experience its users rely on.

About the Author

Connecting Software is proud to be an active publisher in the CRM Software Blog since 2019. Read more Dynamics 365 insights on the Connecting Software blog.

The post Case Study: How Stars Behavioral Health Group Reduced Dynamics 365 Storage Costs appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A good test of your renewal process is surprisingly simple:

If the person who normally manages an account were unexpectedly out for a week, could someone else immediately tell where every renewal stands?

Not after searching through their inbox, opening a spreadsheet and trying to decipher the color coding, or asking three coworkers what they remember. They should be able to tell immediately.

Renewals are one of the most important recurring jobs in an employee benefits agency, but they also involve a lot of moving pieces. Information needs to be collected, options reviewed, clients contacted, decisions recorded, plan information updated and deadlines met.

The job isn't simply to "track renewal dates." The real job is to move every client through the renewal process, from start to finish, without missing a step, losing information or depending on one person to remember what happens next.

Renewal season exposes whether you really have a process

Most agencies have a renewal process. The question is whether that process exists somewhere the entire team can see and follow.

It's easy for a process to gradually become a combination of spreadsheets, calendar reminders, emails, personal task lists and institutional knowledge. That can work surprisingly well, until it doesn't.

A carrier update arrives in someone's inbox. A client hasn't returned information. A task gets completed but the spreadsheet isn't updated. Someone thinks a coworker is handling the next step. An account manager goes on vacation.

None of those situations is unusual. The problem is that when the process depends on people remembering what happened and manually keeping several places synchronized, there are more opportunities for something to fall through the cracks.

Knowing the renewal date isn't enough

A renewal date tells you when something needs to happen. It doesn't tell you whether the work required to get there is actually happening.

A useful renewal process needs to tell you who owns the renewal, what has already been completed, what you're waiting for, what needs to happen next, whether the client has been contacted, whether decisions are outstanding and whether anything is overdue.

Perhaps most importantly, someone other than the account manager should be able to answer those questions.

That's the difference between having renewal dates in a system and actually managing renewals.

Give the renewal a repeatable path

BenefitsBridge approaches renewals as a process rather than simply a date on a client record. Policy renewal projects and project templates can be used to create a repeatable structure for the work that needs to happen.

That matters because many renewal activities aren't unique. Your team may follow similar steps for dozens or hundreds of clients. If those steps have to be recreated from memory every time, the agency is depending on individual habits rather than a shared process.

A repeatable workflow gives everyone a common starting point while still allowing the agency to manage the details of an individual client's renewal.

One agency using BenefitsBridge told us it was actively using the closeout functionality and that its team had been keeping the closeout information updated, giving them the data they needed.

That's what the system should help accomplish: not simply documenting a renewal after the fact, but creating visibility while the work is happening.

Visibility changes the question

Without a shared renewal process, managers often have to ask, "Where are we with this client?" Then someone has to find out.

With the work, status and information being maintained as part of the process, the better question becomes, "Which renewals need our attention?"

That's a meaningful difference.

BenefitsBridge dashboards can be configured to surface information such as upcoming renewals, open activities and active policies, giving employees a way to focus on what requires action rather than manually assembling the picture each time.

The goal isn't more reporting. It's earlier visibility into something that might otherwise become a problem.

A renewal shouldn't live in someone's head

Experienced account managers will always know things about their clients that a system can't replace. That's part of the value they bring to the relationship. But knowing whether a renewal is on track shouldn't depend entirely on that knowledge.

If someone is unexpectedly unavailable, another member of the team should be able to understand where the renewal stands, what has happened and what needs to happen next. When renewal season gets busy, the team shouldn't have to rely on memory to make sure every step gets done.

That's the job BenefitsBridge is designed to make easier: giving every renewal a visible, repeatable path from beginning to end, so the team knows what has happened, what is still outstanding and what needs to happen next.

Also Read: How Can Employee Benefits Brokers Keep Renewals From Falling Through the Cracks?

The post How Can Employee Benefits Brokers Keep Renewals From Falling Through the Cracks? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Key Takeaways

• Having complete CRM data does not guarantee that teams can see where work is progressing or getting stuck.
• Hidden bottlenecks affect sales cycles, customer service response times, team workloads, and forecast accuracy.
• A Kanban view in Dynamics 365 makes work visible by organizing CRM records into cards and lanes.
• An interactive Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 CRM helps teams manage record movement, monitor processes, and act on delays sooner.

Your sales pipeline is full of opportunities. Your service team has a queue of cases. Your managers have dashboards, reports, and regular review meetings.

But can they tell which opportunities have stopped progressing, which cases are approaching escalation, and where the team is falling behind, without opening multiple records or asking for another status update?

This is a visibility problem many businesses overlook. Dynamics 365 CRM stores the information, but the way teams view and manage that information can make it difficult to understand the movement of work.

Your CRM Has the Data. Does Your Team Have the Visibility?

Businesses invest in CRM systems to centralize customer information, track activities, and manage processes. Yet, everyday work often remains spread across grids, forms, dashboards, spreadsheets, and conversations.

A sales manager might see the number of open opportunities but still need to investigate individual records to understand why deals are not advancing. A service manager might know how many cases are open but struggle to identify where cases are accumulating.

The issue is not necessarily missing data. It is the lack of a practical way to see how work moves from one stage to another.

Traditional Dynamics 365 CRM views are useful for finding and reviewing records. However, when teams need to monitor progress, compare workloads, and identify bottlenecks, a card-based view in Dynamics CRM offers a more direct perspective.

What Is the Cost of Managing Work Without a Visual View?

The impact goes beyond a few extra clicks. When teams cannot easily see the status and distribution of work, small delays can become larger business problems.

• Sales opportunities lose momentum: Deals remain in the same stage without timely follow-up, affecting pipeline movement and revenue forecasts.
• Customer service cases accumulate: High-priority or aging cases get buried among routine requests, increasing the risk of customer dissatisfaction.
• Managers spend time collecting updates: Review meetings become exercises in reconstructing status instead of resolving obstacles.
• Teams carry uneven workloads: Managers struggle to identify overloaded employees or redistribute work effectively.
• Record updates become an administrative task: Repeatedly opening forms to change status or ownership adds friction to everyday CRM activities.

These issues are particularly difficult to manage when several teams or processes depend on the same CRM data. Better visibility helps businesses identify where attention is needed before delays affect customers or business targets.

Why a Kanban View Changes the Way Teams Manage CRM Work

A Kanban board organizes work into cards and lanes. Each card represents a record, while each lane represents a stage, status, owner, priority, or another relevant business value.

This makes the movement of work easier to understand. Sales teams can see opportunities across pipeline stages. Customer service teams can organize cases by status or priority. Operations teams can track tasks as they move through different stages.

A Kanban board for Dynamics 365 brings this approach directly into the CRM environment. Instead of relying only on rows and columns, users get an interactive workspace where they can review records, identify bottlenecks, and move work forward.

The value is not simply a different way to display data. It is the ability to make decisions based on what is happening across the workflow.

Bring Visual Work Management into Dynamics 365 CRM

Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 CRM by Inogic transforms supported CRM views into interactive boards. It helps Sales, Customer Service, and Operations teams organize records and manage everyday workflows within their existing Dynamics 365 environment.

With an interactive Kanban board for CRM, teams can:

• Move Records with Drag and Drop: Move individual or multiple cards between lanes to update corresponding CRM field values without opening each record.
• Configure Cards and Lanes: Create boards for standard and custom entities, configure lanes and rows, and display up to five selected fields on each card.
• Visualize Business Process Flows: Work with single-entity and multi-entity Business Process Flows, with options to pin relevant processes globally, personally, or to specific views.
• Highlight Important Records: Use field-based card colors to distinguish records by values such as lead rating, case priority, purchase timeframe, or risk.
• Identify Workload Bottlenecks: Sort lanes by card count and use SUM, AVG, MIN, and MAX calculations to understand summarized values on the board.
• Find and Manage Records Faster: Use search, sorting, advanced filters, and quick activity actions to work with relevant CRM information.
• Work Across CRM Views: Use Kanban boards in main grids and subgrids, with lazy loading to support navigation through larger record sets.

The board supports Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online, Microsoft Dataverse, and Power Apps model-driven apps, with access across web, tablet, and mobile experiences.

Make Work Visible Before It Becomes a Bottleneck

Give your teams a clearer way to manage CRM workflows, track progress, and identify delays with Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 CRM by Inogic.

Explore the app on the Microsoft Marketplace, visit the Inogic website for product details, or start your 15-day free trial. For a personalized demo, contact crm@inogic.com.

FAQs

What is a Kanban board in Dynamics 365 CRM?

A Kanban board in Dynamics 365 CRM displays records as cards organized into lanes based on fields such as status, stage, owner, or priority. It helps users visualize and manage work as records progress.

Can I use a Kanban board for Dynamics 365 sales pipeline management?

Yes. Sales teams can organize opportunities into pipeline stages, move cards using drag and drop, and monitor deal progression through a visual Kanban view in Dynamics 365 CRM.

How is Inogic's Kanban Board different from the native Dynamics 365 Kanban view?

Inogic's Kanban Board extends visual record management with configurable cards and lanes, single-entity and multi-entity Business Process Flow support, aggregate calculations, multiple-card movement, advanced filtering, and additional board customization options.

Does Kanban Board support Microsoft Dataverse and mobile devices?

Yes. Kanban Board supports Microsoft Dataverse and Power Apps model-driven apps, with access across web, tablet, and mobile experiences.

Can I customize Kanban boards in Dynamics 365 CRM?

Yes. With Inogic's Kanban Board, users can configure cards, lanes, rows, displayed fields, and card colors to suit different business processes. Boards can also be configured for standard and custom entities
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The post How a Kanban Board Improves Work Visibility in Dynamics 365 CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

When organizations connect Microsoft Dynamics 365 with SharePoint, they often assume that their carefully configured CRM permissions will follow their documents. They don’t. This creates a hidden access-control gap that may allow users to open documents in SharePoint even when they cannot access the corresponding records in Dynamics 365.

ORBIS, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Modern Workplace consultancy, repeatedly encounters this issue among its automotive and manufacturing customers. By implementing CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator, ORBIS automatically carries Dynamics 365 privileges over to SharePoint—protecting sensitive documents without ongoing manual administration.

“It does exactly as the name states. It replicates the permissions from Dynamics CRM to SharePoint. After a quick setup, it just works!”
– Richard Bosse, Team Lead Business Process Collaboration at ORBIS Modern Work GmbH

Key Takeaways

• Don’t assume the standard Dynamics 365 and SharePoint integration synchronizes document permissions

• Consider if you need to control document access because of data separation across teams, countries, and business units

• Automate permission replication to only authorized persons can access documents

Want to Know More?

Read the complete case study on Connecting Software’s blog to learn why ORBIS recommends Permissions Replicator, how the solution fits into Dynamics 365 and SharePoint projects, and why customers often forget it is running in the background.

About the Author

Connecting Software is proud to be an active publisher in the CRM Software Blog since 2019. Read more Dynamics 365 insights on the Connecting Software blog.

The post Case Study: ORBIS and Connecting Software Close the Hidden Microsoft Dynamics 365 Permissions Gap appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

The good news is that these notifications give you an opportunity to get ahead of the problem. The bad news is that ignoring them could create challenges for your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform environments down the road.

The Dataverse Storage Problem Most Businesses Never See Coming

Microsoft Dataverse sits at the heart of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform environments. Every customer record, attachment, workflow, integration, audit log, and business process adds to your Dataverse storage usage. The problem is that storage growth isn't always obvious. It happens little by little until one day Microsoft starts sending notifications.

At that point, most businesses don't know:

• What's actually consuming storage
• Which environments are growing the fastest
• Whether growth is normal or excessive
• If additional storage is really needed
• How much they're spending on storage they may not actually need

Without those answers, you're left guessing. The good news is you don't have to guess. enCloud9's FREE Microsoft Dataverse Storage Analysis Service helps you understand what's driving storage growth, identify potential risks, and create a plan before capacity issues impact your business.

Why a Dataverse Storage Warning Matters

When Dataverse storage warning notifications start showing up, it's easy to push them to the bottom of the priority list. After all, everything is still working. But that's exactly why these notifications catch people off guard.

Storage issues rarely become urgent overnight. They build quietly in the background until your team suddenly needs to create an environment, perform a restore, refresh a sandbox, or support a deployment. That's when Microsoft Dataverse storage becomes everyone's problem. The sooner you understand what's driving your storage growth, the more options you'll have to address it.

What Happens If You Wait Too Long to Address Dataverse Storage?

Ignoring a Microsoft Dataverse storage notification doesn't stop storage from growing. While your team focuses on running the business, customer records, attachments, audit logs, integrations, and workflows continue to consume  Dataverse storage behind the scenes. The longer you wait to understand what's driving that growth, the greater the risk of unexpected costs, unnecessary storage purchases, and operational headaches later.

A simple assessment today from enCloud9 can help prevent a much more expensive problem tomorrow. A proactive assessment is almost always easier, less expensive, and far less disruptive than reacting after the fact.

Let enCloud9 Help You Take Control of Microsoft Dataverse Storage Before It's Too Late

If Microsoft is sending you Microsoft Dataverse storage notifications, don't spend weeks wondering whether they're important - find out.

Our Microsoft Dataverse Storage Analysis Service gives you a clear picture of what's happening inside your environment. We'll identify what's consuming your Microsoft Dataverse storage, where growth is occurring, and what steps you can take to reduce risk before it impacts your business.

We'll also help you determine whether additional Dataverse storage is actually necessary or whether there are opportunities to reclaim capacity through better governance, data cleanup, and optimization.

And because storage management isn't a one-time project, many customers choose to pair that analysis with one of our ongoing support plans. enCloud9's managed services team helps monitor your environment, provide governance guidance, and stay ahead of problems before they turn into costly disruptions.

The companies that avoid storage headaches aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that take action before small issues become big ones.

The post Don't Ignore Your Dataverse Storage Warning. Get a Storage Analysis appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Your customers message you on WhatsApp every single day. Now picture those conversations going quiet on September 30, 2028, because the service connecting them to Dynamics 365 no longer exists.

That is the date Microsoft retires Azure Communication Services (ACS) Advanced Messaging with WhatsApp. Nothing breaks today, and you have roughly 23 months. That is plenty of time for a calm, planned move, and not nearly enough to ignore. Here is what is changing and how to get ahead of it.

Key Takeaways

• Retirement date: ACS Advanced Messaging with WhatsApp shuts down on September 30, 2028.
• New sign-ups are closed: Since October 23, 2026, new customers cannot start on ACS WhatsApp.
• No new features: Existing integrations keep working, with support limited to critical fixes.
• No Teams reprieve: Teams integration does not extend any retiring ACS service.
• Alternative Services: WhatsApp4Dynamics connects WhatsApp to Dynamics 365 CRM directly through Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform and even with Twilio if you prefer that. Part of Inogic Omnichannel suite integrating Dynamics 365 with WhatsApp, Text SMS and Website Live Chat.

What Microsoft Announced About ACS

In September 2026, Microsoft announced that ACS will retire as a standalone offering. Its focus is shifting to communication experiences built into Teams, Dynamics 365 and Azure.

Microsoft splits ACS into two groups:

• Retired after September 30, 2028: Email, SMS, Chat, Rooms, Direct Routing, Job Router, UI Libraries and Advanced Messaging with WhatsApp.
• Breaking change (Teams-aligned only): Calling SDK, Call Automation, Recording, Audio Streaming and Closed Captions.

After the cutoff, API and SDK calls that depend on retired services may return errors. Teams integration does not extend the life of a retiring service.

What This Means for You Today

• New sign-ups are closed. Since October 23, 2026, new customers cannot start on retiring ACS services.
• Features are frozen. Existing integrations keep working, but support is limited to critical security and stability fixes.
• Building on ACS now adds migration debt. Every workflow you add today is one more thing to rebuild later.

Are You Affected? Check These 3 Places

1. Custom apps built on the ACS Messaging SDK and Event Grid for WhatsApp.
2. Dynamics 365 channels configured through ACS.
3. Downstream tools fed by Event Grid subscriptions, such as Logic Apps, Functions and reports.

To find ACS resources in your tenant, use the Azure Advisor Service Retirement workbook or the open-source ACS Resource Explorer.

Four Reasons to Migrate Early

• Identity changes: WhatsApp usernames and Business-Scoped User IDs (BSUIDs) are coming. If your logic treats a phone number as the unique customer key, audit it now.
• Number migration takes time: Moving a number follows WhatsApp's phone number migration process, and the new provider must support it.
• Templates need an inventory: Templates belong to a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA), so list them before cutover.
• Automations need rewiring: Every flow that listens to ACS events must be repointed and tested.

Why Go Direct to Meta?

Microsoft's own guidance points Dynamics 365 customers to Dynamics 365 Contact Center and its partner providers. If you simply want WhatsApp inside your CRM, a direct connection to Meta is worth a look.

Today: Customer → WhatsApp → Meta → ACS (Messaging SDK / Event Grid) → your app or Dynamics channel

Direct: Customer → WhatsApp → Meta Cloud API → WhatsApp4Dynamics → Dynamics 365

Cutting out the middle layer gives you:

• Fewer moving parts: no Event Grid plumbing and no ACS retirement dependency.
• Simpler billing: you pay Meta's rates directly plus the app license, instead of an ACS usage fee on top of Meta fees.
• Predictable pricing: Meta charges per message and can change prices only on the first day of a quarter, so you review budgets four times a year.
• Built-in reach: WhatsApp passed 3 billion monthly active users in 2025.

The trade-off: you manage your own Meta Business Manager, WABA and API credentials.

Related reading: Meta API vs Twilio API: Which WhatsApp Integration Fits Your Dynamics 365 Strategy?

What WhatsApp4Dynamics Gives Your Team

WhatsApp4Dynamics is a Microsoft Marketplace Certified app for Dynamics 365 CRM (Online | Dataverse). It connects WhatsApp Business through the Meta API or Twilio. Setup is short: get your number and credentials from Meta, install the app, then add your details under WhatsApp4Dynamics > Configurations.

Chats with CRM context

• Start a chat from any Case, Opportunity, Lead or Contact. No copying phone numbers.
• Create Leads, Contacts, Cases or custom records from a conversation, with Dynamic Field Mapping filling the fields for you.
• Keep timestamped chat history linked to records, so a new owner sees the full story.
• Assign chats and consult a colleague internally without the customer seeing it.

Templates and automation

• Send text, media, buttons and quick replies with static or dynamic variables.
• Trigger messages from workflows and Power Automate, such as order confirmations and appointment reminders.
• Run pre- and post-chat questionnaires and write answers back to the record.
• Share images, videos, PDFs and Word files in the customer's language.

Related reading: Boost Customer Interaction Using WhatsApp in CRM: A Complete Integration Guide

AI assistance

InoWiz AI offers reply suggestions, chat summaries and sentiment analysis, so agents don't scroll through long threads. The AI chatbot answers from Dataverse, SharePoint, websites and uploaded documents.

Start Your Migration Now

You have time, but not unlimited time. Audit your ACS usage, inventory your templates and plan your number move.

Then try WhatsApp4Dynamics and see WhatsApp conversations living inside your CRM, with no ACS in the middle.

FAQs

Is Azure Communication Services being retired?

Yes. ACS retires as a standalone offering on September 30, 2028. Teams-aligned scenarios such as Teams Phone Extensibility remain supported.

Can new customers still use ACS WhatsApp?

No. New sign-ups closed on October 23, 2026.

How do I connect WhatsApp to Dynamics 365 without ACS?

Use the Meta WhatsApp Business Platform API through WhatsApp4Dynamics. Enter your Meta API details under Configurations, then manage chats from Dynamics 365 records.

Do I need a BSP to use the WhatsApp Business Platform?

Not necessarily. Meta's Cloud API can be accessed directly with Meta Business Manager credentials, which is how WhatsApp4Dynamics is set up.

Can WhatsApp chats create Leads and Cases in Dynamics 365?

Yes. WhatsApp4Dynamics creates Leads, Contacts, Cases and other records straight from chats.
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The post ACS WhatsApp is Retiring: Your Dynamics 365 Migration Plan appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

According to Bobby Small from Dynamics User Group, the organization behind Convergence, approximately 40% of the conference content is focused on F&SCM, 40% on CE, and 20% on Business Central. That means nearly 60% of the sessions are expected to cover products beyond F&SCM. 

Convergence is a Microsoft-led conference, giving customers direct access to the
people building the software they use every day. 

What also makes Convergence 2026 different is the opportunity to hear directly from the Microsoft teams building the software. With more than 100 Microsoft-led sessions, attendees can learn about product roadmaps, upcoming features, and Microsoft's AI strategy, while also getting direct access to product managers and engineers. 

Nearly 60% of the conference content is expected to focus on products outside of Dynamics 365 F&SCM.  

Convergence 2026 takes place December 8–11 in Miami, Florida. Here's why Dynamics 365 CE and Business Central customers should take a closer look. 

More Microsoft-Led Sessions Than Any Other Dynamics Event 

One of the biggest differences between Convergence and other Microsoft Dynamics conferences is who's delivering the content. 

As Bobby explained it, DynamicsCon is community-led, while Convergence is Microsoft-led. 

At community conferences, you typically hear from customers, consultants, and partners sharing HOW they use Dynamics 365, what has worked for them, and what they've learned. That content is extremely valuable. 

But Convergence offers something different. You hear directly from the Microsoft product managers, engineers, architects, and executives who are developing the software, planning future releases, and making decisions about the product roadmap. That is the WHY they build Dynamics 365. 

The Convergence 2026 website lists more than 100 Microsoft-led sessions (including the Partner Pre Day). This involves technical deep dives, product roadmap updates, and demonstrations. 

For customers making decisions about their technology investments, that's an opportunity to understand not just what Dynamics 365 can do today, but what Microsoft is building next and why. 

Convergence 2026 Registration 

What Can Dynamics 365 CE Users Expect? 

According to Bobby, approximately 40% of the conference content is expected to focus on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. 

That includes topics relevant to organizations using: 

• Dynamics 365 Sales 

• Dynamics 365 Customer Service 

• Dynamics 365 Field Service 

• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 

• Dynamics 365 Contact Center 

With Microsoft investing heavily in Copilot, AI agents, and automation, CE customers have plenty of reasons to want direct insight into where these products are going. 

The conference also features Microsoft executives such as Deva Rajamohan, Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience, who leads the teams developing Microsoft's customer experience applications and AI capabilities. 

If your organization is planning its CRM strategy, evaluating new functionality, or trying to understand how AI will change sales and customer service, hearing directly from Microsoft's product teams could be especially valuable. 

What About Dynamics 365 Business Central Users? 

Business Central users shouldn't overlook Convergence either. Bobby estimates that approximately 20% of the content will be focused on BC. 

For organizations running Business Central, the opportunity is to learn about Microsoft's product direction, upcoming capabilities, AI investments, and how Business Central fits into the broader Dynamics 365 ecosystem. 

It's also an opportunity to connect with Microsoft experts and other customers who are working through similar challenges. 

Whether you're trying to get more value from your existing Business Central investment or planning your next phase of growth, direct access to Microsoft's product teams can help you make better-informed decisions. 

Ask Questions Directly to the People Building Your Software 

For me, one of the most compelling reasons to attend Convergence is the access to Microsoft. 

Bobby spent many years as an IT director and Dynamics user before moving into the Microsoft Dynamics community. He remembers attending conferences where he could walk up to Microsoft product managers and discuss specific challenges his company was having. 

That kind of access is difficult to replicate through support tickets, webinars, or conversations with your implementation partner. 

At Convergence, Microsoft is bringing product managers, engineers, and other specialists who don't necessarily travel to every community event. Customers have opportunities to ask questions, share feedback, and explain how they're using the software. 

Bobby shared an example from last year's event where a customer presented an AI success story. Microsoft representatives heard the presentation and became interested in helping the company expand and promote what it had accomplished. 

That's the kind of opportunity that can come from being in the same room as the people making product decisions. 

Learn from Other Dynamics 365 Customers 

While Microsoft's involvement is a major differentiator, Convergence isn't exclusively about Microsoft presentations. 

The event will also feature customer stories from larger enterprises across different industries, sharing how they're using Dynamics 365 and addressing business challenges. 

These real-world examples complement the product roadmap sessions. You can hear what Microsoft is planning and then learn how other organizations are already putting the technology to work. 

Convergence is also intentionally customer-focused. According to Bobby, approximately 70% of attendees at last year's event were Dynamics users, around 20% were Microsoft employees, and about 10% were partners. 

For 2026, organizers are targeting approximately 3,000 attendees while maintaining a strong concentration of customers and Microsoft representatives. 

Could You Qualify for a Customer Pass? 

Bobby also mentioned that some Dynamics 365 customers may be eligible for passes through Microsoft. 

If you're interested in attending, he recommends talking to your Microsoft representative or Dynamics 365 partner about whether your organization could be nominated. Availability isn't guaranteed, but it's worth asking. 

Convergence 2026: Dates and Registration 

Convergence 2026 takes place December 8–11, 2026, at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in Florida. The main conference sessions are scheduled for December 9–10, with additional workshops on December 11. 

If you're a Dynamics 365 CE or Business Central customer who previously dismissed Convergence as an F&SCM event, take another look. 

With approximately 60% of the content expected to cover CE and BC, more than 100 Microsoft-led sessions, and opportunities to speak directly with Microsoft's product teams, this could be a valuable event for your organization. 

View the Convergence 2026 agenda and registration details. 

The post Why Dynamics 365 CE/CRM and Business Central Users Should Attend Convergence 2026  appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

KingswaySoft's 2026 Release Wave 3 introduces new data integration capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, expanded SSIS components, 23 additional JDBC drivers, and a new codeless synchronization platform called EasySync. Announced on October 27, 2026, the release gives integration teams more control over data extraction, processing, and connectivity across business applications. The updates are particularly relevant to organizations that depend on Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dataverse, SQL Server, and other enterprise systems for reporting and daily operations.

Key Highlights

• Dynamics 365 and Dataverse enhancements: New SQL query support, business logic bypass options, and timezone controls improve flexibility when retrieving and processing CRM data.
• Expanded SSIS integration capabilities: New connectors, SQL Server Change Data Capture (CDC) components, parallel destination writes, and bulk-processing options support more demanding data integration workloads.
• 23 new JDBC drivers: Additional connectivity for Microsoft Teams, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, WooCommerce, and other business applications expands reporting and integration options.
• Integration Gateway updates: Updated supporting software libraries help maintain the platform's real-time integration capabilities.
• New EasySync platform: KingswaySoft introduces codeless, scheduled data synchronization with more than 100 connectors. EasySync is currently available through an invitation-only private beta.

What's New for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse Integration?

KingswaySoft's 2026 Release Wave 3 expands the capabilities of its SSIS Integration Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics 365, particularly for organizations working with Microsoft Dataverse and CRM data.

