Company launches new Office 365 enterprise capabilities,
Dynamics CRM 2016 and introduces PowerApps.
BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 30, 2015 /CNW/ -- Monday, at its
annual Convergence EMEA conference, Microsoft Corp. introduced
new innovations that will enable companies to succeed in a
mobile-first, cloud-first world. Chief Marketing Officer
Chris Capossela detailed new
capabilities in Microsoft Office 365, including meetings and voice
services in Skype for Business; announced the worldwide
availability of its customer engagement solution, Microsoft
Dynamics CRM 2016; and introduced Microsoft PowerApps, a new
enterprise service empowering employees to create the apps they
need, connect to business systems in a secure way and easily share
their apps with coworkers.
In a new commissioned study of European business and IT leaders,
Forrester Consulting found widespread recognition of the importance
of digital transformation in their organizations, and the need to
dramatically reshape their business around customer outcomes and
desires. The innovations Microsoft announced Monday are aimed at
helping businesses achieve this by igniting entirely new ways to
collaborate and intelligently engage with customers. Through
comprehensive first-party solutions such as Office 365 and Dynamics
CRM, along with innovations that empower businesses to rapidly
create new business apps and easily share them on any device,
organizations can control and drive their own transformation.
"As businesses strive to keep up with the pace of change, they
are looking to technology to drive digital transformation,"
Capossela said. "Microsoft can help businesses achieve their
transformations by empowering individuals and organizations with
innovative solutions that unleash the productivity and potential of
their workforce, spur entirely new ways of collaborating, and
infuse intelligence into their systems and processes."
New Office 365 enterprise capabilities
Today marks the general availability of new capabilities in
Office 365 that modernize the enterprise across meetings and voice,
intelligence, and security and privacy. These new services
represent the single most significant release of new enterprise
value in the history of Office 365:
- A complete meeting and voice solution. With Skype
Meeting Broadcast, Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN)
Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Cloud Private Branch Exchange,
Office 365 customers now have one platform for calling,
conferencing, video and sharing integrated with the Office
applications they use every day.
- Analytics and data visualization. Delve Analytics
empowers individuals by providing rich, interactive dashboards that
surface insights into how they spend their time and who they spend
it with, so they can focus on the tasks and people that matter
most.
- Advanced security and compliance. Customer Lockbox
offers customers full control over access to their data in Office
365 by giving them ultimate approval rights in the rare instances
when a Microsoft engineer must request access to the service.
Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery brings machine learning and text
analytics that reduce the costs and risks inherent in managing
large quantities of data for e-discovery.
Starting today, these capabilities along with Power BI and
Advanced Threat Protection are available to customers in a new
premium enterprise suite, Office 365 E5.
"We need a strong voice and meetings solution that meets the
evolving needs of our business and our employees," said
Andre Garcia, assistant vice
president of Global Infrastructure Services in IT at ABM. "Office
365 with Skype for Business is a game changer. It will give us the
ability to consolidate on a single platform for all our
productivity and voice services, reducing our costs and complexity
while giving employees the flexibility they need to get their jobs
done no matter where they are or what device they are using."
Dynamics CRM 2016 now generally available
Beginning today, Dynamics CRM 2016 will be generally available
for online and on-premises deployments. The most comprehensive CRM
release to date, Dynamics CRM 2016 includes advancements in
intelligence, mobility and service, with significant productivity
enhancements to help businesses and customer-facing employees
achieve more.
Data and intelligence are critical components of next-generation
customer engagement, and Dynamics CRM 2016 delivers intelligent
capabilities that surface insights to enable sales, marketing and
service professionals to make quicker decisions and take action.
Powered by Azure Machine Learning models, Dynamics CRM 2016
previews capabilities such as intelligent product recommendations
for sales reps to personalize up-selling and recommended knowledge
articles to more effectively resolve customer service issues.
This version of Dynamics CRM will preview industry-leading, full
offline capabilities for mobile professionals on phones and tablets
and across all major platforms. Dynamics CRM 2016 also provides the
ability to create task-centered mobile apps to streamline the
completion of customer-facing activities, like meeting follow-ups,
and Cortana integration that surfaces data to drive proactive
interaction and voice-driven CRM.
Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts is one such customer that knows
the benefits firsthand. "To transform how you operate and to become
a leader requires an internal transformation," said Abdullatif Awadh, director of customer
relationship marketing at Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts. "We found
Microsoft Dynamics CRM had what we needed, and now we're shifting
our focus to ensure our campaigns are relevant to the guest, rather
than the business, because it's the guest who drives our
business."
Earlier this month Microsoft also announced the next version of
its flagship ERP solution, Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Introduction of PowerApps
The way businesses work is changing, with employees more mobile
than ever before. Consumer applications have evolved rapidly and
employee expectations have followed suit. However, limited
developer resources mean business apps haven't kept pace with
employee demand. In fact, Gartner predicts, "through 2017, the
market demand for mobile app development services will grow at
least five times faster than internal IT organization capacity to
deliver them."* To address this, today Microsoft
introduced PowerApps, a new service that empowers employees to
create the apps they need, connected to business systems in a
secure way, and easily share their apps with coworkers. Available
in preview, PowerApps helps businesses create employee-facing apps
of all kinds, from the simplest app — like an employee survey — to
long-lived, mission-critical apps that connect to line-of-business
systems and cloud services and run on any device.
PowerApps benefits the entire organization:
- Employees. Quickly create apps that work on any device,
using the familiar Microsoft Office experience, with no coding
required.
- Professional developers. Expose data and services to
empower employees to innovate on their own, and continue to create
native Web and mobile apps and APIs with Azure App Service.
- IT professionals. Manage organizational data and app
sharing in a controlled and secure way.
PowerApps makes it easy to get an app up and running within
minutes, with built-in data connections to SaaS services like
Office 365, Dynamics, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive in addition
to on-premises business systems including SharePoint, SQL Server,
Oracle databases, SAP and more. The service provides a familiar,
Office-like experience for creating new business apps, templates to
help get started quickly and a visual designer for automating
workflows. These tools work in concert with enterprise-grade
services for professional developers and IT professionals, so
everyone can work together to unlock new business agility.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) is the leading platform and
productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and
its mission is to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
* Gartner, The Enterprise App Explosion: Scaling One
to 100 Mobile Apps, Adrian Leow,
07 May 2015
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.