By Ed Staats
Here is a look at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2: Introducing Microsoft OneLake for marketing!
Marketing departments often have some of the most complex data management needs within a company. They have to manage the campaigns, data warehousing, analytics, and reporting needs across discrepant data sources, and processes all of that while protecting customer information and managing internal data security. This challenge has often been addressed by bolting technology platforms together and the solution that many companies have ended up is a centralized data warehouse. The data warehouse often starts well-intentioned, but can grow unwieldy as marketing strategies, systems, and priorities shift.
In 2023, Microsoft released Fabric, which is a comprehensive data management technology platform. It can be used for any type of data and provides highly scalable data management functionality, AI and machine learning, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Fabric does this by incorporating several Microsoft products such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Purview, Power BI, and Microsoft Copilot into a cohesive solution. Simply put, Fabric allows organizations to move data into a cost-effective and scalable data storage environment where business users can easily glean knowledge to provide information in real-time, or in the form of business reporting, all while keeping the data secure. Fabric has native connections to the Power Apps platform which means that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service can utilize information in Fabric within core business applications.
Microsoft OneLake takes Fabric one step further with a set of business-line specific capabilities that create ready-to-use functionality within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. These capabilities in the 2024 release Wave 2 (which are being released between October 2024 and March 2025) provide real-time hand-offs of qualified leads so Sales can take place quicker and with more timely information based on data from OneLake. This data can help drive tailored communication with a prospect or customer, such as an email or a text message when a certain piece of data is received in real-time. These communications can provide information or direct the prospect or customer to applications such as a portal.
Customer Insights itself is also receiving enhancements in 2024 release Wave 2. Microsoft is releasing a new event registration portal which will be available for preview in October 2024. The portal can be integrated into an existing Content Management System (CMS) or deployed through Power Pages. Customer Insights is also using AI to help speed up the creation of customer journeys utilizing Microsoft Copilot.
Copilot for Sales was released earlier this year and saw many useful capabilities in 2024 release Wave 1 and 2. We anticipate that Microsoft will take a similar approach in the 2025 releases (April 2025 – March 2026) for Marketing with Customer Insights, OneLake, and Copilot to provide many AI capabilities that businesses can easily adopt. We recommend that any company that uses Dynamics 365 Customer Insights evaluate Microsoft OneLake for how it could transform a Marketing department’s operations.
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