The updates give developers more options for querying records, controlling business logic execution, and handling date and time values during data movement. They build on the Dynamics 365 integration improvements in 2026 Release Wave 1.

SQL Query Support for Dynamics 365 Dataverse

The Dynamics CRM/Dataverse Source component now supports a SQL Query source type, allowing developers to retrieve Dataverse records using supported SQL syntax.

This builds on Microsoft's SQL query capabilities for the Dataverse Web API, which allow SQL SELECT statements to retrieve data from Dataverse tables. Microsoft supports familiar SQL operations such as filtering, sorting, joins, and aggregation, subject to documented limitations.

For integration developers accustomed to SQL, this provides another way to define data extraction requirements without relying exclusively on other query formats.

More Control Over Custom Business Logic and Plug-ins

The Dataverse Source component introduces options that let authorized users bypass custom business logic or specific plug-in steps for individual data retrieval requests.

This gives integration teams more control over how Dataverse processes requests without requiring changes to the overall system configuration.

Microsoft documents the underlying Dataverse business logic bypass capabilities, including the permissions required to use them. These controls should be applied carefully because bypassing custom logic can affect how business rules and processes execute.

Improved Timezone Handling

KingswaySoft has also expanded timezone configuration options in the Dynamics CRM/Dataverse Source and Destination components.

These settings provide more control over how date and time values are returned during extraction and interpreted when data is written to Dataverse.

Microsoft Dataverse supports different date and time behaviors, including user-local and timezone-independent values. Consistent handling helps organizations avoid unintended differences when exchanging data between applications operating in different time zones.

For technical details, see KingswaySoft's SSIS Integration Toolkit release notes.

How Does KingswaySoft 2026 Release Wave 3 Improve SSIS Data Integration?

The latest SSIS Integration Toolkit release adds new service connections, incremental data extraction capabilities, and destination processing improvements.

SSIS, or SQL Server Integration Services, is Microsoft's platform for extracting, transforming, and loading data between systems. Its Data Flow components move data from sources through transformations to destinations.

KingswaySoft extends these capabilities with connectors and components designed for enterprise applications and data platforms.

New Connectors for AI, Financial, and Ecommerce Applications

The release expands the range of services supported by the SSIS Integration Toolkit:

• Anthropic: New connectivity for integrating AI service data into SSIS workflows.
• Wave Accounting: Additional options for connecting financial data.
• WooCommerce: A dedicated service within KingswaySoft's REST Suite.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: REST API support alongside the existing SOAP connectivity available through the Salesforce toolset.

These additions give organizations more ways to incorporate information from external applications into existing integration processes.

SQL Server Change Data Capture for Incremental Integration

KingswaySoft introduces two new Premium SQL Server CDC components:

• Premium SQL Server CDC Source: Retrieves incremental changes from SQL Server.
• Premium SQL Server CDC Command Task: Supports CDC operations within SSIS workflows.

Microsoft SQL Server Change Data Capture records insert, update, and delete activity in database tables, making those changes available for downstream processing.

By accessing incremental changes rather than repeatedly extracting entire datasets, integration teams can build more efficient data movement workflows. See also using incremental data loads for efficient Dynamics 365 integrations.

Faster Processing for High-Volume Data Operations

The release also expands destination processing capabilities for workloads involving large amounts of data.

Parallel destination writes: REST and GraphQL Destination components now support multithreaded writing, allowing multiple write operations to run concurrently.

Expanded bulk operations: ADO.NET and MySQL Destination components add bulk-processing support for Update, Upsert, Delete, and Full Sync operations. Upsert combines insert and update behavior, allowing a destination to create records when they do not exist or update existing records when they do.

Together, these enhancements provide additional processing options for organizations managing high-volume integrations.

Excel Integration and Authentication Improvements

Several targeted updates address common integration requirements:

• Premium Excel: Automatic retries for intermittent connection errors and options to suppress format-not-found errors provide more control over error handling.
• Azure Service Bus: Certificate authentication adds another supported authentication method.
• Salesforce Pardot: PKCE support strengthens OAuth authentication options.
• TikTok Business: Support for short-term access keys expands connection configuration options.

These changes improve the flexibility of existing SSIS workflows, particularly where integrations depend on external APIs and authentication requirements.

Which 23 New JDBC Drivers Are Included in KingswaySoft 2026 Release Wave 3?

KingswaySoft's JDBC Driver Pack adds 23 drivers for business applications, cloud services, and data formats.

JDBC, or Java Database Connectivity, provides a standard interface that Java-based applications and compatible tools can use to access data. KingswaySoft's drivers make supported application data accessible through familiar SQL-style queries.

The 23 additions cover the following categories:

• Marketing, communications, and analytics: Emarsys, Facebook Business, Facebook Messenger, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Business, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SendGrid, and Twilio.
• CRM and business management: MYOB, Odoo, SugarCRM, and SuiteCRM.
• Productivity and collaboration: Microsoft Teams and Trello.
• Content management and ecommerce: WordPress and WooCommerce.
• Documents, files, and cloud storage: Box, Dropbox, DocuSign, and Premium Excel.
• AI services: Anthropic.
• Fundraising and nonprofit applications: Enthuse.

Two notable additions are Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Teams. Their inclusion gives developers additional ways to access marketing and collaboration data through JDBC-compatible applications, with authentication options suited to different integration requirements.

For organizations that already use Microsoft Dynamics 365 alongside other business applications, the expanded driver catalog provides more options for bringing information together for analysis, reporting, and integration workflows.

What's New in KingswaySoft Integration Gateway?

KingswaySoft's 2026 Release Wave 3 includes updates to the supporting software libraries used by Integration Gateway.

Integration Gateway supports real-time integration workflows triggered by webhook events across cloud and on-premises systems. Unlike scheduled integrations, webhook-driven processes can respond when supported applications generate events.

The latest release focuses on maintaining and updating the platform's underlying software libraries rather than introducing a major new integration feature.

Organizations using Integration Gateway can review the Integration Gateway changelog for additional technical information.

What Is KingswaySoft EasySync, and How Does It Work?

EasySync is a new codeless data synchronization platform introduced alongside KingswaySoft's 2026 Release Wave 3.

Designed for recurring synchronization, EasySync allows organizations to move and synchronize data from supported applications, services, and databases into a target database without building custom integration code.

The platform includes several key capabilities:

• More than 100 connectors: Support for a broad range of applications, services, and databases.
• Web-based configuration: Users can configure synchronization jobs through a centralized interface.
• Built-in scheduling: Recurring synchronization tasks can be scheduled without developing separate automation processes.
• Execution monitoring: Users can review synchronization activity and track job execution.

EasySync provides another approach for organizations that need to keep data synchronized between systems but do not necessarily require a fully customized SSIS integration workflow.

Availability: EasySync is currently in private beta, with access available by invitation only. Organizations interested in evaluating the platform can explore EasySync and contact KingswaySoft for information about participation.

KingswaySoft 2026 Release Wave 3: What Changed, by Product Area

Announced on 27 October 2026, KingswaySoft's 2026 Release Wave 3 is weighted toward Dynamics 365 and Dataverse extraction control and SQL Server incremental loading, while its one wholly new product, the codeless EasySync platform, remains invitation-only.

Why Can Businesses Trust KingswaySoft for Dynamics 365 Data Integration?

KingswaySoft specializes in data integration and connectivity solutions for enterprise applications, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and numerous cloud-based business platforms. Its products help organizations connect systems, move information between applications, and make business data available for operational and analytical purposes.

Thousands of enterprise clients across more than 110 countries and regions use KingswaySoft solutions. Its SSIS Integration Toolkit includes more than 300 connectors and premium components, providing integration teams with options for working across different application environments.

KingswaySoft also highlights customer case studies describing practical integration projects involving Microsoft Dynamics and other enterprise systems. Combined with its ongoing product updates, documentation, and support services, this experience gives organizations a useful starting point when evaluating solutions for complex integration requirements.

Explore KingswaySoft 2026 Release Wave 3

For organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SQL Server, or multiple connected business applications, KingswaySoft's latest updates offer additional options for managing data extraction, integration performance, and synchronization.

Review the complete 2026 Release Wave 3 announcement and its associated release documentation to identify improvements relevant to your existing integrations.

By KingswaySoft | www.kingswaysoft.com

The post KingswaySoft 2026 Release Wave 3: Dynamics 365 Data Integration Updates appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

You just did an Email campaign for your biggest launch. Your customer opens their inbox and sees your offer. Then they see it again. Same email, same name, same minute.

They don’t think “CRM glitch.” They think “this company doesn’t know who I am,” and they unsubscribe. Duplicate records caused that, and they are sitting in your Dynamics 365 right now.

Does this sound familiar?

• Customers reply, “I already got this email.”
• Unsubscribes and spam complaints keep creeping up.
• Your lead count never matches what sales actually closes.
• Two reps contact the same prospect in the same week.

If you nodded at even one, duplicates are the likely cause, and the fix takes an afternoon. This guide gives you a simple data-cleaning Dynamics 365 routine, then shows you how to keep duplicates out for good.

Why Does the Same Person Get the Same Email Twice in Dynamics 365?

Because that person exists as two or more records, and your campaign treats each one as a different human.

Rita registers for your webinar with her work email. A week later, she downloads an ebook with her Gmail. A sales rep then adds her manually as “Rita S.” That is three records, three emails, and one irritated buyer. Multiply that across every form, import, integration, and event list, and duplicates grow faster than anyone notices.

What Do Duplicate Contacts Really Cost Your Marketing Team?

They cost you budget, sender reputation, and credibility, and they quietly erode dynamics crm data accuracy with no warning light.

Do the math. If 10% of a 20,000-contact list is repeats, every send wastes 2,000 emails. Over 12 campaigns, that is 24,000 chances for someone to hit “report spam.”

• Your reports lie: One lead counted three times inflates MQLs and makes cost per lead look better than it is.
• Your reputation drops: Repeat emails raise complaints, and inbox providers notice.
• Your personalization breaks: Details are split across records, so names and job titles go out wrong.
• Sales and marketing clash: Two reps chase the same lead, and the customer feels it.

How to Detect Duplicate Dynamics CRM Records Before a Campaign

Match on email, phone, and company name first, then hunt for near matches that look different but belong to the same person. Run this for Leads and Contacts separately.

1. Find the easy ones. Use a view or Advanced Find to find duplicate Dynamics 365 data by email and mobile number. Sort so repeats sit together.
2. Standardize your fields. Fix phone formats, capitalization, and suffixes like “Inc.” and “Incorporated.” Messy formatting hides duplicates from simple rules.
3. Hunt the sneaky ones. This is where the costly duplicates live: “Jon” and “John,” “Acme Ltd” and “ACME Limited,” or a record with no email at all. To detect duplicate Dynamics 365 records like these, you need fuzzy matching, because exact comparisons walk right past them.

How to Merge Duplicate Dynamics 365 Records Without Losing History

Pick the most complete record as the master, bring over the best field values, and merge so activities and relationships stay attached. Never use delete as a shortcut.

1. Pick the master. Choose the record with the valid email, the richest history, and an active owner.
2. Merge, then refresh. Combine each group, rebuild your lists and segments, and only then hit send.

By hand, this works for a few dozen records. At 50,000 contacts, it becomes someone’s full-time job.

Why Native Tools Leave Duplicates Behind

Because the duplicate detection Dynamics 365 ships with is rule-based and built for exact or near-exact matches. Phonetic variations and hidden relationships slip through, and merging stays largely manual.

That is when a dedicated duplicate merge tool Dynamics 365 teams can trust stops being a nice-to-have. It should catch what rules miss, merge in bulk, and protect your history while it works.

How DeDupeD Fixes the Problem Without the Manual Work

DeDupeD is a data quality app that Dynamics 365 teams install to find, merge, and block duplicates across Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Cases, and custom entities, all inside the interface your team already uses.

• Catch the invisible: Fuzzy matching spots phonetic, partial, and format differences.
• See the whole picture: Related-record detection exposes repeat Contacts under the same Account.
• Merge with confidence: AI recommends the master record and fields, with confidence scores and plain-language reasons.
• Clean in bulk: Select many, merge once, and let auto-merge with governance rules handle repeat cleanup while preserving history.
• Stay clean: Scheduled scans and form-level checks run quietly, and you can exclude inactive records or let users ignore valid duplicates.

Want proof before you believe us? Get your free duplicate report and see the exact records native rules missed.

How to Prevent Duplicates in Dynamics 365 for Good

Check every record in real time at each entry point: forms, imports, integrations, and workflows. Cleanup is mopping the floor. Prevention is fixing the leak.

To prevent duplicates, Dynamics 365 setups need real-time checks, a monthly scheduled scan, and one named owner for data quality. Do that, and your list stays campaign-ready all year.

Stop Sending Twice. Start Sending Once.

Every send to a dirty list repeats the same damage: an annoyed customer, a distorted report, a wasted budget. One clean list fixes all three. Find out what is hiding in your CRM before your next launch.

• See the product: Explore DeDupeD for Dynamics 365
• Try it free: Download from Microsoft Marketplace with a 15-day free trial
• Ask our experts: Email us at crm@inogic.com

Frequently Asked Questionsl

How do I find duplicate records in Dynamics 365?

You find duplicate records in Dynamics 365 by matching key fields such as email address, phone number, and company name, then sorting or grouping the results so repeats appear together. Start with views or Advanced Find for exact matches in Leads and Contacts. Exact matching misses variations like “Jon” and “John” or “Acme Ltd” and “ACME Limited,” so use fuzzy matching to catch phonetic, partial, and format differences. DeDupeD automates this scan across standard and custom entities, including related records.

How do I deduplicate Dynamics 365 contacts in bulk?

To deduplicate Dynamics 365 contacts in bulk, group the matching records, select a master record for each group, and merge the groups together instead of handling them one pair at a time. Native merging is largely manual, which does not scale to thousands of records. DeDupeD lets you select multiple duplicates directly from CRM grids, merge them in bulk, and use AI field recommendations with confidence scores, so you keep control without reviewing every record individually.

How can I remove duplicate Dynamics 365 data without losing history?

The safest way to remove duplicate Dynamics 365 data without losing history is to merge records rather than delete them. A merge keeps one master record and consolidates related activities, notes, emails, and relationships into it, while deleting erases that information permanently. Before merging, choose the record with the most complete data and a valid email. DeDupeD suggests the best master record with a confidence score and explanation, and its governed auto-merge rules protect relationships and activity history.

Why is native duplicate detection not enough?

Native duplicate detection in Dynamics 365 is not enough because it is rule based and mostly limited to exact or near-exact matches. It can overlook phonetic variations, abbreviations, and missing fields, and it does not detect duplicates across related entities, such as repeat Contacts under the same Account. Merging also stays largely manual, with no AI recommendations. Extending it with fuzzy matching, real-time checks, and bulk merging closes these gaps and gives you one reliable customer record.

How often should you do Dynamics CRM data cleansing?

You should do Dynamics CRM data cleansing before every major campaign and run a scheduled duplicate scan at least monthly. High-volume teams that import lists, run web forms, or sync integrations may need weekly scans, because duplicates build up quickly at each entry point. Pair scheduled cleanup with real-time checks on forms, imports, and workflows, so new duplicates are blocked before they enter the CRM. This keeps cleanup small and reporting accurate all year.

Do duplicate contacts hurt email deliverability?

Yes, duplicate contacts hurt email deliverability because they cause repeat sends to the same person, which raises unsubscribe rates and spam complaints. Inbox providers use those signals to judge sender reputation, so a poor reputation can send future campaigns to spam folders. Duplicates also inflate list size and distort open and click rates, which makes performance harder to measure. Merging duplicates before each send keeps engagement metrics honest and protects your inbox placement.
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The post Same Customer, Same Email, Twice: What Duplicate CRM Records Are Really Costing You appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Structure without the overhead

A well-built CRM can encode the entire Shipley process natively, then let each organization decide how much of it to actually use. Some deals warrant the full rigor of the framework — think large, complex, highly regulated procurements. Others move through a much simpler, condensed version. The point is flexibility: the full methodology is available when the stakes call for it, without forcing every deal through all 96 steps by default.

Different processes for different business lines

Not every part of an organization sells the same way. A government-focused team may need the full Shipley rigor, while a commercial or product-focused team might manage opportunities through a much simpler three-step process. A capable CRM supports different layouts and workflows per opportunity type, so each part of the business can use a process that actually fits how it sells — all inside the same system.

Automation on top of structure

Once a methodology is encoded into the system, it becomes something you can build on: required fields at specific stages, automated rules, workflow triggers, and reporting tied to methodology milestones. This turns a capture framework from a document teams are supposed to follow into something the system actively supports and enforces.

Why this matters

A methodology that lives only in a slide deck or a binder rarely gets followed consistently. One that's built into the day-to-day tool people already use — and scaled to the size of the deal — is far more likely to actually shape how opportunities get won.

The post 96 Steps, Simplified: Making the Shipley Methodology Actually Usable in GovCon365 AwardTrack appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A Sales leader opens a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE/CRM) reporting pipeline before a quarterly review. The forecast looks reasonable until managers question the numbers. Several opportunities have not been updated in weeks, and two business units use different methods to calculate pipeline revenue. Instead of discussing which opportunities need attention, the meeting risks turning into a debate about whose numbers are right.

Why Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Reporting and Source Records Disagree

When a sales manager questions a pipeline number, checking the underlying opportunities is a reasonable place to start. But the problem may be in the report itself. A filter, an outdated Microsoft Power BI refresh, or differences in record access can change the figures people see.

Other problems develop through everyday CRM usage. An opportunity can have a valid stage even though nobody has reviewed its status recently. Activities may be missing because employees track customer conversations elsewhere. The report reflects what is in Dynamics 365 CE/CRM, even when that information no longer tells the complete story.

At New Dynamic, we would start with the number being questioned and work backward. Compare the reporting period, filters, user permissions, and a few of the source records. That gives us a better basis for deciding whether to correct the report, address the underlying data, or review how the business maintains its CRM information.

The post When Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Reporting Becomes Unreliable and What to Do About It appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

If your SharePoint libraries are slowing down, permission changes are taking minutes instead of seconds, and you've traced it back to the unique permissions limit, you're not imagining it, and cleaning up documents won't fix it. The sustainable fix is to redesign how your document libraries are structured, so permissions are distributed across many libraries instead of piling up in one.  

Microsoft's own guidance backs this: the supported limit is 50,000 uniquely permissioned items per list or library, but the recommended threshold is 5,000, after which changes measurably slow down. 

This article covers why Dynamics 365 integrations hit that threshold faster than almost any other SharePoint use case, and exactly how to restructure your environment to fix it, without breaking existing documents or re-platforming your integration. 

Why This Happens in Dynamics 365 Specifically 

Most SharePoint environments take years to accumulate 5,000 uniquely permissioned items in a single library. Dynamics 365 integrations often get there in months. The reason is structural, not accidental: the default Dynamics 365–SharePoint integration typically creates one document (or folder) per CRM record, one per account, case, opportunity, or contact, and each of those needs unique permissions to mirror the access rules already defined in Dynamics 365. Every new record your team creates in the CRM adds another uniquely permissioned item to the same library. There's no native mechanism to distribute that growth, so it all funnels into one place until SharePoint starts pushing back. 

Why Manual Cleanup Doesn't Work 

Reorganizing a library by hand once it's already past 5,000 items is not a realistic fix. It's slow, it's error-prone at scale, and it carries real risk: stripping or re-mapping permissions retroactively can break the very access controls that keep CRM records aligned with the right SharePoint documents, the opposite of what you're trying to protect. The problem isn't clutter. It's that a single library was never designed to hold unlimited uniquely permissioned items in the first place. Fixing that means fixing the architecture, not tidying the output. 

The Fix: Redesign of the Library Structure, Not the Permissions 

Microsoft's own recommendation for large lists is to "design the list to have as few unique permissions as possible." In practice, that means distributing documents across multiple libraries, by date, by record type, by naming convention, or by any rule that fits how your organization actually grows, so no single library ever approaches the threshold in the first place. 

Doing this manually, on an ongoing basis, for a live Dynamics 365 integration isn't practical. This is exactly what SharePoint Structure Creator is built to automate. 

How it works for Dynamics 365 environments: 

• Rule-based library distribution. Documents are automatically routed into separate libraries based on rules you define, per letter or letter set, per period (year, quarter, month, week, day, or custom), per record, or any combination of these. For more complex needs, custom scripting with LUA lets you build structures around specific fields, projects, departments, or case types. 

• No disruption to existing documents. The rules apply going forward. Documents already in place stay exactly where they are and continue working normally, there's no forced migration or reorganization required to get started. 

• Fully transparent to end users. The distribution logic isn't visible inside Dynamics 365, and in SharePoint, users only see what their permissions already allow. Nothing changes about how your team works day to day. 

• Scales across sites. Structure Creator isn't limited to a single SharePoint site or site collection, documents can be distributed across multiple sites and collections using the same rule set, which matters once an organization is managing this at real scale. 

It's worth being clear about scope: Structure Creator solves the architecture and scale problem, keeping libraries under the threshold as your record count grows. It's a different layer from CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator, which solves the security problem — syncing Dynamics 365 access rules to SharePoint permissions so users only see what they're authorized to see in the CRM. Many organizations run both together as part of the Dynamics 365 + SharePoint Document Management Suite, but if your immediate issue is libraries hitting the unique permissions limit, Structure Creator is the piece that addresses it directly. 

See how the rule engine works 

What Changes Once the Structure Is Fixed 

Once documents are distributed across libraries that stay well under the recommended threshold, the practical effects show up quickly: library load times return to normal, permission changes process in seconds rather than minutes or timing out altogether, and you get real headroom before the next library approaches 5,000 items again. Just as importantly, the fix is structural, it keeps working as your Dynamics 365 record count keeps growing, instead of buying you a few more months before you're back where you started. 

If your SharePoint libraries are already approaching the limit, the gap between "recommended" and "critical" closes faster than most teams expect.  

Talk to our experts or start a free 15-day trial to see how rule-based structuring fits your environment before it becomes an outage. 

FAQ 

Will fixing the structure disrupt documents my team already has open or linked?  

No. Structure Creator applies its rules to new documents going forward. Existing documents remain exactly where they are and continue to function normally. 

How long does implementation typically take?  

Setup is configuration-based rather than a rebuild, you define the rules (letter, period, record, or custom logic), and the tool takes over routing from there. A free 15-day trial is available to test rule configuration and structure generation directly in your own environment. 

Does this require changes on the Dynamics 365 side, or only SharePoint?  

The restructuring happens on the SharePoint side. If you're also running CB Dynamics 365 to SharePoint Permissions Replicator, Structure Creator can be configured directly through it; as a standalone tool, installation is separate but straightforward. 

Can this run alongside our existing Dynamics 365–SharePoint integration without re-platforming?  

Yes. It's designed to layer onto your current integration rather than replace it, supporting Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Dynamics CRM 2013–2016, and custom Dataverse solutions, across SharePoint 2013, 2016, 2019, and SharePoint Online. 

Self-hosted or SaaS, which fits our environment?  

Both are supported. Self-hosted runs on-premises or on your own cloud servers/virtual machines; SaaS runs through Connecting Software's portal with no installation required. Either option includes a free trial. 

The post SharePoint’s 5,000 Unique Permissions Limit: Causes and Fixes appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Your biggest field cost is the extra kilometers nobody planned!

Every extra kilometer costs fuel, time, and visits you did not make, and across a field team, those costs repeat every single day.

A reputed client of ours spent almost $200 per day beyond the standard budget just on fuel! With 3 field reps on the job, the total cost went up to $7,200 per month.

The good news is that most of this waste is visible in the data you already hold. Every account, job, and appointment in Dynamics 365 has an address. Put those addresses on a map, and the wrong turns, double backs, and mismatched assignments stop being invisible.

This is where Dynamics 365 location intelligence pays for itself. Here is how Maplytics helps your team drive less, spend less, and do more, without changing the CRM they already use.

Where your fuel budget disappears

Unnecessary kilometers burn three things at once.

• Fuel: you pay for every wrong turn and every route that doubles back.
• Time: hours spent driving are hours not spent with customers.
• Money: wasted fuel plus lost visits hit both your costs and your revenue.

Consider a service team of ten technicians. Jobs are handed out to whoever is free, routes are decided one stop at a time, and nobody checks whether a customer sits two streets away from the next appointment. Nothing looks broken on any single day. But over a month, the extra kilometers add up to a real line on the budget and a real gap in the number of visits completed.

Fixing this takes four things working together- smarter assignment, nearby search, better routes, and planning around what is on the way.

Auto scheduling the right technician on the right job, first time

The cheapest kilometer is the one you never drive. That starts with who is sent where.

When work orders go to whoever is free, a technician may cross town for a job that someone closer could have done, or arrive without the right skills and need a second visit. Both cost fuel and time.

Auto scheduling on the map in Dynamics 365 solves this by allocating work orders to the right resource based on skills and characteristics. In Maplytics, this is delivered through pre-scheduled bookings.

Picture a dispatcher with a morning full of new jobs. Instead of assigning them one by one from a list, she sees the jobs on the map, and the work orders are matched to the technicians whose skills fit. No technician crosses town unnecessarily, and no job needs a repeat visit because the wrong person went. Fewer wasted trips mean less fuel burned and more jobs done.

Search Radius/Proximity to add visits, not trips

Once the day is planned, the next question is what else is close by. Radius search in Dynamics 365 answers it by finding records within a set distance or travel time around a point. Proximity search in Dynamics 365 works the same way, and on a Dynamics CRM proximity map, a rep sees nearby accounts, open opportunities, or service jobs without leaving the CRM.

Take a sales rep whose afternoon meeting is canceled. Without a map, that hour is lost. With a radius search around her current location, she finds open opportunities within a short drive, and turns the gap into two quick visits.

The saving works both ways. A technician heading to one job can pick up another one nearby, and a manager can see which customers share a neighborhood before sending anyone out. Radius search in Dynamics CRM turns scattered one-off trips into grouped visits, which is how teams fit more into the same day without driving more.

Route optimization for the shortest, smartest routes every day

With the right jobs assigned and nearby visits grouped, the order of the stops decides how much you drive. Dynamics 365 route optimization turns a list of stops into the shortest, smartest route, so reps drive less and visit more.

Teams often search for route optimization in Dynamics CRM or sales route optimization in Dynamics 365 because planning stops by hand is slow and rarely the shortest. Route mapping in Dynamics 365 solves both problems. The route appears on the map, with turn-by-turn directions and navigation through Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze, whichever the rep prefers. No one has to change how they drive.

Imagine a service manager with ten jobs and three technicians. Instead of guessing, she groups the jobs around each technician, then optimizes each route. The route map in Dynamics 365 shows the plan before anyone leaves the yard. The day ends with fewer kilometers driven and more jobs completed.

Point of Interest Location plans around what is on the way

Even a good route can be undone by midday detours. Point of Interest Location helps you plan around relevant places near a stop or route, rather than reacting once the day is already underway.

For a field team, that means fewer unplanned diversions. The stops that matter are part of the plan from the start, so the route stays short, and the schedule stays intact.

What your team gets back

When scheduling, nearby search, routing, and planning work together on one map, the savings show up where it counts:

• Up to 30% fewer kilometers
• 4 more visits per day
• Up to 40% lower fuel costs

Those are the benefits of treating location as part of how your team works, not as an afterthought. Less fuel, less time on the road, and more time with customers.

What’s More?

If you wish to combine maps, routes, schedules, and real-time updates to make a difference, Maplytics with MapCopilot, its AI assistant, is available immediately for Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Pages, and Dataverse. Organizations interested in adoption, 15-day free trials, or personalized demos are encouraged to contact Maplytics’ sales team at crm@inogic.com

For more information, visit our website or Microsoft Marketplace. One can hop onto the detailed Blogs, Client Testimonials, Success Stories, Industry Applications, and Video Library for quick query resolution. Technical docs for the working of Maplytics are also available for reference.

Please leave us a review or share your experience on the Microsoft Marketplace or the G2 Website.
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The post Drive Less, Spend Less, Do More with Maps in Dynamics 365 appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Every sales and service team on Dynamics 365 takes some version of this call. A customer phones in to reorder, or to ask about a shipment, and identifies themselves with whatever is in front of them: a PO number, a tracking number off a box, part of a company name, the last four digits of a phone number.

What happens next depends on where that detail lives. A rep who already knows which record holds the answer finds it quickly. A rep holding a PO number and half a company name starts asking questions one at a time. Customer, prospect or lead? Is the email on the account or the contact? Is it on an order or an invoice? Each question is its own search, and the customer is on hold for all of them.

Time the Search

Here is a test you can run this week. The next time a customer calls with only a PO or a partial phone number, time how long it takes to get from that clue to the customer, the order and the invoice on screen, and count how many separate places the rep looks along the way.

Then look for that time in your reporting. You won't find it. Handle time tells you a call ran long. It doesn't tell you how much of it went to searching, and the only person keeping track was the customer.

The Tell

If "let me look that up" gets said more than once on the same call, or a rep has to ask the caller for a different piece of information because the first one didn't find anything, the problem isn't the rep. The search was built for the database, not for the call.

What Fixed It?

At P2 Automation we replaced the one-question-at-a-time routine at a manufacturer with a single search panel built around the call. Any detail the caller offers, from a company fragment or customer ID to an email domain or part of a phone number, returns customers, prospect accounts and leads together. An order, invoice, PO or tracking number swaps the leads list for sales orders and invoices, so the customer, the order and the invoice land on one screen in under a second.

The lesson for any Dynamics 365 team: if the rep has to decide where to look before they can look, the customer pays for it in hold time.

Read the full case study, with screenshots: https://www.p2automation.com/insights/why-customers-wait-on-hold-while-reps-search-the-crm

See more about how P2 Automation works with Dynamics 365 teams: https://www.p2automation.com/managed-services-plans

Or tell us the process your team hates most. Twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether a My Day view would fix it, and if it wouldn't: https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post The Hold Time No Dynamics 365 Report Will Ever Show You appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A client calls with a question. Before you can answer it, you need to know who the main contacts are, what coverage they have, what happened at the last renewal, what your team has discussed with them recently, and whether there is anything still outstanding.

How many places do you need to look?

For many employee benefits agencies, the answer is more than one. Some information is in the agency management system. Other details are in spreadsheets. Recent conversations are sitting in Outlook. Someone maintains a separate list for key contacts. And there may still be information that lives primarily in the head of the account manager who works with the client every day.

None of those decisions necessarily seemed inefficient when they were made. The problem becomes apparent over time, as the agency accumulates more clients, more employees, more plans and more information.

The job isn't simply to "centralize data." The real job is to be able to understand the full history of a client when you need it, without having to reconstruct that history every time.

Five places can easily become the normal way of working

We spoke with one benefits agency that described exactly how this happens. Before centralizing more of its client information, the team maintained separate lists for different purposes: a "who to call" list, a birthday list and contact lists for individual clients. Now the team can go into one system, run the appropriate report and update the information there.

That may sound like a small operational improvement, but it points to a much larger issue. Every separate list creates another version of the client. The spreadsheet might tell you one thing, the contact list another, while the policy records and recent activities contain other pieces of the story.

Eventually, someone has to determine which one is current.

The more places employees have to maintain, the more opportunities there are for information to become incomplete or outdated.

The real test comes when someone else needs the information

A fragmented client history may not seem like a serious problem when the account manager who knows the client best is sitting at their desk. They know where everything is.

But what happens when that person is on vacation, out sick, leaves the agency or simply isn't available when the client calls? Someone else has to reconstruct the account. They need to know the right contacts, which policies are active, what changed recently, what is coming up and what has already been discussed.

This is why having a complete client history is about more than saving employees a few minutes of searching. It makes client knowledge agency knowledge rather than individual knowledge.

That's especially important as an agency grows. Clients should not receive a completely different level of service depending on whether the one employee who knows their account happens to be available.

A client record needs to be more than a contact record

Putting names, phone numbers and email addresses into one system is useful, but it doesn't solve the larger job. The account itself needs to provide a starting point for understanding the relationship.

In BenefitsBridge, information is organized from the account level down, giving the team a way to move from an employer account into the information associated with that client.

That includes the benefits information that makes an employee benefits relationship more complicated than an ordinary CRM relationship. For example, a client may have medical, dental, vision and disability policies. BenefitsBridge can maintain active policies as well as renewed or terminated policies, and users can drill into individual policies to see details such as the carrier, coverage type, policy number, effective date and primary producer. Policy terms can contain additional information including funding type, rate type, covered lives and premium information.

That changes what it means to "look up a client." You're not simply finding an address and phone number. You're getting closer to answering the question that actually matters: What is going on with this client?

The information becomes more useful when you can ask questions of it

Centralizing information isn't very valuable if the only way to use it is to open records one at a time. Sometimes the job is to understand one client. Other times you need to find a group of clients that share a particular characteristic or answer a question about your book of business.

One agency using BenefitsBridge described a request from leadership to see its groups based on revenue and headcount. Rather than requesting a new custom report, the user could add the needed columns, export the information to Excel and have what leadership needed.

The same agency said that after investing the time to build its data, it could see the value of having that information readily available.

That's an important distinction. The goal isn't to collect more data for the sake of collecting data. The goal is to have usable information when there is a job to do.

One client shouldn't require five searches

Benefits brokers deal with enough complexity already. Finding out what your own agency knows about a client shouldn't add another layer.

The ideal isn't necessarily that every piece of information looks exactly the same or that employees never use Excel or Outlook again. Those are useful tools and, in most agencies, aren't going anywhere. The goal is to have a reliable home for the client relationship so employees know where to start.

When someone needs to understand an account, they shouldn't have to hunt through a collection of disconnected lists and files or wait for the person who "knows that client" to become available. They should be able to find the client, understand the relationship and get on with the actual job that needs to be done.

That's the job BenefitsBridge is designed to make easier: turning scattered client information into a client history your entire agency can actually use, so understanding an account doesn't depend on knowing which spreadsheet to open, which inbox to search or which employee to ask.

The post How Do Employee Benefits Brokers Keep a Client's Full History From Living in Five Different Places? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

For benefits agencies using Microsoft technology, BenefitsBridge combines CRM and agency management capabilities on the Microsoft Power Platform. This gives producers, account managers, and agency leaders a shared view of client relationships while helping automate the activities that keep those relationships moving forward.

Key Highlights

• CRM can help benefits brokers uncover sales opportunities within their existing book of business.
• Automated reminders make client check-ins and sales follow-up more consistent.
• Structured onboarding helps agencies provide a consistent client experience while creating opportunities to expand relationships.
• A centralized sales pipeline gives producers and management better visibility into prospects and next steps.
• Shared CRM data makes it easier to identify internal referrals and clients who may need additional products or services.

1. Use CRM to Find Sales Opportunities Within Existing Client Accounts

One of the easiest places for a benefits agency to find new opportunities is within relationships it already has.

A CRM gives producers and account managers a centralized view of the client across departments and product lines. Depending on the agency, that could include group benefits, individual health plans, commercial insurance, retirement planning, or other services.

More importantly, the CRM can remind employees when it is time to reach out rather than relying on someone to remember.

How can automated client check-ins lead to more sales?

Regular client check-ins give account managers an opportunity to strengthen relationships while learning whether a client's needs have changed.

One agency we work with, for example, has a rule that every client with premium volume of $50,000 or more is contacted once per quarter. Those accounts are categorized in CRM, making it easy to generate the appropriate client list.

Each quarter, the account manager contacts those clients to ask how things are going and whether there is anything else the agency can do to help. Notes from the conversation are recorded in CRM for future reference, and management can track whether the required activities have taken place.

Sometimes simply asking the right question at the right time uncovers an opportunity that otherwise would have been missed.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, agencies can use workflows to assign and track activities based on criteria such as territory, specialization, or workload. Agencies that need more advanced automation can extend those processes with Microsoft Power Automate.

2. Turn New Client Onboarding Into a Consistent Relationship-Building Process

Client onboarding is more than an administrative process. It is one of the first opportunities a benefits agency has to demonstrate the quality of its service and begin building a long-term relationship.

CRM workflows can create tasks and reminders based on the products a client purchases, helping ensure that important onboarding activities do not depend on an individual employee's memory.

For example, when one benefits agency onboards a new client, specific product codes automatically initiate a series of activities. If the client enrolls in a certain type of health plan, the CRM may assign a task reminding the employee to send a handwritten thank-you note three days later.

Fifteen days after enrollment, another reminder prompts an employee to call the client to make sure insurance cards and the first benefit statement were received.

Additional tasks can continue throughout the client's first year.

The result is a repeatable process that helps employees provide a consistent level of service. It also creates natural opportunities to learn more about the client and determine whether additional products or services could be useful.

Because BenefitsBridge is built on the Microsoft platform, agencies can combine these types of CRM workflows with familiar Microsoft tools. Learn more about CRM for health insurance and employee benefits brokers.

3. Give Producers a Clearer CRM Sales Pipeline

CRM can also help benefits agencies turn lists of prospective clients into an organized, measurable sales process.

Instead of prospects living in individual spreadsheets, inboxes, or personal contact lists, CRM provides one place to track who owns each opportunity, where it stands in the sales process, when the prospect was last contacted, and what needs to happen next.

What does CRM prospect management look like for a benefits agency?

Some insurance brokers import contact lists from organizations they work with, such as a local Chamber of Commerce. The businesses on that list can be imported into CRM and distributed among members of the sales team.

Account managers and producers can then review the businesses, select the prospects they plan to contact, and convert the appropriate records into leads.

From there, an organized sales pipeline can show:

• Who is responsible for the prospect
• Where the opportunity is in the sales funnel
• When the prospect was last contacted
• What the next step should be
• Which opportunities require follow-up

Prospects can also be segmented using criteria such as industry, company size, renewal date, or other information captured by the agency.

That gives producers a more structured way to personalize outreach and continue nurturing prospects rather than allowing opportunities to disappear after the first contact.

BenefitsBridge includes sales pipeline management alongside client, policy, renewal, and other agency information. This means sales activity does not have to operate as a separate process once a prospect becomes a client.

4. Use Shared CRM Data to Generate More Internal Referrals

Employee benefits agencies often have opportunities hiding inside existing client relationships because one department knows something another department does not.

A centralized CRM can make that information visible across the agency.

For example, a benefits broker may see that a client is approaching Medicare eligibility or learn during a conversation that the client needs another type of coverage. Instead of relying on an informal email or hallway conversation, the opportunity can be captured and routed to the appropriate person.

The agency can also use a personalized, pre-built email to begin the conversation with the client.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 business process flows or Power Automate can trigger notifications and create follow-up activities so the referral does not get lost.

CRM can also identify clients who have gone quiet

Another useful sales trigger is inactivity.

Some agencies establish a rule that if six months pass without notes or updates on a client's CRM record, an activity is automatically created for the appropriate broker to follow up.

That simple rule helps keep client engagement from depending entirely on memory.

It also creates another opportunity to ask what has changed since the last conversation and whether the agency can provide additional assistance.

How Does CRM Help Benefits Agency Managers Improve Sales Accountability?

CRM gives agency leaders visibility into whether client engagement and sales activities are actually happening.

Depending on the level of reporting an agency needs, managers can use:

• Dynamics 365 dashboards for quick performance overviews
• On-demand reports for more detailed analysis
• Filtered views for specific client or prospect segments
• Excel exports for additional analysis
• Microsoft Power BI for more advanced reporting and visualization

The objective is not simply to produce more reports. It is to make client and prospect activity visible enough that managers can identify gaps, reinforce successful processes, and make sure opportunities receive appropriate follow-up.

Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform for Employee Benefits CRM?

Benefits agencies often already use Microsoft products throughout the workday. Outlook, Excel, Word, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications are familiar parts of the agency's workflow.

BenefitsBridge is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, allowing CRM and agency management processes to operate within that broader Microsoft environment.

For benefits agencies, BenefitsBridge can support processes including:

• Client and account management
• Sales pipeline management
• Client onboarding
• Policy management
• Policy renewals
• Commission tracking
• Automated alerts and workflows
• Reporting and dashboards
• Document management
• Client service activities

This approach is especially useful when an agency wants CRM to become part of employees' everyday workflow instead of another isolated system they have to remember to update.

For example, Dynamics 365 integration with Outlook can help employees capture relevant client communications as part of the shared CRM record rather than leaving important relationship history inside individual inboxes. See how BenefitsBridge works with the Microsoft tools benefits agencies already use.

CRM Should Support Sales Without Creating More Work

The best CRM sales strategy is not necessarily about asking producers to do more. It is about using the information and activities already happening throughout the agency more effectively.

A client service conversation may reveal another need. An onboarding task can become an opportunity to strengthen a new relationship. A prospect list can become a structured pipeline. A client record with no activity for six months can trigger a follow-up before the relationship goes cold.

When those processes are connected, CRM becomes more than a database. It becomes a practical way to help producers and account managers know who needs attention, why they need it, and what should happen next.

Frequently Asked Questions About CRM for Employee Benefits Sales

How can CRM help employee benefits brokers increase sales?

CRM can help benefits brokers increase sales by organizing prospects, automating follow-up, identifying opportunities within existing accounts, supporting internal referrals, and giving producers better visibility into their sales pipeline.

Can CRM identify sales opportunities among existing benefits clients?

Yes. Agencies can categorize clients and create automated activities based on factors such as premium volume, product ownership, eligibility milestones, or time since the last interaction. These activities give account managers a reason to reconnect and determine whether the client's needs have changed.

Can a CRM automate follow-up for benefits brokers?

Yes. Dynamics 365 workflows and Microsoft Power Automate can create reminders, assign activities, trigger notifications, and support repeatable processes for client onboarding, prospect follow-up, referrals, and ongoing client engagement.

How can CRM improve referrals inside an insurance agency?

A centralized CRM gives employees across departments greater visibility into the overall client relationship. When an employee identifies a need for another product or service, the opportunity can be recorded, assigned, and tracked instead of relying on an informal referral.

What is BenefitsBridge?

BenefitsBridge is ForgeXRM's CRM and agency management platform for health insurance and employee benefits brokers. Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, it brings client and policy information, sales, renewals, commissions, workflows, documents, and reporting into one system.

Put Your CRM Data to Work

If your agency already captures client, policy, prospect, and activity information, the next question is whether that information is actively helping your team find and follow up on opportunities.

BenefitsBridge is designed specifically for health insurance and employee benefits brokers and is built on the Microsoft platform many agencies already use every day.

Learn more about BenefitsBridge for employee benefits brokers or contact ForgeXRM to discuss how CRM, automation, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 could support your agency's sales and client relationship processes.

The post How Can Employee Benefits Brokers Use CRM to Increase Sales? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Choosing between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Mailchimp depends on your marketing requirements, existing technology, budget, and preferred platform. Both offer marketing automation capabilities, audience targeting, personalized communication, and automated customer journeys.

For businesses using Dynamics 365 Sales, the decision also involves how effectively marketing activities and customer engagement can be connected with CRM. If Mailchimp already supports your marketing operations, the practical requirement may not be replacing it, but connecting it with Dynamics 365 CRM.

Key Takeaways

• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Mailchimp both support marketing automation and automated customer journeys.
• The right choice depends on your marketing requirements, existing technology, budget, and preferred platform.
• Connecting Mailchimp with Dynamics 365 CRM helps maintain aligned customer information and campaign visibility.
• Bringing marketing engagement into CRM gives sales teams better context for customer follow-ups.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights vs. Mailchimp: A Marketing Automation Comparison

Both platforms help businesses create campaigns, target audiences, automate communications, and measure engagement. Rather than treating one as simply more advanced than the other, businesses should evaluate which platform best fits their existing marketing operations.

The choice is therefore not simply about functionality. Organizations should consider their current marketing investment, operational requirements, licensing costs, and how closely they want their marketing platform connected with Dynamics 365.

Why Do Businesses Continue Using Mailchimp?

Many businesses already have established audiences, templates, campaigns, automation workflows, and Customer Journeys in Mailchimp. Depending on their requirements, Mailchimp can also be a more cost-effective option than moving to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. For these organizations, replacing an existing marketing platform may not be necessary. Instead, they need to integrate Mailchimp with Dynamics CRM so marketing and sales teams can work with connected information.

Connect Mailchimp and Dynamics 365 CRM

When Mailchimp and Dynamics 365 Sales operate separately, campaign engagement and customer information can remain disconnected. Marketing teams may know who opened or clicked an email, while sales users cannot easily see that engagement when reviewing the same contact or lead. Dynamics CRM Mailchimp integration that helps businesses continue using Mailchimp while bringing relevant marketing information into Dynamics 365 CRM.

Synchronize Contacts and Marketing Data

Sync Dynamics 365 records with Mailchimp through supported synchronization workflows. Contacts and leads can be synchronized with Mailchimp, while Mailchimp audiences, members, and tags can be brought into CRM.

This reduces repeated exports and imports and helps teams sync Mailchimp Dynamics CRM data more efficiently.

Track Mailchimp Campaign Engagement in CRM

Users can access supported Mailchimp campaign activities in Dynamics 365 CRM, including emails sent, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and bounces. This makes Mailchimp email marketing in Dynamics 365 more useful for sales teams by providing campaign context before customer follow-ups.

Track Mailchimp Customer Journey Activity

Businesses using automated Mailchimp Customer Journeys can also bring relevant email engagement activity into Dynamics 365 CRM.

This helps CRM users review what customers received and how they interacted with automated campaigns. Learn more in How to Track Mailchimp Customer Journey Email Insights in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Manage Campaigns with CRM Context

This campaign integration for Dynamics 365 helps businesses keep supported Mailchimp campaign activities connected with their CRM workflows while continuing to use their preferred marketing platform.

Which Option Is Right for Your Business?

Choose Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys if it best fits your Microsoft ecosystem, marketing strategy, and customer engagement requirements.

Choose Mailchimp if it already supports your marketing workflows and provides the functionality and cost structure that suit your business.

If you use Mailchimp and Dynamics 365 CRM together, Marketing4Dynamics provides a way to connect both platforms through a Mailchimp Dynamics 365 integration.

Marketing4Dynamics also has a 5-star rating on Microsoft Marketplace.

Connect Mailchimp with Dynamics 365 CRM using Marketing4Dynamics and explore how your sales and marketing teams can work with connected customer and campaign information.

Visit www.inogic.com or Contact crm@inogic.com to learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Mailchimp?

Both platforms support marketing automation and customer engagement. The choice depends on your existing technology, marketing requirements, budget, and preferred platform.

How do you integrate Mailchimp with Dynamics 365 CRM?

Marketing4Dynamics provides a Mailchimp Dynamics CRM integration that connects supported customer, audience, campaign, and engagement information with Dynamics 365 CRM.

Can Mailchimp Customer Journey activities be tracked in Dynamics 365 CRM?

Yes. Supported Mailchimp Customer Journey email activities and engagement information can be synchronized into Dynamics 365 CRM for improved visibility.

Can Mailchimp campaign opens and clicks be viewed in Dynamics 365 CRM?

Yes. Marketing4Dynamics synchronizes supported campaign activities, including emails sent, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and bounces, making engagement information available in CRM.
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The post Dynamics 365 Customer Insights vs. Mailchimp: Your email marketing guide! appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A Dynamics 365 map is where customer data becomes a decision.

Every account, lead, and work order in your CRM carries an address, yet most teams still read those addresses as rows in a grid. The leaders pulling ahead put a map on top of the data. They see patterns, plan smarter visits, and balance workloads before problems appear. Below, each capability comes with a use case, so you can see what it changes in practice.

If you are evaluating how to map Dynamics CRM data, here is what matters, and how Maplytics delivers it inside the CRM you already use.

Start with clean location data

A map is only as good as the coordinates behind it. Before dynamics crm maps can show anything useful, records need latitude and longitude. That is what geocoding Dynamics 365 data does. It converts addresses into points that can be plotted, filtered, and analyzed.

Once records are geocoded, Inogic-Maplytics plots them with color-coded, custom pushpins, so segments such as account type or status are visible at a glance.

Use case: Consider a distributor that imports 3,000 accounts after a trade show. Until the records are geocoded, none of them appear on the map. Once they are, the sales head colors the pushpins by account type and sees that most high-value accounts sit in two cities, while a third city has many small accounts and no key ones. A grid of addresses would never have shown that.

Then comes the question leaders actually ask: where is the concentration?

Heat maps in Dynamics 365 answer it by showing the intensity of your data across a region. A heat map in Dynamics CRM can reveal where sales are strongest, where cases cluster, or which areas are underserved. Maplytics supports heat map visualization of CRM data, so those insights stay inside the platform where your team already works.

Use case: A regional support manager overlays open cases on a heat map and sees a dense cluster around one suburb. That points to a decision: station a technician nearby or investigate a recurring product issue. A table of case counts per city would have hidden it.

Map integration should be a choice, not a constraint

Searches for Dynamics 365 map integration, maps integration, and map integration for Dynamics CRM all share one assumption: that you will pick a provider and live with it. That assumption is outdated.

Teams ask for different things. Some search for Dynamics 365 Google Maps integration because their users already know Google Maps, and a field rep who navigates with it every day needs no training. Others look up Azure Maps for Dynamics CRM and Azure Maps Dynamics 365 integration because they want mapping to sit within their Microsoft cloud and governance, as an organization with strict data policies would. Others want a map styled to their brand, such as a retail chain showing its store network in its own colors.

Maplytics supports all three: Google Maps, Azure Maps, and Mapbox. You choose the map that fits your business, and the same Maplytics features sit on top!

A note on Esri: teams searching for Esri Dynamics 365 or Esri maps for Dynamics 365 are usually after GIS-grade context. Maplytics lets you overlay ESRI ArcGIS feature layers on the map, so specialist boundary or infrastructure layers can sit alongside your CRM records.

Use case: A utility or public-sector team overlays an ArcGIS layer of service boundaries behind its customer pushpins and sees at once which customers fall inside an affected zone, without exporting a single list.

From "what is nearby?" to "where do I drive next?"

Proximity/Radius Search in Dynamics 365 is the question every field team asks first: which customers are close to this location? A radius search in Dynamics 365 finds records within a specified distance or travel time from a point. On a Dynamics CRM proximity map, a rep can see nearby accounts, open opportunities, or service jobs without leaving the CRM.

Use case: A rep's afternoon meeting is canceled. She runs a radius search around her current location, finds three open opportunities within 10 km, and turns a lost hour into two quick visits.

The next question is how to visit them. Dynamics 365 route optimization turns a list of stops into the shortest, smartest route, so reps drive less and visit more. Route mapping in Dynamics 365 also gives turn-by-turn directions, with navigation through Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze, whichever the rep prefers.

Use case: Consider a service manager with ten jobs and three technicians. Instead of guessing, she searches by radius around each technician's location, groups the jobs, and optimizes each route. Each technician opens the route in the navigation app they already use. The day ends with fewer kilometers driven and more jobs completed.

Territories decide who wins the quarter

A Dynamics CRM sales territory is more than a line on a map. Uneven territories mean overloaded reps, neglected accounts, and missed targets. Territory planning in Dynamics 365 needs to be visual, flexible, and easy to revisit.

Maplytics lets you build, balance, and categorize multiple territories with flexible filters and save draft territories for future planning. Assignment rules then connect territories to records, so the plan on the map becomes the plan in your CRM. Leaders can test a new structure on the map before anyone's accounts change hands.

Use case: A sales director is adding two reps next quarter. She builds draft territories on the map, adjusts the boundaries until the workloads look even, and saves each version as a draft. Only when she is happy with one do the assignment rules move the accounts, so no rep wakes up to a surprise.

Ready to Explore What Maplytics Can Do for Your Team?

Maplytics with MapCopilot, its AI assistant, is a 5-star rated application on the Microsoft Marketplace. It is available immediately for Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Pages, and Dataverse. It is a certified app on the Microsoft Marketplace and empowers users with location intelligence within the CRM. Organizations interested in adoption, 15-day free trials, or personalized demos are encouraged to contact Maplytics’ sales team at crm@inogic.com

For more information, visit our website or Microsoft Marketplace. One can hop onto the detailed Blogs, Client Testimonials, Success Stories, Industry Applications, and Video Library for quick query resolution. Technical docs for the working of Maplytics are also available for reference.

Kindly leave us a review or write about your experience on the Microsoft Marketplace or the G2 Website.
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The post Heat Maps, Routes, and Territories- The Dynamics 365 Map Playbook! appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

In October 2026, Microsoft Announced 30 CRM Skills across Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights. The skills are generally available in Microsoft Copilot Cowork for tasks such as reviewing deals and preparing customer responses. Code supports building reusable solutions and is available through the Frontier program. Autopilot supports recurring work and remains in private preview.

For teams planning AI projects in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE/CRM), we would revisit the development backlog before approving another custom agent. Something that required custom development six months ago may now be covered partly by a Microsoft skill. The remaining work could be an approval, an integration, or a business rule that needs more attention.

What Do Dynamics 365 CRM Skills Actually Add

Dynamics 365 CRM skills provide reusable instructions for business tasks that involve CRM information. They work through Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, which provide access to supported data and actions. Microsoft reports that the 30 skills work with more than 180 generally available tools.

In Dynamics 365 Sales, skills can help analyze pipeline health and identify deals that need attention. Customer Service representatives can use them to prepare escalation summaries from case histories. Customer Insights skills can check consent requirements and assist with preparing marketing communications.

Microsoft provides separate guidance for D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights. Copilot Cowork can combine these CRM skills with relevant information from Microsoft 365 emails, meetings, and other workplace sources.

Where Do Native Dynamics 365 CRM Skills End and Custom Development Begin

Consider the original request to identify stalled opportunities. If the sales director wants a review of deals that have gone quiet, an existing skill may provide enough information. If the sales director also wants Copilot to update opportunity stages or coordinate approvals, we need to understand how those actions should work before deciding what to build. Microsoft provides several ways to support those requirements.

Take the approval step. If a sales manager needs to sign off before an opportunity changes stages, we would first look at what Dynamics 365 CE/CRM or Power Automate already supports. That is a smaller problem than developing and maintaining another agent.

Connecting the process to an outside business system may require more work. We would need to understand what information moves between the systems, which actions are available, and how failures are handled. For a broader comparison, see New Dynamic’s article on Native Dynamics 365 Agents, Copilot Cowork, and Copilot Studio.

A Pipeline Review Can Be Accurate and Still Misleading

Suppose two Sales teams use the opportunity stage Negotiation. The first team moves deals into that stage only after legal review. The second moves them there when pricing discussions begin.

Both teams are using the same field, but the stage represents a different level of buyer commitment. Now the sales director asks Copilot to identify late-stage opportunities that may slip. The skill can retrieve the correct records and still produce a comparison that leadership should question.

At New Dynamic, we would examine how the teams use the opportunity stages. We would also review close-date practices, recorded activities, currency handling, and access across business units.

For instance, a deal with an old close date and little recent activity may appear stalled. But if one team records most customer discussions outside Dynamics 365, that assessment is missing important context.

Before comparing at-risk opportunities across business units, check what each team means by Negotiation and account for differences in how those stages are used.

 What Changes When Copilot Can Update CRM Records

Analyzing an opportunity is one thing. Changing it introduces different responsibilities. Microsoft's Sales skills documentation specifies user confirmation before consequential actions, including updating records and sending emails. Customer Service and Customer Insights have their own review and consent requirements.

Administrators also need to verify the intended Dynamics 365 CE/CRM environment and the permissions of the people using the skills. These checks matter in organizations with several environments or business units that restrict access to customer information.

Licensing cannot be assumed from the announcement alone. For example, the Sales plugin requires qualifying Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot licensing, an enabled Dataverse MCP server, and applicable usage-based charges.

Someone needs to investigate unsuccessful actions, maintain the configuration, and determine what happens when business requirements change. New Dynamic’s AI Agent Governance Guidance examines those responsibilities in greater detail.

A proposed CRM update and a completed change are different things. Confirm who approves the action, whether the change was saved, and who investigates an unsuccessful update.

What If Your Organization Already Built Custom Agents

Organizations with existing Copilot Studio agents have another reason to review the announcement. Consider a custom workflow that collects account information, summarizes recent customer activity, and prepares a briefing for a seller. A supported CRM skill may now handle some of that preparation.

The organization still needs to examine everything that happens around it. The current workflow may contain specialized rules, integrations, or approval steps that the native skill does not replace.

There is little value in removing a working solution simply because Microsoft has introduced overlapping functionality. Compare the actual requirements, test the alternative, and consider the maintenance involved before making that decision. This review may also identify opportunities to simplify a custom agent without replacing it entirely.

How Should You Test a Skill Before Building Something New

Return to the sales director's request to identify at-risk opportunities. Start with a few sellers who know the pipeline and can recognize when a recommendation misses something important. A useful initial test has three steps.

1. Choose opportunities that reflect Sales activity.
   Include records from different business units, with varying stages, close dates, and activity histories. Use information that the participating sellers already know well.
2. Compare Copilot's findings with the sellers' assessments.
   Do the flagged deals need attention? Did Copilot miss a customer conversation or misunderstand the stage of an opportunity? Ask sellers to explain where they agree or disagree with the results.
3. Investigate the differences before changing the solution.
   Missing information may come from incomplete records, different Sales practices, limited access, or a capability the skill does not support. Determine the cause before considering custom development.

A successful test should tell the team whether the skill helps sellers make better decisions during their normal work. It should also reveal where existing Dynamics 365 configuration or Power Automate could address a remaining requirement. For organizations still evaluating AI priorities, New Dynamic's D365 AI Opportunity Lab can help assess potential applications, readiness, and the scope of an initial pilot.

Dynamics 365 CRM Skills: Key Takeaways

• Microsoft's new Dynamics 365 CRM skills expand the work organizations can accomplish with supported Copilot capabilities.
• MCP tools provide access to CRM data and actions, while skills and Copilot Cowork help coordinate tasks.
• Different business definitions can produce misleading recommendations even when the underlying records are technically correct.
• Permissions, licensing, and approvals require attention when Copilot moves from analysis to changes in CRM.
• Existing custom agents are worth reviewing for overlapping functionality, but replacement should follow testing.

For the sales director, identifying stalled opportunities may be enough to get started. Let the sellers review what Copilot finds and see whether the information helps them manage the pipeline. If the team later wants to automate stage changes or follow-up activities, those requirements can be evaluated separately.

Travis South – Director of Marketing

The post Dynamics 365 CRM Skills: When to Use Native Copilot Before Custom Agents appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Think about your team's typical workday. A sales representative spends time reviewing CRM records before a customer meeting. A service agent searches through previous cases for a relevant solution. Meanwhile, another team manually updates information across multiple applications. You already have the data, the tools, and the processes. What you need is a way to make them work better together.

That's where Microsoft Copilot Consulting Services come in.Rather than expecting your business to adapt to AI, you can bring Copilot into your existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform environment, configured around how your teams actually work.

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft Copilot Consulting Services help businesses implement AI capabilities within their existing Dynamics 365 and Power Platform environments.
• Copilot Studio supports the development of custom AI agents tailored to organizational workflows and business requirements.
• Dynamics 365 Copilot provides AI assistance across sales, customer service, field service, and customer engagement activities.
• Copilot integration can connect business applications and internal knowledge sources to make relevant information easier to access.
• AI consulting expertise helps organizations customize and implement Copilot capabilities for practical business use.

Your Workflows Are Unique. Your Copilot Should Be Too.

A standard AI assistant can answer questions or generate content. But what happens when you need it to understand your CRM records, access internal knowledge, or support a specific business process?

Through Microsoft Copilot Studio consulting and development services, you can build custom AI agents that connect with your business data and workflows.

Imagine asking an agent to retrieve customer information, summarize an opportunity, or initiate a routine process without navigating multiple screens.

For more complex requirements, multi-agent orchestration can help specialized agents coordinate activities across connected business processes.

The goal isn't to introduce another tool into your day. It's to make the tools you already use more useful.

One Microsoft Ecosystem. Different Teams. Different Needs.

Your sales, service, marketing, and operations teams don't work the same way. So why should they use AI in exactly the same way?

Copilot implementation and consulting services are available across Microsoft business applications:

• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Help representatives prepare for meetings, draft emails, qualify leads, and understand opportunities.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Support agents with case summaries, knowledge recommendations, and contextual responses.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service: Make work order information, scheduling assistance, and troubleshooting guidance more accessible.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys: Support audience segmentation, campaign planning, and personalized customer engagement.
• Copilot in Power Platform: Use natural-language capabilities to simplify app development, workflow automation, and reporting.

These Dynamics 365 Copilot services help organizations introduce AI capabilities where teams can put them to practical use.

What If Your Business Knowledge Was Easier to Find?

Consider how much valuable information sits inside SharePoint documents, CRM records, and internal knowledge bases.

Your employees shouldn't have to remember where every document is stored just to find an answer.

Through Copilot integration services, you can connect AI capabilities with organizational knowledge sources, making relevant information accessible through natural-language interactions.

Whether someone needs customer context, an internal procedure, or supporting documentation, connected knowledge can reduce unnecessary searching and help them work with greater clarity.

Make Copilot Fit Your Business

Implementing Copilot is about more than enabling AI features. It's about deciding where those capabilities belong and how they should support your processes.

With the right expertise in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and AI solutions, organizations can customize and integrate Copilot around their operational requirements. And sometimes, the value of AI becomes clearer through a specific CRM task.

Take Inogic's Map My Relationships Agent, for example. It brings interactive Dynamics 365 CRM relationship visualization into Microsoft Teams and Copilot, allowing users to explore connected records, access relationship health insights, and interact with CRM information directly from the visualization.

It's one example of how AI can make existing business information easier to understand and act upon. You know how your business works. Inogic helps you explore how AI can work within it.

Ready to Make Microsoft Copilot Work for Your Business?

From customizing Copilot for Dynamics 365 to developing AI agents and automating workflows, Inogic ensures you bring AI capabilities into your existing business processes.

Explore our services at www.inogic.com or email us at crm@inogic.com to discuss your requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Microsoft Copilot Consulting Services?

Microsoft Copilot Consulting Services help organizations plan, customize, integrate, and implement Copilot capabilities within their business applications. These services support Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot Studio.

Can Microsoft Copilot be customized for specific business workflows?

Yes. Microsoft Copilot Studio allows organizations to develop custom AI agents, connect business data, and automate processes based on specific requirements.

How does Copilot integrate with Dynamics 365 CRM?

Copilot can assist users with CRM record summaries, contextual information, email drafting, and workflow-related activities. Available capabilities depend on the Dynamics 365 application, configuration, and integrations.

What is the difference between Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio?

Microsoft Copilot provides AI assistance within supported Microsoft applications. Microsoft Copilot Studio is a platform for creating, customizing, and managing AI agents that can interact with business data and workflows.

How can businesses get started with Microsoft Copilot implementation?

Organizations can begin by identifying workflows that would benefit from AI assistance, assessing their existing Microsoft environment, and exploring suitable Copilot capabilities. Consulting and implementation services can help align these solutions with specific business requirements.
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The post Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365: Make AI Work the Way Your Business Does appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Most Dynamics 365 sales teams have an unwritten dollar line. Above it, quotes get a phone call. Below it, they wait. Nobody decided that on purpose. It just happens, because a ten-minute call about a $2,000 quote never feels worth it, today or tomorrow.

The usual fix is a rule: every open quote gets touched every two weeks. It fails for the same reason the calls do. When following up costs more than the quote seems worth, people make a sensible choice and skip it.

Add Up What You're Skipping

Here is a test worth running. Pull every open quote under $5,000 with no activity in the last thirty days, and group them by account. Then total each account. At a manufacturer we work with, a single customer could carry a dozen quotes of about $3,000 each, $36,000 that nobody had asked about, because no individual quote ever looked big enough to call on.

Count the Email Steps

Email is the obvious answer, so count what it takes in your system. Open the contact, find every open quote, copy the numbers and amounts, add them up, attach the PDFs, work out who else to copy, send, then log the follow-up on each quote separately. If that's the path, the problem isn't discipline. The CRM only makes one kind of follow-up easy, and it's the one that doesn't scale down.

What Fixed It

At P2 Automation we added an email routine to the follow-up screen we had already built for this team. An Email button next to each contact opens a builder that lists that contact's open quotes with amounts and a total, rewrites the message as quotes are clicked in or out, and puts the company's other active contacts one click from the CC line. Create Draft produces a standard Dynamics 365 email, sent from the rep's own Outlook mailbox. When it goes, every quote on it is marked as followed up. The email is the activity, so there is nothing left to log.

When a routine job isn't getting done, make it cheaper before you make it mandatory.

Read the full case study, with screenshots: https://www.p2automation.com/insights/small-quotes-dont-need-a-phone-call

See more about how P2 Automation works with Dynamics 365 teams: https://www.p2automation.com/managed-services-plans

Or tell us the process your team hates most - twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether a My Day view would fix it, and if it wouldn't: https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post Small Quotes Aren't Small: Why Dynamics 365 Sales Teams Skip Them Anyway appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Employee benefits brokers don't come to work thinking, "Today I need to use my CRM."

They come to work with jobs to get done. A client renewal needs to move forward. A producer has a meeting tomorrow and needs to understand what's happening with the account. A carrier payment doesn't match what the agency expected. A prospect filled out a form on the website and someone needs to follow up before the opportunity goes cold.

Those are the jobs that matter.

That's the idea behind The Busy Broker's Guide to Jobs to Be Done series. Instead of starting with a list of software features, we're looking at eight real jobs employee benefits brokers deal with every day, where those jobs tend to become harder than they should be, and how BenefitsBridge – CRM for Health Insurance Agencies can help.

1. Keep Client Information and History in One Place

Client information has a way of spreading. Contacts are in one place, policy information in another, recent conversations are in Outlook, and someone has created a spreadsheet to keep track of something the other systems don't handle very well.

We've seen this happen in real agencies. One benefits agency we spoke with had accumulated separate "who to call," birthday and individual client contact lists before moving more of that information into one system.

The job is to make the client's history available to the agency, so understanding an account doesn't depend on knowing which five places to search or which employee to ask.

Read: How Do Employee Benefits Brokers Keep a Client's Full History From Living in Five Different Places?

2. Keep Employee Benefits Renewals on Track

Renewals involve too many moving pieces to depend on memory. Information has to be collected, clients contacted, decisions made, plan details updated and deadlines met.

A good test is simple: If the person who normally manages an account were unexpectedly out for a week, could someone else immediately tell where every renewal stands?

The job isn't just tracking a renewal date. It's giving every renewal a visible path from beginning to end, with enough structure that the team knows what has happened, what is still outstanding and what needs to happen next.

Read: How Can Employee Benefits Brokers Keep Renewals From Falling Through the Cracks?

3. Prepare for Employee Benefits Client Meetings

Your agency probably already has the information you need for the meeting. The problem is how much work it takes to assemble it.

A broker may need current policies, upcoming renewals, recent activity, open items and financial information before walking into a client conversation. BenefitsBridge can bring that information together so the broker can focus on what deserves attention rather than reconstructing the account before every meeting.

The job is to spend less time finding information and more time preparing for the conversation.

4. Keep Client Emails and Service Activity in the CRM

This is a problem we've heard described very directly by benefits brokers. One agency told us employees weren't consistently recording emails, activities and service requests because doing so required extra steps. For a busy service employee, another five or ten minutes of documentation was easy to skip. Later, management could walk into a renewal meeting without a complete picture of all the service work the agency had performed.

The job isn't to save every email. It's to make sure important client conversations and service activity become agency knowledge rather than remaining in one employee's inbox.

5. Keep Policy and Plan Information Accurate

A client may have medical, dental, vision, life and disability coverage, with different carriers, effective dates, funding arrangements, rate structures and premiums. Then renewal happens and the information changes again.

We've also heard agencies describe the frustration of maintaining renewal information in Excel and then having to re-key some of that information into another system.

The job is to maintain policy and plan information the agency can trust, even as coverage becomes more complicated and changes over time.

6. Track and Reconcile Employee Benefits Commissions

One broker we spoke with described commission tracking as something close to the "unsolved mystery of the industry." It's not hard to understand why. Enrollment changes, premiums change, commission structures vary and carrier payments arrive on different schedules and in different formats.

Knowing what a carrier paid isn't enough. The agency needs to know what it expected to receive, what actually arrived, how it should be split and where there is a discrepancy worth investigating.

7. Manage Leads and Follow-Up to Win New Business

Getting someone to fill out a website form isn't the end of lead generation. It's the beginning of the sales process.

Someone needs to take ownership of that inquiry, follow up, qualify the opportunity and keep the conversation moving. If the process lives primarily in a producer's inbox and memory, interested prospects can quietly disappear.

The job is to take someone who has raised their hand and move that person through a consistent process until they become a client or until the agency knows why they didn't.

8. Choose a CRM and Agency Management System You Won’t Outgrow

The agency you're running three years from now may not look exactly like the agency you're running today. You may have more employees, different workflows, new reporting requirements or more complex lines of business. Even without dramatic growth in headcount, the way you operate can change significantly.

One broker evaluating BenefitsBridge made another practical point: his organization already ran its business on Microsoft, so why choose another system and then have to connect the dots himself?

The job is to solve today's problems without choosing technology that becomes tomorrow's limitation.

The CRM Isn't the Job. Getting the Work Done Is.

There is a common thread running through all eight of these situations. The broker isn't trying to use more technology. They're trying to get something done.

They want to understand the client without hunting for information. They want the renewal to stay on track. They want to walk into a meeting prepared. They want important conversations preserved. They want to trust their policy data and know whether they're getting paid correctly. They want technology that can grow with the agency, and they want interested prospects to become clients instead of forgotten leads.

That's how we think about BenefitsBridge at ForgeXRM.

The best CRM or agency management system isn't the one with the longest feature list. It's the one that helps your team get the jobs that matter done.

Ready to get more of the important jobs done?

If your agency is looking for a better way to manage clients, renewals, commissions, service activity and new business, let's talk. Contact ForgeXRM to see how BenefitsBridge can help your team get the jobs that matter done.

The post The Busy Broker's Guide to Jobs to Be Done appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

The Shift from CRM as a System of Record to a System of Action

Traditionally, CRM systems have functioned as systems of record. They store customer information, sales activities, service history, and marketing engagement data. While that information is valuable, employees have often needed to leave their workflow to access it or update it.

Microsoft's latest announcement signals a shift toward a more active role for CRM. Rather than simply storing information, Dynamics 365 can now help employees make decisions, complete tasks, and move customer interactions forward through Copilot-powered experiences.

This approach helps reduce context switching, one of the biggest productivity challenges facing modern organizations. Instead of jumping between email, Teams, CRM records, and other business applications, employees can access customer intelligence directly within the tools they use every day.

What Are the 30 New Microsoft Copilot CRM Skills?

The most significant part of Microsoft's announcement is the introduction of 30 pre-built CRM skills that connect Dynamics 365 expertise with Copilot experiences. Microsoft states these skills are built on more than 180 Dynamics 365 tools across Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights, providing ready-to-use capabilities without requiring organizations to build custom workflows from scratch.

For sales teams, these skills can help:

• Analyze opportunities and identify potential risks
• Build competitive sales strategies
• Prepare for customer meetings and leadership reviews
• Access customer and account context more efficiently
• Convert meeting outcomes into suggested CRM updates and next actions

These capabilities allow sellers to spend less time on administrative work and more time focused on customer relationships and revenue-generating activities.

For customer service teams, the new skills can help:

• Review customer and case history
• Transform correspondence into structured case proposals
• Research relevant answers and solutions
• Draft customer communications
• Surface important account information within existing workflows

Rather than searching multiple systems for customer context, service representatives can use AI-powered assistance informed by Dynamics 365 data to support faster and more informed customer interactions.

Microsoft also notes that marketers can use these skills to create consent-aware outreach and develop brand-compliant content while remaining connected to customer information and business processes.

Why This Matters for Businesses

The announcement is about more than adding new AI features. It reflects Microsoft's broader vision for how organizations will work with customer data in the future.

Historically, employees have been responsible for gathering information from multiple systems, entering updates manually, and determining the next steps themselves. With Copilot and CRM skills working together, organizations can begin embedding intelligence directly into business processes.

This means customer context, recommendations, and actions can appear at the exact moment employees need them, helping teams work more efficiently while improving customer experiences.

As AI continues to evolve, businesses that successfully connect their data, processes, and productivity tools will be in a stronger position to drive growth and improve operational efficiency.

Further Reading

For additional information from Microsoft, check out:

• Bringing CRM into the flow of work and agents into business process for sales and service teams
• Customer Intelligence: Where Work Happens
• Microsoft Copilot

How enCloud9 Can Help

At enCloud9, we make it our job to stay current on the latest Microsoft technologies so our clients can focus on running their businesses. As Microsoft continues to expand Copilot, Dynamics 365, and AI-powered business applications, understanding how these tools fit into your organization becomes increasingly important.

Whether you're exploring Microsoft Copilot, evaluating Dynamics 365, or looking for practical ways to integrate AI into your sales and service operations, our team can help you identify opportunities, build a strategy, and maximize the value of your Microsoft investment.

We help organizations move beyond the hype and focus on real business outcomes through thoughtful planning, adoption, and optimization.

Ready to Explore AI-Powered CRM?

Microsoft's latest announcement shows that the future of CRM is not just about storing customer information. It's about bringing customer intelligence directly into the tools employees use every day and empowering teams with AI-driven insights and actions.

If you're ready to discover how Copilot, Dynamics 365, and AI-powered business processes can help your organization work smarter and serve customers better, contact enCloud9 today. Our experts can help you build a practical roadmap that turns Microsoft's latest innovations into measurable business results.

The post 30 New Microsoft Copilot CRM Skills Help Companies Work Smarter appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 admin tools help CRM administrators, developers, consultants, and power users manage data, troubleshoot issues, and maintain their CRM environments more efficiently. EASI Toolbelt, developed by Team EASI, brings many of these utilities together in a browser extension that works directly within Microsoft Dynamics 365 model-driven apps. Instead of constantly switching between records, solutions, workflows, and external tools, users can handle common administrative tasks in one place.

Key Highlights: Dynamics 365 Admin Tools in EASI Toolbelt

• Access Dynamics 365 admin tools in one place: EASI Toolbelt provides CRM utilities directly within Dynamics 365 through a browser extension.
• Query CRM data efficiently: Use SQL-style queries to retrieve records, inspect results, and create personal views.
• Find components and dependencies: Locate workflows, plugins, tables, and fields across Dynamics 365 solutions.
• Simplify troubleshooting and workflow management: Run and clone workflows, inspect record properties, and investigate field behavior.
• Work within your existing CRM environment: The toolkit uses the Dynamics 365 Web API without requiring a separate account or sending CRM data outside your browser.

What Is EASI Toolbelt, and How Does It Simplify Dynamics 365 Administration?

EASI Toolbelt is a collection of browser-based Dynamics 365 admin tools designed to simplify everyday CRM administration, development, and troubleshooting.

Managing a Dynamics 365 environment often means moving between different areas of the system to investigate data, maintain customizations, or resolve issues. Even straightforward tasks, such as finding a field's schema name or determining which solutions contain a particular component, can involve several steps.

Team EASI developed EASI Toolbelt to make these tasks easier by bringing Dynamics 365 admin tools together in one place. The toolkit helps administrators and power users spend less time navigating between tools and more time completing the work they need to do.

How Can Dynamics 365 Admin Tools Simplify CRM Data Queries?

EASI Toolbelt includes a SQL to FetchXML console that allows users to query Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM data using familiar SQL-style statements.

Administrators and consultants often need to inspect CRM data to investigate records, verify information, or troubleshoot issues. Rather than navigating through multiple screens or manually creating views, they can use the console to retrieve the information they need.

The SQL to FetchXML console allows users to:

• Write SQL-style queries to retrieve CRM data.
• View query results directly in the console.
• Open individual Dynamics 365 records from query results.
• Save queries as personal views for future use.

How Can Administrators Find Dynamics 365 Solutions, Fields, and Dependencies?

EASI Toolbelt helps Dynamics 365 administrators and developers locate components and understand where they are used throughout a CRM environment.

As an environment grows, keeping track of customizations becomes more challenging. Workflows, plugins, tables, and fields may be associated with different solutions, forms, views, or other components, making it difficult to understand their relationships.

EASI Toolbelt allows users to search for workflows, plugins, and tables, and identify which solutions contain them, or depend on them.

What Dynamics 365 Workflow Management Tools Does EASI Toolbelt Provide?

EASI Toolbelt includes workflow utilities that help administrators locate, execute, copy, and investigate existing Dynamics 365 workflows.

The toolkit supports several common workflow administration tasks:

• Search workflows: Find an on-demand workflow using an alphabetical, searchable list.
• Run workflows: Execute on-demand workflows directly from the toolkit.
• Clone workflows: Copy an existing workflow into a new Draft.
• Search workflow XAML: Examine workflow definitions by searching their XAML locally.

How Does EASI Toolbelt Help Troubleshoot Dynamics 365 Records and Fields?

EASI Toolbelt provides record and field inspection tools that give administrators easier access to information needed for troubleshooting.

The toolkit allows users to:

• View field schema names and values.
• Inspect record properties.
• Identify fields that have changed.
• Reveal hidden controls.
• Unlock fields.
• Copy record URLs quickly.

These utilities are helpful when examining form configurations or investigating field behavior that is not immediately visible to the user. They give administrators additional ways to inspect and troubleshoot existing CRM forms.

How Can Dynamics 365 Admin Tools Help Users Work Across Multiple Environments?

EASI Toolbelt provides color-coded environment banners that help users distinguish between Production (PROD), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and Development (DEV) environments.

Administrators and developers frequently move between environments when testing changes, reviewing configurations, or supporting users. Because those environments may look similar, it is important to recognize which one is currently open.

How Does EASI Toolbelt Connect to Dynamics 365 and Handle CRM Data?

EASI Toolbelt works as a browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, connecting directly to the Dynamics 365 environment through its existing Web API.

Unlike tools that require users to move information into a separate application, EASI Toolbelt keeps its utilities accessible within the CRM interface.

The toolkit is designed to operate with:

• No separate EASI Toolbelt account.
• No analytics collection.
• No CRM data sent outside the user's browser.

Why You Can Trust EASI for Dynamics 365 Admin Tools

Team EASI has more than 22 years of Microsoft technology experience. Based in Houston, Texas, the company is an award-winning Microsoft Solutions Partner and Cloud Solution Provider specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure, and Microsoft 365.

EASI's expertise extends beyond software implementation. Its consultants and developers work with organizations on Dynamics 365 CRM customization, application development, business process automation, integrations, upgrades and migrations, training, and ongoing support.

That experience provides important context for EASI Toolbelt. The company works directly with the Microsoft technologies and CRM environments that administrators and power users manage every day, giving its development team a practical understanding of the administrative tasks involved.

EASI also develops its own solutions to extend Dynamics 365 capabilities, including AppsHost, AppsHost eSign, and Portal XRM. This combination of consulting, development, and ongoing CRM support helps EASI focus on tools that address everyday administration and troubleshooting needs.

To learn more about the company's experience and Microsoft technology services, visit Team EASI's About Us page.

Frequently Asked Questions About Dynamics 365 Admin Tools

Q: What are Dynamics 365 admin tools?

A: Dynamics 365 admin tools are utilities that help administrators, developers, and power users manage CRM data, investigate customizations, troubleshoot records, and maintain workflows. EASI Toolbelt combines several of these capabilities in a browser extension for Dynamics 365 model-driven apps.

Q: Is there an easier way to run SQL queries against Dynamics 365 CRM data?

A: EASI Toolbelt includes a SQL to FetchXML console that supports SQL-style queries. Users can view results, open individual CRM records, and save queries as personal views.

Q: Can Dynamics 365 admin tools help identify field dependencies?

A: Yes. EASI Toolbelt allows administrators to search for fields and identify their usage across entities, forms, views, and dependencies. It can also locate workflows, plugins, and tables within Dynamics 365 solutions.

Q: Does EASI Toolbelt require a separate account, or send CRM data to an external service?

A: No. The extension works through the existing Dynamics 365 Web API, requires no separate Toolbelt account, collects no analytics, and does not send CRM data outside the browser.

Q: Why choose EASI Toolbelt for Dynamics 365 administration?

A: EASI Toolbelt brings commonly used CRM administration and troubleshooting utilities together in one browser extension. It was developed by Team EASI, a Microsoft Solutions Partner with more than 22 years of experience implementing, customizing, and supporting Microsoft business applications.

Make Dynamics 365 Administration Easier with EASI Toolbelt

Effective Dynamics 365 administration involves more than maintaining records and configuring forms. Administrators and power users also need to investigate data, understand dependencies, manage workflows, and troubleshoot issues across different CRM environments.

EASI Toolbelt brings many of these everyday Dynamics 365 admin tools together in a single browser extension, making commonly performed tasks easier to access without constantly switching between applications.

By Team EASI | www.teameasi.com

The post Dynamics 365 Admin Tools for CRM Power Users appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Yes, it can. Imports, integrations, Power Automate flows and AI-driven processes can create or update Dynamics 365 records faster than anyone can review, and AI matching only helps you detect duplicate Dynamics CRM records after they already exist. The lasting fix is a lifecycle: detect, validate, prevent, merge, and monitor.

Trick or Treat? Your CRM Just Rang the Doorbell

You open Dynamics 365 and see John Smith. Then Jon Smyth. Then J. Smith.

Three records. One customer. And you didn't create any of them.

An import did. Or an integration. Or a Power Automate flow running quietly at 2 a.m. Or an AI-driven process nobody has reviewed in weeks. Nobody was in the room when it happened, and nobody noticed.

If that makes your stomach tighten, good. It should.

So, trick or treat? AI hands your CRM both. The treat is smarter matching that can find duplicates no human would spot. The trick is a flood of automated updates that sneaks new ones in while you sleep.

This Halloween, the scariest thing in your CRM isn’t a ghost. It’s the duplicate that keeps coming back after every cleanup.

The Trick: Why AI Makes Dynamics CRM Data Accuracy Harder to Protect

CRM data used to come mostly from sales and service users typing it in. Not anymore. Today records can be created or changed by:

• Imports and spreadsheets
• Integrations with other systems
• Power Automate flows
• Custom applications and APIs
• AI-driven processes

Each source is another trick-or-treater at your CRM’s door, and none of them wears a name tag. Each is another chance for inconsistent or duplicate information. Each one can act faster than any person could review. That is why Dynamics CRM data accuracy is no longer a once-a-year housekeeping task. It is a daily risk.

The Treat: How AI Helps Detect Duplicate Dynamics 365 Records in Disguise

A simple exact-match rule sees John Smith, Jon Smyth and J. Smith as three strangers. It misses the resemblance entirely.

Smarter matching looks at several clues together to detect duplicate Dynamics 365 records, including:

• Similar names and spelling variations
• Email addresses and domains
• Phone numbers and formatting
• Company or account information
• Addresses
• Related records
• Multiple fields considered together

Microsoft has also introduced AI-based duplicate lead detection that uses signals such as matching email addresses, phone numbers, similar names, company names and email domains. This is real progress. But it leads to the uncomfortable part.

Finding a likely duplicate is not the same as deciding what to do with it.

That is the treat with a trick hidden inside: someone still has to decide which record survives, whether the match is reliable enough to merge automatically, and which relationships and history must be preserved. A wrong automated merge can be scarier than the duplicate itself.

The Trick Returns: Why Cleanup Keeps Failing (the Find-Merge-Repeat Curse)

Most teams follow a familiar ritual: find duplicates, review them, merge, move on.

Then the curse activates:

• A new import creates fresh duplicates.
• An integration brings in another version of an existing customer.
• A user types in a record that already exists.
• An automated process creates or updates data and no one notices.

So you find duplicate Dynamics 365 data, clean it, and start again. For teams that rely on Dynamics 365 for sales, service, marketing, reporting and automation, this loop doesn't scale. It just repeats.

If the same kinds of duplicates keep reappearing after every cleanup, you don't have a detection problem. You have a process problem.

Stop asking how to clean faster. Ask this instead:

"How do we keep duplicates from becoming a recurring problem?"

How to Prevent Duplicates in Dynamics 365: Turn the Trick into a Treat

To prevent duplicates in Dynamics 365, build a process instead of waiting for the pile to grow:

Detect → Validate → Prevent → Merge → Monitor

Step 1: Detect

Identify potential duplicates using exact, partial, fuzzy or multi-field matching. This is the foundation of duplicate detection in Dynamics 365.

Step 2: Validate

Confirm whether the records really represent the same customer, account, contact or other business entity. Not every lookalike is a duplicate. Not every duplicate looks alike.

Step 3: Prevent

When a reliable match already exists, stop another duplicate from being created through supported CRM processes. This is the step most cleanup projects skip, and it is the one that breaks the curse.

Step 4: Merge

When duplicates already exist, merge duplicate Dynamics 365 records using defined business rules that protect important customer information and relationships.

Step 5: Monitor

Keep checking data quality as new records enter the environment. A clean CRM today says nothing about tomorrow.

The goal is no longer just to remove duplicate Dynamics 365 data. It is to reduce the conditions that create it.

What Should a Data Quality App for Dynamics 365 Actually Do?

A modern data quality app for Dynamics 365 shouldn't be judged only by how many duplicates it finds. When evaluating one, or any duplicate merge tool for Dynamics 365, ask:

• How accurately does it identify potential matches?
• Does it catch variations that exact matching misses?
• Can it stop duplicates during record creation?
• How does it merge existing duplicates, and what does it protect?
• Can it handle custom entities and business-specific data?
• Does it cover automated processes and imports?
• Can administrators review and control automated actions?
• Can data quality be monitored continuously?

This connects duplicate management to Dynamics CRM data cleansing, data governance and customer data management. Governance is the part that keeps AI-driven actions from becoming another source of risk.

How DeDupeD by Inogic covers this checklist. DeDupeD is Inogic’s data quality app for Dynamics 365 and Dataverse, built to detect, prevent, and merge duplicates in one place:

• Detection: on-demand detection from the record form or home grid, scheduled jobs (daily, weekly, or monthly) with emailed reports, and phonetic fuzzy matching
• Prevention: duplicates blocked on both the client and server sides
• Merging: merge rules, master record selection, and field and address merge
• Coverage: standard and custom entities (the email entity is excluded), plus bulk cleanup of historical duplicates
• Control: duplicate exclusion and user access privileges so admins decide who can use what

Don’t Let Duplicates Haunt Your Dynamics 365 Next Halloween

AI will keep adding data to your CRM, whether you are ready or not. The only choice left is whether that data arrives as a treat or a trick.

Here is a test. If you ran a full cleanup today, how many duplicates would be back by next quarter? If you don’t know, you are relying on luck, and luck is not a data quality strategy.

Ready to find out how many duplicates are hiding in your Dynamics 365? Start a 15-day free trial of DeDupeD by Inogic and detect, prevent, merge, and monitor duplicates in one process, before the next import, integration, or automation creates more.

Trick or treat? The choice is yours. Download DeDupeD from Microsoft Marketplace or drop us an email on crm@inogic.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I detect duplicate Dynamics CRM records?

Compare fields such as names, email addresses, phone numbers and company information. Matching can be exact, partial, fuzzy or multi-field, depending on your data-quality requirements.

How can I find duplicate Dynamics 365 data?

Start with the entities and fields where duplicates are most likely, such as contacts, accounts and leads. Then use duplicate detection rules or a data quality solution to surface potential matches for review or merging.

How do I merge duplicate Dynamics 365 records safely?

Validate first that the records represent the same business entity. Then merge according to business rules that decide which information and relationships are retained.

How can I prevent duplicates in Dynamics 365?

Build checks into the record creation process so new or updated records are compared against existing CRM data. This helps flag a potential match before another duplicate is created. Apps such as DeDupeD by Inogic apply this prevention on both the client and server sides.

What is the role of AI in duplicate detection in Dynamics 365?

AI can weigh multiple matching signals and spot variations that exact-match rules miss. Organizations still need business rules and governance to decide when records are reviewed, merged or handled automatically.

Is AI a trick or a treat for Dynamics 365 data quality?

Both. AI is a treat when it uses multiple signals to detect duplicates that exact-match rules miss. It becomes a trick when automated processes create or update records faster than people can review them. Pairing AI matching with prevention, validation, merge rules and monitoring keeps it on the treat side.
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The post Is AI Creating Duplicate Records in Your Dynamics 365 CRM? Here’s How to Find Out appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Sales reps copy opportunities. Service teams rebuild cases. Operations teams re-enter orders line by line. Every repeat entry is time not spent on customers.

Record cloning in Dynamics 365 fixes this by duplicating a record, along with its related data, in one action. This guide covers how it works, how to clone orders with line items, and how Click2Clone compares to workflows and Power Automate.

Key Takeaways

• Most Dynamics 365 teams lose 20-30% of productive hours to repetitive data entry.
• Cloning copies a record plus its child records, notes, attachments and activities in one click.
• Orders with many line items are the best use case, since rebuilding them by hand is slow and error-prone.
• Workflows and Power Automate can duplicate records but need building, testing and ongoing maintenance.
• Click2Clone is a no-code option to clone records in crm that handles bulk, cross-entity and multi-level cloning through templates.

Why Manual Data Entry Hurts Dynamics 365 Teams

Repeat entry costs more than time. Every retyped field is a chance for a wrong owner, a missed line item or a mismatched date. Small errors then spread into quotes, invoices and reports.

Cloning removes the retyping. You start from a record that is already correct and change only what differs.

How to Clone Orders with Line Items in Dynamics 365

Orders are where manual copying hurts most. A single order can carry dozens of line items, plus notes and activities. Rebuilding it for a repeat customer can take a long time.

With Click2Clone, the process is short:

1. Open the order, or select several records from a view.
2. Click Clone in the command bar.
3. Click2Clone applies your cloning template, which defines the fields and child records to copy.
4. The new order appears with line items, notes, attachments and activities already in place.

You can also update values during cloning, such as owner, dates, lookups and option sets. The copy then arrives correct, with no cleanup step.

Click2Clone vs Workflows vs Power Automate

All three can duplicate data. They differ in effort and reach.

Workflows and Power Automate suite custom automation across many systems. For repeatable record duplication, a purpose-built tool is usually faster to set up and easier to maintain.

Want to see how templates are configured? Follow our step-by-step guide to setting up record cloning in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Why Click2Clone for Cloning records in Dynamics 365 CRM

Click2Clone by Inogic is a Microsoft Marketplace-certified app built natively for Dynamics 365 CRM. It supports:

• One-click and bulk cloning across standard and custom entities
• Deep cloning of multi-level parent-child hierarchies, including 1:N and N:N relationships
• Cross-entity copying, such as Opportunity to Order or Quote to Invoice, using field mapping templates
• Update on clone, which changes field values across all copied records
• Source tracking, so you can trace every clone back to its original
• Rule-based selection for targeted bulk cloning

Stop Retyping. Start Cloning.

Give your team the hours back. Try Click2Clone free for 15 days and clone your first record, order or full hierarchy in minutes.

Want to try it firsthand? Get a 15-day free trial directly from our website or Microsoft Appsource.

Have questions? Reach out to us at crm@inogic.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I clone a record in Dynamics 365 CRM?
Select the record and use a cloning tool such as Click2Clone from the command bar. A template controls which fields and related records are copied.

Can I clone an order with line items in Dynamics 365?
Yes. Click2Clone by Inogic copies the order together with its line items, notes, attachments and activities in one action.

Can I bulk clone records in Dynamics 365?
Yes. Select multiple records from any view and clone them at once. You can also make several copies of one record using Click2Clone.

Is Click2Clone better than Power Automate for cloning?
For record duplication, it is usually quicker to set up, since it needs no flow design. Power Automate remains a good fit for wider automation.

Does Click2Clone work with custom entities to Clone CRM records?
Yes. It supports standard entities such as Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Invoices and Cases, as well as custom entities.

Can I change field values while cloning CRM records?
Yes, with Click2Clone. You can update lookups, dates, option sets and owners during cloning, and the change applies to all copied records.
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Where Copilot earns its place

The most immediately useful application is drafting communication. Rather than manually composing an email from scratch, a user can prompt Copilot to draft it, then adjust the tone or length before sending — all without leaving the CRM record they're working from.

A second strong use case is automatic summarization. On an opportunity record, Copilot can generate a short natural-language summary of what's going on — the client, the type of engagement, the key details — surfacing that information immediately rather than requiring someone to dig through the record to reconstruct the story.

Where it still falls short

The conversational chatbot experience — asking the system open-ended questions about your own data, like "what opportunities closed in the last 30 days" — is functional, but noticeably behind the standalone AI assistants many teams are now used to. It's an area of active improvement, not a finished product.

For organizations with more advanced needs — deep lookups, complex summarization across large datasets, industry-specific automation — custom AI configurations can be built on top of the platform. This has been done for clients needing sophisticated ticketing and service workflows layered on the CRM's data, essentially building a more capable pilot than what comes out of the box.

A practical takeaway

AI in the CRM is genuinely useful for drafting, summarizing, and reducing manual busywork today. For more advanced analytical or conversational capability, expect to either wait for the platform to mature or invest in custom configuration — and be skeptical of any vendor who oversells where the technology currently is.

The post AI in the CRM: What Copilot Actually Does Well Today (and Where It Still Lags) in GovCon365 AwardTrack appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A CRM for employee benefits brokers can help create a more complete record of those interactions. BenefitsBridge – CRM for Health Insurance Brokers is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and is designed to connect client information, communications, activities and service requests so agencies have better visibility into the work their teams are already doing.

Key Highlights

• Benefits agencies may provide significant client service throughout the year without having an easy way to document and demonstrate that value.
• Tracking activities, service requests and communications in the CRM creates a more complete client history.
• Better activity visibility can help with renewal preparation, account profitability, workload analysis and staffing decisions.
• CRM adoption is more difficult when employees have to spend extra time manually documenting work they have already completed.
• BenefitsBridge connects CRM and agency management information with the Microsoft environment employees already use, including Outlook.

Why Is It Difficult for Benefits Agencies to Show Their Value at Renewal?

The problem isn't necessarily that the work isn't being done. The problem is that the complete history of that work may not be easy to find.

Think about everything that can happen between one renewal and the next. An employee has a coverage question. HR needs help resolving an issue. A carrier needs to be contacted. Someone requests a document. There is a plan change, enrollment question or another service issue requiring several emails and follow-ups before it is resolved.

Your account management team handles these requests and moves on to the next one.

Then renewal time arrives.

There is a big difference between telling a client, "Our team did a lot for you this year," and being able to show exactly what your team handled.

What Client Activity Should an Employee Benefits CRM Track?

A CRM can provide a more complete picture of the client relationship by associating activities, service requests and communications with the client record.

Instead of depending on an account manager's memory or searching individual inboxes, an agency can look back at the activity that took place throughout the year.

For example, agency leaders may want to know:

• How many service requests did the client have?
• What types of issues came up?
• Who handled them?
• What communications took place?
• What was resolved?

Having that history available gives the agency a much clearer way to demonstrate the work performed for a client.

Better CRM Visibility Can Help Beyond the Renewal Meeting

Client activity data isn't useful only when preparing for renewals. It can also help agency leadership understand how much effort different accounts require.

Two clients generating similar revenue may create very different workloads for the service team.

When leadership has better visibility into the activities and service requests associated with each account, the agency has a stronger foundation for evaluating account profitability, employee workloads and staffing needs.

Why Doesn't Client Activity Always Get Entered Into the CRM?

When information is missing from a CRM or agency management system, it is easy to conclude that employees simply need to do a better job documenting their work.

But the real question should be: How easy are you making it for them to do that?

This issue came up recently in a conversation with an employee benefits agency evaluating BenefitsBridge.

The agency knew its service team was doing a tremendous amount of work for clients, but its agency management system wasn't giving leadership a complete picture of that activity. Emails were being sent and issues were being resolved, yet much of that history wasn't easily visible when management needed it.

The agency executive acknowledged that employees weren't always documenting everything he wanted to see. But there was a practical reason.

Connecting emails and creating activities or service requests in the existing system wasn't easy.

For a busy service person, it was easier to handle the request and move on than to spend another five or ten minutes documenting what had just happened.

CRM Adoption Depends on Making Documentation Easier

If documenting client activity creates extra administrative work every time someone communicates with a client, consistent CRM adoption will always be a challenge.

That distinction matters.

The objective shouldn't simply be to tell employees to enter more information. Agencies should also look at whether their technology makes capturing that information a natural part of the employee's existing workflow.

This is one of the reasons ForgeXRM builds its CRM solutions on the Microsoft platform.

How Does BenefitsBridge Connect CRM With Microsoft Outlook?

Most benefits agencies already conduct a significant part of their daily work in Microsoft applications, especially Outlook.

BenefitsBridge connects CRM and agency management information with the Microsoft environment employees already use.

Emails, client information, activities and service requests can become part of a more connected workflow rather than being scattered across an agency management system, Outlook and individual employees' files.

Employees shouldn't have to constantly jump between completely separate systems simply to keep client information current.

The goal isn't to give employees another system they have to maintain. The goal is to make BenefitsBridge a natural part of how they already work, giving management better visibility without creating unnecessary administrative work for the people servicing clients.

For a closer look at why this matters, read Why Employee Benefits Brokers Need a CRM That Integrates With Outlook.

How Can Better CRM Tracking Make Your Agency's Value More Visible?

Benefits agencies provide a lot of value that clients may never see.

A problem gets resolved quickly. A carrier gets contacted. An employee gets an answer. Everyone moves on.

That's good service. But months later, when renewal time comes around, many of those individual interactions have been forgotten.

BenefitsBridge gives agencies a more complete view of the client relationship throughout the year. Instead of preparing for a renewal by relying on memory or piecing together information from multiple inboxes, the agency already has a clearer picture of what the team has done and the value it has provided.

A Simple Test for Your Employee Benefits Agency

Pick an important client and ask yourself one question:

Could you quickly show what your agency has done for that client over the past 12 months?

If the answer is no, it doesn't necessarily mean your team isn't providing enough value.

It may mean the value you're already providing isn't visible.

Frequently Asked Questions About CRM for Employee Benefits Agencies

Why should an employee benefits agency track client service activity in a CRM?

Tracking service requests, communications and activities gives an agency a more complete history of the client relationship. That information can help with renewal preparation and provide management with greater visibility into account workloads, profitability and staffing needs.

Why do employees sometimes fail to document client activity?

Documentation can be inconsistent when recording emails, activities or service requests requires additional administrative work. If employees have to interrupt their normal workflow to update another system, consistent adoption can become difficult.

How can Microsoft Dynamics 365 help employee benefits agencies?

BenefitsBridge is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and connects CRM and agency management information with the Microsoft environment employees already use. This allows client information, emails, activities and service requests to become part of a more connected workflow.

How can a CRM help during benefits renewal meetings?

A CRM can provide a history of the service requests, communications and activities associated with a client. Instead of relying on memory or searching through individual inboxes, the agency can more easily see what happened throughout the year.

What is BenefitsBridge?

BenefitsBridge is a CRM for health insurance brokers built on Microsoft Dynamics 365. It is designed to connect client information, communications, activities and service requests so benefits agencies have better visibility into client relationships and the work their teams perform.

Make the Work Your Benefits Team Does More Visible

Your service team is already doing the work. The question is whether your systems make that work easy to see.

If your agency can't quickly show what it has done for an important client over the past 12 months, it may be time to look at how client activity is being captured.

Learn more about BenefitsBridge CRM for Health Insurance Brokers or contact ForgeXRM to discuss how your agency can create a more complete view of client activity and make the value your team provides easier to see.

Watch a BenefitsBridge overview video:

The post Can Your CRM Show the True Value Your Employee Benefits Team Provides? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

In fact, roughly 30% to 40% of our Business Central customers now add Dynamics 365 Sales as part of their project. Manufacturers, engineering companies, and construction firms are leading that trend.

Key Highlights

• Approximately 30% to 40% of our Business Central customers add Dynamics 365 Sales to their projects.
• We have not lost a CRM deal to Salesforce since Microsoft CRM Online was introduced.
• The connection between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales is easier than it was with older on-premises Dynamics systems.
• Dynamics 365 licensing can make CRM an attractive addition for companies already licensing Business Central.
• Our ongoing client success check-ins help customers continue getting value from their CRM investment after implementation.

Why Are Business Central Customers Considering Dynamics 365 Sales for CRM?

For many companies already using Business Central, Dynamics 365 Sales is a logical CRM option because both applications are part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem.

But it wasn't always such an easy case to make.

Years ago, connecting the ERP side of Microsoft Dynamics with the CRM side could create friction, and we heard about it regularly. When Dynamics CRM was still an on-premises product, we competed against Salesforce and didn't see the level of success we see today.

Pricing didn't help the case either. On-premises Dynamics CRM could be a harder sell next to a platform with Salesforce's name recognition, even when the total cost of ownership told a different story.

Today, the conversation is very different.

What Changed with Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales?

The shift isn't the result of one specific improvement. We see it as a combination of pricing, easier connectivity between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft's continued investment in the product.

The integration complaints that once came up in nearly every sales conversation have largely disappeared. Part of that is the native connector Microsoft built between Business Central and CRM, and part of it is simply that cloud-to-cloud connections are easier than the on-premises environments we used to troubleshoot.

For companies that want ERP and CRM within the Microsoft ecosystem, Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales can now work as parts of a more connected business platform.

You can learn more about how we work with companies as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales partner.

How Does Dynamics 365 Sales Licensing Compare for Business Central Customers?

Licensing is another reason we see Business Central customers considering Dynamics 365 Sales rather than a separate CRM platform.

A full Dynamics 365 Sales license can add a relatively small amount on top of a full Business Central license, particularly with applicable Bridge to Cloud discounts.

For many of the companies we talk with, that changes the CRM conversation. Instead of purchasing and connecting an entirely separate CRM platform, they can evaluate the cost of adding Dynamics 365 Sales to the Microsoft Dynamics environment they already use.

Licensing and available discounts can vary, of course, so each company should evaluate its specific Microsoft licensing situation.

Why Does Ongoing CRM Support Matter?

We believe the partner relationship is just as important as the price.

We regularly work with companies that come to us after buying Salesforce and getting stuck. In our experience, some companies get Salesforce up and running, use it in a relatively narrow way, and then don't receive the ongoing help they need to take the system further.

They're functional, but they aren't necessarily getting everything they could from their CRM investment.

That's a gap we work hard to close.

Our clients have direct access to our team, including our cell phone numbers. Every client conversation includes the solution architect who will actually build the system, not just someone responsible for selling it.

We also conduct client success check-ins at no charge. These conversations are specifically designed to identify the difference between a company that's using Dynamics 365 CRM and one that's actually getting value from it.

Being functional isn't the same as taking full advantage of your investment. We would rather ask those questions before a customer falls behind than wait for them to come to us.

Learn more about our approach as a Microsoft Dynamics partner.

How Does Dynamics 365 Sales Compare with Salesforce in Our Experience?

One number stands out for us: we have not lost a CRM deal to Salesforce since Microsoft introduced CRM Online, the cloud version of Dynamics CRM.

That wasn't always the case.

Years ago, when we were competing with Salesforce using older, on-premises versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce often won those deals.

We believe today's results reflect several changes working together: a lower price point, easier connectivity between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft's continued investment in the platform, and the support model we provide our customers.

See a Real-World Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales Migration

We've also helped companies make the move from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.

One example is a global institutional asset manager serving insurance companies. The company was facing rising Salesforce licensing and operating costs and needed a CRM that integrated more closely with Microsoft 365.

We implemented Dynamics 365 Sales, migrated the company's Salesforce customizations, business processes, and historical data, and extended the solution with custom business entities and automated processes built around its investment management business. We also implemented and personalized Microsoft Customer Insights Journeys and integrated Dynamics 365 with Microsoft 365.

After the move, the company reduced CRM licensing and operational costs, lowered its total cost of ownership, and increased user adoption.

Read the full Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales case study to see how we approached the migration.

What Do AI and Copilot Mean for Dynamics 365 CRM?

We expect Microsoft's investment in AI to make Dynamics 365 Sales increasingly valuable for Business Central customers.

Copilot can already help with tasks such as summarizing sales calls, updating CRM records, and drafting follow-up thank-you emails. These are the types of manual activities that can consume a meaningful part of a salesperson's day.

For manufacturing and engineering companies already running Business Central, AI adds another reason to think about ERP and CRM as parts of the same Microsoft environment rather than completely separate technology decisions.

When Does It Make Sense to Use Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales Together?

For a company already running Business Central, Dynamics 365 Sales is worth evaluating when the goal is to create a more connected ERP and CRM environment.

We are seeing particularly strong interest from manufacturing, engineering, and construction companies.

We've seen firsthand what the combination can look like when Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales are set up correctly from the start instead of being bolted together after the fact.

That doesn't mean Dynamics 365 Sales is automatically the right CRM for every Business Central customer. But the combination of connectivity, licensing, continued Microsoft investment, and ongoing partner support makes it worth comparing with standalone CRM platforms such as Salesforce.

FAQ: Dynamics 365 Sales vs. Salesforce for Business Central Customers

Does Dynamics 365 Sales integrate with Business Central?

Yes. Microsoft's connector between Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM is one reason we find integration easier today than it was with older on-premises Dynamics environments.

How many of your Business Central customers also use Dynamics 365 Sales?

Approximately 30% to 40% of our Business Central customers add Dynamics 365 Sales as part of their project.

What types of Business Central customers are adding Dynamics 365 CRM?

In our experience, manufacturers, engineering companies, and construction firms are leading the trend.

Is Dynamics 365 Sales less expensive than Salesforce?

Price is one of the reasons we've been successful competing against Salesforce. For Business Central customers, a full Dynamics 365 Sales license can add a relatively small amount on top of a full Business Central license, particularly when applicable Bridge to Cloud discounts are available. Actual licensing costs will depend on each company's situation.

Why use the same Dynamics partner for ERP and CRM?

Working with one Dynamics partner means the team can understand how the Business Central and CRM environments fit together. Our model also includes ongoing client success check-ins designed to identify opportunities for customers to get more value from Dynamics 365 after implementation.

Dynamics 365 Sales vs. Salesforce: Which CRM Is Right for Your Business Central Environment?

The CRM decision looks very different today than it did when we were selling on-premises Dynamics CRM. Easier connectivity, attractive licensing, Microsoft's continued investment, and a strong support model have made Dynamics 365 Sales a compelling option for many of our Business Central customers.

If you're already using or considering Business Central and want to compare Dynamics 365 Sales with Salesforce or another CRM, learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales with Dexpro Dynamics or contact our team to discuss your requirements.

You can also visit Dexpro Dynamics to learn more about our Microsoft Dynamics services.

The post Comparing Dynamics 365 Sales vs. Salesforce for Business Central Customers appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Customer engagement increasingly depends on how well businesses use customer data to guide their next interaction. AI can help marketers plan customer journeys, identify suitable email send times, and reduce repetitive campaign tasks. However, meaningful results require more than AI features. Businesses also need connected systems, reliable data, and well-defined processes that align communication with customer needs.

Key Takeaways

• AI-powered customer engagement helps marketers plan customer journeys, optimize outreach timing, and reduce repetitive campaign tasks.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys supports automated, personalized communications across onboarding, retention, and re-engagement campaigns.
• Dynamics 365 Copilot consulting helps businesses apply AI capabilities to journey planning and marketing workflows while retaining human oversight.
• Power Platform automation and Dynamics 365 integration connect customer data and business processes to support consistent campaign execution.
• Successful AI implementation depends on reliable data, clear workflows, customer consent, and measurable business objectives.

How Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys Supports AI-Powered Marketing

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys helps businesses coordinate customer communications across different stages of the customer lifecycle. With customer journey automation, marketers can structure interactions using audience segments, triggers, conditions, and follow-up actions.

These capabilities support practical use cases such as customer onboarding, event reminders, renewal communications, and re-engagement campaigns. AI-assisted journey creation can further help marketers develop journey structures from business goals and refine them before activation.

The key is to define the audience, message, and intended outcome first. AI can assist with execution, but campaign logic and customer preferences still require careful review.

Dynamics 365 Copilot Consulting for Smarter Customer Engagement

Dynamics 365 Copilot consulting focuses on applying AI capabilities to business workflows where they can provide practical value. In marketing, this may include assisting with journey creation, generating content suggestions, or analyzing historical engagement patterns to help determine suitable email send times.

For example, a retention campaign may use engagement history to inform when a message should be sent. These insights can support campaign planning, although past behavior does not guarantee future engagement.

Businesses should also consider consent requirements, configured quiet times, and human review before deploying AI-assisted campaigns. The objective is to make marketing workflows more efficient while retaining appropriate control over customer communications.

Power Platform Automation and Dynamics 365 Integration

AI-powered marketing also depends on the systems surrounding the campaign. Customer information may need to move between CRM, marketing, and operational applications before a journey can run effectively.

Power Platform automation can connect business processes through tools such as Power Automate, while Dynamics 365 integration can help organizations connect relevant data and applications.

These capabilities can reduce manual data entry, automate follow-up tasks, and support consistent information updates. For instance, an onboarding journey may depend on a customer record being updated or an internal process being completed before the next communication is triggered.

Reliable integration and data quality are essential because incomplete or outdated information can undermine personalization and campaign decisions.

What Businesses Should Consider Before Implementing AI

Before introducing AI into customer engagement workflows, organizations should evaluate four areas:

• Data quality: Is the customer information accurate, relevant, and up to date?
• Process design: Are journey triggers, conditions, and follow-up actions clearly defined?
• Governance: Are consent, privacy, and communication preferences respected?
• Performance measurement: Are the business objectives and campaign metrics clearly established?

These considerations help businesses identify whether they need better journey configuration, AI implementation, workflow automation, or system integration.

The same principles underpin the AI-assisted journey creation and outreach optimization capabilities covered in the 4 November 2026 webinar on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.

Register here to explore how these AI capabilities can help streamline customer journey planning and optimize outreach timing before putting them into practice.

Explore Dynamics 365, AI, and Power Platform Services

Discover how the right technology solutions can support customer engagement, workflow automation, and connected business processes.

See our services at www.inogic.com/services or contact crm@inogic.com to discuss your business requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys?

It is a Microsoft application that helps businesses orchestrate customer interactions, automate journeys, and coordinate personalized communications across customer touchpoints.

How can AI improve customer engagement in Dynamics 365?

AI can assist with journey planning, content suggestions, and analysis of historical engagement patterns. Its effectiveness depends on data quality, business rules, and appropriate human oversight.

Why is Power Platform automation useful for marketing in Dynamics CRM?

Power Platform automation helps connect marketing activities with operational workflows, reducing repetitive tasks and supporting timely follow-ups.

Why does Dynamics 365 integration matter for AI-powered marketing?

Dynamics 365 Integration helps make relevant customer information available across connected systems, supporting more consistent journeys and better-informed campaign decisions.
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Years in Salesforce often leave duplicate contacts, unused fields, and old custom objects. Some automation also exists only because of constraints in the original platform. Copying those elements into Dynamics 365 CE/CRM brings their maintenance burden along.

At New Dynamic, we treat the period before detailed mapping as a simplification window. Teams often discover that a field, automation, or integration everyone assumed was required is really supporting an old report, exception, or workaround.

Clean first. Migrate second. Moving technical debt efficiently still leaves technical debt in the target environment.

Salesforce Migration Should Start Before Data Moves

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Checklist for Data Management covers data ownership, architecture, quality controls, testing, and cutover planning. Dynamics 365 Activate, currently in preview, can inspect Salesforce objects and their dependencies. That includes relationships, automation, and custom code that may need review.

That visibility helps teams understand the source environment, but the migration team still has to decide what belongs in the future one. Microsoft Learn’s Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Migration Overview explains the migration stages, while New Dynamic’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Activate: What Enterprise CRM Teams Should Evaluate Before Migration looks more closely at those design decisions.

What Should You Audit Before a Salesforce to Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Migration

An audit should go beyond simple record counts. Each part of the existing Salesforce environment should be evaluated against the business process the organization wants to operate in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.

Before detailed mapping begins, each major area should have a clear disposition: migrate, clean, consolidate, redesign, archive, or retire.

Clean the Data Based on Future Use

Data cleanup gets difficult when technical facts collide with business history. Duplicate contacts are straightforward. Seven years of dormant leads or an unused field with reporting history are not.

Technical teams can identify stale records and incomplete fields, but business owners still need to decide what supports current Sales, Service, reporting, or compliance requirements. Microsoft’s Implementation Guidance recommends defining ownership, data architecture, use cases, and cleanup effort before migration.

Question Custom Fields and Objects Before Mapping Them

One custom field may support an important sales requirement. Another may exist because a limitation from years ago required a workaround. Both can look equally important in a metadata export.

Before mapping custom fields or objects to Microsoft Dataverse, trace each one to a current business requirement. Then determine whether a native Dynamics 365 table, relationship, business rule, Power Automate capability, or other supported pattern can handle it with less custom development.

New Dynamic's Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce: A Practical Comparison for Enterprise Teams looks more broadly at how architecture, governance, workflow, and Microsoft ecosystem fit differ between the platforms. Those differences matter during migration because the target system should reflect Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement architecture rather than recreate Salesforce terminology and structure.

Rebuild the Business Process, Not the Salesforce Workaround

Start with the business rule the automation supports, then decide how Dynamics 365 CE/CRM and Power Platform should implement it. Do not treat every Salesforce Flow, Workflow Rule, Process Builder process, or Apex trigger as a separate migration requirement.

Salesforce automation can reflect years of accumulated process decisions. Flow, Workflow Rules, Process Builder, Apex triggers, validation rules, approvals, and custom code may all support what users experience as one process.

Dynamics 365 Activate can inventory that automation and code for assessment, but Microsoft does not automatically convert it during migration. The implementation team still has to decide which logic belongs in the future process.

For each significant automation, document:

1. The business event that starts it.
2. The decision or rule it supports.
3. The systems and data it touches.
4. The exception path when something fails.
5. The person or team responsible for the process.

This review often reveals that several Salesforce components are supporting one business rule. A Flow may call Apex, rely on a validation rule, and feed an approval process. Users still experience that chain as one step.

Documenting the business rule first prevents the migration team from treating each technical component as a separate requirement. Once the business rule is understood, decide whether it belongs in Power Automate, Dataverse, native Dynamics 365 CE/CRM configuration, or a custom extension.

Which Salesforce Integrations Should Move to Dynamics 365 CE/CRM

A long-running Salesforce environment may connect to marketing platforms, finance applications, service systems, data warehouses, custom applications, and point solutions introduced at different points in the platform’s history.

Before reconnecting each integration, ask:

• Which system should own the data after migration?
• Does the integration still support a current business process, or is it compensating for an old platform boundary?
• Who monitors failures and owns changes after go-live?

Reporting needs the same scrutiny. Preserve the business question and KPI definition, then decide whether the future report belongs in Dynamics 365 CE/CRM, Power BI, Fabric, or another governed reporting layer. The target architecture may also eliminate or change integrations that existed primarily because of Salesforce.

What Salesforce History and Security Should Move to Dynamics 365 CE/CRM

Keep the history users need in Dynamics 365 CE/CRM. Archive other records when retention or reporting needs do not justify placing them in the active system. Design Dataverse security around future access requirements instead of copying Salesforce permissions.

Historical migration becomes more complicated when activities and related records must retain their context. Tasks, meetings, emails, notes, and attachments may depend on links to contacts, accounts, opportunities, or cases. Before migration, decide which relationships, dates, owners, and attachments users need to preserve. Test representative records to confirm the history remains useful in Dynamics 365 CE/CRM.

Salesforce profiles, permission sets, role hierarchies, sharing rules, and field-level permissions do not translate one-for-one to Dataverse. Audit who can view, edit, assign, and share records before designing the target access model. Then test Dataverse Security roles, business units, teams, record sharing, and column-level security against real Sales and Service scenarios. Pay special attention to sensitive fields and users who work across business units.

Historical access and operational access are different requirements. Decide which one each data set needs before migration.

Why Should the Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Target Be Designed Before Migration Mapping

Define the target Dynamics 365 CE/CRM environment before detailed migration mapping begins. Document the intended data model, security boundaries, ownership, integrations, reporting, solution structure, and application lifecycle management approach. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Implementation Guidance treats these as connected project disciplines. Migration tools should follow those decisions.

When Does a Salesforce Migration Service Add Value

External expertise becomes more useful as the source environment adds complex data relationships, customization, integrations, multiple business units, regulatory requirements, or significant process redesign.

New Dynamic helps organizations plan and execute Salesforce-to-Dynamics 365 migrations when the work extends beyond moving records. That includes evaluating source-system complexity, designing the target Dynamics 365 CE/CRM data and security model, reviewing integrations and reporting dependencies, and identifying Salesforce-specific customization that can be simplified with native Microsoft capabilities.

One pattern we look for is source-platform logic that has quietly become treated as a business requirement simply because it has existed for years. Separating the requirement from the Salesforce implementation helps determine what should survive the platform change and what can be redesigned.

Key Takeaways

• Challenge custom objects, fields, and Salesforce-specific automation before recreating them in Dataverse.
• Review integrations and reporting around the business process and KPI they support today.
• Decide which historical data belongs in production, which should be archived, and how security should work in the Dynamics 365 CE/CRM target environment.
• A migration partner should help simplify the target environment, not only transfer data.

If a Salesforce-to-Dynamics 365 CE/CRM migration is being scoped, start by inventorying the data, schema, automation, integrations, reporting dependencies, history, and security model. New Dynamic provides Salesforce-to-Dynamics 365 CE/CRM migration planning and implementation for organizations that need help simplifying that environment and defining the target architecture before migration begins.

The best migration is not the one that reproduces Salesforce most accurately. It is the one that leaves the organization with a Dynamics 365 CE/CRM environment that is easier to operate, easier to change, and better aligned with the business it needs to support next.

Travis South – Director of Marketing

The post Salesforce Migration to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE/CRM: What to Simplify Before You Move appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Moving from Efficiency to Empathy

Digital engagement has long been judged by volume and resolution time. Those measures still matter, but they reveal little about how a customer felt after the interaction. Dynamics 365 CE brings forward the history, context, and sentiment behind each conversation, so team members can respond to the person rather than the ticket. When automation handles the routine work, people have more room to provide the care customers notice.

Reading Tone and Timing

The same message can land well or poorly depending on when and how it arrives. A promotional email sent right after a customer reports a problem feels careless, and a stiff, scripted reply can make a long-standing partner feel like a stranger. Sentiment analysis in Dynamics 365 CE shows whether an incoming email reads as positive, negative, or neutral, while the activity timeline shows recent events in the relationship. Teams can also configure Customer Insights journeys to pause marketing messages while a customer has an open case or a recent complaint.

Giving Agents More Room to Help

Some leaders worry that AI will make engagement feel colder, but it often does the opposite. Copilot summarizes cases and conversations, drafts replies based on the customer record, and surfaces knowledge articles while agents work. Tone options such as Friendly, Professional, or Formal give agents a strong starting draft that they can personalize, and summaries make handoffs easier so customers do not have to repeat their story. Microsoft is bringing similar capabilities to sales teams through its Dynamics 365 Sales agents.

Clear Guidelines, Not Rigid Scripts

Technology works best when agents are trusted to use their judgment. Pairing Copilot with clear guidelines lets agents offer goodwill gestures, pick up the phone when an email thread stalls, or step away from a script when the situation calls for it. This approach builds on using customer data to understand behavior, which we covered in our look at product-led CRM. The result is engagement that is both efficient and personal.

Next Steps

Dynamics 365 CE gives teams the tools to read sentiment, adjust tone, and time outreach with care. Logan Consulting is a proud Microsoft partner. We are here to help your business get the most out of your CRM. Contact us today to learn more.

The post Keeping Digital Customer Engagement Human in Dynamics 365 appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Every Dynamics 365 organization has a process someone wants to “just automate.” Renewal reminders. Annual contract notices. The once-a-year check-in with every account. The request usually arrives as a short list of emails and dates, and the obvious response is a workflow or a Power Automate flow: set the triggers, write the templates, let it run.

Sometimes that is exactly right. But for a certain kind of process it is the wrong fix, and the failure is hard to spot because nothing appears to break. This article is about how to tell the difference, and what to build instead.

The three-question test

Full automation works when the world stays roughly still between runs. For a process that fires daily, it does. For a process that touches any given customer once a year, it usually doesn’t. Before automating something with a long cycle, ask three questions.

• Do the recipients change between runs? Notices go to people, not companies. Over twelve months, the contact who handled the last renewal may have left, and there may now be two or three people who need to hear about it. A workflow sending to a lookup field on the account will happily email someone who no longer works there.
• Does the offer change between runs? Pricing, terms and the product line all move over a year. A template written twelve months ago may be quietly selling last year’s product at last year’s price.
• Does it fail silently? This is the one that matters most. An automated reminder sent to a blank greeting, a dead mailbox, or nobody at all does not raise an error. It simply doesn’t land, and for a renewal, the first sign that anything went wrong is a subscription that has already expired.

If the answer to all three is yes, the process doesn’t need automating. It needs what we call semi-automatic automation: the system does everything it can - tracking, timing, personalization, and the checks - and a person stays in the loop for the one step that shouldn’t happen unattended.

The pattern: a dashboard that does everything but send

The build for a semi-automatic process is a single-screen dashboard the process owner opens every day or every week. It has four jobs.

First, it shows the whole population and the timing. In the renewals case that is every active subscription customer in one list, with term and expiration date, and three working lists beside it: due in thirty days, due in seven, and expired. The timing logic that a workflow would hide in its triggers is on screen where a person can see it.

Second, it resolves who should receive each notice - and lets there be more than one. Instead of a single “renewal contact” lookup on the account, each contact carries a toggle. The dashboard reads the toggles and lists the people, not the company.

Third, it prepares the message and then checks its own work. In this case every contact has a “Dear” field for the greeting, which the system fills from the first name if it is empty. Then it blocks anything that isn’t ready: a contact whose greeting is still blank, a contact with no email address, an account where nobody is flagged to receive notices at all. Each block is shown in the list with a one-click path to fix it.

Fourth, a person sends - and the send goes through the user’s own mailbox. This is the part most teams skip. When the reminder leaves from the account owner’s Outlook rather than a marketing platform, it reads like a person wrote it, replies land back with that person, and it is far more likely to clear the recipient’s filters. The client in this example has seen more customers write back than they did to bulk mail.

Once a batch is sent, those contacts drop off the list and reappear on the next one when it is their time. The user is only ever looking at what is due, and what is blocked.

What it looks like in practice

The example running through this article is a printing company with a subscription product, mostly annual, some two and three-year terms. And a few hundred customers on it, so renewals fall every week. Their request was three reminders: thirty days before, seven days before, seven days after. The semi-automatic version took the same three dates and put them on a screen, with the checks described above and a Send Reminder button that a person clicks.

Nothing about the pattern is specific to renewals. It fits any long-cycle, person-to-person process: annual account reviews, contract anniversaries, compliance notices, the yearly “are these still the right contacts?” pass. The test is the same three questions.

A quick way to spot candidates

If a process on your automation backlog has a cycle measured in months, addresses individual people, and would not raise an alert if it sent to the wrong person, it is a candidate. Build it so the system does the remembering and the checking, and a person does the sending. It is a small amount of human time in exchange for never finding out about a problem from an expired customer.

P2 Automation builds custom Dynamics 365 dashboards. We call them My Day views for exactly this kind of process. If you have one your team hates, tell us about it: in twenty minutes we’ll say whether a My Day view would fix it, roughly what it would take, and if it wouldn’t. https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post Semi-Automatic Automation: When a Dynamics 365 Process Shouldn’t Run Itself appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

A well-designed integration connects Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Finance and Operations around the workflows that matter most. The strongest approach is practical: prioritize the right processes, design the data movement carefully, and validate the solution before production. Here is how to move through that sequence. 

Start with the CRM Workflows That Need Improvement 

Start by identifying where people re-enter data, chase approvals, or move information manually between teams. Lead management, quoting, approvals, and order fulfillment are useful places to look because they often cross CRM and ERP boundaries. 

Do not map every process at once. Choose one or two workflows where a stronger connection can deliver a clear business benefit. Slow contract turnaround may point to document or approval gaps. Weak lead quality may point to enrichment or qualification issues. A phased approach gives the team room to learn and adjust before expanding the scope. 

Also document the warning signs already affecting daily work: incorrect inventory data, delayed transactions, duplicate customer records, or failed handoffs. Then prioritize a workflow with meaningful value and manageable risk. A focused first release is easier to test, support, and improve than an integration program that tries to solve everything at once. 

A useful way to narrow the list is to score each workflow against three questions. How much time does the current process consume? How often does bad or late data affect a customer, order, or forecast? How difficult will the first release be to support? The best pilot is rarely the biggest opportunity on paper. It is the one that can prove value, expose design gaps, and build confidence without putting daily operations at risk. 

Design the Data Connections Behind Each Workflow 

Once the target workflow is clear, map how data should move between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Finance and Operations. Define the system of record for each field, the trigger for each exchange, the expected volume, and what should happen when a request fails. 

Put those decisions in writing before development begins. For every data element, name the owner, the source system, the destination, the update direction, and the response to an exception. This work may feel basic, but it prevents a common problem: two systems repeatedly overwriting each other with different answers. Clear ownership also gives support teams a faster path from an alert to the person who can resolve it. 

Service protection API limits apply per user, so integration identity and workload design matter. Sending bulk data through one service principal can concentrate demand and trigger throttling. Microsoft recommends increasing request rates gradually and respecting the Retry-After value when the service asks the client to slow down. For bulk operations, batching can improve efficiency, with finance and operations apps supporting up to 5,000 operations in a batch. 

Match connection settings to the workload. Interactive applications can benefit from the affinity cookie because requests reuse cached data. High-throughput integrations may perform better without it because requests can be distributed across more servers[2]. 

Plan the operating schedule before launch. Run high-volume or long-running jobs outside peak business hours when possible, and monitor how synchronization affects response times. The goal is not simply to move data. It is to keep both systems dependable while the business is using them. 

Move from a Pilot to Reliable Daily Operations 

Use a sandbox to test the full workflow before production. Validate create, update, and error scenarios with realistic data volumes. Confirm that security roles, field mappings, ownership rules, and recovery steps behave as expected. The team should know how to identify a failed transaction, correct the issue, and restart the process without creating duplicate records.

Treat data quality as part of the integration, not a separate cleanup project. Establish standards for required fields, naming, formats, duplicate management, and record ownership before the pilot expands. Moving inconsistent data faster does not improve operations; it spreads the inconsistency across more teams. 

After the pilot passes technical testing, focus on adoption. Give each role clear guidance on what changes, what stays the same, and where to go when something fails. Training should continue after launch as workflows, releases, and business requirements evolve. Reliable operations depend on both the integration and the people using it. 

Set the operating measures before go-live, not after the first complaint. Track failed transactions, processing time, duplicate creation, manual corrections, and user adoption for the chosen workflow. Review those measures with business and technical owners on a regular schedule. When the numbers move in the right direction, the team has evidence to expand. When they do not, the same measures point to the next fix. 

Conclusion 

Connecting Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Finance and Operations is not a one-step project. Start with a high-value workflow, design the data movement around real operating conditions, and validate the solution before production. That sequence reduces manual work, improves data reliability, and gives teams a stronger foundation for growth. 

Ready to build an integration that holds up beyond go-live? See how Velosio helps organizations modernize revenue operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. 

The post Modernize CRM with Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O Integration appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

The post Why Teams Spend Weeks Choosing a CRM—but Only Minutes Designing a CRM Pipeline appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Dexpro Dynamics helped the company assess its options and move from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, including its customizations, business processes, and historical data. The project also included Microsoft Customer Insights Journeys, Microsoft 365 integration, automation, and a platform designed around the company's investment management business.

Key Highlights

• Replaced Salesforce with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
• Migrated Salesforce customizations, business processes, and historical data
• Extended Dynamics 365 for the company's investment management requirements
• Implemented Microsoft Customer Insights Journeys for marketing automation and personalized engagement
• Reduced CRM licensing and operational costs while creating a scalable Microsoft platform

Why Was the Asset Manager Considering an Alternative to Salesforce?

The decision to replace Salesforce wasn't based on a single issue. The company's CRM licensing and operating costs were increasing, and the existing platform wasn't scaling the way the business needed.

Fit was an even bigger concern.

The asset manager wanted a CRM that integrated closely with Microsoft 365 and could be administered and enhanced as the company grew without requiring constant workarounds.

Marketing presented another challenge. The company's existing marketing platform couldn't support the sophisticated customer journeys and engagement required by its investment business.

Together, these issues prompted the company to evaluate whether a move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales would provide a better long-term CRM foundation.

How Did Regulatory Requirements Affect the CRM Decision?

For this company, selecting a CRM also required careful consideration of compliance and data governance.

As an asset manager serving insurance companies, the business operates under SEC regulatory requirements and strict data governance standards. Any new CRM platform had to meet those requirements from the beginning.

That made a detailed assessment especially important. The company didn't want to commit to a major CRM migration without first understanding how the proposed Dynamics 365 environment would support its business.

Why Did Dexpro Start with a CRM Assessment?

Before implementing anything, Dexpro Dynamics began with a comprehensive CRM assessment.

The assessment included a business process review, gap analysis, solution prototyping, and architecture design. Dexpro brought those elements together into an implementation roadmap the asset manager could evaluate before committing to the migration.

For an organization considering a significant CRM change, this provided a way to evaluate the proposed solution before moving forward with the full implementation.

How Did Dexpro Migrate the Company from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales?

Once the company decided to proceed, Dexpro implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and migrated the company's existing Salesforce customizations, business processes, and historical data.

Rather than applying a generic CRM template, Dexpro extended Dynamics 365 with custom business entities and automated processes designed around the company's investment management business.

This distinction was important because the goal wasn't simply to reproduce Salesforce in a different CRM. The new Dynamics 365 environment needed to reflect how the company actually operated.

Organizations considering a similar CRM change can learn more about Dexpro's services as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales partner.

How Did Microsoft Customer Insights Improve Marketing Capabilities?

CRM wasn't the only part of the company's technology environment that needed attention.

Dexpro implemented and personalized Microsoft Customer Insights Journeys to give the marketing team the advanced automation and personalized engagement capabilities that its previous marketing platform couldn't provide.

Dexpro also integrated Dynamics 365 with Microsoft 365 to improve collaboration, reporting, and productivity across the organization.

The result was a more connected Microsoft environment supporting both sales and marketing rather than treating CRM as a standalone application.

What Were the Results of Moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365?

The asset manager reduced CRM licensing and operational costs and lowered its total cost of ownership after moving to Dynamics 365 Sales.

User adoption also increased. According to the project results, the modern Microsoft-based platform felt familiar to employees who were already working in Microsoft 365.

Sales and marketing processes are now streamlined through automation, improving operational efficiency across both teams. The company also gained access to AI-powered insights and productivity capabilities through Microsoft Copilot.

Importantly, these are the results reported for this particular implementation. Every organization's CRM requirements, licensing environment, and potential cost savings will be different.

A Different CRM Migration: Moving from HubSpot to Dynamics 365 Sales

Salesforce isn't the only CRM platform organizations may outgrow.

In another Dexpro Dynamics project, a healthcare technology company had customer and sales data spread across HubSpot, spreadsheets, and other systems. Dexpro replaced HubSpot with Dynamics 365 Sales to centralize customer data and create a more structured sales environment.

Read the related HubSpot to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales case study to see a different example of a company replacing its existing CRM with Dynamics 365.

How Does Dynamics 365 Support the Asset Manager's Future Growth?

With Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 working together, the asset manager now has a scalable Microsoft platform designed to support future growth rather than require another major technology overhaul.

For organizations evaluating their own Microsoft business applications strategy, learn more about Dexpro Dynamics and its approach as a Microsoft Dynamics partner.

FAQ: Moving from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Can Salesforce data and customizations be migrated to Dynamics 365 Sales?

In this implementation, Dexpro migrated the asset manager's Salesforce customizations, business processes, and historical data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.

Why did this company replace Salesforce with Dynamics 365?

The asset manager was dealing with rising Salesforce licensing and operating costs, scalability concerns, and the need for tighter Microsoft 365 integration. It also wanted a CRM that could be more easily administered and enhanced as the business grew.

Did the Salesforce-to-Dynamics 365 migration reduce costs?

For this company, yes. The asset manager reduced CRM licensing and operational costs and lowered its total cost of ownership after the move.

Was marketing included in the Dynamics 365 project?

Yes. Dexpro implemented and personalized Microsoft Customer Insights Journeys to provide advanced automation and personalized customer engagement capabilities.

Does Dynamics 365 Sales integrate with Microsoft 365?

For this implementation, Dexpro integrated Dynamics 365 with Microsoft 365 to improve collaboration, reporting, and productivity across the organization.

Should Your Organization Consider Moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales?

For this asset manager, replacing Salesforce wasn't simply about finding a less expensive CRM. The company wanted a platform that fit its Microsoft environment, supported its sales and marketing processes, addressed its regulatory and data governance requirements, and could scale with the business.

If your organization is evaluating the costs or limitations of its current Salesforce CRM environment, learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales with Dexpro Dynamics or contact Dexpro Dynamics to discuss your CRM requirements.

The post Why a Global Asset Manager Replaced Salesforce with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

You probably built the report because someone asked for a number, or because you needed proof before asking for budget. It worked. The tile says 3,200 duplicate contacts, there is a drill-through by owner, and everyone agrees the problem is real. Then the meeting ends and all 3,200 are still there.

That gap between seeing duplicates and resolving them is where many cleanup efforts stall. Power BI handles the first half well. This article covers where it stops, and what the second half requires.

What a Power BI duplicate report does well

Power BI is a sound way to measure duplicates, and it is worth building for that reason that alone.

The Dataverse connector reads your tables directly, once an admin has enabled the TDS endpoint setting in the environment. You can import the data or query it live with DirectQuery. From there, finding exact duplicates is a group-by: count the rows that share an email address, an account number, or a website domain, and keep the groups with more than one.

Near matches are possible too. Power Query includes fuzzy merge and fuzzy grouping, which use a similarity threshold that defaults to 80%. That catches "Contoso Ltd" against "Contoso Limited" without extra code.

So a report can size the problem, break it down by owner, source, or creation date, and track whether it is getting better or worse. All of that helps when you need to make the case for fixing it.

Where the report stops

Every limit below comes from the same fact: a report reads data. It does not change it.

It cannot merge

Merging happens in Dynamics 365 CE, not in the report. Per Microsoft's merge documentation, you select the duplicate rows in a view, choose Merge, pick the primary record, and choose which columns carry over. You can merge only two records at a time, so a group of five duplicates takes four merges. A drill-through link in your report can open each record, but someone still works through them one pair at a time. Some teams automate the merge with a Power Automate flow, which has its own failure modes.

It cannot decide which record wins

A report flags a match. It does not know which record has the current phone number, the right owner, or the most recent activity. In native merge, a person decides that for every pair. At 3,200 duplicates, that decision needs rules, not memory.

It cannot help with tables native merge does not cover

In the Dynamics 365 CE interface, only Account, Contact, and Lead records can be merged. Microsoft's Web API reference adds Case (incident) for environments running Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Other standard tables and custom tables are not supported. Power BI will report duplicates on a custom table without complaint, and then there is no built-in action to take on what it finds.

It is a snapshot

A report is only as current as its last refresh. Meanwhile, records keep arriving through imports, Web API inserts, Power Automate flows, and integrations, and those routes can skip native duplicate detection entirely. We covered that in how Web API inserts bypass duplicate detection by default. Native bulk duplicate detection jobs are snapshots too, and each one stops at 5,000 records. Clean up the backlog and the tile turns green. A week later it turns red again, and nothing in the report explains why.

What closes the gap

The report covers visibility. Fixing duplicates takes two more jobs: cleaning what is already in the environment, and checking what arrives next.

Clean means merging in bulk, by rules you set. That includes choosing the winning record, deciding per field which value survives, reviewing side by side where it matters, and merging automatically where it does not. It also means working on custom tables, and re-pointing related records to the surviving record so nothing is orphaned.

Prevent means every new record gets checked as it arrives, whether a user typed it, an integration wrote it, or an import brought it in. Without this step, the cleanup in the previous paragraph has to be repeated.

Monitor is where Power BI and a data quality tool overlap. If a number on a tile is all you need, the report does that job. Monitor in Plauti for Dynamics 365 CE runs duplicate-rate and field-level analyses inside Dataverse, shows each result as green, amber, or red against thresholds you set, and stores results so you can compare them over time. The difference is that it sits next to the tools that act on what it finds.

Keep the Power BI report for the leadership meeting. Then pick a tool that merges and prevents, so the next report shows a number that went down.

Plauti for Dynamics 365 CE installs from Microsoft Marketplace and runs inside your own Dataverse environment. To see Monitor, Clean, and Prevent together, start at plauti.com/crm/microsoft-dynamics.

The post A Power BI dashboard can show you duplicate records in Dynamics 365 CE. It can't fix them. appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

The goal shouldn't be to get employees to spend more time managing the CRM. It should be to reduce the steps between doing the work and having a record of the work.

BenefitsBridge – CRM for Health Insurance Agencies was built to make this happen.

Key Highlights

• Look at workflow problems before assuming poor CRM adoption is an employee problem.
• Reduce duplicate entry and unnecessary steps required to document client activity.
• Connect CRM with Outlook, where many benefits professionals already communicate with clients and carriers.
• Ask employees what they skip, duplicate or keep outside the CRM when they're busy.
• Better CRM adoption gives leadership better visibility into client service activity, workloads and the sales pipeline.

5 Ways to Improve CRM Adoption in an Employee Benefits Agency

Improving CRM adoption isn't necessarily about more training or stricter rules. For employee benefits agencies, it often means making the system easier to use during the everyday work employees are already doing.

Here are five areas to consider.

1. Look at the Workflow Before Blaming the User

You can tell your team that every client interaction needs to be entered into your agency management or CRM system. You can create processes, provide training and remind people why complete information is important.

But if using the system makes their job harder, eventually someone is going to decide it's easier not to do it.

When information is missing, management may immediately ask:

• Why aren't people using the CRM?
• Why aren't they entering their activities?
• Do they need more training?
• Should managers enforce the process more closely?

Those may be valid questions. But there is another important question:

How easy have we made it for employees to do what we're asking?

If employees have to choose between serving the client and maintaining the system, client service is probably going to win. And frankly, that's what you want them focused on.

2. Reduce the Extra Steps Required to Document Client Activity

Consider what happens during a typical day for an employee benefits account manager.

A client sends an email with a question. The account manager responds, contacts the carrier if necessary, sends another email and resolves the issue.

From the client's perspective, that's exactly what should happen. They needed help, and they got it.

But now the account manager may be expected to go somewhere else and document everything that just happened.

If that requires opening another application, finding the account, creating an activity or service request and entering the details, you've added another task to an already long list.

Five minutes here and ten minutes there add up quickly. When the next client email is already waiting, it's easy to understand why documenting the previous interaction gets pushed aside.

The better approach is to reduce the extra effort required to keep your agency's information current.

3. Connect CRM With Outlook

For many benefits professionals, Outlook is where a large part of the workday happens.

Client questions arrive there. Carrier conversations happen there. Follow-ups happen there.

If your CRM is disconnected from Outlook, employees may finish the work in one system and then have to go somewhere else to document it.

BenefitsBridge – CRM for Health Insurance Brokers is built on the Microsoft platform, which means Outlook and CRM are part of the same Microsoft environment. Instead of treating email and CRM as two completely separate parts of the job, BenefitsBridge makes it easier to connect communications happening in Outlook with the appropriate CRM records.

That's the real benefit of Outlook integration. Account managers and producers don't have to change where they naturally communicate with clients just so management can have better information in the CRM.

For more on this topic, read Why Employee Benefits Brokers Need a CRM That Integrates With Outlook.

4. Fit CRM Into the Applications Employees Already Use

Technology doesn't eliminate the need for good processes. Employees still need to understand what information matters and what should be captured.

But a process that fits into the applications they already use has a much better chance of becoming part of their normal workday.

That's one reason ForgeXRM builds its CRM solutions on the Microsoft platform.

The goal isn't to give employees another system to maintain. It's to make CRM fit more naturally into the way they already work.

5. Ask Your Employees Where CRM Friction Happens

There will always be some responsibility on employees to use the systems an agency puts in place. No software can completely eliminate that.

But when the same adoption problem keeps happening, it may be worth looking beyond the users.

Ask your service team:

• What slows you down?
• What do you skip when you're busy?
• Where do you have to enter the same information twice?
• What do you keep in Outlook or Excel because putting it into the agency management system takes too long?

Their answers may tell you a lot about why your CRM isn't being used the way you expected.

Why CRM Adoption Matters Beyond the Client Record

Better CRM adoption isn't just about keeping cleaner records. The information employees do or don't capture eventually affects management visibility.

If important client activity is missing, agency leaders have a harder time understanding:

• How much work particular accounts require
• What issues keep coming up
• How workloads are distributed
• What the agency has actually done for a client throughout the year

Poor adoption can affect sales visibility too.

If producers aren't consistently maintaining opportunities and activities, leadership doesn't have a reliable view of the pipeline.

At that point, the agency may technically have an agency management system or CRM, but people are still relying on inboxes, spreadsheets and individual knowledge to understand what's happening.

What Does Microsoft Outlook Integration Have to Do With CRM Adoption?

For an employee benefits agency, CRM adoption is easier when employees don't have to constantly switch between the CRM and the tools where they're already working.

BenefitsBridge connects CRM with the Microsoft environment benefits professionals use every day. This can reduce the separation between communicating with a client and maintaining the client's CRM record.

Instead of asking employees to spend more time inside an agency management system, the objective is to reduce the extra steps between completing the work and capturing a record of it.

Make the Easiest Way the Right Way

You still need good processes, clear expectations and employees who understand what information should be captured.

But when CRM adoption remains a problem, another round of reminders may not address the underlying issue.

Look at the process from the employee's perspective. Find the extra steps. Look for duplicate entry. Identify what employees are keeping in Outlook or Excel because updating the CRM takes too long.

Then ask whether your CRM could fit more naturally into the way your team already works.

That's the goal with BenefitsBridge: not convincing employees to spend more time managing CRM, but making CRM easier to incorporate into their existing workflow.

Because when doing it the right way is also the easiest way, you don't have to spend nearly as much time reminding people to do it.

Frequently Asked Questions About CRM Adoption for Employee Benefits Brokers

How can an employee benefits agency improve CRM adoption?

Start by reducing unnecessary steps between completing client work and documenting it. Look for duplicate data entry, disconnected applications and tasks employees regularly skip when they're busy. Integrating CRM with applications employees already use, such as Outlook, can also help CRM become a more natural part of the workflow.

Why don't employee benefits teams consistently update their CRM?

Sometimes the problem isn't a lack of training or understanding. Employees may skip CRM updates because documenting an interaction requires additional steps after they've already completed the client work.

Can Outlook integration help improve CRM adoption?

It can reduce the separation between where employees communicate and where client activity is recorded. For benefits professionals who already spend much of their day in Outlook, connecting Outlook and CRM can make it easier to associate communications with the appropriate CRM records.

Is CRM training enough to improve user adoption?

Not always. Employees still need to understand what information should be captured, but training doesn't eliminate an inefficient workflow. If employees know what to do but the process requires too many extra steps, the process itself may need attention.

Why does CRM adoption matter to agency leadership?

When important client and sales activities aren't consistently recorded, leadership has a harder time understanding client workloads, recurring issues, service activity and the sales pipeline.

What is BenefitsBridge?

BenefitsBridge is a CRM for health insurance brokers built on the Microsoft platform. It is designed to connect CRM and agency management information with the Microsoft environment benefits professionals already use.

Our tool is certified by Microsoft on the Microsoft Marketplace.

See How BenefitsBridge Fits Into Your Team's Workflow

If your employees understand why CRM matters but still aren't consistently using the system, look at how much effort you're asking them to put into maintaining it.

We would like to start a conversation on this topic.

The post 5 Ways to Improve CRM Adoption in an Employee Benefits Agency appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Key Highlights

• Dynamics 365 Sales brings sales pipeline information, communications, and next steps together to help teams manage opportunities.
• Copilot can assist with routine CRM tasks, including analyzing sales information, preparing follow-up emails, and keeping records current.
• Copilot Cowork allows sales representatives to ask questions about sales data using plain language.
• Understanding which AI capabilities are available today can help businesses evaluate how they fit into existing sales processes.
• A recorded webinar from Western Computer demonstrates Copilot capabilities and explores how they fit within the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

Why Are Sales Teams Looking at AI in Dynamics 365 Sales?

Sales representatives need time to build customer relationships, understand prospects, and move opportunities forward. However, maintaining CRM records, documenting conversations, tracking opportunities, and preparing follow-up communications can take time away from those activities.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales helps organizations manage their sales pipeline, communications, and next steps in one place. With Copilot capabilities, sales teams can also explore ways to simplify routine tasks and make better use of the information already available in their CRM.

The goal is not to replace the judgment and relationship-building skills of a sales professional. Instead, AI can help reduce some of the administrative work that competes with time spent selling.

For organizations already using Dynamics 365 Sales, the important question is how these capabilities work in practice and which ones might be useful for their teams.

What Can Copilot Do Inside Dynamics 365 Sales?

Copilot brings AI-assisted capabilities into the sales workflow, helping representatives work with sales information and complete routine activities more efficiently.

Depending on the capability being used, sales professionals can explore ways to:

• Ask questions about sales data using plain language.
• Draft emails and follow-up communications.
• Prepare for customer meetings.
• Keep CRM records current with a short prompt.
• Review pipeline information and gain a clearer understanding of opportunities.

These capabilities address everyday tasks that can otherwise require representatives to move between different activities and manually maintain information. Making those tasks easier may help salespeople spend more time engaging with customers while keeping the CRM useful for the rest of the organization.

For sales managers, current and accessible information also matters when reviewing the pipeline and understanding where opportunities stand. Dynamics 365 Sales provides a central place for sales information, while Copilot offers additional ways to work with that data.

What Is Copilot Cowork, and How Does It Help Sales Representatives?

Copilot Cowork is a capability highlighted in Western Computer's webinar about AI in Dynamics 365 Sales. The session explores how the Cowork plugin allows sales representatives to ask questions about their sales data in plain language.

Rather than relying exclusively on manual searches or navigating through records, users can interact with information through natural-language questions. This provides another way to access relevant sales information during the workday.

The webinar also examines where Copilot can save time across the selling process and how these capabilities fit into Microsoft's broader technology ecosystem, including Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.

For organizations evaluating AI for sales, seeing these tools demonstrated in a working context can help clarify their potential uses. It also provides an opportunity to distinguish capabilities available at the time of the session from items that may be part of Microsoft's evolving roadmap.

Why Should Businesses See Copilot in Action?

Understanding what an AI tool can do on paper is different from seeing how it fits into an actual sales workflow. A demonstration can help decision-makers connect individual features with the everyday responsibilities of their sales teams.

Western Computer's recorded webinar, AI in Your CRM: Copilot Cowork Inside Dynamics 365 Sales, offers a practical look at Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales. The session focuses on current capabilities and how sales professionals can use them to work with information and manage routine activities.

The webinar covers three important areas:

• Practical capabilities: What Copilot can do inside Dynamics 365 Sales at the time of the demonstration.
• Everyday sales tasks: Where AI assistance may help reduce time spent on routine work.
• Implementation considerations: What it takes to enable Copilot for a sales team.

The session also provides context on where these capabilities fit within Microsoft's broader Dynamics 365 roadmap.

For sales and revenue operations leaders, the demonstration offers a starting point for evaluating whether these tools align with existing processes and business priorities.

Watch the Recorded Webinar: AI in Your CRM

If your sales team uses Dynamics 365 Sales, or you are evaluating it for your organization, watching the recorded webinar is a useful next step.

The approximately 30-minute session explores Copilot inside Dynamics 365 Sales, including natural-language questions about sales data, practical ways to save time, and considerations for enabling the technology.

Watch the recorded webinar: AI in Your CRM: Copilot Cowork Inside Dynamics 365 Sales

The recording provides an opportunity to see the capabilities discussed in this article rather than relying on feature descriptions alone.

Frequently Asked Questions About Copilot and Dynamics 365 Sales

Q: What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales?

A: Dynamics 365 Sales is a CRM application that brings sales pipeline information, communications, and next steps together to help teams manage customer opportunities.

Q: How can Copilot help users of Dynamics 365 Sales?

A: Copilot can assist with tasks such as asking questions about sales data, drafting emails, preparing for meetings, and keeping CRM records current.

Q: What is Copilot Cowork?

A: Copilot Cowork is highlighted in the webinar as a way for sales representatives to ask questions about their sales data using plain language.

Q: Who should watch the recorded webinar?

A: The session is designed for sales and revenue operations leaders interested in understanding Copilot's capabilities within Dynamics 365 Sales and how they may support everyday sales work.

Q: What will viewers learn from the webinar?

A: Viewers will see a demonstration of Copilot capabilities, explore opportunities to save time across the selling day, and learn about enabling Copilot for a sales team.

Take the Next Step with Dynamics 365 Sales

AI capabilities are evolving, making it important to understand what is available and how those tools fit into the way a sales team works. A practical demonstration can help businesses identify areas worth exploring without assuming every capability will suit every organization.

Watch Western Computer's recorded webinar to see Copilot Cowork inside Dynamics 365 Sales and consider how AI-assisted sales workflows could support your team's daily work.

After you watch the video, contact our team at Western Computer, and let's talk about how Copilot Cowork inside Dynamics 365 Sales can benefit your business.

By Western Computer, westerncomputer.com

The post 5 Ways Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales Saves Reps Time appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Working with Dexpro Dynamics, the company replaced HubSpot with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, centralized its customer and sales data, standardized sales processes, and added dashboards and Power BI reporting. The implementation also created a Microsoft-based foundation the company can expand as its needs grow.

Key Highlights

• Replaced HubSpot and disconnected sales tools with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
• Centralized customer, prospect, and sales activity in one CRM
• Standardized lead, opportunity, and sales processes
• Added automated workflows, dashboards, and Power BI reporting
• Created a foundation for future expansion into other Microsoft business applications

Why Had the Healthcare Technology Company Outgrown HubSpot?

The healthcare technology company provides virtual care and diagnostic solutions. As the business grew, the sales tools it had started with were no longer supporting the way the company needed to operate.

Customer and sales information was scattered across HubSpot, spreadsheets, and several other systems. There was no single source of truth, which meant the sales team was spending significant time managing information instead of focusing on customer and prospect relationships.

Reporting was another challenge. Producing reports could take days rather than minutes, and leadership couldn't get a clear picture of the sales pipeline without combining data from three different places.

The company wasn't simply looking to replace one CRM with another. It needed a CRM foundation that could support a repeatable sales process, better reporting, and continued growth.

What Did the Company Need from a New CRM?

The company needed to bring lead management, opportunity tracking, and customer relationship management into one system.

It also needed a standardized sales process. Rather than having results depend on the individual person managing a deal, the company wanted a consistent approach that could be followed across the sales organization.

Dexpro Dynamics recommended Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as the platform for that new CRM foundation.

How Did Dexpro Dynamics Implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales?

Dexpro's solution architects led the project from the beginning, with Dynamics 365 Sales replacing HubSpot and becoming the central location for customer data.

The implementation included:

• Configuring Dynamics 365 around the company's healthcare-specific processes
• Building business process flows
• Setting up territory management
• Migrating historical customer data
• Integrating Dynamics 365 with Outlook
• Creating dashboards and Power BI reporting
• Training end users and administrators

Connecting Dynamics 365 with Outlook allowed the sales team to continue using the email workflows it already relied on while working with the new CRM.

Dexpro also provided hands-on training so both end users and administrators could confidently operate the system after implementation.

Organizations considering a similar project can learn more about Dexpro's services as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales partner. Dexpro's CRM practice includes Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights as well as implementation and support services.

Why Did Dexpro Use a Phased Dynamics 365 Rollout?

Rather than introducing every available Dynamics 365 capability at once, Dexpro recommended a phased implementation.

The first phase concentrated on the core sales processes and reporting capabilities the company needed most. This approach was intended to keep adoption manageable instead of overwhelming users with too many new capabilities at once.

The phased approach also established a CRM foundation that could support additional Microsoft applications as the company's needs grow.

What Changed After Moving to Dynamics 365 Sales?

With Dynamics 365 Sales in place, the healthcare technology company now manages its customer, prospect, and sales activity through a single CRM platform.

Manual work has given way to automated workflows and a standardized sales process. Leadership also has real-time visibility into the sales pipeline through dashboards and reporting that were not available with the previous collection of systems.

For the sales organization, customer and sales information is now centralized instead of being spread across HubSpot, spreadsheets, and other systems.

Another CRM Migration to Dynamics 365

This healthcare technology company isn't the only organization Dexpro has helped move from another CRM platform to Dynamics 365.

In another project, a global institutional asset manager moved from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. You can read the Salesforce-to-Dynamics 365 Sales case study on the Dexpro Dynamics website.

How Does Dynamics 365 Support the Company's Next Phase of Growth?

The move to Dynamics 365 Sales was not designed as an isolated CRM project.

The platform opens the door to AI-assisted selling and deeper customer insights. It also provides a foundation for potential expansion into Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Customer Insights as the company's requirements grow.

That means the company can expand into the broader Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem as its needs change rather than starting from scratch again.

Dexpro works with Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Insights, and Power Platform solutions. Learn more about Dexpro Dynamics and its approach as a Microsoft Dynamics partner.

FAQ: Moving from HubSpot to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Can a company replace HubSpot with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales?

Yes. In this project, Dexpro Dynamics migrated a healthcare technology company from HubSpot to Dynamics 365 Sales, including its historical customer data.

Can Dynamics 365 Sales integrate with Outlook?

Yes. Dexpro connected Dynamics 365 with Outlook so the company's sales team could continue using its existing email workflows while working with centralized CRM data.

Can Dynamics 365 Sales improve sales pipeline reporting?

For this company, moving to Dynamics 365 provided leadership with real-time pipeline visibility through dashboards and reporting. Previously, leadership had to pull information from three different places to understand the pipeline.

Does a Dynamics 365 implementation need to include every feature at once?

No. Dexpro used a phased approach for this project, beginning with the core sales processes and reporting capabilities the company needed most.

Next Steps to Replace Hubspot with Dynamics 365 Sales

For this healthcare technology company, replacing HubSpot was about more than changing CRM software. The larger goal was to bring customer information, sales processes, automation, and reporting together in one system while creating a platform the company could build on in the future.

If your sales team is still managing customer relationships across spreadsheets, an existing CRM, and disconnected tools, learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales with Dexpro Dynamics or contact Dexpro Dynamics to discuss your CRM requirements.

The post Healthcare Technology Company Moves from HubSpot to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

As organizations continue exploring AI, we're seeing a common challenge emerge. The question is rarely which AI tool to choose. More often, it's whether the organization's data is ready to support it.

Many businesses and municipalities already have valuable data spread across CRM, ERP, HR, operational systems, databases, and spreadsheets. The issue isn't a lack of data. It's that the data often lives in separate systems, making it difficult to trust, connect, and analyze.

That's Where Microsoft Fabric Comes In. 

Rather than introducing another standalone analytics platform, Fabric brings together data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, Power BI, and AI capabilities within a single environment. At the center of the platform is OneLake, Microsoft's unified data foundation, designed to create a single source of truth for analytics and AI workloads across the organization. Microsoft positions OneLake as a centralized data repository that reduces duplication and supports multiple analytics workloads from a single copy of data.

A Practical Example 

Consider a municipality running Dynamics 365 for service management, and permitting, ADP for HR, and Power BI for reporting. Without a unified data strategy, answering what appears to be a simple question can require multiple reports and manual analysis.

For Example: 

"Are increases in service requests impacting response times, and do staffing levels correlate with the departments experiencing the highest demand?". Answering that question requires information from several systems.

Fabric helps by bringing those datasets together into a common analytical platform, allowing leadership teams to analyze information across business functions instead of within individual applications. The value isn't simply faster reporting. It's making better decisions with more complete information.

The result is familiar:

• Why don't these reports match?
• Which numbers should we trust?
• Why does executive reporting take so much effort?

These aren't reporting problems. They're data foundation problems. Fabric helps address these challenges by bringing data together into a unified architecture where reporting, analytics, and AI initiatives can all work from the same trusted source.

More Than Power BI 

One misconception we encounter is that Fabric replaces Power BI. It doesn't.

Power BI remains Microsoft's primary reporting and visualization platform. Fabric complements Power BI by providing the data services, governance, engineering, and storage capabilities behind the scenes.

Think of Power BI as what users see. Fabric helps manage how the data gets there. For organizations already invested in Power BI, Fabric often feels like a natural extension of their existing Microsoft data strategy rather than a complete technology shift.

Why Fabric Matters for AI 

One lesson we've learned from modernization projects is that AI rarely fixes underlying data challenges. People are excited about Copilot, AI agents, and predictive analytics, but those capabilities are only as effective as the data behind them. If information exists across multiple disconnected systems, meaningful AI becomes much harder to achieve.

Fabric helps establish the foundation AI depends on by creating a more connected and governed data environment. With capabilities such as Copilot in Fabric and Data Agents, organizations can explore data using natural language and accelerate insight generation while maintaining security and governance controls.

Consider a municipality using Dynamics 365, ADP, AMANDA, and Power BI. Fabric can bring data together across those systems, allowing leadership teams to better understand service demand, staffing impacts, and operational performance without relying on multiple disconnected reports.

Build the Foundation First 

Successful AI initiatives start with trusted data. If you are already using Dynamics 365, Business Central, Power Platform, and Power BI, Microsoft Fabric provides a path toward a more connected, governed, and AI-ready environment while maximizing existing Microsoft investments. 

Endeavour4 helps organizations evaluate where Fabric fits within their broader data strategy, identify integration opportunities, and build practical roadmaps that move them from disconnected reporting to trusted analytics and AI-ready operations. To see how we can help you build a solid data foundation, visit: https://www.endeavor4crm.com/microsoft-fabric/

Endeavor4 CRM is part of Endeavor4. We're a founding member of the Endeavor4 brand and a proud North American Cloud Microsoft Solutions Partner for AI, ERP, CRM, and Business Applications focusing on implementations, upgrades, development, data analytics, training and support for the cloud-centric Dynamics 365 Platform including, Business Central (ERP), Finance & Operations / Supply Chain Management (ERP), Customer Experience (CRM), Power Platform, Power Apps, Microsoft 365, Azure and Microsoft Copilot.
https://www.endeavor4crm.com/services/our-methodology/

The post Building the Foundation for Data, Analytics, and AI appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 shows you exactly where you are: every lead, case and opportunity, mapped in fine detail. What it doesn’t say is where to turn next. So reps scroll, guess and hope. Next Best Action, an AI/ML-powered assistant for Dynamics 365 CRM, adds the missing voice: “In 300 feet, call this customer.”

Key Takeaways

• Next Best Action recommends the most impactful next step for each CRM record.
• Every suggestion shows a priority, a confidence score and the reasoning behind it.
• Recommendations appear inside Dynamics 365 forms, so users act without leaving the record.
• It predicts the best time to call, email or meet.
• It works on standard and custom entities in Dynamics 365 Online | Dataverse.

The hidden cost of guessing

Research found that reps spend only about 40% of their week actually selling, and that sales rep turnover averages 35% annually. The rest of the week goes to logging activity, researching accounts and wondering which record deserves attention first. That’s a lot of fuel spent before the car moves.

What is Next Best Action in Dynamics 365?

Next Best Action is an AI/ML-powered assistant that analyzes CRM data, customer interactions and historical outcomes to recommend the most impactful next step for each record, such as sending an email, scheduling a call or following up. It’s built on Microsoft Azure AI services and runs inside Dynamics 365.

How it works

• Context-aware recommendations: it evaluates historical outcomes, engagement signals and activity patterns to suggest actions on leads, opportunities, cases and custom entities.
• Activity Cards: recommendations sit directly on the form with due date, activity type, priority (High, Normal or Low) and confidence score. Users can execute, dismiss or complete them in place.
• Explainable AI: each suggestion states why it was made and what goal it serves.
• Optimal timing prediction: it learns when your customers respond and recommends the best day and time to reach out.
• Timeline and Digest: a timeline tracks completed, due and dismissed actions, and a daily or weekly email digest lists top priorities.

What it looks like in Real Life

• Sales: an opportunity goes quiet for two weeks. A High-priority card suggests a follow-up call, with the reason attached: engagement dropped after the proposal was sent.
• Customer service: a case is aging with no update. The card recommends a proactive check-in before the customer escalates.
• Marketing and leads: a lead keeps opening your emails. The card suggests a meeting request at the time this contact is most likely to respond.

Where it Fits: Across Industries

Next Best Action works on any standard or custom entity, so it adapts to whatever a “record” means in your industry. The same engine reads your own CRM history, so recommendations reflect your processes, not a generic playbook.

Why Explainable Beats Mysterious

Nobody follows a black box for long. Because each recommendation comes with its rationale, influencing factors and confidence level, reps can judge it, trust it and act, which drives the adoption that decides whether AI actually pays off. It also standardizes best practices, so a newer rep benefits from patterns your top performers already follow.

Built for Dynamics 365

Next Best Action works with Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Marketing and Dataverse (Online). It’s built on Azure with enterprise-grade security and GDPR compliance.

Ready to stop guessing?

Start Your 15-Day FREE Trial:

• Get it from the Inogic Website
• Get it from Microsoft AppSource

Have questions or want to see it in action? Request a free demo or reach out to our team at crm@inogic.com.

FAQs

What is Next Best Action in CRM?
It’s an AI-powered capability that recommends the most effective next step for each record. Inogic’s Next Best Action does this inside Dynamics 365 with confidence scores and clear reasoning.

How does AI decide the next best action in Dynamics 365?
It analyzes historical CRM data, customer interactions, engagement patterns and past outcomes. Next Best Action uses AI/ML to turn those signals into prioritized, real-time recommendations.

Does Next Best Action work with custom entities?
Yes. It supports standard and custom entities across Sales, Customer Service, Marketing and Dataverse, so your own processes get guidance too.

Can I trust AI recommendations in my CRM?
Next Best Action shows the rationale, influencing factors and a confidence score for every suggestion, so users can judge each one before acting.
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The post Call, Email or Wait? Next Best Action Decides in Dynamics 365 appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Fortunately, the Dynamics CRM suite (which includes apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights – Journeys) offers several ways to search for information, depending on what you’re looking for and how broadly you want to search. You can search across all your tables, narrow your search to a specific table, or look for values within an individual column. 

There are four search methods, ranging from broad search capabilities to granular: 

• Dataverse search 
• Advanced find 
• Quick find 
• Column-level search 

Read on to learn how each search method works and when to use it to find the information you need more effectively in any Dynamics 365 CRM application. 

Dataverse search for broad, system-wide queries 

A Dataverse search lets you interrogate tables across your entire ecosystem of Microsoft applications, thanks to the Dataverse connector. This capability needs to be enabled by a system administrator; Once it is, the Dataverse search bar will appear at the top of your application window. 

Results of a Dataverse search are grouped by record types, and you can filter them by: 

• Owner 
• Modified on (from oldest to most recent and vice versa) 
• Created on (from oldest to most recent and vice versa) 

A Dataverse search is your best option when you don’t know what record type or table contains the information you’re looking for, so finding it calls for a broad search.  

Imagine you’re a sales representative who is about to contact a lead, but you can only remember that they told you to call them Bob. By searching “Bob” in the Dataverse search bar, you can surface closely matching contact names and the companies they’re associated with. 

Dataverse search modifiers 

With all that data at your fingertips, it’s a good idea to get specific about exactly what you’re looking for. Modifiers let you hone your search using certain words and characters. 

• AND: Use the plus symbol (+) to find records containing both keywords. For example, searching for Alpine + Paul looks for records containing both Alpine and Paul. 
• OR: Use the vertical bar (|) to search for either keyword. It will surface records containing either Alpine OR Paul. 
• NOT: Place a minus symbol (-) directly before a keyword to exclude it. For example, the search, “Alpine - Patrick” would surface records containing Alpine that exclude any mention of Patrick.  
• Wildcard: Use an asterisk (*) to broaden a partial-word search. Placing it before a word will surface records ending with that text. Placing it after the word searches for terms beginning with that text. For example, pine would surface Alpine, while pine* would surface Pineapple. 

Advanced find for complex, multi-filter searches 

To search tables that are in your application but not in your left-hand navigation, you can use advanced find. Advanced find also lets you apply multiple filters in the same search to curate highly precise results.  

There are two versions of advanced find: modern and legacy.  

Legacy advanced find 

While Microsoft has deprecated (deemed obsolete) legacy advanced find, you may still find yourself using it if your organization has yet to implement modern advanced find. Some Dynamics users still prefer the old experience, as it continues to meet their search needs.  

In the legacy advanced find window, you select the table that you’re interested in searching from the dropdown menu on the left side. On the right side, you can choose any of the system views or saved views.  

Below that, you choose the field that you want to search. Next to that, you select your operator (equal, does not equal, contains). In the box next to that, you type in your search term.  

If you want to keep this search to use again, you can save it as a personal view.  

Modern advanced find

Modern advanced find is the default search experience, but it must first be enabled by your system administrator. Once it is, when you click your Dataverse search bar, there will be an option at the bottom of the drop-down called “Search for rows in a table using advanced filters.”  

To use modern advanced find, click into that option. Then select the tables from your application in which you want to search. From here, the process becomes similar to searching a list view, where you can edit the columns and filters applied. 

Learn more about creating, saving, and sharing views in Dynamics 365 CRM --> 

Let’s say you’re a customer service manager who wants to identify all high-priority support cases that have been open for more than seven days and are still unresolved.  

To start, you’d select “Cases” from the menu of tables to search. 

From there, you’d apply the following search criteria on the Edit filters window: 

• Priority: High 
• Status: Active 
• Created On: Older than 7 days 

This would generate a list of high-priority cases that are still active and were created more than seven days ago. 

For another example, imagine you’re a marketing manager planning an in-person event in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Using the address filters in modern advanced find, you can filter your contacts by their associated location to send targeted invites.  

Quick find for fast, simple in-list searches 

When you know what you’re looking for and need to find it fast, you can use quick find.  The quick find bar is located in the top right corner of model-driven list views. Whatever you type into the quick find bar, the system defaults to the “begins with” filter for your search.  

If you receive a call from John Smith and need to pull up their contact record quickly, you’d need to enter “John” into the quick find bar, as “Smith” would not return the correct results. 

Quick find only searches across columns included in the quick find view, which is configured by your system administrator. Keep in mind that quick find looks exclusively at active records. For these reasons, it can be a great option for fast, general searches of your lists.  

Column-level search for when the location is known, but the details are not 

Column-level search is the most granular option for searching your data in a list view. It can also be the fastest way to find what you’re looking for when you already know where the information is located.  

To search within a column, click on the caret icon next to the column title, then choose your “filter by” selections (the operator and keyword that will drive your search). 

For example, if you’re looking for a customer’s full name but you can only remember their email address, you can search the Email column to find the appropriate record. 

The “Edit filters” button can further refine your searches. This comes in handy when the column you wish to filter by is not included in your view, or if you have multiple filters you’d like to apply to a single search (as in modern advanced find).  

Check out our Syvantis Learn Fast Class for more information and demos on CRM search. 

Bonus: Natural language search for AI-assisted results 

Released in June 2025, natural language search is a new feature that allows you to employ natural language in the search bar, which AI then translates into a formal search query.   

For example, typing “accounts with adventure in the account name” into the search bar will automatically apply a filter of “Account name contains: adventure.”  

When using this feature, it’s good practice to ensure that your search was interpreted correctly by opening the Edit filters window. 

The name of the view is also automatically adjusted to reflect the search. In this example, it becomes “Accounts with ‘Adventure’ in the account name.” You can save this view for later reference by clicking into the caret menu next to the name of the view. 

The natural language search feature must be turned on by your system administrator, and it’s still in preview. This means it’s not yet ready for production environments as it may be subject to change. 

See natural language search in action with a Syvantis Fast Class. 

Find what you’re looking for in Dynamics 365 CRM with search savvy 

There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing information is in your system and being unable to find it, or having to wrestle with the system to eventually get to it. With the search options above, you can locate even the most elusive record with more efficiency or query a list down to the precise results you need. 

And when you can find what you’re looking for, you can work with what you already have. 

The post So many ways to search records in Dynamics 365 CRM! When do you use each one? appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Most Dynamics 365 teams spend part of every day asking questions the system already knows the answer to.

Where are we with this quote? Who has the baton on this order? When’s the last time we touched this customer? Are we on target to hit our goal?

Every one of those answers is sitting in the CRM. But getting to it means opening a record, finding the right fields and working it out, so most people take the shortcut and ask someone. The weekly status meeting is often the same thing at scale: a room full of people reading fields out loud to each other.

A simple test

Take those four questions, or the four your team asks most. For each one, ask whether someone could answer it in one glance from the screen they already have open, without clicking into anything. If not, your team isn’t short on information. The system just isn’t telling them.

Data is not an answer

This is the gap between storing data and giving answers. A stage value, a last-contact date, a number against a goal: that’s data. Someone still has to find it, read it and decide whether it’s good news. An answer is the same information with the deciding already done. This order is in QC. This customer hasn’t heard from us in too long. We’re behind on this goal.

Most CRMs are very good at the first and leave the second to people. That’s where all the asking comes from.

What closes the gap

At P2 Automation we built two controls for exactly this. Stage Indicator shows where a quote or an order stands the moment you open it, and every department sees the same thing. Smart KPI turns a number into green, yellow or red, so anyone looking at it knows whether it needs attention without knowing the target.

Neither replaces judgment. They replace the asking. The status meeting still happens, but it starts on what’s red instead of reading through what’s fine.

Read more about Stage Indicator and Smart KPI: https://www.p2automation.com/status-at-a-glance

See how the P2 Control Layer works: https://www.p2automation.com/p2-control-layer

Or book twenty minutes and we’ll show you both live: https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post If It Takes a Meeting to Know Where Things Stand, Dynamics 365 Isn’t Doing Its Job appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Microsoft describes Dynamics 365 Contact Center as a Copilot-first, cloud-based contact center that supports voice and digital channels, artificial intelligence (AI), unified routing, analytics, and customer relationship management (CRM) context. That breadth matters during evaluation because the existing platform may support much more than phone calls. Business processes, data flows, security requirements, and teams outside the primary service organization can all become part of the migration scope. Some of that work will not become visible until the team starts tracing dependencies.

Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center Replatforming Gets Complicated

Organizations usually begin reconsidering contact center technology for one of two reasons. Cost pressure may come from renewals, licensing changes, infrastructure expense, or total cost of ownership. Complexity creates a different kind of pressure through aging infrastructure, custom applications, fragmented processes, or new security requirements.

Both are valid reasons to change platforms. Neither tells you everything the current environment is doing. That is where planning risk enters. A workload that looks small during early discovery can become a major scope change if the business depends on it every day.

Understand How Deeply the Contact Center Is Embedded

This sounds obvious, which is one reason teams can move through it too quickly. Mature contact center platforms often have years of integrations, automations, carrier dependencies, reporting feeds, security decisions, and business processes built around them.

The main service team is usually easy to identify. The less obvious groups are where teams tend to find dependencies that change scope. Reception may use the same telephony environment. Sales or account teams may depend on contact center capabilities. An internal IT group may have built automation around call events. A third-party provider depends on a data feed that nobody considers part of the contact center. I usually work through three lenses during this part of discovery:

• People and Business Groups
  

  Start with customer service and supervisors, then look beyond the obvious users. Sales, reception, back-office teams, IT, security, compliance, and third-party providers may also depend on the platform.

• Technology and Data

  Trace the telephony and carrier services first, then follow computer telephony integration (CTI), application programming interfaces (APIs), bots, workflows, identity controls, recording, quality management, reporting feeds, and data stores.

• Operational Criticality
  

  For each dependency, document volume, hours of operation, downtime tolerance, retention requirements, fallback options, and who owns the business and support decisions.

Microsoft’s Voice-Channel Documentation is a useful reminder of how many functions can sit around what looks like a simple phone interaction. Native voice can involve routing, voicemail, recording, transcription, sentiment analysis, transfers, supervisor capabilities, and analytics. Unified Routing adds another dependency layer because queues, skills, capacity, and assignment logic may affect work across channels.

The output I want from this step is a dependency register with an owner, business impact, replacement approach, and validation status for every material item. Built early, that same register can become part of the readiness review before go-live.

A small missed dependency can become a major scope change when the affected workload is business critical.

Map the Operational Impact, Not Just the Technology Change

Technology teams naturally focus on connectivity, configuration, migration, and integration. The operational transition often creates just as much project work. Workforce Engagement Management planning introduces another set of operational dependencies as service models expand.

Reporting continuity is one place where the operational work becomes visible quickly. If the old and new contact center platforms run in parallel, leadership may still expect one set of service metrics. The project may therefore need a temporary data migration or hybrid reporting model that was not obvious when the platform change was first scoped.

Training creates a different planning dependency. The team needs to know which roles need new material, how much content must change, who will prepare supervisors and IT support, and how much lead time the training organization needs before go-live.

At that point, I stop treating these as checklist items and turn them into workstreams with evidence that the team can actually review before launch.

If readiness cannot be demonstrated, I still consider the item an assumption rather than a completed plan. A simple user story is also a useful test of whether the requirement is clear enough to plan around.

“The training team needs two months of lead time before go-live so it can build material and schedule in-person training” is much more useful than “training is in scope.” If the need cannot be explained clearly, the need probably is not understood well enough yet.

New Dynamic has also looked at how voice, routing, workforce management, automation, and AI change the operating model in Scaling Customer Service Beyond Case Management. Those capabilities can improve service operations, but they also add dependencies that need clear ownership before rollout.

Recheck the Timeline After Discovery

By the end of discovery, the original date may no longer fit the work. Teams often try to absorb every new dependency without moving the timeline. That is where avoidable risk starts to accumulate.

If discovery uncovers another business group, a reporting bridge, or an integration that needs to be rebuilt, use that information to change the plan. The schedule should reflect what the team now knows.

At that point, I sort the work into three buckets. Table stakes are required for a safe launch. Fast follows have value, but they can wait for the next release. The wish list contains useful improvements that should not be allowed to drive the first production date.

A limited pilot is often the least expensive place to prove the assumptions that matter. A smaller user group can validate routing, reporting, support, and operational behavior before those same issues affect a broader rollout. The goal is not to delay value. It is to reduce the cost of learning by finding issues while the blast radius is still small.

If your plan includes “it is going to be close,” Murphy’s Law says you will overshoot.

Microsoft’s unified routing model makes this especially relevant because routing can span voice and digital work, queues, representative capacity, skills, and assignment rules. Those are not details I would want to validate for the first time during a full-scale launch.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center Replatforming FAQs

What should an organization inventory before replatforming to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center?

Start with the people and business groups that depend on the platform. Then trace the technology, data, and operational dependencies around them. Telephony, reporting, security, automation, integrations, support ownership, and workloads outside the primary service team can all affect scope.

Is contact center implementation mainly a technology project?

No. The technology build is only one workstream. Reporting continuity, training, routing, integrations, operational support, and stakeholder readiness can move the schedule just as easily as a configuration or migration issue.

Should organizations pilot Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center before a broader rollout?

A pilot is useful when it can disprove a real project assumption. A limited user group might validate routing under realistic conditions, compare old and new KPI calculations, or run a support escalation from start to finish before the same process reaches hundreds of users.

Key Takeaways

• Replatforming risk often appears outside the obvious Contact Center user group.
• Build the dependency register early enough that it can later become part of go-live validation.
• Treat reporting, training, routing, and integrations as real workstreams rather than notes on a project checklist.
• Let discovery change the roadmap. Table stakes belong at launch; fast follows and wish-list items do not.
• Use pilots to test assumptions that could materially change support, scale, or timing.

Replatforming works better when discovery is treated as part of delivery rather than a short exercise before the “real” project begins. The current environment has accumulated years of business decisions. Some of those decisions will follow the organization whether the project team notices them early or late.

My recommendation is straightforward. Discover broadly, prioritize deliberately, and validate before scaling. That gives the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center implementation a roadmap based on evidence rather than the assumptions that existed before discovery started.

Dave Braun – Senior Consultant

Working with New Dynamic

New Dynamic is a Microsoft Solutions Partner focused on the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platform. Our team of dedicated professionals strives to provide first-class experiences incorporating integrity, teamwork, and a relentless commitment to our client’s success. Contact Us today to transform your sales productivity and customer buying experiences.

The post Dynamics 365 Contact Center: Three Ways to Reduce Replatforming Risk Before Implementation appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

The shift comes as CRM teams move AI from pilots into daily operations. AI agents and assistants in Salesforce and Dynamics 365 CE draw directly on CRM records to answer questions, route leads, and take action. They need trusted data and trusted context to do that. When those records are duplicated, outdated, or incomplete, the AI works from the same flawed picture.

Many organizations are not prepared for that. According to a Gartner survey, 63% of organizations either do not have or are unsure of they have the right data management practices for AI. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data.

For years, customers approached Plauti's tools one at a time, picking whichever app addressed the data problem in front of them. The new structure reflects how that work actually happens in practice: as an ongoing cycle rather than a set of separate purchases:

• Monitor gives teams ongoing visibility into data quality across their CRM, so they know where their data stands before AI and automation depend on it.
• Clean addresses existing errors and duplicates.
• Prevent stops bad data from entering in the first place.
• Act puts clean, reliable data to work in automated processes and in the AI tools that now run on CRM data.

"For years, our customers came to Plauti to solve one data problem at a time," said Sten Ebenau, CEO of Plauti. "Now that AI is acting on CRM data, data quality can’t be a one-off project anymore. Monitor, Clean, Prevent, and Act gives teams one ongoing cycle: see where their data stands, fix it, and keep it ready."

The new website and positioning are live now at www.plauti.com. Current Plauti customers can explore the changes directly; no action is required on their part.

About Plauti

Plauti builds data quality software for teams running Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE), organized around a single lifecycle: Monitor, Clean, Prevent, and Act. Plauti is headquartered in Arnhem, the Netherlands. For more information, visit www.plauti.com.

The post Plauti Unifies Its Data Quality Tools Into One Platform to Help CRM Teams Get Their Data Ready for AI appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Field sales and service work doesn't usually make for dramatic storytelling. It's appointments, drive time, and paperwork. But now and then, a normal Tuesday turns into something closer to a thriller. A rep alone on an unfamiliar road, a storm closing in, a phone with one bar of signal and no idea what happens next.

These are the stories field teams tell each other afterward, half-laughing, half-still-shaken. In almost every one of them, the thing that turned a bad situation into a story with a happy ending isn’t luck. It is someone, somewhere, who knew exactly where they were.

Here are a few of those stories, and Inogic’s Maplytics features that made the difference!

The Field Rep Who Went Dark

It's early evening, and a field rep is driving back from a rural service call, twenty minutes past the last town with a gas station. The engine sputters, then dies with no houses in sight, no streetlights. Just a two-lane road disappearing into the dark in both directions, and a phone showing one bar of signal that's fading fast.

Back at the office, a colleague notices something's off. The rep hasn't checked in, and their last known stop has been the same for an hour. Instead of guessing, they open Maplytics' Real-Time Location Tracking and see exactly where the rep's last ping landed. A stretch of county road nobody would have thought to search. A quick call to local roadside assistance, with an exact location instead of a vague "somewhere past the old mill," gets help moving in minutes instead of hours.

What could have been a long, frightening night alone on an empty road became a story the rep now tells with a laugh, because someone back at the office didn't have to guess where to look.

The Storm That Closed the Only Road

A service technician is thirty minutes into a two-hour drive when the sky turns the color of a bruise. The radio starts warning about flash flooding. By the time the first fat raindrops hit the windshield, the GPS app they'd been using is still routing them straight toward a low-lying road that's about to become a river.

Because their route was planned through Maplytics, the picture looks different. Route Optimization continuously factors in real road and traffic conditions, and the technician's route adjusts away from the flood-prone stretch, toward higher ground, arriving a little later but arriving at all. No white-knuckle crossing. No waiting out a flood in a car on the shoulder. Just a longer, safer way around a problem the old route never saw coming.

The Wrong Side of Town, After Dark

A rep pulls up what they think is the right address for a late-afternoon appointment, except the neighborhood doesn't match the account notes at all. Narrow streets, no clear signage, and a part of the city they don't know well, with the light already starting to fade.

Instead of knocking on doors and hoping, they pull up the record in Maplytics, where the account is pinned exactly where it belongs, the precise location, geocoded straight from Dynamics 365, not an approximate street name typed in years ago. The real address is four blocks over, in a well-lit commercial strip. Five minutes of mild unease instead of twenty minutes of wandering an unfamiliar neighborhood after dark.

The Appointment That Was Never Possible

A rep's calendar shows back-to-back meetings, one just wrapping up downtown, the next supposedly starting in a suburb forty-five minutes away, in ten minutes. It's the kind of scheduling horror that turns a normal day into a mad dash through traffic, breaking every speed limit just to arrive barely on time and completely frazzled.

With Auto Scheduling, appointments get grouped by geography as well as availability in the first place, so a day like that never gets built. Nearby visits land together, distant ones get spread out, and nobody has to choose between being on time and driving safely to get there.

Why These Stories Matter

None of these situations are rare. Breakdowns happen. Storms roll in without much warning. Addresses get typed in wrong, or neighborhoods look different after dark than they did on a map at 9 a.m. The difference between a bad five minutes and a genuinely frightening night usually comes down to one simple thing- whether anyone, a colleague, a manager, the rep themselves, can actually see where they are and what's around them.

That's the quieter side of location intelligence. It's not just about shorter routes and tidier territories. It's about a colleague who can find you on a dark road when you can't describe where you are. It's a route that adjusts before the storm does. It's an address that's exactly right, even when the night makes everything look unfamiliar.

The Best Stories Are the Ones That End Well

Field reps will always have stories, as that's the nature of a job spent on the road, in unfamiliar places, on unpredictable days. Maplytics doesn't promise a day with zero surprises. It just makes sure that when something goes sideways, someone can see exactly where, and get help moving in the right direction.

Here are some commonly asked questions about Maplytics

What is Dynamics 365 location intelligence, and how does it help field reps?
Dynamics 365 location intelligence means your CRM data, customer records, appointments, and routes are tied to real, accurate map data instead of static addresses in a database. In practice, this means a colleague can see a rep’s real-time location on a map, a route can adjust the moment conditions change, and an address is pinned exactly where it is, not where it was typed years ago.

How does Dynamics 365 route optimization prevent dangerous situations on the road?
Route optimization in Dynamics 365 continuously factors in live traffic and road conditions rather than calculating a route once and leaving it fixed. If a storm closes a road or floods a low-lying stretch, the route adjusts automatically, directing a rep toward a safer path instead of straight into the hazard.

Can real-time tracking actually help locate a stranded field rep?
Yes. Real-time location tracking logs a rep’s last known position as they move through their day. If someone goes quiet or misses a check-in, a colleague can pull up that last ping on the map, turning a vague “somewhere on the way back” into an exact stretch of road, which matters enormously when every minute counts.

Why does accurate map dynamics CRM data matter for field safety, not just efficiency?
An imprecise or outdated address doesn’t just waste time. It can leave a rep wandering an unfamiliar neighborhood after dark, trying to match a vague street name to what they’re actually seeing. Geocoded, CRM-accurate pins remove that guesswork entirely, pointing directly to the right location.

Does Dynamics 365 territory mapping play a role in keeping field teams safer?
Indirectly, yes. Dynamics 365 territory mapping and territory planning ensure reps are assigned to areas they know, and that coverage is logical rather than scattered. Combined with route optimization and auto scheduling, well-planned sales territories mean less unfamiliar driving and fewer last-minute, poorly planned trips into unknown areas.

How does auto scheduling prevent back-to-back, impossible appointments?
Auto scheduling in Maplytics groups appointments by location as well as availability. Instead of a scheduling tool optimizing purely for “who’s free,” it also considers “who’s nearby,” so a rep’s day doesn’t end up with two meetings forty-five minutes apart and only ten minutes between them.

Ready to Explore What Maplytics Can Do for Your Team?

Maplytics with MapCopilot, its AI assistant, is a 5-star rated application on the Microsoft Marketplace. It is available immediately for Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power Pages, and Dataverse. It is a certified app on the Microsoft Marketplace and empowers users with location intelligence within the CRM. Organizations interested in adoption, 15-day free trials, or personalized demos are encouraged to contact Maplytics’ sales team at crm@inogic.com

For more information, visit our website or Microsoft Marketplace. One can hop onto the detailed Blogs, Client Testimonials, Success Stories, Industry Applications, and Video Library for quick query resolution. Technical docs for the working of Maplytics are also available for reference.

Kindly leave us a review or write about your experience on the Microsoft Marketplace or the G2Website.
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The post The Field Stories Where Maps in Dynamics 365 Became the Hero appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Every fall, sales teams across manufacturing and distribution get pulled together to plan next year. And in a lot of Dynamics 365 shops, that planning still happens in Excel, not in the CRM. The numbers get typed in once, checked by hand, and handed to accounting to load in after the fact.

The usual fix is more diligence: a tighter deadline, a cleaner template, a manager double-checking the math. It helps for one planning cycle, and then the same problems show up again the next year - because the process itself, not the discipline behind it, is what's slow.

Count the days

Here's a test worth running on your own team: how many people-days does your planning cycle actually cost, start to finish? At a metals processor we work with, the answer was uncomfortable. Accounting spent days building an individual spreadsheet for every salesperson. Then the whole sales team came off the phones for a day or two to enter next year's numbers by hand - quarterly volume, price, margin - customer by customer. Multiply that by however many reps are in the room, and "a day or two" is a meaningful chunk of a sales team's selling capacity, spent once a year on data entry.

The tell

There's a reliable sign that this is a system problem, not a people problem: check how current the numbers actually were on the day of the planning meeting. Annual plans usually run off a rolling twelve months, since the current year isn't finished yet. So any lag between pulling that data and the meeting where people use it means the numbers are already out of date before anyone types a single cell. Add the manual entry on top, and accuracy takes a second hit.

What fixed it

At P2 Automation we replaced the spreadsheet cycle with a single planning screen built around the rep's day: it refreshes automatically, so the numbers are always current; it highlights exactly which cells still need input; and it lets a salesperson pull last year's numbers forward, apply an increase, and let the system spread it across the year using seasonality it already knows, filling in most of the plan in one click instead of a day of typing. What's left is reviewing the handful of accounts that actually changed.

The lesson holds past planning season: if a Dynamics 365 team is still solving a data-entry problem with a spreadsheet and a calendar invite, the CRM is usually capable of doing that work on its own. Nobody's asked it to yet.

Read the full case study, with screenshots: https://www.p2automation.com/insights/annual-planning-without-two-day-spreadsheet-marathon

See more about how P2 Automation works with Dynamics 365 teams: https://www.p2automation.com/managed-services-plans

Or tell us the process your team hates most - twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether a My Day view would fix it, and if it wouldn't: https://go.oncehub.com/P2StrategySession

The post Two Days Lost to Annual Planning? That's a Dynamics 365 Problem, Not a Sales Problem appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.